Democracy is future-oriented and self-correcting: today’s problems can be solved, we are told, in tomorrow’s elections. However, the waning of the future as a political lodestar is widely reported today. Whereas modern Europe was built by movements and parties in pursuit of a better world to come, today’s politicians seem increasingly focused on short-term concerns and the effort to preserve a receding status quo. 
In his lecture Jonathan White investigates who leads, and who contests, this abdication of the future, and what follows for our societies and institutions. As will be argued, how the future is envisioned is politically crucial; shaping expectations of who should hold power, how it should be exercised, and for the sake of what ends.

A great deal hangs on whose outlooks come to prevail. Those who neglect the future give a free pass to others – such as the powerful ideologues of Silicon Valley – to use it in advance of their own ends. What might it mean to democratise the future in the contemporary European context? And why is a political commitment to the long term the best way to safeguard democracy?