Time, Politics and War: the Politics of Modern Experience

Reading recent work on temporality, on power and on war, this article considers in particular some important new reflections on time in modern historical experience. It draws out themes to do with the politics and management of time in modern societies and discusses some of the more important new insights on how history as a discipline might better engage with the emotional and subjective force of temporal experience. The experience of time is often difficult to capture in traditional historiographies, but, from war fiction to oral testimonies of war experiences, to novel reflections on time and power in the language of revolutionary movements, new ground is being opened up that promises to make historians themselves think more deeply about their own subjective relationship to the times of which they write.