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The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice. By Cohen Elizabeth F.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 190 p. $74.99 cloth, $24.99 paper.
When political scientists think in four dimensions, history joins geography; that is, the object of interest is commonly the substance of political events and their causal relations. Yet time itself is politically significant too. Its marks and measures may be constructed for political ends, shaping our experience of time. And its deceptively natural and objective character can conceal the workings of power. Although recent scholarship, notably William Scheuerman’s Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (2004) and Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration (2013), explore speed, and my own Out of Joint: Power, Crisis and the Rhetoric of Time (2019) explores time’s political construction, Elizabeth Cohen offers an intriguing engagement with time’s democratic deployment in The Political Value of Time.
Cohen asks “how and why durational time has become such a critical part of the architecture of every democratic state” (p. 2). Stretches of time, she answers, “serve as proxies for a vague or undefined set of processes” important to democratic values (p. 154). The elapse of 16 or 18 years proxies processes of maturation, yielding voting rights or criminal responsibility or a capacity to give consent to marriage or sexual activity. The elapse of three to five years proxies processes of migrant naturalization in the United States—here, linking to Cohen’s earlier work—through growth of affection and loyalty, familiarity with customs and values, and the like. And the elapse of some stretch of months or years leading up to elections proxies processes of deliberation that, theoretically, generate a more substantive form of consent (p. 83).
Why use temporality as a proxy? Time provides “a metric for measuring value that is universally accessible and … available” (p. 114) and has a...