In the Long Run

Reviews / Votes

Highly perceptive, engaging and somewhat startling ... lively, smartly-written, jargon-free ... deft and attractively written -- Jonathan Wolff * Literary Review * Stimulating and full of original thinking ... fascinating * Times Literary Supplement * Exhilarating ... the health of a democracy lies not in what it thinks of itself now, but in the hopes it has for what's next * Financial Times * White is a scholar with radical commitments ... rigorous and expansive -- Oliver Eagleton * New Statesman * An original reading of the current crisis of democracy * Foreign Policy * Wise and beautiful ... This magnificent book reminds leaders to take care with the claims they make for the future ... a wonderful work of political scholarship -- Pascal Donohoe * Irish Times * How much time do we have? Jonathan White shows us that the politics of the last two centuries have all begun with this question. Even-and maybe especially-in today's vice grip of temporal compression, he gives us hope that democracy's answer has to be: enough time to make something better -- Quinn Slobodian, author * Crack-Up Capitalism * In an age of ever shorter political time horizons and fractured politics, this book is a profound meditation on how and why democracy must keep its faith in the future and the future must keep its faith in democracy -- David Runciman, author * The Handover * 'Incisive, wide-ranging and thought-provoking, this book opens up new ways of seeing and thinking. Through the prism of the future - the ways it is imagined, calculated, instrumentalised - Jonathan White brilliantly analyses the political health of our present democracies, our global order and the challenges of climate change. This is an important book that urgently needs to be read -- Lisa Appignanesi, OBE In The Long Run is a book about the history of the future, and what it means for the present ... for democracy to function, White observes, it is critical that people believe an "open future" is possible -- Aveek Bhattacharya * LSE Blog * This is a refreshing and (dare I say it) timely book. White offers a compelling and lucid account of the multifaceted temporal regime in which current democracies are floundering ... And he offers a strong and convincing defence of representative democracy as the best way to confront the challenges ahead. -- Duncan Bell * Critical Review * Insightful ... well-written and compelling, In the Long Run is a must-read for those looking for new insights into political decision-making. * buzz * Erudite, eloquent, perceptive and wonderfully written ... in this fascinating book, Jonathan White illustrates how democracy fares in the age of emergencies, hyper anxieties and "temporal claustrophobia." He shows how the future is used and abused in politics and he explains why representative democracy ought to be cherished despite all its flaws. It should be read by all those who care about the future of democracy -- Jan Zielonka, author * The Lost Future and How to Reclaim It * It is important that those who govern nations should act with a view to the future," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "but this is even more necessary in democratic and sceptical ages than in any others." No one has answered this call more penetratingly and rigorously than Jonathan White does in this extraordinary book of political theory. It is an essential contribution for our era-and eras to come -- Professor Samuel Moyn, author * Liberalism Against Itself * A powerful and poignantly timely political theory of temporality - of the troubled and troubling times in which we live and the imagined futures in and through which they are made and will be remade. Take the time to read it -- Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Paris