Revolutionary Time and Regeneration

Lynn Hunt
2016
Beginning in 1789 and escalating in intensity into at least 1793, a new temporal schema took shape in which revolutionary time pulverized the foundations of the old order. Revolution came to mean rejecting the past, introducing a sense of rupture in secular time, maximizing and elongating the present in order to turn it into a moment of personal and collective transformation, and shaping the future in accordance with the discoveries made in the present. Time ceased being a given. It became a
more » ... ium of endless potential for change that could be willed, that is, enacted by conscious choice.
doi:10.13128/ds-18687 fatcat:2zgmmw6c2bdxxhudjr2tbrmmuu