The embedded temporality of tools for managing the future

Abstract

A strong focus in political and policy circles on ‘managing’ the future – most visible during the latter half of last century in tools and techniques of central and strategic planning – was itself the outcome of an explosion of interest, dating from the beginning of that century, in the idea of establishing a science of administration. This idea was in turn related to the burgeoning throughout the 19th century of the social sciences, and of ‘governmentality’ in general (Wallerstein, 1991; Dean, 1999). In the early 1900s, Charles Merriam, a political scientist who later headed the United States National Resources Planning Board, coined a term which is emblematic of this whole development. The proper object of politics, he wrote, was no longer ‘the art of the traditional’ but ‘the science of constructive social control’ (quoted in Marini, 2001, 29).