Perceptions of accelerating time began around 1750, before industrialization.

Evidence

Observers of modernity are at one in their diagnosis of the kind of transformation of time at issue, even if they disagree about how to evaluate it: reports of the perception of an immense acceleration of time and history, often expressing a state of bewilderment, appear in rapidly increasing number since roughly 1750, which is identified by the editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe series as marking an epochal threshold (literally a “saddle period”: Sattelzeit). Note that this is long before the beginning of the industrial revolution and even before the French Revolution. With the introduction of the railroad this feeling intensified, and in the wake of the industrial revolution the practice of everyday life became, as it were, experientially saturated by it. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 106

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the Sattelzeit (‘saddle period’) concept naming the 1750 epochal threshold.
• XREF: connects to: Temporalized power arose first in eighteenth and nineteenth century bourgeois society. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 712

Broader Connections

• Temporalized power arose first in eighteenth and nineteenth century bourgeois society. #corroborates (0.80) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 712