Liisi Keedus

“Between the times”: Embattled temporalities and political imagination in interwar Europe

The project aims to redefine the intellectual history of interwar Europe, focusing on the shift away from historicism and progressivism. It emphasises the emergence of anti-teleological views of time and their impact on ethics, politics, and methodology and seeks to capture the breadth of this rupture, traditionally confined to German culture. Through narrative innovation, it explores how temporality was reimagined across various disciplines and creative fields. Methodologically, it reconstructs political thought dynamics through intellectual groupings active during the period. Unlike traditional approaches limited to a few national contexts, it examines interactions across Europe, including France, Britain, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Key questions include the political implications of temporal reinventions and how they varied across nations. The project aims to uncover the fragmented legacies of this intellectual shift and its impact on post-1945 European thought.

Results

What were the new ways how Europeans began to experience time and historicity after World War I, when they could no longer believe in progress? The main hypothesis is that these new ideas about time had a profound influence on contemporary political and social languages across Europe. In the 21st century context of decline of confidence in the future and the emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene as a radically new era, the project highlights the fact that modern European thought always operated within plural and competing temporalities that not only have lasting intellectual legacies but could also be critically used for reframing our own temporal imagination.

The initial focus shifted once the team understood that modern linear temporalities were already challenged much earlier in the late 19th and early 20th century. The team realised how recurrent similar themes and ideas are in contemporary critiques of modern progressivism and growthism in the era of the climate crisis. 

Impact

The wider social aim of the project is to raise the question of how 20th-century alternative historicities can illuminate the present crisis of progressivism. The contemporary world and its values are based on the paradigms of endless progress and growth: more, better, faster, further, endlessly. At the same time, there is an increasing awareness that our planet has limits, possibly already surpassed in terms of sustainability.

Many people already believe that we need to think and aspire differently, in a new, more sustainable way. But how do we think and act as a society beyond the maxim of (economic) growth? The project explores the philosophical underpinnings of thinking beyond limitless progress; that is, it explores alternative ways of imagining human temporality, change, and historicity.