Suchergebnisse

This book investigates how people have thought about and experienced time, and how their ideas about time have shaped their political views and actions. Using French thinkers and activists of the radical left and right between the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War as a case study, it argues that time provides an important means of exploring how concepts such as nationalism, revolution and social change were understood at the turn of the century. Attending to different experiences of time - the speed at which it was perceived to move, the extent to which the future was near and graspable, the ways in which the past was seen to impinge on the present - opens up exciting new possibilities for analysing politics, ideologies and worldviews. --

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, summarises some of the underlying themes of the following articles and examines what may be gained from writing time into the history of political activism.