Introduction – Activist times: temporality and political action in twentieth-century Europe

ABSTRACT

Understandings of time have long formed a fundamental part of political ideologies and served to structure political action. The articles in this special issue of the European Review of History explore different ways in which different groups of activists have drawn on, experienced or projected different understandings of time in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, often in contexts shaped by substantial upheaval and uncertainty. This introduction outlines the strands of the historiography of time, summarizes some of the underlying themes of the following articles and examines what may be gained from writing time into the history of political activism.

Les compréhensions du temps ont longtemps été un élément fondamental des idéologies politiques, et elles ont souvent structuré l’action politique. Les articles qui se trouvent dans ce numéro de la Revue d’histoire européenne étudient comment des diverses groupes d’activistes ont utilisé, ont éprouvé, et ont projeté des différentes conceptions du temps dans la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle en Europe, souvent dans le cadre des bouleversements importants et l’incertitude intense. Cette introduction résume quelques éléments de l’historiographie sur les compréhensions du temps, souligne les thèmes qui réunissent les articles inclus ci-dessous, et suggère ce que l’on peut gagner en mettant ensemble l’histoire du temps et celle de l’activisme politique.

KEYWORDS:

• Time
• temporality
• activism
• political action
• social movements

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who participated in the original workshop and have contributed to this collaborative project since.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Allegra Fryxell’s eloquent Afterword, “The Human Scale of Time” in Time on a Human Scale.

2. Antentas, “Notes on Corona Crisis,” 316.

3. See Fryxell, “The Human Scale of Time”; and Shamekh et al., “COVID-19.”

4. Siegfreed, “Reconfiguring the Future?” For special editions, e.g. Matthew S. Champion, ed., “Viewpoints: Temporalities”; and Esposito and Reichardt, eds, “Fascist Temporalities.”

5. The founding text is Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale. A more recent synthesis is Heywood, A History of Childhood. The political use of children in a British context, King, “Future Citizens.”

6. Although the term – and fundamental premise – is older, the starting point for debating the Anthropocene is usually Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” 17–18. See a meditation on the challenge of the Anthropocene for conceiving and writing human history in Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History.”

7. Armitage and Guldi, The History Manifesto.

8. Aslanian et al., “AHR Conversation: How Size Matters.”

9. Roemer, “Between Hope and Despair,” 345.

10. See, recently, Edwards et al., eds., “Time for Change?”

11. A summary in Markoff, “Historical Analysis.”

12. McAdam and Sewell, “Temporality in Social Movements.” On events, see Sewell, “Three Temporalities” and developed in his The Logics of History.

13. On the ways in which the French Revolution advertised itself as a temporal rupture, Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 1–79. On modernity and the French Revolution, see Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 11–54.

14. Koselleck, Futures Past, 3. For a stimulating collection of essays which tackle Koselleck’s legacy, see Lorenz and Bevernage, Breaking Up Time, in particular the chapters by Peter Osborne and Aleida Assman.

15. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, 39.

16. A healthy scepticism regarding modernity has been manifest in Clark, Time and Power as well as in the collection of ‘viewpoint’ pieces on time in Past & Present.

17. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.”

18. Ogle, “Time, Temporality and the History of Capitalism,” 5.

19. Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 7.

20. Martin, Leisure and Society; and Cooper, “Colonizing Time.” Another recent and significant contribution on the relationship between time and power comes from Clark, see Time and Power; see also Greenhouse, A Moment’s Notice.

21. Koselleck, “Some Questions,” 13.

22. Graf, “Either–or,” 600. See also Graf and Jarausch, ‘“Crisis’ in Contemporary History and Historiography.”

23. See for example Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, or Carvalho and Gemenne, eds., Nations and their Histories.

24. See for example Wright, Socialism and the Experience of Time, or Krakowský, Réinventer le monde.

Additional information

Funding

This special issue has its roots in a workshop on ‘Time and Activism: Ruptures, Experiences, Aftermaths’, generously funded by Durham University’s Department of History, the University's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and the Royal Historical Society.

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Paulin-Booth

Alexandra Paulin-Booth is a historian of time, and she is particularly interested in how understandings and experiences of time played a role in politics and intellectual life in France and the French Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees at Durham University before studying for a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in History at the University of Oxford. She finished her doctoral studies in 2017. She has held teaching positions at Balliol College, Oxford (as Lecturer) and Durham (as Assistant Professor). She was a Research Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles before moving to the Berlin-based ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script’ Cluster of Excellence.

Matthew Kerry

Matthew Kerry is Lecturer in European History at the University of Stirling and is a social and cultural historian of modern Spain, with a particular focus on the meaning and practice of politics. Prior to joining Stirling, he taught at Durham, Loughborough and Sheffield, and was a postdoctoral fellow at York University, Toronto, and the Institute for Social Movements, Bochum. His first book, Unite, Proletarian Brothers! Radicalism and Revolution in the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936, was published in 2020 and his work has also appeared in the English Historical Review, European History Quarterly and Cultural & Social History.