Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order

234 Pages·1994·5.904 MB·English

by  Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash

REFLEXIVE MODERNIZATION
Reflexive Modernization
Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the
Modern Social Order
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
1994
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 1994 Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and
Scott Lash
Originating publisher Polity Press, Cambridge
in association with Blackwell Publishers
First published in the U.S.A. by
Stanford University Press, 1994
Cloth ISBN 0-8047-2471-7
Paper ISBN 0-8047-2472-5
LC 94-67058
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Preface vi
1 The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of
Reflexive Modernization 1
Ulrich Beck
2 Living in a Post-Traditional Society 56
Anthony Giddens
3 Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics,
Community 110
Scott Lash
4 Replies and Critiques 174
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash
Index 216
Preface
The idea of this book was originally suggested by Ulrich Beck. Scott
Lash taught for some while in Germany and Lash and Beck came to
see common threads in each other's work. Giddens and Beck gained
a proper grasp of each other's writings only at a somewhat later
date. Once this three-way interchange was established, however, a
number of striking convergences emerged between what were
originally separate bodies of work. These cluster around several
dominant themes. Reflexivity - although understood in rather dif­
ferent ways by eachfof the three authors - is one of the most signifi­
cant. For all of us, the protracted debate about modernity versus
postmodernity has become wearisome and like so many such de­
bates in the end has produced rather little. The idea of reflexive
modernization, regardless of whether or not one uses that term as
such, breaks the stranglehold which these debates have tended to
place upon conceptual innovation.
The notion of detraditionalization, appropriately understood, is a
second common theme. To speaTc of detraditionalization in the
present day at first seems odd, particularly given the emphasis of
some forms of postmodern thinking upon the revival of tradition.
To speak of detraditionalization, however, is not to talk of a society
without traditions - far from it. Rather, the concept refers to a social
order in which tradition changes its status. In a context of global
cosmopolitanism, traditions are today called upon to defend them­
selves: they are routinely subject to interrogation. Particularly im­
portant in this respect, the 'hidden substratum' of modernity,
Preface vii
involving traditions affecting gender, the family, local communities
and other aspects of day-to-day social life, becomes exposed to view
and subject to public debate. The implications are both profound
and worldwide in scope.
A concern with issues of ecology is a third common focus. Al­
though again there are some differences between us here, we agree
that ecological questions cannot simply be reduced to a preoccu­
pation with the 'environment'. The 'environment' sounds like an
external context of human action. But ecologicalissuesliave come to
the fore only because the 'environment' isjjiia£t no longer external
folrnmaivscidariife^uTiiorougHTy penetrated and reordered by it:
If human'beings once knew what 'nature'was, they do sd no longer.
What is 'natural' is now so thoroughly entangled with what is
'social' that there can be nothing taken for granted about it any
more. In common with many aspects of life governed by tradition,
'nature' becomes transformed into areas of action where human
beings have to make practical and ethical decisions. The 'ecological
crisis' opens up a host of issues concerned essentially with the
plasticity of human life today - the retreat of 'fate' in so many areas
of our lives.
The paradoxes of human knowledge that have so nourished
postmodern views - where they are often connected to the demise
of epistemology - can now be understood in more mundane, socio­
logical terms. The social and natural worlds today are thoroughly
infused with reflexive human knowledge; but this does not lead to
a situation in which collectively we are the masters of our destiny.
Rather to the contrary: the future looks less like the past than ever
before and has in some basic ways become very threatening. As a
species we are no longer guaranteed survival, even in the short term
- and this is a consequence of our own doings, as collective human­
ity. The notion of 'risk' is central to modern culture today precisely
because so much of our thinking has to be of 'as-if' kind. In most
aspects of our lives, individual and collective, we have regularly to
construct potential futures, knowing that such very construction
may in fact prevent them coming about. New areas of
unpredictability are created quite often by the very attempts that
seek to control them.
In these circumstances major transitions occur in everyday life, in
the character of social organization and in the structuring of global
systems. Tendencies towards the intensifying of globalization inter­
act with, and causally condition, changes in everyday life. Many of
the changes or policy-making decisions most influential upon our
viii Preface
lives today do not derive from the orthodox sphere of decision­
making: the formal political system. Instead, they shape and help
redefine the character of the orthodox political order.
Practical political consequences flow from the analysis of these
issues. We differ among ourselves in our various diagnoses of what
these political ramifications might be. However, we all refuse the
paralysis of the political will apparent in the work of so many
authors who, following the dissolution of socialism, see no place for
active political programmes any longer. Something like the contrary
is actually the case. The world of developed reflexivity, where the
interrogation of social forms becomes commonplace, is one that in
many circumstances stimulates active critique.
The format of the book is as follows. Each of us has independ­
ently written a substantial essay upon aspects of reflexive modern­
ization. The three essays have been guided by the common
perspectives mentioned above, although we have not sought to
conceal our differences with one another. Each of us then sub­
sequently wrote critical responses to the contributions of the other
two. These appear towards the end of the book in the same
sequence as the original statements.
The contributions by Ulrich Beck were translated from the
German by Mark Ritter.
Ulrich Beck
Anthony Giddens
Scott Lash
1 The Reinvention of
Politics: Towards a Theory of
Reflexive Modernization
Ulrich Beck
Introduction: what does reflexive modernization mean?
The year 1989 will go down in history, it seems fair to predict, as the
symbolic date of the end of an epoch. As we are very aware today,
1989 was the year in which the communist world, quite unexpec­
tedly, fell apart. But is this what will be remembered in fifty years'
time? Or will the collapse of the communist nation-states of Eastern
and Central Europe then be interpreted akin to Prinzip's shot at
Sarajevo? Despite its apparent stability and its self-indulgent stand,
it is already clear that the West was not left unaffected by the
collapse of the East. 'Institutions founder on their own success',
Montesquieu argued. An enigmatic yet exceptionally topical con­
tention. The West is confronted by questions that challenge the
fundamental premises of its own social and political system. The
key question we are now confronting is whether the historical sym­
biosis between capitalism and democracy that characterized the
West can be generalized on a global scale without exhausting its
physical, cultural and social foundations. Should we not see the
return of nationalism and racism in Europe precisely as a reaction to
the processes of global unification? And should we not, after the
end of the cold war and the rediscovery of the bitter realities of
'conventional' warfare, come to the conclusion that we have to
rethink, indeed reinvent, our industrial civilization, now the old
system of industrialized society is breaking down in the course of its
own success? Are not new social contracts waiting to be born?
2 Ulrich Beck
'Reflexive modernization' means the possibility of a creative
(self-)destruction for an entire epoch: that of industrial society.1 The
'subject' of this creative destruction is not the revolution, not the
crisis, but the victory of Western modernization.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolutionizing the
instruments of production, that is, the relations of production, hence
all social relationships. Unchanged maintenance of the old mode of
production, by contrast, was the primary condition for the existence
of all previous industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of pro­
duction, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all
earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of
venerable ideas and views, are swept away, all new ones become
obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into Air, all that
is holy is profaned, and the people are at last forced to face with sober
senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their
fellows.2
If simple (or orthodox) modernization means, at bottom, first the
disembedding and second the re-embedding of traditional social
forms by industrial social forms, then reflexive modernization
means first the disembedding and second the re-embedding of
industrial social forms by another modernity.
Thus, by virtue of its inherent dynamism, modern society is
undercutting its formations of class, stratum, occupation, sex roles,
nuclear family, plant, business sectors and of course also the
prerequisites and continuing forms of natural techno-economic
progress. This new stage, in which progress can turn into self­
destruction, in which one kind of modernization undercuts and
changes another, is what I call the stage of reflexive modernization.
The idea that the dynamism of industrial society undercuts its
own foundations recalls the message of Karl Marx that capitalism is
its own gravedigger, but it means something quite different. First, it
is not the crises, but, I repeat, the victories of capitalism which
produce the new social form. This means, second, that it is not the
class struggle but rather normal modernization and further mod­
ernization which are dissolving the contours of industrial society.
The constellation that is coming into being as a result of this also has
nothing in common with the by now failed utopias of a socialistic
society. What is asserted instead is that high-speed industrial dyna­
mism is sliding into a new society without the primeval explosion
of a revolution, bypassing political debates and decisions in
parliaments and governments.