Did the Clock Cause Capitalism?

There is an argument put forth by philosophers of technology that asks the improbable question - did the clock cause capitalism? The motivation, I believe, is to show how seemingly benign technologies can have profound and far reaching impacts on our lives. Yet, as unlikely as it seems that there is any connection at all between advances in timekeeping technology and the rise of a new economic model, the argument that they offer is difficult to dismiss. I will sketch it our here and leave it to those more diligent than I to look up references. You can find the basics of this argument, if you are so inclined,  in the works of Lewis Mumford.

In the Middle Ages timekeeping devices such as the tower clocks in monasteries were improved  as the residents of monasteries wished to keep a regular schedule and perform their devotions at the right time. The villages around the monasteries could hear the bells tolling as the hours passed giving the residents a growing sense that time was, indeed, a real thing and that it could be accurately measured.

The measurement of time led to another new idea that one could not only measure time but measure the amount of work done in a unit of time. In earlier days, when time could not be accurately measured this idea would have been preposterous. Today we would call this notion of work done per unit of time productivity. And it didn't take long before people began to think that producers should be rewarded from productivity. The most productive should be rewarded and move to the top. The less productive should receive less rewards and move to the bottom. It is a small step from this fundamental notion to the tenets of capitalism.

A secondary effect of these more precise timepieces was an advance in instrumental realism. The clocks were made to measure a phenomenon, that is - time. But after a while the clocks themselves became more real than the phenomenon they were measuring. If you ask anyone today what a day is, they will say 12 hours. But, the days nature creates vary greatly and can best be described as the time between sun up and sun down. Today we view those widely varying and imperfect days created by nature as secondary, whereas the perfect days created by our time keeping devices are the real ones.

While on this thread of unexpected effects of technology, one could argue that the telephone caused skyscrapers. The gist of this argument is that considering the number of messages going in and out of offices in buildings, it would not be practical to have buildings more than a dozen or so stories high if messages had to be carried in and out by couriers. But, allowing electronic transmission of messages removes that bottleneck and allows for the tall buildings that we have today.

One has to ask, did the clock cause capitalism or did it allow capitalism. Similarly one could ask die the telephone causes skyscrapers or did it allow them.  I would lean toward allowing rather than causing.  But, semantics aside, the point is that seemingly benign and unrelated technologies can have a major impact on our lives and our worldview.