To think about our relationship with time is to raise profound questions around mortality, transience, memory, continuity and identity. Even the most cursory reflection suggests that we do not experience time in any straightforward, externally measurable way; rather, our sense of time changes over our life span (so that the days of childhood seem endless, but months and years rush past in later life), while time can appear to stretch out or speed up in the course of a day, and the transitory moment of the present can acquire significance through anticipation, or a retrospective importance that becomes frozen in the individual or collective memory (that glance across a crowded room, that shot fired in Dallas …). We are also likely to perceive and experience the significance of time's passing differently according to whether we see human time on earth as ending in death or as a prelude to eternal life, whether our daily activities are dictated by the natural rhythms of the seasons or by the demands of the clock, whether our experiences are recorded in diaries or digital photographs, and whether or not we understand Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Such differences are not simply individual, but are to varying degrees socially and culturally produced. They also have important political implications. For example, a belief that the social, political and economic world in which we live is unchangeably ‘natural’, or that history is the inexorable unfolding of God's will, is less favourable to a sense of political efficacy and the development of movements for political change than a belief that the world is the product of human agency and that we can change it for the better.

Addressing the psychological, philosophical, scientific and theological implications of our human relationship with time is well beyond the scope of this book. The aim of this and the next two chapters is much more modest and prosaic: to assert the importance and assess the implications of a temporal perspective for political analysis and action; to explore the political implications of different ‘time cultures’; and to investigate the relationship between patterns of time use and systems of power and inequality in contemporary capitalist societies.