No Time for Utopia

Since the beginning of modernism, time concepts in general have had Utopian contents. Such Utopian contents were not accidental to time; rather they provided it with substantial meaning. Contemporary concepts of time, however, no longer seem to have such a Utopian impetus. On the contrary, they localize conditions in time and its structure which exclude Utopian perspectives in the future. This paper deals with the societal preconditions of early modern semantics of time and contrasts them with contemporary forms of time management. In connection with this change in time from a source of meaning to a merely formal chronos which is neutral to meaning, philosophical discussions of modern world-time and time implications of contemporary semantics of risk come to the fore.