Przeszłość jako przyszłość nauk społecznych i pedagogicznych

In this paper I will try to look to the past in the present as the possible future of social science. My argument proceeds in the first section to explore a genealogy of social science as planning the future. The planning to design people is visible in the long nineteenth century. This planning to design the child, the family and community joins utopian narratives in the planning associated with the social sciences, linking human agency to effect change with spaces of collective belonging given in the names of democracy, the common good and the nation. The scenario of design in contemporary research is taken up in the second section. The final section turns to a different notion of practice as an alternative practical science, that is, a history of the present. The future of the social sciences as argued is one that takes the present and asks about the conditions that historically make possible what is seen, acted on, talked about and felt. The argument, however, is not against planning but to explore the limits of contemporary orthodoxies.