The Making of a Capitalist Time Consciousness

Abstract

The history of capitalism in England can be written as the collapse of a society based upon two dimensions, a system of instrumental action of work and the economy and a system of symbolic interaction of communication and culture, into a one-dimensional society. In this process the cultural is gradually incorporated into the economic as a formal rationality (based upon quantification and calculation) which comes to figure in all human individual or group projects and pushes practical rationality to one side. Slowly but surely English society becomes the domain of technique with the result that dissent becomes ‘sterile instead of productive or humane’ and the life of understanding is increasingly constrained ‘to fragments of reciprocal irony or isolation’ (Steiner, 1978, p. xi). The capitalist order takes the form of a ‘new hegemony’ based upon routinised, reciprocally confirming, calculative practices and projects grounded in a functional, spatial and temporal differentiation of production and consumption, thus increasing the division not only of labour but also of space and time.

(From Nigel Thrift, ‘Owners’ Time and Own Time: The Making of a Capitalist Time Consciousness, 1300–1880’, Australian National University, 1980.)

it is a myth that industrial man was made by the machine; from its first origins industrialism is the application of calculative rationality to the productive order (Giddens, 1973).