Abstract
This article stands in Reinhart Koselleck’s tradition of investigating the historical experience of time. It focuses on the manner in which the experience and conceptualization of the future changed in Dutch parliamentary speech between 1814 and 2018. Based on a quantitative analysis of a corpus of political texts of more than 800 million tokens spanning more than two centuries, we argue that the future transformed from something unknown but principally predictable into a synonym for change itself during the final quarter of the twentieth century. We contend that this resulted in unpredictability becoming the future’s defining trait and the future, consequently, losing its character as a knowledgeable singular in a process of what can be called “de-singularization.”
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 52-82 |
Number of pages | 31 |
Journal | Contributions to the History of Concepts |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
Keywords
- digital history
- future
- Netherlands
- parliament
- Reinhart Koselleck
- quantitative text analysis
- time