Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 130

change into a doctrine of the development of rational consciousness (Sherover
1975). Time in this view is not simply the measure of change, but synonym-
ous with change, a view that became widely popular in nineteenth-century
historical scholarship. Hegel's work turned attention from eternal Platonic
ideals to the concrete speci cs of historical circumstances, even if the causal

motor he attributed to this, the transcendent World Spirit of Reason, was itself
profoundly Platonic in inspiration. Hegel speci

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ed three phases to history:
despotisms, in which very few were free (when the world geist was centered on
the Middle East), oligarchies, in which some were free (when the geist cen-
tered on Asia), and democracies, in which most were free (when the geist had
shifted to Europe). His work valorized the nation-state as the embodiment of
the world spirit, culminating in the apex of Prussia. Marx, too, engaged in
this practice by categorizing the historical record in a series of modes of
production (Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism) that unfolded in strict,
unyielding course of history. Like other Enlightenment intellectuals, Marx
too stressed the progressive character of history.
Social theory of the nineteenth century also drew heavily upon Darwinian
evolution for inspiration and legitimation, biologizing social relations and
thus denying their contingency. The original theory of evolution as contin-
gent and open-ended was usurped as legitimating the notion of “progress”
in the history of life, a simplistic, linear view of phyletic gradualism that
was challenged in the twentieth century. Spencer's corruption of Darwinian
selection—“survival of the

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fittest”—drew heavily upon modernist notions of
progress and dressed historicism in a veil of pseudo-science. In nineteenth-
century social theory, no distinction was made between “evolution” and
“progress” (Nisbet 1980). This line of thought persisted until the structural-
ism of the early twentieth century jettisoned the synchronic in pursuit of
universally ascribed atemporal structures (Baert 2000).
Likewise, Enlightenment geographic thought, Orientalist to the core,
imagined a new, ostensibly universal geography with Europe recentered in the
middle, a project central to the works of Kant, Toynbee, and others. This task
was accomplished by the deployment of linear stages representing universal
historical time, in which Europe, naturally, represented the most advanced
stage and distance from Europe testi

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ed to the nature of earlier, more primi-
tive stages. Nineteenth-century textbook portrayals of the globe framed the
Western geographical imagination around a series of continents, typically
con

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ated with simplistic notions of race, that were hierarchically organized
in terms of their degree or alleged degree of temporal progress and, thus,
similarity to European and North American whites, a schema that gained
respectability through appeal to various forms of social Darwinism and
environmental determinism. In this way did historicism eclipse space in the
service of imperial thought. Beyond Europe was before Europe (McGrane
1983:94), a theme articulated over and over again in modernization theory
and its current neoliberal variants.
All of these intellectual and cultural changes were wrapped up in the

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