Time For Democracy: Continuity and Rupture in the Political Thought of Kant, Tocqueville, and Arendt

Is it possible, or even desirable, to speak of a temporality appropriate to democratic politics? For more than two centuries, this question has been dominated by two lines of thought organized around competing and sharply opposed views of democracy. One side imagines democracy as a set of institutions and norms that order political time into a pattern of rational, continuous development. The other finds democracy in moments of revolutionary resistance that inaugurate a rupture with the political past. This project investigates the temporal dimension of democracy against the grain of the binary thinking that presses us to align ourselves with only one of these lines of thought, while casting the other as depoliticizing or anti-democratic. To theorize political time beyond the terms of this binary, I recover unfamiliar entanglements of rupture and continuity from the work of thinkers who are commonly read as allied with one side or the other of the continuity/rupture opposition.;Advocates and critics alike have viewed Immanuel Kant's universal-progressive history and Alexis de Tocqueville's inexorable "march" of equality as exemplary metanarratives of democratic continuity. However, I find investments in revolutionary rupture animating Kant's theory of history's uncertain telos and Tocqueville's unorthodox figuration of providential history. On the other side of the binary, Hannah Arendt's theory of free action as "new beginning" is commonly read as affirming revolutionary rupture as the proper time concept of democracy. I unsettle this view via a reading of the politics of legendary storytelling in Arendt's theory and practice of historical judgment, which attends to the political need to relate moments of origination to their pasts and futures in order to forge new narratives of continuity.;These readings forge a path toward a conception of the temporal register as an arena of democratic theory and practice in which relative continuity and relative novelty are contingent, and related, political achievements. I contend that the production of these temporalities is crucial to the political task of rendering the conditions of collective life available to democratic actors as both given and available for change.