Timo Miettinen

*Time of Democracy* asks what kind of relationship to time democracy presupposes. Democracy is usually understood through institutions, rights and popular sovereignty, yet it also rests on a distinctive temporal horizon: the future must remain open, history alterable and political outcomes subject to collective action. The book argues that the contemporary crisis of democracy is therefore also a crisis of historical time. The title has a double meaning. The book traces the history of democracy from early modern republican thought and the rise of public opinion to the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, representative government and the democratic breakthroughs of the twentieth century. At the same time, it reconstructs democracy’s conception of time. Modern democracy was made possible by a break with cyclical models of history. Once societies ceased to regard political order as the repetition of inherited forms, the present could become a field of choice and the future a horizon of competing possibilities. Drawing on thinkers including Tocqueville, Weber and Schmitt, the book examines how this temporal promise has been challenged by liberalism, nationalism, totalitarianism and technocratic rule. It also analyses the contemporary weakening of democratic time. Accelerating crises compress political horizons, while governance is presented as the management of necessities without genuine alternatives. Populism responds by turning toward nostalgia, grievance and imagined moments of national unity. Meanwhile, the idea of the “end of history” transforms democracy from an unfinished project into an order concerned primarily with preserving itself. *Time of Democracy* offers a historical and philosophical defence of democratic temporality. Democracy depends not only on elections or institutions but on the capacity to learn from the past without becoming captive to it, to sustain meaningful conflict in the present and to keep the future politically open.

It is a well-known fact that Husserl’s late works were defined by a growing consciousness of a scientific and cultural crisis. This crisis was inextricably connected to the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of European values; its true sense, however, could only be understood against the backdrop of the whole of modernity. Science had not only lost its unity, but it was unable to answer fundamental questions regarding the normative ideals of humanity. This article deals with the emergence of historical critique in Husserl’s late works as an answer to this crisis. It shows how Husserl’s post-WWI insistence of philosophy as a generative idea – something that develops as a part of historical lifeworld in the course of generations – was tied to the idea of historical critique as a necessary prerequisite of phenomenology. Against his earlier view on the fundamental “presuppositionlessness” of phenomenology, Husserl began to treat the critique historical presuppositions as a necessary starting point of a responsible philosophical attitude. It was only this type of critique that made possible the idea of philosophy as a common and an infinite task. This argument, however, necessitated a reinterpretation of the concept of teleology and a rethinking of the narrative of modernity itself.

This article examines ordoliberalism as a distinctive response to the intellectual and political crises of interwar Europe, positioning it not merely as a theory of economic governance but as a broader attempt to reconfigure liberalism through a normative conception of science. While rooted in ethical traditions—including Protestant theology, Kantian moral philosophy, and humanism—ordoliberal thought simultaneously advanced a vision of economic theory grounded in scientific rigor and epistemological clarity. Challenging both the metaphysical assumptions of classical liberalism and the technocratic tendencies of socialist planning, ordoliberals sought to reconcile empirical analysis with normative purpose. Through this synthesis, they aimed to restore liberalism’s cultural authority in an era marked by disillusionment with both laissez-faire economics and authoritarian alternatives. The article argues that the tension between ethical commitment and scientific neutrality in ordoliberalism signals a deeper transformation: an effort to reconstruct reason itself as a normative foundation for liberal order.