The politics of time

Abstract

Dystopias may once have functioned to raise an emancipatory alarm about the present; today they all too readily confirm the 'worst case scenarios' of the policy planners, using the imagination to undercut, rather than underpin, the possibility that things might proceed in another way. The philosophy of history may not 'belong' to the Left, in the sense in which some of Fukuyama's admirers like to think, but it is a field upon which a certain socialist tradition depends, intellectually, for its credibility. From the point of view of the European philosophy of history, the current situation is thus not unlike the late 1930s, when Horkheimer's famous essay set the Frankfurt School on the road which would eventually lead, by the 1960s, to the impasse of Theodor Adorno's negativism. The first concerns he centrality of totalising temporalisations of history to the structure of everyday experience in capitalist societies.

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