The Revolution in Time

Time is ‘hot’ these days. Its investigation once the preserve of philosophers and horologists, study of the ‘fourth dimension’ has dramatically increased over the past quarter century, within multiple disciplines. The late medieval/early modern centuries have provided ample material for the study of shifting perceptions of and adjustments to time on scales ranging from the hourly to the yearly, and beyond. Apart from intensively empirical research into the more practical aspects of time-keeping by historians (following David Landes’s influential 1983 book Revolution in Time, to which the title of the present book punningly alludes) and others such as the geographers Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, historical theorists dwelling outside philosophy departments have increasingly made ‘temporality’ (or its plural, temporalities) an important category of historiographical analysis. Some of this thinking has been brought to bear on political history, given that the flow of information, its volume, its seemingly accelerated speed during times of crisis, and its ambiguity, influenced people’s perceptions of how events, especially during such times of crisis, were moving, and how those on the periphery could make sense of events at the centre at a time when communication was still no quicker than the speed of the swiftest horse. (As recent years have shown, the speed and volume of communications does not do much to fix the ambiguity problem.) Since F.J. Levy’s important 1982 essay ‘How Information Spread among the Gentry’, much further work on what may be called ‘the politics of information’ has been done by historians of the book and of news such as Joad Raymond, Steve Pincus and Brendan Dooley, much of it inspired or at least influenced by the 1988 translation into English of Jürgen Habermas’s classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Ambiguity · Archaeology · Epistemology · Gentry · Historiography · Modernity · Plural · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Temporalities · Temporality · Australian History and Society · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity