--- id: media/anticipatory-democracy about: label: Anticipatory Democracy description: >- A 1978 collection edited by Clement Bezold, introduced by Alvin Toffler, on 1970s experiments that put forecasts and alternative futures before citizens, legislatures and city and state governments. tags: - anticipatory democracy - futures studies - public participation - foresight - history book: authors: - Clement Bezold (ed.) - Alvin Toffler (introduction) publisher: Random House year: 1978 isbn: 0394412362 url: 'https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4570764M' domains: - people relations: - predicate: about target: terms/foresight-and-anticipation provenance: origin: agent sources: - title: >- Open Library: Anticipatory democracy: people in the politics of the future (Random House, 1978) url: 'https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4570764M' - title: 'Open Library: Anticipatory democracy (Vintage Books, 1978)' url: 'https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21362919M' - title: >- Anticipatory Democracy and Aspirational Futures (Clement Bezold, Journal of Futures Studies 15(2), November 2010) url: 'https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/152-S06.pdf' - title: >- Book Reviews (Sujata Singh, Indian Journal of Public Administration, July 1980) | vLex url: 'https://vlex.in/vid/book-reviews-874308887' - title: Clement Bezold - Wikipedia url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Bezold' - title: >- From future shock to social foresight: Re-contextualising cyberculture (Richard A. Slaughter, in Prefiguring Cyberculture, MIT Press, 2002) url: >- https://foresightinternational.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Slaughter_FShock_to_Soc_For_2001.pdf - title: >- Congress Takes a Peek Into Its Crystal Balls (William J. Lanouette, National Journal, 1 July 1978; copy at the Wilson Center) url: >- https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/crystalbal.pdf - title: Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future | Wilson Center url: >- https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/congressional-clearinghouse-the-future - title: 'Newt''s New-Age Love Gurus (Tim Murphy, Mother Jones, 30 January 2012)' url: >- https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/newt-gingrich-new-age-love-gurus-alvin-toffler/ - title: >- D.C. Virtually Full Of Newt-Age Gurus, Sages (Maureen Dowd, New York Times, in The Spokesman-Review, 11 January 1995) url: >- https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/jan/11/dc-virtually-full-of-newt-age-gurus-sages-will/ created: '2026-11-02' reviewed: '2026-11-02' reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed' status: draft --- Anticipatory Democracy: People in the Politics of the Future is a collection edited by Clement Bezold, with an introduction by Alvin Toffler, published by Random House in 1978 and in paperback by Vintage the same year.[^1][^2] Bezold writes that a few years after [Future Shock](/media/future-shock/), Toffler asked him to edit a book reviewing experiments in looking ahead and involving the public.[^3] Toffler's introduction defines anticipatory democracy as "a process for combining citizen participation with future consciousness".[^3] A 1980 review in the Indian Journal of Public Administration traces the book to a committee on anticipatory democracy that Toffler formed in 1975 to spread anticipatory-democracy groups.[^4] The committee had over fifty futurists, professional planners and future-oriented citizens, and most of the book's contributors belonged to it.[^4] Bezold, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Florida, founded the Institute for Alternative Futures in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1977 to encourage anticipatory democracy.[^5] The book has seven sections: anticipatory democracy in cities, states and regions; in legislatures; in policies and programmes; in the workplace; in citizens' movements; its techniques; and its future.[^4] Chapter 15, "Social Technologies of Freedom", asks how many people should take part, at what level and for how long, what they need to know, and whether the process should make decisions, advise decision-makers or educate the public.[^4] In the introduction Toffler writes that anticipatory democracy "compels us to ask how, when, and by what process today's increasingly obsolete constitutions must be rewritten".[^4] One chapter, by Robert Stilger, describes Alternatives for Washington.[^3] In that state programme more than 60,000 people took part in focus groups, surveys or local meetings, generated 11 alternative futures and voted on their preferences.[^3] The governor then asked the public to take up budget priorities.[^3] Bezold later wrote that state legislators were not engaged in it, and that five years after it ended the state budget office put the share of its recommendations in place at about 80 per cent.[^3] Richard Slaughter describes a Hawaii exercise in which citizens were polled on likely and desired futures, the results were acted out as scenarios on television, and a television vote followed; he calls the book a showcase for experiments of this kind.[^6] In Congress, a group of members set up the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future in the spring of 1976; by mid-1978 it counted 66 representatives and four senators, and its monthly "Dialogues on America's Future", founded by Representative Charles Rose, had heard speakers including Toffler.[^7] Anne Cheatham, its first staff member, described the work as putting forecasters in touch with those who could use them: "We don't do any forecasting ourselves".[^7] At its height the Clearinghouse claimed more than 100 members of both parties from both houses, and it was dissolved in January 1994 under new rules for legislative service organisations.[^8] Newt Gingrich met the Tofflers in the early 1970s at a futures conference in Chicago, and while teaching geography at West Georgia College he was invited to their "Conference on Anticipatory Democracy" in Washington, the only Republican there.[^9] In January 1995, as the new Speaker of the House, he had asked the Tofflers to advise him on how to recast the way Congress works, and they called him "a third-wave leader".[^10] He wrote the foreword to one of their later books, and in his first week as Speaker named Future Shock among "four books [that] describe everything we're going through".[^9] For anyone who puts a model of a place in front of the public, the book records early attempts to show citizens and legislators a set of alternative futures and let them choose.[^3][^4] For one state it also gives figures on how many took part and how much was carried out.[^3]