Linear time as political technology

The nineteenth‑century choice to represent time as a single forward‑moving line functioned like a political‑technical device: it made narratives of progress, historical causation and planning legible and actionable. That graphic and conceptual habit reshaped how states, historians and citizens justified reform, economic planning and notions of historical responsibility. — If accepted, this reframes many modern policy arguments (progress, development, reparations, forecasting) as downstream effects of a change in temporal representation rather than purely substantive disagreements.