Out of ‘time out of mind’: The emotional experience of time and the English constitution between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract This article investigates the role of the emotional experiences of time in the constitutional debates of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. It posits temporality as a shared, collective and emotional experience, rather than an external and natural line where events develop unidirectionally. As such, temporality is proposed as a new analytical framework for exploring the shift from a past-oriented to a future-oriented constitutional theory from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Adopting this perspective, this shift in constitutionalism is framed, in part, as a response to different emotional experiences of time. Focusing on the writings of Coke in the seventeenth century, and Bentham and Godwin in the nineteenth century, this article also identifies a point of continuity between the past-oriented claims for legitimacy of the English constitution in the seventeenth century and the future-oriented ones in the nineteenth century, and indicates new paths for future investigation. Questioning the role of historicity in the legitimation of the English constitution in the seventeenth century, and the role of progress in the nineteenth century as ‘past’ and ‘future’, this article proposes to analyse these temporal categories as a qualified ‘immemorial’ past as opposed to a qualified ‘timeless’ present ruled by the steady category of progress.