Writing towards the end of the twentieth century, Giddens (1990) compared the experience of modernity to riding a juggernaut. Yet since that time the speed and volatility of social change has increased. From the rise of political populism and religious radicalism to rapid advances in digital media, robotics and artificial intelligence, the current global era appears to be one of constant flux. This book explores these recent developments, highlighting how our understanding of them can be assisted by the longstanding and vitally important sociological concern with the ‘problem of order’. In so doing, it analyses how the social, cultural and technological systems central to society are eroding existing social relationships and communities, leaving individuals directly exposed to their institutional logics. The effects of these changes are, however, far from uniform.
The institutional dynamism of our age has, on the one hand, provided educated, skilled and relatively affluent individuals with opportunities to forge new relationships and identities (accelerated, for example, by the Internet and new social media). On the other hand, these institutional changes have opened a social space in which those opposed to or unable to take advantage of them can promote alternative values and even reassert past ways of life that challenge the status quo. This is illustrated by the anti-establishment Brexit vote in the 2016 British referendum on European membership, and by the anti-globalization and anti-liberal sentiment that helped Donald Trump’s election to power in the same year. If these political events exemplify for some the curse of living in ‘interesting times’, they are indisputable examples of the dynamism and volatility of contemporary social life.
This introductory chapter provides a context for our subsequent discussions. It highlights the continued relevance of sociology’s historical legacy for understanding the current era, before outlining the book’s main themes. Starting with the discipline itself, the writings of those long established as founders of sociology – Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel (as well as those, including Harriet Martineau and Jane Addams, who have been reappraised as important contributors to the subject) – developed diverse theories and methods. They nevertheless converged in recognizing that enormous changes had brought about the modern societies of their day, and that dynamic processes continued to transform the institutions, social relationships and individuals populating the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The effects of these changes remain with us today, and it is as such worth noting their contours in a little more detail.
Historically, the inception of modernity was defined above all by three ‘revolutions’. Politically, the French Revolution (1789–1799) replaced Absolutist Monarchy with a secular government that ended the church’s domination of society’s institutional system. Intellectually, the Enlightenment that occurred in Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasized reason over tradition, displacing a God-centred view of the universe with conceptions of the world as amenable to human intervention. Economically, the late eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution brought about a shift towards factory and mass manufacture and away from agriculture and domestic production, as well as a steep rise in urban populations and attendant concentrations of wealth, poverty and social problems.
The modern age ushered in by these political, intellectual and economic revolutions has been depicted by Marx (1968 [1848]: 38) as one in which ‘[all] fixed fast frozen relations … are swept away’ and ‘[a]ll that is solid melts into air’. For all the interest Marx and others displayed in the novel possibilities that accompanied industrial modernity, however, this period of flux made more prominent the longstanding practical and intellectual concern with social order. Formulated most famously by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (2008 [1651]), in the context of violent civil conflict, the problem of order has been central to the development of sociology and the social sciences and is concerned with how individuals can live together without social life degenerating into a ‘war of all against all’. Given the constant change associated with modernity, one of the key challenges facing classical sociologists was to identify whether and how societal order could still be accomplished in a manner that would benefit rather than oppress those within its parameters.
Sociologists developed contrasting answers to this problem, but unanimously rejected Hobbes’s own solution, which involved installing a Leviathan – a form of government possessed of total power over life and death. They also disagreed with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utilitarian approaches of Jeremy Bentham and others who thought that societal order could emerge from individual self-interest. While Hobbes neglected past and even existing societies in which peaceable existence had prevailed for significant periods (where conflict was rule-bound and channelled through institutions), the utilitarians assumed that self-satisfying actions would produce social integration (Parsons, 1968 [1937]).
Opposing these accounts, Weber’s (1991 [1904–1905]) analysis of capitalism as an ‘iron cage’ held that rational bureaucracies would impose a systemic resolution to the possibility of destructive conflict. Other sociologists explored how shared values or norms could maintain societal stability amidst fast-paced change. Thus, Durkheim (1984 [1893], 1995 [1912]) identified a collective conscience, underpinned by the energizing force of collective effervescence, as the basis for social cohesion. Simmel (1971 [1908a, 1908b]) identified ordered social forms as emerging from individual interactions. Even Marx (1975 [1844]) viewed capitalism as an ordered system consolidated by the (false) consciousness and (partial) values generated by commodity production (in which the interests of the ruling class appear universal rather than sectarian).
Against this background the American theorist Talcott Parsons (1968 [1937]) claimed that a number of sociologists had converged in establishing a single normative solution to the problem of order, but this is an exaggeration. Indeed, classical sociological explorations of modernity as transformative not only varied significantly but also raised serious questions about the prospects for and consequences of future societal order. Weber (1991 [1919a]: 128) expressed concerns that rationalization would result in an existentially bleak ‘polar night of icy darkness and hardness’, while Durkheim (1984 [1893]) explored how rapid economic change could result in an egoistic individualism separated from shared moral frameworks. Simmel (1990 [1907]) suggested that the advance of the money economy liberated individuals from the constraints of traditional communities, but threatened to transform them into cynical, blasé and calculative beings. Marx argued that the limits of order lay within the inherently contradictory mode-of-production characteristic of capitalism, and suggested that the irrationalities of this socio-economic system would produce further economic revolution.
Far from simply espousing normative solutions to the problem of order, then, these sociological accounts balanced a concern with the prospects of societal stability alongside widely contrasting analyses of modernity’s dynamism. Despite their differences, however, classical sociologists did indeed tend to share some common ground, recognizing that while the systemic parts of society may by themselves constitute or impose an order (even if in Marx’s case the capitalist order was temporary), this institutional framework was not necessarily conducive to the creation of integrated social relationships or cohesive individual identities.
This recognition of order’s limited scope is evident in Weber’s (1991 [1919b]) depiction of how mechanized capitalism and rational bureaucracies leave individuals ruptured from social relationships based on fellow feeling and struggling to act authentically or feel complete in a world where traditional truths have been undermined. It is also present in Durkheim’s (1984 [1893]) analysis of social integration – an account associating order with the collective recognition of sacred symbols and objects, yet that acknowledges the modern system of organic solidarity has diminished the collective space occupied by these exceptional phenomena. Simmel’s (1990 [1907], 1971 [1903a]) explorations of the money economy and the metropolis paint an image of efficient and rational systems that are nevertheless indifferent to and even destructive of cohesive social relationships and the capacity of individuals to act consistently with their core personality. Perhaps most strikingly, Marx (1975 [1844]) details the alienating effects of labour within a capitalist system characterized by a division of labour in which individuals are distanced from the product and process of their work, from others they work with and from their own species capacities.
Classical sociologists thus often suggested that society’s systemic parts could form an internally coherent order irrespective of whether these institutions help cultivate cohesive social relationships and individual identities. In so doing, they made clear that the problem of order is not an undifferentiated issue, but can as Wrong (1994) suggests be explored in terms of the degrees of integration that exist within and between 1) the systemic or institutional parts of society, 2) the social relationships characteristic of society, and 3) the individual identities formed within this environment. In the fast-paced global era in which we live, moreover, the changes that continue to affect institutions, relationships and individual identities raise questions about the present existence of and the future potential for order on each of these levels of analysis. Contemporary institutional changes, indeed, often undermine the basis on which previously common social relationships and identities were sustained, and it is in this context that we explore both the opportunities and the constraints that confront those released from past interdependences as well as the new forms of association emerging in these uncertain times.
In exploring these issues further, the following chapters can be divided into two sections. Chapters Two and Three explicate the theoretical issues involved in these distinctive dimensions to the problem of order. Chapter Two emphasizes that the creation of societal order from disparate and internally complex individuals is an accomplishment that should never be taken for granted. Outlining sociology’s concern with the relationship between individuals and society, it draws on Wrong’s (1994) analysis to explicate how the writings of classical sociologists enable us to identify the three dimensions to the problem of societal order noted above: those concerned with system integration, social integration and individual integration. Chapter Three then asks how these classical engagements with the problem of order remain helpful in understanding our contemporary era of accelerating change, and develops by focusing on Georg Simmel’s writings. Simmel was especially sensitive to the speed and extent of change in the modern world. In addition, he helps us to think about how the systemic features of society can appear to overwhelm individuals, yet may also facilitate our ‘doubled participation’ within and outside them (circumstances that can create opportunities for the creation of new relationships and identities).
The second section of the book, Chapters Four to Eleven, explores these issues of order and change in relation to contemporary topics. Here we examine both transformations to longstanding societal systems (including the means by which states govern, and the changing character of employment) and newly emergent institutional environments (associated, for example, with the Internet and artificial intelligence). Chapter Four examines how the embodied basis of humankind has itself been subject to radical change. Dominant conceptions of health have altered as a consequence of system-wide changes in science and medicine that have contributed to the growing malleability of the body, while there has been an unprecedented commodification of biology itself. This has resulted in new opportunities for those able to benefit from such developments as ‘personalized medicine’, but has also stimulated new and often racialized forms of inequality and exploitation affecting those on the other side of medical trials and the organ trade. Alongside the body’s deepening commodification, however, there has been a reassertion and extension of humanist notions of identity, ideals that illustrate the ongoing proliferation of cultural forms in the contemporary era.
The heightened malleability of the body has also affected conventional notions of sex, gender and sexuality, the subject of Chapter Five, with binary conceptions of male/female identity challenged additionally by neo-liberalism (a system that remains enormously influential despite limited recent trends towards protectionism). Heteronormative conceptions of sex, gender and sexuality are still held widely, but the economy no longer supports these structurally as it once did, and now places more emphasis on individual producers and consumers. While the West still exports conventional notions of the family via foreign aid, for example, the development of individualism, individuality and individuation is making the social forms and meanings associated with gendered relationships and identities more volatile.
Chapter Six looks at another key systemic part of societies – employment – discussing how labour has become increasingly disembedded from many of those subject to its disciplines, imposing a gap between the ordering of institutions and communal social relationships. This disembedding has at the same time, however, provided the conditions in which skilled and educated individuals are able to take advantage of the possibilities associated with portfolio and flexible work. Chapter Seven follows this discussion in its concern with the economic environment in which work has been restructured in recent decades, by focusing on the influence of ‘financialized capitalism’. Here, we look at how the practice of arbitrage has restructured the economy, being implicated in both major financial crises but also in investments in the creation of new social, cultural and even biological forms.
This mention of new spheres of life leads us to the next two chapters, which assess the proliferation of forms associated with media and technology. Chapter Eight focuses on new social media and the Internet. While governments and corporate interests have exploited the monitoring and commercial potentialities of these communications media, the Internet has also provided groups and individuals with capacities to pursue their own interests and goals. In this respect, it is notable that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, spoke in February 2017 of the Internet’s capacity to ‘re-boot’ globalization, providing a system in which people could build international communities. Chapter Nine examines how new innovations in technology and artificial intelligence have created the possibility of technogenetic environments run entirely by machines, a scenario that can expand human potential massively but that also prompts particular concerns in the case of warfare.
Our analyses of the extent to which the institutional parts of society marginalize or facilitate the actions of those subject to their influence vary. Certain cases, such as the disembedding of employment, focus on the power and influence of society’s systems to effect change and impose order irrespective of the wishes of many subject to it (a process that has at times exacerbated existing patterns of racial disadvantage). This is not always the case, however, and one of the most important examples of how social groups and individuals are influencing their environment, creating social relations and forms that mediate and even threaten the institutional environments they confront, is in the area of religion. Chapter Ten examines the co-existence of secularization and de-secularization processes as evident in the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). For many politicians in the West and elsewhere, ISIS represents an evil social force that threatens established orders with uncompromising theocratic rule. In the terms of our analysis, however, it also demonstrates the capacity of certain groups to reject the systemic and social orders with which they are confronted and to use extreme violence and cruelty to impose an alternative. Chapter Eleven then explores how state institutions respond to such threats and, in so doing, examines what we refer to as the paradox of governance. In an era of change and uncertainty, governments have to confront the threats associated with terrorism and counter-terrorism, yet state attempts to impose control threaten to undermine existing sources of social integration in society. This brings us back, full circle, to the problem of order first posed by Hobbes, prompting us to ask again whether the imposition of force can substitute for the cultivation and maintenance of socially cohesive norms. Chapter Twelve, the conclusion, revisits the core themes of system integration, social integration and individual integration in the light of these discussions, highlighting some of the major trends of recent decades and also the capacity of sociology to help us understand the current era.
