Forecasting the Post-Socialist Future: Prognostika in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1970–1989

Abstract : In the late 1980s, the Czechoslovak public was enthralled by prognostika. Scholars and experts, mainly economists who were involved in the forecasting project of the Academy of Sciences (CSAS) Forecasting Institute (Prognostický ústav) and in other more informal expert activities, constituted an important part of the newborn critically minded intelligentsia, which was composed of professionals increasingly dissatisfied with growing economic and political malaise; their field of inquiry became a political phenomenon of Czechoslovak perestroika.