Senses of the Future Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today

“Delanty offers a productive way of approaching the future, especially in a time when it seems rather bleak.”



Elizabeth Soer,
European Journal of Sociology

“A first-rate book—and Gerard Delanty’s Senses of the Future belongs to this category—can affect the reader in two ways. You can learn something new from it that is important; and it can also help you to think for yourself and formulate your own opinion.”



Richard Swedberg, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Cornell University (US), in his review “On the future as possibilities”, published in the
Journal of Classical Sociology

“Do we have a future? Does it matter? Our present is being defined and redefined by the future. Enlightenment confidence in reason and progress has evaporated and our sense of catastrophe has produced multiple responses including dystopia, and retrotopia. However, Gerard Delanty argues that we must not see the future only as our fate. In his masterly overview of past and present visions of the future, Delanty’s diagnosis and prescriptions are indeed timely.”



Bryan S. Turner, Catholic University Australia, Sydney (Australia)

“Ideas of and about the future are as necessary now, in our own transformative times, as they were in earlier epochs of great transformation, as during the Axial Age or the 18th-century birth of modernity. Delanty’s critical examination of some dominant theories and approaches is an instructive and illuminating guide to current thinking about the future. An exemplary book, as timely as it is necessary.”



Krishan Kumar, University Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia (US)

“This very important book combines a vast range of historical reference with a sustained set of arguments about how we have conceived the future in the past and how we should do so today.”



William Outhwaite, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Newcastle (UK)

“This is the right book at the right time. Behind the modest methodological habitus of a scrupulous, however hitherto unmatched mapping of the most pertinent visions of the future stands a radical thesis: That a total reorientation of social theory toward the future is underway and demands to be openly affirmed. Systematically drawing on phenomenology and critical theory, this new ‘critical hermeneutics of the future’ asserts the inevitable orientation toward transcendence, centrally positioning the categories of possibility and potentiality, and thereby breaks open the horizon of agency and transformation so badly needed now. It convincingly serves as a counter-poison to any dystopian, negativistic, or simply neo-realist apologetics of the status quo in our challenging times.”



Hans-Herbert Kögler, University of North Florida/Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt