Harold Wilson’s oft-quoted quip that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ reflects a basic truth: politics plays out in time, and the haste of political change can sometimes seem to chafe at the seams of the calendar. This sentiment is evident too in another done-to-death Wilsonian quip: as the story goes, when asked what the greatest challenge for the statesman was, he replied ‘events, my boy, events.’ Together, these quotations summarise what ‘politics’ means today: a series of reactions to changing contingencies that emerge in time.
It might be contended that talking of politics as ‘emerging in time’ is superfluous. Doesn’t everything emerge in time? We can rethink this contention by asking: is it possible to imagine a de-temporalized vision of politics? This would certainly be difficult—if we had no sense of time in our understanding of politics, then the notion of contingency would also collapse, for how could chance events occur without the temporal dimension? A ‘non-temporal politics’ would therefore have to be a politics radically different from our own use of the word ‘politics’. But it is exactly such a vision that we see in premodern Western political theory, which understood ‘doing politics’ as theorising about a timeless, utopian ideal. On this basis, the historian J.G.A. Pocock has argued that notions of time and notions of politics are intimately entwined.
We understandably take for granted the ‘time regime’ by which our own politics is organised. For us, time is divisible into discrete, exact units that stretch infinitely from the past into the future. Our lives are impossible to conceive without—in the words of Georg Simmel—‘[the] most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule.’ Still, this does not imply that our experience of time is unchanging. According to the historian Reinhardt Koselleck, time in modernity is characterised by an ever-accelerating horizon of expectation, an experiential snowball pushed into motion by the French Revolution. This distinctively modern time regime is also historicist, conceiving of events as progressing arbitrarily and discontinuously, rather than in any preordained scheme, natural or divine. In the modern period, therefore, time is secular, shorn of any eschatological direction afforded it by religion, and so aimless. As such, our experience of time is a world apart from that of the premodern peasant in Europe, for whom Church bells and festivals offered basic structure to the days and months. More significantly for our purposes, it is also different from that of the classical and scholastic philosophers, whose political theories have lasting currency, despite the fact they describe a vision of politics diametrically opposite to that outlined by Wilson.
To suppose that the mediæval world was ‘timeless’ probably sounds like preserve of Merrie England Romantics. But Pocock maintains that ‘there are several senses in which we can say that the scholastic intellect did not offer a philosophy of history at all.’ This disinterest in ‘history’ arose from a disinterest in worldly time more generally. The mediæval schoolmen preferred to follow Augustine’s example in lifting their eyes from the particular events of secular society towards the enduring universals of the Divine. To understand why, the opposition of the particular and the universal is central. Wilson’s ‘events’ may appear important in the short-term, but at a cosmic scale they resemble insignificant particulars that disappear down the stream of history. Time was therefore understood as both phenomenal and ephemeral. For Augustine, God was located outside of time, existing at a theorised point from which all events in time could apprehended simultaneously. By this understanding, our experience of time thus reflected a flaw of human perception, rather than the true nature of the universe. Political structures of mediæval Europe embodied this logic, with the monarch’s inconvenient mortality drowned out with the cries of ‘the King is dead, long live the King.’
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that it was outside of a monarchical context that a shift in the time regime would occur. The break can be identified in the writings of civic humanists during the Italian Renaissance, for whom the active participation in the life of the republic precipitated a reckoning with scholastic universalism. With the Greek model of the polis in mind, Florentines thinkers were faced with the fact that their desired republican system of government arbitrarily flitted in and out of existence over the course of history. In their view, as Pocock explained, ‘The republic was not timeless, because it did not reflect by simple correspondence the eternal order of nature; it was differently organised, and a mind which accepted republic and citizenship as prime realities might be committed to implicitly separating the political from the natural order.’ The particular, then, needed to be rescued from its Augustinian snub and elevated to a place of some importance. By affirming the value of civic engagement in a particular republic at a particular time, Florentines had enacted a dramatic reversal. Politics was no longer a matter of seeking the universal beyond the unravelling of time, but rather of realising a specific and limited civil community in the present. Once a mimetic exercise in replicating God’s atemporality in an unbroken succession of monarchs, politics became a matter of reckoning with contingent Wilsonian ‘events’. And this humbler, more pragmatic paradigm stuck.
For the concept of ‘politics’, then, the Florentine innovation marked the swing of the pendulum from the universal to the particular, and so from sacral to secular time. As long as nature and politics were united, politics progressed in time towards a definite end—namely the prophetic end times of Revelation. Once this bond had been loosed, politics could be imagined and understood as aimless, progressing in secular time to no-where in particular. This transformation was not immediate. The eschatological framework continued to imply some linear development. But the emphasis on the immediate needs of a particular, historicised republic grappling with contingent events contributed to the fragmentation of any unified narrative of time. If we look to the political structures of the nineteenth century, when historicism of this kind reached its height, we can find a particularly apt metaphor for political community in Ernest Renan’s description of the nation as a ‘plebiscite of the every day.’ Renan indicates that the model polity of the modern age is one of constant temporal renewal. In secular time, having moved away from the model of perpetual kingship, we are instead called to offer repeated affirmations of political legitimacy through active engagement with our political community. Renan’s example is extreme, but these affirmations are demanded from us with high frequency in our political structures today: in election cycles, participation in annual national ceremony, and repeated acts of authorisation.
A de-temporalized politics is, then, not only imaginable—it was, to some extent, once a reality. Of course, the fact that we can speak of a change in ‘time regime’ during the Renaissance, is itself a result of this change: we can consider the ideas of scholastic philosophy, historicise them as the product of a particular period with a particular religious context, and understand how these ideas have developed into the modern day. This process is possible because of our understanding of time, and its progress. For the scholastic, a week was most certainly not a long time in politics—nor indeed was a year or a century. Only in the modern time regime, governed by the politics of the particular, can such an utterance be considered banal.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 11: Time.
Luke Dale is a student at Oriel College, University of Oxford. He is currently based at Heidelberg University.