Time & Society

More than any other institution, the museum is preoccupied with time, perpetually creating, contesting, and regaining it. From the collections of ancient art amassed in mid-14th-century Italy to the contemporary galleries without their own collections, the museum has always been a leading force in shaping Western civilization’s perceptions of time. After a survey of the history of Europe’s museums, the article traces the configurations of temporality that have arisen in different periods. Beginning in the 15th century, museums exhibited recent art alongside classical masterpieces, highlighting the cleavage between new and old. Three and a half centuries later, however, the art of the present was proclaimed a contemporary of the art of the past and the future, a notion upheld in spite of the outpourings of revolutionary pathos. It was in the second half of the 20th century that this synchronizing tendency yielded to the domination of the one and only present, which remains in force today. This new and challenging situation could be a starting point for the reassessment of contemporary museums’ role in influencing and realizing social temporality.

The comparison of the present to the time of the Prophet could mean very different things at different times and for different people, in spite of the finite authoritative sources, the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. The article argues that the time of the Prophet and the comparative standard it offered not only changed depending on the concerns of the present from which the authors wrote and the future they imagined, but also affected the present and the future of each community referring to it. In the colonial contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth century, this temporal comparison met with and integrated the model of the stages of development. Comparisons with Europe, standing in for modernity, became central for the location of the community on a scale of progress, but also for attempts to change this position by catching up, educationally, economically, and politically. They went hand in hand with a strong appeal to the emotions: The successful reform of the community or nation was what would make the difference between honor, hope, and pride on the one hand and despair, humiliation, and shame on the other, and it was the responsibility of the present generation to gain or lose the future. The article investigates two comparisons of the present with the early Islamic past, Altaf Husain Hali’s Musaddas, a long poem on the Ebb and Flow of Islam (1879), and the speeches Bahadur Yar Jang delivered in Hyderabad in the 1930s and 1940s. Both, though in a noticeably different way, show a Prophetic time, which is not only situated in the past, but also the age of the most perfect form of progress (taraqqi). Reverting to the past thus also means advancing toward the future; comparing the present to the Prophetic times is an indication how far the community is ready to face the challenges of the future.

In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern historical time. Based on these theoretical considerations, this article has a dual objective. First, through an analysis of historical approaches to the Anthropocene—that exemplifies present-day perceived radical novelty—it attempts to identify the linguistic-conceptual means of temporal domestication through historical time. Second, it raises the question of the politics of historical time today by focusing on the evaluative aspects of temporal domestication in an age when the future increasingly appears a threat. As a brief conclusion, the article calls for broader recognition of what it calls a plurihistoricity of “historical” transitions, the co-existence of multiple kinds of transformation and change over time.

The main purpose of this article is to raise some questions about temporal comparisons and analogies in the writing of history. The article has four parts. The first one shows that historical discipline, conceptual history and language itself can scarcely be conceived of in the absence of comparisons, implicit or explicit, between events, processes and individuals. The second section provides a few samples of the sources of inspiration of some recurrent temporal parallelisms in the Western tradition. The third identifies two key moments in the history of modern Europe when temporal analogies assumed particular importance. These two periods – two turns of the century (16th century and 18th century) – correspond to transitional phases between successive stages in the development of Western historical consciousness. The article ends with a brief reflection on the usefulness and limits of temporal analogies in the writing of history.

Comparisons across historical times can appear in various shapes. Apart from simple then/now contrasts, three basic modalities may be distinguished: (1) Comparisons that stress similarity and repeatability (“once again”), (2) comparisons that claim absolute novelty, if not incommensurability between present and past (“never before”), and (3) comparisons that suggest a time lag between two entities which, although synchronous in calendar time, appear nonsynchronous in other respects (“too late”/“not yet”/“far ahead”). Relying on a broad range of comparison-performing utterances by leading politicians and observers, this article will assess the conjunctures of those three modalities of temporal comparison in 19th- and 20th-century German politics. Prima facie, one might expect an increase in the use of novelty claims (“never before”) and comparisons of the “too late”-type in that period of frequent upheavals. By contrast, the “once again”-variant should be declining because it builds on the historia magistra vitae topos which, according to Reinhart Koselleck, was dissolved in the post-1789 age of revolution. However, there is abundant evidence to show that historical examples and analogies continued to play a significant role all through the 19th and 20th centuries, whereas allegations of absolute novelty or of being too late remained limited to situations of imminent crisis. Even though the examples presented in this article refer to Germany’s special case, it will be argued that the pattern is typical for Western modernity at large: Modern political rhetoric and action are characterized not by one dominant regime, but a copresence of all three—competing—modalities of temporal comparison.

The creation of Finland as a grand duchy within the Russian Empire in 1809 opened up the question of what Finland was, in fact. Comparing Finland synchronously with other countries and diachronically with itself before and after its elevation into a grand duchy gained temporal features in which its level of development was assessed. Such temporal comparisons during the first half of the 19th century were used to shape Finland as a political unit, as they facilitated assessment of which parts of society needed to improve in order to make the country comparable with imagined or real others. Given that the Diet (the Estate Assembly) was not convened between 1809 and 1863, these comparative notions largely dealt with questions of political constitution and state institutions. The comparative mindset of the Finnish actors also developed in the process of conducting temporal comparisons. These comparisons can be analyzed through the analytical categories of descriptive synchronization, comparative synchronization, and participative synchronization, the last mentioned being possible only when Finnish actors began to think that Finland, indeed, had developed to a level of maturity.

No literary genre seems to be more popular to transport the hopes and fears of humans than the genre of utopia. With the temporalization of Utopia in the 18th century temporal gaps where opened, that had to be somehow closed to explain the reader their present and the fictive future. The means of choice to close the temporal gap is the temporal comparison. On the basis of a corpus of utopian fiction, several thousand temporal comparisons were identified, to find an answer on the question what functions the temporal comparisons fulfill. With the five centuries of modern utopian fiction in mind, also questions about the narration techniques within the history of the genre had to be raised (utopia/dystopia/temporalization) and what these changes do with the temporal comparisons. On the basis of this preparatory work, this article proposes two prototypes of temporal comparisons—the synchronization of different temporalities and the actualization of memory.

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.