Hello and welcome to another episode of the UK's ITAL podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Jonathan White.

Jonathan's a professor of politics and deputy head of the European Institute at the LSE.

But more importantly for today, he's the author of In the Long Run, The Future is a Political Idea,

a new book which came out in February earlier this year.

Welcome, Jonathan.

Thank you for having me.

So can we just start by asking a little bit about what the motivation was for writing this book,

which focuses particularly on the sort of notion of the future and how that's shaping contemporary democracy?

Yes, certainly.

So I've long had an interest in time and politics and emergencies and politics, which I think are often all to do with time

and the acceleration of time and the way in which the experience of acceleration can shape politics,

can shape the kind of policies that perhaps seem appropriate, but perhaps even more importantly,

can shape who seems like they ought to be in control.

So a standard argument from the history of thinking about emergencies is that when time is short,

then you don't really have time for deliberation, for disagreement, for contestation. On the contrary, you should

shift power to those who can act quickly, think in a single voice, and so on. So coming from

a background of thinking about how certain experiences of accelerated time can be difficult for democracy,

I then got into thinking also about how ideas of the future and the sense in which the expectation of what lies ahead could perhaps perform a similar kind of function in making both certain

kind of policies seem appropriate, but also certain kind of transfers of power or certain

ways of thinking about how power is exercised, whether more in terms of deliberation and ideas,

or whether more in terms of personalities and heroes and individuals.

So it was a continuation of a wider stream of thought about the place of time in politics.

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