Teleology and progressivism have never been systematically defined political concepts, yet they dominate the political poetics for some of our most cherished pursuits, including democratization, Europeanisation, and emancipatory movements. In the past decade, however, Europe’s present – the reality of enduring and agonizing crises – has tuned the tension between our tenaciously progressivist “horizon of expectation” and the newly disillusioned “space of experience” close to the point of exhaustion. In this time of a radical need for a redefinition of Europe’s self-identity, progressivist public regimes of historicity are failing to deliver their elusive promise. Yet what are – if any – the alternative historicities for reframing our political horizons? The project seeks to answer this question both theoretically and historically.
Historically, the first aim of the project was to offer a new intellectual history of the political imagination in the interwar period that places the demise of progressivism and the emerging anti-teleological visions of time at the center of some of its most innovative ethical, political and methodological pursuits. Here, we have presented a distinctively cross-disciplinary (theology, jurisprudence, classical studies, literary theory, linguistics, sociology, philosophy) and a trans-national European narrative of the reinvention of temporality in order to capture its multiple ramifications.
The second main aim was to challenge the sufficiency of the conventional focus on one or two, at most three (usually “Western” European) countries in interwar intellectual history by exploring these themes across national contexts (France, Britain, Germany), including in Central and Eastern Europe (Russia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Hungary). We hope to have significantly extended the geographical scope of twentieth century history of political thought by offering both comparative studies across national contexts, as well as intellectual histories of several Eastern and Central European, in addition to the German, French, British and Italian temporal imaginations in our project.
The third aim was to methodologically shift the usual focus in intellectual history on individual thinkers to intellectual groupings, which we have successfully pursued in research publications (articles, monographs), although whether this will be a more widely implemented method, will be seen in the future.
The fourth aim was to trace the eclectic legacies of interwar novel experiences and concepts of temporality in the philosophical, methodological and political dicta of post-1945 thought. We aimed to unearth some of these genealogies, as well as explore the ways in which these alternative historicities and their legacies can illuminate the present crisis of progressivism. With this aim in mind, we have made contributions to recent surge in philosophies of history, attempts to conceptualise the various implications of the Anthropocene, as well as intervened in debates on presentism and post-growth discourses.
