Bachner’s review of The Time of Global Politics is fair and generous, and I appreciate the care with which it addresses the work. Ultimately, there is a great deal of overlap in the two pieces, and much to recommend both, but there are also important distinctions and points of difference that I wish to underline here. Some of these are undoubtedly due to the substantive focus of each—elections versus global politics, as Bachner mentions—but there are also some good faith differences in perspective regarding temporality and time itself, which emerge throughout the review and warrant discussion.

For instance, while I take the point of Bachner that the parable of the blind man and the elephant is compelling, it is inapplicable to the framework I advocate here. Part of the idea of presentism is that time and temporal experience—of which politics is a part—is heterotemporal, rather than universal. What this means is that metaphorically, there is no real elephant by which to adjudicate who is or is not correct. In some versions of the parable, the participants devolve into conflict precisely because each attempts to articulate their perspective as correct and/or universal—the framework advocated in The Time of Global Politics seeks to avoid that outcome by accepting the radical contingency of temporal perspective and moving forward with that perspective, rather than seeking to resolve political reality in any final way.

On the other hand, there is not as much difference between the two works regarding the malleability of past and future or the importance of each. The framework advocated The Time of Global Politics is one where the present shapes and creates past(s) and future(s) which seems very much in line with Bachner’s perspective. The present—or should I say these presents—create past and futures that attach to each. And while it is true that these pasts and futures cannot be invented in just any fashion, they equally do not necessarily have any correspondence with the universal past or future which Bachner seems to assume exists to adjudicate the validity of political claims and observations. Alternatively, the framework advocated in The Time of Global Politics is largely agnostic about the ultimate reality of any depiction of temporal experience. This agnosticism is born out of a philosophy of time, but more directly, an understanding of politics as constructed and constitutive of reality. This is where I differ from Bachner—while they assert a “quasi-eternalist” sense of time, I do not, because that eternalist sense of time presumes the existence of one reality which I argue is less appropriate when the focus is on globality and its manifold differences in political practice.

There is also some discrepancy between my position on social science and the way that Bachner characterizes it in the review. In the book, I am explicitly open to the possibility of social science, making claims across time, and devoting an entire chapter to reimagining prediction. What I am opposed to is the idea that one can assert traditional social science claims—namely timeless applicability of a theory and its predictive quality—while unquestionably accepting notions of time as dominantly practiced. One may indeed be able to make comparisons and even predictions between eras, but one must be much more specific and intentional in terms of theorizing the parallels that exist between two times and articulate why a prediction generated in one can effectively inform the other.

Differences aside, Bachner does make one point I wholeheartedly agree with—I do think that focusing on the narration of past and future—and present—in elections is something that much more clearly lends itself to measurement and assertions of reality versus foreign policy, international relations, or war, which are largely imaginary enterprises. I am not saying they are imaginary in the sense that they are not real or without real effect, but that in order to function imaginaries must be in place. Without a shared imaginary of what “China” is—even if not finally universal—it is impossible to consider the possibility of relations between “China” and the “United States,” let alone the possibility of “war” or “conflict” between the two. And as is the case with any imaginary, where and when it takes place are central to understanding how it functions in politics.