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‘Exhilarating’ Financial Times

‘Highly perceptive, engaging and somewhat startling’ Literary Review

‘A profound meditation on how and why democracy must keep its faith in the future and the future must keep its faith in democracy’ David Runciman

Democracy is future-oriented and self-correcting: today’s problems can be solved, we are told, in tomorrow’s elections. But the biggest issues facing the modern world – from climate collapse and pandemics to recession and world war – each apparently bring us to the edge of the irreversible. What happens to democracy when the future seems no longer open?

In this eye-opening history of ideas, Jonathan White investigates how politics has long been directed by shifting visions of the future, from the birth of ideologies in the nineteenth century to Cold War secrecy and the excesses of the neoliberal age.

As an inescapable sense of disaster defines our politics, White argues that a political commitment to the long-term may be the best way to safeguard democracy. Wide in scope and sharply observed, In the Long Run is a history of the future that urges us to make tomorrow new again.

Publisher Review

How much time do we have? Jonathan White shows us that the politics of the last two centuries have all begun with this question. Even-and maybe especially-in today's vice grip of temporal compression, he gives us hope that democracy's answer has to be: enough time to make something better -- Quinn Slobodian, author * Crack-Up Capitalism * In an age of ever shorter political time horizons and fractured politics, this book is a profound meditation on how and why democracy must keep its faith in the future and the future must keep its faith in democracy -- David Runciman, author * The Handover * 'Incisive, wide-ranging and thought-provoking, this book opens up new ways of seeing and thinking. Through the prism of the future - the ways it is imagined, calculated, instrumentalised - Jonathan White brilliantly analyses the political health of our present democracies, our global order and the challenges of climate change. This is an important book that urgently needs to be read -- Lisa Appignanesi, OBE Erudite, eloquent, perceptive and wonderfully written ... in this fascinating book, Jonathan White illustrates how democracy fares in the age of emergencies, hyper anxieties and "temporal claustrophobia." He shows how the future is used and abused in politics and he explains why representative democracy ought to be cherished despite all its flaws. It should be read by all those who care about the future of democracy -- Jan Zielonka, author * The Lost Future and How to Reclaim It * It is important that those who govern nations should act with a view to the future," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "but this is even more necessary in democratic and sceptical ages than in any others." No one has answered this call more penetratingly and rigorously than Jonathan White does in this extraordinary book of political theory. It is an essential contribution for our era-and eras to come -- Professor Samuel Moyn, author * Liberalism Against Itself * A powerful and poignantly timely political theory of temporality - of the troubled and troubling times in which we live and the imagined futures in and through which they are made and will be remade. Take the time to read it -- Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Paris