Reflections on the Cultural History of Time

This article is concerned with the historiography of “social time,” and it distinguishes three approaches that have emerged one by one since the topic began to be taken seriously by scholars about a hundred years ago. The first approach, associated with Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, focuses on differences between whole cultures in attitudes to time, conceptions of time, or experiences of time. The second, following the classic article by Jacques Le Goff on “church time” and “merchant time,” distinguishes the times of different groups within the same society and the conflicts between them (particularly obvious in the case of factory workers and their employers). A third approach, which has emerged only recently, focuses on individuals or small groups and their employment of different notions of time in different domains of activity, at work, in school, or at home.