The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice

by Elizabeth F. Cohen

Waiting periods and deadlines are so ubiquitous that we often take them for granted. Yet they form a critical part of any democratic architecture. When a precise moment or amount of time is given political importance, we ought to understand why this is so. The Political Value of Time explores the idea of time within democratic theory and practice. Elizabeth F. Cohen demonstrates how political procedures use quantities of time to confer and deny citizenship rights. Using specific dates and deadlines, states carve boundaries around a citizenry. As time is assigned a form of political value it comes to be used to transact over rights. Cohen concludes with a normative analysis of the ways in which the devaluation of some people's political time constitutes a widely overlooked form of injustice. This book shows readers how and why they need to think about time if they want to understand politics.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory

190 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[Andrew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been getting a lot of attention from academics and rightly so. Time is one of the most important research agendas at the moment for students of politics. In this blessedly jargon free analysis, Elizabeth Cohen explores how time functions as a political good in democracies. States use time to decide who is or isn't a citizen (such as whether people were born before or after a certain date), to govern (cycles of elections, deadlines for census and taxation), to enable access to rights (naturalisation processes after a waiting period, abortion before deadlines) and as a form of punishment (imprisonment for set periods of time).

In a democracy, time is particularly important as it often stands in as a (supposedly) neutral proxy for other goods (such as waiting in a queue for services, or using time as a proxy for developing the patriotism & loyalty expected of citizens). Yet as Cohen shows, time is not necessarily neutral or a proxy. Even if just looking at 'durational time' (the ticking of the clock), we all encounter and use time differently, can access more or less of it, and our choices about it are often untested (why 5 years wait for citizenship, not 4 or 6?, why is it unfair to let only the wealthy vote, but ok to ban those under 18?) Time matters and we need to better understand its impact.

Democratic political theory is beyond my usual reading these days. And this is very much a book for academics (half the book feels like re-statements and guides to future statements, befitting one scholars might dip into). But it is a valuable, informative and clearly written book (which is no mean feat given the word salad many academic discussions of time fall into).

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "The Political Value of Time," Elizabeth Cohen analyzes the various ways that time functions in a democratic state. Time is undertheorized, but it is everywhere. Because time (like geographic space) sets boundaries, it is essential to the boundary-setting of a state, its administration, and the definition of the constituent citizens. She homes in on the uses of time in establishing citizenship (e.g., voting rights and other rights at 18), sentencing for criminal punishment, and wait periods for immigration, but acknowledges the many other uses (work hours, election cycles, censuses, etc.). Time, as Cohen emphasizes, "takes highly subjective, abstract, and qualitative processes and expresses them in highly precise, tangible, and quantifiable terms." It is a proxy for other variables, and like all proxies, it may be imperfect -- but it is ultimately more faithful to underlying goals than any other possible one.

[Արսեն Նազոյան · Rating 5 out of 5]

This groundbreaking book will change the way that you think about how time is used as a tool to achieve political ends- and in unexpected ways. Deadlines and required waiting periods can be as critical as political borders for understanding restrictions on rights and opportunities to participate in civic life.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and important, though at times repetitive, argument about the crucial need to think time and politics together.

[Andrew Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth F. Cohen’s The Political Value of Time is one of those books – my favourite is James C Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed – that highlight how significant quantification and measurement is to states and politics.

An important feature of democratic countries is that although the state itself is set up to be for an indefinite time period, each government itself has a set maximum time. We are only prepared to give them temporary control over us, and that substantially limits their power.

States themselves set numerous ‘temporal boundaries’, as Cohen calls them. Another recent book I reviewed highlighted how citizenship relates to the complex bundle of rights and duties associated with living in a state. Cohen’s book highlights how temporal boundaries connect to these rights and duties.

For example, it is usual to have to wait to get the vote – whether that be turning a particular age for people who are already citizens, or seeing out periods of residence before migrants get to become citizens and then acquire the right to vote.

These time periods are often proxies for more qualitative considerations related to what is desirable in a voter, such as maturity, experience in a country, and for migrants loyalty. Of course in reality there are 15 year olds with better political judgment than many of the people who can vote, and non-citizens who are better informed about a country than people are citizens. But compared to a time period, these things are hard to measure and to administer. We just hope that these time periods roughly correlate with what we are concerned about.

Cohen notes other aspects of time periods that make them politically useful. Compared to a test of maturity, 18 years as the age of getting the vote seems objective. We can agree on how long 18 years is in a way that we won’t agree on many other things. A time period is relatively egalitarian – everyone waits for the same amount of time regardless of their other characteristics or status in society (we have occasional debates about lowering the age, but compared to other previous or proposed tests of being competent to vote, such as gender or property holdings, reaching a certain age is uncontroversial).

Time periods also let us agree on a conclusion when we cannot agree on ultimate purposes. Cohen notes that this has been the case for jail sentences. We may differ on whether the purpose of sending people to jail is retribution, rehabilitation or incapacitation, but we can agree that a period of time is the right conclusion (all agree that time is valuable, and spending it in jail is significant).

This is an academic work rather than one for the general reader, but I found it to be an interesting analysis of the sometimes non-obvious aspects of a pervasive feature of political life, time and time periods.

[kghgte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super quick read. A lot of novel (at least to me) ideas that had me thinking even after I finished reading. I would not pick this up outside of an academic context though.