The Future of the World

Jenny Andersson holds a PhD in economic history from Uppsala University in Sweden. She is currently a scholar with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and based at Sciences Po in Paris, where she also co directs the Max Planck Sciences Po Center. She has worked on the intellectual history of contemporary social democracy, and more recently, on the history of future research and concepts of the future in the post war era.

• Introduction 1: A New History of The Future? From Conceptual History to Intellectual World History 2: The Future as Moral Imperative : Foundations of Futurism 3: Futures of Liberalism: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and Futurology as a Transnational Space 4: The Future as Social Technology : Prediction And The Rise Of Futurology 5: Predicting the Future of American Society: From RAND to the Commission for the Year 2000 6: Bridging the Iron Curtain: Futurology as Dissidence and Control 7: The Future of the World: The World Futures Studies Federation and the Future as Counter Expertise 8: The Futurists: Spreading Futurology to the World Conclusion

The Future of the World is an important book that properly situates the history of future research during the Cold War within its international contextand brings our attention to the methods that futurists used to justify the future worlds theyimagined. Andersson's book also highlights the need for historians to look at the broader institutional landscape of Cold War research firms, of which RAND was just one of many such examples. Such work will not only help us better understand RAND's historical significance, but also the ways in which professional expertise, consultancy, and method all intersected to shape the Cold War world and the one that came out of it.