This groundbreaking book presents new perspectives on how the exercise of power is shaped by different notions of time. Acclaimed historian Christopher Clark draws on four key figures from German history — Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Prussia, Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler — to look at history through a temporal lens and ask how historical actors and their regimes embody unique conceptions of time, says a review on the Princeton University Press website. Inspired by the insights of Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog, two pioneers of the “temporal turn” in historiography, Clark shows how Friedrich Wilhelm rejected the notion of continuity with the past, believing instead that a sovereign must liberate the state from the entanglements of tradition to choose freely among different futures.
He demonstrates how Frederick the Great abandoned this paradigm for a neoclassical vision of history in which sovereign and state transcend time altogether.
