American Futurism in the Atomic Era

The Futures Studies Movement

            While futurism spans the work of scientists, artists, and laymen in providing their visions of the future, in the 1960s a specific branch of visionaries united in a combined effort to make economic and policy change. This group included think tanks such as RAND Corporation and the Stanford Research Institute which collectively studied science and social issues to predict future outcomes and eventually affect change.  Futurists were contracted to develop military based strategic solutions to combat a variety of social issues in the present and as predicated would crop up in the future by perceiving quantitative data.  By using science, they believed they could find a scientific and systematic solution to the world’s problems.[1]
            Jenny Andersson’s, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination, examines the international futurist intellectual movement as it emerged in the Cold War. Andersson studied the futurists, such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and RAND Corporation researchers, Olaf Helmer and Theodore Gordon, and their motivations for seeing future studies as a necessary tool for progress. Andersson describes this view of the future as a political issue in the post Second World War era. According to Andersson, “the future emerged as a core problem of human action after 1945 the post-war world was, more than any previous historical world, marked by the idea of human influence, and with the idea of unprecedented influence came new conceptions of consequence, reach, and responsibility.”[2]  Andersson delves deep into archives that explain the motivations and impact of 1960s futurists. 
            Kaya Tolon has also recently examined the application of social science in application to Cold War strategy. In an article titled, “Future Studies: A New Social Science Rooted in Cold War Strategic Thinking,” Tolon examines organizations such as the World Future Society, Institute for the Future, and the World Futures Studies Federation. Tolon looks at the RAND Corporation’s use of the Delphi method, an attempt to quantify the damage that could be done if nuclear war were to break out between nations. While acknowledging the impact of futurism on popular culture, Tolon focuses on how the futures studies movement itself affected, “organization of governments, businesses and military forces.”[3]Tolon credits the impact of the futurist movement to the Cold War period because communication advancements facilitated a global reach. 
 
[1] Kaya Tolon, “Future Studies: A New Social Science Rooted in Cold War Strategic Thinking,” Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 45-62. Futurists Olfa Helmer and Norman Dalkey attempted to use statistics to craft logic based predictions.
 
[2] Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination, (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2018) 2.
 
[3] Kaya Tolon, “Future Studies: A New Social Science Rooted in Cold War Strategic Thinking,” 45-62.
 

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