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Everywhere, life seems to be speeding up: we talk of "fast food" and "speed dating." But what does the phenomenon of social acceleration really entail, and how new is it? While much has been written about our high-speed society in the popular media, serious academic analysis has lagged behind, and what literature there is comes more from Europe than from America. This collection of essays is a first step toward exposing readers on this side of the Atlantic to the importance of this phenomenon and toward developing some preliminary conceptual categories for better understanding it.
Among the major questions the volume addresses are these: Is acceleration occurring across all sectors of society and all dimensions of life, or is it affecting some more than others? Where is life not speeding up, and what results from this disparity? What are the fundamental causes of acceleration, as well as its consequences for everyday experience? How does it affect our political and legal institutions? How much speed can we tolerate?
The volume tackles these questions in three sections. Part 1 offers a selection of astute early analyses of acceleration as experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 samples recent attempts at analyzing social acceleration, including translations of the work of leading European thinkers. Part 3 explores acceleration's political implications.
Hartmut Rosa
Hartmut Rosa has been a Full Professor for Sociology and Sociological Theory at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, since October 2005. His areas of study include theories of modernity, sociology of time, communitarianism, and social theory. He is the author of Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity.
William E. Scheuerman
William E. Scheuerman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Between the Norm and Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (1994). Franz L. Neumann (1900–1954) was a labor lawyer and legal advisor to the German Social Democratic Party before emigrating to England and then the United States after Hitler's rise to power. He was Professor of Public Law at Columbia University at the time of his death. Otto Kirchheimer (1905–1965) was a lawyer and left-wing Social Democrat who defended Weimar Democracy during its waning hours. He fled to France and then the United States, where he taught at Wellesley, the New School, and Columbia University.
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