Time Abstraction, Temporal Policy and the Right to One’s Own Time*

Abstract

Abstract Democratic time policies—policies intended to coordinate working times, public and private service times, and urban time schedules, to the needs of human beings, individuals, families, communities—have to be founded and justified on concepts of abstract time and the right to time as preconditions of self-determined concrete individual and collective time. The right to time—in favor of which the Council of Europe recently declared itself—contains the right of individuals and groups to demand that their temporal requirements become the subject of protective and co-ordinating measures. And it requires appropriate social rules and provisions enabling the effective social co-ordination of times. The right to time foreshadows a welfare-society that deals not only with the redistribution of money but also simultaneously with the temporal conditions of its citizens’ quality of everyday life.