Ćwiczenie wyobraźni socjologicznej - polska futurologia naukowa lat 70. XX wieku
An Exercise in Sociological Imagination: Polish Scientific Futurology in the 1970s

Summary/Abstract: This article draws attention to the role of sociological forecasting under state socialism. It analyses four conceptualizations of the future developed in the Polish People’s Republic in the 1970s. These ideas are contextualised by transnational discourses on futurology, the constraints of science under the monocentric system of decision-making and ideological discourse officially confined to the Marxist theory of progress. These boundaries limited past prognoses. However, reflections on their function, prospective techniques and future orientation – which are exposed in futurological texts by Jan Szczepański, Stefan Nowak, Waldemar Rolbiecki and Andrzej Siciński – reveal a rethinking of modern concepts of history and temporality pointing far beyond the historical state socialist regime towards current redefinitions of temporal orders by the anthropocene and emerging research agendas such as historical future research, and the sociology of expectations.

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