Here we stand: temporal thinking in urgent times

Abstract

The challenge of our era is to find ways to respond to the ecological, social and political breakdown our world is facing as an entwined and inseverable phenomenon. These interwoven crises are taking place in a context where fatalistic and managerialist conceptions of change enjoy almost hegemonic power in key institutions. If society is to be remade in ways that preserve a commitment to democracy, it is crucial that citizens be imaginatively equipped to be able to respond to deterministic claims that refuse their agency as members of multiple political communities. This is precisely the kind of orientation that historicity enables. Our times call upon historians to understand themselves as community-builders whose task is, through dialogue, to connect the past to the present and gather the people so that we might build a better kind of world together.