The way a person or institution understands history and their relationship to it may not tell you who they are, but it can say a lot about how they see the world and operate within it. Assumptions about the connections between past, present, and future, along with a feeling for the motion of time—consciously or otherwise—frame all our actions. This makes exploring how different people see time a chance to consider the mindset they reflect. Behind a scholarly literature on historicity and temporality stands the fact the people of different eras have understood time differently. For example, thinking in terms of cyclical patterns or a linear unfolding of events guided by divine providence, or in terms of a secular alternative, imposes different starting points upon all of us. A mania for progress sets history on one deterministic path, while an emphasis on decline epitomized by Oswald Spengler with its accompanying cultural pessimism charts another. The assumptions of a person who sees events or particular episodes in history as providing timeless lessons differ greatly from those of a person who embraces the historicist tendency to see historical development as the most fundamental aspect of existence.
Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, argues that “as gravity bends light, so power bends time.” Adapted from his Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton in 2015, Time and Power takes four examples from German history to develop his theme. Historicity, which Clark defines as individual or collective assumptions about the relationship between past, present and future, along with an intuitive sense of time, shaped how rulers and regimes wielded power. These factors set boundaries and opened possibilities for action, and the resulting events revealed how other people understood them. Episodes from the clash between Frederick William, the Great Elector of Prussia, and his provincial estates, to the eras of Frederick the Great and Bismarck, to National Socialism's coming to power after World War I, also point to other changes. Exercising power bolstered belief in the Prussian state and its Imperial German successor whose collapse in 1918 opened space for a rejection of history in a favor of an imagined past transcending it.
Competing Visions of Providential History
Vulnerability during the Thirty Years War provided the context for Frederick William's clash with the provincial estates of Ducal Prussia. The region from which the later kingdom would take its name was only part of a composite monarchy he ruled and forged into a more coherent state. Territories scattered across northern Germany whose local elites claimed privileges and rights that constrained their ruler compounded the weakness of an electorate whose core territory of Brandenburg suffered military occupation. Frederick William found it difficult at best to compel them to provide for their common defense. His position as the Calvinist ruler of a Lutheran realm, a commitment reinforced by his teenage years in the Dutch Republic, complicated matters further. An electorate divided against itself risked falling prey to more powerful rivals, especially when it lacked natural defensive frontiers or the wealth to field a large army.
Clark raises the question of how Calvinism, whose salvation theology opened a new time horizon “within which everything was possible and ‘constructible'”, shaped the change Frederick William imposed. His grandfather John Sigismund had converted to Calvinism, outraging his Lutheran subjects whose suspicion of their rulers' policies strengthened reluctance to finance them. Friction between the two Protestant confessions persisted into Frederick William's reign until he intervened. The elector's toleration for a small Calvinist minority and an invitation to theological discussion which might resolve differences both implied by an open-ended view that ran into his subjects' insistence on limits grounded in tradition. Resistance led him to impose his policy with a purge of Lutheran clergy that curbed their ability to operate separately from the state. Frederick William promoted Calvinism because he saw it as an advance, theologically and perhaps also in building a stronger state.
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