Foundations of Futures Studies

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 1997.¹² The first volume is subtitled History, Purposes, and Knowledge and the second Values, Objectivity, and the Good Society.³⁴

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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁴