Socialism and the experience of time : idealism and the present in modern France

Author / Creator

Wright, Julian, author

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Summary

How do we make social democracy? Should we seize the unknown possibilities offered by the future, or does lasting change really occur when we focus our attention on the immediate present? These arg...

How do we make social democracy? Should we seize the unknown possibilities offered by the future, or does lasting change really occur when we focus our attention on the immediate present? These arguments are fundamental to the divisions within left-wing politics in particular. A modernist vision of revolution suggests that the present is precisely the time that needs to be surpassed, but can society change without putting today's experience of social injustice at the heart of its programme? In 'Time Present, Time Future', Julian Wright asks how, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, socialists in France tried to follow a democratic commitment to political voices in the present. The debate about time and modernity that emerged in French socialism sat beneath the surface of political arguments within the left. Socialists reflected on how political programmes of change connected with social experience. But how did this focus on the present relate to the tradition of revolution in France? And in particular, what did socialism have to say about the human experience of the present?

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