Something Happened to the Future: Reconstructing Temporalities in Dutch Parliamentary Debate, 1814–2018

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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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)52-82
Number of pages31
JournalContributions to the History of Concepts
Volume16
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Keywords

  • digital history
  • future
  • Netherlands
  • parliament
  • Reinhart Koselleck
  • quantitative text analysis
  • time

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