Time

In modern societies, however, those who control public discourse have arrogated to themselves the kind of time that Durkheim regards as merely utilitarian, "temporal," and thus lacking in the bases of traditional solidarity that would have been available in more primitive societies, where temporal sequence was a matter of peripheral concern for individuals and those practicing magic: not for those on whom the duration of the society itself depended.

Thus, for Durkheim, modern societies represent an inversion of the traditional: a change in which type of time dominates public discourse, and a change in the sort of elites that control public discourse. Because of his antipathy to utilitarianism, Durkheim took as his preferred model traditional social systems that considered themselves to be part of time that runs from the past through the present into the future; thus the sort of time that is concerned with the logical and practical relation of means to ends and of causes to effects was relegated, in his view, to the social periphery. In modern societies, however, these oppositions were reversed, with the utilitarian engagement with time preoccupying the political and cultural center, and communities with their own traditional bases of solidarity (and their views of the present as being linked with the past and the future) being relegated to the periphery.

Sociologists and historians remain divided as to whether the new elites and their utilitarian view of time can provide the bases for solidarity and for personal identity, which had been mediated by powerful myths and rituals linking the self to the duration of the society from the past into the present and the future. Some regard this conflict as a contest for the "soul" of a nation such as America, while others regard the contest in more comparative terms as a problem faced by a wide variety of nations coping with indigenous and external sources of both threats and opportunities. Whether or not Durkheim is right about the inversion of time-sense between modern and traditional societies, a question remains as to whether any society, by its very formation, divides the flow of time into two separate streams, the one sequential or utilitarian, temporal and temporary, the other concerned with the long duration of peoples over many generations, and with the impact of both the past and the future upon the social present.

The question also remains whether, as Talal Asad argues, what is needed is an alternative to utilitarianism: a view of the world that "is not divided into significant binary features" (p. 15). In modern societies, of course, those opposites have been, at least since the Enlightenment, the modern and the premodern, and sometimes these oppositions have been arrayed in ideological discourse along lines separating the West from the East, or within the West between Europe and the United States. Other forms of binary opposition have arrayed the relatively educated, who have adapted well to living in a complex, highly differentiated society, in opposition to those who are looking for simpler formulations and more primitive forms of solidarity. For modern commentators working from within Weberian assumptions, utilitarianism has been accompanied by the emergence of a self with political rights and the freedom to make a variety of choices in the economy and the political system, as well as in the more intimate spheres of the family and local community. This freedom comes from the individuating consequences of complex societies, which keep individuals from being embedded in particular and highly limiting social contexts.