A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Allen’s reconstruction of the diverse temporalities—or ways of experiencing time—that shaped Americans’ “social imagination” during the nineteenth century is a welcome contribution to the literature about nationhood and national belonging. Challenging Anderson’s view that the “imagined community” of the nation is homogenous and homogenizing, reducing its deracinated subjects to a single soul-destroying temporality, Allen argues that national time “is not a unity; it is multifarious and protean, riven with conflict” (219).¹ National identity is “an ongoing negotiation, in narrative, of heterogeneous temporal modes” (4), not a functionalist fantasy of the mindless masses moving forward in metronomic lockstep.

Americans did not experience new ways of telling and thinking about time as a narrowing and flattening of their temporal horizons. Even as mechanical timepieces facilitated market expansion, and the nation began to run on timetables, clock time promoted new subjectivities, enabling Americans to “remake themselves into members of a heterogeneous national community” (113). Technological and scientific developments facilitated the proliferation of temporalities and identities. A sense of the living past, or what modern people call “tradition,” emerged in tandem with the market’s homogenizing impulses; revivalists infused old-time religion with new vitality, even as geological “deep time” raised cosmic questions about man and nature and the secular pieties of liberal democracy. Contestation characterized all of these coexisting temporalities, but it was this contestation that gave Americans a common ground—a “locus for healthy dispute” (223)—and a shared sense of national belonging.

Allen’s achievement is to save the idea of the “nation” from totalizing, reductive critics who imagine a premodern or postmodern world where their conceptions of a more fully human life were, or might be, realized. Such constructions of alternative futures and reconstructions of alternative pasts are characteristic products of the intelligentsia in modern nations—even when they seek to transcend their national identities. Happily, Allen adds, “globalization does not mean the death of the nation” (224); nations provide the only plausible instruments “to create the social and political worlds that we would like to inhabit” (222). By contrast, self-professed postnational critics, imagining themselves out of the nation, offer no such hope.

A Republic in Time makes its important case by reconstructing the rich history of debate and negotiation that the American national project has entailed. Its animating premise is that Americans have always imagined themselves as a nation through time, in the future. American exceptionalists—whether of the celebratory or critical variety—privilege space over time, supposing that “nature’s nation” has been, or has imagined itself to be, exempted from the constraints of history. But the “recursive and dynamic interactions” between “time and the nation” that Allen charts show Americans to be both precociously and unexceptionally “modern” (11).

For all their many sins, nineteenth-century Americans engaged with the many temporalities that constituted national identity in ways that should command our attention. If we listened more carefully to what Allen’s subjects have to say—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Catherine Beecher, and Emma Willard, as well as the ingenious and enterprising clockmakers and merchandisers who promoted modern time-keeping and the many other Americans who made sense of their world in and through time—we might be inspired to continue the debates that they initiated about who we have been and who we could be.