Whose Time? Whose World?

Hartmut Rosa. Time and World. Polity, 2025. $22.95 pb. 228 pp.

For English-speaking students of modernity, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has come to prominence over the last decade. He has been developing his theories since the turn of the new millennium, but his influence in the United States took off after the English-language publication of The Uncontrollability of the World in 2020. Much like Rosa’s chief dialogue partner, Charles Taylor, his theories are remarkable for both defying basic summary and inviting it.

Drawing extensively on social science research, Rosa’s questions and aims are meta-disciplinary. In short, he seeks to help late-modern humans grasp what is unique about us (individually and collectively) and our social problems. Of course, many theorists do this too, but sometimes very basic plot points help us map out all others naturally and non-arbitrarily. Leaning toward the descriptive over the normative, Rosa’s project involves precise “labeling” to locate the main causal faultlines that explain modern consciousness.

Three labels of particular importance in his project are “social acceleration,” “resonance,” and “alienation.” We will have occasion to return to each below, but for Rosa, they are conceptually related. The logic of modern efficiency (in combination with the technological apparatus to realize this logic) has so conditioned the pace of human psychic life—both at the level of individual existence and political common will—that we are increasingly losing touch with the world, with one another, and even with ourselves (since we know ourselves in relation to the world). The reason for this fissure is that we have evaporated the conditions suitable to a “resonant” relation with the world.

Resonance is a loadbearing concept for Rosa. At a minimum, it refers to a meaningful, non-instrumental, and inter-active relation with things. Resonance is a “lived tension” rather than dialectical collapse of the self into the other. But we find the depth of things precisely in the “uncontrollable” things that are insistently themselves and talk back to us (e.g., nature, people, etc.). We are, as it were, “attached.” But late-modern temporality (and the style of consciousness this relation to time cultivates) swallows our ability to achieve this resonance, replacing attachment with “alienation.” This last term has quite a pedigree, as Hartmut knows. His own usage is comprehensive but accented toward the existential. Modern man tends to lose touch with himself, the meaning of his own acts, and a sense of participation in a common project with others. Hegel famously said that freedom was “being at home with one’s self in the other.” By this standard, one might say that Rosa’s diagnostic implies that late modern consciousness tends to slavery—being un-homed from self and other.

Time and World is likely to become an excellent proxy for Rosa’s overall project. The book opens with Frederic Vandenberghe’s introductory essay, providing an extensive summary of Rosa’s philosophical development. In the seven chapters of the book itself, Rosa summarizes and extends the theories noted above. This book clearly represents the frontier of his current thoughts and his proposal for future research.

Rosa is not just interested in contemporary modes of relating to time, but also how time itself (i.e., human history itself) shapes human consciousness. While we are not totally unlike our ancestors, “what it felt like to be alive” was different in key respects. You might say that the history of mankind—not unlike the history of a person—involves continuous but ever-changing “phenomena,” and Rosa engages phenomenological discourse to grasp these shifts. Looming large in the background are the original sociologists (Durkheim, Weber, and even Marx), but largely as those who had identified that consciousness has a history. To live after the industrial revolution does something substantive to the structure of experience and interpretation. But Rosa draws more on later figures like Anthony Giddens and Charles Taylor. Taylor especially grasps that to understand our age is to “tell a story,” because a story—“a sense of having overcome a previous condition”—is written into the fabric of our self-understanding individually and socially. None of these persons are subjectivists, but none believe in the timelessness of discourse and politics.

Yet there is an ever-present concern for the latter. Especially if our modern sense of “being a people” (in a nation state, for instance) is a common perception rooted in uncommon reasoning, then there is a fragility at the very root of late-modern politics. We imagine ourselves to be a people who are somehow prior to our “forming a more perfect union.” But what holds this conception of peoplehood together? And can it change? Perhaps, like Joseph Ellis’s fascinating argument in Founding Brothers, there is contradiction of principle but a “lived coherence” at the practical level. Still, this lived coherence, and the habits of mind and modes of consciousness that sustain it, are susceptible to history. One question at the heart of this book (similar to Hunter’s recent Democracy and Solidarity) is whether the lived coherence can hold, or whether the fissure of values has become so wide that there is no “lived coherence” that will satisfy individual needs and political needs.

It is this sort of insight that Rosa develops in the first chapter. What makes his discussion unique is that he brings together discourse(s) across the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and political science—drawing upon different thinkers who grasp what “modern subjectivity” is. In some ways, these authors come to similar conclusions about modern human beings, but each discipline, argues Rosa, must see its peculiar vantage point and limits. This is especially true because each also “shapes” modern consciousness and self-understanding at a discursive level.

For a sociologist to attempt to identify a hierarchy of norms for society as a sociologist would be crossing into a grammar and mode of human action for which sociological discourse is unfit. Modern politics, you might say, is the art of deciding which values will be reflected in law, and which nudges will be guaranteed in the social order. But, once again, political science alone cannot decide which values ought to be individually and collectively chosen. In other words, which “future subjectivity” should we choose? Rosa’s devastating analysis of the basic choices we are all incentivized to make as a clear value to guide us feels increasingly elusive. But he is hopeful that these disciplines can identify their competencies and (with hermeneutically sensitive philosophers) begin to create the kind of dialogue that modern social problems require. One might say that Rosa is attempting to identify “who should talk to who” given his particular reading of our problems.

But if a modern society is a running self-interpretation, who are “we” now? How do we see ourselves and what makes us “us?” What do we all share that can enable us to be a society together? The second chapter explores these questions through probing the relationship between our explicit and implicit self-understanding. It takes the mutual gaze of all the disciplines mentioned above to see the live coherence that can make a society like ours work, but also to see its fragilities and vulnerabilities. Not least among these is when there is no practical lived coherence and mediation between common action and uncommon motivation—between, say, our mutual agreement to pay taxes and our quite different motivations for doing so. Political scientists especially notice that we live in a legitimation crisis. Even if we have not found a solution to our fragilities, locating our deepest and most practical self-understanding(s)—and how these have held us together so far—is at least useful for those who ask normative questions.

The effect of this fragile collective self-understanding on our political process is massive. The third chapter builds upon Rosa’s previous work on modern social acceleration, with its inner logic of denying both finitude and death. As we increase our options, we store away future experiences, but there are far more than we can ever possess. Slowly, we feel we get less of “the share of” the world just as we seem to have “more” of it. This is true of both the individual and the political life. Politics is a human art and moves at a human pace, and it cannot bear burdens often placed on it without cracking. The resulting political jadedness is not surprising, nor the tendency to treat the political apparatus in a Machiavellian way. But for most, the sensation is simply that as technology increases we are more “connected” than ever, we are less in control of social change. We do not feel like participants for the most part, but like passengers. The result is that we cannot keep up with history (concludes Rosa). Its effects are accelerating, but “its meaning is slowing.”

This acceleration is the cause of modern “alienation,” the subject of Rosa’s fourth chapter. While it is not up to sociology (qua sociology) to define the good life, sociology originated as a set of questions that assumed “something was wrong” with modern society and had some implicit “vision of the good life” that contemporary forms of life mitigated against. Sociology is about “social problems” to the core, but problems defined precisely as violating certain standards of the good life, such as political and individual self-determination.

However, in the West, finding a solution has often been a promise that cannot be kept. And perhaps it is not simply because politics cannot deliver it. There is no pure “self” that isn’t already co-determined by the world, society, and politics. The value for autonomy, argues Rosa, goes together with the value for authenticity, the notion that I exist and possess an “inner core” manifested in my acts. But what if this is mostly not what it is like to be a self? And what if our “inner core” is more deeply susceptible to influence than that? Such is the case with modern social acceleration, and it has resulted in a loss of a “resonant” relationship with things. Alienation is a “loss of responsiveness” from the things themselves because we are no longer in an attending relationship to them. This can mean alienation from nature or politics and even from the self and the sense of “being caught up in” one’s own projects.

Rosa proceeds, in chapter five, to identify the “implicit logic” and “value system” that define our tacit sense of the good life. The good life is what makes the world more available, accessible, and attainable (One is reminded of Giddens’s reading of modernity as involving the suspension of time and space—bringing the far near). And yet we are not a satisfied people and feel the loss of our capacity to see or grasp the whole of things. Rosa critiques this implicit notion written in the logic of our social practices with a notion of the good life rooted in his conception of “resonance.” He goes on to relate resonance to that which is non-controllable and non-disposable, and what might also be called unpredictable. Alienation is the loss of this relationship with ourselves, the world, and one another. When the world moves from being a chorus of communicators to an amalgam of externally related machine parts, we have lost resonance. Rather than a theory we defend, this is simply written into our habits and resultant imagination. Hartmut concludes the chapter by identifying key “axes of resonance” that make for a stable modern social order, as well as the key function that each of these axes plays. The concept of resonance here stands over against concepts of reduction or repulsion.

The sixth chapter is a reading of the corpus of Charles Taylor as a theorist of “resonance.” Ultimately, all of Taylor’s career and interdisciplinary work has been about the loss and recovery of “resonance” and connection to the world. Moreover, Taylor sees this loss of resonance as bound up with events in human self-understanding and the “sense of ourselves” as a society. A resonant relation to the world does not easily leave the world of common ceremony, action, and political imagination. Rosa’s seventh chapter, then, attempts to draw upon the notion that a “resonant” relationship with the world is a trans-historical common good, albeit differently inflected in each time-period. Still, it can be said that the modern libido to have everything available, accessible, and attainable is constitutionally inconsistent with the conditions of a resonant relationship with the world in any circumstance. Moreover, unlike (on Rosa’s reading) Taylor’s move at the end of A Secular Age, a resonant relationship to the world simply is a radical choice of interpretation. Rosa notes that this already reflects the deep alienation that resonance means to overcome. But given the radically dialogical nature of (and means to achieve) resonance for Rosa, perhaps the way forward is simply discovered in a disposition of an openness to talk and take one another seriously. Whether we like it or not, members of a society share one another, and perhaps there remains the possibility, individual and political, to be holy wasters of time.

There is much to appreciate in this work, and in Rosa’s project overall. He deserves his growing reputation as a key reader of modern life. But there remain crucial questions. Is there a way to imagine “the good” beyond late modernity? Is whatever our project is the end or a means to the end? Relatedly, if our end is freedom, then is our conception of freedom more about deliberation and options, or is it about ends? The recent work of D. C. Schindler asks this last question and identifies a deep fracture in the contemporary society rooted in an imaginative misunderstanding of both freedom and the will.

More ominously, is there such a thing as a political situation that politically demands radical and quick action (and for the sake of resonance)? I remain quite doubtful of this, but it is worth noting that others demur. Rosa’s own political affect sounds gentlemanly and (to me) ideal. But what does one do when there are no gentlemen and that is unlikely to change?

Finally, there is the crucial matter of how we resolve the normative (even if “implicitly normative”) question about the vision of the good life that provides a map for both individuals and a people. Moreover, is the extent to which we can tolerate any tension here a fixed thing, or does that change with “us?” After all, we cannot simply ask what our ancestors can handle—we must ask what we can. Only time will tell if late-modern human beings can endure a lack of more explicit common value.