No Future: Liberal Democracy and the

Loss of Time Sovereignty

Robert Hassan PhD

Media and Communications Program

The University of Melbourne

Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nexus between

neoliberal globalization (the capitalist networked economy)
and the political processes of liberal democracy. It argues
that the both the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ function
in differing timescales to an extent that is historically
unprecedented—and increasingly undemocratic. The timescale
of capitalism is premised on an open-ended speed that
translates into social acceleration along a widening front.
The timescale of liberal democracy, conversely, evolved in
the social and intellectual context of 18th century
Enlightenment and its embedded rhythms became
institutionalised and its structures of organization became
immanently prone to inertia. Since the 18 th century until
the 1970s liberal democracy was able to ‘synchronize’ more
or less with the timescales of industrial capitalism and
was the undisputed master of time. However, since the rise
of neoliberalism and the revolution in information and
communication technologies, the ‘time sovereignty’ of
liberal democracy has been severely diminished—and with it
liberal democracy’s historical respons ibility to the past
and the future.
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I want to speak on a subject—the subject of time in general

and the future in particular—that Professor Adam introduced

me to in what already seems like a long time ago. Time

flies. This feeling of the ‘rush of time’, indeed, is

central to what I want to speak about today. We all feel

it. We experience it in our work, in our private lives, in

our thinking, reading, writing and speaking (indeed,

researchers in Italy have recently concluded that we tend

to speak faster that we did a generation ago). This feeling

and this effect have a discernible locus. The social

geographer David Harvey famously termed the cause of this

feeling ‘time-space compression’—a process that is at its

roots economic—and is the technologically-driven process

that allows us to pack more into our day as well as act

upon the world as if it is a much smaller physical space.

The shorthand term for Harvey’s thesis is one we are all

acutely aware of—globalization. And it is against this

backdrop of ‘time -space compression’ or ‘globalization’

that I argue my thesis on the nature of the liberal

democratic political process and its relationship to the

future.

My thesis is simple. It is that social contexts can create

governing forms of temporality, and that meta-contexts

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create even larger, more dominant and enduring forms. And

with the end of these contexts come the effective end of

the forms of temporality and any social institutions that

may have developed—and these of course may be replaced with

new ones reflecting new contexts. [slide liberal democracy]

In its big picture mode the thesis argues that the contexts

that gave rise to the creation of liberal democracy—and

when I use this term I give it the widest interpretation,

which is to mean the form of ‘government of the people, by

the people, and for the people’, in the words of Abraham

Lincoln —reflected a time that was much less technologically

and socially sophisticated than our own; and crucially, it

reflected a time that was infinitely slower than our own.

The result, in brief, is that in our era of technologically

driven social acceleration, liberal democracy no longer

works—or at least no longer works democratically or

possesses the futural orientation it once did.

How does this historically conditioned timescape of liberal

democracy relate to the future at the beginnings of the 21 st

century? The premise I have just laid out would indicate

that it does not fit very well and there has been, over the

course of the last twenty-five to thirty years, a

disconnection between the temporal horizons of liberal

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democracy and what I shall call ‘postmodern capitalism’, to

the extent the ‘time sovereignty’ historically accorded to

itself by the institutions of liberal democracy have been

surrendered—and I use that term intentionally—to the short-

term and profoundly anti-democratic expediencies of

globalising capitalism. The lack of democracy in our time

(or in any time) is not a novel concept. However, the

deficit is usually ascribed to corrupted individuals, or to

the workings of inner cabals who manipulate the system for

their own narrow ends. Implicit in many of these readings

is that the system is OK; you just need to root out the bad

apples and have more transparency. Rarely has the light of

temporality been thrown onto the issue, and when it is, as

I shall show, it reveals a political and economic dynamic

that cannot be fixed by the old ways. Rather, it needs to

be tackled by a wholesale reappraisal of our relationship

with time in a postmodern economy and society—postmodern

because the collapse of the modern period brought with it a

collapse of the modernist utopia—and this entails a new

approach to the future and a deeper appreciation of the

fact that the sustainable future is embedded in the

processes of a vibrant and inclusive and democratic

present.
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To understand this process, to shed light on how this

surrender came about, we need to look at the political

economy and political theory of liberal democracy, through

the relatively neglected prism of temporality. By

explicitly foregrounding a theory of time we are able to

see how the political system has degenerated from one that

had a future-oriented conception of time at its core, to

one that is reactive, has power increasingly concentrated

within executive authority, and ends to look no further

than to the short -term needs of the economy.

I spoke of the social context as helping to shape the

‘timescape’ that humans create as they move through time

and live through time. We can perhaps understand this more

clearly if we consider something we know at least

intuitively—that there is a time, a temporality, in

everything. For me it comes most readily apparent through a

thought experiment. Think of sitting on a park bench

enjoying the sun. If we become time awar e, become conscious

of the forms of temporality around us, then the times and

rhythms, emergences and traces of the past and

presentiments of the future reveal themselves in an

intersection of temporal scapes that can become our

experience of time. The tem po of our breathing, the

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velocity of the breeze, the depth of our memory, the

projection of our mind into the future, onto things that

have to be done in the day, the rapid -fire of a pneumatic

drill in the distance, the swaying of the trees, the

rhythmic pounding of the footsteps of a jogger who flashes

past—and so on.

This ‘timescape’ is in continual motion, always alive,

connected in our consciousness and stretching into the past

and the future in an always emergent now. This might be

called a timescape of personal consciousness. But it can

connect with others to construct a social timescape. These

timescapes constantly connect, dissolve, reconnect and

dissolve again in an ongoing process of temporal becoming.

Moreover social timescapes can become meta-timescapes

through the process of institutionalisation, or

acculturation or habit—to evolve into the dominant temporal

scapes in the life of an individual, a family, or a

culture, a society or polity.

This conference is specifically concerned with the future,

so I hope I do not retrace the steps of many others here

and bore you with a rhetorical answer to the question:

‘what is the future’ —and relatedly, what has liberal

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democracy relinquished when it surrendered its stake in the

future? Here we need to tou ch on certain philosophies and

social theories of how the future ‘comes about’, so to

speak. In an article I would recommend to anyone seeking an

entrée into theories of the future, Elizabeth Grosz, in her

‘Thinking the New’ (1998) [slide Grosz on future] cogitates

on the future through a blend of Henri Bergson and Gilles

Deleuze. She argues that the future is open-ended and

emergent. However this does not mean that the future is

either completely free or completely determined. It is

rather, in her words ‘constrained and undecidable’. By

‘constrained’ I interpret this to mean that the future is

limited in its openness by the human imagination and by the

systems and cultures they create—and so the future (the

possible) will always be constrained to some exten t; and by

‘undecidable’ it take this to mean that no matter what we

plan for the future, no matter how painstakingly we try to

order its emergence it will always be shaped, as Grosz puts

it, ‘not by continuous growth, smooth unfolding or

accretion, but through division, bifurcation, dissociation—

by difference—through sudden and unexpected change or

eruption (Grosz, 1998).

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The creators of liberal democracy knew this at some level

of consciousness. From Montesquieu and Locke (we can even

go as far back as Pl ato), a theory of time and a theory of

the future were considered integral to what constituted

democracy. The different liberal democratic systems devised

and created during the 17 th and 18 th century were temporal to

their core—and they reflected the timescapes of that phase

of Western history. And arguably perhaps no feature of

classical liberal democracy is more fundamental than its

commitment to the idea of a separation of powers, which as

we are all aware, are the judiciary, the executive and the

legislative. In what ways are these powers explicitly

temporal? Well, the judiciary is concerned with the past in

terms of its focus upon precedent and is therefore

‘fundamentally retrospective’; the executive power is

designed to be fast-acting and entails decision-making that

is oriented toward the present; and the legislative, the

essence of liberal democracy and the living connection to

the people, is future-oriented in that it is required to

project, plan and coordinate the activities of the state

beyond the present or short -term future. To paraphrase the

great sociologist Max Weber in his 1919 essay ‘Politics as

Vacation’: ‘The politician is interested in and has a

responsibility toward, the future’. The legislative task,

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in so far it is possible, is to build the good future and

build progress into its construction—to practice what we

today call sustainability.

Of course I am speaking in terms of Weberian ‘ideal types’

and it is doubtful if any liberal democracy anywhere,

anytime, has lived up to these perfect forms. Still, the

separation of powers is and remains central to the proper

functioning of democracy, and as I have shown, it is deeply

temporal, with its most important function, the

legislature, being powerfully connected to the future.

More, this temporally oriented liberal democracy was able

to function—more or less effectively and durably—because

within the evolving meta-timescape of modernity, the

Enlightenment and capitalist industrialism, there was the

space and the time for it to function. There was space

enough because for most of the period of modernity the

world had not been ‘compressed’ by networks of

communication such as it is today, and capitalist

industrialisation was able to spread, as it must, over

space. And there was time enough, bec ause the temporality

of industrialising society was metered by, and increasingly

dominated by, the time of the clock. The clock functioned

in such a way as to organize society, economy and polity

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around a precise rhythm, and in interaction with a

relatively unproblematic space economy that was not

‘compressed’ to the extent that it placed too much pressure

on the capitalist propensity towards temporal acceleration.

I’ll speak a little more on this presently.

And so as liberal democracy grew and settled, it grew and

settled into the rhythms of modernity and its clock time

domination. There was the time to engage in the forms of

dialogue that its Greek heritage deemed essential to the

democratic process. Parliaments and congresses formed in

different countries and in their different ways, with the

separation of powers giving the legislature the central

futural role. Generations of legislators knew at some level

of consciousness (as do we all) that coordinating and

planning for the future takes time—time to cogitate, to

debate, to develop plans, to discern patterns, anticipate

and even to guess, as well as have a plan B in case plan A

is useless.

For much of the period of modernity, from the 18th century

to very near our own time, liberal democracy claimed

sovereignty over time and with it some stake in the future.

Of course, as I said, these ideal types rarely if ever

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functioned as intended. There were constant overlapping and

greyness between the powers, failures abounded, and there

was always executive power (what we might call the

potential dark side of democracy) to come in and override

all this future-oriented democracy and people-centred time

sovereignty so as to act quickly. It could do this in

either cases of national emergency (such as war, or its

threat, and economic crisis, or its threat) or for more

anti-democratic reasons to do with tendencies within the

polity, driving it for whatever reason, toward

authoritarianism or worse.

As industrialism developed, the pace of change and the

speed of life grew apace in the democracies, but this was

within the more or less comfortable time -space boundaries

constructed by modernity. This clock-based meta -rhythm was

able to coordinate political and economic development so

that capitalism could flourish in ways n ot overly

constrained by politics; and the politics of liberal

democracy could also flourish, because capitalism had not

yet developed to the point where it is confronted a global

spatial and temporal crisis.

 12

The relationship between capitalism and democracy has

always been an uneasy one. Indeed this association is at

the root of the problem concerning the future—which is the

operation of capitalism within space and time. Analysis of

this begins to shed light on why liberal democracy began to

lose sovereignty over time and shorten its futural temporal

horizon.

From its inception, industrial development needed the

organizational rhythms of the clock to schedule production,

organize workforces and predict profit or loss. Time became

money and vice versa. But at another level of abstraction,

capitalism must continually expand into physical space if

it is to maintain and grow markets. It must seek new

resources and new areas into where investments may flow. In

other words as capital accumulates it must be dispersed

physically into new spatial realms to ensure that

accumulation continues. In terms of time, the faster the

circulation of capital, then the more profitable it will

likely be. To quote David Harvey from his book The Limits

to Capital:

There is…considerable pressure to accelerate the velocity of

circulation of capital, because to do so is to increase the

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sum of values produced and rate of profit. The barriers to

realization are minimized when the transition of capital

from one phase to the next occurs [as Marx termed it] ‘at

the speed of thought’.

The faster capital circulates in time and space then the

more profitable and ‘efficient’ it will be. The orientation

toward acceleration is thus built-in to the process of

capital —and by extension, modernity. However as

industrialism grew and matured into the dominating mode of

production called Fordism [slide for definition of

Fordism], its intrinsic spatial and temporal limits became

apparent—and this was, as many economists have agreed,

around the early- to mid-1970s. Capitalism had become more

or less global, and as new investment had fewer and fewer

new areas to flow to. This led to a crisis of what has been

called ‘overaccumulation’ of capital. This occurs when

there is not enough space into which investment can flow,

causing crises of both productivity and profitability. This

crisis in the 1970s signalled the spatial and temporal

maturation and stagnation of Fordist capitalism. It was

also a temporal crisis for liberal democracy.

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Capital had reached its spatial limits under Fordism and

the international system of tariffs and protectionism that

increasingly impeded its circulation; and capital had

reached its temporal limits, in large part because the

post-war consensus in many countries limited the

introduction of new technologies that would speed up

production and improve efficiency—but was seen to cost

jobs. This was a growing economic crisis on a general scale

that had begun in the 1960s and came to a head in the

1970s. This was an economic crisis but it was also a

political one, and the resolution to that crisis was also

political—and it came in the rise of a new form of

liberalism, neoliberalism.

In his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi

exposed the myth of the liberal-capitalist state as being

one devoted to classical liberal values [slide on hegemony

of capital]. Instead, he insisted that over time democratic

institutional interests were sacrificed to the overriding

interests of capital. And so it proved when the crunch came

in the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism.

Reinterpretations of ‘classic’ liberalism were injected

with an extraordinary focus on the rights of the individual

and the sanctity of private property.

 15

With the emergence of the Reagan and Thatcher governments,

came the practical neoliberal experimentation to cure the

ills of the economy. Key concerns were spatial and

temporal—even if they were not literally expressed so. The

approach to these issues was to take institutional politics

out of the equation. The market would decide, as much as

possible, the spatial and temporal composition of capital—

in terms of where it should circulate and how fast.

Government would restrict itself to legislating to make

this happen. The systems of tariffs that tended to keep

economies ‘national’ were inexorably dismantled to create

an interconnected or ‘globalized’ system. Open-ended speed

was injected into globalising capital through the

revolution in information and communication technologies,

and ICTs seeped into culture and society as well as the

economy to transform and accelerate all of them.

The effect of this transformation of time and space is the

‘time-space compression’ of neoliberal globalisation we see

all around us today. What has this meant for liberal

democracy’s ‘time so vereignty’ and its historic

responsibility to the future?

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As the ideology of neoliberalism spread then so too did the

idea that the primary role of government was, almost

naturally, to support business, and to synchronise

government functions (and synchronise society) with its

increasing tempo. This was, supposedly, simply being

‘efficient’. Generally speaking, this has meant an

unprecedented temporal shift. It has also been a power

shift.

A temporal shift has occurred in that the legislature now

devotes much energy to the creation of the ‘optimal

business climate’, that is to say, to do what is required

to meet the ‘here -and-now’ needs of an ever-accelerating

economy. The ideology of ‘efficiency’ has seeped into the

legislative process. Good governance is now efficient

governance, which means to work with expedience. This has

ramifications for what William Scheuerman calls the

‘central role in liberalism’s conceptualisation of elected

legislatures as requiring robust—and necessarily unrushed—

rational debate’ (2004:39). The effect has been to

surrender the temporal sovereignty of parliaments and

congresses to that branch of government most able to act

quickly —the executive.

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In a high-speed society, the drafting of legislation,

debating, the gauging the effects of legislation by

committees and by research groups, the liasing with

experts, and with public interest groups and so on, are

increasingly seen as too slow and ‘inefficient’. The

growing influence of executive power has meant that

neoliberal government tends to follow the agenda of a group

of ‘insiders’ with the closest links to big business and

its needs. Executive insiders, many of them unelected

political appointees, now give direction or present fait

accompli to the legislative in many polities. T o quote

Scheuerman once more:

Ours is an increasingly high-speed society, and high-

speed society places a premium on high -speed political

institutions: the widely endorsed conception of the

unitary executive as an ‘energetic’ entity best capable

of acting with despatch means that social acceleration

often promotes executive-centred government and the

proliferation of executive discretion, while weakening

broad-based representative legislatures as well as

traditional models of constitutionalism and the rule of

law.
 18

This does not mean that the legislature is out of the loop—

in fact many have never been busier. Business can tell

government what it needs in terms of the necessary economic

conditions such as labour policy, tax rates, as so on. But

it needs government to act on the neoliberal social agenda,

which is to control as much as possible the fallout from an

accelerated and semi -dysfunctional society. We see it

clearly in the way in which successive Thatcherite

governments ideologically transformed perhaps the majority

of British people to look to themselves and to strategies

of short-term gain. This has created an unstable

neoliberalised culture. But the Blair government has

carried on the tradition of reshaping the British into an

agglomeration of politically apathetic individuals who need

to be kept in check. Since 1997, for example, more than

fifty Bills have been passed to ‘reform’ the criminal

justice system, creating over 700 new offences. Indeed, the

acronym ASBO has already become a noun in common language.

In the USA the growth of executive now-centred power has

been even more insidious. For example in July of this year

the American Bar Association (ABA) released a report on the

huge proliferation of an executive instrument called a

‘signing statement’. These are statements that the

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president attaches to a Bill sent up from congress that he

has signed into law. The Bill passes, and on the face of

it, it seems like there has been no executive veto or

interference. However, the ‘signing statement’ written by

the president says, effectively, ‘I pass this bill into

law, but intend to ignore it and do not feel bound by it’.

The American Bar Association noted in its report that ‘…it

was Ronald Reagan who first used signing statements ‘as a

strategic weapon in a campaign to influence the way

legislation was interpreted’. And since 1980, the beginning

of that critical time which saw the rise of neoliberalism,

there have been more ‘signing statements’ attached to

passed legislation than in any other time since the

inception of the American republic. George Bush himself has

signed 800 of them, whilst 600 in total had previously been

signed since the time of George Washington.

In some developing economies, the rate of acceleration and

concentration of executive power in nominally democratic

countries has been even greater—and is a trend that offers

a disconcerting glimpse into the future. The New York Times

reported in 2000 that ‘Peru is considered a democracy

because it elects a president and parliament. [But] in the

five years after an election [in 1996]…the executive has

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been known to make 134,000 rules and decrees with no

accountability to the congress or public.’

What are the effects of this loss of temporal sovereignty—a

loss that hardly anyone has remarked upon in our latest

glorious revolution? By abrogating our responsibility to

the future, we nonetheless still have effects upon it, big

and small, systemically and as individuals. Living with a

predominant focus on the present and short-term causes us

to discount the future. We discount metaphorically, in that

we no longer seem to care for it or orient towards it; and

we discount it in the sense of drawing down upon it now,

with no provision made for those generations who follow us.

As Jérôme Bindé a Director of Analysis and Forecasting at

UNESCO puts it:

Our relation to time has enormous economic, social,

political and ecological consequences. All over the

world, the citizens of today are claiming rights over

the citizens of tomorrow, threatening their well-being

and at times their lives, and we are beginning to

realize that we a jeopardising the exercise by future

generations of their human rights. Without proper

attention, future generations are in danger of becoming

the prisoners of unmanageable changes…

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Now I have to disagree that ‘we’ are ‘claiming rights over

the citizens of tomorrow’. The issue is, I feel, is that

our temporal rights have been taken away from us by a

neoliberalism that is oriented towards a speed-filled

present, and is conducted through increasingly undemocratic

executive power. Nevertheless, Bindé is correct when he

predicts that we influence the future in more, and more

complex, and ultimately unknowable ways. With less regard

for the future we not only discount it, but we also lay

time-bombs that are set to go off, in the environment, in

culture, in the economy and even in our personal lives at

points in the future we cannot foresee because we are no

longer able to factor in enough time for reflection,

forecasting or prevention.

In closing I will not enumerate at length what these time

bombs might be. But a little reflection on the political

economy of neoliberal globalization will give us some

portentous indication. Indeed we need not reflect long to

think of the booby traps that we may fall into such as

global warming, environmental degradation, species

extinction, disease pandemics, the uncertainties connected

with GM technology and so on. At the level of the

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individual many of us see the future as a dark and

unknowable time, a time of perpetual uncertainty and worry;

worry about how we will live in retirement; apprehension

about the kind of world our children and grandchildren will

inhabit; and a deep seated anxiety over whatever the future

brings it does not promise to be brig ht—because if we

simply don’t know then we tend to expect the worse. It is a

terrible form of passivity and powerlessness.

In his article Bindé goes on to call for an ‘ethics of the

future’ upon which we can begin to build what he terms a

‘realistic utopianism’ which rests upon a ‘renewed dialogue

between the present and the future’. The aim is laudable,

but is short on practicalities. I want to close this paper

with a focus on the political. Because I believe it is in

the political realm of everyday exper ience that we can

begin to regain and develop and strengthen sovereignty over

time. The control over time and a responsibility to the

future that the founders of democratic theory saw as

fundamental has to be rearticulated as a human right. We

are used to rights in terms of space, personal space,

private property and national sovereignty. If we see space

and time as indivisible—and we must—then the idea of

temporal rights begin to take on far reaching importance.

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Ordinary people, experiencing the loss of temporal

sovereignty, in the multifarious forms that comprise the

tyranny of the present and the dark uncertainties of the

future are well placed to take the lead here. In a recent

Observer article Mary Riddell noted that ‘When politicians

lose their compas s citizens can become the steersmen’.

The utility of this political argument is that it does not

need to rest upon abstract concepts. Temporal rights can be

rooted in a transhistorical materialist argument. This

allows people to recognise that temporal rights are akin to

material well being, now and in the future. The further

utility of the political argument is that is can use the

language of neoliberalism to illustrate and articulate and

advocate the right to a stake in the present and in the

future, and to leave the future open for our descendants.

This is to use the neoliberal language of freedom. To

connect the right to temporal freedom with the more general

freedoms of liberty such as property and association is to

create a powerful argument that brings neoliberal

globalization and its disregard for the future and its

compression and acceleration of the present in the service

of corporate profit into serious question. It throws into

stark relief what has been termed the ‘tyranny of the

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present’ where our loss of sovereignty over the times we

create and experience has created an unfreedom for us in

the here and now—and caused us to let slip our stake in the

future.

We all need to become steersmen once again, because if we

look to the bridge of politica l sovereignty over time, we

will see that there is currently no one at the wheel.