Imagining the future: Social struggles, the post-national domain and major contemporary social transformations

Abstract

The question this article seeks to answer is what are the major social transformations going on in contemporary society that will shape the future? The argument is that the analysis of the future requires a clearer perspective on social struggles and major social transformations in societal structures including structures of consciousness. The future is thus both actuality and possibility; it is of the present but also beckons beyond the present. Or, in the terms of Koselleck (2004 [1976/1979]), it opens up the space of expectations beyond the horizons of the present. The radical uncertainty of the future has opened it up to imaginary significations of all kinds. Yet many such projections of the future lack a normative orientation and also do not provide a satisfactory connection with actuality, namely the world as it exists. This is to the detriment of a perspective on possibility. The future is created in moments of transformation when radically new interpretations of the present take root. The article discusses the fate of the post-national domain in the context of societal struggles in which new visions of the future are created and which play out in three major social transformations of the present. The argument in this article places more emphasis on a normative conception of a cosmopolitan future that identifies links between the social and the ecological as well as widening the notion of justice to include a broader sphere of issues than those that have traditionally been the concern of the left.