W. Warren Wagar, who died November 16, 2004, was an extraordinary futurist equally at
home in the past and the future. As a distinguished teaching professor in the history
department at Binghamton University (State University of New York), Wagar drew thousands
of students to his courses on history and the future. He also wrote 18 books on
future-relevant topics.
The City of Man: Prophecies of a World Civilization in Twentieth-Century Thought
(1963) surveyed visions of world order through the ages, especially in the twentieth
century. In contrast, Building the City of Man: Outlines of a World Civilization
(1971) was a scholarly polemic, a passionate but well-informed call for revival of
utopographic traditions, more people spending much more time in learning, departments of
cognitive synthesis, and world ecological planning.
Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse (1972) looked at
the various ways that thinkers saw the human condition as getting better. The obviously
pessimistic opposite was Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (1982),
an eloquent and entertaining survey of visions about cataclysms and an approaching day of
doom.
Wagar's most ambitious and imaginative work, A Short History of the Future
(1989, revised 1992 and 1999), took the form of a memoir written in 2200 looking back on
three successive world-order regimes: first, a megacorporate global economy lasting until
the mid-twenty-first century (including a great depression in 2038 and a nuclear war in
2044); second, a socialist world commonwealth, and third, a decentralized order of
autonomous societies that Wagar calls "The House of Earth."
For those who couldn't appreciate this lengthy scenario, Wagar published a conventional
nonfiction version as The Next Three Futures: Paradigms of Things to Come (1991).
Here, he explained not only the distinctive notion of three global regimes over the next
200 years, but also the state of futures inquiry, the future of the earth system, wealth
and power, and war and peace.
Memoirs of the Future, an autobiography published in 2001, tied together
Wagar's personal and professional life. This book covered his growing up in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, his 151-page Philosophy of Progress written when he was only 13
years old, his reading of all 120 of Wells's books by the age of 19, and his first
published book, H.G. Wells and the World State (1961).
Wagar's famous "History of the Future" course begun at Binghamton in 1974,
taken by some 7,000 students, and his "World War III" course first offered in
1983 made Wagar a legend among students and alumni at Binghamton. Wagar's last two books
returned to his first and greatest passion, the life and ideas of H.G. Wells, arguably the
greatest of all futurists. The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution
(2002) is a reprint of the 1933 edition of Wells's 1928 book. Wagar added a 44-page
critical preface, noting that, despite seven "considerable" problems, Open
Conspiracy "may be the most important book written in the twentieth
century." In contrast to this assessment of a single Wells book, Wagar's final
publication, H.G. Wells: Traversing Time (2004) summarizes the immense work and
many ideas of Wells, both in fiction and nonfiction form, in 334 very entertaining and
illuminating pages.
Wagar bridged a number of polarities, between scholarly and somewhat popularized work,
between optimism and pessimism in visions of the future, between fiction and nonfiction
and between self and world. If anyone seeks an introduction to the best of futures
thinking by taking a long step backward into twentieth-century history, the works of
Warren Wagar are undoubtedly the place to begin.
About the Author
Michael Marien is the editor of Future Survey.
