Humans may be the only creatures conscious of having a future, but all too often we would rather not think about it. Likewise, our societies, unable to deal with radical uncertainty, do not make policies with a view to the long term. Instead, we suffer from a sense of powerlessness, collective irrationality, and perennial political discontent. In The Future and Its Enemies, Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity makes a plea for a new social contract that would commit us to moral and political responsibility with respect to future generations. He urges us to become advocates for the future in the face of enemies who, oblivious to the costs of modernization, press for endless and unproductive acceleration. His accessible book proposes a new way of confronting the unknown-one grounded in the calculation of risk. Declaring the classical right-left divide to be redundant, Innerarity presents his hopes for a renewed democracy and a politics that would find convincing ways to mediate between the priorities of the present, the heritage of the past, and the challenges that lie ahead.
"In this fascinating inquiry into how our image of the future has changed and into the consequences of this modification for democracy, Innerarity explores the challenges of post-heroic politics and the prospect for reclaiming hope as part of transformative politics. The Future and Its Enemies enriches our democratic imagination with new vistas."
University of Rome
"[Innerarity] ably surveys a rich literature on the role of time in governance and planning in an erudite, pleasant-to-read style of grand social theorizing not unlike that of recent books by Zygmunt Bauman."
