BETWEEN THE TIMES – Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Inter-war Europe is a Starting Grant Project, led by Liisi Keedus and funded by the European Commission through the European Research Council. The project is based at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University.

The project seeks to offer a new intellectual history of the political imagination in interwar Europe by exploring its emerging anti-teleological visions of time and their intersections with changing understandings of the human world and methods for its study. It argues that only a distinctively cross-disciplinary and pan-European narrative can capture the full ramifications and legacies of this fundamental rupture in thought.

What were the political languages encoded in the reinventions of time, and vice versa – how were political aims translated into and advanced through theoretical innovation? How did these differ in different national contexts, and why? What are the fragmented legacies of this rupture, disbursed in and through the philosophical, methodological and political dicta and dogmas that rooted themselves in post-1945 thought? How can past counter-historicities illuminate the present crisis of progressivism?