Transcript 投影片 1 - Sociology Department -

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Giddens’s intellectual linkage to the classical theories
3. Structuration theory: what’s new?
4. From theory as such to theory of modernity
5. Issues of modernity: (a) institutions; (b) intimacy; (c)
trust; (d) self as project
6. Political implications of Giddens’s theory
7. Criticisms and conclusion
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Suggested Readings*
1. A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity.
2. A. Giddens, Runaway World.
3. A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory.
4. A. Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy.
5. U. Beck, A. Giddens & S. Lash, Reflexive
Modernization.
6. W. Hutton & A. Giddens (eds.), On the Edge.
7. D. Held & J. Thompson (eds.), Social Theory of
Modern Society: Anthony Giddens and his Critics.
* Full references could be found in the useful
introductory essay by Lars Bo Kaspersen, in Heine
Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen (eds.), Classical
and Modern Social Theory. Blackwell 2000.
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Suggested Readings, cont’d
8. C.G.A. Bryant & D. Jary (eds.), Anthony Giddens:
Critical Assessments (4 volumes) Routledge 1997
(This is probably the most comprehensive collection of
reviews, critiques and development of Giddens’s
concerns and theoretical framework.)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
1. Introduction
•
Giddens as a ‘household’ name: prolific writer,
intellectual powerhouse, travelling lecturer, adviser to
leading politicians…
•
Giddens as a contemporary theorist: broad-fronted and
critical response to intellectual traditions as well as
more contemporary debates; i.e. offering the basis of a
new, and more adequate, language/theoretical
framework
•
Giddens as picking up where the classical masters
have left off: grappling with the issue of capitalism,
modernity, and globalizaton, viz. the broad contours of
our society
•
Giddens as contributing to critical understanding of
selected contemporary social issues
•
Our approach
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
2. Giddens and the Founders
• G took them all on board; particularly critical of Marx,
while drawing more resources from Weber
• the inadequacies of the Marxist tradition
 at the level of history of human society (or
philosophy of history), there is no necessary
overall mechanism of social change, no universal
motor of history, such as class conflict; history is
not teleology but contingency
 it makes no sense to fit societies into universal
stages of development (periodization), because
inter-society conflicts and their different abilities in
controlling their environment (time – space) mean
that no two societies would undergo the same
stages of development
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Inadequacies of the Marxist tradition, cont’d
 Marx assimilated industrialism and capitalism, and
mistakenly believed that the transcendence of the capitalist
society will lead to a fundamental change in the organizational
and technical conditions or requirements of industrial society;
state-socialist societies equally relied on a mass of workers
controlled on top by the technocrats and the party
 Marx is right that class conflict is central in capitalist
societies, but he is wrong in thinking that therefore the working
class will emerge in all capitalist societies as a revolutionary
(universal working) class; it does not follow that class conflict
will inevitably lead to an emergent class that replaced the
dominant class
 G is against the ‘vulgar’ ‘economic reductionism’ in Marxist
theories, which stipulates that political activities (state) and
cultural matters (ideology) are to be explained in terms of class
domination or economic power relations
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
 there are forms of domination which pre-dated
capitalism and which still existed in capitalism, i.e. racial
domination and sexual exploitation; they could not be
accommodated within or explained by class domination
alone
 the Marxist orientation is outdated in the mid-20th
century, where there are great differences among both
industrial capitalist (e.g., Germany vs. Japan) and statesocialist societies (Soviet Union vs. Czechoslovakia)
 there are also inadequacies in regard to ‘class’,
‘power’ and ‘domination; this will be revealed when it
comes to Giddens’s own orientation
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• Giddens’s linkage to Weber
 G’s world view is closer to Weber than to Marx: history as
more an infinitely complex reality, in flux, and could only be
grasped by the use of analytical devices, underlaid by the
researcher’s theoretical interests
 G took it from Weber that social sciences should not be
seen as immature (natural) sciences, but should be seen as
something completely different; what is distinctive about the
social world (and thus the subject matter for sociology) and
that should serve as the point of departure of our thinking is
social action (thus implying intentions, meanings, purpose,
reflexivity…)
 G also inherited Weber’s insistence that generalizations in
sociology are not so much to confirm or disconfirm general and
overarching laws as in the natural sciences; this is too narrow
a conception of empirical research (deep and thick description
of the forms of life of social agents is equally important)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Giddens’s linkage to Weber, cont’d
 G is skeptical of any imputed universal trend of
development, or motor of history; thus he is equally
skeptical of the thesis of ‘rationalization’, or the ‘iron
cage’
 G’s concept of power and domination draws
insights from Weber; power is a relational concept,
in which resources drawn upon by one party would
be used to overcome the resistance of the other
party (in securing compliance despite the agency of
the other party)
 G took seriously Weber’s conception of authority,
and saw this as a serious gap or inadequacy of
Marx, who emphasized the power over objects at
the expense of the power over persons; G
elaborated this into allocative power vs.
authoritative power
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• Giddens’s orientations to the ‘how’ and ‘what for’ of
sociological explanations (G’s response to contemporary
functionalist theories)
 functionalist theory sees social systems as
possessing system needs, and social institutions (in
particular the tasks of socializing each new generation
of social beings) as fulfilling these needs (performing
functions)
 functionalist theory often explains by invoking the
unintended consequences of social phenomena (thus
social stratification serves the latent function of
motivating people to take up tasks that are often
difficult and incurs a lot of investments; or social
deviance as performing a more positive function of
reaffirming the core values of the society)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
 Giddens is against this mode of explanation/research:
societies do not possess needs; only individuals do;
explanation in terms of unintended consequences (latent
functions) does not explain at all (what or where is the link or
mechanism that connects deviance and the bolstering of
common values?); ultimately, system’s functional needs is a
fiction, and there is no need to make it more plausible by
using the analogy with biological organisms
 All in all, G is against both the evolutionary (e.g, in the
Marxist strand) and the functionalist modes of sociological
explanation
 G proposes a new language (new concepts, or new ways
of defining concepts), a different way of looking at the logic of
sociological explanation, and a way of doing sociology that
would make sense to both the observer and the observed (i.e.
what we learn and impart to the observed may then change
the behaviour of the latter, as the conditions of the social
actions are changed by our knowledge)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
3. Structuration theory: Giddens’s new language
• G sees social life as a continuous flow of our interventions
in the world in our capacity as autonomous agents; these
interventions are social actions, which are (following Weber)
meaningful, purposeful (with clear goals in mind) or at least
purposive (as we monitor our actions when we survey what
we are doing)
• This level G called practical consciousness; it is what we
know about our social world, but which we cannot articulate
(Bourdieu’s practical mastery without symbolic mastery);
practical consciousness is distinguished from discursive
consciousness and the two as a whole from unconsciousness
• The first two levels of consciousness have no fixed
boundary; the boundary is vague and fluctuating; the
implication being we are skilful, knowledgeable actors, and we
are not just faceless carriers or supports of culture, class
interests, etc.; in other words, agency is reinstated clearly and
firmly by G
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• The level of unconsciousness belongs to those
things that form the unacknowledged conditions of our
action; thus repressed desires (as sources of our
motivation) and the impact of material conditions
beyond our cognition are examples
• G also retained the functionalist insight that social
actions have unintended consequences (though he
would deny that they are latent functions), and these
consequences could in turn become part of the
unacknowledged conditions of action (e.g., material
deprivation leading to poor schooling leading to low
level employment leading to material deprivation (a
loop, feedback))
• But the unintended consequences become part of
the conditions of our action more directly by helping to
reproduce the structure which makes further action
possible
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• Giddens’s notion of structure
 First, G emphasizes that structure should not be seen as a
static, external thing imposed from the outside on the social
actors (this is his gripe with the Durkheimian social fact); rather,
structure should be seen more as a processual concept, thus
structuration
 Actor and structure thus should not be seen as constituting
dualism; rather, they should be seen as part of a duality of
structure: ‘social structures are both constituted by human
agency, and yet at the same time are the very medium of this
constitution’
 G likens structure to grammar; speech is something localized
and concretized (specific speaker and his object of
communication), but language is something virtual, existing
outside time and space, not monopolized by the subject or the
object (thus ‘subject-less); grammar being the rules of language
is likened to structure: it is being activated whenever we use the
language in our speech, and by using the language (or by
speaking) we help to reproduce the rules/structure
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
 Structure thus consists of rules and resources, that
are implemented in interaction (thus structuring
interaction), and that are, in that very process,
reproduced; structuration refers to this situation and this
process
 Here, we may want to consider some problems
(to be dealt with later in Section 7):
 if structure does not exist in concrete time and
space, but are simply moments in the constitution
(implemented, activated by knowledgeable actors)
of social systems, does this diverge too greatly from
our more ordinary conception of structure (as
meaning the distinct mode of interactions which
‘compose’ organizations or collectivities)?
 if structure consists of rules and resources, are
there rules and resources that are more determining
that others? If so, what is our conception of the
society that justifies these criteria?
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
 G suggested three dimensions (modalities) of
rules and resources, pertaining to three types of
action systems (the analytical exercise of making
distinctions, constructing types, etc. is reminiscent of
Weber)
Interaction
Communication
Power
Sanction
(modality)
Interpretive schemes
Facility
Structure
Signification
Domination Legitimation
Norm
(After J. Thompson in Held & Thompson (eds.)
The communication action system has rules, at the level of
structure, which are semantic in nature; the power action
system has facilities that are analyzed as resources at the
level of structure; and cultural action system has rules that
are moral in nature.
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
 Social systems are regularized patterns of
interaction; they are not ‘structures’, as G defined it;
rather, they ‘have’ structures, implying that rules and
resources are properties of the social system
 When the regularized interactions structured by
rules and resources are ‘sedimented’ in time and
space, G talked about institutions; and institutions
could be classified according to the primacy of the
three ‘action systems’: cultural, communicative or
domination (political and economic, with power
further distinguished into allocative and authoritative
power
 Thus G has formulated a comprehensive
framework, a basis for a new social theory, by
conceptualizing (and sometimes giving quite novel
meanings to) the key concepts of actor/agency,
structure, social system and institution
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
4. From theory of structuration to theory of modernity
• G’s insistence that actors are not just supports or
bearers of social structures; rather, they are
knowledgeable agents invoking rules and resources in
specific contexts, and by doing so, they ‘implicate’
structure in their action
• G is thus wary of any claim that sees any specific
context or its factors that determines all other contexts
and their actions; he is against any reductionism,
especially the Marxian economic reductionism, or the
functionalist claim that social action could be explained
by their fulfilling certain systemic needs or functions
• next questions are thus (a) what are the
characteristics or parameters of the contexts of action,
and (b) what are the decisive rules and resources for a
specific society
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• G’s response to the first question: time and space as the
parameters of social action; the tremendous changes that happen
to time-space relations in modern society then lead him to an
exploration of the nature of modernity
• G’s response to the second question: Marx may have rightly
focused on the material/economic conditions of production as the
most decisive factors shaping modern capitalist society, but this
argument is weak on two fronts: (i) class relations are not
necessarily prominent in all societies; (ii) even in capitalist societies,
economic power is not the only dimension that shapes modernity;
other dimensions of power are equally necessary and important
• G thus keeps his distance from a materialist account of the
emergence of modern society, just as he would dissociate himself
from any universalizing accounts of human history
• For G, modernity is not exhausted by capitalism, despite the
latter’s obvious significance; modernity is as much a transformation
in the parameters of time-space relations, in the way institutions
relate to one another, in the way people relate to authority, etc.
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• G’s theory of modernity is thus framed by these
considerations:
a. Capitalism: competitive, market-regulated, pricedriven, productive system in search of profit; a
system characterized by private ownership of
property, and the selling/buying of labour on the
market
b. Industrialism: the widespread and inevitable use
of inanimate sources of energy in production; it
presupposes regularized coordination of a wide
range of human activities
c. Surveillance capacities: this is not just physical
control (schools, mental hospitals, etc.), but also
the control of information, the increase in social
supervision in a wide range of institutional
contexts
d. Control of the means of violence: the monopoly
within the nation state of such means, and the
industrialization of warfare
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• These four dimensions G called the institutional
dimensions or mechanisms of modernity; each is closely
linked to the others, e.g., surveillance is closely tied to the
expansion and increasing administrative power of various
key spheres/nodes of industrialized society, such as
schools, factories; or industrialism is closely tied to
capitalism’s inherently expansionist tendencies; or
industrialism made it possible for the nation-state to
industrialize warfare, thus making total war both possible
and unlikely
• there is both insulation and dependence among these
four mechanisms (e.g., without the growth of surveillance
capacities of the nation-state, capitalism could not have a
supply of ‘docile’, ‘complying’ labour force)
• Underlying these considerations, it is the transformation
in time-space relations that seems to be the key driving
force in the rise of modernity, i.e. that drastically
demarcates the modern from the pre-modern
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• All of the four institutional mechanisms have contributed, or
indeed made possible, the revolution in time-space relations,
as all of them made it possible to coordinate a larger amount
and complexity of activities across time and space (transport,
communication, modern state-to-state connections, the
expansion of the capitalist logic of production, etc.)
• G’s theory of modernity then orients more to the problems
and promise of this transformed time-space terrain, rather
than to the more orthodox concern with resources and
constraints associated with socio-structural changes
• Example: Giddens’s arguments on class
 G saw power as resting on two kinds of control over
resources: allocative (control over distribution of material
resources) and authoritative (control over the coercive power
over other people)
 It is in capitalist societies that the allocative control
becomes dominant; by this he referred to his conception of
class as domination created by private ownership of property
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Giddens on class, cont’d
 Class is thus the central basis of power in modern
capitalist societies; in this sense, modern societies are
‘class societies’
 By contrast, when societies are mainly governed by
the dominance of the authoritative (coercive) control of
resources (i.e. political rather than narrowly economic),
the central basis of power is very different; but as such
power would have implications for the access to
economic resources, G called them ‘class-divided
societies’
 The most important qualitative break is then
between class-divided societies (e.g., feudal societies)
and class societies
 This is still very much a classificatory exercise;
when G brought class to the level of explaining
phenomena, he saw class more definitely in Weberian
terms
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
 G sees the central class problem as the
translation of an economic category into a sociopolitical group; similar to Weber’s idea of ‘social class’
(or in Marxist terms, the problem of class formation)
 Class is thus examined in terms of structuration:
what are the factors that help to bring about this
socio-political entity?
 Two kinds of structuration: mediate structuration
(market position determined by one’s assets,
occupation and education, with the overall regulation
governed by the amount of social mobility in the
society), and proximate structuration (‘localized’
factors consisting of occupation-specific
characteristics, authority relations at workplace, and
other social distributive groupings like ‘housing class’,
residential zoning (community) or general
consumption patterns (life-styles)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
 This makes for a great diversity, although G
thought that it makes sense to distinguish the upper,
middle and working class; the distinction between
manual and non-manual is to him major and is
reinforced by e.g., workplace authority, consumption
patterns, residence, etc.
 However, G argued that the link between these
positions and class as an actor is not automatic;
there is no mechanism that translates class
positions into groupings that have selfidentity/awareness and agenda
 Class awareness vs. class consciousness; class
identity, conflict consciousness and revolutionary
consciousness: all these distinctions point to one
thing, viz. G did not believe that class as a structural
constraint is as important as the time-space
extension of allocative and authoritative
control/power
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• Thus Giddens’s theory of modernity places emphasis
often on the enabling side (rather than the constraining
side) of this great transformation (time-space distanciation)
• The three key features of modern society all add to its
dynamic nature:
a. Time-space distanciation or separation: unlike premodern society, where the ‘when’ of social actions are
often universally associated with the ‘where’ (sunrise,
ploughing in the field..), modernity has time and space
separated by the standardization and globalization of
time; social interactions no longer simply take place at
localized space (place or locale), but are infused with
distanciated relations
b. Disembedding mechanisms: this follows from the
distanciation; these mechanism ‘mean the ‘lifting out’
of social relations from local contexts of interaction
and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time
and space’; two such mechanisms are money and the
expert systems; the disembedding capacity is
characteristic of modern institutions
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
c. Reflexivity: this is about the crucial role
played by knowledge in our activities;
modern society is reflexive because there is
a continuous and constant application of
knowledge to our activities, thus monitoring
its course, adjusting along the way, and thus
changing the outcome; reflexivity is
facilitated by communications, and is
something practiced by both institutions and
individuals (thus governments take census
to collect information on its people and
shape its policies; or individuals become
more health-conscious once they know more
about the side-effects of medicine, and so
on); but reflexivity does not necessarily
mean greater control over our lives, for our
knowledge also includes the recognition of
what we don’t know, or that what we know is
not certain….
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• These three features of modernity point up one
important lesson in G’s works: the transformative and
reflexive capacity of both institutions and individuals have
expanded tremendously in modern society; tradition
(religion, custom, faith, ideology) could not be taken on
faith, but is always subject to the scrutiny and approval of
knowledge; nation-states, corporations and individuals
have social interactions spanning a much wider timespace terrain, resulting in more goods and more
reflexivity; the dynamism of modernity is more an open
and enabling environment than an iron cage or class
conflict-ridden situation
• G’s verdict on modernity is ultimately more on the
opportunity side rather than on the dark side, a distinction
he applied to the founding fathers
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
5. Specific issues of modernity
a. Institutions and trust
•
Modern institutions all involve the problem of
trust, for the reason that they are closely
connected with the disembedding mechanisms;
thus we place trust in an institutionalized risk
environment such as the stock-market; in our
everyday life, we trust that our money will be
honoured by others; or in modern travel, we
trust that the air travel will be safe, because we
place trust in the expert system, etc.; this trust
is necessary because we are no longer living in
a familiar, secure, co-presence setting as in the
traditional community
•
Trust is some kind of faith; we are not unaware
of the alternatives, but having weighed them,
we nevertheless place trust in these modern
institutions
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• Trust is something other than confidence; confidence
often requires some knowledge (as derived from past
performance, what G called weak inductive knowledge)
to back up, but trust often takes place without any
knowledge of what’s happening in, say, the plumbing
system, the train system, the stock-market, the way
medicine works, government administration, etc.; in
other words, we put faith (sometimes even blind faith!)
in the principles, expertise and practices of modern
institutions, in regard to what we expect from them
• Trust is thus an essential ingredient – but something
that can’t be comfortably taken-for-granted – in modern
living
• The vulnerability of modern institutions: (i) trust in
abstract systems must be preceded by and sustained
by trust in interpersonal interactions (in those systems);
thus trust in the expert system of modern medicine
could be sustained or undermined by good or bad
encounters with one’s doctors (G called these
encounters the access points in system trust)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Vulnerability of modern institutions, cont’d
(ii) Trust by nature is needed precisely because
there is no clear or trustworthy knowledge; such
ignorance breeds the grounds of skepticism and
ambivalence; thus lay persons attitude to experts is
often a mixture of deference and skepticism; trust
could thus lapse or subside/reduce into some
passive acceptance of the state of affairs; trust
cannot be taken as necessarily a positive integrating
mechanism (‘leap to commitment’) in modern society;
it could lapse into passivity and cynicism
• The sources of trust:
(i) socialization (e.g., school curriculum teaches not so
much concrete knowledge as the respect for and trust in
knowledge);
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Sources of trust, cont’d
(ii) science’s respectability spills over into many
spheres of social life; through publicization and
popularization of scientific knowledge
(iii) the experience of mutuality (from childhood,
the close (and consistent, reliable, and routine)
relations between care-provider and children
builds up a sense of trust; it is also a basis for
ontological security (confidence in the continuity of
self-identity, and one’s surrounding environment)
G’s psychology of trust is important, because trust
nurtured in this way enables children (and later, adults)
to deal with time-space separation (children trusting that
the mother will return, that there will always be love to
reassure, etc.), and
A faith in the caretaker’s love is the essence of that leap
to commitment which basic trust --- and all forms of
trust thereafter – presumes. (Consequences, p. 95)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
b. Intimacy and self
• For Giddens, the modern self is a project, a
reflexive project; self is liberated from tradition and
its taken-for-granted assumptions
• The modern self applies knowledge to both its
environment and itself; the self, like the
environment, is to be the object of knowledgeoverseeing and knowledge-guided action; action
for better adapting to circumstances or for fulfilling
values and goals
• The self in modern society craves for sociability,
loyalty, etc., and for these to happen, it requires a
personal trust
• But personal trust in modern society is very
much overshadowed by system trust (impersonal,
and consisted of abstract principles and expertise)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• Abstract systems do not answer our needs for
interacting with people with human faces and who share
mutually meaningful relationships with us (abstract
systems as empty and unmoralized, p.120))
• Traditionally, social relationships like friendship is
institutionalized, embedded in the strong institutions of
the family, kinship and community; ‘friend’ has a clear
opposite of either ‘enemy’ or ‘stranger’; the boundaries
are re-affirmed by customs, rituals, practices (such as
marriage patterns)
• In modern society, these relationships are no longer
institutionalized in that way; each self is to find the niche
for specific others; thus ‘friend’ is arrayed alongside
‘acquaintance’, ‘someone I know’, ‘neighbour’, etc.; it
makes for a more unstable and fleeting environment for
the self
• In modern society, the self experiences the most
intimate and the most distant in the most connected and
simultaneous way (nursing a child in Germany as
potentially affected by reactor incident in Ukraine)
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• In these circumstances (fleeting, impersonal, feeling
that things are not within one’s control), personal trust
is something that one could not take for granted; it has
to be won; it is something that has to be worked at,
constructed and maintained
• The implication for intimacy: in relating oneself to
intimate others, one needs to see it as a project; a
project of disclosing one’s self, of entering or
maintaining a relationship
• When this is combined with the reflexive character of
self/modernity, it means intimacy is not just gaining
intimate, shared experience; it is also about selfdisclosure, self-enquiry and self-fulfillment
• The self in modern society is thus as dynamic as the
system which enables and constrains it: ‘constrains’ in
the sense that the self is no longer given the comfort or
reassurance of tradition, or that system trust does not
meet the needs of personal trust
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
‘constrains’ in the sense that the self is no longer given
the comfort or reassurance of tradition, or that system
trust does not meet the needs of personal trust
‘enables’ in the sense that reflexivity and the availability
of disembedding mechanisms give the self resources
which tradition could not provide
• For Giddens, there is the tendency for modern intimate
relationships to become what he called ‘pure relationship’, i.e.,
relationship whose main or only reason to exist is that it will
satisfy both parties; no other considerations (obligations,
parents’ wishes, etc.) are regarded as important
• Such pure relationships have an important political
implication; for what they demand, no more and no less, is the
total opening of one’s self to the other party; openness, respect
for the other, dialogue, self-reflections, adjustment, rights as
well as obligations, etc. are the key ingredients in such intimate
relationships, just as they are in public political life
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
• Giddens’s theory of modernity thus ‘ends’ with
this close intermeshing of the personal and the
political: the democratization of the emotions
being a prelude and a prerequisite to social
democracy
• G’s vision for the future is thus, with
globalization, some kind of cosmopolitan
citizenship, could appear, based on this ‘ground
zero’ matrix of self, intimacy, trust and reflexivity,
in a world where nation-states are ‘too big for the
small problems, and too small for the big
problems’, and where our personal biographies
are inevitably tied up (with all the risk, danger,
transformative capacity) with distanciated people
and events
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
7. Criticisms and Conclusion
• the novelty of seeing social change in terms of
time-space separations; G reinstated important
components in the emergence of modern industrial
capitalism
• reasserts the importance of keeping in sight the
nature of social relationships, and not lose one’s
way in the jungle of structures and macro factors
• argued convincingly that there are other forms of
domination that could not be reduced to
class/economic domination; but the latter could and
did impose the range of options and variations in
the former
• the meaning of structure in the theory of
structuration has seemingly lost sight of the ordinary
meaning of ‘structural constraint’
Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity
Criticisms and Summary, cont’d
• the gap between the structuration theory and the
theory of modernity: the theory should have led to the
examination of modernity in terms of the different
mixtures of rules and resources that actors in
different societal/organizational contexts invoke or
confront with, and what this entails for the self, for
interpersonal relationships and system integration
• theory of modernity proposed tried (through, e.g.,
the discussion of personal trust and system trust, or
how democratization of emotions is a prelude/basis
for broader democracy) to forge linkages between
the personal and the public, but during the process,
G lost sight of ‘structure’
• Ultimately, G retained his hope in the future of this
juggernaut; he has faith in the reflexivity of modernity:
is this faith justified?