Time, Temporality and the History of Capitalism

Bibliographic Data

ID4809965
AuthorsVanessa Ogle (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume243
Issue1
Pages312-327
Publication date2019-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtz014
OpenAlexW2943768293
LanguageEN
Citations received22

The year 2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E. P. Thompson’s landmark article ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ in the pages of this journal. At currently 4,298 citations on Google Scholar, it is one of the most frequently cited articles in the field of history.1 Although ostensibly about work and industrial labour in particular, the appeal of Thompson’s suggestive piece has extended far beyond a more narrowly defined labour history, into cultural history and general problems concerning the period since the eighteenth century, of life under Enlightenment rationalism and capitalist modernity. In any case, E. P. Thompson’s article established the centrality of time for understanding the logic of capitalism. Thanks to the broad, overarching questions it raised, even non-Marxists could safely feel compelled. In the fifty years since Thompson’s writing, the study of economic life has undergone manifold transformations. ‘History of capitalism’ is a relatively new area of interest, above all in the United States, an umbrella category of sorts uniting approaches that previously might have existed separately as economic history, political economy, legal history, social history, labour history and environmental history. Women and questions of gender, often conspicuously absent as both writers and subjects of economic history, are very much a part of this new and different history of economic life. Many works are, moreover, deeply informed by cultural history.2 In the past decade or so, there has been a now well-documented return of capitalism and political economy to the teaching of history and Ph.D. topics in the United States, in a markedly different key from a previous generation’s economic history.3 Kenneth Lipartito has written one of the most insightful review articles engaging with some of these ‘new’ histories of capitalism and charting some of the directions in this growing area of research (I am consciously avoiding ‘field’ here).4 Based on Lipartito’s suggestions, I shall use E. P. Thompson’s original intervention on the topic of time and capitalism to raise broader questions of how such a new history of capitalism might benefit from more explicit reflection on the times and temporalities of capitalism.

Aesthetics · Capitalism · Economic history · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Intellectual history · Modernity · Political economy · Political history · Political science · Politics · Social history (medicine) · Social science · Sociology · Temporality · American Environmental and Regional History · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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