This introductory chapter starts from the insight that within the social sciences, two knowledge collectives are concerned with the study of the future. The two collectives are futures studies and the sociology of the future. While basically all science produces some form of knowledge about the future, it is these two that explicitly concern themselves with describing and analyzing futures beyond the sphere of the individual or the single system, but with futures of the world or of humanity. From this insight, this chapter proceeds to introduce the objective of the book: to explain this bipartite institutionalization with reference to historical processes in the social sciences; building on this exploration of their roots, to explore by empirical means how the attention spaces of the two knowledge collectives are structured; and to derive, in concluding, how futures thinking in the social sciences might, and should, be organized in the near future.