'The Future' as a Method in Political Theory

'The Future' as a Method in Political Theory All politics is oriented towards the future. Far from being simply the natural temporal extension of the present, ‘the future’ is a horizon of action that can profoundly shape the present and how political actors respond to ongoing and emerging challenges. Political theorists engage with ideas of ‘the future’ as the domain of human action that must be reflected upon at the present. For example, political philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 257) explains that ‘the future erupts through a kind of leap or rupture, [it] is not the predictable, foreseeable continuation of the past’; this leap, she argues, is politics. Indeed, in politics envisioning the future is not a task that distracts from current affairs, but the necessary condition for planning and materialising decisions that can change the existing arrangements towards a more positive direction. This paper considers ‘the future’ as a method in political theory. It proposes that to the extent that political theorists are pre-occupied with questions of how things could be different, the future is an integral part of the task of theorising. In envisioning the future, political theorists strive ‘to project a more perfect order into future time’, not necessarily in the sense of partaking in an exercise in utopia-building, but in producing knowledge at the centre of which has been ‘an imaginative element, an ordering vision of what the political system ought to be and what it might become’ (Wolin 2004, 33–34). Political theory has a futurist quality, in that it projects ‘the political order into a time that is yet to come’, with the intention not merely to understand political life as it is, but to provide a more ‘comprehensive vision...about the political society in its corrected fullness’ (Ibid, 17-20). The argument of the paper takes seriously this futuristic quality of political theory and evolves in three stages. First, it establishes the link between political theory and ‘the future’, by considering the latter not as the horizon of action, but as a method of studying the evolution of political institutions. Second, it clarifies how considering the future as an approach to political theorisation differs from the positivist and rationalist approaches currently dominating the field of political analysis, especially public policy. Finally, it illustrates how ‘the future’ as a method of political theory is pertinent to the task of envisioning and theorising climate futures. If Anna Tsing (2015) is right that we are already living in the ruins—'spaces of abandonment for asset production’—caused by an economic system that destroyed the very conditions that make this planet liveable, then imagining the possible futures that can be crafted for living together—as opposed to merely surviving—on this planet is an essentially political task. Theorists are uniquely placed to foster our understanding of the political concepts, institutions, visions that emerge in the ‘generative space of unknowing’ (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011, 517) that abrupt and unpredictable changes in climatic regimes open up.