To think of the future involves drawing a horizon of expectations into which our concepts are embedded. It means to acknowledge an internal temporal structure to them that speaks of an orientation and a relation between a fictional anteriority and a not yet realised futurity. Such has been until now a basic assumption and experience of our modern understanding of the world in all its diachronic synchronicity. Current epochal discussions regarding the end of the horizon of expectations of modern times seem to indicate a shift in this understanding, bringing with it a series of critical-theoretical problems that are not simply philosophical, but also fundamentally political. How we come to understand “the new time of the world” relates directly to the afterlife (Nachleben) of critical theory in it. 1

There is no reason for me to elaborate here dominant time theories about the stretched present, where the past loses its depth of focus and where the future has arrived presentifying our life-time (Lebenszeit).2 The direct link between the acceleration of innovation and data gathering, that in turn produces more presentification technologies and corresponding forms of subjectivation. New forms of global asynchronicity generate new, but not unfamiliar inequalities. Some of these discussions go back some decades, think of Virilio among many others, but they have taken a new turn with important consequences in the discourse of the Anthropocene.3 In it the future is not only detemporalized into the permanent catastrophic present of anthropogenic activity, but it is populated by the normed and atemporal notion of species, disfiguring the historical categories of past and future.

Taking seriously the state of perpetual emergency that the Anthropocene announces would require an understanding of how the distance between the horizon of human expectations and its distance from human experience has been reduced so drastically, and with it the temporal determinants of the future and the past. The cancelling of that historical distance has infiltrated an ever expanding present necessary for coinciding with a future, which in principle has already arrived. The idea of a species-in-the-now, whose conceptual constitution is necessarily après coup, becomes the functioning term in the revision of our temporal-historical categories and hence of our understanding of politics.

In his book O novo tempo do mundo,Brazilian Marxist philosopher Paulo Arantes offers an analysis of what he calls “the new time of the world” in an era of decreasing expectations. According to Arantes, the Braudelian world temporality, as we had known it, has come now to a full disarticulation. Its zero hour, the events between 1789-1815 which initiated a political storm until then unknown in the modern world, inaugurated and crystallised a system of values supported by capitalist compulsion and unending accumulation. Following Wallerstein, Arantes argues that the capitalist strata extracted two lessons from the revolutionary uprisings in Europe and the New World. The first lesson was the threat that the new Robespierres unleashed as the plebeians of the world. The slaves of Santo Domingo, the European peasantry, and the sans culottes, to cite three examples, showed how a world struggle over the accumulation of capital was being forged. These revolutionary uprisings were intensely fought because of the unprecedented threat they presented to the polarised structures of the capitalist world system. They configured the first true anti-systemic revolts of the modern world.

The defeat of the 1848 revolution, which Reinhart Koselleck had interpreted as the triumph of the bourgeoisie against the reactionary strata of the Ancien Régime, Arantes reads as the moment of the geocultural invention of something akin to a technology of the management of risks provoked by an excess of expectations; a kind of astute normalization of social change. This was the second lesson learned, derived perhaps as mere consequence from the Great Fear that the unleashing of an anti-hierarchical democratic avalanche would alter the process of accumulation. It was only through the acceptance of gradual transformation that the world bourgeoisie would have its chance at containing it and reducing its rhythm. According to Arantes, this is how the new temporal horizon of the world came to consolidate itself. Its vanishing point was an expectation very different from the prognosis calculated by absolutist power and by the evolution of the political mechanism to direct the system. To control it and dominate it became the job of modern politics.

Arantes rereads Koselleck (for whom the meaning of the new in modernity is a new temporal understanding [Neue Zeit] which accompanied the capitalist acceleration of progress) to illuminate how the culture of legitimation of historical capitalism became visible in the growing scale of the planet over the past two hundred years.4 The capitalist world economy was an immense field of expectations that, while antagonistic, was still unified in an unknown future, so unknown that to know it and to control it became the continuous job of politics. In his radicalized reading of Koselleck, brushing it against the grain of the world-systems theory, Arantes concludes that the role not only of critique but of politics itself had been the management of this horizon of expectations.

To fully understand the framework of Arantes’ O novo tempo do mundo and its implication it is important for us to engage with Koselleck’s ideas in his book Crisis and Critique: Enlightenment and Pathogenesis of Modern Society. What are the temporal determinants of crisis and revolution in a global order? Are we living in a truly crisis conscious time that, much like once pre-revolutionary France, prophecies revolution? Why or why not? Are its political prognosis and its historico-philosophical concealment themselves aspects of the very phenomenon of crisis itself as Koselleck argued with regard to the politics of Enlightenment during the era of Absolutism? It seems that today’s crisis is the subsumption of the political to the economic in an era of indetermination whereby future oriented utopian ideologies are systematically undone. This ideological operation sets us back to pre-enlightenment temporal political determinants, this time not of an Absolutist character but of a neoliberal one that require us to articulate again a politics of critique and of global determinate readings that recover the very temporal dimensions of a term, that once upon a time both announced and elided a revolutionary moment.

Reinhart Koselleck’s account has two fundamental strengths that make him a thinker of choice for Arantes. First, his account of the emergence of critique and crisis is not philological, but rather a historical-semantic explanation of the emergence in the late eighteenth century, as terms proper to a particular form of temporality. Second, his is a political reading, conservative as it may be, of why critique reaches its limits vis-à-vis the very social position of its own enabling class. An attentive reading of Koselleck allows us to understand on the one hand, why and how the hostility to critique dates back to Absolutism and finds its way all the way to the present, and on the other hand, how a demand for the normativization of critique has brought it under the very order of dominant reason, as expressed today in the discourses of its current hegemonic political formation, that of liberal capitalist democracies. It seems as if in the current crisis, we find ourselves in the situation exactly opposite to the one Koselleck described as “a crisis conscious time that once prophesied revolution, and whose political prognosis and its historico-philosophical concealment were themselves aspects of the very phenomenon of crisis itself.” It is important to explore how we arrived at this inversion.

Crisis, Critique, and the Threat of Revolution

In his book Reinhart Koselleck seeks to illuminate, through the connection of the terms critique and crisis, the relationship between an utopian philosophy of history and the revolutionary period that commences in 1789. Koselleck argues that the Illuminati’sfailure to make the connection between the critique they practiced and the crisis that was forthcoming led to the conjuring of the crisis and at the same time to its political obfuscation. The political significance of crisis remained hidden and stored in historico-philosophical images of the future proper to the philosophy of history they advanced.5

To understand the significance of this argument, we must first revisit some of Koselleck’s assumptions about the semantics of historical time in the eighteenth century. It is during the Enlightenment, according to Koselleck, that the term “modernity” (Neue Zeit) differentiates itself into a term that acquires both a qualitative meaning with respect to the newness of the era and a transcendence of future orientation (Neueste Zeit). This reorientation of the term and the opening of a particular semantic space is possible at the moment when Christian eschatology declines, science advances, and the awareness of the New World is firmly in place. It is in the decades around 1800 when the terms “revolution,” “progress,” “development,” “crisis,” “Zeitgeist,” all acquire temporal indications which were not present previously. Time is no longer the medium in which all histories proceed; time acquires a historical quality and becomes a historical and dynamic force in itself. The concept of history, as expressed for the first in the collective and singular form “Geschichte,” acquires a new meaning in and for itself, apart from a particular subject or object.6

Modernity cannot be understood then simply as a periodizing category, but must be understood rather as a rupture in the quality of historical time itself. The characteristics of the historical matrix of modernity which determine it as a quality of social life include the valorization of the present over the past as its negation and transcendence, the opening up toward an indeterminate future that is only possible if the present is conceived of as surmountable and as a future relegation to the past, and the tendency toward the elimination of the historical present itself as the perpetual transition between a continually changing past and an indeterminate future.7

This distinct kind of temporality affected as well the internal temporal structure of our political concepts, which became instruments for the direction of historical movement, hence making possible for the first time for political rivals to make reference to each other in true ideological terms.8 It will be important to remember this detail for the argument I will offer in the next pages regarding the relationship between the current crisis, the erasure of political discourses that are identified today as ideological and, hence, pregnant with a future oriented temporality, that was once defined as utopian.

Of particular interest is the question he poses regarding how the prognostication of revolution comes about and, specifically in the case of the Enlightenment, how exactly is it that the threat of revolution that so endangered the Absolutist state could live on long after the Illuminati were gone. For him the answer lies in the power of the philosophy of history articulated by the Illuminati and the way in which their plan of conquest was perceived as a threat by those under attack. Koselleck explains, “While the Masons in this document of 1742 did not yet claim to encompass history totally nor to determine the future, the Illuminatidid identify the course of history with their plans, wishes, and hopes. Historico-philosophical legitimation was one — and perhaps the most important aspect of their plan.”9

Twenty years later he will retake this point in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time and formulate it with even greater clarity:

It was the philosophy of historical progress which first detached early modernity from its past, and with a new future, inaugurated our modernity. A consciousness of time and the future begins to develop in the shadows of absolutist politics, first in secret, later openly, sustained by an audacious combination of politics and prophecy. There enters into the philosophy of progress a typical eighteenth-century mixture of rational prediction and salvational expectation.Progress occurred to the extent that the state and its pronostication was never able to satisfy soteriological demands which persisted within a state whose own existence depended upon the elimination of millenarian expectations.10

The point here is that the Iluminati’s plan to bring about the collapse of the State was temporally projected into the future, but the paradox of their self-historical identification of plan and history was that no direct politics ever entered into their moral self-confidence of how the State would collapse by itself. It is in this sense that Koselleck understands that their moral-philosophical stance shrouds the possibility of revolution, while conjuring it at the same time.11 Revolution prophesied, but the dialectic of society and politics invested the struggle with a radicalism completely out of proportion to the social position of the bourgeoisie.

Let’s return then to Koselleck’s original question of how revolution is prophesied and how its threat was able to live on. On strictly historical grounds, he passes a negative judgment on the position of the Illuminatifor advancing a position that exacerbated tensions at that specific historical moment through a dualistic position that morally intensified the battle, while veiling it politically. We can be easily convinced by his historical explanation, but we can also pass a different political judgment on it. We could argue, for example, that it is precisely with the emergence of a philosophy of history of future orientation that allowed for prophesying of revolution, but that it was that which allowed its threat to live on. Clearly, revolution was not the causal outcome of a philosophy of history with new temporal determinants — Koselleck himself accepts that political decisions were already pre-empted by the French Revolution — however, the argument is not whether the Illuminaticould have brought about revolutionary change in the political sphere, but rather how their future-oriented philosophy of history allowed for the threat of revolution to permeate the very political sphere that it sought to transform and transcend. This is not a minor detail in the history of a century that we remember today as the century of revolutions. From the revolutions of 1848 all the way to the Commune, the spirit of the age was one that bet its existence on the possibility of radical transformation, in a language always pregnant with historico-philosophical images of the future.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have grown accustomed to the hegemony not only of liberal technocratic political discourses, but also to philosophical-theoretical positions defined by contingencies, multiplicities, multitudes, agonistic antagonisms that are purely formal, which prophesy not only no future oriented revolutionary change, but that are, hence, at no risk of leaving any kind of political threat behind. While they may seem to sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they must be thought of as being part of one political continuum. We have been indoctrinated to believe that any position that advances a historical-philosophical program of utopian transformation, not only is not faithful to its time, but that it conjures après-coup all those terms that belong to the modern past: ideology, revolution, utopia. It is as if by an act of will, the historical semantic universe we inhabited before 1989 was taken away from us and declared as no longer existing. No self-respecting intellectual would dare to live in the ruins of the future’s past after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Or so at least it seems to have been in the European-North American axis, until the eruption of the present crisis.12 My interest here is not to repeat the well-known historical and intellectual reasons for why post-cold war ideologies of western democratic virtue become the ruling discourse of the present, but simply to point out that with the discourses of “the end of history” came also the impossibility of imagining its transformation.

The temporal determinant of the political-semantic field became the present as culmination of a history that found itself in no need of utopias of radical transformation. I can’t offer here a detailed historic-semantic account proper to the political discourses of the post-cold war period, but I invite us to think of the theoretical preoccupations of the dominant liberal repertoire, deeply seated in the atemporal universe of rights, norms and justifications that seem to have prescribed and regulated the theoretical terms in which politics was to be thought about in our times. Popular democracies, socialisms of the 21st century, or new constitutional forms that broke with those of liberal representative democracies were considered, until yesterday, political forms that belonged to places historically lagging, still stuck in primitive imaginaries of utopian orientation.

It is in this sense that the current political-theoretical indeterminacy and the very clearly future-oriented destruction of the European welfare State that we are currently witnessing are two aspects of the single phenomenon of crisis. If the dialectic of society and politics invested the struggle against the absolutist State with a radicalism completely out of proportion to the social position of the bourgeoisie at that time, at this historical juncture we find ourselves at its precise opposite moment: the lack of prophesied revolution is directly linked to a constitutive discourse of capitalist democracies, always contingent and open and with no future-oriented plans, that have dominated the political, theoretical and philosophical self-understanding of Europe. Socialist and conservative governments alike have subsumed even the weakest of their political ideas to the economic logic of austerity and reform that the markets demand.13 Ostensibly, accepting tout court that it is the one and only path for the survival of capitalist democracies, the European political classes have become the public administrators of market capitalism at the expense of the political projects that once defined them. At this point, one welcomes the problem of an enlightened radicalism out of proportion to the social condition of the working populations of Europe. Instead, a different turn of fate announces itself for the European working classes in an era of political indetermination but of absolutely determined neoliberal economic rule which has subsumed the political to the economic, thereby defining the terrain under which German capital and the troika (ECB, EC, and IMF) will rule all its territories and its populations.14 The retraction of politics and the capitulation to the now sovereign-market has the air of absolutist times, as if an accelerated re-wind to the desolate situation of what once was pre-revolutionary Europe.

It is under these circumstances that the question of the historical future that is inherent in crisis returns to us with a vengeance and demands answers dictated by its modern defining temporal determinant. As Arantes argues, the ascribed presentism of societies dominated by the autonomization of globalized global markets in the post-cold war period mark the space of world time, entirely dominated by the planetary logic of instantaneity. It is activated by the end of a horizon d’attente of the Cold War; there is no more travelling of the distance between experience and expectation. It simply announces the substitution of politics by the management of the destruction of the present. “Urgency” becomes the organizing principle of the central category of a “permanent” conjuncture, hence Arantes’s definition of “an atemporal present of perpetual urgency.” The Anthropocene and its species actor enter the stage. The future arrives at the present full of negations as a kind of apocalypse of the integrated.The collapsing of a horizon of expectations, the conversion of politics into a management of the now, announces the arrival of the future in the now and forecloses a politics that at its conceptual core had a temporal structure that allowed for an after, après the atemporailty of the new regime of time of the current world order.

In Arantes’s view the end of politics is a consequence of the consolidation of a new temporal horizon, whose vanishing point was an expectability very different from the prognosis calculated by absolutist power and by the evolution of the political mechanism to direct the system. The end of the cold war inaugurates a triumphant era of decreasing expectations, already fabricated in the 70s and 80s when the liberal Keynensian consensus comes to an end, and implements what Arantes calls the atemporal time of perpetual urgency (27-28). That is the new time of the world, according to the premier Marxist philosopher of Brazil. For Arantes the future has arrived in the form of the destruction of the present, where the reduction of the horizon of expectation has been reduced to the zero sum game of the very present we live in. In his radicalized reading of Koselleck, brushing it against the grain of the world-systems theory, Arantes concludes that the role not only of critique but of politics itself was the management of this horizon of expectations. Now we have arrived at the zero hour of politics, namely that of its extinction.

With Paulo Arantes we begin to understand that we inhabit a time of exception, a time where the promise of emancipation has been sequestered and suspended in “o novo tempo do mundo” — a new global time of permanent war in which the future has arrived announcing its own end. A time in which the future’s past is not more than a historico-philosophical image of what once the bourgeois revolutions promised, except this time understood under the temporal order of global capitalism. It is here, perhaps, where a different fate of critique reveals itself: in the fracture of the world still readable by critical theories with global aspirations and those who have been disciplined to fulfill a service philosophy of capitalist democratic republicanism, that at the current moment of political indetermination has already failed the European working populations, apparently condemned to return to the temporal political determinants prior to their own emergence. What does it mean for critical thinking to imagine a future that appears to have already arrived? How do we read now ideas, concepts, programs, that remain imbedded in the mute letter of a time passed but whose now-time is yet to be realized? Contesting the way we have come to understand history and the historicity of our current stretched present is a foremost task for critical theory, that in all is archaic after-life (Nachleben) cannot but promise to resist this new geological colonization of our conceptual world. At stake is the restoration of the horizon of the political, refusing the fate of European politics. Without it the critique of the present becomes folded into the very extinction of politics and incorporated into presentist species ontology, where the actualization of the structure of fear-time at a planetary scale becomes the most successful end to the human revolutionary imagination.

1. As coined by Paulo Arantes in his book O novo tempo do mundo: e outros estudos sobre a era da emergência (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014).
2. Helga Nowotny, Eigenzeit: Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefühls (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1989).
3. The proposal was first made by chemist Paul J. Crutzen and marine science specialist, Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000.
4. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Boston: MIT Press, 1998).
5. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis 9.
6. The classic description of this process is found in Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
7. Modernity is obviously not exhausted as concept in historical semantics but has its origin in the temporality of the accumulation of capital and its social and political consequences for the formation of capitalist societies. My interest, in this paper, is restricted to a very concrete problem, namely that the workings of a temporality specific to a philosophy of history that allowed for the prognostication of revolution.
8. Koselleck, Futures Past 250 and passim.
9. Critique and Crisis 131.
10. Futures Past 21.
11. Critique and Crisis 132-3.
12. Which could date for heuristic purposes as starting with the financial collapse of 2008.
13. For a comprehensive political-economic analysis of the crisis of capitalist democracies see Wolfgang Streeck, “The Crises of Democratic Capitalim,” New Left Review 72(2011): 63-71. Praised by both the Financial Times and Perry Anderson of New Left Review it is positioned to become the standard interpretation of the crisis. We must not forget, however, that as director of the Max Plank Institute, Streeck was a close adviser to chancellor Schröder and directly involved in the neoliberal policy recommendations to that administration, that have been part and parcel of the very crisis in which Europe finds itself.
14. For a devastating critique of this new old Europe see Perry Anderson, The New Old World (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2011).