This work investigates the relations established between time and politics in the international society. In order to do so, it highlights how given representations of time – or temporalities – organize and are organized through discrete conceptions of politics which, themselves, constitute particular forms of discrimination between political communities. Such discrimination implies, on the one hand, a demarcation of the boundaries between communities taken as equals and, on the other hand, the hierarquization of communities held to be unequal. More specifically, the discrimination of inequality is identified with different colonial logics related to European imperialisms. Therefore, this work intend to shed light on how time is, itself, a political phenomenon: its understanding is always subject to disputes and, therefore, its naturalization as a fixed phenomenon brings dynamics of exclusion. The analysis proposed is taken to term through an historical approach which attempts, in the encounter between past and present, to generate that estrangement effect [Verfremdungseffekt] that explicates the politics of time underlying modern international society in different periods and whose dynamics have been hidden. Starting from Reinhart Koselleck’s thought and from a literature on the temporalities of modernity, this work applies its triple reading of time, politics and discrimination to two periods whose turning point is situated somewhere around the second half of the eighteenth century – early modernity and the enlightenment –, thus locating two triptychs of the organization of politics: return-artifice-salvation and progress-self-determination-philosophy of history. Such analysis opens space for a new historical and political understanding of modernity which doesn’t take it as permeated by the imaginary of progress, but as constituted through an articulation of multiple temporal and political logics.