The Future of Society

A Soviet entry in a global argument about who owned the future.

Its subject is the Western science of the future - the wave of futurology, post-industrial theory and long-range forecasting that had crested across the 1960s and was at its loudest as this was written. Its purpose is to demolish that literature and set against it the one forecast its authors regard as scientific.

The roster carries an irony the book never registers. The lead contributor, author of the opening historical chapter and of the long technical section on forecasting, is I. V. Bestuzhev-Lada - not a marginal figure but the founder and public face of Soviet prognostika, the USSR's own professional futurologist. The chapter mounting the assault on bourgeois futurology proper is by Y. D. Modrzhinskaya, the hard-line ideologist who also wrote Leninism and the Battle of Ideas. That division of labour is the whole enterprise in miniature: a genuine forecasting specialist supplies the technical ballast, a Party ideologist supplies the verdict.

What makes it worth reading now is that it is a serious survey of the Western forecasting literature by people who had read it, at the exact moment that literature was at its most confident - and that the argument was settled afterwards by history, in a direction none of its authors foresaw.

The frame is Engels's distinction between the socialism that is invented by a good heart and the socialism read out of the movement of real history, applied to the business of prediction.

Edited by Murad Saifulin. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.