History is currently abuzz with multiple times which owe their flourishing to the pervasive “culturalisation” of our discipline: Here nineteenth-century historicism with its anti-Revolutionary resistance to transfer and comparison chimes with the recent culturalist disparagement of unilinear time-concepts. It may come as little of a surprise, therefore, that the category of “delay” remains something of a Cinderella subject: The collapse of modernization theory and the dismantling of “special paths” in European history (Sonderwege, think of Reinhart Koselleck’s critique of Helmuth Plessner) have further conspired to make arguments about paragon-like, pace-setting developmental paths seem methodologically flawed and politically unsavoury. In a fragile, soul-searching West, it seems outrageous to rank societies in hierarchies of superior and inferior development, and to suggest that the latter should engage in catch-up improvement.

And yet: A unprejudiced archaeology of Europe’s intellectual, social, and economic histories from the French Revolution to twentieth-century imperialism might well prove the fecundity of delay as a category employed by historical actors themselves. The central idea this lecture will focus on is the following one: To what extent were these actors able to turn their self-perception as latecomers into an asset precisely because they hoped to skip and leapfrog historical “states,” to reap the benefits of progress while avoiding the mistakes, the folly and bloodshed of the West? After all it was N. G. Chernyshevsky who called history a “generous grandmother” in 1858 – while tight-fisted vis-à-vis her children, she is fond of her late-coming grandkids. Tarde venientibus dat non ossa sed medullam ossium, Chernyshevsky says: The East sucks the marrow, while Western Europe badly cut its hands on the broken bones.

Lecture: Franz L. Fillafer (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)

The Chronopolitics of Delay:The Benefits of Backwardness in Modern European History

3 September 2026, 14:15-15:45

German Historical Institute, Warsaw

Fot. Bartłomiej Błesznowski (a clock with a 10-hour dial from the Museum of Modern Art)