Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions

TIME AND REVOLUTION

TIME AND REVOLUTION

Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions

Stephen E. Hanson

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1997 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanson, Stephen, 1963—

Time and revolution: Marxism and the design of Soviet

institutions / Stephen E. Hanson.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2305-8 (cloth: alk. paper).—

ISBN 0-8078-4615-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Time—Social aspects. 2. Revolutions and socialism. 3. Soviet Union—Economic policy. 4. Statics and dynamics (Social sciences). 5. Time and economic reactions. I. Title.

HM73.H316 1997             96-13723

304.2′3—dc20                      CIP

01 00 99 98 97 5 4 3 2 1

Chapter 6 was previously published, in a slightly different form, as Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?, in The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left, ed. Daniel Chirot (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE

Traditional, Modern, and Charismatic Time

CHAPTER TWO

Time in the Works of Kant and Hegel

CHAPTER THREE

The Theoretical Cycle:

From Marx to the Second International

CHAPTER FOUR

The Political Cycle:

From Lenin to the End of the NEP

CHAPTER FIVE

The Socioeconomic Cycle:

From Stalin to the Era of Stagnation

CHAPTER SIX

Gorbachev’s Perestroika and the Charismatic-Rational Conception of Time

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

The clock was accurate, but Margulies did not depend on it. He was not asleep. He always rose at six and was always ahead of time. There had never yet been an occasion when the alarm clock had actually awakened him.

Margulies could not really have faith in so simple a mechanism as a timepiece; could not entrust to it so precious a thing as time.

—Valentin Kataev, Time, Forward!, 1932

The passage above, which begins a prominent Stalinist propaganda novel extolling the virtues of heroic efforts to overfulfill the First Five-Year Plan, unwittingly encapsulates a central dilemma of Soviet development: how might a regime whose purpose was to build a communist society beyond the constraints of ordinary time nonetheless enforce economically productive norms of time use so as to compete with the capitalist West?

Margulies, the archetypal Bolshevik engineer of the novel, is a character unimaginable in a Western context. Certainly, the idea that time is too precious to entrust to a watch seems hard to fathom from a capitalist point of view. What is time, anyway, besides the name we give to what a watch measures? A capitalist engineer reading Kataev’s book today would simply laugh at its main conclusion—that economic productivity under socialism could have been enhanced if everybody in the Soviet Union had been like Margulies and thrown away his or her watch so as to utilize time in a more revolutionary manner.

Yet, as this study will show, Stalinist economic institutions were originally set up to encourage precisely this sort of behavior. Many of the well-known structural problems of the Soviet planned economy—the enormous waste of human and material resources, the tendency of factories to alternate between periods of frantic rush work and periods of prolonged inaction, the shoddiness of goods, and the lack of incentives to innovate—become explicable once we take into account something often overlooked in Western analyses: the men who designed this economy were not interested in trying to achieve efficiency in the Western sense.¹ If the ideal of bourgeois economists is a system in which each unit of time is utilized in as productive a manner as possible given scarce resources, the goal of Soviet socialism was to organize production in such a manner as to master time itself.

Early liberal capitalist regimes forced newly urbanized workers to adjust to the idea that the rule of abstract time is inexorable; work must therefore be steady and disciplined and free time kept within strict bounds. The Soviet regime held out a different promise: that if work was done intensively enough, according to the party’s direction, time could actually be compressed and the conflict between labor and leisure ultimately overcome.² The institutionalization of this idea created a sort of final-exam economy—since an endless summer vacation (communism) was always held to be just around the corner, the most rational thing to do was to cram (or storm) so as not to have to repeat the course.³ Thus, the Stalinist economy temporarily mobilized workers for intense, even frenzied activity but did not provide any basis for the routinization of that activity according to norms of modern time discipline.⁴ And once Stalinist methods of mobilization were abandoned, the basic irrationalities of the design of that economy led inexorably to its downfall.

But why was such a strange system of economic incentives, from the Western point of view, established in the first place? This book shows that the characteristic inefficiencies of time use under Stalinist economics can be traced ultimately to the ideological framework developed by Karl Marx—in particular, to Marx’s conception of time itself. Without a careful analysis of this quite novel conception of time and its historical development from Marx to Lenin and Stalin, I argue, the specific design of Soviet economic institutions must remain incomprehensible. Moreover, in the absence of a coherent explanation of where the Soviet system came from, the reasons for its decline and fall in the post-Stalin era must also remain obscure.

Following Ken Jowitt’s application of the Weberian types of legitimate domination to Leninist regimes, I term the distinctive view of time originated in the works of Marx and institutionalized under Lenin and Stalin the charismatic-rational conception of time.⁵ Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism, I will show, all rejected the ideal-typically rational conception of time as an abstract, linear grid outside all concrete events—the time orientation that is politically and economically institutionalized and, to a remarkable degree, culturally internalized in the liberal capitalist West. At the same time, they also rejected the purely charismatic conception of time as a force that can be transcended through revolutionary will—the time orientation characteristic of, for example, revolutionary anarchists. Instead, the ideology ultimately codified as Marxism-Leninism was based on Marx’s principle that effective revolutionary praxis depends upon utilizing rational time discipline to master time itself.

I argue that the development and institutionalization of Marx’s charismatic-rational conception of time occurred in three broad cycles. The first, which I term the theoretical cycle, begins with the development of Marx’s synthesis of scientific analysis and revolutionary action in his theory of historical materialism; this cycle ends with the collapse of the socialist Second International during World War I. The second period—the political cycle—begins with the seizure of state power by the Leninist party of professional revolutionaries in November 1917 and ends with the destruction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1928. Finally, the socioeconomic cycle begins with Stalin’s synthesis of American efficiency and Russian revolutionary sweep in the institutions of the Five-Year Plan and ends with the period of stagnation under Brezhnev.

It should be emphasized that the unfolding of these cycles was by no means inevitable. Indeed, throughout the historical period under examination here, the problem of how to institutionalize Marx’s vision of socialism was the source of continual controversy and factional rivalry. Had these controversies been resolved differently, Marxism might never have generated anything like the Soviet system. But the precise form the historical debates among Marxists and Leninists took, I will argue, can be fully understood only in terms of the charismatic-rational conception of time underlying Marxist discourse, for in each cycle—the theoretical, the political, and the socioeconomic—a remarkably similar pattern occurred. First, a revolutionary innovator created new formal institutions designed to synthesize charismatic time transcendence and modern time discipline. Then, after the death of that innovator, the elite split into three camps: a left group that adopted an essentially charismatic time orientation, a right group that adopted an essentially rational time orientation, and a center group that dedicated itself to maintaining orthodoxy against attacks from both left and right. In each cycle, these splits led to a decline in revolutionary momentum and a danger of the movement’s collapse.

Adopting this theoretical approach, we can see the entire history of Marxism and of the Soviet Union, from the writing of the Communist Manifesto to the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, as constituting an unprecedented, often highly coercive, and ultimately unsuccessful 150-year revolutionary experiment in reordering the human relationship to time—an experiment whose history from beginning to end displayed a remarkably consistent developmental logic. Moreover, if this approach is correct, failure to take into account the distinctive nature of the revolutionary project linking Marx to Gorbachev will be a serious obstacle to making sense of what emerges from the rubble of that project in the years to come.

I have divided the present work into six chapters. Chapter 1 examines the social science literature dealing with time conceptions and time discipline in various social contexts. After providing a critique of this literature, I set out an alternative Weberian theory of social time that distinguishes between types of organization based upon three basic time conceptions: the traditional, the rational, and the charismatic. This framework is then utilized to contrast the institutionalization of rational time under liberal capitalism in the West with the organization of social time under Leninism.

Chapter 2 examines the problem of time in the works of Kant and Hegel, which are critical for understanding Marxist thought. The conceptions of time developed by these philosophers are interpreted as a reaction to, and partial rejection of, the triumph of rational time in western Europe. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of philosophical debates within the Hegelian school after Hegel’s death.

Chapter 3 focuses on the first, theoretical cycle of development in the history of Marxism, from the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 to the destruction of the Second International during World War I. I examine in detail the problem of time in the theoretical work of Karl Marx, arguing that Marx’s work presents a novel, if not wholly consistent, interpretation of the nature of time—labor time in particular—that can be interpreted in Weberian terms as an amalgam of charismatic and rational time conceptions. This is followed by an analysis of the routinization of revolutionary Marxism manifested in the works of Bernstein, Luxemburg, and Kautsky.

Chapter 4 examines the second, political cycle in the history of charismatic-rational time, focusing on the institutional evolution and eventual political triumph of Lenin’s party of professional revolutionaries—itself an innovative synthesis of charisma and rationality in the political organization of time. I then turn to a discussion of the decline of political Leninism as Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Stalin struggled for power in the 1920s.

Chapter 5 analyzes the socioeconomic institutions built during Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan as the beginning of a third cycle of development. I argue that these institutions are based on a charismatic-rational form of planned heroism that can also be understood as emerging out of the conception of time developed by Marx and Lenin—now on the economic level. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the period of decline of socioeconomic Stalinism under Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev.

Chapter 6 deals with the period of Gorbachev’s perestroika from 1985 to 1991. I argue that Gorbachev’s reforms were intended not to repudiate the conception of time implicit in Marxist theory and institutionalized in Leninist politics and Stalinist economics but rather to usher in a new period of cultural charismatic rationalism in time use—that is, the internalization by Soviet citizens of the specific norms of revolutionary time discipline envisioned by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. I trace how Gorbachev’s pursuit of this goal led not, as he had intended, to the beginning of a new phase of Leninist development but instead to the collapse of the Stalinist economy and the Leninist polity.

The conclusion presents an overview of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union from the theoretical perspective developed throughout the book, assessing in a preliminary manner the degree to which the formal institutions of the Soviet regime succeeded in transforming the everyday time sense of the social groups subjected to them. I then briefly suggest how analyzing the history of the Leninist charismatic-rational conception of time can enrich our understanding of political, socioeconomic, and cultural development in the West and elsewhere.

Considering the scope of this work, a few words of caution are in order. It should be emphasized at the outset that this book is meant only to outline a novel interpretation of Leninist rule based on the Soviet case; it is by no means intended as a comprehensive social history of time use in prerevolutionary Russia or the USSR. Specifically, the focus throughout is on elite struggles to define and institutionalize socialism, struggles in which conceptions of time played a central part. I emphasize the role of elites not because identifying the sources of broader social support for and resistance to Leninist policies is somehow unimportant in explaining the course of Soviet history; clearly, the implementation of the formal institutions favored by Lenin and Stalin could not have taken place without some degree of social support for them, nor would they have evolved in the same manner had there not been significant social resistance to their implementation. However, I am primarily interested here in accounting for the formal design of the political and socioeconomic institutions within which social struggles in the Soviet Union took place, and this requires a detailed examination of the motivations of, and debates among, the designers. To analyze the diverse reactions of different sectors of Russian society to Bolshevik elite policies in different periods of Soviet history—as would be necessary in any study of the organization of social time in the Soviet Union more generally—would require a whole series of separate works. Hopefully, the necessarily top down analysis of Leninist elites presented here will prove complementary to investigations of everyday time use in Soviet society from the bottom up.⁶

In addition, although this analysis is embedded within a comparative theoretical framework, it remains essentially a single case study. No attempt is made to apply the framework developed here to other Leninist regimes such as China, North Korea, or Cuba, although further research into the generalizability of the argument would be of great interest. However, given the fact that the Soviet Union was the first and, until 1989, the most powerful Leninist regime, explaining the origins and inherent contradictions of its institutional design remains in any case of central interest for the study of communism and postcommunism.

Finally, to argue that ideology mattered to Leninist elites throughout the Soviet period—let alone that it played the central role I ascribe to it here—admittedly contradicts the general tendency of social scientists to downplay the independent influence of ideas in history.⁷ It is my conviction that a large part of the reason for scholarly skepticism about the causal role of ideology is that few analyses endeavor to show concretely, rather than speculatively, how ideological visions get translated into institutional outcomes. Hopefully, then, this book will inspire a reevaluation of the theoretical marginalization of the study of ideology’s effects on institutional order—in the Soviet case and elsewhere.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without the support of a great many people, not all of whom I will be able to mention here. The good things in this work I owe chiefly to their teaching, criticism, and advice during the book-writing process; the bad things are, of course, my own responsibility.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Ken Jowitt, who has been an inspiration to me intellectually and personally for many years. My debt to Ken is enormous; there is no way I could possibly have made any sense of the Marxist-Leninist conception of time without the benefit of his intellectual framework, and my life has been enriched in every way by our collaboration.

Secondly, I would like to thank Gail Lapidus, George Breslauer, and Gregory Grossman, both for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this work and for their leadership in founding the Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet Studies, which provided the kind of dynamic academic environment in which new approaches to the study of the USSR could truly flourish. I also thank them for their unfailing personal support of my work at Berkeley. In addition, I would like to thank Hanna Pitkin for her comments on my early drafts and for her inspiring teaching of political theory. I hope I have done it justice.

TIME AND REVOLUTION

1 TRADITIONAL, MODERN, AND CHARISMATIC TIME

For people who live in modern liberal capitalist societies, time is an omnipresent force. Popular magazine articles and public administration courses alike stress the importance of proper time management, punctuality is taken as a sign of maturity, and one’s first waking moments are often spent staring at the digital display of a buzzing alarm clock. But in our time-saturated culture it is hard to keep in mind that things were not always so. In fact, as recently as the late nineteenth century, the prospect of standardizing time measurement on a national scale aroused active political resistance; two hundred years ago, the vast majority of Europeans worked in an agricultural setting whose cyclically changing demands on human activity allowed for fairly extended periods of relative relaxation; before about 1450, the mechanical clock itself was practically unknown.¹

The decisive transformation in social time perception accompanying industrialization in the West—conventionally labeled as the change from a traditional time sense to a modern one—has become a standard theme in sociology and comparative history.² Many different definitions of traditional and modern time have been proposed, but perhaps the most fundamental distinction between the two conceptions of time is that in traditional cultures, by and large, time is conceived of as concrete, tied to the flow of actual events; in modern societies, by contrast, time appears as abstract, a kind of universal grid against which the duration of all particular events can be measured.³ The clearest manifestation of this distinction is the shift in the predominant mode of time measurement, from observing the movements of heavenly bodies to the keeping of mechanical clocks. The traditional world was one governed by the sun’s position in the sky, the phases of the moon, and the seasons of the year; the modern world relies on recent social inventions such as abstract seconds and minutes.⁴

Related to this distinction between concrete and abstract time is a secondary distinction between cyclical and linear conceptions of time. Since the time measurement of traditional cultures is most intimately connected with the cyclical movements of the heavenly bodies, these cosmic patterns tend to provide a framework for understanding time itself in terms of repeating cycles, and it is the cyclical metaphor for time that is predominant in traditional religion and philosophy. Conversely, once time is seen as an abstract grid outside all concrete events, only the addition of directionality—from the past toward the future—is required to make time appear to be an infinite line, extending perhaps even before and after the period of the universe’s existence.⁵

The ethos of a society for which time is synonymous with the flow of concrete events is well captured by Evans-Pritchard in his description of the time sense of the Nuer tribe in East Africa:

The Nuer have no expression equivalent to time in our language, and they cannot, therefore, speak of time as though it were something . . . which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time, because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Nuer are fortunate.⁶

In fact, such a description of the traditional time sense—whether or not one accepts Evans-Pritchard’s judgment of its superiority—appears to be equally apt for the vast majority of people living in preindustrial societies. Of course, the traditional understanding of time as concrete does not preclude the development among traditional elites—the ancient Greek philosophers, for example—of highly sophisticated analyses of the nature of time. Even these philosophical works, however, uniformly link time to the flow of actual events, even as they debate whether this flow is cyclical, repetitive, illusory, or representative of some deeper unchanging principle.⁷ Not until the modern era do we find a widespread acceptance of the idea that time exists altogether separately from both daily activities and cosmic processes. Nor do elites in premodern societies attempt the mass organization of human activity to conform to purely abstract time demarcations.

The consequences of time orientation for the social order are immense and affect practically every aspect of social life. Some sense for the importance of distinguishing between the time sense predominant in different social contexts can be illustrated by a brief comparison of traditional and modern cultures on two issues intimately bound up with the question of time orientation: the issue of the temporality of the human life span, and the issue of how daily activity is organized in time.

The conception of time as concrete and cyclical predominant in non-Western cultures is associated with a notion of the human relationship to cycles of nature quite different from that typical of the modern West. Birth and death in traditional cultures tend to be seen not as the finite endpoints of a life span conceived in linear terms but instead as passages in a natural process of generational renewal. The concept of childhood as a special phase of an individual’s life span is essentially a modern one; traditional societies tend to see life in terms of the cycle of youth, maturity, and old age, with youth extending from infancy to young adulthood.⁸ Death, as well, is perceived not as the ultimate cessation of existence but as another necessary (if not particularly welcome!) part of the cyclical journey of the human soul, and thus it can be accepted relatively peacefully. As Ariès puts it, The tame death is the oldest death there is.⁹

The contrast here with the cultural patterns of modern societies is striking. Birth and death are now seen as the absolute endpoints of an individual’s life span rather than as passages in a continuing, collective cyclical process. Along with this change has come a new, peculiarly modern anxiety about wasting one’s time—if one has only, say, seventy years to make one’s mark on a time span of history extending, in principle, infinitely into the past and future, one can hardly afford to lose any time. The impact of such anxiety on family life, predictably enough, has been enormous. Children are now often subjected to achievement pressures almost immediately after birth; finding the time to nurture intimate relationships becomes increasingly difficult. Finally, the modern attitude toward death is characterized by an almost pathological avoidance of the issue.¹⁰

Tied to the traditional conception of time as concrete and cyclical is a particular mode of time use in the daily activity of traditional cultures, one that is based on a conception of labor activity and leisure activity as belonging to completely different temporal spheres. Specifically, labor is defined as activity that is necessary for the simple maintenance of human life in the realm of nature governed by cyclical time—the obtaining of food and shelter, the raising of children, and the like.¹¹ Conversely, leisure is defined as activity that takes place instead in the realm of freedom from time.¹² This distinction could take the form of a class distinction between the laboring classes and a leisure aristocracy that abstained from all manual labor, as in ancient Greece. Alternatively, the distinction between labor and leisure could be determined by the consecration of holidays (holy days), which were seen as removed from mundane time, when all worldly activity ceased. The Jewish Sabbath is one well-known example of this, but the pattern of associating work days with profane time and holidays with sacred time is common among traditional societies.¹³

As with the traditional conception of time, the modern view of time as abstract and linear has vital implications for how labor and leisure are understood and organized in daily patterns of time use. Within an abstract time frame, the distinction between labor and leisure can be understood only as a distinction between work time and free time; that is, the distinction is no longer between activity performed under the constraints of time versus activity performed in a state of freedom from time but instead refers merely to activity performed at different times of the day. Holidays, therefore, lose their sacred character in modern society; they are no longer holy days. Instead, they can be rescheduled or even combined to allow for more convenient vacations, as with the United States holiday Presidents’ Day in February, which substitutes for the concrete birthdays of both Washington and Lincoln in order to create a more efficient three-day weekend. Modern time thus has the advantage of allowing for periodic breaks in activity without losing sight of worldly concerns of efficiency and productivity; however, modern societies pay the price of a marked devaluation of leisure and increased feelings of stress even during what is supposed to be free time.¹⁴

Theories of Social Time Orientation

As this overview shows, the analysis of changing conceptions of time can be applied to a wide range of issues of fundamental social importance. An attempt to develop a theory of the relationship between social understandings of time and types of social order, therefore, would seem to be well worth pursuing. However, despite the vast literature on the problems surrounding time, most treatments of the topic have been primarily philosophical, historical, or interpretive and are not framed in terms of the broader concerns of social science theory.¹⁵ Even fewer studies attempt to explain changes in social time, rather than simply describe them. In order both to clarify and to provide a critique of the competing theories that might explain the dramatic shift from traditional to modern time, one must to some extent tease out the implicit theoretical assumptions of the various authors working on the topic. In general, explanations of changes in time conceptions in the modern capitalist West separate into three basic approaches: modernization theory, neo-Marxism, and cultural relativism.

The modernization perspective on time orientation is perhaps most clearly presented in the work of Inkeles and Smith.¹⁶ Drawing on a tradition of social analysis derived from the work of Talcott Parsons, Inkeles and Smith argue that the shift from traditional to modern time is part of a general unilinear, universal process of rationalization of culture, driven by the rationalization of material life. In other words, they see the changes in technology brought about during industrialization as bringing about concomitant shifts in time perception:

Industrial production requires precise scheduling in bringing together the diverse elements entering into the production process. This requirement is most evident with the assembly line, since it rigorously imposes the necessity that everyone start and stop at the same time, that each process be allocated a precise amount of time, and that each step be completed as scheduled. According to the socialization principle of exemplification, men working in factories should come to internalize a concern for orderly advanced planning and precise scheduling.¹⁷

From this point of view, liberal capitalist societies have become modern in their time orientation essentially because of cumulative cultural exposure to industrial modes of work organization.

This argument is subject to two objections, however. First of all, although it is certainly true that factories that are run according to rationalized time discipline can be important schools of modernity for those who work in them—since the failure to internalize abstract time norms often results in stiff penalties or dismissal—not all factories are actually run in such a uniform, rationalized way.¹⁸ If factory managers themselves are not convinced of the importance of efficient time use, they are unlikely to organize production so as to bring about any fundamental change in the way their employees use, let alone conceive of, time. This is especially true if the factory in question is protected from the market by state intervention, in which case efficiency may not be crucial for economic survival. Assembly lines by themselves do not preclude traditional afternoon naps or inefficient rush work. Whether a factory becomes an effective means of transmitting a modern time sense, or modern culture in general, thus depends on whether it is run by modern elites with an efficiency orientation who are to some degree reinforced by a peer group with an identifiably modern way of life. As we shall see in the case of Soviet industry, such is by no means automatically the case.

The second objection to Inkeles and Smith’s argument concerns their hypothesis that the experience of time in the factory will be generalized to the factory worker’s view of time in society as a whole. In fact, it seems quite plausible to expect, at least in some cases, precisely the opposite: to the extent that a factory in a traditional cultural setting successfully approximates modern, abstract norms of time discipline, factory workers who still value traditional, relatively leisurely patterns of time use may be even more opposed to the spread of factory-type work schedules to other areas of social life. Indeed, the persistence of traditional attitudes toward time in many non-Western countries seems quite evident despite the advent of factory work.¹⁹

A more nuanced version of the modernization argument is presented in David Landes’s seminal work Revolution in Time. Landes, unlike Inkeles and Smith, explores in detail the crucial role of cultural predispositions in explaining the origins of the primary technological instrument making a modern time orientation possible on a mass scale—the mechanical clock. He argues compellingly that before the technological breakthrough of the use of the pendulum for time measurement could occur, a prior change in thinking about time had to take place; as he puts it, the clock did not create an interest in time measurement; the interest in time measurement led to the invention of the clock.²⁰ Landes traces the origins of the interest in modern, abstract time measurement to the medieval Christian monastery, with its regular succession of daily prayers that had to be performed punctually; he contrasts the situation in western Europe with that of China, where the lack of any such religious demand for daily time reckoning led to a concentration of the technologically far more advanced Chinese on the development of ever more sophisticated water clocks, whose cyclical nature betrayed their cultural roots in traditional time perception.

Still, Landes is less persuasive in explaining the rapid spread of modern time reckoning throughout western European society. He first argues that the clock spread from the church to the city because just like the monastery, the city needed to know the time even before the mechanical clock became available.²¹ But the objections given above to the notion that factory work automatically creates the conditions for a cultural change toward modern time perception apply equally to the argument that city life per se creates those conditions. There are, after all, traditional as well as modern cities; ancient Rome prospered for centuries with its daily time measured by sundials.