Book Review
Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of
Soviet Institutions
Stephen Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 258 pp.
It has long been the practice of historians and social scientists to ignore the effects of ideas and
ideologies on the design of political institutions. In particular, some scholars have argued that
Communism had a negligible influence on the behavior of Soviet leaders. Instead, scholars have
preferred to explain the decisions and policies of world leaders on the basis of rational calculation,
interest group pressure, or bureaucratic politics. It is therefore refreshing to come across books
like Stephen Hanson's Time and Revolution that seek to focus our attention on the importance of
Communist ideology for the making (and unmaking) of the Soviet Union.
Hanson isolates and describes the Marxist understanding of the concept of time, persuasively
demonstrating its significance for Soviet politics. He argues, quite rightly, that it is necessary for
scholars to show "concretely, rather than speculatively, how ideological visions get translated into
institutional outcomes" (p. xiii). Nonetheless, because the book relies almost exclusively on
published material, it too remains somewhat in the realm of the "speculative." Valuable as
Hanson's contribution is, future scholars will need to use the newly available archival sources to
trace more concretely the effects of ideology on Soviet institutions.
Explicitly borrowing Max Weber's categories of "legitimate domination," Hanson distinguishes
three general categories of attitudes toward time: traditional, rational, and charismatic. Traditional
conceptions of time, Hanson explains, measure time according to the occurrence of certain
events (such as festivals on a religious calendar) or according to the duration of certain
processes (harvesttime, summertime, the length of a day). Rational time, which emerges in
modern, industrial societies, is defined as [End Page 119] "an abstract grid outside all concrete
events" (p. 11). It becomes a regulated system of reference, according to which all other events
and processes are scheduled, and it is considered impersonal because it is seen as lying beyond
all subjective interpretations. Finally, there is charismatic time, which, like Weber's "charismatic
leadership," emerges during crises or revolutionary situations and claims to transcend all ordinary
rational and traditional conceptions of time. According to Hanson, revolutionaries wish to
manipulate time so that their actions can exist "in the unpredictable realm of the extraordinary" (p.
12). Charismatic groups and leaders claim that they can rearrange time to suit their own purposes
and for the greater good, and they often argue that they are able to "start time over again" (p. 13).
Hanson traces the development of this last, charismatic, conception of time through the work of
Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Josif Stalin, all
the way through the Gorbachev era. The book is clever and convincing in its interpretation of
Marx's revolutionary philosophy, arguing that in calling for revolution Marx desired to transcend
"rational" time. For Marx, the capitalist mode of production used rational time as another means
of exploiting labor: By measuring productivity in work hours, it failed to respect the intrinsic value
of a worker's product. The Communist revolution, according to Marx, would smash the tyranny of
the abstract, impersonal chaining of humans to time lines and, in apocalyptic fashion, would
thrust the power to control time back into human hands. Marx was, however, simultaneously
fascinated with the efficiency of rationally organized modern industry. In his view, only the
assembly line, with its timesaving methods, would allow workers to find the leisure time needed
for their own fulfillment. Hanson labels Marx's desire to combine these two opposed approaches
to time as "charismatic-rational" (p. 33). For Hanson, Marx's problem in reconciling the rational
and charismatic notions of time was analogous to other major contradictions in his revolutionary
theory, and his successors inherited these difficulties.
In what is arguably the most interesting and convincing part of his book, Hanson reveals how
Lenin and Stalin shared Marx's dilemma, seeking to avoid overreliance on either the charismatic
or the rational in their approaches to time. According to Hanson, Lenin insisted that rationalism
and charisma be balanced in all approaches to the revolutionary struggle. The difficulty of
balancing these two conceptions of time caused Lenin to adopt contradictory economic policies at
the start of the Soviet era. On the one hand, as Hanson demonstrates, Lenin was fascinated by
the precision of Henry Ford's and Frederick Taylor's attempts to organize work. Lenin wished to
use all of the modern approaches to production, including the precise timing of worker
movements on the assembly line, to maximize the productivity of Russian industry--a necessity if
the Soviet Union was to compensate for its economic backwardness. On the other hand, this
mastering of the rational approach to time was, for Lenin, simply not sufficient. Another step could
be taken by Communist workers, one that would use revolutionary enthusiasm to transcend the
limits of the ordinary workweek. Lenin supported the creation of subbotniki, in which workers
came to work on Saturdays; he was particularly pleased that workers who took part were often
willing to expend twice their normal effort. [End Page 120]
No less interesting is Hanson's analysis of Stalin's contradictory goals in implementing the first
Five-Year Plan, which he describes as part of Stalin's attempt to bring charisma back into a social
and economic system that lost its revolutionary edge during the New Economic Policy (NEP) in
the 1920s. The tension between charismatic and rational reappeared and was expressed, as
Hanson points out, in Stalin's stated aim to combine "American efficiency" with "Russian
revolutionary sweep" and in his use of the term "planned heroism" to describe what was required
of the Soviet worker (p. 149). In particular, the slogan "Fulfill the Five-Year Plan in Four Years!" is
a perfect illustration of Hanson's point that Stalin set up a series of rational, abstract norms and
targets and then expected them to be transcended or "overfulfilled." As Hanson explains, "If five
years could be compressed into four, then, in principle, four years could be compressed into three,
three into one, and so on. . . . The socialist economy would, in theory, thus give rise to an upward
spiral of achievement beyond anything witnessed before in human history" (p. 149). Those who
sought to fulfill Stalin's wishes by challenging the limits of human productive effort were rewarded.
It was, however, extremely dangerous to misunderstand the difficult combination of charisma and
rationality. Many of Stalin's victims were accused of being "bourgeois wreckers" when they did
not adhere to a revolutionary "heroic" approach to industrial production (p. 154).
Hanson ends his book with a novel interpretation of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika as
an attempt to inject "charisma" back into the Soviet economy. According to Hanson, Gorbachev
knew that it was necessary to reinvigorate the now stagnant Soviet economic system to forestall
the total collapse of the Communist state.
Despite the original and insightful qualities of the book, there are a few significant difficulties. In
the first place, Hanson overreaches in the implications of his thesis. In certain parts of the book,
he suggests that conceptions of time determine all other religious and philosophical concepts.
When he describes various religious approaches to time, for example, he overemphasizes the
importance of the question, arguing in one place that the entire history of Protestantism was
determined by debates over time. Similarly, in the sections on Kant and Hegel, Hanson seems to
argue that attitudes toward time shaped the philosophers' approaches to other philosophical
questions, such as morality or freedom. In his explication of the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin,
he also often conflates attitudes toward history with attitudes toward time, even though history
and time are distinct concepts.
The other, more difficult, problem in the book is Hanson's nearly exclusive reliance on the
published speeches, writings, and philosophical tracts of Soviet leaders. His use of this material
to trace the evolution of an idea is effective, but it is less persuasive when he attempts to
determine the effect of this idea on institutional design. To trace the influence of Marxist
conceptions of time on the Soviet state, it would have been more convincing to look at a few
concrete institutions in detail, perhaps using newly available archival sources. The notions of time
embedded in bureaucratic structures, specific laws, and economic and social organizations need
to be studied more carefully. How, for example, did the design of a collective farm reflect Soviet
notions of the way time should be managed in agricultural work? It was very easy for Soviet
leaders such as Lenin and Stalin to talk about charismatic approaches toward time, but [End
Page 121] one would imagine that many of these ideas were transformed in the process of
implementation.
In short, Time and Revolution is an interesting reevaluation of the centrality of Marxist ideas in the
creation and administration of the Soviet state. Hanson has managed to point the way for future
scholars, who will, it is hoped, use new and accessible archival material to examine the concrete
implementation of ideas in Soviet institutional design.
Ana Siljak
Harvard University