On the crisis of the design and prognostic ability of Western modern political philosophy

Time is compressed and accelerated, the horizon of the vision of the future turns out to be deformed and, as it were, flattened to what seems to be modernity - as a moment of belonging to the present. And it is precisely to this - mental causes and their consequences - that the collective monograph “The image of the future in political thought of the 20th - early 21st centuries” (Fedorova, M.M. (Ed.). Moscow; St. Petersburg: Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2024) is dedicated. The team of authors offers an interesting conceptual study, a review on the topic of images of the future. The paper examines: 1) the state of the project and of utopian (in a good sense of the word) political thought of our time; 2) the state and degree of perspective of the ideas of democracy and reflections on democracy in the modern world; 3) constructs (both left and right) of ways and proposed models of “overcoming capitalism” (Georgism and Accelerationism), that exist today; 4) the ideas of representatives of conservatism in Germany, Spain and Britain, which developed after 1945, about the future ideological self-determination on the path of development of their countries and humanity as a whole; 5) finally, partly specific, but therefore interesting - the problems of political projectivity of architecture and art. The twentieth century as a whole remains today a space filled with many sketches of future socio-political forms, but we have to admit that their diversity is almost forgotten in nostalgic searches turned into retrotopic escapes. The turn of the XX-XXI centuries is marked by processes involving such instruments as collective historical memory and attempts to revise the historical past. At the same time, the search by socio-political thought for development models is becoming an urgent need for political philosophy today. These complicated, contradictory processes have become the research perspective of the authors of the reviewed book. A separate study is devoted to such an important form of political thinking as Utopia, presented in the book in a not entirely traditional way of transforming the space-time components of utopian thinking. The monograph is more than interesting, it is worth reading - and it suggests a lot of thoughts, which cannot all be mentioned in this article.