The political life of prediction. The future as a space of scientific world governance in the Cold War era

This working paper explores the role of the future as a space of scientific exchange and dialogue in the Cold War period. We argue that in East and West the governance of the future were understood as both intellectual and technical problem that, importantly, challenged existing notions of the nature of liberal democratic and communist political regimes. Casting the future as a governable sphere led to the development of new forms of scientific governance which sought explicitly to depoliticize the future and turn it into a new transnational domain of technocratic politics. The paper focuses on the parallels and exchanges among American and Soviet futurologists. East-West collaboration was essential to the invention of the future as a governable technoscientific space, situated beyond political dispute