In the Long Run

In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea
by Jonathan White

A revealing history of the future as a political idea, from the Enlightenment to the current climate crisis.

Democracy is future-oriented and self-correcting: todays problems can be solved, we are told, in tomorrows elections. But the biggest issues facing the modern world- from climate collapse and pandemics to recession and world war- each apparently bring us to the edge of the irreversible. What happens to democracy when the future seems no longer open?

In this eye-opening history of ideas, Jonathan White investigates how politics has long been directed by shifting visions of the future, from the birth of ideologies in the nineteenth century to Cold War secrecy and the excesses of the neoliberal age.

As an inescapable sense of disaster defines our politics, White argues that a political commitment to the longterm may be the best way to safeguard democracy. Wide in scope and sharply observed, In the Long Run is a history of the future that urges us to make tomorrow new again.