Nomi Claire Lazar’s compelling new book Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time is a significant contribution to recent literature on the politics of time. In this wide-ranging text, Lazar deftly explores how, when faced with challenges of legitimacy in times of upheaval and innovation, political leaders frame their language through the rhetoric of time. From the French revolutionaries who famously established their own calendar and clock by setting the year 1792 to Year 1, to two different preambles to the Chinese constitution in 1978 and 1982 that pursue different strategies of temporal framing and positioning, to recent populist speeches by Viktor Orbán in Hungary who seeks to reshape the past in order to shape a new future, all these attempts to establish legitimacy and cement a new order are also projects in shaping time.

The very malleability of time, what Hamlet famously bemoaned as its out-of-jointness, also provides a powerful tool for political positioning. Lazar notes that “a regime that successfully anticipates and mitigates risk, effectively manages contingency” (p. 7). Managing or attempting to order the very contingency of time establishes a sense of harmony that can provide powerful grounds for legitimation. The very finite nature of human life, its existential desire to transcend death, leads to a desire for meaning that constitutes and constructs our experience of time. She notes that “ultimately, temporal framing is effective in political speech because time drives both the demand for and the possibility of experiencing meaning” (p. 11). The temporal framing that underlines much of political rhetoric during moments of upheaval and unrest, when time is vertiginously experienced as out of joint, demonstrates how leaders can use it to create the perception of restoring order. By asserting control over the unruly past, by ordering it through revamped calendars and new iterations of clock time, they can smooth it into a future of possibility. As such, the rhetoric of time functions as a key component in the toolbox of legitimation in times of crisis and change.

Lazar argues that “all experienced time is shaped time” and professes an agnosticism about whether such a thing as time in itself exists (p. 21). This is not by itself an entirely problematic claim, because her project focuses on the ways in which the rhetoric of time can give shape and legitimacy to the political. But in drawing the contrast quite so starkly between clock time (which she correctly notes takes varying technological forms) and an objective ideal of time-in-itself, Lazar skirts a significant amount of work in contemporary political theory that fleshes out the possibilities and constraints of the lived experience of time in thought, perception, and memory. The scope of this literature is too broad to capture here, but many of these texts engage with multiple aspects of time beyond the orderliness of clock time, whether it is exploring the fastness or slowness of time and affect in shaping thought below the level of consciousness (William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, 2002); the often constraining and sometimes productive role that the presence of the past plays in discussions of political memory (P. J. Brendese, The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics, 2014, and Smita A. Rahman, Time, Memory, and the Politics of Contingency, 2014); the category of the people in democratic politics as an ongoing process unfolding in time (Paulina Ochoa-Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State, 2011); or the disruptive politics of the untimely or positing that a theory of time must indeed go beyond the experience of time and be linked to a theory of social formation (Samuel Chambers, Untimely Politics, 2003, and “Untimely politics avant la lettre: The temporality of social formations,” Time & Society 20(2), 2011). Lazar’s deeply researched and wide-ranging text would benefit from a productive engagement with these texts, which would push it beyond its binary approach to theorizing time as either clock time or time-in-itself. It is a missed opportunity for a text that otherwise sits comfortably adjacent to such works and indeed has important contributions to make to this literature with its layered and erudite examination of the rhetoric and technology of time across the centuries.

Lazar’s careful and considered reading of the political construction of time is particularly impressive, running the gamut of texts from Plato’s Timaeus, to Augustine and Vico, to reflections on the Mayan calendar. Her analysis of the two different preambles to the Chinese constitution is equally compelling. She carefully unpacks the eschatological patterning of the 1978 preamble in which “the period of violent struggle preceding the period of peace takes on a purpose beyond its immediate political goals, incorporating overtones of purification” and highlights the redemptive role that the present is positioned to achieve in that temporal frame (p. 54). By contrast, she notes that the later 1982 preamble does away with eschatological framing, instead positioning the constitution as part of the gradual ongoing progress of China. Each offers legitimacy at a different moment in Chinese political history, and each does so through the deft use of temporal framing. Lazar is equally convincing in her analysis of calendars and the role they play in what she calls performance legitimacy. She explores ancient Assyrian letters to note how the king’s legitimacy was tied just as much to when he acted in certain ways as what he did, such that “performance was a pillar of legitimation for the Assyrian kings, and this performance was tightly bound up with temporal propriety” (p. 117). Calendars therefore also came to play a significant role in shaping and mediating the experience of time in this analysis as they in turn shape the infrastructure of risk management. Lazar writes, “Time technologies can be used to naturalize and hence institutionalize and legitimize political innovations and political orders. In this light it makes sense that the reform of time technologies is so common—and so commonly beneath notice—as times of political change” (p. 127). As such the reform of time technologies is fundamentally an exercise of power that produces knowledge, which in turn legitimates power.

If the lived experience of time is one of vertiginous flux, where the tenses flow in and out of each other, the attempt to establish a new synchrony or a new form of clock or calendrical time becomes a strategy not just for soothing the unruly currents of time but also to establish order and shape political meaning. This deeply researched and beautifully written book therefore makes a convincing and compelling case that the desire to smoothly order and shape the out-of-joint experience of time is a powerful act of political legitimation that we cannot ignore.