Temporal comparisons: Evaluating the world through historical time

Tracking temporal comparisons: A very brief introduction

This special issue paves the way for a historically focused interdisciplinary study devoted to the semantics, argumentative structures and pragmatic uses of temporal comparisons as inherent features of historical time. A distinctive feature of our approach is that we treat temporal comparisons, and comparisons generally, as practices, building on ideas developed by Epple (2015), Epple et al. (2020), Grave (2019) and others. Practices of comparing between and across times pervade all spheres of activity: from high-level theory and historical reflection to the most trivial situations in everyday life. Temporal comparisons may appear in philosophical treatises as well as in public speeches, newspapers or private diaries. Tracking temporal comparisons is thus a way of exploring the broad middle ground between consciously elaborated theories about time and ordinary ways of contending with time.

To render these claims feasible, in the coming pages we will do three things. First, we will offer a brief overview of the workings of historical time by reviewing a sample of (both theoretically and empirically oriented) current scholarship. Second, at the centre of this introductory piece, we will flesh out in more details the central notion of this special issue: temporal comparisons. In doing so, we will pay special attention to the scales in which they can be studied and their performative character. Third, in the final step, we will provide a sneak peek into the main contentions of the contributions.

The workings of historical time

It would be preposterous to claim that there has been a lack of historical research and theoretical reflection in recent decades on historical time. Historians have studied ‘regimes of historicity’ (Hartog, 2015), ‘multiple temporalities’ (Jordheim, 2014), ‘sediments of time’ (Koselleck, 2018), and ‘futures past’ (Hölscher, 2017; Koselleck, 1985). They have addressed the ways in which ‘historical distance’ has been established (Phillips, 2013), investigated the techniques of bridging the gap between ‘lifetime and world time’ (Blumenberg, 1986) and pondered the question of how historical narratives have been shaped by imagined time lines, time cycles or time names (Corfield, 2007). More recently, one can witness a rethinking of ‘historical time’ (Tamm and Olivier, 2019), a re-negotiation of the ‘borders between present, past and future’ (Lorenz and Bevernage, 2013), a reckoning upon the ‘rise and fall of the modern time regime’ (Assmann, 2020), an enquiry into the ‘temporal anxiety’ of modern culture (Fuchs, 2019), an exploration of the new ‘times of unprecedented change’ (Simon, 2019a) and reflections on the conflict of temporal regimes (Edelstein et al., 2020). These works represent only a small fraction of inspiring publications on the varieties of experiencing time as specifically ‘historical’. Many more deserve to be listed, including works that link the incredible topical richness of time research with questions of history and historicity either directly or in a less explicit manner. Studies of non-synchronicity in world literature (Menozzi, 2020), enquiries into ‘the acceleration of life in digital capitalism’ (Wajcman, 2015) or into the temporal underpinnings of the financial world (Esposito, 2011; Samman, 2019) constitute only a tiny sample of an immense body of research in this respect, too.

In the course of their investigations, scholars dealing with ‘time’ histories and theories of historical time have reached a broad consensus about the need to historicize almost everything that concerns time. This includes not just the notion of abstract time itself, but the whole range of subsidiary concepts and related practices that we, the human beings of the 21st century, usually take for granted in our everyday lives. Among historicized concepts one can find ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ in the sense of empty spaces to be filled with events. Similarly, studies have shown that practices such as the consecutive placement of epochs or ages into a meta-narrative in accordance with specific names attributed to them (Middle Ages, the Renaissance or modernity, for instance) occurred only rather recently – in the German case not before the 18th century (Hölscher, 2014, 2015).

To gain a broader overview, theoretical insights need to be compared more systematically across linguistic divides in order to see whether, and when exactly, the respective time concepts and practices were available at all, and how and why they emerged. We need to know more about the ways in which those concepts and practices might have accumulated into stable clusters that one might call temporal regimes, and we should also ask how stable those regimes actually were. Is there anything like a ‘modern time regime’ (Assmann, 2020) with its specific fundamental tenets? Is it possible to empirically substantiate the claim that certain temporal arrangements dominated certain periods to such an extent that permits us to align them in a row of, for instance, pre-modern, modern and currently reigning ‘presentist’ regimes of historicity (Hartog, 2015)? Or would it be more cautious to assume that for most periods in history several temporal regimes coexisted side by side? Following the latter hypothesis, we would be more likely to find ‘pluritemporality’ (Landwehr, 2017) or ‘multiple temporalities’ (Jordheim, 2014) to have been the most common experience – if not everywhere and at all times, then at least with regard to world history from the early modern period. And, if that is so, can the framework of multiple temporalities adequately capture the constitution of ‘Islamic time’ (Bashir, 2014)? Can it encompass non-Western temporalities in any ways other than relegating parts of the world – conceived as ‘lagging behind’ and hoping to ‘catch up with’ those who lead the ‘development’ – into an ‘imaginary waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 8)? And does it consider times other than ‘historical’ (Nandy, 1995) or times prior to the colonial expansion of modern historical time (Mantena, 2007)?

These sweeping questions are typically discussed on a fairly abstract level. Theories of times are developed in various ways, oftentimes merging conceptual analysis, conceptual innovation by means of exploring and reflecting upon wide societal trends, cultural diagnosis and criticism, and profound engagement with intellectual traditions of philosophical and social analysis. In some cases, the latter approach fulfils the dual function of serving both as theoretical inspiration and as historical evidence at the same time. For ‘time histories’, however, the plausibility of such theories remains questionable, requiring closer scrutiny and a broader array of empirical evidence.

No wonder that the profusion of theories of historical time is accompanied by a growing body of historical research on a more practical level. To mention but a few, a large number of historical works are devoted to the emergence of clock time, clock use, time measurement and standardization of time around the globe (Dohrn-van Rossum, 1996; Maier, 1987; Ogle, 2015). To indicate the scope of historical investigation, one may mention topics as diverse as the time perceptions of tobacco consumers when they smoke ‘slow’ cigars or ‘fast’ cigarettes (Reichard, 2015), or the time regulations at Japanese workplaces (Schmidtpott, 2015), or in global financial markets (Ogle, 2019).

While all these perspectives have rendered excellent results, there seems to be a widening gap between enquiries into theoretical conceptions of time, on the one hand, and studies on the (micro)policies of dealing with time, on the other. This challenging situation is the backdrop against which we present this special issue, attempting to close or at least narrow the gap between theoretical innovation and empirical grounding in the study of historical time. To do so, we propose an approach that foregrounds a specific operation inherent in historical time as we know it, showcasing a variety of practices of temporal comparison. We think that a closer look at temporal comparisons will reconnect theory-based studies on time with those that address policies of time on a practical level.

Temporal comparisons

Past events and projections into the future have long been used as anchors for evaluating historical development in general and the respective present times in particular. Particularly in the modern period, historical time has become subject to multiple practices of temporal comparison, fleshing out the development of the socio-political world in evaluative terms. Whereas pessimists stressed human decline since the Golden Age or another idealized past, optimists praised progress as the development irrevocably leading to salvation, communism or market equilibrium. Comparisons between ‘then’ and ‘now’, between ‘now’ and ‘afterwards’ or ‘later’ not only marked perceived differences in history but also stressed politically and culturally relevant similarities. While the abundance of such comparative evaluations is evident, few attempts have been made to track down their vocabularies and syntactic structures and, most importantly, link these constructions to specific languages, periods, political disputes or literary genres.

In our short introduction, we would like to highlight two central tenets of the study of temporal comparisons. First, it seems inevitable to temporally locate temporal comparisons, that is, to address the question of the historicity of temporal comparisons: when did it become possible to perform practices of temporal comparison, and what forms have they taken over time? Second, temporal comparisons can fruitfully – although not exclusively – be approached by focussing on their performative dimension. The question to ask in regard to this is how exactly have temporal comparisons been performed linguistically and conceptually in various discourses and speech acts.

As to the historicity of temporal comparisons, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (2002) provides a good point of departure. According to Foucault, until about the early 17th century, comparisons generally followed a rhetorical mode of similitudes and analogies and thereby reflected a view of the world as an ordered harmony of resemblances, a great chain of beings, establishing corresponding planes between the celestial powers, the body politic of humans and the microcosms of the organic and anorganic world (Tillyard, 1981). From that period onwards, Foucault claimed, comparisons began to turn more and more around establishing qualitative or quantitative differences rather than similitudes. Comparisons now primarily served to define boundaries, or clear-cut steps, between various entities – between us and them, this and the other, above and below or inside and outside. Yet another epistemic shift, argues Foucault, occurred in the decades around 1800, namely, the shift that added a temporal dimension to the comparative disciplines and inaugurated a view of the world as a succession of evolutionary stages.

While Foucault’s hypothesis seems convincing on the whole, its empirical evidence is limited to the highest peaks of European philosophical and academic literature. It has also been challenged from various angles – even within his major field of expertise, the history of the sciences and the humanities. To begin with, Eggers (2016) has pointed to the long persistence of analogical forms of reasoning in a wide range of academic and non-academic fields – from aesthetics and linguistics to literature and the natural sciences – stretching far into the 19th century, while Griffiths (2016) even called the 19th century an ‘Age of Analogy’ – not only in literature but also in the natural sciences, particularly in regard to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. What both Eggers and Griffiths claim thereby is that analogies continued to function in the nineteenth-century sciences and humanities as explorative heuristic tools for disclosing new patterns and identifying new questions.

In a reverse movement, the scope of Foucault’s interpretation can also be stretched backwards. One could point out that important shifts in the modes of comparing emerged at least a century earlier than Foucault assumed. Already at or around 1500, comparisons increasingly began to stress differences as well as resemblances. Several factors have been held responsible for these shifts: first, the advent of print which led to an explosion of comparative knowledge across times and spaces; second, the confrontations of Europeans with overseas peoples and civilizations as colonization efforts increased from 1500 onwards; third, the split of Christendom into a multitude of different confessions and sects from the 1520s onwards (polemical comparisons); and fourth, the emerging quarrels between the ‘Ancients’ and the ‘Moderns’ following the humanist’s rediscovery of Greek and Roman Antiquity (see Baecker, 2001: 47, 67; Steinmetz, 2015: 105–110, 121–122). These latter quarrels have led to the 17th century’s first claims of superiority (and progress – avant la lettre) by the Moderns over the Ancients (and a fortiori over the ‘dark ages’ in between the two). Already in 1620, the then English Lord Chancellor and philosopher Francis Bacon proudly proclaimed in his Novum Organum ([1620] 2000), that he himself had moved past the trite competitive comparisons between the Ancients and the Moderns, because he (Bacon) would, in his work, pave the way to new forms of human understanding, forms unheard of and untried by the Ancients.

Many questions remain to be solved concerning the precise description, the timing and the historical contexts of, as well as the reasons for, major shifts in the uses of comparisons. Our main concern in this respect lies with the occurrence of specifically temporal comparisons, asking whether (and if so, when and how) we can identify a ‘modern’ regime of temporalized comparisons that might correspond to what Hartog (2015) calls the ‘modern regime of historicity’. Or to phrase the question through an engagement with the work of Koselleck (1985), it may also be appropriate to ask ourselves whether the late eighteenth-century invention of history with a big H, history as a collective singular, history as a unitary, progressive and open-ended process, resulted in new forms of temporal comparison. And, if so, we should also ask, and perhaps more interestingly still, whether it can be said that these new forms became in any way the dominant mode of temporal comparison.

It occurs to us that Koselleck himself was at least doubtful with respect to the latter question. On the one hand, in his essay on ‘Neuzeit: Remarks on the Semantics of Modern Concepts of Movement’, Koselleck (1985: 248) points to the proliferation, in the later 18th century and beyond, of what he calls ‘progressive comparisons’:

Comparisons promoted the emergence in experience of a world history, which was increasingly interpreted in terms of progress. A constant impulse leading to progressive comparison was drawn from the fact that individual peoples or states, parts of the earth, sciences, Stände, or classes were found to be in advance of the others. From the 18th century on, therefore, it was possible to formulate the postulate of acceleration; or conversely, from the point of view of those left behind, the postulate of drawing level or overtaking. This fundamental experience of progress, embodied in a singular concept around 1800, is rooted in the knowledge of noncontemporaneities which exist at a chronologically uniform time.

On the other hand, in his 1988 essay on Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel, Koselleck (2000: 50) emphasizes the persistent repeatability (Wiederholbarkeit) or availability (Abrufbarkeit) far into the 19th century and further on into our own times of very old forms of temporal comparison, used for the first time in Antiquity, and he refers more particularly to the historical comparisons of constitutions made by Herodotus and especially Polybios in order to make that point:

One can argue that here [with Herodotus and Polybios] we have a classic example for the fact that experiences, once made, remain repeatable, whether these experiences involve models of human self-organization or certain regular sequences of events engendering consequences that are then differently evaluated. […] The transformation of singular histories into a longer-term history (Fortschreiben) has not only released the comparability and hence structural repeatability of similar or analogous histories, but also pointed out purely diachronic regularities of successions of events. [our translation].

In this essay, as well as in some of his later essays written in the 1990s and the early 2000s, Koselleck seems to relativize the importance of the progressive mode of framing temporal comparisons since the Sattelzeit (roughly, the period between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries that Koselleck associates with a semantic change in the key concepts of modernity that gave birth to the modern temporalized concepts of movement). He seems to emphasize instead the long persistence of an analogical mode of reasoning, not only in practical politics or everyday social experience, but even in the practice of history writing itself.

If we follow Koselleck, then, we should probably abandon the idea of relegating older types of temporal comparison (historical analogies or parallels) into the ‘pre-modern’ (pre-Sattelzeit) age exclusively, and we should also no longer assume that the ‘modern’ (progressive) mode of framing temporal comparisons completely replaced these older types in the 19th and 20th centuries. What can nevertheless be said, until proof to the contrary, is that progressive comparisons as described by Koselleck are hard to find before the mid-eighteenth century (at least we have found no pertinent examples so far), and that they have proliferated ever since into our own times without, however, becoming the only or perhaps not even the dominant mode of temporal comparison.

We might also assume – although again, pending upon empirical verification – that explicit declarations of a ‘present time’ being incomparable to anything seen in the past, and expectations of a future that is likely to be again incomparable to the present, could not have been formulated before the Sattelzeit. As a proof for this vision of a fundamental rupture in history around 1800, Koselleck (2010: 132), in a posthumously published paper on ‘Das 19. Jahrhundert–eine Übergangszeit’ that he wrote in 1978, quotes from a letter written in 1820 by the German publisher Friedrich Perthes [we quote Perthes from Koselleck]:

All comparisons of our own times with earlier turning points in the history of individual peoples or centuries are far too petty-minded. The immeasurable significance of our own years can only be appreciated properly when we recognize that our own part of the world is involved in a transition period, in which the contradictions of an elapsing half-millenium collide with those of a forthcoming half-millenium…We, however, will not live to see the solution of this conundrum.

Finally, let’s consider just one more quote, dating from the early 19th century again. The young John Stuart Mill intuitively grasped the point that Koselleck makes about the pre-Sattelzeit unavailability of comparisons that require a holistic understanding of history when he claimed in 1831 that ‘[T]he idea of comparing one’s age with former ages, or with our notion of those which are yet to come, had occurred to philosophers, but it never before was itself the dominant idea of any age’ (Mill, 1986: 228). One might note that by using the adverbs ‘never before’ Mill framed his claim as a temporal comparison, in this case one about temporal comparison itself. What Mill seems to imply is that the decades around and after 1800 apparently saw a growing awareness that temporal comparisons encompassing the past, the present and the future now informed historical consciousness to a formerly inconceivable degree.

To situate these larger hypotheses concerning the historicity of temporal comparisons, the question that must be asked is that of how to conduct empirical studies enquiring into actual practices of temporal comparison. As the second main contention of this introduction, we wish to put forward the claim that conceiving temporal comparisons as performative activities carried out by conceptual and linguistic means is the most adequate way to approach them. While there are several ways and modes in which temporal comparisons are performed in written and oral discourses, we hope to illustrate our point by singling out three different scales on which the performing of temporal comparisons can be investigated.

On the largest scale, as linked with the aforementioned hypothesis of Koselleck concerning the Sattelzeit invention of the modern notion of a temporalized history, one may explore the extent to which this notion functions as a performative tool of temporal comparison. In this regard, what can be investigated is the operation of historicization enabled by the modern idea of history and carried out by actual histories. Such histories are typically products of the professionalized and institutionalized discipline of history and various ‘historical’ or ‘historically oriented’ modes of knowledge production across the human and social sciences.

On this scale, the main focus lies with the question of how any ‘regime of historicity’, any sense of historicity, that is, any configuration of the relationship between past, present and future as a scenario of change over time, necessarily entails temporal comparisons between past, present and future conditions of their studied objects. For instance, according to Simon (2019b), one of the co-authors of this introduction, ‘historicism’ and ‘constructionism’ represent two rival modes of historicization precisely because they perform two distinct practices of temporal comparison. A ‘historicist’ mode of historicization and temporal comparison has a strong evaluative component in considering its objects of study over their different stages of development – from ‘underdeveloped’ past states through more developed present states to expected future fulfilments of potentials. By contrast, a ‘constructionist’ mode of historicization and temporal comparison emphasizes what it perceives as the genuine novelty of present (and potential future) occurrences by showing how they are temporally incommensurable with what has existed in the past prior to the construction of the studied objects.

The next two scales can be best illustrated by the project of the other two co-authors of this introduction, Willibald Steinmetz and Kirill Postoutenko, devoted to the historical semantics of comparison and carried out within the framework of Bielefeld University’s Collaborative Research Centre on ‘Practices of Comparing’, together with Olga Sabelfeld and Michael Götzelmann. One line of inquiry pursued here is what may constitute the second – still large, less abstract and more empirically focused – scale of investigating temporal comparisons, devoted to a diachronic history of the concept (or concepts) of ‘comparison’, a Begriffsgeschichte in the Koselleckian sense, but a multi-lingual Begriffsgeschichte that has itself a comparative dimension. In other words: it is a history of the vocabularies used in various languages to designate performative comparative activities. More particularly, it is a history of the changing meanings and uses of that comparison-vocabulary as we call it in a shorthand terminology (Steinmetz 2015).

Lastly, the third scale moves from the level of concepts to the level of sentences that perform comparisons. These are, for example, simple sentences that equate two entities (a is like b), or sentences that establish a better–worse relation between two entities (a is better than b, a is the best). Or we have more complex sentences that establish a classification scale (a resembles b with regard to x but not with regard to y, and therefore, a should belong to a class of its own in the classification). Or we may come across sentences that stress difference and yet emphasize (moral or functional) equivalence at the same time (a is in many respects different from b, but as valuable or functional as b). Finally, we should not forget about sentences that claim the incomparability of two entities (a cannot or should not be compared to b) (for a more refined typology see Postoutenko 2020a). How far digital methods may help to explore those comparison-performing sentences is another question that deserves to be further explored (for first attempts see Götzelmann et al., 2020).

There are of course many other scales in which one can approach temporal comparisons. Our small illustrative sample did not intend to exhaust all possibilities. The spatial and temporal confines of this special issue (dominantly, although not exclusively, modern Europe) are due to the nature of taking an initial step in a potentially far larger exploration, which, in principle, would enable tracking temporal comparisons in their various functions. The complicity of the modern ‘regime of historicity’ in the unfolding of British colonization (Satia 2020), for instance, demands an exploration of the politics of temporal comparisons in regard to their function as means of colonialization. Similarly, it is yet to be explored whether and how European modes of temporal comparisons fuelled an inability even to acknowledge the varieties of ‘indigenous time’ in the Pacific (Salesa 2014) that Western temporalities largely overwrote in struggles of conquest and resistance. Gaining an understanding of the practices of the temporal comparison entailed in modern historical time opens up potential lines of inquiry of far larger scopes.

What we would like to emphasize, however, is that whenever one attempts to approach temporal comparisons, one should be able to track them down in their practical manifestations. Practices of temporal comparison may manifest themselves verbally or non-verbally. An example for non-verbal comparisons would be the display of visual images that contrast modern and medieval architecture in order to demonstrate an aesthetic decay over time, as in Augustus Welby Pugin’s Contrasts (1836; on this see Phillips, 2013: 117–120). Such juxtapositions strongly suggest comparisons, leaving it, however, up to the observer to follow up on these offers (or not): thus, the pendant hanging of Noël Hallé’s two alike paintings at the Paris Salon of 1759 became a completed comparison only after Denis Diderot wrote about the differences and similarities in his review of the exhibition (Postoutenko, 2020b). In contrast, verbal communication allows not only the display of comparata and – sometimes – suggestions of tertia, but the actual carrying out of the comparative operation.

Indeed, there are myriad ways of performing temporal comparisons in and through language. In rare cases, they may be explicitly highlighted by using words such as ‘comparison’, ‘to compare’ and ‘comparable’ themselves. More often, they will appear in rather inconspicuous forms, marked only by the occasional temporal adverb, a syntactical juxtaposition of dates or by nouns and verbs that imply a distance between ‘now’ and ‘then’ or a movement from an ‘earlier’ to a ‘later’ stage. Even a phrase like ‘x seems to have much improved in recent years’ implies a temporal comparison. Either explicitly highlighted or tacitly implied, historical parallels and analogies pervading historical, political, memory and commemoration discourses (Leutzsch, 2019) represent the most prominent loci of such performative temporal comparisons.

It is this very unobtrusiveness in outlook that makes the study of comparison-performing utterances a rewarding task. Investigating verbal practices of comparing in these ways allows researchers to extend the study of time into spheres far beyond and below the level of explicit statements in philosophy and history writing. Findings on larger and more abstract scales concerning temporal regimes – their stability, durability and outreach – may thus be grounded more firmly in source materials that have been generated in the course of practical activities of all kinds. Eventually, this is precisely what we hope to gesture towards with this special issue: to build a closer connection between more theoretically oriented accounts on historical time and more empirically focused research.

Special issue outline

The composition of this special issue exemplifies a transition from reflections on multiple temporalities to their comparative cross-evaluation in discourse as outlined above. François Hartog’s contribution deals with the tendency of accommodating – and ultimately dissolving – various pasts in the present by means of creating museums juxtaposing, likening and finally blending old and new. Margrit Pernau shows how selective versions of the past served Islamic activists of 19th century India as a blueprint for the bright future of both the faithful and faith itself. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon turns to today’s prospects and ponders upon the intricacies of attempts to confine runaway futures of radical alterity to the well-trodden path of conventional historical reasoning.

This point allows for the transition from our investigations into the contested relations between historical times to more specific case studies on different practices of temporal comparisons. The general overview is provided by Javier Fernández Sebastián, who also pays particular attention to the recurrent formulae of comparison between historical epochs. As a complement, taking 19th- and 20th-century Germany as an example, Willibald Steinmetz focuses on the political use of figures of speech that state similarities (‘once again’) or differences (‘never before’) between certain historical periods. He tracks down their varying relevance for parties and ideologies and relates them to the prevailing modes of historical consciousness in modern Europe. In a similar vein, Jussi Kurunmäki and Jani Marjanen chart the role of temporal comparisons in the belated – and suppressed – national awakening of 19th century Finland. Michael Götzelmann broadens the scope again by investigating the functions, forms and conjunctures of temporal comparisons in utopias and dystopias ranging from Thomas More up to most recent examples of the genre. Finally, Kirill Postoutenko and Olga Sabelfeld draw attention to the dialogical potential of temporal comparisons, interpreting them as a mighty tool of political stance-taking by competing factions in 20^th-century British parliamentary debates.