This is a remarkably creative and beautifully written book. Inspired by the broad “temporal turn” in historical studies for which Reinhart Koselleck is a seminal influence, Christopher Clark reinterprets central questions about the German state and politics through close readings of the political careers of three figures—Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg (in power 1640–1688), Frederick II, King of Prussia (1740–1786), and Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Empire (1867–1890)—and one political regime, the Third Reich. In all four of the book's chapters, Clark proves himself an astonishingly adroit reader of texts—from speeches, memoirs, and political testaments to paintings, novels, works of history, museum exhibitions, philosophy, and political theory. For historians, Clark's book offers an exemplary (if possibly inimitable) approach to political institutions, actors, and cultures from the perspective of their temporal textures and rhythms, and their implicit or explicit conceptions of why and how historical change occurs. The general reader too will be enchanted by the book's charming style and energetic pace.

In Chapter One, “The History Machine,” Clark narrates Frederick William's consolidation of power vis-à-vis the provincial estates as a struggle between two different views of historicity and temporality. Where the Elector sought to use futurity, or posterity, as an argument for his dynamic, centralizing institution-building, the Estates argued that their traditional rights were grounded on “continuity with the past” (31). Clark examines how “the trope of necessitas was radicalized [and] temporally stretched” so that ad hoc state intervention could be transformed into a “permanent anticipatory posture.” The language of emergency supported the expansion of state power, and both engendered (or reflected) a new concept of history, which Clark defines as a “shifting flux of demands … the ‘conjunctures’ and ‘current trends’ (jetzigen Läufe) of a constantly changing present” (41).

From 1650 to the mid-1680s, Frederick William consistently tried to imagine himself from the perspective of posterity, employing Samuel Pufendorf as his court historian in 1686. Clark's close reading of Pufendorf and other contemporary European historical writings such as the Theatrum Europaeum (1633–1738) yields profound insights into how historical writings legitimated the early modern state and described the role of the statesman in the flux of history. By “emancipating itself” from the past, “anticipating possible futures, and inventing new instruments to confront them,” Clark writes, the state became “a time machine, an engine that makes history happen” (64). If history is secular flux, “dislodged … from the diachronic grip of prophecy,” and the interests of states were constantly changing, the sovereign needed to be a perceptive and adroit decision-maker, able to assess “possible futures”and act appropriately (63).

Chapter Two, “The Historian King,” takes the reader a century forward, into the late Enlightenment world of Frederick II. Clark directs our attention to a stark difference between the king's historicity and his temporal awareness. Although his philosophical understanding of history was linear and progressive, his “intuitive grasp of the felt texture of time” was recursive and nonlinear (74). It is rare, Clark points out, that a monarch invests as much effort in writing a work of history as Frederick II did, with the assistance of Voltaire, in his 1751 Memoires. Although Pufendorf's court history emphasized change and contingency—and the attendant importance of the sovereign as decision-maker—Frederick II's faith in history as governed by law led him to deemphasize the sovereign's role in choosing between alternative futures.

The metaphors of a decisional calculus or decision tree are an important leitmotif also in Chapter Three, “Boatman on the River of Time,” which focuses on Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Clark's reading of Bismarck's mental world and political career from the perspective of time and power is a tour de force. “ ‘Moments of decision’ and ‘decisive moments’ (the two are not identical) were the joints from which his political ego-narratives were constructed” (148). Clark argues that industrial and clock-time heighted awareness of the fleeting moment and that historians and painters produced many works that were “thickly saturated with moments of decision, danger, opportunity, destiny and revelation” (150). In this context, in which the historian-narrator achieved what Clark calls hermeneutic mastery over the contingent quality of every situation—its sudden threats and limited opportunitiesâ Bismarck aspired to this “elevated standpoint” (150). Bismarck's fondness for chess analogies for his political “moves” illustrates the central feature of his self-image—“a uniquely skilled reader of the historical moment” (151).

Clark uses this characterization to underscore the distance that separates Bismarck from the protagonists of the previous chapters, for whom the temporal specificity of the moment of decision was not as crucial. With the defeat of the monarchical state in World War I, the premise common to Hegel and Ranke that the state was the primary agent of historical change and guarantor of continuity entered a crisis. “To travel on the swollen river of history, a boat was necessary, a permanent (or at least stable) structure that sat atop the currents of change. But what if the boat capsized … might not history, in turn, degenerate into mere tumult?” (165).

The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 accelerated the crisis of German historical consciousness. In “Time of the Nazis,” the final chapter, Clark emphasizes how radically the Nazis rejected both the centrality of the state to politics and the linearity and progressivistic views of history. Through close reading of Nazi texts and artifacts, such as the Halle Museum of the National Socialist Uprising, of Hitler's notions of himself as a “prophet,” and of Nazi archaeology and interest in deutsche Vorgeschichte (German prehistory), Clark advances a bold and important interpretation of the temporality of the Nazi regime.

Though it fits elegantly with the previous chapters, this is the least convincing of the four. Utilizing insights gleaned from Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return, Clark argues that the Nazis did not just conceive of their revolution as a rupture with the decadence of Weimar, but as the “inauguration of a new kind of time” (180). Like Eliade's archaic man, Clark explains, the Nazis “sought to evade history altogether, to slip out of it into the racial continuum time of a transhistorical memory” (189). Clark does not comment on whether or how Eliade's involvement with the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael in interwar Romania might have helped Eliade arrive at these insights into fascist temporality. Rather, Clark emphasizes that Eliade identified a psychological “reflex” discernible in many times and places, providing an insight that transcends the fascist context (170). Clark musters some evidence of a “millennial chronoscape” dominating Nazi public culture, for which Weimar was “astronomically remote” and the ancient Germanic tribes or Greco-Roman antiquity “came to seem (or were supposed to seem) very near” (195). His argument juxtaposing the longue durée of Germanic memory and so-called ethnographic time of the Volk, with the profane history of events and day-to-day politics is richly suggestive, but far from proven. There are many reasons to be skeptical of his thesis that “important as the linear energies of the productivisation and force maximization were, they were embedded into a larger, non-linear temporality” (209).

Time and Power revisits important questions of German political theory—of the relationship between the state and civil society, of sovereignty, decision-making, and Realpolitik—from the unexpected perspectives of historicity and temporality. The result is a rich cultural history of politics and political thought that explores profound questions about the way political actors viewed themselves as agents embedded in historical logics and structures. Time and Power seizes the “moment” of the temporal turn to commandingly refresh our view of some of the most important figures and issues in German history.