We live in a constantly changing world, which requires reformulating our research questions. CHA is particularly well suited for describing and redescribing this changing and ultimately historical world. It emerged independently in many different disciplines, and thus is spoken many different vernaculars. This book extracts from those vernaculars a common grammar of time, to place CHA on more systematic methodological foundations. The introduction previews key elements of CHA: its reliance on historical thinking to explore social reality; its deployment of a rich temporal vocabulary; and three distinct strands of CHA, each making its own distinct contributions.

Our comment to Pasinetti’s fourth point starts from Robinson’s distinction between ‘logical’ and ‘historical’ time and from the critique based on that distinction that she addressed to both the neoclassical and the classical theory of value and distribution. We find that there are two sides to Robinson’s critique: one by which that critique can legitimately be addressed to both theories, but that should be rejected; and the other, that with one reservation should be accepted but that has to do with the specific nature of the neoclassical theory inasmuch as this theory is based on demand and supply curves. Moving to further questions with a ‘chronological’ dimension, we argue that the interpretation which is sometimes proposed of the classical theory as a theory aimed at determining single ‘pictures’ of the economic system taken at different ‘points of time’ should also be rejected. Finally, we point out that the distinction between two notions of time reappears in the neo-Walrasian reformulation of the neoclassical theory, where, differently from what happened in Robinson’s case, it has the effect of obscuring the very possibility of comparing that theory with alternative economic theories.

In this chapter on “Constructive Disorderings,” Eyers argues that Wallace Stevens subtly eludes our most common ways of treating literature. Where many scholars today reflexively adopt a historicist-contextualist approach to literature, Stevens, Eyers argues, instead produces a rather more uncanny, and more powerful, approach to historical time. Focusing in particular on “Of Mere Being” and “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Eyers locates in this verse repeated scenes of historical-temporal “afterwardsness,” whereby what would seem to have come first in fact came later, and where what one would have expected to follow on is instead shown to have been there all along. Far from resulting in mere disorder, however, such instances, when read closely and associatively, bring into being a singular poetic logic of historical time and, further, a radical rerouting of our expectations about modernism.

Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the katechon - a theological figure of the ‘restrainer’ - it is argued that two different accounts of ‘restraint’ operate within contemporary historiography. In one, the USA and the Soviet Union assume the role of the katechon during the Cold War, holding at bay an earthly apocalypse, securing stability through their mutual enmity. In the other, liberal account, it is the Cold War itself that acts as the restrainer, holding back the promises of Kant’s enlightenment project of world government, and of the securing of global peace through law. Each of these accounts has problematic effects: either by operating as an apology for the power of the guarantors of order, or by denying/deferring responsibility for the present state of affairs. We are therefore asked to think, instead, about international law and its history through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘weak messianic power’.