Temporal Multiplicity in E. P. Thompson and Reinhart Koselleck
This essay places E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967) alongside Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979; English trans. 1985) to examine how two paradigmatic historians characterize temporal change and multiplicity. Both texts explore how the experience of time was transformed at the threshold of modernity, and both reach for a process-oriented vocabulary of gradual, sedimented change. Yet their accounts diverge in consequential ways. Thompson narrates a compression: plural, heterogeneous premodern temporalities are progressively subjected to the disciplinary regime of capitalist clock time, and the range of temporal experience contracts. Koselleck narrates a proliferation: a nearly homogeneous premodern temporality, structured above all by eschatological expectation, dissolves into a distinctly modern condition in which possible futures multiply and the past recedes into irretrievable distance. The difference between these two accounts is not merely empirical but methodological. It reflects the kinds of historical work that Thompson and Koselleck conceive themselves to be doing, and the philosophical commitments that underwrite their respective projects.
Thompson: Temporal Discipline and the Logic of Capital
In 1967, Past & Present published Thompson’s landmark essay on time and labor. Thompson concedes at the outset that “important changes in the apprehension of time” occurred in the “intellectual culture” of Western Europe between roughly 1300 and 1650, but his interest lies less in intellectual history than in what he calls the “shift in time-sense”—the “inward apprehension of time” among working people. [1] The framing is characteristic. It weds an analysis of lived temporal experience to his broader social-historical Marxist project. As a member of the postwar British Marxist historians’ group, Thompson was committed to recovering the agency and creative capacities of laboring people, and the essay extends that commitment into the domain of temporal consciousness. [2]
Thompson begins by marshaling anthropological and sociological evidence to establish a baseline of temporal plurality. He notes the “occupational definition of time” among the Nuer and Nandi peoples and describes what he terms a “task-orientation” notation of time, as opposed to measured, clock-regulated time. [3] He characterizes this task-oriented rhythm in terms of its humanistic legibility: it reflects “the least demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life,’” expanding or contracting according to the internal logic of the task rather than any external metric. [4] On the Aran Islands, he observes a “disregard for clock time” made possible by a subsistence economy with minimal market integration. [5] What matters analytically is that Thompson treats these temporalities not as survivals of an archaic mentality but as fully coherent systems whose logic is internal to particular modes of production and social organization.
The essay’s central narrative concerns the dissolution of this plurality. Thompson locates the decisive transformation in the eighteenth century, when the relation between labor and time is restructured by the commodification of time itself. Time, he writes, “is now currency: it is not passed but spent.” [6] The semantic shift from passing to spending encodes a broader Marxist argument about reification: time becomes an abstract, quantifiable commodity subject to the logic of exchange. Thompson traces this process through its material agents—the sundial, the pendulum clock, the pocket watch—arguing that “a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring…at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour.” [7] The clock, in his telling, is both instrument and symptom: “The small instrument which regulated the new rhythms of industrial life was at the same time one of the more urgent of the new needs which industrial capitalism called forth to energize its advance.” [8]
What Thompson describes, then, is a progressive narrowing. The “characteristic irregularity of labour patterns before the coming of large-scale machine powered industry” gives way to synchronized, measured, externally imposed time-discipline. [9] Premodern temporal plurality—the coexistence of task-oriented, seasonal, liturgical, and other rhythms—is compressed into a single dominant register. Thompson is careful to note that this is not a purely technological transformation; it is “lived through in the society of nascent industrial capitalism,” shaped by cultural factors, class conflict, and the disciplinary ambitions of mercantile and industrial elites. [10] His account amounts to a modified modernization theory, one inflected by Marxist teleology but attentive to the unevenness and contestation that attend any transition.
Koselleck: Temporal Proliferation and the Dissolution of Eschatology
If Thompson’s essay is difficult to detach from its Marxist commitments, Koselleck’s Futures Past is difficult to detach from the conceptual apparatus of Begriffsgeschichte. Peter Burke acknowledged as much in a 1987 review, noting that the essays “do not make easy reading,” in part because their “conceptual universe”—terms like “planes of historicity” and “space of experience”—resists easy naturalization in English. [11] Helge Jordheim has gone further, arguing that Anglo-American scholarship long misread Koselleck as offering primarily a theory of periodization, when his work is better understood as a “radically different theory of overlapping temporal structures and layers, synchronicities and nonsynchronicities that defy periodization.” [12]
Still, Koselleck does offer temporal landmarks. In his preface, he writes that the essays “will constantly ask: how, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future related?” [13] The central problematic is the emergence of what he terms “historical time”—a distinctly modern temporal consciousness in which the past becomes an object of contemplation at a distance, no longer continuous with the observer’s own present. His paradigmatic illustration is the experience of viewing a painting: in modernity, the observer perceives the work as a product of a bygone era, aesthetically and historically remote, rather than as a living element of a shared temporal horizon. [14] This is what Koselleck means by the increasing asymmetry between the “space of experience” (Erfahrungsraum) and the “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont). Accumulated experience can no longer reliably ground prediction; the future becomes genuinely open. [15]
Where Thompson frames temporal change within the periodization of roughly 1300–1650, Koselleck asks, “What new quality had historical time gained that occupies this period from about 1500 to 1800?” [16] His answer is Verzeitlichung—a “temporalization of history” that culminates in “the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity.” [17] But the most striking feature of Koselleck’s account may be his characterization of what precedes this transformation. Where Thompson sees plural premodern temporalities organized around task, need, and the rhythms of subsistence, Koselleck sees something closer to a singular temporal structure, one dominated by eschatological expectation. Prior to the Reformation, he argues, “the future of the world and its end were made part of the history of the Church.” [18] A temporal equilibrium obtained between the imminence of the Last Judgment and its institutional deferral: the Church “fended off the End of the World” by interpreting contemporary events through an apocalyptic hermeneutic, and in doing so kept the history of the Church coextensive with the history of salvation. [19]
The Reformation shattered this equilibrium. “The most basic assumptions of this tradition were destroyed,” Koselleck writes; “Neither Church nor worldly powers were capable of containing the energies which Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin unleashed upon the European world.” [20] But the dissolution of eschatological time did not produce temporal homogeneity. It produced its opposite: a proliferation of temporal horizons. Statecraft, rational prognosis, and political calculation replaced prophetic expectation. Possible futures multiplied, and the past was progressively compressed and distanced. The cyclical temporality of astronomical revolution was refurnished in the cultural lexicon as an empty form, filled in modernity not with providential certainty but with anxiety and contingency.
Compression and Proliferation: A Methodological Divergence
Read side by side, Thompson and Koselleck offer something like mirror-image narratives of temporal modernity. Thompson begins with plurality and ends with compression: the diverse, humanly legible temporalities of premodern labor are disciplined into the uniform metric of clock time. Koselleck begins with a kind of unity—the encompassing horizon of eschatological expectation—and ends with proliferation, the dissolution of that horizon generating a plurality of possible temporal orientations. Modernity, in Thompson’s account, constrains temporal experience. In Koselleck’s, it opens it up.
The divergence follows from the different objects and methods each historian brings to the problem. Thompson’s Marxist social history privileges the experience of laboring people, and his narrative is organized accordingly around the coercive logic of capital accumulation. The disciplining of time is a disciplining of bodies and habits; its agent is the employer, its instrument the clock, its logic the extraction of surplus value. Koselleck’s conceptual history privileges something else entirely: the transformation of elite philosophical and cultural production. His landmarks are the Reformation and the French Revolution; his actors are Luther, Robespierre, and the unnamed observers of Renaissance paintings. The temporalities he tracks are not those of labor but of expectation, experience, and historical consciousness.
But the difference in vantage point produces more than different periodizations. It also produces different accounts of what temporal multiplicity means. For Thompson, the multiplicity of premodern temporalities is a sign of the relative autonomy of laboring communities—their capacity to organize time according to the rhythms of need rather than the imperatives of accumulation. Its loss is a loss of agency, a form of dispossession. Koselleck’s modern multiplicity is something else: a consequence of the collapse of a totalizing framework that had organized experience into a single, legible pattern. The result is not freedom in any straightforward sense but a condition of radical openness, in which the future becomes the object of planning, speculation, and dread. Koselleck’s own formulation captures the contrast precisely. For Luther, “the compression of time is a visible sign that…the Final Judgment is imminent”; for Robespierre, “the acceleration of time is a human task, presaging an epoch of freedom and happiness.” [21] Between these two figures, Koselleck locates the entire arc of his narrative—one that moves not from plurality to uniformity, as Thompson’s does, but from prophetic certainty to secular contingency.
To read these two thinkers together is to recognize that the question of temporal multiplicity cannot be separated from the question of whose temporality is under examination, or from what disciplinary and philosophical vantage it is observed. Thompson’s compression and Koselleck’s proliferation are not contradictory accounts of the same phenomenon. They are accounts of different phenomena, differently conceived. The value of the comparison lies not in adjudicating between them but in making visible the methodological choices that produce such divergent characterizations of what it means to experience time at the threshold of modernity.
Notes
[1]: E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–57, http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.
[2]: On the postwar British Marxist historians, see Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity, 1984).
[3]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 58, 60.
[4]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 60.
[5]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 59.
[6]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 61.
[7]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 69.
[8]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 69.
[9]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 71.
[10]: Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 80.
[11]: Peter Burke, “Review: ‘Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time,’” History of European Ideas 8, no. 6 (January 1987): 744–45.
[12]: Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 157, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23277637.
[13]: Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1985]), 3.
[14]: See Koselleck’s discussion of the Alexanderschlacht painting in the first chapter of Futures Past.
[15]: Jordheim, “Against Periodization,” 153.
[16]: Koselleck, Futures Past, 10.
[17]: Koselleck, Futures Past, 11.
[18]: Koselleck, Futures Past, 13.
[19]: Koselleck, Futures Past, 13.
[20]: Koselleck, Futures Past, 13.
[21]: Koselleck, Futures Past, 12–13.
Works Cited
Burke, Peter. “Review: ‘Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.’” History of European Ideas 8, no. 6 (January 1987): 744–45.
Jordheim, Helge. “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities.” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 151–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23277637.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1985].
Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.
