Article Rethinking the time’s arrow: Beginnings and the sociology of the future Filipe Carreira da Silva Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon; Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK M onica Brito Vieira University of York, UK Abstract This article asks: What is, sociologically speaking, a beginning? And why has sociology so relatively little to say about beginnings, that point of discontinuity between past meaning and future meaning? We answer these questions in four successive steps. First, we suggest that the existing literature on beginnings can be organized in light of L evi-Strauss’ distinction between the irreversible time of social practices and the reversible time of analytic models. We use this distinc- tion in the next two sections as we review existing approaches on beginnings. The next section discuss works that have studied beginnings from the perspec- tive of irreversible time. The following section analyses approaches that centre on the perspective of the reversible time of the observer, that collapse the two, or that distinguish them in purely methodological grounds. Building upon the foregoing, we advance a sociological conception of beginnings as a future- oriented duration involving a non-linear succession of temporalities. Corresponding author: Filipe Carreira da Silva, Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon; Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK. Email: fcs23@ics.ulisboa.pt Time & Society 0(0) 1–24 ! The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20916075 journals.sagepub.com/home/tas