This book offers a geneaological understanding of the condition of our time by reconstructing the complex story of the transition from the "cyclical time" of the classic era to the "linear and infuturant time" of the modern world. Time is therefore understood not as a simple vector, but as a trans-political form par excellence, which involves the fundamental philosophical and political categories of the modern constellation: beginning with the concepts of progress, revolution, liberation, and alternative.

Arguing that the process of secularization (in its broadest sense) is dependent on the modern notion of cumulative and irreversible time—together with the temporalization of history—Power and Secularization constitutes a conceptual history that will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and philosophy with interests in intellectual history and the genealogical method.