Histories of the Future: Hope in the Past and Present

This class, offered in the Transformative Ideas Program, explores the ways in which people have imagined the future from Antiquity to the present. We begin with a study of the prophetic traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the spread of apocalyptic ideas in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Then, we turn to the emergence of the Idea of Progress in the Enlightenment and beyond before tracing the interplay of apocalypticism and progressivism down to the contemporary period. Historically these visions of the future – one religious and one predominantly secular – have played a major role in shaping the human capacity for hope. But what can we do at present? Neither narrative exercises the hold it once did. Where – in a moment of global crises – do we turn for hope? x