ABSTRACT
The focus of this volume is on different ways in which we can theorize the future of political community at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this chapter, rather than developing a substantive account of what the future might hold my concern is with analysing what it means to theorize the future of politics in the first place. In particular my concern is to examine the assumptions about time that underpin influential accounts of both the present and future of world politics. Since 1989 a variety of theories of the temporal trajectory of world politics have flourished. These include accounts of the world-political present as embedded in narratives of progress in which a cosmopolitan future is immanent, and much more apocalyptic accounts which describe or foretell a situation in which politics is exhausted and the existence of the world itself is in question. I will argue that such analyses rely on theorizing time in ways that are fundamentally at odds with the actual temporal plurality (heterotemporality) of world politics and that are therefore unhelpful for addressing the question of the future of political community in a hierarchically organized, plural and interconnected world. The argument proceeds in four sections. First, I examine how the time of politics is constructed in the Western tradition of political thought as produced through the interaction of two different forms of temporality: chronos and kairos. In the second and third sections I examine the arguments of two influential theorists of the future of political community, Habermas and Agamben, who exemplify respectively the cosmopolitan and apocalyptic tendencies referred to above. In the final section, I argue that the alternative approach to political temporality found in Connolly’s work provides a more productive starting point for theorizing political futures.
