Conversations with Anthony Giddens E-Book

Anthony Giddens

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PCVS-Polity Conversations Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 342

Beschreibung

Anthony Giddens has been described as 'the most important English social philosopher of our time'. Over twenty-five years, and even more books, he has established himself as the most widely-read and widely-cited social theorist of his generation. His ideas have profoundly influenced the writing and teaching of sociology and social theory throughout the English-speaking world. In recent years, his writing has become much more explicitly political, and in 1996 he took up his high-profile appointment as Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. It is in this new position and with these new political ideas that he has been described as the key intellectual figure of New Labour in Britain. Following the astonishing success of Labour in the 1997 General Election, his ideas have been the focus of intense interest. In this series of extended interviews with Chris Pierson, Giddens lays out with customary clarity and directness the principal themes in the development of his social theory and the distinctive political agenda which he recommends. This volume will be of great interest to second- and third-year students in sociology and social theory, politics and political theory, as well as to the general reader.

Leseprobe

Conversations withAnthony Giddens

Making Sense of Modernity

Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson

Polity Press

Copyright © Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson 1998

The right of Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1998 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6642-6 (Multi-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 13½ pt Berkely Medium by Ace FilmsettingPrinted and bound by T J International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

The Sociology of Anthony Giddens: An Introduction (Martin O’Brien)

Interview One: Life and Intellectual Career

Interview Two: The Sociological Classics and Beyond

Interview Three: Structuration Theory

Interview Four: Modernity

Interview Five: From the Transformation of Intimacy to Life Politics

Interview Six: Politics Beyond Left and Right

Interview Seven: World Politics

Centre Left at Centre Stage

The Politics of Risk Society

Beyond Chaos and Dogma

Risks, Scares, Nightmares

Preface

As Martin O’Brien’s introductory essay makes clear, Anthony Giddens is something of a social science phenomenon. Over a quarter of a century of unrelenting productivity, he has become established as one of the world’s most authoritative and widely cited social theorists. His interests are remarkably diverse, from the driest of Continental philosophy to the therapy-speak of the self-help manual, and his work builds upon a critical engagement with an extraordinary array of texts from within and way beyond the canon of the social sciences. He has helped to develop a whole new lexicon with which we can grasp what it means to live in the rapidly changing world of modernity: structuration, practical consciousness, time-space distanciation, manufactured risk, life politics. As if this were not quite enough, Giddens has also made the time to co-found his own publishing house, head up the new Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and still bear witness to the failure of his beloved Spurs football team to recreate the successes of his north London youth.

In 1997, Giddens took up his most significant challenge as Director of the London School of Economics. Giddens has a very clear view of the special role of the LSE. The School has always been engaged in a special way with the real world of politics and policy-making, especially in periods of systematic reform. In recent years, Giddens has himself shown an increasing interest in and engagement with the world of mainstream politics and, since arriving at the LSE, has rapidly set about creating the links that will make the School’s ‘special relationship’ with the wider world of political practice work. That the arrival of a new and activist Director at the LSE should be so closely followed by the election of the first centre-left government for a generation has made for exciting times. And Giddens’s belief in the importance of the ‘radical centre’ and of a ‘Third Way’ that goes ‘beyond right and left’ has made him a popular and influential figure at the top of the New Labour hierarchy.

The interviews which make up the greater part of this book were all conducted within months of Giddens’s arrival at the LSE and in the aftermath of the New Labour success of 1 May 1997. They seek to cover the full range of his thought since the early 1970s, beginning with his engagement with the makers of ‘classical’ sociology and concluding with his thoughts on the nature of world politics under ‘reflexive modernity’. The style is conversational and technical jargon is kept to a minimum. I have tried to ask the questions which any interested reader might pose and left Giddens to answer in his own, uniquely clear and concise voice.

Giddens remains a controversial figure. His critics insist that his work is not just wide-ranging and diverse but shallow and eclectic. They argue that he never stays in one spot long enough either to be pinned down or to establish the truth of what (for them) remain largely unsubstantiated conjectures. But even his fiercest critics would find it hard to deny that Giddens’s work fizzes with challenging ideas and provocative suggestions. Others will simply want to admire and learn from this intellectual tour de force.

Chris PiersonNottinghamMarch 1998

Acknowledgements

The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:

London Review of Books for Anthony Giddens, ‘Risks, Scares, Nightmares’ (review: ‘Why sounding the alarm on chemical contamination is not necessarily alarmist’), London Review of Books, 5.9.96;

Polity Press for Anthony Giddens, The Politics of Risk Society’ (‘Risk Society: the Context of British Politics’) in Jane Franklin, ed., The Politics of Risk Society (1997) pp. 23-34;

New Statesman Ltd for Anthony Giddens, ‘Beyond chaos and dogma. . .’, New Statesman, 31.10.97; and Anthony Giddens, ‘Centre left at centre stage’, New Statesman, May 1997, Special edition.

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

The Sociology of Anthony Giddens: An Introduction

Martin O’Brien

Anthony Giddens is one of the leading British sociologists of the post-war period. His writings span more than three decades of social and political change and have been at the forefront of the development of sociological theory and practice in the 1980s and 1990s. His interpretations of the classical sociological traditions have been a central pillar of much undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in sociological theory for twenty years (and continue to be so) and his imaginative reconstruction of sociology’s central concerns has stimulated academic debate and intellectual controversy in equal measure. He is an agenda-setting social theorist, a virtual one-man publishing industry, and a political philosopher of growing influence, and he has now taken on the professional challenge of directing the London School of Economics and Political Science in the uncertain era of the first Labour government since the 1970s.

In introducing the extraordinary breadth of Giddens’s thinking to the new reader, I will focus on the outlines of his overall project, rather than on the critical details of any of its specific aspects. In particular, I will emphasize the connections between the different strands of his diverse output in order to provide a conceptual map of his theoretical and philosophical thinking. In this way, I want both to give a sense of the importance of his work and to disclose some of the critical questions that his reconstruction of sociology raises. I begin with some comments on Giddens’s understanding of the discipline of sociology before going on to sketch in some of the main contours of his work.

The sociological enterprise

According to Giddens, sociology is a special kind of intellectual discipline. Unlike physical scientists, a sociologist seeks to understand a world that is already understood by its members. The ‘objects’ of sociological inquiry – what people say and do, what they believe and desire, how they construct institutions and interact with each other – are unlike the objects of natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry or biology, in so far as people’s actions and interactions, their beliefs and desires, are a central feature of the world that the sociologist investigates. Moreover, this world cannot be reduced to one ‘correct’ set of meanings or explanatory system. The social world is irreducibly characterized by competing and sometimes conflicting frames of meaning, understandings, and patterns of belief. When physicists dispute with each other about whether (and why) the universe is expanding, they are disputing the single, unique cause and character of the basic physical relationships between energy and matter. When sociologists dispute with each other about whether (and why) society is divided by relationships of class, gender, ethnicity or personality, they are disputing the complex intersections between different layers of social experience and action. Sociologists must develop alternative kinds of explanation for each of these social forces because there is not one unique cause and character of the basic relationships between individuals and society.

To take another example, a chemist, in seeking to understand the properties of water, need not wonder whether some atoms of hydrogen intended to bond with some atoms of oxygen to produce a pond, a lake or an ocean; even less what it means to the different hydrogen atoms to get together with oxygen atoms to make water. A sociologist, on the other hand, is faced precisely with the problem that people have motivations and purposes for doing what they do, that (mostly) they know why they are doing the things they do, and that the meaning of their actions and interactions is, at least to some degree, transparent to them. Whilst the hydrogen and oxygen atoms did not intend to produce the lake or the ocean, people manifestly do intend to get married or divorced, live in town or countryside, work for wages or employ others to do so for them. It may be that some people get married or go to work in spite of the fact that they do not want to, but they could not marry or work unintentionally. Thus, unlike the natural sciences, sociology must seek to understand the relationships between people’s intentions and purposes and the character of the social world they inhabit.

The sociological problem, however, is yet further complicated by the fact that sociologists belong to the world they research: they employ the same kinds of everyday routines to manage their lives and engage in meaningful actions and interactions with the people and institutions which are the objects of their study. The social being of the sociologist, including what the sociologist knows about the objects of her research, is inescapably mediated by the social world she inhabits. In accounting for that world the sociologist must draw upon the common-sense understandings and the socially embedded beliefs and meanings that make it what it is. Whereas the chemist in my earlier example does not and cannot draw upon the hydrogen atom’s account of its physical existence, the sociologist must draw upon people’s ordinary accounts of their social existence. The sociologist is first and foremost an ordinary member of the world she investigates whose explanations of that world, like those of every other individual within it, are part and parcel of its basic character.

In this respect, the sociologist’s task – of explaining how the social world works or how and why a society is organized in one way rather than another – appears, at first sight, as a second-order account, or gloss, on how all of us ordinarily explain the world for ourselves. After all, if people know what they are doing and why, at least most of the time, if they know and understand the causes and consequences of their daily, routine activities, then the sociologist’s account merely adds to the total number of explanations of the world that can be given and is neither more nor less insightful, rigorous or accurate than any other. What, then, does the sociologist do that might lead anyone to suppose that a professional sociologist’s account of the world had any value?

Giddens’s response is to propose that sociology performs a ‘double hermeneutic’: it spirals in and out of the knowledges of everyday life. Its fate is always to become entangled in the common-sense accounts by which people explain their world. Concepts and ideas that have been extensively developed in sociology, notes Giddens – like ‘social status’, the ‘charisma’ of religious and political leaders, or ‘moral panics’ – are now widely used in the media and in ordinary, everyday discussions. Social research into divorce rates, the distribution of health and illness, income and lifestyle, the effects of the media, patterns of family formation and much more is now a central pillar of local and national policy formulation. Sociological knowledge is destined to become ‘what everyone knows’ because sociological knowledge is precisely one of the main means by which members of modern society come to understand and account for the workings of that society. Sociological knowledge enters into, becomes a part of and helps to transform the very world that it seeks to explain and analyse (see Giddens, 1996: 4-5, 77). In this respect, the sociological enterprise is a critical endeavour: it draws upon the ordinary meanings shared by people in society but reformulates and expands them in order to assist in the process of positive social change. It is a conscious exercise in what Giddens calls social reflexivity (which I explain in more detail below): the reflective application of knowledge about the social world to meet the challenges of new circumstances and conditions in the social world. Stated thus, the idea appears alluringly simple, but its emergence in Giddens’s work and its diffusion throughout professional sociology have involved a long and arduous expedition through the jungles of classical and contemporary sociological thought.

Settling accounts with the classics

Giddens began writing and publishing on classical sociological theory in the late 1960s. At the time, the discipline’s understanding of the works of classical theorists (notably Marx, Weber and Durkheim) was dominated by American traditions – and, in particular, by the writings of Talcott Parsons. Not only were these traditions dominant in interpreting the classics, they also tended to be dominant in determining how these should be applied to practical problems such as deviance, health and illness, mass media effects, or social integration, for example. During the 1960s Giddens addressed both of these tendencies simultaneously In relation to the first, he reconsidered the sociologies of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel. In relation to the second, he expended a great deal of energy on reconsidering the sociology of suicide. The choice of this problem as a vehicle through which to explore sociological theory was significant in a number of ways. It was significant because it led Giddens to a systematic reappraisal of the work of Émile Durkheim – whose own study of Suicide in 1897 (Durkheim, 1897) had represented an attempt to cast the new discipline of sociology as a positive, objective science of society. It was significant also because, as Durkheim had recognized, the study of suicide exposes a fundamental theoretical task of sociological inquiry. That task is to reveal how a social science which deals with social forces, social structures and social action can understand an event that, common-sensically, appears intensely personal and private. A third way in which the problem of suicide was significant was that, in his treatment of the topic, Giddens was forced to address a radical division within sociology between two apparently opposed and mutually exclusive approaches to the study of a common problem – the ‘positivist’ approach and the ‘phenomenological’ approach – representing two distinct sociologies inhabiting the post-war academy (see Dawe, 1970).

In brief, the positivist approach, drawing on Durkheim’s methods and guidance, attempted to show the objective correlations between rates of suicide and various external factors such as urban isolation (Sainsbury, 1955). The phenomenological approach, drawing on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, investigated how the event of a death is given the subjective meaning of ‘suicide’, under what circumstances and with what consequences. Whilst the positivist view accepts official data on suicide rates as presenting, more or less, an accurate picture of its social reality, the phenomenological view undermines this idea by showing that cultural and subcultural factors influence whether any particular death will or will not be classified as suicide – either officially or otherwise (see Douglas, 1967). The ‘two sociologies’ division, in relation to the suicide problem, can be summed up in the form of two contrasting questions: is the sociological concept of suicide equivalent only to what is officially recorded as suicide by coroners and other functionaries? Alternatively, is it the task of sociology to probe the cultures and subcultures in which people understand and give personal significance to deaths as suicidal events?

In spite of expending much intellectual energy on this conundrum, Giddens’s approach to the specific question of suicide in sociological theory has not been widely adopted by the social science community, partly because the analytical problem of suicide dropped off sociology’s intellectual agenda. But his exposure to the problems that it throws up have reverberated throughout his work ever since. From the early 1970s, the suicide problem begins to drop off Giddens’s own theoretical agenda and he takes up, instead, some of the broader theoretical issues that were raised by his encounter with it. In particular, the effort to interweave the positivist strand of Durkheim’s thought with the phenomenological strand of Husserl’s philosophy, although often not explicit, characterizes his writings throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1971, Giddens published Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, a book which remained his best-known work for some ten years and which – remarkably, given the numerous texts on the same topics that have appeared since – remains one of the most valuable sources on Marx, Weber and Durkheim. The book signalled the beginning of an extensive assessment of the complex layers of sociological theory in which Giddens is still engaged. In 1972 two related books appeared. One was an edited collection of Durkheim’s writings (Giddens, 1972a), the other a short reflection on Max Weber’s social and political writings (Giddens, 1972b). The next year saw the publication of The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (Giddens, 1973), which was followed in 1974 by an edited collection on positivism and sociology (Giddens, 1974) and a collection on élites in British society (Giddens and Stanworth, 1974). Throughout this time Giddens was also busy writing articles for the professional press and in 1977 a collection of these essays appeared under the title Studies in Social and Political Theory (Giddens, 1977). These essays extended Giddens’s treatment of the sociological classics and also engaged with other important and emerging traditions in social science – represented by, amongst others, Talcott Parsons and structural functionalism, Jürgen Habermas and critical theory, and Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. In this period of theoretical and philosophical reflection, Giddens established the basis on which his later writings would propose a new sociological paradigm, structuration theory, whose outlines were tentatively hinted at in New Rules of Sociological Method (Giddens, 1976).

The title of this (1976) book is instructive for several reasons. Like Giddens’s earlier focus on the suicide problem in sociology, the title of the 1976 book recalls the significance of Émile Durkheim to contemporary sociology. In 1895, Durkheim published his statement of what sociology should be in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895). For Durkheim, sociology is a systematic, disciplined, empirical science which treats the world as a source of objective data, comparable to the natural sciences and uninfluenced by the subjective beliefs and intentions of its members. For Giddens, in contrast, renewing sociology’s outlook in the second half of the twentieth century requires that the subjective be brought back into the sociological fold – although in ways not envisaged by Durkheim. In short, for Giddens, sociology should attend to the world as a world that holds meaning and personal significance for its members, whose intentions, in one way or another, are central to sociological understanding. Otherwise, the discipline has no hope of explaining how each individual contributes to and helps to shape the collective history of society. New Rules of Sociological Method is at the same time an acknowledgement of the importance of Durkheim to Giddens’s sociology and a settling of accounts with the Durkheimian tradition. Although the focus of the book is a critique of interpretative (or, loosely, phenomenological) sociologies, it is also a conscious acknowledgement of the need to go beyond Durkheim. After the publication of New Rules, a fresh chapter in Giddens’s sociology begins and his new paradigm, structuration theory, is given its first systematic outline, three years later, in Central Problems in Social Theory (Giddens, 1979).

The theory of structuration

I have spent some time on Giddens’s relationship to Durkheim’s sociology, in particular, because it is central to his – or any – proposed reconstruction of the discipline. This is not to say that other classical sociologists – Marx and Weber, in particular – have not been important in his work, for they have. But Durkheim is the most important classical influence in structuration theory because his legacy leads Giddens to adopt a highly formal and abstract idea of ‘social structure’. Whereas Marx, for example, described the structures of the capitalist system often in the most vivid and graphic detail – the factories, the slums and warrens, the engines of production, the opulence of the bourgeois class, the inevitable denigration and degradation of the proletariat, the formation of working-class movements and parties, and so on – Durkheim described structures indirectly, by analogy with the cells and organs of living bodies. Social structures were held together by the glue of ‘social bonds’ that were only visible to the sociologist abstractly – as more or less stable and ordered patterns of social integration. Giddens takes up a comparable formalist approach, but he argues that the concept of ‘structure’ in itself is of no use to sociology and that sociologists should speak of the ‘structuring properties’ of social interaction as media through which people achieve their purposes and goals.

If sociology is to understand the world as a world that both holds meaning for its members and is, at least in part, reproduced and transformed by them, then any sociological account of that world must recognize, so Giddens argues, that ordinary people’s own accounts of it are themselves sociologies of a kind. Sociological knowledge and understanding are not the sole privilege of professional sociologists. People’s routine behaviour both exposes and expresses the importance of sociological knowledges in the conduct of everyday life. Conversational rules, behavioural expectations or intimate interpersonal rituals, for example, are embedded in knowledge about how and why social life happens: who speaks or is silent and when, who stands or sits and why, who belongs or does not and where, who is revered or reviled and how – these are mundane constituents of everyday sociologies. Knowledge (however partial or fragmented it may appear) of how the social world works is embedded in the day-to-day actions and interactions of people living out their lives. It forms ‘practical sociologies’ that people use without, usually, consciously thinking about them. Such knowledge of how the world works is analogous to the rules of language use. Competent speakers of a language can use rules of grammar in order to communicate with each other but they do not need to make their grammatical knowledge an explicit feature of what they are saying. Indeed, if speakers and hearers always had to establish rules of grammar every time they communicated something, they would communicate very little at all. In using rules of grammar in order to communicate what they intend, speakers unintentionally reproduce them as rules of grammar. When I speak, my intention is to communicate a meaning and I may manipulate certain grammatical rules in order to make what I say more plausible, convincing or poetic, for example. However, whilst I may consciously orient to grammatical rules in order to realize my intentions, it cannot be said that my intentions include the reproduction of those grammatical rules. The reproduction of the rules of grammar is, from the point of view of my use of them, an unintended consequence of my effort to communicate a meaning.

Comparably, suggests Giddens, people also know ‘rules’ of social action and interaction that they do not need to formulate explicitly in order to live in society or to deal with social institutions. People draw on rules of action and interaction as resources that enable them to get things done on an everyday level. But this ‘drawing on’ has the consequence of reproducing those rules as structuring properties of their action and interaction. The apparent objectivity of the social world, the ways that it appears, from the point of view of any individual, ordered and rule-governed, are in reality an unintended consequence – an outcome neither premeditated nor designed by any one person or group – of the routinized practices that all individuals must employ in order to conduct their daily affairs.

Giddens does not deny that there are differences between rules of language use and social rules. His point is that the structuring properties of social action, like the rules of language use, are not only constraints on what can and cannot be achieved: social structures are not simply ‘facts’ that are external to or constraining upon the use that people make of them. Rather, they are conditions of social action that are reproduced through social action. In simplified form, this is what Giddens means when he writes:

As I shall employ it, ‘structure’ refers to ‘structural property’, or more exactly, to ‘structuring property’, structuring properties providing the ‘binding’ of time and space in social systems. I argue that these properties can be understood as rules and resources, recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems. Structures exist paradigmatically, as an absent set of differences, temporally ‘present’ only in their instantiation, in the constituting moments of social systems. (Giddens, 1979: 64)

The elaboration of structuration theory after 1979 takes some very complex and divergent routes. It is pitched against Marxist sociologies of social change in A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Volume 1: Power, Property and the State (1981). Here, Giddens rejects the linear view of historical progress proposed by Marx – in which one mode of production inevitably gives way to another under the combined weight of its internal contradictions and a revolutionary class itching to overthrow existing conditions. Instead, Giddens develops a novel typology of social systems as arrangements of time-space relations – a theme that is extended in The Constitution of Society (1984), which is the formal (and, at least so far, final) statement of structuration theory In brief, each historically located society encodes relations of time and space in its institutions, habits and practices. Social action of any kind is always situated in time and space but it also gives substance to time and space. In premodern societies, time and space are connected intrinsically to ‘place’. Activities which occur at particular times – working, exchanging goods and services, even conversing – all transpire in limited and tightly bounded spatial contexts. The ‘when’ of activity is intimately connected to the ‘where’ of activity. In the modern world, in contrast, time and space are organized independently of each other: today, economic exchanges may take place across continents and time zones at the press of a computer key; telecommunications media make it possible to converse across vast distances and also to beam images of events from any one part of the world onto a screen virtually anywhere else in the world instantaneously or, as in Match of the Day, in endless replay. Time and space in the globalized modern world have been ‘disembedded’ from their traditionally local contexts of action. All social action occurs in time and space but the ways that time and space are organized through social action differs between modern and traditional societies.

Structuration theory is also applied to the question of the state and state violence in The Nation State and Violence (1985) (volume 2 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism) and underpins diverse essays on contemporaneous sociological problems – including questions of ideology space and time, revolution, social class, and power. At this stage of his writings, however, the question of the ‘modern’ becomes increasingly and explicitly central to Giddens’s project. In fact, the later texts that are addressed specifically to this question, which I discuss next, are all rooted in the concepts and perspectives put forward as the theory of structuration during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Are we modern?

The idea that the world today is a ‘modern’ world is an embedded part of common-sense ways of thinking: it seems an obvious, indisputable fact. By all common-sense measures and standards, the contemporary world is incomparably modern, more intensively and extensively modern than early twentieth-century modernist artists and architects could have dreamed. Any simple comparison between life in the 1990s and life in the 1890s would suggest that there have been very many technological and social developments. Jet engines, video-recorders, microwaves, computers, nuclear power, space shuttles, genetic manipulation, a welfare state (for the time being), television, antibiotics, and so on all appear to confirm how much more complex, sophisticated and advanced is the world today than in the past. In comparison to the 1890s, then, life in the 1990s appears to be indisputably ‘modern’, so much so, in fact, that for some it is even more than modern, it is ‘post-modern’.

But what is it to be ‘modern’? What makes contemporary society more modern than the societies of our forebears? Our great-grandparents themselves believed that they were modern in comparison to their own forerunners. In what ways is society today so different from its past that we can claim to be modern in contrast to them? In some version or another, these questions have underpinned a very large part of the discipline of sociology: working out the unique characteristics of the present vis-à-vis the past has been central to sociology’s understanding of itself. In a series of books addressed specifically to this question (Giddens, 1990; 1991; Beck, Lash and Giddens, 1994) Giddens’s contribution to this understanding has been to make that uniqueness – the distinction of the present from the past – one of the central problematics of contemporary sociology. According to Giddens, the modernity of the world, what it is to be modern, is precisely the social arrangement of contemporary society as a world that has superseded its past, as a society that is not bound by the traditions, customs, habits, routines, expectations and beliefs that characterized its history. Modernity is an historical condition of difference; in one way or another a displacement of everything that has gone before. Note, here, that Giddens is not saying that there are no longer any traditions. Nor does he claim that people do not believe things that were believed by our forebears. On the contrary, Giddens proposes that the world today is a ‘post-traditional’ world to the extent that uncountable traditions, beliefs and customs mingle with each other. In this world, as Durkheim had claimed in 1898, no one tradition can hope to hold sway and no one customary mode of action can stand as the foundation for living one’s life in the complex and ever-changing circumstances of the present. Traditions and customs, beliefs and expectations, today are adaptable, bendable, ‘plastic’ resources in a globalized, cosmopolitan world of intersecting cultures and lifestyles. Thus, the modern world does not bring about the death of tradition. Instead, it locates and contextualizes traditions as alternative contexts of decision-making and as alternative sources of knowledge, value and morality. If once we lived in a traditional world, today we live in a world of traditions. In simplified form, this is what Giddens intends when he writes: ‘Where the past has lost its hold, or becomes one “reason” among others for doing what one does, pre-existing habits are only a limited guide to action; while the future, open to numerous “scenarios”, becomes of compelling interest’ (1994: 92-3).

This transformation of tradition is unique to modernity. It is central to the distinction between the modern form of society and the premodern form of society and is institutionalized through the former’s bureaucratic, commercial and technological systems. Although, today, the transformation is more clearly visible than ever before, this is because its long-term consequences are now more extensively experienced and more intensely engaged. Our great-grandparents were, indeed, modern but their society comprised a form of ‘simple modernization’ whereas, today, we have entered an age of ‘reflexive modernization’. This term means that the contemporary era is characterized by a high degree of what Giddens calls ‘social reflexivity’. Social reflexivity refers to a society where the conditions in which we live are increasingly a product of our own actions and, conversely, our actions are increasingly oriented towards managing or challenging the risks and opportunities that we ourselves have created. In earlier stages of history, human beings lived in conditions that were dependent to a large degree on external forces. The rhythms of the seasons, the cycles of night and day, the extremes of weather and the impenetrability of natural environments (the depths of the ocean or the heights of the skies, for example) comprised external limit points to human action. In our own society, night and day or the rhythms of the seasons are arbitrary temporal divisions in the context of a twenty-four-hour, three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day-a-year global economy. The depths of the oceans and the heights of the skies are resources that provide marine food or enable sea and air mobility and cable and satellite communication.

Furthermore, what used to be ‘limits’ to social action are now saturated with the consequences of that action. On the bottom of the ocean and in the outer limits of the atmosphere the environmental consequences of modern industrial society continue to accumulate. Whether one believes in the reality of global warming or not it cannot be denied that the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat are saturated with the chemical contents of industrial society. If the meteorological office issues urban air pollution warnings, if the labels on our food list the (known) chemical additives in what we eat and if the water that pours from the tap is, variously, filtered, chlorinated and fluoridated, then it must be acknowledged that the environmental conditions of modern society are heavily mediated by the technological and expert systems of that society. Today, hardly any aspect of what used to be ‘nature’ escapes the influence of human technological and social inventiveness. From beef production to human reproduction, from nature reserves to ‘experimental’ sheep, from rivers running with oestrogen to valleys dusted with nuclear radiation, human beings live in environments of our own creation: environments that are no longer simply a constraining limit to what we can do but are increasingly infused with what we do. Where premodern societies faced the threat of natural risks, modern society faces the threat of manufactured risks – risks to personal and planetary life that arise from the way that we live today.

The modernity of the world comprises all of these things – it is a characteristic less of any particular technology institution or belief system than of the seemingly limitless opportunities and risks that contemporary societies appear to offer. The modern technoscientific culture has cloned life and revolutionized agriculture, it has reduced the world to a few hours’ flying time and photographed volcanoes from space, it has introduced the microchip into the daily routines of millions of people and automated everything from acquiring money from a hole in the wall to ‘neutralizing’ an enemy with an (often not so) ‘smart’ missile. Contemporary scientific and bureaucratic procedures have provided us with both central heating and global warming, with two-minute microwave meals and ten-year-incubated CJD. The wonders of the world are matched step for step by the horrors of the world in every domain of life from eating potentially dangerous meat to swimming in the sun-kissed waters of polluted seas.

The peculiarly modern character of this paradox – the means of sustaining our collective life is the major threat to planetary (and, therefore, collective) life – is repeated in each individual’s relationships to modern society. Whereas in premodern times my relationship to society, or, in other words, my social identity, was constrained and limited by tradition, kinship and locality, today this relationship is much more ambiguous. I am surrounded by traditions of every conceivable kind, I no longer inhabit the locality of my birth, and my name – and the particular kinship connections it ostensibly denotes – means nothing at all to readers of this text. Here, I am a name on a page; there, I am a web-site address; elsewhere I am a national insurance number in a government computer. My relationship to modern society – my social identity – has become unglued from the contexts, communities and expectations that once circumscribed my (and your) knowledge of who I am and how I live. Today, I am responsible and liable for my own identity. No longer bound by external reference points, my identity is a moving projection through the complex social and institutional contours of a globalized cultural system. In this world, all individuals must strive to reconcile the modern paradox for themselves by undertaking a ‘reflexive project’ of the self: each person is required to steer his or her own, individual course between the threats and the promises of modern society.

Yet, this risky scenario is not only a source of anxiety. True, the pace and diversity of contemporary social life, the uncertainty about the impact of sophisticated technologies like genetic engineering and the environmental problems of polluting societies may create conditions for widespread apprehension and psychological turmoil. At the same time, their very social visibility indicates that people are contributing to a redefinition of what modern society should be like: how animals should be treated, how pollution should be tackled, how different cultures should interact. The public resonance of questions relating to ethical matters – human and animal rights, the responsibilities of rich nations to poor nations, the status and social organization of social differences of sexuality, ethnicity, embodiment or gender, for example – indicates that modern society, no less than traditional society, continues to encounter and struggle over issues of moral conduct. This struggle, which Giddens refers to as a process of ‘remoralization’ of social life, suggests that politics today remains as salient as ever but the foundations of contemporary political action have undergone some profound changes. No longer appealing to socialist or neo-liberal traditions in order to ground politics in morality, the new politics of reflexive modernity is moving, in the title of Giddens’s (1994) major work on political philosophy, Beyond Left and Right (volume 3 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism).

The personal and the political

The rapid transformations that characterize the modern world are not simply things that are ‘out there’, beyond the experiences, intentions and desires of ordinary people. The concept of modernity refers to the private and passionate as well as the public and rational. For example, few would disagree that the languages of intimacy have undergone some profound changes in recent times: ‘Wild child f. seeks sim. slim n/s m. 28-35 with GSOH for cosy nights in and fun nights out – Box 12345’ is a language of the emotions that differs radically from that of Shakespeare, Tennyson or Wordsworth. The public code of the personal column expresses a language of emotional negotiation: it sets out one’s stall in a swap-shop of intimate transactions and communicates desire across time and space. It declaims the most familiar sentiments to complete and total strangers whilst at the same time specifying a limited constituency (for example, ‘wild’, ‘slim’, ‘n/s’, ‘m.’, ‘28-35’, ‘GSOH’) among them. At the end of a telephone line is a voice-mail system that collects any responses to the emotional appeal for later perusal, ranking, action or disposal. If the personal column pronounces a desire for intimacy, it does so publicly in the context of an exercise of choice. Intimacy, here, contrives to be an exchange relationship: each person offers certain qualities to an audience of strangers and each specifies what qualities are valued in return.