Fred Polak

Who was Fred Polak?

Frederik Lodewijk Polak was one of the Dutch founding fathers of futures studies, perhaps best known in the field for theorising the central role of imagined alternative futures in his classic work The Image of the Future.

Polak was the son of Alexander Polak, violin builder and concertmaster of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Janet Kiek, who founded the first Home Economics Budget Bureau. He studied law and economics in Amsterdam and, before the Second World War, was a member of the Board of Directors of a large chain of stores in the Netherlands. In 1936 he married the poet Louise Moor. As a Jew, Polak spent the war years in hiding and preparing a PhD thesis in philosophy. After the war he became a staff member and managing director of the Netherlands' Central Planning Bureau, personal advisor to the Minister of Education, advisor of the Dutch government for Full Employment, Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Managing Director of an industrial organization at Twente.

Polak was a Senator for the Socialist Party and later became a cofounder of the political party DS-70.

Polak graduated cum laude in philosophy in 1946, and since his thesis and inaugural address in 1947 on the evolution of science and society of tomorrow, devoted himself continuously to the future of man and society.