Anyone who has dipped into any work of classical economics, whether A Smith’s Wealth of Nations, D Ricardo’s Principles, K Marx’s Das Kapital, it doesn’t matter, recognizes the intimate relationship that adheres between time and value. And, yet, what distinguishes Marx’s theory from other classical theorists, warranting some historians to call Marx the first of the neo-classicals, is that Marx was the first to recognize that not only labor, and value, but time as well is a social category. This week’s readings from D Landes, EP Thompson, and I Kant display varying degrees of recognition of the social character of time. I Kant is perhaps the most naive, but also the most important, since, when we interrogate our shared experience it naturally and easily yields Kant’s analysis. Yet, with D Landes and EP Thompson as well, we may detect, “double” time-keeping insofar as the emergence of work discipline appears against a backdrop of a drive for “industry” for which the invention of time was itself responsible. How can this be? Is capitalism simply greed? And, if greed, then why did it take so long to develop into a full system?
Which is why D Landes’ focus on religion helps move us some distance. For it is certain that in their initial attraction to time the monastics were aiming not at time, but eternity. But this only takes us part way. We still have to understand why such a novel and disturbing transformation in practice caught on with such speed once it was introduced. For, think of it; the clock is introduced some time in the twelfth or thirteenth century. By the fourteenth it is reshaping social life, if not generally, then at least in urban areas where textiles are produced. And so it is shaping the rhythms of social life throughout urban Europe. By the fifteenth century it is helping to constitute a complete revolution in religious subjectivity and practice, which by the sixteenth has penetrated the state and interstate relations. It has by then created a whole new world. How?
Part of the answer must surely lie in the relative weakness and backwardness, the fragmentation of what was not yet known as “Europe.” For there is nothing more certain but that if Europe has a culture, or if there is something resembling “Western Culture,” it is not composed out of the fragments of pagan tribes and practices left behind when Rome vacated the region for Constantinople. Rather is this culture composed here with the invention of time, this revolution in time, that occurred no further back than the 13th century and which, since, has completely engulfed the world.