Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: a history of times
Part I: Time and the Dreyfus Affair
1 Action: engaging in the Affair
2 Disillusion: the Universités populaires and the aftermath of the Affair
Part II: Time and the nation
3 Darkness and emptiness: the radical right, the Franco-Prussian War, and the present
4 The radical right and the ‘eternal France’
Part III: Time and revolution
5 Between reform and revolution: notions of change on the left
6 The infinite temple: futurist fiction and scientific discourse on the left
7 Syndicalist solutions? Proletarian time, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the Cercle Proudhon
Conclusion: changing times
Index
