Governing Futures: States and the Management of Expectations
Résumé
This chapter examines the predictive technologies employed by states to transform potentially chaotic social futures into a number of manageable ones. The process by which this happens can be opened up as one in which key forms of knowledge and expertise, but also discursive and symbolic forms of power, are mobilized as part of the social technologies of government. The rise of predictive technologies is indicative of a post-war state ambition to govern future expectation, which is itself crucial to contemporary policy practices. Although this aim to plan future governance does not simply originate after 1945, its modern incarnation does arise in the context of a search for novel forms of control originating first in a militarization of the state in the Cold War era, and spills over into governmental rationalities marked by neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards.