Book – The Image of the Future

Polak, F. L. (1973). The image of the future. Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientific Publ. Comp.

Fred Polak published his essential work ‘The Image of the Future’ in 1955 in two volumes in Dutch, before Elise Boulding translated it in 1961 and then published it again in 1973 in an abridged version. The Image of the Future examines social images of the future throughout history and their influence on cultural development.

Fun fact: The abridged version is freely available as a PDF. But it seems to be based on a bad OCR scanning with lots of errors. The world is still waiting for a hero to find one of those rare print versions and do a proper scan.

Key concept: Pull of the Future

Notes mentioning this note

Books on Futures
If people ask me for book recommendations on the topic of foresight and futures studies, I usually recommend two books...
Futures Studies
Rough definition: the academic field dealing with images of the future (s. [[The Image of the Future]])
Pull of the Future
This article is part of my [[Master’s Thesis - Future Imaginaries]]. Previous Chapter: 2.1.1 [[Present futures]] from Grunwald
Book – The Image of the Future
Polak, F. L. (1973). The image of the future. Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientific Publ. Comp.

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