Secular homogeneous time is a precondition for modern democratic legitimacy.

Evidence

Apart from the idea of a direct-access society, homogeneous time is a prerequisite for imagining the totality of individual lives that comprise a (national) community in which there are no privileged persons or events, and therefore no mediations. This makes the sources of political legitimacy in a modern direct-access, temporally homogeneous state radically different from the sources in a traditional temporally and politically mediated one. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 23

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vaulted Cooper argument about how ‘secular modernity’ smuggles in Christian-normative temporal frameworks; also resonates with Benedict Anderson and the imagined-community literature.