---
id: media/foundations-of-futures-studies
about:
  label: Foundations of Futures Studies
  description: >-
    Wendell Bell's two-volume account of futures studies as a field: its
    history, purposes, assumptions, theory of knowledge, methods and values,
    written partly as a basic text for courses.
  tags:
    - futures studies
    - foresight
    - methods
    - epistemology
    - textbook
  depiction: bell.jpg
  depiction_credit: >-
    Wendell Bell at Fresno State, about 1948. Unknown photographer, via
    Wikimedia Commons, public domain (published in the United States without a
    copyright notice).
book:
  authors:
    - Wendell Bell
  publisher: Transaction Publishers
  year: 1997
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3275147W'
domains:
  - people
relations:
  - predicate: about
    target: terms/foresight-and-anticipation
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: >-
        Open Library: Foundations of futures studies: human science for a new
        era (Transaction, 1996)
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/books/OL984728M'
    - title: >-
        Open Library: Foundations of futures studies: human science for a new
        era (Transaction, 1997)
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22162395M'
    - title: >-
        Open Library: Foundations of Futures Studies: Values, Objectivity, and
        the Good Society
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3275143W'
    - title: >-
        Foundations of Futures Studies, Volume 1: History, Purposes, and
        Knowledge | Taylor & Francis eBooks
      url: >-
        https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203791684/foundations-futures-studies-wendell-bell
    - title: Wendell Bell - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Bell'
    - title: Futures studies - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Wendell Bell (1924 to 2019) was a professor of sociology at Yale, where he chaired the sociology department, and worked as a futurist for over forty years.[^5] Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era is his two-volume account of the field, published by Transaction Publishers of New Brunswick; Open Library's records date the first edition to 1996 and 1997.[^1][^2] The first volume is subtitled History, Purposes, and Knowledge and the second Values, Objectivity, and the Good Society.[^3][^4]

The publisher describes futures studies as "a new field of inquiry involving systematic and explicit thinking about alternative futures".[^4] The first volume's six chapters cover the field as a new area of inquiry, its purposes, its assumptions, whether it is an art or a science, an epistemology "from positivism to critical realism", and methods and exemplars of futures research.[^1][^4] The description lists Bell's five purposes: to show that futures studies exists as an identifiable field, to provide a basic text for core courses, to "futurize" the thinking of specialists in other disciplines, to improve the field, and to give ordinary people and leaders tools to create better futures.[^4]

In 2008 the Association of Professional Futurists named the two volumes among the ten most important futures studies books, and in 2005 the World Futures Studies Federation gave Bell a lifetime achievement award.[^5] Wikipedia's history of the field places the work among the 1990s attempts to give futures studies a coherent framework.[^6]

A reader coming to futures work from modelling will find here a sociologist's case for how claims about the future can be judged, set out as chapters on assumptions, epistemology and method.[^4] Its chapter "Is Futures Studies an Art or a Science?" takes up the question that Bertrand de Jouvenel answered with [The Art of Conjecture](/media/the-art-of-conjecture/).[^1][^4]