"The Future and its Enemies"

The Future and its Enemies (1998) by Virginia Postrel is one of the best non-fiction books I have read in the last five years. A lengthy and helpful review can be found here written by Kelley L. Ross. Borrowing heavily from Professor Ross and Ms. Postrel's website, I'll summarize:

Postrel speaks of the unpredictable future that is threatening to some and an exciting challenge to others. Those who don’t want their cherished present disturbed or are fearful that they will not be able to control what happens in the future, she calls stasists who tend to appeal to politics for the power they need to inhibit or control “change.” Within this group are reactionaries whose central value is stability and simply prefer the past to either the present or the future; and technocrats who want to control the future and hate the present because it contains things they don’t want and would never have allowed if they were in charge. The technocrats are made up of ideologues that have some grand theory about what the future should look like and why they should be in control, and pragmatists who have no particular axe to grind but being organizers at heart, believe that somebody should be in charge. "Postrel argues that these conflicting views of progress, rather than the traditional left and right, increasingly define our political and cultural debate. On one side, she identifies a collection of strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader standing shoulder to shoulder against international trade; 'right-wing' nativists and 'left-wing' environmentalists opposing immigration; traditionalists and technocrats denouncing Wal-Mart, biotechnology, the Internet, and suburban 'sprawl.' Some prefer a pre-industrial past, while others envision a bureaucratically engineered future, but all share a devotion to what she calls 'stasis,' a controlled, uniform society that changes only with permission from some central authority."

She identifies the alternative to stasists as dynamists who see power as something residing in individual creativity, rather than in the collective and the state. Dynamists see power in change while stasists see power in controlling change. She offers that reactionaries and technocrats, including the ideologues and pragmatists, don’t understand (or never consider) that control is not needed; indeed, it may be adverse to growth and development! Her book is a wealth of fresh thinking in light of the incessant whining of Democrats and Republicans about the “best way” to run the country.