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Abstract

A long-standing allegation holds that democracy is inherently biased in favour of the present to the detriment of the future. In this article, I question this premise by looking at temporality as a contested aspect of democratic practices of legitimisation. I approach democracy as a fundamentally historical phenomenon with language-based practices at its core. This is done through an examination of parliamentary debates on long-term policies on forests in the 1830s and 40s in France. In this context, there was a struggle over temporality that was played out as a conflict over the concept of interest. This article suggests an examination of the concept of interest as a locus for contestation between competing political languages implying different temporalities as a way of understanding democracy historically. The development of a concept of interest with the long term at its core in the late 1840s can be seen as a redescription of key concepts established as part of the radical Enlightenment political program of presentism. Following this analysis, I argue that democracy is not inherently presentist, but is shaped by a history in which both languages of radical presentism and elaborate long-term perspectives are constitutive parts. As such, these languages make up resources for developing legitimacy for long-term policies in contemporary democracies.

Keywords: Democracy, presentism, future generations, interest, conceptual history, July monarchy, France, forest policy, long-termism