Espérer en l'avenir. À propos de l'ouvrage de Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Le Goût de l'avenir

Benjamin Delannoy discusses the most recent book by the essayist Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Le Goût de l’avenir (The Taste for the Future, Paris: Seuil, 2003). As in his earlier books, Guillebaud investigates the question of the future and the ability of human beings to confront it, control and even shape it.
This time, Jean-Claude Guillebaud alerts his readers to the many changes under way in modern societies which are depriving individuals of the means to alter their fate, especially as there is a tendency to abandon history and give in to the prevailing fatalism. The author rejects this fatalism and this surrendering of the keys to the future, and instead argues we should revive our “taste for the future” and find new ways of thinking about the major contradictions of modern life: transgression versus limits, links versus independence, transparency versus privacy, innocence versus guilt, body versus spirit, or belief versus knowledge. In this review Benjamin Delannoy investigates the paths explored by Jean-Claude Guillebaud, adding his own voice to the appeal for our societies to restore our hope in the future.