Diverging Time

Book excerpt: Temporal divergence creates a need for new narratives and paradigms. In Diverging Time David Carvounas supports this assertion through detailed expository and diagnostic readings of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. He focuses on their contribution to our understanding of modernity as an epochal shift in the relationship between past and future--recasting the significance of the past and future of the modern present. Despite their different solutions to the problem of temporal coordination, they urged the modern world to look not to the past but to the newly opened future for continuity, meaning, and purpose. This book not only offers a fresh look at a defining characteristic of modernity, but also makes a compelling case that a coherent modern temporal structure requires a sustainable orientation toward the future--an orientation that Kant, Hegel, and Marx delineate in distinctive and powerful ways.