History and Theory 50 (October 2011), 373-389

Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

Connecting the New Political History with Recent

Theories of temporal Acceleration: Speed, Politics, and
the Cultural Imagination of fin de sicle Britain
Ryan Anthony Vieira
Abstract

The political impact of social acceleration has recently attracted much attention in sociology and political theory. The concept, however, has remained entirely unexplored in the
discipline of history. Although numerous British historians have noted the prominent position of acceleration in the late-Victorian and Edwardian imagination, these observations
have never expanded beyond the realm of rhetorical flourish. The present paper attempts to
build a two-way interdisciplinary bridge between British political history and the theories
of social acceleration that have been posited in the social sciences, arguing that both British
political historians and acceleration theorists have much to gain from further dialogue.
Keywords: acceleration, time, temporality, desynchronization, Hartmut Rosa, William
Scheuerman, new political history, linguistic turn

In his 1935 book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield
described Edwardian England as a nation which wanted to revive a sluggish
blood by running very fast in any direction. . . . Though much of Dangerfields
historical interpretation has been challenged, the implication that turn-of-the-century Britain was characterized by a hastened experience of time has remained
constant. As recently as 2004, the political historian G. R. Searle described the
late-Victorian and Edwardian experience as one of living through an age of ever
accelerating change. Similarly, Judith Walkowitz described this period as one
where values and perceptions seem in constant flux. Historian Jose Harris also
noted a temporal shift in this period when she described it as a quantum leap into
a new era of human existence. Indeed, Harris claimed that the late Victorian
and Edwardian era was one of great contingency . . . [when] fast-moving change
was occurring on many fronts. As these statements suggest, a sense of tempo. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London: Constable, 1936), 8.
. For a detailed consideration of the challenges made against Dangerfields position, see David
Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 19011914 (London: Macmillan Press, 1996).
. G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 18861918 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 3.
. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 17.
. Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 18701918 (New York: Penguin, 1984), 33.
. Ibid., 255.

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ral acceleration has been seen by historians, writing at different times and from
various sub-disciplinary backgrounds, to be characteristic of turn-of-the-century
Britain.
Although commonly acknowledged, the issue of acceleration has not received
any sustained treatment. Even the conceptual foundations for exploring this issue
do not currently exist. The purpose of the present paper is to establish these foundations and to assess the viability of further study in this area. To accomplish this,
I narrow the subject matter to the relationship between acceleration and political
culture. I have done this for three reasons: to make the question manageable for a
study of this size; to make it possible to create an interdisciplinary bridge between
history and the political theories of social acceleration posited by Hartmut Rosa
and William Scheuerman; and to contribute to the new political history in British studies.
The study begins by discussing the recent work of sociologist Hartmut Rosa
and political theorist William Scheuerman, which has suggested a causal connection between acceleration and political developments at both the legislative and
ideological level. Although this body of work can be used to help uncover some
of the temporal narratives of late-Victorian and Edwardian political culture, its
explanatory power is limited by its lack of attention to the linguistic mechanisms
that frame acceleration as a political issue. In an attempt to bridge this interpretive
gap, this study employs three of the linguistic insights of the new political history. These insights are: first, that the shape of individual experience is, in large
measure, dictated by the language through which it is interpreted and the narrative
form used to structure it; second, that ideological competition takes place within a
common linguistic framework, which both enables and restricts political expression; and third, that in the process of ideological competition in the public sphere,
the deployment of language is implicated in the construction of its audience.
By connecting the recent work on acceleration with the linguistic insights of the
new political history, this paper outlines a conceptual basis for understanding
the function of acceleration in late-Victorian and Edwardian political culture.

. Even historians, such as Paul Readman, who are concerned with demonstrating the prominent
place of the past in Edwardian life acknowledge that in England . . . the period around the turn of
the twentieth century saw widespread and acute levels of concern with the speed of change and the
passage of time. Paul Readman, The Place of the Past in English Culture, 18801914, Past and
Present 186, no. 1 (2005), 147.
. These postulates are put forward in the following books and articles: James Epstein, Radical
Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 17901850 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994); Dror Wahrman, The New Political History: A Review Essay, Social
History 21, no. 3 (1996), 351-353; Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in
Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Patrick Joyce,
Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 18481914 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1991); James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English
Political Culture, 18151867 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Gareth Stedman
Jones, Rethinking Chartism, in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History,
18321982 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90-178.

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I. Acceleration and the Temporality of Modernity:

Hartmut Rosa, William Scheuerman, and the Emergence of an
Integrative and Systematic Approach

Early efforts to analyze temporality by historians and social scientists were conceptually limited by the commonly held assumption that time was a normative
and objective reality or a passive and subjective construction. The result was a
lack of inquiry into the political function of time.10 In more recent years, scholars
have begun to make significant strides in a new direction. This has been particularly evident in analyses of acceleration and its place in the temporality of modernity (modern time). Indeed, a multidisciplinary group of scholars, including
Stephen Kern, Reinhart Koselleck, Peter Fritzsche, Roger Griffin, David Harvey,
and Paul Virilio, have suggested that speed is central to modernity and that it has
important political consequences.11 These scholars, however, either provided multiple causes in overly vague terms or stressed one cause at the expense of others.12
. The main proponent of time as an objective and normative reality was probably Fernand
Braudel. For Braudels insistence on the objective character of historical time, see Fernand Braudel,
History and Sociology, in Braudel, On History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 76-79;
also see John R. Hall, The Time of History and the History of Times, History and Theory 19,
no. 2 (1980), 113-131, esp. 114-118. For a discussion of time as subjective, see Georges Gurvitch,
The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1964); E. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline,
and Industrial Capitalism, Past and Present 38 (December 1967), 56-97; Wolfgang von Leyden,
History and the Concept of Relative Time, History and Theory 2, no. 3 (1963), 263-285; Chester G.
Starr, Historical and Philosophical Time, History and Theory 6, Beiheft 6: History and the Concept
of Time (1966), 24-35.
10. As Donald Miller wrote of the general academic discourse on time: One particular time
appears to receive little attention. . . . I call it political time. And as Andreas Schedler and Javier
Santiso similarly observed: Political time is still very much a neglected variable . . . as a rule, reflections on politics and time have remained unsystematic, implicit, and disperse, and our theoretical
insights, conceptual tools, and empirical knowledge have remained severely limited. Donald F.
Miller, Political Time, Time and Society 2, no. 2 (1993), 180; Andreas Schedler and Javier Santiso,
Democracy and Time: An Invitation, International Political Science Review 19, no. 1 (1998), 5.
11. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 18801918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History:
Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Peter Fritzsche Nazi
Modern, Modernism/Modernity 3 (1996), 1-21; Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern
Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Roger
Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell
1989); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext, 2006).
12. For instance, Koselleck provides numerous reasons for the emergence of Neuzeit, but as philosopher Espen Hammer has recently observed, he is also reticent about the underlying forces of
change, providing no fundamental logic which can be said to lead to the uprooting of traditional
time-consciousness. Similarly, Kern suggests multiple causal factors in the periods technological
and cultural life, but his analysis also lacks an integrative and systematic logic. In contrast, Harvey
provides a thoroughly elaborated mechanism, but his emphasis on capitalism unduly simplifies the
issue. Indeed, Harveys Marxian explanation precludes his acknowledging the autonomous causal
role of non-economic factors, such as the logistics of interstate military competition emphasized by
Virilio. For more on these issues, see Espen Hammer, Temporality and the Culture of Modernity,
in Responsibility in Context: Perspectives, ed. Gorana Ognjenovic (New York: Springer, 2010), 107;
William E. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), 125.

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The more recent work of sociologist Hartmut Rosa and political theorist William
Scheuerman has moved the field beyond these problems by creating a comprehensive theoretical system that integrates the insights developed in this earlier work.
Over the past several years, Rosa has worked to produce a more complex and
sophisticated model for the analysis of accelerationboth in its origins and impact. To properly analyze acceleration, Rosa contends that it is first necessary
to differentiate it into its component parts. To this end, he distinguishes among
technological acceleration, the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life.13 These spheres, he argues, inform and propel one another, creating a closed and self-perpetuating cycle of acceleration.14 For instance,
technological innovations that heighten the pace of communication or transportation often lead to increased rates of transformation in social intercourse, which
then affect the pace of change in everyday life.15 Beyond this self-perpetuating
feedback loop, Rosa identifies three key external propellants that can help set the
acceleration process in motion: capitalism (the economic motor), the dominant
cultural ideals of modernity (the cultural motor), and the process of functional
differentiation (the structural motor).16 According to this model, then, accelera13. By technological acceleration, Rosa is concerned primarily with the speeding up of intentional goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production that, in his view, have
inverted the natural priority of space over time. The empirical measurement and quantification of
technological acceleration is feasible, as Kerns work clearly demonstrates. By the acceleration of
social change, Rosa is referring to the process whereby attitudes and values as well as fashions and
lifestyles, social relations and obligations as well as groups, classes, or milieus, social languages as
well as forms of practice and habits are said to change at ever increasing rates. Quantification of this
form of acceleration is much more difficult, although Rosa suggests that Kosellecks expectation
versus experience model may prove fruitful. By the acceleration of the pace of life, Rosa is referring to both subjective and objective processes. On the subjective side, alterations in the perception of
time are the primary consequence: it will cause people to consider time as scarce, to feel hurried and
under time pressure and stress. On the objective side, Rosa is interested in the measurable contraction of time that people spend on definable episodes or units of action like eating, sleeping, going
for a walk. . . . For a more in-depth discussion of these spheres of acceleration, see Hartmut Rosa,
Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized HighSpeed Society,
Constellations 10, no. 1 (2003), 6-10.
14. Ibid., 11.
15. For more on this point, see Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of
Time, 18.
16. By the economic motor, Rosa is referring primarily to the logic of capitalism that involves the
equation of time and money. As he writes: In short, the functioning of the capitalist system rests
on the accelerating circulation of goods and capital in a growth-oriented society. Thus the logic of
capitalism connects growth with acceleration in the need to increase production (growth) as well
as productivity (which can be defined in terms of time as output per unit of time). By the cultural
motor, Rosa is referring to the dominant cultural ideals of modernity which have gradually shifted
the balance between tradition and innovation towards the priority of change such that real life . . .
is to be sought in change for the sake of change. This motor is tied to the relationship between the
desire for a fulfilled life and the growth of secularization. As he puts it: The idea of the fulfilled
life no longer supposes a higher life waiting for us after death but rather consists in realizing as
many options as possible from the vast possibilities the world has to offer. By the structural motor,
Rosa is referring to modern societys basic structural principle of functional differentiation that
structures society not according to a hierarchy of classes but rather according to systems like politics,
science, art, the economy, law, etc. This ordering process, Rosa claims, leads to an opening up of
the future and an increase in contingency that in turn causes society [to] experience time in the form
of perpetual change and acceleration. For a more thorough discussion of these motors, see Rosa,
Social Acceleration, 11-14.

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377

tion is set in motion by a series of broader institutional mechanisms but is subsequently driven by its own autonomous logic.
According to Rosa, the process of acceleration has significant political implications. He contends that in any sufficiently accelerated societythat is, any society
where the tempo of change exceeds the potential for political institutions to keep
uppolitical action tends to become situational. As he puts it, in this scenario
politics confines itself to reacting to pressures instead of developing progressive
visions of its own. Very often, political decisions no longer aspire to actively steer
(acceleratory) social developments but are defensive and deceleratory.17 In this
way, politics starts to exhibit only a limited degree of autonomy as the sense of
a directed movement of history has given way to a sense of directionless, frantic
change.18 The basic cause of this problem, according to Rosa, is the inability of
institutions of governance (the bureaucracy, the legislature, and so on) to accelerate sufficiently, thus producing a desynchronization between the state and civil
society. As the needs and demands for legislative action multiply at a hurried
pace, the state is forced to become a largely reactionary entity.
The problem of desynchronization affects different systems of governance in
different ways, Rosa notes. For instance, authoritarian political systems that exhibit a short duration between legislative demand and action are less prone to
desynchronization than are democracies, where an emphasis on pluralism makes
political deliberation a necessarily time-consuming process.19 The matter, however, does not end there. Rosa aptly points out that the process of acceleration
makes contradictory political demands that perpetuate desynchronization and are
particularly problematic for democratic polities: while leading to demands for
hastened legislative action, acceleration also works to increase the actual duration
of time required for political debate. As he writes:
the less certainty there is about future conditions, the longer it takes to plan for the future
and to make decisions. . . . On the other hand, contrary to this need for more time for political decision-making, the acceleration of the surrounding systemsespecially economic
circulation and technological-scientific innovationdecreases the time given to politics
to decide an issue.20

In addition to this, the increasing rate of change in society at large (economically,

culturally, and technologically) also works to increase the number of separate legislative demands, thus further decreasing the time available for discussing each issue. That being the case, policy-makers are forced to circumvent the time-consuming deliberative structures of democratic decision-making and provide additional
powers to the more fast-paced and action-based branches of the government.
Scheuermans work builds on many of the insights that Rosa provides, while at
the same time correcting weaknesses in Rosas conceptualization.21 For instance,
while accepting the general framework of Rosas model for the acceleration pro17. Ibid., 21.
18. Ibid., 22.
19. For more on this point, see Sheldon Wolin, What Time Is It?, Theory and Event 1 (1997), 4.
20. Rosa, Social Acceleration, 23; For more on this point, see Rosa, The Speed of Global Flows
and the Pace of Democratic Politics, 449-451.
21. For Scheuermans discussion of the weaknesses of Rosas work, see William Scheuerman,
Speed, States, and Social Theory: A Response to Hartmut Rosa, Constellations 10, no. 1 (2003),
42-48.

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cessincluding its self-perpetuating natureScheuerman contends that Rosa

neglects the motors of acceleration inherent within modern inter-state politics.
Rosas neglect of this, Scheuerman suggests, leads to a conceptual imbalance
wherein the political is treated as passive: affected by, but not affecting, the acceleration of modern temporality. To redress this deficiency, Scheuerman points
to international politics and the inherently competitive nature of the Westphalian
state system as a motor of the acceleration process.22 He argues that, in striving
to attain domestic security from external threats (both in economic and military
terms), modern nation-states manipulate speed as a crucial source of power:
The acquisition of power necessitates high-speed weapons and social organization, which
in turn typically engender yet more insecurity and thus subsequent attempts to accelerate
the tools of organized destruction once again. Because no one is ever secure in this scenario, a vicious cycle of power accumulation via social acceleration likely ensues.23

In this way, Scheuerman suggests, it becomes easy to see both that the modern
state system powers acceleration and that acceleration in political life tends to be
self-perpetuating. Scheuermans analysis of the relationship between politics and
acceleration, however, does not end here.
Like Rosa, Scheuerman suggests that there is a fundamental desynchronization
between acceleration in civil society and the temporal imperatives of democracy;
but whereas Rosa is sweeping and highly abstract in his analysis, Scheuerman
digs deeper and produces a fairly comprehensive investigation of this problem. He
argues that each branch of a democratic polity has specific temporal requirements.
While the legislature is forward-looking and slow-moving, and the judiciary is
retrospective and slow-moving, the executive branch of the government is contemporaneous and fast-moving.24 On this basis, he argues that acceleration disfigures
liberal democracy by undermining the temporal requirements of the legislative and
judicial branches. In other words, increased demands for speed and efficiency tend
to benefit the executive, whose contemporaneous and high-speed temporal contours appear to leave it especially well suited to decision making in a corresponding high-speed social environment.25 With the emergence of desynchronization,
then, another self-perpetuating aspect of acceleration is introduced: it is the highspeed branches of government that grow in high-speed environments.
II. Applying the Existing Theories of Modern Time to Turn-of-theCentury Britain: Possibilities and Limitations

Persuasive evidence suggests that the turn-of-the-century British polity was subject
to the desynchronization and deliberalization processes that Rosa and Scheuerman
have associated with acceleration. The popular English political magazine Punch
captured this growing temporal distinction nicely in several political cartoons pub22. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time, 19.
23. Ibid., 19.
24. Ibid., 26-70. For more on this point, see William Scheuerman, Liberal Democracys Time,
unpublished paper presented at University of Michigan Political Theory Colloquium, 5-19. For
Scheuermans earliest expression of this idea, see William Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the
Empire of Speed, Polity 34, no. 1 (September 2001), 41-69.
25. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracys Time, 30.

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379

lished in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, all of which imply an accelerated
public sphere outpacing the Governments potential speed of movement.26 In these
cartoons, politics is invariably linked to physical movement through space, and the
primary subject of representation is the relative speed of that movement exhibited
by the state and a specific political issue. In every cartoon, the image representing
the political issue is either demanding faster legislative action or is represented
as moving at such a fast rate that it far outstrips the state. Although this structure
of representation generally implies temporal desynchronization, some of the cartoons are very explicit. For example, in the 1848 image The Hour and the Man
the representation of Lord John Russell, then Chancellor of the Exchequer (state),
replies to the representation of Richard Cobden (political issue): youre too fast
for me.27 Similarly, the 1903 cartoon entitled History Reverses Itself; or, Papa
Joseph taking Master Arthur on a Protection Walk depicts Joseph Chamberlain,
then the primary spokesman for tariff reform (political issue), as a grown man
hastily walking in the direction of Protection, while a childlike Arthur Balfour,
then Prime Minister (state), stumbles behind complaining: you know I cannot go
as fast as you.28 The speed of Chamberlains movement is suggested implicitly by
the puff of smoke that trails behind him in the fashion of a coal-powered locomotive.29 In these and several other cartoons, Punch exhibits a clear recognition of the
inability of the British government to keep up with the legislative pace demanded
by the dominant political movement in the public sphere.
The sentiment that the legislative pace of the state was too slow for Britains
modern society was common in British political discourse at the turn of the century. This sentiment was often conveyed through statements that juxtaposed the
time-consuming procedures of the legislature with the rapid pace of Britains
technologically modern society. As one author wrote in Reynoldss Newspaper:
[I]t is necessary to revise the antiquated rules of the House of Commons, which are about
as suitable to English life today as the coach and six of our great grandfathers before the genius of Macadam had invented the process of road making, or like the oil lamps of the early
26. Representations of a temporal desynchronization can be found in Punch cartoons concerning
the 1867 Representation of the Peoples Act, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the reform of House of
Commons procedure, and the WSPU. See A Block on the Line, Punch (March 2, 1867), 86-87;
John Fast and John Slow, Punch (December 9, 1865), 228; The Hour and the Man, Punch (1848),
211; Mending the Machinery, Punch (March 25, 1882), 138.
27. The Hour and the Man, Punch (1848), 211.
28. History Reverses Itself; or, Papa Joseph taking Master Arthur on a Protection Walk, Punch
(December 16, 1903), 425. The depiction of the state slowing down in relation to Chamberlain and
Tariff Reform is both apt in its interpretation of recent political developments and prophetic when one
considers future developments. Between September and October 1903, tariff reform was responsible
for three significant ministerial resignations, and by 1905 it was largely responsible for Balfours own
resignation as Prime Minister, which initiated a general election in 1906.
29. The incorporation of a railway metaphor into this image is consistent with earlier representations of political speed and desynchronization in Punch. Moreover, it is also consistent with a
linguistic shift in parliamentary discourse that involved the incorporation of railway metaphors into
verbal representations of the state, for example, the word shunt, allusions to the broad gauge, and
references to George Stephenson. It is worth speculating that this type of metaphor suggests the pervasiveness of technological acceleration in the English imagination. For more on this point, see my
upcoming work: Ryan Vieira, The Time of Politics and the Politics of Time: Reflections on the Role
of Temporality in the Constitutional Development of Britains Liberal Democracy, Ph.D. dissertation (McMaster University, forthcoming).

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days of George IV, before Windsor lighted up Pall Mall with gas. Now that we travel from
York to Chester by the light of a winters day, and have our great thoroughfares lighted by
electricity, it is impossible to put up with the Fabian rust of old rules in Parliament.30

Law-making practices that gave each Bill three readings and five stages of debate
were often seen as outdated in an age when the political press was rapidly communicating to the public the details, merits, and problems of proposed legislation:
In the old days of mail coaches it was necessary to give the country time between
the stages of a Bill, but now when the telegraphs are enabling a man at the Lands
End and at John-O-Groats to read what took place the night before in Parliament
. . . it is not necessary to multiply the stages of a Bill.31 Moreover, such drawnout legislative deliberation could easily be seen as counterproductive in a society
where the perceived rate of social and cultural change might reduce the duration
of relevancy or applicability for particular Bills.
Empirically quantifiable evidence also suggests that, consistent with Rosas
theory, desynchronization between state and civil society during this period helped
create contradictory demands on the British parliament. For instance, it is clear that
the number of demands on the British legislature increased substantially over the
second half of the nineteenth century: between 1860 and 1901 the number of questions on the notice paper increased from 699 to 6,448.32 Similarly, between 1880
and 1900 the number of Private Bills brought to the Commons increased from 204
to 321, while the number of Public Bills increased from 191 to 300.33 Moreover,
30. Liberty of Speech in Danger, Reynoldss Newspaper (February 26, 1882), 1.
31. Author unknown, The Commons and Their Rules, Reynoldss Newspaper (November 5,
1882), 1. As Edward Webster wrote in 1868: At the time these stages were contrived, the amount
of business devolving on Parliament was much smaller than at present, the means of diffusing
information of its acts slow and tedious, and the difficulty to Members of travelling to London for
the purpose of voting against any measure required time; under these circumstances it was only just
that the stages should be numerous and dilatory; now however, the introduction of any measure has
usually been anticipated by public discussion, and when everybody knows in the course of one day
what the House proposes to do, and when most Members can reach the House in eight and forty hours
afterwards, if within the United Kingdom, the reasons for retaining so many stages seem to disappear;
but under any circumstances any impending injustice or oversight could be remedied in the passage
of a Bill through the House of Lords. Twenty years later another author in Reynoldss Newspaper
made the same point, It was once very necessary that every stage of legislation should be separated
by time from the stage immediately succeeding. We are no longer under the same necessity, because
railways and telegraphs have annihilated distances and the people likely to be affected by legislation
are now informed within twenty-four hours of what was done in parliament on the preceding day. We
can therefore now afford to minimize the number of stages affecting each Bill, and need only to be
informed of the next in good time to permit the people interested to instruct their representatives as to
the views to be entertained for and against the provisions of a Bill. Edward Webster, The Public and
Private Business of the House of Commons Considered in Relation to the Economization of the Time
of the House and of its Members (London: William Ridgway, 1868); Author unknown, Late Hours
in the House of Commons, Reynoldss Newspaper (February 26, 1888), 4.
32. Procedure of the House of Commons, Times (London) (January 3, 1902), 5c.
33. Return of Number of Private Bills introduced and brought from House of Lords, and of Acts
passed in: Sessions 1880, House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers. LVI.25 (1880), 24;
Return of Number of Public Bills introduced or brought from House of Lords, 1880, House of
Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers. LVI.63 (1880), 7; Return of Number of Private Bills introduced and brought from House of Lords, and of Acts passed in: Session 1900, House of Commons
Papers: Accounts and Papers. LXVII.63 (1900), 24; Return of Number of Public Bills introduced or
brought from House of Lords, 1900, House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers. LXVII.255
(1900), 10.

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381

between 1893 and 1901 the amount of public time devoted to discussing private
bills in the House more than doubled: from 23 hours 40 minutes to 53 hours 50
minutes.34 Whereas these figures indicate a clear increase in the time required for
political deliberation, concomitant demands for hastened legislative action led to
amendments of House of Commons procedure that decreased the amount of time
available for legislative debate. Such amendments include Gladstones introduction of the closure and Balfours wholesale revision of the Standing Orders for
public business.35 It is also clear that these measures were increasingly used by
MPs during the Edwardian period to limit political debate. For instance, between
1903 and 1909 the number of times the closure was moved increased from 20 to
156.36 Although a strong case can be made that these amendments enhanced the
democratic process by removing obstructionist time strategies, an alternative and
less rosy reading is suggested by Rosas theoretical framework.37
34. Report from the Select Committee on Private Business; with Proceedings, Minutes of
Evidence, Appendix, and Index, House of Commons: Bills, Private: Private Business. VII.321
(1902), 3.
35. For a brief discussion of the background to Gladstones procedural reforms, see H. C. G.
Matthew, Gladstone, 18091898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 422-425; see also Joseph
Redlich, The Procedure of the House of CommonsVol. I (London: Constable, 1903), 164-212. In
addition to these Liberal and Conservative initiatives, there was also some discussion of reforming procedure to expedite parliamentary business taking place in the Edwardian Labour Party; see
Miles Taylor, Labour and the Constitution, in Labours First Century, ed. Duncan Tanner et al.
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 151-190.
36. It is important to note in addition that the proportion of times the motion was carried without
a division decreased over the same period from 20% (4 out of 20 in 1903) to 11.5% (18 out of 156 in
1909), while the proportion of times the motion was carried with division increased from 45% (9 out
of 20 in 1903) to 68% (106 out of 156 in 1909). These figures indicate that there was an increasing
minority of MPs in the House and Committee who felt that additional time was required for legislative debate. Return respecting the Application of Standing Order No. 26 (Closure of Debate) during
Session II. of 1899 and the Session of 1900 (in continuation of No. 325, of Session I. of 1899) (House
of Commons: Closure of Debate (Standing Order No. 26)), House of Commons Papers: Accounts
and Papers, L1V.13 (1903), 6; Return respecting the Application of Standing Order No. 26 (Closure
of Debate) during Session II. of 1899 and the Session of 1900 (in continuation of No. 325, of Session
I. of 1899) (House of Commons: Closure of Debate (Standing Order No. 26)), House of Commons
Papers: Accounts and Papers, LXX.15 (1909), 30. The relationship between an increase in the use of
the closure and the stifling of democratic debate in the House through 1909 was noted in the press.
One letter to the editor of the Times noted: Legislation can only be forced through the House of
Commons by the stifling of free discussion, by the drastic use of the closure. Another letter noted in a
more pessimistically prophetic tone that this was likely to continue: It may reasonably be contended
that every one of the successive Ministers who have employed the closure has been acting under the
stress of imperious necessity; but this only makes the matter more serious, and all the indications point
to the probability; almost amounting to a certainty, of further restrictions on the freedom of debate
being imposed in the immediate future. . . . The inference is clear that regulations of a more and more
restrictive character will be adopted . . . and I do not doubt that in the end the Parliamentary machine
will be reformed and readjusted till it has become a thoroughly efficient instrument in the hands of
the Minister of the day. . . . I do not know which party would ultimately benefit by this arrangement,
but the nation would certainly lose. T. A. Brassey, The Issues at the Forthcoming Election, Times
(London) (December 30, 1909), 6D; Custos, The Second Chamber and the Gag, Times (London)
(December 24, 1909), 6D; see also Author unknown, The Closure by Compartment Debates, Times
(London) (June 16, 1909), 11E; Bradford, Lord Rosebery and the Budget, Times (London) (June
26, 1909), 12D.
37. Democratic theorists Andreas Schedler and Javier Santiso have set out the viability and importance of such forms of study; see Andreas Schedler and Javier Santiso, Democracy and Time: An
Invitation, International Political Science Review 19, no. 1 (January 1998), 5-18.

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On several levels, evidence clearly suggests that the political culture of the
late-Victorian and Edwardian periods was characterized by the acceleration and
desynchronization processes identified by Rosa and Scheuerman. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suggest that the theoretical formulations of these two
scholars could help to unlock the temporal narratives of late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century British politics. That being said, however, it is also important to
recognize that there are significant limitations to their use. For instance, although
Rosas desynchronization thesis appears to be applicable to turn-of-the-century
Britain, there is no reason to accept his associated postulate, that desynchronization breeds situational politics. In other words, politics does not necessarily
become reactionary in accelerated and desynchronized societies but can instead
steer temporality for pragmatic ends.38 This, it seems, was largely the case in the
Edwardian period, when political movements such as tariff reform often framed
acceleration in decline-oriented terms so as to provide the need for change with
an increased urgency.39 Indeed, this consistently and politically expressed anxiety
over British decline is largely what separates this period from its predecessor. The
models provided by Rosa and Scheuerman are unable to properly elucidate this
idiosyncratic aspect of acceleration.
The above limitation is tied to a more general problem in the Rosa and Scheuerman model, namely, the limited degree of autonomy and agency that they assign
to the political. In Rosas formulation, the political is positioned as posterior to the
social, economic, and cultural motors of acceleration. At no point in Rosas model
is the political actively engaging with or steering the temporal. Although Scheuerman makes some effort to understand the active role of politics in the acceleration
process, for him this begins and ends with inter-state competition. Indeed, in most
of Scheuermans work political developments result from temporal alterations:
the balance of the separation of powers is disfigured by acceleration as is the potential for democratic citizenship.
Although this current interpretive imbalance probably stems from multiple factors, the most obvious one is that Rosa and Scheuerman neglect language. Indeed,
they have provided no analysis of how language and representations affect the
construction of time as a political issue. As political philosophers from Aristotle
to Hannah Arendt have demonstrated, however, language is a basic precondition
38. See my discussion below, 385-388.
39. Frans Coetzee observed this dynamic in his analysis of the Tariff Reform League: Ardent
tariff reformers insisted that priority be accorded their policy because the urgency of the situation
demanded the immediate implementation of their remedy [my emphasis]. Frans Coetzee, For Party
or Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 61. The relationship among speed, decline,
and the need for immediate change is clearly evident in the writing of the prominent Tariff Reformer,
John Beattie Crozier. In a Fortnightly Review article supporting Chamberlains tariff position, Crozier
wrote that Britain was threatened on all hands by younger rivals and that the situation had moved
so fast . . . that both the public and the press have been staggered and bewildered. Crozier continued:
To sit and see our commerce captured by pre-concerted design, and our industries given over to the
spoiler like sheep on an open plain, because the ghost of a dead and superannuated political economy
has forbidden the erection of defences against the wolves . . . would be an inherent cowardice, and
he who shall deliver the nation from this Old Economy under which it sits enchanted will, like Cato,
deserve if he does not receive, the gratitude of his country. John Crozier, How to Ruin a Free Trade
Nation, Fortnightly Review 78 (July 1902), 34-35.

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383

for politics to occur.40 It is only through language that phenomena can become
framed as experience, and it is also only through language that individual experiences can be communicated and translated into intersubjective forms of meaning.
In other words, language is the mechanism by and through which phenomena
become political issues. As one British historian recently observed, politics can
only take place within the context of language.41 Moreover, philosophers such
as David Carr and Paul Ricoeur have demonstrated that language, particularly its
function as narrative, is essential to the construction of time/temporality.42 This
being the case, the omission of language by these scholars makes their project of
tying acceleration to politics severely problematic.
III. Bridging the Linguistic/Discursive Gap

We have already seen how the objective processes of acceleration identified by

Rosa and Scheuerman seem manifest in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods.
What remains to be seen is how acceleration became linguistically framed, expressed, and negotiated as a political issue. The discussion here will focus on the
interaction of two political languages and three narrative forms. These are what I
will call the language of active citizenship, emplotted according to both Classical
and New Liberal narrative forms, and the language of national efficiency, emplotted according to melodramatically structured narrative forms of national decline.
Although it is certainly beyond the bounds of this paper to exhaustively discuss
these languages and narrative structures, it is possible to put forward two tentative
hypotheses. The first hypothesis suggests that the interaction of these languages
and narrative forms played a significant role in structuring political interpretations
of acceleration, and that any full understanding of how acceleration and politics
interacted requires focused, language-based analyses. The second hypothesis suggests that the narrative form often employed in national efficiency rhetoric played
an active role in propelling and perpetuating the acceleration process. Here, my
hypothesis holds that the expression of national efficiency rhetoric contained important temporal implications that helped to reconstruct the temporal dimensions
of individual political identities.
40. Aristotle, The Politics, 1253bl; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1958), 3-4.
41. James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England,
17901850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 28.
42. David Carr and Paul Ricoeur both argue from a philosophical perspective that narrative is
central to the construction of time. Ricoeur argues that humans use different devices to combine and
make sense of different forms of time. While mechanisms such as calendars and clocks combine
cosmic time and lived time thus creating historical time, narrative is the device that endows
historical time with meaning, thereby creating human time. David Carr takes the argument further, suggesting that narratives are not imposed but rather are natural to the human experience of time.
Thus, he suggests that pre-thematic narratives structure all human interactions with temporality and
that the human experience of time is impossible except through narrative. Paul Ricoeur, Time and
Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19841988); David Carr, Time, History,
and Narrative: An Essay in the Philosophy of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986);
David Carr, Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity, History and Theory 25,
no. 2 (1986), 117-132.

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First, the language of active citizenship. This language frames acceleration as

political insofar as it affects the citizens ability to become informed about and
participate in the political process. Within this linguistic code, acceleration can be
interpreted in either positive or negative terms depending on the degree to which
it is perceived to enable or restrict public political activities. Therefore, the main
question is: what causes one to perceive acceleration in either of these ways?
In 1901 the New Liberal intellectual L. T. Hobhouse interpreted acceleration in
negative terms through the language of active citizenship. In Democracy and Reaction, he wrote:
The man-in-the-street . . . is now the typical representative of public opinion, and the manin-the-street means the man who is hurrying from his home to his office, or to a place of
amusement. He has just got the last news-sheet from his neighbor; he has not waited to
test or sift it . . . but he has an expression of opinion ready on his lips, which is none the
less confident . . . the man-in-the-street is the man in a hurry; the man who has not time
to think. . . .43

Although the objective structural processes that Rosa has associated with acceleration (communication technology and functional differentiation) are clearly
important here, there is also the issue of linguistically constructed subjectivity.
In other words, although the speed-up of the economic, social, and media forces
to which Hobhouse refers can be interpreted through Rosas model, this does
not explain why Hobhouse interpreted these as negatively affecting citizenship.
Logically, Hobhouse should have been led to the opposite conclusion: if the manin-the-street is hurrying everywhere, he should build up a body of excess time,
which then would provide him with more time to think about political issues.44
Explaining why Hobhouse framed his interpretation in negative terms becomes
possible when his credentials as a New Liberal are also considered.
The dominant New Liberal narrative of modern British politics was structured
in regressive terms. Thus, C. F. G. Masterman lamented the emergence of the
modern city in The Heart of the Empire, and J. A. Hobson linked the intensification of political irrationality to the growth of modern communication networks in
The Psychology of Jingoism.45 Hobhouse, being one of the intellectual leaders of
the New Liberalism, also narrated British history in this way. In his 1911 book,
Liberalism, he claimed that while the nineteenth-century might be called the
age of Liberalism . . . its close saw the fortunes of that great movement brought
to their lowest ebb.46 Given the predominance of a regressive narrative in the
political subjectivity of New Liberalism, it is plausible that the connections Hobhouse made among speed, modernity, and the decrepit nature of contemporary
43. L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London: T. F. Unwin, 1904), 70-71; see also 119124.
44. It is, at first, tempting to invoke Scheuermans argument from Busyness and Citizenship
to explain the deftness of Hobhouses reading. It is important to note, however, that there is a large
distinction between Hobhouse and Scheuerman. Whereas Scheuerman points to acceleration increasing the quantity of activities in individual lives and thus decreasing the amount of time for politics,
Hobhouse makes no such claim. William Scheuerman, Busyness and Citizenship, Social Research
72, no. 2 (2005), 447-470.
45. C. F. G. Masterman, The Heart of the Empire (London: T. F. Unwin, 1901); J. A. Hobson, The
Psychology of Jingoism (London: G. Richards, 1901).
46. L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), 110.

political history and temporal acceleration

385

citizenship were the result of the dominant narrative structure associated with his
political identity.
This claim is enhanced when Hobhouses interpretation is contrasted with a
reading of acceleration framed within a Classical Liberal narrative structure. In
his immensely successful book The Great Illusion, the prominent Edwardian
pacifist Norman Angell referred to his period as being governed by the Law of
Acceleration.47 Like Hobhouse, Angells political framing of acceleration was
done through a language of active citizenship. Unlike Hobhouse, however, Angell
interpreted acceleration as a positive force. According to his analysis, the ever-increasing speed of his age was progressively enabling the individual citizens ability to participate meaningfully in political discourse. Responding to the criticism
that it takes thousands of years for humans to fundamentally change, Angell
argued that this dogmatism ignores the laws of Acceleration. . . . He concluded
that given the speed of his contemporary society, the public temper could be made
more rational at a much faster pace.48 The clear interpretive divergence between
Angell and Hobhouse, then, was owing to the differing narrative forms (progressive versus regressive) in which they emplotted their respective interpretations.
It is probable that this difference in narrative structure derived from the forms
of Liberalism to which these two thinkers each subscribed. In contrast to Hobhouses New Liberalism, Angell was a Classical Liberal of the nineteenth-century
variety.49 He was thus prone to narrate modern British politics according to what
Patrick Joyce has termed the democratic romance. Angell conceptualized the
history of modern British politics according to a narrative of improvement that
emphasized the romantic, consistent, and concomitant expansion of liberty and
reason.50 According to Angell, the contemporary state of political Liberalism was
not at its lowest ebb; rather, it was approaching its climax.51 In this way, it seems
possible to explain the variance between Hobhouses and Angells interpretations
of acceleration by referencing the differing narrative structures embedded within
their political identities.

47. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to
their Economic and Social Advantages (Toronto: McClelland and Goodchild, 1910), 199.
48. Angell, The Great Illusion, 220. The interpretive difference is made even more manifest when
one considers an unpublished article by Angell that tied the growing potential for a rational public
sphere to the continued advancement/acceleration of modern communication networks. In Free
Speech Angell wrote: The immense superiority of Broadcasting over the popular press as we have
known it in the past is this: newspapers are compelled by the economic condition of their existence
to compete in pandering to prejudice and onesidedness. . . . Broadcasting, at least as we know it in
England, is much more favorably situated for developing the saner second thought for exercising
impartiality; the responsibility which we associate with a judiciary. Free Speech, Norman Angell
Collection (Ball State University, Muncie, IN), Box 45.
49. Although Angell employed biological metaphors that resembled the organic political philosophy of the New Liberalism, he cannot appropriately be termed a New Liberal. His primary emphasis
was on reason, the individual, and the public sphere, not social reform. His intellectual idol was Mill,
not Green. For a discussion of Angell as a nineteenth-century Liberal, see Albert Marrin, Sir Norman
Angell (Boston: Twayne, 1979), esp. chaps. 2 and 4.
50. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth Century England
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 19-20, 156, 175-176.
51. See Angells discussion of the evolution of human nature and the incumbent growth of cooperation, in Angell, The Great Illusion, 200-221.

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The analysis that I have offered so far has dealt only with issues of framing
and interpretation. By employing new political history insights regarding issues
of expression and negotiation, it also becomes possible to see how language was
implicated in the perpetuation of acceleration as a temporal experience. Although
clearly important in dictating individual interpretations of acceleration, language
was also significant insofar as it provided the speaker with the means to remake
his or her audience. This is evident in the second political language I wish to explore, the language of national efficiency.
Stephen Heathorns recent book, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing
Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 18801914, has demonstrated that national historical narratives in English elementary school readers
at the beginning of the twentieth century worked to configure a form of national
time that became a central part of individual political identities.52 Building on
this aspect of Heathorns work, my second hypothesis holds that expressions of
particular decline-oriented political narratives worked to fundamentally reconfigure national time by rhetorically increasing the nations imagined proximity
to a temporal endpoint. The idea of a temporal end was entirely absent from the
optimistic national narratives that characterized much of the earlier nineteenth
century and that were continued in the English elementary school system during the Edwardian period.53 Thus, the intensification of decline-oriented narratives clashed hard with the temporal foundations of various political positions
and identities. This being the case, it is worthwhile to speculate that the declineoriented rhetoric that emerged in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods set
in motion a process that helped to dismantle and then reconstruct the temporal
presuppositions of national political subjectivities.54 By this means the speaker
of this rhetoric was able to create new temporal/political audiences. This point is
made most clearly with reference to the framing and expression of acceleration in
the language of national efficiency.
National efficiency framed acceleration as an issue that affected Britains ability to establish and maintain international and imperial hegemony in both military
and economic terms.55 Here, the acceleration of economic and military advances
of other nations was contrasted against a relatively sluggish Britain. The common image of Britain propagated by this discourse was a nation corrupted with
ease and displaying increasing symptoms of slowing down.56 In his 1896 book,
Made in Germany, E. E. Williams framed acceleration by emphasizing the sig52. Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness
in the Elementary School, 18801914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 56-84.
53. Thus the national master narrative Heathorn identified was one of unending progress: the very
nature of this story of progress was such that it was without end. Ibid., 57.
54. For further discussion of the relationship between temporality and national political identity,
see Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 277-286; Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great
War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1989), 80-89.
55. Here I am drawing upon the definition of the national efficiency movement set out by Searle,
but in contrast to Searle I am treating it primarily as a set of discourses rather than a series of ideologically connected political movements. Also, whereas Searle ties the origins of national efficiency to
the Second South African War, by treating it as a series of discourses I am here reaching further back
and linking it to public expressions of national decline that emerged in the 1890s. Searle, The Quest
for National Efficiency, 55-106.
56. Author unknown, England after the War, Fortnightly Review (July 1, 1902), 3.

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387

nificance of German commercial penetration of traditional British markets: It is

but too clear . . . that on all hands Englands industrial supremacy is tottering to its
fall, and this is largely German work.57 The images of decline that Williams put
forward suggested the nearness of a temporal endpoint through the use of metaphors of mortality: England and Germany were engaged in a deadly rivalry,
and England was approaching the extinction of its commercial supremacy.58
Significantly, Williamss representations were not concerned just with British decline but with the rapidity at which that decline seemed to occur: The industrial
supremacy of Great Britain has long been an axiomatic commonplace; and it is
fast turning into a myth [my emphasis].59 Though prone to reading acceleration
in decline-oriented narratives, national efficiency did not put forward images of
hopeless decline. To the contrary, it always held out the possibility of national
resurgence. Thus, Williams suggested that a series of reforms, including fair trade
and greater technical education, could lead to Englands salvation and restore
some of its departed glory.60
The rhetorical combination of rapid decline with the possibility of national revival is abundantly clear in Arnold Whites 1901 book, Efficiency and Empire.
Consider, for example, the following statement: Nero fiddled when Rome burnt.
Our rulers feast and idle while England rots. We cannot continue in existence
for twenty years if we pursue the course we now follow.61 Here the nation is
again situated within a decline-oriented narrative. The rapidity of that decline is
emphasized by the timeline provided in the last sentence, which also suggests the
imminence of a temporal endpoint.62 At the same time, though, the potential for
national resurgence is suggested by the possibility of changing the nations political direction. This particular framing of acceleration is interesting for the active
role it could play as a motor in the acceleration process.
The narrative form of national efficiency rhetoric suggests that a sense of acceleration can be created or perpetuated through the linguistic resituation of the
present within an accepted historical trajectory (that is, national history). By positioning the nation in a fatal and decline-oriented narrative, national efficiency
57. Ernest Edwin Williams, Made in Germany (London: Heinemann, 1896), 44. For a historiographical consideration of German infiltration of traditional British markets, see Zara Steiner and
Keith Neilson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), 60-61; and James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (New York: Longman, 1984), 164.
For a consideration of British suspicions surrounding the growth of the German economy, see Ross
J. S. Hoffman, Great Britain and the German Trade Rivalry, 18751914 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1933), 224-272.
58. Williams, Made in Germany, 8.
59. Ibid., 1.
60. Ibid., 164-175.
61. White, Efficiency and Empire, 312.
62. National efficiency rhetoric often played up this imagery of national death or imminent disaster. In addition to the examples outlined above, Cecil Chesterton wrote in 1905 that if demographic
trends continued on their present course, nothing will save us from shipwreck. Quoted in Searle,
The Quest for National Efficiency, 61. Also in 1905, Fabian Ware wrote that if a new national leader
doesnt come soon the country is done for. Quoted in ibid., 162. In the wake of the Second South
African War, the prominent national efficiency advocate W. T. Stead wrote: [t]he Empire stripped
of its armour, has its hands tied behind its back and its bare throat exposed to the keen knife of its
bitterest enemies. Quoted in Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 18601914
(London: Ashfield Press, 1980), 242.

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increased the nations temporal proximity to a perceived end. This was not necessarily the end of the nation per se but the end of one of the nations narrativesparticularly, the rise and fall of its international hegemony. Moreover, by
inserting into that narrative the presence of a strong external enemy, this rhetoric
increased the perceived likelihood of continued decline and eventual extinction.
In these ways, national efficiency rhetorically accelerated the rate at which national history was perceived to be occurring. At the same time, by holding out the
possibility of redemption, the need for action was endowed with great urgency.
Thus, acceleration was furthered by every moment that passed without the prescribed action being taken. The language of national efficiency thereby facilitated
the acceleration process in two ways. First, it turned time into a scarce resource,
and second, it set in motion a process through which the scarcity of that resource
was constantly increased.
As a political strategy this rhetorical rendering of time could pay dividends.
In 1904 Bertrand Russell observed this when he wrote to the French historian
Elie Halvy that protectionists here spend almost all their time proving, what
is obvious, that we are losing our industrial supremacy. Thus they get people in
a fright, ready for any remedy that may be proposed.63 Given the political capital that could be gained in this way, it seems possible to consider the temporal
implications of national efficiency rhetoric as being intentionally constructive.
National efficiency created a temporal/political constituency by dismantling and
then reconstructing the temporal presuppositions of the British citizennamely,
the historical position of his or her nation and the perceived pace of its movement
through history. This rhetorical act of construction suggests that political actors
consciously guided the acceleration process to achieve pragmatic ends. This realization, in turn, reveals the need to introduce a linguistic motor to the model put
forward by Rosa and Scheuerman. Once conceived of in this way, the rhetorical
rendering of time can be seen as an important technology of power. To move
beyond this conjecture, however, further research is required in the areas of audience reception and the political authors intentionality.
IV. Conclusion

The present paper has aimed to set out a conceptual foundation on which to build
the study of the temporal subtext of late-Victorian and Edwardian politics. The
body of work in history and the social sciences that addresses the temporality of
modernity seems, at first, to provide new readings and explanations for several developments in this periods political culture. This is particularly true of Rosas and
Scheuermans recent work on acceleration. Whereas the earlier work of scholars
such as Koselleck, Kern, and Harvey suffered from the absence of an integrative
and systematic logic, Rosa and Scheuerman have provided a thorough and logical
system for understanding how acceleration emerges and is perpetuated. This system seems to provide a novel means of interpreting certain political developments
during this period: perhaps most notably, the growing desynchronization between
63. Bertrand Russell to Elie Halvy, February 2, 1904. The William Ready Division of Archives
and Special Collections, McMaster University (Bertrand Russell Collection), Box 5.20.

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389

Britains polity and civil society. Significantly, however, Rosa and Scheuerman
neglect the linguistic processes by which acceleration is framed, expressed, and
negotiated as part of a political identity. As a result, they inaccurately place politics in a position that is both passive and posterior in relation to the social. This
oversight obscures the complexity of the temporal/political relationship, which in
reality is more balanced than has been thus far supposed.
This interpretive gap precludes the possibility of straightforwardly applying
these models to the history of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. This is especially true since these periods are not unique primarily in terms of acceleration,
but rather because of the growth of a pessimistic framing of acceleration. Without
a linguistic analysis, the historically distinctive aspects of the acceleration/politics
relationship in this period would remain hidden. However, by borrowing from
the theoretical insights of the new political history, this interpretive problem
can be remedied and a fuller interpretation can be offered. This interpretation
acknowledges both the structural and the linguistic processes involved in the production, perpetuation, and effect of acceleration. As the hypotheses put forward in
the preceding section show, this new framework allows for a significant enhancement of our understanding of the political function of time in late-Victorian and
Edwardian Britain.
Reassessing the relationship between time and politics, however, is significant
not only in terms of creating a fuller historical understanding of Britain at the turn
of the century. The issue has a clear contemporary resonance as well. As Scheuermans and Rosas accounts demonstrate, speed poses one of the most significant
challenges to the functioning of liberal democracy in the contemporary West, and
for modern political systems everywhere. By exploring the temporal underpinnings of Edwardian political culture, British historians can contribute to wider
contemporary debates regarding the viability and renewal of liberal democracy in
late modernity, and to analyses of problems facing governing in this period more
generally.64
McMaster University

64. British historians working within the new political history have sometimes referred to their
work in such a way. Patrick Joyce wrote in his recent book, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the
Modern City: [w]hen at the opening of a new century, the role of freedom seems so markedly in the
ascendant, it may be timely to consider the inception of this reign in the nineteenth century. Patrick
Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York: Verso, 2003), 1.