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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Hartmut Rosa is a leading social theorist whose books on social acceleration and resonance have become milestones in discussions about the problems and promises of late modern societies. Rosa not only presents a critical diagnosis of our times but also searches for innovative solutions.
This new collection of Rosa’s essays provides an overview of his work and explores key topics and concepts in depth. Among the subjects discussed are Charles Taylor’s account of alienation, self-interpretation and social critique; the theory of acceleration and the challenges for identity formation and democratic politics in the high-speed society; the theory of resonance and its relation to alienation and uncontrollability; and the relation between social theory and moral philosophy. Among other things, this volume highlights the influence of Taylor’s social philosophy on Rosa’s work and brings out the architecture of Rosa’s social theory, in particular the opposition between the concepts of resonance and alienation.
This book by one of the most creative and influential social theorists writing today will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary social theory, critical theory and the sociology of late modernity.
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Seitenzahl: 481
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Publisher’s Note
In Defence of Inconsistency: A Note on Hartmut Rosa in English
Christophe Fricker
Introduction: Moral Maps, Time Structures and World-Relations
Frédéric Vandenberghe
Systematic romanticism
The philosophical and historical anthropology of Charles Taylor
A social theory of acceleration
A critical theory of alienation
A phenomenology of resonance and responsivity
Opening: another relation to the world is possible
Notes
1 Why We Live the Way We Live
On the Philosophy, Sociology and Politics of Life as a Practice
Introduction: how social theory, philosophy and political science can shed light on the way we live our lives
Cognitive-evaluative maps: suggestions towards a theory of action
The social construction of cognitive-evaluative maps
Implications for late modern lives
Conclusion
Notes
2 Four Levels of Self-Interpretation
A Paradigm for Interpretive Social Philosophy and Political Criticism
Interpretive social science
The basic model
Normative consequences
Refined models
Prospects for social analysis and ‘time-diagnosis’
Notes
3 Social Acceleration
Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society
I Social acceleration in the process of modernization
II What is social acceleration?
1. Technological acceleration
2. Acceleration of social change
3. Acceleration of the pace of life
III What drives social acceleration?
1. The economic motor
2. The cultural motor
3. The structural motor
IV The form and relevance of social deceleration
V Ethical and political implications
1. Situational identity and the de-temporalization of life
2. The ‘end of politics’ and the de-temporalization of history
VI Conclusion
Notes
4 Critique of Temporality
Acceleration and Alienation as Key Concepts of Social Critique
1 Sociology and social critique
2 Immanent and transcendent criteria of social critique
3 Alienation and the critique of our relationship to the world
1 Loss of autonomy: ethical liberty and total management
2 Acceleration, or, the muted violence of temporal norms
3 Alienation as late modernity’s prevailing experience
Conclusion: a critique of the conditions of our time
Notes
5 Dynamic Stabilization, the Triple A Approach to the Good Life, and the Resonance Conception
Dynamic stabilization and the escalatory logic of modernity
Systemic requirements and ethical imperatives: the Triple A approach to the good life
Alienation and pollution – or: what is wrong with the Triple A approach?
The resonance conception of the good life
Towards a social critique of the conditions of resonance
Notes
6 Is There Anybody Out There?
Muted and Resonant Relationships to the World: ‘Monomaniac’ Charles Taylor’s Analytical Focus
Notes
7 Resonance
A Key Concept in Social Theory
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 1 Four levels of self-interpretation
Figure 2 The basic model: influences and pathologies
Figure 3 Refined model of interdependence between (A) and (B)
Figure 4 Political self-descriptions and practices
Chapter 3
Figure 1 The process of modernization I
Figure 2 Motors of acceleration
Figure 3 The dialectics of acceleration and institutional stability: modern
accelerat...
Figure 4 Paradoxes of political time
Figure 5 The process of modernization II
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Time and World
Hartmut Rosa
Edited and with an Introduction by Frédéric Vandenberghe
With translations by Christophe Fricker
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Hartmut Rosa, 2026
Introduction copyright © Polity Press, 2026
English translations of chapters 1, 4, 6 and 7 © Polity Press, 2025
This English edition published by Polity Press in 2026
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose 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.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6626-6 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6627-3 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025934597
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Publisher’s Note
Chapters 1, 4, 6 and 7 were translated by Christophe Fricker.
In Defence of InconsistencyA Note on Hartmut Rosa in English
I am late to the party. The most important books by Hartmut Rosa have already been translated into English, by several colleagues, and Rosa himself has written a significant amount of his own work in English. One of the results of this ‘emergent’ landscape of English versions is a certain amount of terminological inconsistency. Translations of some of Rosa’s most important concepts differ, including Weltreichweite and Unverfügbarkeit. On the latter, Rosa has offered a reflection in the preface to the English version of the eponymous book. For both, new terms are still being introduced: Rosa has more recently tended to speak of the ‘Triple A horizon of what is – or, what can be made – attainable, available and accessible’, rather than simply ‘reach’ and ‘control’, and has proposed ‘disposability’ for Verfügbarkeit. The jury is out.
Translation strategies differ, too. While the established English version for Steigerung, ‘escalation’, is creative, ‘options’ for the equally central Optionen is less adventurous, compared to ‘choice’, which would also be available. For at least one key term, the German and English versions differ quite considerably: Anverwandlung is intuitive, and has connotations of magic and, perhaps slightly more remotely, Eucharistic transubstantiation, whereas ‘adaptive transformation’, its established counterpart, sounds rather managerial.
There are three distinct advantages to this situation. First, inconsistency indicates that the original terms are nuanced and sophisticated, and may suggest different meanings to different readers. This inevitable dynamic of intralingual translation (through interpretation) is made explicit in interlingual translation. Second, it indicates that a theory develops over time, with new aspects added by its author and his interlocutors (Rosa has repeatedly emphasized that he does not ‘own’ resonance theory but invites colleagues and readers to contribute). Finally, it shows that translation does not simply replace words, phrases or passages of an original text with new language that means ‘the same’, but offers a distinct perspective on an existing work. In other words, it can be read both alongside and instead of the text first published in one language only.
What I have just outlined with regard to terminology applies to ‘voice’ as well. I first came to know Hartmut Rosa not through his written texts but through his work as a director of a summer school for teenagers. I listened to his interactions with youngsters and was struck by his enthusiasm, the balance between intellectual rigour – never abandoned even in noisy comments during late-night table tennis matches – and outright silliness, and of course the speed at which he speaks, so appropriate to the author of the theory of social acceleration. I have aimed for ‘my’ Hartmut Rosa to be imbued with these qualities, resulting perhaps in a slightly more ‘spoken’ feel than other translations. I hope that readers feel that this inconsistency too is a gain of translation.
I would be keen to discuss all of this with colleagues, as a contribution that linguists can make to sociology.
Christophe Fricker
Introduction: Moral Maps, Time Structures and World-RelationsFrédéric Vandenberghe
With four successive generations of scholars, the Frankfurt School is now almost a centennial school of thought.1 From within the fold of critical theory a new star has risen in the intellectual firmament: Hartmut Rosa. He does not write only for his peers, but reaches out to a general and rather variegated public in a lively style with appealing metaphors and striking images.2 He’s at his best in Q&A sessions, where he listens intensely to every question and responds by illustrating abstract concepts with surprising references to politics, pop culture and everyday life. Rosa has a knack for choosing large transversal topics that allow him to interweave broad theoretical discussions in philosophy, sociology and political science with more existential issues. How individual conceptions of the ‘good life’ harmonize with systemic imperatives, or, rather, how systemic imperatives undermine the possibility of self-realization at the individual and collective level in modern societies, seems to be his central question. If his readers are interested in and moved by his work it is because he is able to connect the topics he puts on the agenda for critical reflection – personal identity, acceleration, alienation and resonance – to their personal lives. Both Social Acceleration (2005) and Resonance (2016), his major theoretical works so far, are composed like elaborate orchestral symphonies, usually with four movements and some counterpoints, that articulate moral and political philosophy with social and political theory into a critical diagnosis of the present age.3 While his transitional books are often schematic and overly programmatic,4 his classic books are more complex, composed and harmonious. They open up large vistas on conceptual landscapes in critical social theory that blend a radical critique of large-scale social systems that are out of control with a more romantic yearning for social integration, cultural significance and personal connection. With his theory of world-relations, Rosa has brought a different sensibility into critical theory.5
Systematic romanticism
In this introduction I will give an overview of Rosa’s intellectual trajectory. The presentation is divided into four sections that span four phases in his intellectual career. Each of these phases is represented by one or two major theoretical texts. In the first, formative phase (1994–2001), around the time of his PhD, Rosa engaged with Charles Taylor’s philosophical anthropology, moral philosophy and communitarian politics and laid the foundations for a critical hermeneutics of the self and a communitarian critique of modernity. In the second phase (2001–9), focusing on the temporal structures, processes and practices of early, classic and late modernity, he transformed the metaphor of acceleration into a wide-ranging, all-encompassing prophetic analysis and critical diagnosis of the times. In the third phase (2009–11), hitting middle age, the German theorist returned to his early interest in moral philosophy and complemented his sociological diagnosis of acceleration with a normative critique of alienation. Like his predecessors in the first Frankfurt School generation, he radicalized his critique of industrial capitalism, denounced alienation as an anthropological catastrophe, and put the ‘question of an alternative to modernity’ on the agenda.6 Frightened, as it were, by the radicalism of his own negative conclusions, in a fourth and last phase (2011–present), Rosa has developed resonance theory as a hermeneutically sensitive, phenomenologically inspired moral sociology of fulfilling relations to the world that complements the critical theory of alienation and reification with an affirmative philosophical anthropology. In various texts, Germany’s most famous sociologist retraces his path from acceleration to alienation and resonance or, in short, from time-relations to world-relations.7 The book on social energy he’s currently working on will probably open up another phase. Drawing on the ‘new materialisms’, it will give an ‘ontological turn’ to resonance and construct a conceptual arc that connects psychic energy (libido), social energy (effervescence) and physical energy (combustion) to explain what moves people and things and what makes them move.8 Throughout these phases, Rosa has been centrally concerned with a single theme: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ (Taylor); or, ‘What type of humanity’ (Weber) is being produced in the various phases of modernity? Or, in his own words: ‘Why do we live the way we live?’ (Chapter 1). His answer to this classical question interweaves a moral philosophical reflection on the anthropological and cultural conditions of successful identity formation with a critical sociological analysis of the social structures that lead to alienation and a political theoretical exploration of the possibilities of a more resonant society. In this way, the analysis, diagnosis and therapy of modern forms of conduct come together in a communitarian sociology of the good life in late modernity.9
Born in Lörrach in 1965, Hartmut Rosa is a child of his time. He used to play the keyboards in a rock band, called Purple Haze, and still occasionally plays the organ in his local church in the Black Forest or at the annual party of the Max Weber Kolleg, which he runs at the University of Erfurt. During the pandemic, he wrote a small book on heavy metal.10 Alternating between structural pessimism (the Frankfurt School), cultural criticism (hermeneutics) and personal optimism (with a tinge of mysticism), his sociology is not exactly of one piece. One senses that the author waivers between the ‘deep structures of classicism and romanticism’11 that have pervaded the social sciences since their emergence in the eighteenth century. Both strive for expression in his work at the same time, balancing each other out, but without ever finding complete unity. Like his romantic forebears at the University of Jena (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), where he teaches, he is ‘searching for a way to be modern without having to reject religion’ and ‘pursuing “development” without endorsing “progress”’.12 In his worldview, the romantic principle of self-realization should have the upper hand over the Enlightenment project of self-determination. In the spirit of Louis Dumont’s logic of ‘hierarchical complementarity’,13 the principles of equality and freedom should be hierarchically subordinated to the principles of authenticity and difference to complement the dominance of the former, so that the tensions between cultural holism and normative individualism can be tempered in an unstable equilibrium.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the reactivation of romantic motifs of the nineteenth century and their continuation in the modernisms of the twentieth century could thus be read and interpreted as a counter-hegemonic move within critical theory. From the vantage point of a critical theory that deploys mimetic powers against the domination of instrumental reason, romanticism, aestheticism and atheistic mysticism appear as counter-currents not against, but within the fold of, modernity. The fusion of Enlightenment and Romanticism in a communitarian critical theory of society might thus indicate a progressive and emancipatory strand within the romantic critique of modernity that renews the indictment of alienation and reification without equating the latter with modernity.
Rosa’s ‘positioning’ within critical theory cannot be understood without constant reference to Charles Taylor. Rosa wrote his doctoral thesis on Taylor’s social philosophy and his influence can be felt throughout Rosa’s whole oeuvre.14 The Canadian philosopher is quoted in almost every article that he has ever written. Taylor is for Rosa what Hegel is for Taylor. Many of Rosa’s intellectual motifs and themes, including resonance, come directly from Taylor. I am therefore tempted to answer the question ‘What holds the work of Hartmut Rosa as a whole together?’ by referring to the inspirational work of his philosophical mentor, guide and friend. While Taylor is a professional philosopher in the analytic tradition with profound knowledge of the continental tradition, Rosa is a classical social theorist who places himself in the tradition of critical theory. Both are public intellectuals on the left with ecological sympathies, romantic leanings and religious sensibilities. Both are also interested in the cultural preconditions of the formation of individual and collective identities and both are worried about the depletion of cultural resources in advanced modern societies.
In Taylor’s work, which can be considered an analytic rendering of Hegel’s social philosophy via the detour of intellectual history, one finds two interconnected but heterogeneous and contradictory strands of social self-interpretation that are constitutive of modern identity. The two strands were already summarily mapped in his great book on Hegel;15 they will be developed, refined and expanded in Sources of the Self, The Secular Age and Cosmic Connections.16 The first strand is naturalist, instrumental and utilitarian. It values objectivity, autonomy and control. It constitutes the dominant master frame of modernity. The second strand is romantic. It values subjectivity, authenticity and self-expression. While the first values ‘radical freedom’, the second treasures ‘integral expression’.17 In his book on the philosophy of Charles Taylor, Rosa opposes naturalism and expressivism/romanticism as two conflicting paradigms of society and identity. Social Acceleration shows the dead ends of a culture of autonomy and control. The necessity to synchronize practices at all levels and in all spheres of life has spawned reified systems that are out of control, undermine autonomy and alienate subjects. Resonance follows the second strand and opposes the expressive-mimetic relation of self to the world to the non-relation of alienation. It is only by taking his first book on Charles Taylor into account, I contend, that Rosa’s full intellectual landscape becomes visible. Before one can see the whole, one must look at the parts and analyse them serially and sequentially.
The philosophical and historical anthropology of Charles Taylor
In his doctoral thesis, written under the guidance of Axel Honneth at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Hartmut Rosa offers a systematic and critical reconstruction of Charles Taylor’s social, moral and political philosophy. Published under the title Identität und kulturelle Praxis (1998), this (untranslated) PhD thesis on personal and collective identity forms the basis of his whole oeuvre. Rosa asks the question ‘What holds the work of Charles Taylor as a whole together?’ and answers it with reference to the philosophical anthropology that traverses and structures Taylor’s critique of behaviourism, his hermeneutical philosophy of language, his existential phenomenology, his theory of human agency, his cultural genealogy of the modern self, his politics of recognition, his communitarian critique of liberalism and his theological reflections on secularism.18 In Taylor, philosophical anthropology comes in two complementary versions: a more fundamental one that spells out in quasi-transcendental fashion what it means to be a human being (analysed in the first part of the PhD), and a second, more historical one that explores what it means to be a modern human being (analysed in the second part of the PhD). Rosa’s dialogical reconstruction of Taylor’s trajectory is systematic. It shows that the formation of a stable personal identity presupposes a cultural background of shared worldviews and values, hence the title. It is also critical. It points to an unresolved rift in Taylor’s work between realism and constructivism, universalism and relativism, essentialism and historicism, and suggests some solutions (in the third and last part of the PhD).
Taylor spells out his vision of the Anthropos by means of three interrelated concepts: ‘self-interpretation’, ‘strong evaluation’ and ‘articulation’. His answer to the question ‘What is Man?’, or better, ‘What is it like to be a human being?’, takes the form of a ‘Best Account’ of what it means to be a human being. According to the ‘BA Principle’, one cannot describe what a human being is from the third-person perspective without ‘changing the subject’.19 To understand what it means to be human, explanations must be ‘adequate on the level of meaning’ (Weber). One must thus adopt a first-person perspective and reconstruct the self-understandings of the actors from within. One must take seriously their moral intuitions in order to understand what kind of person they want to be. Like other authors in the phenomenological and critical tradition who have also taken the ‘linguistic turn’, be it with Heidegger (Gadamer and Ricoeur) or with Wittgenstein (Apel and Habermas), Taylor assumes that life is always already ‘pre-interpreted’ and ‘pre-understood’. Verstehen is therefore not a method, but an ontological way of being-in-the-world. In the tradition of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, human life always and inevitably takes place in the ‘clearing’ (Lichtung) that opens up and discloses the world as a human world, a world in which the environment has significance and is endowed with meaning and value. It is because as ‘self-interpreting animals’ we give value to our environment that it makes sense.20 The meanings that orient action vary from culture to culture, but in each case they configure the space of possible self-interpretations in which actions occur. The interpretations of the world are of the ‘second order’. As the world is always already interpreted, they are interpretations of interpretations. ‘What is interpreted is itself an interpretation’, says Taylor; ‘a self-interpretation which is embedded in a stream of action’.21 Like in Clifford Geertz’s famous Indian story about elephants that sustain turtles, interpretations thus go ‘all the way down’; we can now add that, in Charles Taylor and Hartmut Rosa, they also go ‘all the way up’ as they lighten up the space of meanings and values in which human beings appear as human agents that are driven to their higher self by cultural worldviews, moral motivations and spiritual aspirations.
One of Taylor’s central claims is that human self-understandings and modes of action are motivated by evaluative moral frameworks, called ‘moral maps’ by Rosa, that define the standards by which subjects judge their lives meaningful, valuable and good, and construct their identity. The values a community espouses and the ideals it cherishes configure the moral choices and the personal identities of its members. Rosa underscores that one’s identity is determined, in the last instance, by the fact that one is positioned in a ‘moral space’ of common meanings and values and, in the first instance, by one’s personal ‘moral maps’ that give meaning and direction to one’s life as a whole. To become who one truly is, one must situate oneself in the ‘moral space’ that defines a community’s values and personalize it by crafting ‘moral maps’ that allow one to locate oneself in relation to what is considered good or bad, worthy or unworthy, lofty or depraved.
Based on Harry Frankfurt’s concept of ‘second order desires’, Taylor introduces the concept of ‘strong evaluations’ to refer to a reflexive ordering of desires that expresses what a person really values and cares about.22 Let’s take an example from a tourist who visits the red-light district in Amsterdam: A beautiful woman in a window hails John. Although he’s tempted by his ‘first order desire’, he decides it would be unworthy of him, degrading to the woman in the window and his wife at home, to give in to his lust. His moral aspirations to be a good husband and a decent human being define what is possible for him and orient his actions. By means of strong evaluations people define their ultimate concerns in life and, thereby, also their personal identity.
Taylor’s philosophical anthropology conjoins a cultural hermeneutics and a moral phenomenology into a transcendental inquiry into the cultural conditions of successful self-realization. It reveals a ‘double hermeneutics’23 between the collective repertoires of self-description and self-evaluation on the one hand and the personal selection of moral maps that allow a subject to orient itself in life on the other. To be human, one needs a self – a self and others: ‘One is a self only among other selves.’24 One needs to be inserted in ‘webs of interlocution’ and interiorize, as well as personalize, the values and ideals that the community puts at one’s disposal.
At both the individual and the collective level, self-descriptions and self-evaluations may be inchoate and implicit or articulated and explicit. In a synthetic article on interpretation, articulation and critique, reproduced here as Chapter 2, Rosa distinguishes four levels of self-interpretation (implicit and explicit, either at the individual or at the collective level). One of the tasks of the intellectual is to ‘articulate’ the tacit background of moral values and social practices into a ‘best account’ of their self-understandings.25 At the individual level, emotions may dimly express values and meanings that need to be articulated to become fully explicit and conscious. At the collective level, those values and meanings may exist in embodied practices (habitus) and institutions or they may be articulated in language and find their full expression in religion, philosophy, the arts and the sciences. Together, the implicit self-interpretations (institutions, habits and body-practices) and the explicit self-descriptions of society that orient conduct at both the individual and collective level form the ‘objective spirit’ of society.
By bringing the emotions, meanings and values that underlie practices into language, the array of goods to which individuals and communities adhere can be articulated, elaborated and submitted to discussion. Rosa follows the history of ideas of the Cambridge School (in particular J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, both of whom were influenced by Taylor and whose work Rosa had discovered during his stay at the London School of Economics and covered in his master’s thesis) and assumes that cultural anthropologies, social theories and political philosophies can help to articulate the self-consciousness of a society and actuate social, cultural and personal morphogenesis.26 In any case, the dialogical interplay between explicit (theories) and implicit self-understandings (practices) is what drives both personal and social history, according to Rosa.
In some of the central texts of his Philosophical Papers, Taylor has sketched out his philosophical anthropology by drawing out the connections between webs of signification, moral landscapes and a sense of self in general. The internally related concepts of ‘self-interpretation’, ‘strong evaluation’ and ‘articulation’ form the basis of his cultural hermeneutics and his moral phenomenology of the self. For a communitarian like Taylor, however, there’s nothing like an unencumbered, disembodied and uprooted self without insertion in a cultural tradition. In the Sources of the Self, Taylor presents a reconstructive hermeneutics that wants to retrieve, articulate and actualize the intellectual traditions of the West that form the moral background of the constitution of the modern self. In broad sweep, with remarkable erudition and in analytic style, he distinguishes three historical-cultural streams that are the wellspring of identity: theism, naturalism and expressivism/romanticism.
The first and oldest stream, which has largely dried up or gone underground in the secular age, is theism. It assumes that God created the world and that He is the ultimate good. The believer aspires to a life beyond human flourishing that realizes God’s plan on earth as in heaven. Whoever one is and whatever one wants to accomplish in life has to be oriented to God. The demise of this conception of ‘fullness’ and ‘holiness’ is treated at length in The Secular Age.
The second stream is naturalism. It has been the dominant worldview since the Enlightenment and assumes that the workings of the world can be fully understood by human beings, explained by science and controlled by technology. It values the objectivity of reason and conceives of the human being as a cold and disengaged (masculine) observer in a lonely world that is slightly threatening. The relations to the world are mainly instrumental-manipulative and strategic-utilitarian. In a later text, following Taylor, Rosa equates the modern conception of the sovereign self of modernity with a fivefold ‘spiritual declaration of independence’.27 The autonomous self is independent of the precepts of history, the limitations of nature, religious or political authorities, family or community traditions and transcendent powers. Completely disengaged from the world, others and himself, this lonely figure objectifies, reifies and neutralizes everything he encounters in the world. Between himself and the world, there’s a chasm, a wall even, which separates him from his body, his fellows and the cosmos. His relations to the world are cold, unresponsive and mute, as Rosa will phrase it later.
Clearly disapproving of the naturalist worldview and its bounded self, Taylor associates it with scientism, mechanism, instrumentalism, capitalism, utilitarianism, liberalism, proceduralism, atomism and individualism. At the same time, bringing the hermeneutic perspective to fruition, and applying methodological holism to disclose the contours of moral individualism, he makes it clear that the emergence of this self is not just an aberration. Behind its mechanics one can discern a positive image of Man as a free human being. Emancipated from religious tutelage, political bondage and economic servitude, the modern self is in control and treasures individual autonomy above interdependence. Although naturalism sees itself as an objective and neutral worldview, it speaks nevertheless from a moral position that it cannot acknowledge. To be free, disengaged and in control is convincing, inspiring and moving. Hence, it comes as no surprise that it continues to orient and motivate action up till today, not just in science and business, not just in production and consumption, but in all spheres of life.
The third stream is ‘expressivism’ (expressive individualism or romanticism). In frank opposition to instrumental reason, it seeks to be responsive to one’s ‘inner voice’. In France, the reveries of Rousseau are a point of departure; in Germany, the Romantic movement of the Sturm und Drang will continue to reverberate in the work of Herder, Hamann and Hegel and in poetry up till today.28 It represents a romantic counter-current to the dominant worldview of modernity. Unlike the Enlightenment view that severs the self from the world, fracturing it into oppositions between body and soul, ego and other, individual and society, Romanticism yearns for unity. It does not strive for disengagement, but for participation. If naturalism values self-determination and freedom above anything else, expressivism prizes authenticity. The deepest aspiration of the expressive self is to become a work of art – unique and universal at the same time. In romanticism, the search for one’s inner nature finds its fulfilment in self-transcendence. When the subject feels most intimately connected to nature, others and the universe, when everything resonates in the soul, the subject supposedly has found and realized its authentic self.
Once Hartmut Rosa will have reformulated his social theory in relational terms and connected it to critical theory, Taylor’s opposition between naturalism and expressivism/romanticism will reappear as an opposition between two modes of being-in-the-world, namely alienation (which disconnects the self from the world) and resonance (which reconnects it to the world) or, in more existential lingo, Geworfenheit (being thrown) and Geborgenheit (being held).
Charles Taylor is a progressive Catholic philosopher with strong Franciscan sympathies. His ultimate position seems to be that the three cultural streams of theism, naturalism and expressivism continue to be available as moral resources in the secular age. Naturalism is the dominant paradigm of the modern age, expressivism the counter-paradigm. Although theism has gone underground, it still nurtures in pianissimo the other two sources. Taylor’s reconstructive genealogy of the moral landscapes of modernity acknowledges that autonomy is the hegemonic hypergood behind the instrumental actions, but he hopes that through articulation of the moral worldviews of theism and romantic expressivism, the hypergoods of plenitude (theism) and authenticity (expressivism) can nevertheless be partially retrieved so as to inspire personal development and collective action.
While the values of freedom and efficacy are most fully institutionalized in the autonomous subsystems of society (the economy, technology, administration and law), the value of authenticity is central to the humanities, the arts and education. It has been captured, though, by mass media and commercial culture or retreated to the private sphere. As a communitarian, Taylor believes that the public sphere can and should be effectively re-moralized just as the private sphere should be re-politicized. When the community consciously defines the ‘common good’ and its members pursue common projects that give them a sense that they are in it together, the social and political preconditions of a ‘good, beautiful and full life’ can possibly be satisfied.
Both Taylor and Rosa are caught between the multiple strands of the modern imaginary. They deplore the hegemony of naturalism in all its variants; yet, as good Hegelians, they cannot simply give up the abstract morality of freedom to the ethics of authenticity. Although they tend to oppose morality to ethics, the just to the good, self-determination to self-realization, autonomy to authenticity, and control to contemplation, they know that the streams have mingled, mutually influenced and transformed each other over the last centuries without ever arriving at a stable equilibrium.
The accumulation of social pathologies and existential crises signals that the predominance of instrumental rationality over value rationality in modern societies is not sustainable. The loss of community, meaning and resonance is so acute that it threatens the very freedom that the ‘project of modernity’ advanced against the traditional order. In Acceleration, his next book, Rosa will explore the risks of a self-propelling society and technology that undermines the conditions of the ‘good life with and for others in just institutions’.29
A social theory of acceleration
Hartmut Rosa’s interest in the phenomenon of acceleration can be traced back to the year he spent as a post-doc at the New School of Social Research in New York in 2001–2. His interest in the sociology of modern time is evidenced in the reader on acceleration and power he edited with William Scheuerman.30 It contains texts by Georg Simmel, John Dewey, Paul Virilio and Reinhart Koselleck, among others. In 2004, he obtained his Habilitation in sociology and political science at the University of Jena with a celebrated book on social acceleration. Beschleunigung (translated into English in 2013 as Social Acceleration) is a thorough investigation of the cultural transformations of the temporal structures of modernity. Published in 2005, this bestseller (with more than ten print runs since) impresses by its scope and ambition, the range and variety of its theoretical sources, the complexity of its composition and the clarity of its lines of argumentation (handily summarized in Chapter 3).31 The book presupposes the cultural hermeneutics of Rosa’s doctoral thesis, but it is also much more oriented towards the social sciences. The central figures in the theoretical landscape are no longer moral and political philosophers. Classical sociologists and theorists of late modernity now occupy the midlands. The conceptual shift from ‘moral spaces’ to ‘timescapes’ coincides with the discovery of Reinhart Koselleck’s oeuvre. The father of German Begriffsgeschichte, who didn’t even figure in the bibliography of Rosa’s monograph on Charles Taylor and who put the theme of historical acceleration on the map, is now, alongside Paul Virilio and David Harvey, the most cited author.
Since Fernand Braudel’s celebrated distinction in the Annales between the three temporalities of events (‘battles’), conjunctures (‘cycles’) and structures (‘civilizations’),32 the question has arisen how the subjective experience of time can be connected to large-scale societal change. Rosa answers by pointing to the changes of temporal structures and horizons over time that sway social systems, social actors and everyday life. Drawing on the sociology of time, he shows that time structures are socially constructed, historically variable cultural representations that modulate self-interpretations at the individual, collective and historical levels of societies. In modern times, the necessity to coordinate and integrate individual actions and systemic operations has given temporal structures a pivotal position in the reproduction and transformation of industrial-capitalist societies. The imperatives of synchronization regulate all spheres of life (family, education, work, leisure, etc.) and simultaneously transform practices, individuals and societies as a whole. As a result, the integration between the levels of daily time (Alltagszeit), biographical time (Lebenszeit) and historical time (Weltzeit) becomes ever more tight on a formal level, i.e. the level of schedules and programmes. But simultaneously, on the level of meaning, it becomes more fractured because in late modernity the continuity between one’s everyday life, one’s life projects and historical progress is no longer guaranteed.
The systemic need to synchronize activities across time and space is accompanied by multiple desynchronizations between the different timescales (daily experience, life course, history) and spatial levels (micro, meso, macro). At the level of practices, the alteration of the routines of everyday life (reading newspapers, checking email, going to the gym, etc.) has significantly changed the course of the day; 24/7, day in day out, we’re packing ever more activities into the span of a single day, week or year. Even during the night, we’re increasingly restless and agitated, suffering from a whole series of sleeping disorders, like apnoea, insomnia, restless legs syndrome and even fatal familial insomnia.33 At the level of individuals and their life course, biographies have become reflexive and subject to planning, yet also more contingent, as the theory of reflexive individualization has pointed out;34 at the level of society, time itself seems to have accelerated, leading up, objectively, to systemic and social disintegration and, subjectively, to a generalized disorientation.
Rosa dramatizes Koselleck’s well-known thesis of the acceleration of history since the eighteenth century and, transposing it to sociology, introduces the logic of social acceleration as the driving principle of modernity.35 Whether one thinks modernization, first and foremost, as a process of division of labour and functional differentiation (Durkheim), commodification and exploitation of nature (Marx), formal rationalization and bureaucratization (Weber) or individualization (Simmel), underneath these master processes one can discern an anonymous logic of dynamic stabilization/destabilization that transforms simultaneously the structure, nature, culture and personality of modern social systems, as Rosa says in a rather loose application of Talcott Parsons’s AGIL-model.36
Rosa complements Parsons’s functionalist version of evolution, which is indeed upbeat, with a contrapuntal analysis of the ‘dark side’ of modernization that highlights its paradoxical reversals. As social change speeds up, functional differentiation turns into structural disintegration, the exploitation of nature clears the way to its destruction, the rationalization of culture induces disenchantment, and individualization is accompanied by massification. Capping the whole process, speed-up itself leads to the ‘fossilization’ (Weber), ‘crystallization’ (Gehlen) and ‘reification’ (Adorno) of history. Once again, the dialectic of the Enlightenment is at play in the paralysing process of social change. Acceleration undermines the principles and hypergoods (freedom, autonomy, efficacy) in whose name the growth machine was set in motion. The obsession with the control of nature, others and the self has turned into self, social and systemic domination by large-scale processes that are themselves autonomous and out of control. History loses its direction and the dialectic comes to a ‘frenetic standstill’.37
The prophetic thesis of the acceleration of history and its counterpoint – reification – is parsed out, specified, and even operationalized so as to be measurable, in a systematic theory of societal morphogenesis that distinguishes (1) technological acceleration, (2) the acceleration of social change and (3) the acceleration of the pace of life as three analytically distinct dynamics that are empirically intertwined in a Juggernaut of speed.38 Technological acceleration is an intentional, goal-directed, teleological process that seeks to speed up the transportation, communication, production and circulation of goods, services and people across time and space. Techno-scientific ‘velorutions’ bring about a new ‘spatio-temporal regime’ that fundamentally changes our mode of being-in-the-world and, by implication, also our human identity.
Unlike technical acceleration, which is conceived as a change within society, the speed-up of social change in post-traditional societies is thought of as an acceleration of society itself. It leads to a generalized morphogenesis. The scientific, industrial and political revolutions of modernity significantly accelerated social change and propelled the world into the vortex of ‘modern times’ (in German, Neuzeit means literally ‘new time’). The accelerating rates of technological, social and cultural innovation, celebrated in communist, futurist and accelerationist manifestos, upended the patterns of habitual action. Thrown into the maelstrom of continuous change, hallowed traditions were quickly rendered obsolete. Continuous adaptation to ever-changing conditions was exhilarating, but the frenzy also caused disorientation, confusion and a dizzying sense that ‘all that is solid melts into air’.39 As social change intensified, the sense of temporal continuity was lost. This was beautifully captured in Koselleck’s celebrated categorical distinction between the ‘space of experience’ (Erfahrungsraum) and the ‘horizon of expectations’ (Erwartungshorizont).40 Eventually, the gap was widened to the point of becoming a genuine ‘rupture’ of temporal continuity. At first, the continuity was ruptured between generations, later, also within generations who continued to live in the same society but in different times.
The acceleration of the pace of life was at the centre of Georg Simmel’s modernist philosophy. In the last chapter of his Philosophy of Money, he presented a coherent vision of a world in dissolution and highlighted the speeding up of the rhythms of daily life in the commercial metropolises (Paris, London, New York) of the first globalization.41 Empirical research on time-use and time-budgeting suggests that since then time has become an even scarcer resource. Objectively, we’re doing ever more things in less time; subjectively, however, we feel under constant pressure and are stressed out by contracting deadlines and expanding to-do lists.
Rosa discerns four structural drivers of acceleration (three external and one internal): capitalist accumulation (the ‘economic motor’), functional differentiation (the ‘systemic motor’), competition (the ‘organizational motor’) and the idea of an intensive life (the ‘cultural motor’).42 With Karl Marx, he shows that the accumulation of capital has brought into existence an economy that is hooked to growth. The dynamization of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services is explained by the profit motive. With Niklas Luhmann, Rosa insists that the necessity to reduce the complexity of social systems with regard to their environment compels the functionally differentiated subsystems of modernity (the economy, law, science, etc.) to develop programmes with specialized media and codes of communication that accelerate the system as a whole. In a later text, Rosa adds competition within organizations as a turbo on the economic engine of acceleration.43 The principle of competition allocates personnel and resources on the basis of merit and performance. It originated in economic organizations, but has now spread to all types of organizations (science, politics, sports, culture, etc.) and produced a type of subjectivity that is always looking to augment its chances on the market. The motorization of the capitalist economy, social systems and organizations is sustained by the cultural idea that a successful life is an intensive life, full of action and experiences. As life is short and unpredictable, one should continuously experiment, sample strong experiences and chase different sensations so as to pack as many lives as possible into a single life. Thus, eventually, a life led infinitely fast would equal an eternal life before death.
The synergies between the processes of capitalist accumulation, functional specialization, performative competition and personal self-realization have created a self-perpetuating, unstoppable and almost mythical logic of incessant growth, innovation and escalation that permeates all spheres of life and imposes itself on everybody, independently of their will. The idea that one should always keep one’s options open and expand the reaches of one’s action has transformed life into a perpetual rat race. The Darwinian struggle of the fittest culminates in the ‘survival of the fastest’.44 In order not to fall back professionally, one has to speed up life, self-optimize and run from one project to the next.
The case of academia with its demands of internationalization and impact, academic entrepreneurialism and independent fundraising, its obsession with excellence, audits and metrics, and its replacement of tenure-track positions with short-term contracts, etc., is the one we all know best from experience. Whether we want it or not, production and consumption, communication and transport, are always speeding up. Objectively, we’re always doing more in less time (more admin, more research, more grant applications); subjectively, we feel nothing really gets done. We’re getting exhausted and burned out by ever-increasing demands and a lack of time to do what we really want to do: spend time with the family, read or write a book, go on holiday or contemplate the sky.
From the perspective of Charles Taylor’s critical hermeneutics, the reification of temporal structures, the alienation of forms of life and the production of an instrumental way of being-in-the-world can be understood as the result of the dominance of the value of autonomy in modernity. The insistence on disengaged reason, individual freedom, instrumental efficacy and affective neutrality has resulted in an uninhabitable world that undermines the very subjects it was supposed to serve. The pursuit of individual autonomy has led via unintended but inevitable consequences to the emergence of quasi-autonomous systems that undermine the community, strip life of meaning and threaten individual freedom and collective self-determination.
Meanwhile the social processes – exploitation of nature, rationalization of culture, structural differentiation and individualization – that were set in motion with the advent of modernity have been swept up once again by the twin processes of acceleration (through time) and globalization (through space). The classical analyses by Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel of the ‘first surge’ of global acceleration at the turn of the twentieth century (1880–1920) have to be updated with an analysis of the ‘second surge’ (1989–2008) of accelerated globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century. To understand the new challenges of this ‘second modernity’, Ulrich Beck and Hartmut Rosa co-authored a piece in which they combined their respective perspectives in a theory of ‘reflexive dynamization’ (a contraction of Beck’s ‘reflexive modernization’ and Rosa’s ‘dynamic stabilization’).45 Accelerated globalization has interconnected societies, cultures and persons in a global ‘community of fate’. It has to face simultaneously the risks of ecological breakdown (global warming), economic meltdown (the great recession), political upheaval (populism), pandemics (Covid-19) and geopolitical strains (wars). Beyond a certain threshold, which, as a good German, Rosa situates around 1989, the accumulation of global risks reaches a tipping point. Crises proliferate, pathologies maturate, and, slowly but surely, highly developed societies start to disintegrate. Swept up by the autonomous logic of hyper-acceleration, nature, culture, structure and personalities start to fall apart.
The promises of both personal and collective autonomy have not been realized. The intertwined processes of economic accumulation through ‘appropriation’, technological innovation through ‘acceleration’ and political regulation through ‘activation’ have led to a generalized disorientation, both at the individual and the collective level.46 In late modernity (though at this stage one might as well say ‘postmodernity’), processes of ‘reflexive individualization’ have dissolved traditional identities. Set free from tradition, individuals are obliged to plan their own lives and craft their own biographies. The obligation to be free and constantly choose who one wants to be has, however, introduced a good deal of contingency in the life course. The pressure to continuously adapt to changing circumstances has undercut the possibility of projecting oneself into the future by engaging in long-term commitments. As a result, identities have become ‘situational’.47 Unable to foresee the future, subjects start drifting.
At the collective level, the loss of historicity and the exhaustion of utopian energies have led to the impossibility of steering society democratically and planning its development over time. Politics has also become ‘situational’ and ‘reactive’.48 Too slow to deal with fast systems like science (Big Science), technology (Big Technology) and the capitalist economy (Big Business), it reacts to immediate pressures, ‘muddles through’ and abandons long-term planning. The desynchronization between different subsystems puts the political system in a bind: while the shortening of its temporal horizon makes time resources scarcer, the long-term effects of scientific, technological and economic change widen its temporal horizon. It is difficult to accelerate politics. It takes time to deliberate and decide about complex and urgent issues, so those are handed over to non-democratic and non-majoritarian institutions (like central banks, constitutional courts or international organizations).
As the promises of self-determination have not been realized, Rosa is tempted by postmodern diagnoses and concludes that the ‘project of modernity’ has failed.49 Everything changes, but the movement leads nowhere. As a result of hyper-acceleration, history and politics have arrived at their end. The ‘eternal return’ of the same has finally arrived. That does not mean that nothing happens or that nothing can be done. But bereft of proper steering mechanisms, changes have lost their direction. Societies are spinning like tops and individuals are drifting, while ecological, economic and geopolitical crises accumulate.
A critical theory of alienation
Social Acceleration was written at the intersection of social theory (Sozialtheorie), the theory of society (Gesellschaftstheorie) and the diagnosis of the times (Zeitdiagnose). In a social-theoretical analysis that skilfully interweaves the timescales of everyday life, the life course and world history, it uncovered the logic of ‘dynamic stabilization’50 as the dominant socio-logic of modern times.51 ‘Modern societies appear extremely dynamic with respect to their high rate of growth, innovation and change, on the one hand, and quite stable in terms of their basic socioeconomic structures, on the other hand.’52 Like in Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’, everything changes to stay the same.
From the beginning, Rosa’s totalizing analysis of the ‘acceleration of social acceleration’ was inseparable from a critical diagnosis of the present and its ‘pathologies of dynamization’.53 It presented, literally, as we have seen, a diagnosis of the times. In German, the diagnoses of society (Gesellschaftsdiagnose) and of the epoch (Zeitdiagnose) constitute a well-defined genre within the theory of society. From Tönnies, Weber and Simmel via Mannheim, Gehlen and Schelsky to Habermas, Luhmann and Beck, German social theorists have painted their societies in broad-brush, using striking metaphors (like the ‘iron cage’) and coining snappy concepts (like the ‘risk society’) to indicate developmental tendencies, intimate epochal ruptures and warn of social crises and pathologies.54 Interpretations of the ‘signature of the age’ typically aim at two different but interrelated publics: the academic community of peers on the one hand and the enlightened public on the other hand.55 Written by social theorists, they transcend academia and use the form of the essay to reach the public sphere and inform public debates about the future of society. Diagnoses of the times are ‘self-interpretations’ by which a society that is going through significant upheavals in all spheres of life observes itself. These self-interpretations are most often associated with ‘strong evaluations’ by which various scenarios of development are judged, evaluated and ranked according to their desirability. These social self-interpretations and self-evaluations are not just self-observations, however; they are interventions in society that have the potential to actively contribute to the constitution of society.56
A theory of society becomes a critical theory when it explicitly formulates the normative criteria of its diagnosis and develops a systematic critique of social injustices and social pathologies. In the tradition of the Frankfurt School, social theory is inseparable from social, moral and political philosophy. The diagnosis of the present presupposes criteria that allow one to distinguish the normal from the pathological, but the justification of these criteria remains a properly philosophical task. Within the second Frankfurt School, two different strategies of normative foundation can be distinguished. A more procedural version that harks back to Kant seeks to ground its moral judgements in (quasi-)transcendental fashion in the formal conditions that make a rational consensus possible. This is the strategy of Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst. The other strategy, followed by Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor and Hartmut Rosa, takes a Hegelian route. It denies that one can arrive at universal truths that are transhistorical or extra-social. It argues instead that one should judge a society on its own terms and that critique should therefore be reconstructive and immanent.
The distinction between transcendent and immanent critique does not fully coincide with the distinction between liberalism and communitarianism in contemporary moral philosophy,57 but it is related to it. Communitarian theories contest the universality and ethical neutrality of liberal theories of justice, like Rawls’s and Habermas’s. Although they pretend to be independent from particular conceptions of the good, their contractual vision of justice as fairness and of the individual as an ‘unencumbered’ (Sandel), ‘punctual’ (Taylor) and autonomous self betrays that they express and embody a particular vision of the good life that is typically modern and typically Western. In Chapter 5 of this volume, Rosa calls it the ‘Triple A approach to the good life’: it seeks to make more and more resources ‘available, accessible and attainable’ to the greatest number. Updating his early analysis of the mutual imbrication of productivist and consumerist self-conceptions and the systemic imperatives of capitalism,58 he claims that the liberal mindset is responsible for the ecological catastrophe and constitutes the main blockage for the realization of the good life in a post-growth society.59 In opposition to theories of justice that invent ideal societies and procedural republics in which goods and rights would be distributed evenly and fairly, communitarian theories of the good life tend to insist that identities are shaped by different kinds of constitutive communities. As these communities are constitutive of individual and collective identities, individuals cannot have a good life without a sense of history and a moral connection to the common good.
From the point of view of critical theory that joins Nietzsche’s critique of culture with a Left-Hegelian critique of alienation, forms of life that do not offer the social conditions for self-realization and self-actualization and systematically thwart human flourishing may be considered ‘pathological’.60 Whereas theories of justice press for the redress of inequalities of basic goods through a politics of redistribution, theories of the good life denounce forms of life in which social pathologies like alienation and reification, anomie and disenchantment, depression and panic attacks abound as misdevelopments.
In a series of intermediary texts between Social Acceleration and Resonance, Rosa resumes his discussion with the moral and political philosophy of Charles Taylor, which had receded somewhat into the background.61 In Chapter 4, he places himself explicitly in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. At the same time as he takes his distance from the second generation of the Frankfurt School (Habermas), he tries to join the first (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) and the third generations (Honneth) in a radical but slightly conservative critique of modernity that explicitly draws on the communitarianism of Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer and Alasdair MacIntyre.
With Walzer and Taylor, the German sociologist assumes that social critique is strictly immanent, interpretive and reconstructive: ‘The standards of sociological “enlightenment” of social critique can and should be rooted in the society that is studied.’62 The self-interpretations and self-evaluations of a given society not only supply the critic with the language, norms and values in the name of which social criticism is proffered, they also help the analyst to translate the common complaints of that society into a systematic social diagnosis and critique.63
Thanks to an ‘articulation’ of existing moralities into a coherent self-image, which holds up as it were a mirror to society in which it can see itself, the critic can contribute to the public discussion by making its self-understandings explicit.64 This can facilitate the diagnosis of tensions, if not outright conflicts and contradictions, between its explicit and implicit, ideal and real, normative and empirical self-interpretations. On the basis of such a diagnosis of tensions between the normative constitution of a society and its existing institutions, various crises (e.g. ideological, legitimation, identity) and social pathologies (reification, alienation, anomie) can then be identified, analysed, diagnosed and, possibly, also cured. Following communitarians, Rosa reorients sociology towards the old Aristotelian question of human flourishing (eudemonia): ‘Whether we choose to believe it or not, the ultimate object of sociology, though rarely articulated (at least not consciously), is the question of the good life, or more precisely: the analysis of the social conditions under which a successful life is possible.’65 Or, in a more negative and sociological formulation: What are the social causes that explain why modern subjects have to lead a life that they themselves find unsatisfactory? Or, again, this time with reference to Adorno’s Minima Moralia: What causes a ‘damaged life’?
In continuation of the diagnoses of modernity by classical sociologists and the critique of capitalism by the early Frankfurt School, Rosa points to the development of industrial capitalism with its escalatory logic of accumulation (growth), acceleration (speed) and globalization (space) to explain why the ideals of individual and collective self-determination cannot be realized in modernity. The reification of social temporal structures into pseudo-natural forces that regulate social life makes them impervious to human control. In the third phase of modernity, the logic of dynamic stabilization has become unstoppable and oppressive. Revamping the complaint about the ‘dictatorship of the present’, Rosa does not hesitate to qualify social acceleration as a ‘new form of totalitarianism’:66
