In your own time

Take the point made below about timescales, but reverse it. This is the more accurate representation of how things stand in terms of influence. Our own particular, partisan approaches require that things be presented in the manner I first suggested, but the more exhaustive reading indicates that the reverse is the case. It seems a minor point, but it is crucial to the presentation of the argument. Here's why.

In this change of timescales throughout history, the fragmentation of time has taken place just as the individual has risen in importance. Fragmentation here isn't necessarily a bad thing. We can simply observe that from the introduction of clocks in villages and towns, allowing for a more precise breakdown beyond the pace of the ringing of church bells for services, up to the industrial age and the ascent of the pocketwatch (and all the social effects of this) ever smaller divisions of time have become possible. As a result, the grand timescales of dynasties and institutions are now seen as an aggregate of phases, of years and decades and centuries. As such, the long view is no longer regarded as an organic or collective entity unto itself.

Consider this with regard to the phenomenon of European aristocratic dynasties. The Habsburg family (with all its various cadet branches included) claims to trace itself back to the 10th century, and from here they married their way to a continental supremacy that convulsed Europe in war and ruin over the centuries. It would not be fruitful to consider their history in terms of individuals, as our sense of time is different to theirs.

Their coat of arms is a testament to the various alliances, co-options, annexations, marriages, and outright thefts that consolidate such a dynasty as a supra-individual entity. In these terms, we must consider the context of time and timescales. By leaving out the collective entity of time, we miss something. In his "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View", Kant points out in his second thesis that "those natural capacities which are directed to the use of [...] reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual." Ignoring the use of the word 'race' here with it's chauvinistic implications, we see that there is an awareness of the different implications of different timescales. One is not superior to another, but has rather a different function.