Which thinkers will define our future?

Berkeley

SEVERAL years ago, it occurred to me that social scientists today are all standing on the shoulders of giants like Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. One thing they all have in common is that their primary focus was on the social, political, and economic make-up of the Western European world between 1450 and 1900. Which is to say, they provide an intellectual toolkit for looking at, say, the Western world of 1840, but not necessarily the Western world of 2016.

What will be taught in the social theory courses of, say, 2070? What canon - written today or still forthcoming - will those who end their careers in the 2070s wish that they had used when they started them in the late 2010s? After mulling this question for the past few years, I've narrowed down my choice to the writings of three people: Tocqueville, who wrote in the 1830s and 1840s; John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s; and Karl Polanyi, who wrote in the 1930s and 1940s.