Time and Social Theory

Three Branches

Treatments of time in social theory can be somewhat crudely divided into three categories. The first includes the work of thinkers who have made explicit attempts to do a “sociology of time.” The second is composed of work that deals with time explicitly in the course of theorizing other social phenomena. In the third category, we find social theories in which time plays an important, if only implicit, role.

“Sociology of time” perspectives include attempts to define social time, catalog forms of temporal regularity, describe multiple temporalities associated with different forms of social organization, and explain cross-cultural or transhistorical differences in the experience and organization of time. Representative authors in this category are Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Pitirim Sorokin and Robert K. Merton, Georges Gurvitch, Wilbert Moore, Julius A. Roth, and Eviatar Zerubavel.

[Page 838]The second strand—corollary theories of time—has to do with theories of social time elaborated as key components of theories of other phenomena. Included here is work by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schütz, Norbert Elias, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, and Anthony Giddens.

The third strand includes theories of diverse social phenomena—social change, development, diffusion, planning, for example—in which, even though not explicitly thematized, time plays a critical role.

Distinguishing Philosophy of Time from Social Theory of Time

Although there are many overlaps and interdependencies, it is useful to distinguish “time and social theory” from “the philosophy of time.” To the latter are generally left questions such as what time is, whether time is real, how time is perceived or experienced, and how human existence is conditioned by its temporality.

Philosophical theories variously identify the origins of temporality in the actual experience of change, birth, growth, decay, and death and the experience of memory, planning, and expectation. For Aristotle (Book IV of the Physics) the “sense of time” depends on the mind registering change. St. Augustine, in The Confessions, argues that time is a creation of God who is outside of time. Isaac Newton, to the contrary, argued that time is independent of both motion and God. For Immanuel Kant, time is real insofar as all experience is in time, but it is also ideal because it is a form of intuition, logically prior to experience, a contribution of the mind. Henri Bergson distinguished between the time of experience and the mind from the objectified time of clocks, mathematics, and physics. Edmund Husserl employed the phenomenological method to analyze the experience of inner time consciousness. William James described the temporality of the stream of consciousness. Martin Heidegger looks at Dasein's continual participation in its coming into being and its being toward death.

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