The Future and Its Enemies In Defense of Political Hope [Hardcover]

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.

InThe 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 unknownone 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.

Innerarity is the sole thinker to date, who is attuned to the futurity of actually exisiting democracies. . . [H]e masterfully combines the insights of a seasoned philosopher with the hands-on analyses of a political scientist or a sociologist. The conclusions of every chapter provide us with invaluable tools for coping with the complexity of our world without either simplifying or getting lost in it. At its best,The Future and Its Enemiesmaintains alive the very future of political philosophy. Innerarity offers a practical alternative to the model that ignores the past. By treating the past as past, he asks us to recognize that there are real problems we can deal with now that might be rooted in that unchangeable history and, most importantly, that the future of our functioning democracies depends responsibly addressing these issues. The future no longer holds meanlÎ