ABSTRACT
We started to work on the book that is now called The Measured Heart more than ten years ago through one of those fortuitous coincidences that characterize academic life: we happened to bump into each other on the stairs and both – rather grumpily – expressed our mutual amazement at a statement made by E. P. Thompson in his then latest book – Customs in Common (1991) – which found Thompson arguing that since his seminal 1967 article ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, ‘while interesting new work has been done on the question of time, none of it seemed to call for any major revision of my article’ (viii).
