Time: An Essay

The nature of time, and how various societies describe and measure the passage of time, has long been one of the most fascinating areas of social history and philosophy. In this essay Norbert Elias argues that what we call "time" is neither an innate feature of the human mind, nor an immanent characteristic of non-human nature. Rather it is an achievement of human synthesis which can be understood only in connection with certain processes of social development. He shows how attitudes to time have differed from early societies to modern by taking examples from a wide range of societies at every level of development and relating time to the move from "involvement" to "detachment": the laborious construction of the European calendar over thousands of years serves as a model of the fruitfulness of the developmental approach to sociology which Norbert Elias has always advocated. This work is aimed at specialists and students in sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history.