The history of the future, 1500-2000

The article offers a panoramic vision of the views that were held about de future in Europe in the period between 1500 and the year 2000, in other words, from the end of Middle Age until the present. At the same time, it compares the attitudes regarding the future between 1500-1800 and 1800-2000. It discuses Lucian Holscher's thesis in his The Discovery of the Future, and the one of Reinhart Koselleck, his mentor, en his Past Futures, for whom before the XVIII century there was no sense of the future. It presents arguments regarding future senses from two perspectives: an "early middle age", around 1500, with the Renaissance, the invention of the printing press and the Reform; and a second one, announced by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - when the future started to be considered as something more opened than before-, there was an "expansion" in the geographical and social meaning of the term, and the relatively distant as well as the close future were starting to be considered as something "constructible" by more people and in more places.