IT’S WORTH NOTING here that a scrupulous accounting of time is not in itself unique to capitalism. As I’ve mentioned, pre-industrial or pre-colonial societies were and still are imagined to have been inherently leisurely, or even “without time,” in part because they were task oriented—a way of working that follows the contours of different tasks rather than a rigid, abstract schedule. But as the sociologist Michael O’Malley has pointed out, such societies exhibited their own “fierce attention to saving time.” Besides the precision required for agricultural timing, every society makes social
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