This chapter is an attempt to think about history and historical understanding from the future. My excuse for choosing such a big and speculative topic for a very short essay is mostly tactical—it is written as a sort of prelude, to sketch out main themes, put forward key concepts, and see if and how readers would react to them. The main argument I propose for discussion is that our contemporary regime of historicity is producing new modalities of the future that have, retroactively, an important impact on our historical thinking. Put differently, my interest is in discussing how to make sense of the past in a world where the future is not what it used to be. 1 Following Frank Ankersmit, I claim that in recent decades the center of gravity of the present has shifted (again) from the past to the future (Ankersmit 2013: 10). In other words, our point of temporal orientation is not in the past anymore, but in the future. This future, however, is not the same as in modernity, but radically different. This creates a need for a new research program that I propose to call future- oriented history. This term is coined in the spirit of Hans Jonas, who in the 1970s advocated a future-oriented ethics (Zukunftsethik), a hypothetical moral position in the future in order to look back on the present. “It is only in its lightning flash from the future—in the recognition of its planetary scope and profound implications for mankind—that it is possible to discover the ethical principles that our newfound powers call for,” Jonas (1979: 7–8) declared in his Imperative CHAPTER ELEVEN Future-oriented history Marek Tamm 9781350168794_txt_rev.indd 131 09-12-2021 21:15:23