Time and Power

One of Times Higher Education's Best Books of 2018

One of the Financial Times' Summer Books of 2019: History

This groundbreaking book presents new perspectives on how the exercise of power is shaped by different notions of time. Acclaimed historian Christopher Clark draws on four key figures from German history - Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Prussia, Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler - to look at history through a temporal lens and ask how historical actors and their regimes embody unique conceptions of time. Elegantly written and boldly innovative, Time and Power reveals the connection between political power and the distinct temporalities of the leaders who wield it.

'Clark's book is brilliantly constructed, dazzling in its scholarship, and immensely stimulating. It shows how Prussian and German rulers located their exercise of power in conceptions of their relationship to past and future, casts new light on the ways in which belief in the nature of the state developed, and describes how the destruction of faith in the state following the First World War gave rise to new and dangerous millennial ideas of the Nazis.' - Ian Kershaw, author of To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

'An original and rewarding approach to modern German history.' - Tony Barber, Financial Times

'Stimulating and entertaining.' - Tim Blanning, Literary Review

'[Clark's] breadth of knowledge is impressive and his conclusions are carefully considered.' - Hester Vaizey, Times Higher Education