Social Life

Contemporary Social Theory

Matthias Benzer, Kate Reed, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781473907843, 9781473907836
• eBook ISBN: 9781526415851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Social Life, the authors highlight, explain, and scrutinize socio-theoretical analyses of contemporary social relations and conditions - put forward by eight modern social theorists - and analyse how these have informed sociological inquiries into people's lives in today's social world.

The book discusses the works of the following social theorists:

• Anthony Giddens
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Bruno Latour
• Donna Haraway
• Zygmunt Bauman
• Jean-Francois Lyotard
• Michel Foucault
• Jean Baudrillard

In each chapter, the authors identify the key components of each theorist's conception of society and apply the theories outlined to specific, modern phenomena. This connection with modern-day phenomena allows for a critical interrogation of issues in contemporary society, including: Inequality and Capital, Power, Fear and Terrorism, Immune System Discourse, Suffering, and Climate Change.

Essential reading for all sociology students studying social theory and the works of modern social theorists.

1 Anthony Giddens: Living with Radical Modernity

Part 1: Radical Modernity

In The Consequences of Modernity published in the early 1990s Giddens argued that, although not yet living in a postmodern world, we were nonetheless witnessing ‘the emergence of ways of life and forms of social organisation’ that were different to those facilitated by ‘modern institutions’ (CM 52). This indicated what he refers to as a radicalised version of modernity – a future-oriented reflexive and globalised form (RW). This version of modernity is for Giddens unsettling: ‘Its most conspicuous features – the dissolution of evolutionism, the disappearance of historical teleology, the recognition of thoroughgoing, constitutive reflexivity, together with the evaporating of the privileged position of the West – move us into a new and disturbing universe of experience’ (CM 52–3). One of the key problems of radical modernity – climate change – according to Giddens requires radical political solutions beyond traditional politics of the left and right (BLR, TW). This chapter seeks to explore the particular dilemmas and problems that radical modernity poses for human life as outlined in Giddens’s socio-theoretical framework. Focusing specifically on the potential threat posed by climate change (PCC), the chapter also examines his proposed solutions with a view to their potential to inform concrete policy.

Radicalised Modernity

Modernity tends to refer in sociology texts to ‘modes of social life or organisation that emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and that subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence’ (CM 1). According to Giddens we now stand at the dawn of ‘a new era’ to which the social sciences must respond and which is taking us beyond modernity itself’ (CM 1). Sociologists have attempted to describe and define this era through concepts such as postmodernism, post-Fordism, postcapitalism, and so on. Post-modernism is a slippery concept and, as Giddens himself points out, can mean any number of things: that the ‘“foundations” of epistemology are unreliable and that “history” is devoid of teleology and consequently no version of “progress” can plausibly be defended’ (CM 46). It may also refer to the emergence of ‘a new social and political agenda’ including an ‘increasing prominence of ecological concerns and perhaps of new social movements generally’ (CM 46). While Giddens acknowledges that significant social changes have occurred in society in recent decades, rather than seeing these as evidence of us living in a society beyond modernity, he argues that they actually ‘provide us with a fuller understanding of the reflexivity inherent in modernity itself’ (CM 49). Giddens is not alone in his attempts to suggest we are living in a modern not postmodern, society. Other theorists such as Bourdieu and Habermas also – in different ways – have sought to develop socio-theoretical positions that are at odds with postmodernity (Callinicos 1999). What is specific to Giddens’s approach, however, is his focus on radical modernity. He argues that ‘we have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalisation’ (CM 51).

In order to understand the times we live in Giddens argues ‘it is not sufficient merely to invent new terms, like post-modernity and the rest. Instead, we have to look again at the nature of modernity itself’ (CM 3). This for Giddens includes an analytical focus on the Janus-faced nature of modernity. Modernity he argues ‘is a double-edged phenomenon’ (CM 7). It has created vast opportunity for ‘human beings to enjoy a secure and rewarding existence’ but it also has a ‘sombre side’ (CM 7). It was only Weber according to Giddens out of the classical theorists who acknowledged this sombre side of modernity, as Marx thought class conflict would lead to a better society: ‘Yet even he did not fully anticipate how extensive the darker side of modernity would turn out to be’ (CM 7). Through developing his theory of radical modernity, therefore, Giddens seeks to include a focus on its dual-edged potential, as well as suggesting sociological strategies for managing its darker side.

The dynamism of modernity

Giddens begins his theory of modernity by outlining what he calls a ‘discontinuist’ interpretation of modern development. In particular he wants to focus on outlining the ways in which modern institutions are different from the traditional order (CM 3, RM). The big differences between traditional and modern institutions according to Giddens are their ‘dynamism’ and ‘global scope’ (CM 16). Giddens distinguishes three dominant and interconnected sources of dynamism that underpin modernity: the first is the separation of time and space. This is what Giddens refers to as the condition of time–space distanciation, a means of precise temporal and spatial zoning. Giddens argues that modernity ‘tears space away from place fostering relations between “absent” others’, and different locales are penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them (CM 19).

The second source of dynamism for Giddens is the development of disembedding mechanisms. Giddens refers here to the “lifting out” of ‘social activity from localised contexts, reorganising social relations across large time–space distances’(CM 53). Giddens gives the example of two types of disembedding mechanisms ‘symbolic tokens’ (e.g. money) and ‘expert systems’ (e.g. medicine). Expert systems refer to ‘systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise that organise large areas of the material and social environments in which we live today’ (CM 27). According to Giddens ‘expert systems are disembedding mechanisms because, in common with symbolic tokens, they remove social relations from the immediacies of context’ (CM 28). Both types of disembedding mechanisms presume, but also foster, the separation of time from space (CM 28). Essential to these disembedding systems, according to Giddens, is trust and therefore trust is involved in an essential way with the institutions of modernity.

The final source of dynamism according to Giddens is ‘The reflexive appropriation of knowledge. The production of systematic knowledge about social life becomes central to system reproduction, rolling social life away from the fixed nature of tradition’ (CM 53). He argues that the reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that ‘social practices are constantly examined and reinformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character’ (CM 38). Giddens argues that sociology as an academic discipline occupies a key position in the reflexivity of modernity, because sociology offers a ‘generalised type of reflection upon modern social life’ (CM 41). ‘The discourse of sociology and the concepts, theories, and findings of the other social sciences’ ‘reflexively restructure their subject matter, which itself has learned to think sociologically’. According to Giddens therefore ‘modernity is itself deeply and intrinsically sociological’ (CM 43).

The institutional dimensions of modernity

Giddens identifies four institutional dimensions of modernity – capitalism, industrialism, surveillance, and military power. These dimensions according to Giddens are irreducible to one another, each consisting of a different set of causal processes and structures. However, they work together to provide a structure for understanding some of the key features, developments, and tensions in modern societies. Capitalism is the first dimension that he identifies. This ‘is a system of commodity production, centred upon the relation between private ownership of capital and propertyless wage labour’. It is this relationship, according to Giddens, which forms ‘the main axis of a class system’ (CM 55). Industrialism is viewed separately from capitalism and, for Giddens, forms the second institutional dimension of modernity: ‘The chief characteristic of industrialism is the use of inanimate sources of material power in the production of goods, coupled to the central role of machinery in the production process’ (CM 55–6).

The nation state occupies a central place in capitalist societies according to Giddens, and the administration of the capitalist system and modern society in general is coordinated control over delimited territorial arenas. In this respect capitalism depends on ‘surveillance capacities well beyond those of traditional civilisations’ (CM 57). For Giddens, therefore, surveillance capacity constitutes a third institutional dimension associated with the rise of modernity (CM 57–8). He states that ‘surveillance refers to the supervision of the activities of subject populations in the political sphere’ – although not confined to that sphere (CM 58). The final institutional dimension is military power (control of the means of violence in the industrialisation of war): successful monopoly of the means of violence within the state. This also refers to the industrialisation of war – total war and nuclear war (CM 58). According to Giddens, ‘behind these institutional clusterings lie the three sources of dynamism of modernity’ referred to earlier: ‘time–space distanciation, disembedding, and reflexivity’ (italics my emphasis). These facilitate the conditions for change. ‘They are involved in as well as conditioned by the institutional dimensions of modernity’ (CM 63).

Globalisation, trust, and risk

Modernity for Giddens is dynamic, and also inherently globalising. Globalisation therefore occupies a central role within Giddens’s theory of modernity. He defines globalisation as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (CM 64). Globalisation is, according to Giddens, essentially ‘action at a distance’ (RM 96). Giddens regards the world capitalist economy as one of four dimensions of globalisation, the nation state is the second, the world military order is the third, and industrial development: ‘the most obvious aspect of this is the expansion of the global division of labour’, for example difference between more and less industrialised countries) is the fourth. The media – for Giddens that is ‘mechanised technologies of communication’ – ‘have dramatically influenced all aspects of globalisation’ (CM 77). According to Giddens the point is not that ‘people are contingently aware of many events, from all over the world, of which previously they would have remained ignorant’. Rather ‘it is that the global extension of the institutions of modernity would be impossible were it not for the pooling of knowledge which is represented by the “news”’ (CM 77–8).

A key part of Giddens’s theory of radical modernity is the relationship between modern institutions and abstract systems. According to him modern institutions are bound by ‘the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems’ (CM 83). The future-oriented nature of modernity is largely structured by trust vested in abstract systems, in particular in the trustworthiness of established expertise (CM 83–4). According to Giddens ‘the reliance placed by lay actors upon expert systems is not just a matter (as was often the case in the premodern world) of generating a sense of security about an independently given universe of events. It is a matter of the calculation of benefit and risk in circumstances where expert knowledge does not just provide that calculus but actually creates (or reproduces) the universe of events, as a result of the continual reflexive implementation of that very knowledge’ (CM 84).

What this means in a globalised modernity according to Giddens is that no one can opt out of ‘the abstract systems involved in modern institutions’ (CM 84). There are no others (Kaspersen 2000). In modernity ‘the dangers we face no longer derive primarily from the world of nature’. Rather, threats (such as ecological decay) ‘are the outcome of socially organised knowledge, mediated by the impact of industrialism upon the material environment’ (CM 110). They are part of what Giddens calls the new ‘risk profile’ introduced by the advent of modernity. By a risk profile he means the particular ‘portmanteau of threats or dangers characteristic of modern social life’ (CM 110). According to Giddens, risk and danger (like everything else) have become secularised in modernity (CM 111). He focuses on the menacing nature of the globalisation of risk, the potential, for example, of nuclear war, ecological disaster, etc. However, he argues that because we are constantly bombarded with information about global risks on an everyday basis we tend to switch off: ‘Listing the dangers we face has itself has a deadening effect. It becomes a litany which is only half listened to because it seems so familiar’ (Bailey cited in Giddens, CM 128). Risk discourses in this sense are, according to Giddens, background noise. Furthermore, he also states that the more we know about modern risk, the more we recognise the limits of so-called ‘expert’ knowledge. This according to Giddens ‘forms one of the “public relations” problems that has to be faced by those who seek to sustain lay trust in expert systems’ (CM 130).

Riding the juggernaut of modernity

‘Radical’ or ‘high’ modernity is according to Giddens a ‘runaway world’, a ‘juggernaut’ veering out of control. No specific individuals or groups are responsible for this juggernaut or can be compelled to ‘set things right’ (CM 131). While sociologists have often criticised Giddens for making sweeping generalisations in his theory of radical modernity (Kaspersen 2000), he is keen to stress that he recognises the juggernaut of modernity is not all of a piece. It is made up of diverse and contradictory forces. However, despite the bleak picture Giddens paints, it is not – according to him – all hopeless. We should not/cannot ‘give up in our attempts to steer the juggernaut’ (CM 154). Giddens puts forward his notion of utopian realism, a critical theory without ‘guarantees’. This theory he argues must be ‘sociologically sensitive’ and ‘geopolitically, tactical’, in order to ‘create models of the good society’. His focus here is on linking what he calls ‘emancipatory politics’ with ‘life politics, or the politics of self-actualisation’ (CM 156). Emancipatory politics for Giddens refer to ‘radical engagements concerned with the liberation from inequality or servitude’. Social movements, he argues, provide instruction to potential future transformations (e.g. labour movements, ecological movements) (CM 160–1). One of the biggest challenges we face in a radical modern world is environmental decay. ‘Since the most consequential ecological issues are so obviously global, forms of intervention to minimise environmental risks’ will, as Giddens argues, need to be on a global scale (CM 170). He states that an ‘overall system of planetary care might be created, which would have as its aim the preservation of the ecological well-being of the world as a whole’ (CM 170). Giddens ends his analysis by stressing the urgency of the need for change on a global scale with respect to environmental decay, lest we end up as a ‘republic of insects and grass’ (CM 173).

Radical politics

According to Giddens, the problems prevalent within radical modernity – such as ecological decay – require radical political solutions. In Beyond Left and Right (Giddens 1994b) and The Third Way (Giddens 1998) Giddens seeks to develop what he calls a radical politics of the centre, a widespread philosophy and approach for the left. He restates many points articulated in CM, that the world of the late twentieth century has not turned out as the founders of socialism anticipated. They felt that the more we collectively know ‘about social and material reality’, the more we will become masters of our own destiny (BLR 3). As Giddens outlines in his work on radical modernity, the world we live in today is not one subject to tight human mastery. Almost to the contrary, it is one of dislocation and uncertainty, a juggernaut veering out of control, a ‘runaway world’ (BLR 3, CM).

Risk again forms a central position in Giddens’s work on radical politics; in this context he focuses in particular on what he calls ‘manufactured uncertainty’ (BLR 4). Giddens argues that ‘manufactured risk is a result of human intervention into the conditions of social life and into nature’ (BLR 4). Manufactured uncertainty for Giddens is the outcome of ‘the long-term maturation of modern institutions’. However, it has also rapidly increased as a result of ‘a series of developments that have transformed society (and nature) over no more than the past four or five decades’ (BLR 4). There are four main contexts in which we confront high-consequence risks coming from the extension of manufactured uncertainty. Each of these corresponds to an institutional dimension of modernity as outlined in CM. These are: the impact of modern social development on the world ecosystem, the development of poverty on a large scale, and the widespread existence of weapons of mass destruction, together with other situations in which collective violence looms as a possibility. The fourth and final source of global crisis concerns the large-scale representation of democratic rights, including the inability of vast numbers of people to develop even a small part of their human potential (BLR).

Beyond socialism and conservatism

Giddens argues that if we are to effectively address these problems posed by radical modernity we need to develop a radical political position beyond the political le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Anthony Giddens: Living with Radical Modernity
• 2 Pierre Bourdieu: Capital and Forms of Social Suffering
• 3 Bruno Latour: Rethinking Modern Social Life
• 4 Donna Haraway: New Modes of Sociality
• 5 Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Social Life
• 6 Jean-François Lyotard: Living in Postmodernity
• 7 Michel Foucault: Power over Life
• 8 Jean Baudrillard: Terror, Death, Exchange
• 9 Emerging Sociological Themes and Concerns
• 10 Conclusion
• References
• Index