Description
This paper addresses the crisis of liberalism, as a global economic and political system, in terms of its temporal imaginary. As communities around the world struggle amidst the fallout from liberalist development, the time of liberalism, marked by narratives of universal progress and linear socioeconomic development, is losing its political purchase. Ranging from the Rawlsian idea of liberalism’s resilience and universality to Fukuyama’s universal theory of history that ended in liberal democracy, the liberal teleology underlying the modern/colonial capitalist project is increasingly contested. Indeed, due to it’s inability to address the multiple political, socio-economic and ecological crises central to contemporary political debates, liberal teleology is displaced by radical, emancipatory temporal imaginaries that grapple with the realities of widening inequality and immanent climate collapse. Besides foregrounding time and temporality as a crucial dimensions of analysis for grasping current political projects, I will be specifically discussing the radical ecological-temporal narratives proposed by groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Ende Gelände, as well as Marxist dialectical thinking on time, as offering glimmers of alternatives to the dominant liberal temporal framework.
