Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich.

• Date: 01 August 2019
• Author: Hare, J. Laurence

Clark, Christopher, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 293 + x pages. Hardcover, $29.95.

Based on a series of lectures delivered at Princeton University, historian Christopher Clark's Time and Power addresses the latest in the seemingly never-ending series of "turns" that have come to dot the landscape of contemporary historiography. Clark's volume is aimed at the "temporal turn," which endeavors to lay bare constructed perceptions of time. Though the focus on time may be somewhat new, the temporal turn actually has a fairly deep pedigree, tracing its lineage back to the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim and more recently to the eminent German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck, who famously identified a transformation of temporality as a hallmark of modernization. Current scholarship has since worked to learn more about the thorny relationship between time and modernity. Clark enters this line of inquiry already well known both for taking on big questions, like the origins of the First World War, and for tackling long periods of time, as in the history of Prussia. So he certainly has the scholarly chops to address the central issue of temporality. Yet Clark comes at the...