In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea

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'Exhilarating' Financial Times'A profound meditation on how and why democracy must keep its faith in the future and the future must keep its faith in democracy' David RuncimanDemocracy is future-oriented and self-correcting: today's problems can be solved, we are told, in tomorrow's 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 openIn 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 long-term 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.

Reviews

'Highly perceptive, engaging and somewhat startling ... lively, smartly-written, jargon-free ... deft and attractively written' - Jonathan Wolff

'Incisive, wide-ranging and thought-provoking, this book opens up new ways of seeing and thinking ... an important book that urgently needs to be read' - Lisa Appignanesi, OBE

'Exhilarating ... the health of a democracy lies not in what it thinks of itself now, but in the hopes it has for what's next' - Financial Times

'White is a scholar with radical commitments ... rigorous and expansive' - Oliver Eagleton

'How much time do we have Jonathan White shows us that the politics of the last two centuries have all begun with this question. He gives us hope that democracy's answer has to be: enough time to make something better' - Quinn Slobodian, author

Author Bio

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. Based at LSE's European Institute, he has published widely on democracy and the politics of emergency. He has written for the Guardian and New Statesman, and received the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for Excellence in Political Science.