Homogeneous, Empty Time Term Analysis

This is Anderson’s term for the new concept of time that arose at the end of the Middle Ages. During and before this period, people tended to think of the past, present, and future as all already determined and all existing together as God’s will, as though people were merely unwitting actors in a play that had already been written out for them. However, Anderson shows that a new, modern vision of time soon arose—this is the one we still have today, in which time moves forward linearly, can be measured by a calendar or clock, and gets “filled” by the events that not only happen, but also cause one another in an endless chain. In “homogeneous, empty time,” large imagined “sociological organism[s]”—like the neighborhood, the political party, or the nation—can be conceived of as moving through time and developing in parallel with other changes and events in the world. Anderson cites novels, newspapers, and early works of historical scholarship as proof that this conception began to displace the old, divine-based view of time: novels began to move linearly through time and imagine their readers looking back from the future, for instance, while newspapers gave readers a snapshot of a single day across the globe, and history started to look at cause-and-effect relationships between events that occurred in succession. Because it made imagining an entity like the nation possible, Anderson argues, the rise of “homogeneous, empty time” was an important precursor to nationalism.