The Sociology of Time, A Critical Overview

ŠUBRT, J. The Sociology of Time. A Critical Overview. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 292 p.

The theme of the book, as the title suggests, is time. To be more precise, it is a temporal reality focused on sociological knowledge. The book is a sociological-philosophical reflection that goes beyond the historical framework. The author focuses on the understanding of time in the process of civilization and divides it into social categories. He also analyses time in the context of human action and social reality. The book consists of nine chapters, each of which provides an insight into the subject and refers to the historical figures, theorists and authors on whose theories it is based.

Since there is no unified vision in sociology of how to grasp and address time within social theory, this book attempts to define an approach to the concept of time and related concepts such as temporality, compression, temporal structures and change, etc. The author therefore addresses three issues in particular in the book with respect to sociological research. Firstly, there is the issue of the formation of human understanding of time. In the search for an answer, there is a clear overlap in the book between the interdisciplinary between history and sociology, on the basis of which changes in society and thus changes in the understanding of time are explained. Secondly, the elucidation of the functioning of temporal structures at different levels of social reality. In this part, the author draws on the individual theories of many authors, whose insights and theories the book builds on, exposing new ideas and new perspectives on the understanding of these theories. The third issue addressed in the book is the role and place of time in general sociological theory, which is the key to understanding the differences in the understanding of time, since even in the same historical period the view of the perception of time and its measurement was quite different. The interdisciplinary overlap of the book is precisely related to this, since all the questions raised here cannot be answered without taking into account that the notion of society and the notion of time are not separate entities, but interact in the civilizational process.

This comprehensive study/consideration of the concept of time in sociology is related to people’s ideas of time, which change and evolve with acquired knowledge and changes in the way of life. The basic pillar on which the author relies is Norbert Elias’ theoretical concept of the process of long-term, continuous change. It was this concept that led to the creation of modern society. “This conception concerned the development of the personality structures of humanity and its conduct (psychogenetic investigation), as well as the development of social structures of inequality, power, and order (sociogenetic investigation).” (p. 7). The book, like Elias, focuses on time as a social phenomenon that is the result of a long process of development of knowledge.

The author focuses on the understanding of time from a historical perspective, presenting the concept of time as perceived by people in the past within historical periods. The book very often emphasizes the awareness of the differences between past and present times and the changes in people’s attitudes towards society, as changes in society have also led to changes in the understanding of time. The author hermeneutically explains the changes in societies’ understanding of time through specific examples, from a detailed description of the workings of the ancient water clock, which was used to measure time and later even to display astronomical phenomena, to the early medieval farmer’s understanding of time, which was influenced by the cycle of growth, as the pace of life and work was influenced by natural laws and not by the cycle, to the comparison of the perception of time in cities and in the countryside, as in the big cities time was no longer determined by nature but by a particular time-keeping machine.

The book also goes into an extensive comparison between Western and Eastern approaches to the understanding of time. However, in these sections it is mostly an analysis of sociological processes emerging in modern society, where Marx’s approach to the working class and the alienation of the worker from part of his work output is more likely to be analysed. “This value was expressed in time, and therefore the management of time was the first economic law. As a result, time itself was alienated.” (p. 35).

The book primarily offers theorizing and serves mainly as an overview of sociological ideas that focus more or less on the issue of time. For this reason, a theoretical approach to understanding the relationship between relation and time is analysed through, for example, Kant, Simmel or Durkheim. The author reassesses their theories and gradually either explains or adds to some of them, thus introducing new ideas. “Durkheim took into account the aspect of rhythmic repetition, but not the experience of death and definitive ends. Moreover, the concept of time as a category reduced to a large extent the question of time to the problem of its measurement, leaving aside the great topic of the temporality of human existence, let us say Existence—“being-in-the-world” (Dasein) … And finally— probably most importantly—a concept that says that time is a social construction ignores the fact that heading towards the end, manifested in the so-called arrow of time, exists completely objectively in many forms.” (p. 51).

An important part of the book is undoubtedly the chapter Time and Human Action, where the author defines himself against individual theorists in the question of access to the causes of temporal structures that are created by people and their social activities. The book makes it clear that the way in which these temporal structures occur has not been sufficiently exhausted by the theorists and, in particular, criticizes the claim, which is of a general nature and shrinks to merely stating that there is a mere connection between time and the rhythms of collective life, as the Durkheim´s school did. According to the author, social reality cannot be treated as a thing that simply happened, because there is an element of human consciousness that is always present. In this sense, social reality is subject to necessary and constant interpretation by social actors.

In the book, the perception of time is gradually discussed in historical periods in the form of many well-known and lesser-known authors – from antiquity, through the Middle Ages – to modern times. It is to this period that most of the second half of the book is devoted. This is because the end of the twentieth century saw a new development of theoretical ideas about the problem of time, reflecting the overall changes in society’s views and the debates associated with it. Among the main representatives who addressed these issues related to time and society were Niklas Luhmann and Anthony Giddens. This is because both of them represent a great contribution to the temporalization of the concept of social reality in historical sociology, and it is this concept that the author is most inclined towards in the book. This is because the very notion of “time” and the various interrelationships between time and a wide cluster of topics yield different understandings of time that manifest themselves in the context of many different social problems. Both Luhmann and Giddens are important authors referred to by many contemporary scholars, but their conceptions and theories differ in some respects. However, the author of this book considers it essential to take into account and work with both authors, as their different concepts shape the overall picture in terms of understanding time and the aforementioned temporality, even if their research was more of a by-product than the phenomenon of time being their primary object of interest. “Luhmann was a programmatic functionalist and a supporter of evolutionary theory, while Giddens fundamentally attacks and criticizes both. Another significant difference is that Luhmann developed his theory strictly within the systemic concept, far distant from Giddens’s ideas on the duality of structures and actions (inspired by E. Goffman and phenomenological sociology). On the other hand, both authors made efforts to reconstruct social theory, combined with a critique of current approaches. What they also have in common is the effort to make time an integral part of their theoretical systems. Their interest in the phenomenon of time is, however, rather as a by-product than as a central point of their attention.” (p. 149).

The book also focuses in detail on the problem of social time, especially in terms of its symbolic representation. However, the author criticizes this conception of social time. In the 1920s, the problem of social time became a full-fledged issue, with the implication that the concept of time is not a matter of one specialized science alone, but is an interdisciplinary overlap, as it extends into the natural sciences in addition to historical sociology. In this area the author follows the same approach as for the representation of historical sociological knowledge and also introduces individual authors and scientists such as Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein and describes their theories in relation to the understanding of time. It should be added that this chapter is only a basic presentation of the issue and is not given as much attention.

The topic that the book deals with is undoubtedly very interesting and can be approached from many angles, the author has chosen to map and explain the theories of many researchers who have more or less dealt with the topic of time, whether they primarily focused their research on this issue or it was just an unintended consequence of some other theory or research. Thus, the book is definitely one of those sophisticated works that strives for the broadest possible interdisciplinary overlap, which is why some chapters feel as if they should have been included in the book, just to make the interdisciplinary as comprehensive as possible. Nevertheless, this comprehensive work, which deals with such a large historical overlap and is so readably and engagingly written, certainly deserves attention, because the topic of understanding time laid out with such a large interdisciplinary overlap is a rarity in our time.

Markéta Minářová

Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

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