Three Historicist Comments

This article discusses the politics of time in the culture wars of the 1980s by way of three comments on the discursive and political uses of the conceptual pairs historicism/otium, reform/revolution, and emergency/patience. This article argues that (1) the culture wars articulated a politically valuable dialectic of critique and the objects of critique, 2) historians tend to foreshorten their account of the culture wars and make light of their nonreformist origins, and (3) a reappraisal of the culture wars would provide precious signposts for strategic approaches to current political threats.