Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 57, Number 3, 2011, pp. 366-376. © 2011 The Author. Australian Journal of Politics and History © 2011 School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd. On the Relation between Politics and Time IAN TREGENZA Macquarie University This article makes the case that politics, understood as a particular kind of public action, presupposes a notion of time marked by the three temporal states of past, present, and future. Political deliberation and judgment are future-oriented activities that, more or less explicitly, draw on the past for guidance. Aristotle’s discussion of deliberative rhetoric in the Art of Rhetoric, which recognizes the inherent contingency of political decision making, is the classic treatment of the topic and is given some attention. Throughout western political theory this view of politics has been contested, most notably by figures such as Plato and Marx, whose respective attempts to transcend the contingency and unpredictability of politics, it will be argued, is connected to the endeavour to overcome the imperfections and conflicts bound up with the temporal order itself. Finally, the article examines two modern expressions of the desire to transcend politics in a timeless world of pure model building or universal morality. The first of these can be found in much contemporary neo-classical economic theory, and the second in the a-political politics of the international human rights movement. Introduction In one of his most famous lines Saint Augustine remarked that he knew well enough what time is along as no one asks him, but as soon as he is asked to explain it he is “baffled”. 1 He would then go on to dissolve the notion of time into the individual consciousness. Unlike God who exists in eternity, time is necessary for us to make sense of ourselves and yet we can only make sense of time by turning into the self. Among philosophers, Augustine is not alone in denying the independent reality of time. In the modern period idealist philosophers from Kant to F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart have located time in the world of appearance, denying it any ontological status. 2 In this article I want to argue that even if time, when viewed sub specie aeternitatis, is an illusion it is nevertheless a necessary one for political action. To make this case we need first to specify terms. Since this is a work of political theory rather than metaphysics I will simply invoke a commonsense notion of time to include the three temporal states of past, present, and future. It might be the case, as some philosophers have suggested, that only the present exists and that the past and the future are a function of our capacities for recollection and anticipation. 3 But making present choices in order to shape a wished-for future invariably involves drawing on a past (explicitly or implicitly) that is believed to have actually happened. So the existence of 1 Augustine, Confessions (Harmondsworth, 1961), R.S. Pine-Coffin, trans., bk.11, p.264. 2 Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford, 1897); McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge, 1927). 3 Hobbes, for instance. See footnote 13 below.