The future is unknowable, but it can be made intelligible.  It raises practical and conceptual problems, as well as reasons for conflict, but also promises to resolve contradictions.  This course examines how the future is used and abused in politics, and the particular significance it holds for democracy.   We begin historically, looking at the future as an emerging theme in eighteenth-century European Enlightenment thought and as a centrepiece of ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  We go on to explore what is distinctive about the future orientations found in societies today; what these imply for the governance of salient issues, from economic crisis to climate change; and what institutions, national and transnational, can help democratise the future and counter pathologies of both short- and long-termism.  As we shall see, beliefs about what lies ahead carry implications for who should hold power, how it should be exercised, and for the sake of what ends.  The course should provide students with a cross-disciplinary grasp of how present-day public affairs are shaped by the ways the future is conceived and acted upon.