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.
Homogeneous, Empty Time Quotes in Imagined Communities
The Imagined Communities quotes below are all either spoken by Homogeneous, Empty Time or refer to Homogeneous, Empty Time. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2
Quotes
The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.
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Homogeneous, Empty Time Term Timeline in Imagined Communities
The timeline below shows where the term Homogeneous, Empty Time appears in Imagined Communities. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: Cultural Roots
...will (and therefore existed simultaneously). This understanding of time was replaced by the current one, “homogeneous, empty time,” which sees time as a linear, measurable, empty container, with one thing causing...
(full context)
...never actually meet in the book. The characters comprise “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time,” just like a nation. To illustrate this complex argument, Anderson uses four examples...
(full context)
Chapter 11: Memory and Forgetting
...been destroyed. But in these cases, “new” and “old” exist at the same time, in “homogeneous, empty time.” This is because the concept of “living lives parallel to those of other[s]”...
(full context)
...same time, the accelerating manufacture of watches, newspapers, and novels contributed to the transition to “homogeneous empty time,” and the academic discipline of History was being formed. This shift in perceptions...
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