Time as a key aspect of historical sociology

Abstract

This article is a review of Jiří Šubrt’s book The Sociology of Time: A Critical Overview (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer; 2021. 283 p.). The author places this work in a broader context of previous books by Šubrt in order to show that all these publications analyze the past and contemporary sociological theories, and focus on historical sociology and the conception of sociology as a science on social processes. Šubrt considers time in the context of the long-term development of knowledge, in which efforts have been made to control and master it. He also conducts a critical analysis of the views of previous generations of sociologists who developed ideas about the nature and functions of time. Šubrt examines different fields of the so-called ‘sociology of time’; however, his main interest is the temporalized sociology such as theories of Niklas Luhmann and Anthony Giddens, but especially the conceptions in the field of historical comparative sociology, which combine the object of sociological research with long-term historical processes. According to Šubrt, the basic aspect of time that should be decisive for sociology is its irreversibility associated with the idea of an open future.