Late Modernity in Crisis E-Book

Andreas Reckwitz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 461

Beschreibung

In times of entrenched social upheaval and multiple crises, we need the kind of social theory that is prepared to look at the big picture, analyze the broad developmental features of modern societies, their structural conditions and dynamics, and point to possible ways out of the crises we face. Over the last couple of decades, two German sociologists, Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa, have sought to provide wide-ranging social theories of this kind. While their theories are very different, they share in common the view that the analysis of modernity as a social formation must be kept at the heart of sociology, and that the theory of society should ultimately serve to diagnose the crises of the present. In this book, Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa join forces to examine the value and the limits of a theory of society today. They provide clear and concise accounts of their own theories of society, explicate their key concepts - including "singularization" in the case of Reckwitz, "acceleration" and "resonance" in the case of Rosa - and draw out the implications of their theories for understanding the multiple crises we face today. The result is a book that provides both an excellent introduction to the work of two of the most important sociologists writing today and a vivid demonstration of the value of the kind of bold social theory of modern societies that they espouse.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Notes

Part I

Andreas Reckwitz

The Theory of Society as a Tool

1. Doing Theory

1.1 Social Theory

1.2 The Theory of Society as a Core Task of Sociology

1.3 Functions of the Theory of Society

1.4 Theory as a Tool

Notes

2. Practice Theory as Social Theory

2.1 Features of Practice Theory

2.2 Four Social Phenomena from a Praxeological Perspective

2.3 Practice Theory as a Tool

Notes

3. The Practice of Modernity

3.1 Opening and Closing Contingency: A Dialectic without a Telos

3.2 The Radicalization of Worldmaking

3.3 Paradoxical temporality

Notes

4. The Theory of Society at Work: From Bourgeois and Industrial Modernity to Late Modernity

4.1 Bourgeois Modernity

4.2 Industrial Modernity

4.3 Late Modernity

4.4 Late Modernity’s Moments of Crisis

Notes

5. Theory as Critical Analytics

Notes

6. Coda: The Experimentalism of Theory

Notes

Part II

Hartmut Rosa

Best Account: Outlining a Systematic Theory of Modern Society

1. What Is a Theory of Society and What Can It Do?

1.1 The Definition of Modernity and the Problem of Formative Concepts

1.2 Society’s Self-Interpretation and the Task of Sociology

1.3 Perspectival Dualism and the Three Levels of a Best Account

Notes

2. Dynamic Stabilization and the Expansion of Our Share of the World: An Analysis of the Modern Social Formation

2.1 Component 1: Dynamic Stabilization

2.2 Component 2: The Expansion of Our Share of the World

Notes

3. Desynchronization and Alienation: A Diagnosis and Critique of Modernity

3.1 Component 3: Escalation and Desynchronization

3.1.1 Too Fast for the Economy: The Financial Crisis

3.1.2 Too Fast for Politics: The Crisis of Democracy

3.1.3 Too Fast for Nature: The Ecological Crisis

3.1.4 Too Fast for the Soul: The Mental-Health Crisis

3.2 Component 4: Alienation and the Muting of the World

Notes

4. Adaptive Stabilization and Resonance: A Therapeutic and Transgressive Outline of an Alternative Horizon

4.1 Component 5: Beyond the Escalation Imperative – Adaptive Stabilization

4.1.1 Metabolic Interaction with Nature

4.1.2 Pulling the Plug: Turning off Negative Motivational Energy

4.1.3 Redirecting the Current: The Institutional Reorientation of Positive Motivational Energy

4.2 Component 6: Alienation’s “Other” – Resonance

Notes

Part III

Modernity and Critique: A Conversation with Martin Bauer

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 3

Figure I.1

Elements and practices of the social

Figure I.2

A four-field matrix of social logics in modernity, with special emphasis on the ...

Chapter 4

Figure I.3

Bourgeois modernity, industrial modernity, late modernity – a synopsis

Chapter 10

Figure II.1

My best account of modernity – a schematic overview

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Late Modernity in Crisis

Why We Need a Theory of Society

Andreas Reckwitz

Hartmut Rosa

Translated by Valentine A. Pakis

polity

Copyright Page

Originally published in German as Spätmoderne in der Krise. Was leistet die Gesellschaftstheorie? © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2020. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2023

The translation of this book was supported by funding from the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation.

Polity Press

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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: 978-1-5095-5629-8 – hardback

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5630-4 – paperback

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

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948144

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavors 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

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank a number of people who contributed to the creation of this book. In particular, Sigrid Engelhardt, Bettina Hollstein, Jörg Oberthür, and Peter Schulz (on Hartmut Rosa’s side), and Vincent August, Nicolas Hauck, and Laurin Schwarz (on Andreas Reckwitz’s side), delved into our respective texts and helped to improve them in important ways. Eva Gilmer, our editor at the Suhrkamp Verlag, also accompanied this book project with her typical competence and dedication. Our special thanks are due as well to Martin Bauer for engaging us in an exceptionally stimulating and focused conversation.

Introduction

We first met in early 1997, at a doctoral seminar held by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation in a monastery in Münsterland. One of us (Hartmut Rosa) was finishing his dissertation on Charles Taylor, while the other (Andreas Reckwitz) was just beginning his doctoral research on cultural theories. At the seminar, there were lively discussions about the cultural turn and the importance of social constructivism to the social sciences and humanities. It was the 1990s. In Germany, the wall between East and West had fallen (a great deal of dogmatism had fallen away along with it), and such questions were typical of the time. This seminar also marked the beginning of a conversation between us – a conversation about academic, professional, and personal matters – that has not stopped since.

After we had received professorships in the mid-2000s and pursued various avenues in our books and research projects – on the topics of acceleration, resonance, and controllability for one of us, and on the topics of the subject, creativity, and singularization for the other – our life trajectories often went their separate ways, but they continued to cross as well. An example of this is the 2016 Congress of the German Sociological Association, which took place in Bamberg. There, one of us (Hartmut Rosa) gave a presentation about his book on “resonance,” while the other (Andreas Reckwitz) served as the respondent to this paper. It was after this conference that we first devised the idea of writing a book together, in order to juxtapose and create a conversation between our quite different – yet in many ways related – theoretical perspectives on modern society and on what sociology can and should do.

Our idea remained latent for a long time. Inspired by recently enflamed and lively debates within and beyond the discipline of sociology concerning the question of how sociology should be practiced, what it can and cannot accomplish, what need there is for a theory of society, and what society might expect from such a theory, we ultimately decided to take on the task. The final impetus behind this decision came from the insight that we share a common motivation that would make such a book meaningful and perhaps even seem necessary: the motivation of emphasizing that the task of formulating a theory of society (and thus also a theory of modernity) should be the central objective of sociology. This conviction has characterized the work of both of us since the 2000s.

Such an understanding of the discipline is far from obvious when one examines the present landscape of the social sciences in Germany and abroad – indeed, it faces resistance from many fronts. There is, instead, a curious discrepancy within this intellectual sphere. On the one hand, there is a clear and growing public interest in comprehensive theories of contemporary society (and of human society and history as a whole); among sociologists, on the other hand, there is a conspicuous lack of desire (and perhaps courage) to produce such theories of society. In other words, while the “demand” for a theory of society has been growing, the corresponding “supply” – expected from the international discipline of sociology – seems to be diminishing.

Regardless of what the field of sociology has been willing to supply, public interest in such a theory – in comprehensive analyses and interpretations of contemporary society, but also in the long-term transformation of human society from its beginning and into the future – has, if anything, been intensifying during the second decade of the twenty-first century. This is true not only in Germany and in other so-called “Western” societies (in Europe and North America especially), but also beyond: in China, India, Brazil, and in the Arabic-speaking world as well. This is perhaps surprising. After all, as long ago as 1979, Jean-François Lyotard famously argued in his book The Postmodern Condition that we had reached the end of the “grand narratives” of modernity and modernization.1 According to Lyotard, the grand theories about social development that had characterized classical modernity had lost credibility, and what was needed instead were “minor narratives” and specific analyses – limited in time, space, and subject matter. Lyotard’s critique of the legacy imposed by the philosophy of history and its (from today’s perspective) naïve and one-sided stories of progress was certainly justifiable, but his prognosis that overarching theoretical interpretations were superfluous was ultimately false. As we have learned in the meantime, such large-scale interpretations are precisely what we need.

In the two decades between 1985 and 2005, social scientists could have complained with good reason about the public’s waning interest in social analyses, but at least since 2008 there has been a noticeable revitalization of public interest in the big picture. “What sort of society are we really living in?” “In what direction is society headed?” These are the sorts of questions that are (once again) being asked. The public discussion is no longer satisfied with small-scale empirical analyses of special issues, and it is certainly no longer content with “minor narratives.” What has crystalized instead is a sense of curiosity and a rather urgent desire for comprehensive analyses of the social condition. Over the past few years, and each in our own way, both of us have experienced this at first hand. Our own attempts at producing a theory of society have each received surprisingly widespread attention, not only within but also outside of the academic sphere: in the media, in politics, in business, in the worlds of art and culture, in ecclesiastical and social organizations, and not least among university students. Moreover, we have received numerous reactions from people highly interested in society and politics, from sympathetic and critical private readers alike, whose thirst for knowledge and impressive powers of observation make any member of the academic establishment who sneers at the alleged simple-mindedness of so-called “laypeople” seem conceited.

This increased interest in theory and in the “big picture” – in a theory that goes beyond the heterogeneous threads of everyday experience and presents a scientifically supported, meaningful whole – has identifiable causes. The most important of these is certainly the fact that, over the last ten years, the accumulation of social crises has jolted Western societies into reflecting critically about themselves. The global financial and economic crisis of 2008 raised awareness about the structural features of post-industrial capitalism and its social consequences, not least among them the intensification of social inequality. Insight into the threatening consequences of climate change has attracted massive attention to ecological questions about the history of the relationship between humankind and the natural environment, and about what characterizes the Anthropocene epoch. That the geology of the earth itself can be altered by human activity has, for many people, led to a profound sense of ontological uncertainty. Finally, the international rise of right-wing populism has sparked a broad discussion about its structural causes and about the winners and losers in modernization. In general, whereas the 1990s seemed to have brought the world to the “end of history” – to the threshold of a posthistoire in which there were apparently no alternatives to the Western model of stable free-market democracies – and to have ushered forth a promising new era of globalization, digitalization, and the knowledge society, the horizon of progress seems to have shrunk rather rapidly since then. On the geopolitical level, in fact, the “Western model” is in retreat. All these moments of crisis are linked to new social and political movements, ranging from Attac and Fridays for Future to the French gilets jaunes, Black Lives Matter, and indigenous movements. The self-reflection that all these crises have induced, however, remains at least implicitly reliant on a theory of society, or on other large-scale models of social development: How can the phenomena under discussion be classified, how can they be explained, and what consequences should be expected from them? What alternatives are conceivable, and which of these would be desirable?

The second reason for this intensified public interest in comprehensive syntheses is obviously related to the fact that the public itself has changed. There are many indications that this change is a reaction to the explosion of information and opinion outlets brought about by digitalization over the last decade. In the world of digital media, information about social issues and critical commentary on these issues follow each other endlessly, to an extent that is now beyond our capacity to absorb. An unmanageable amount of heterogeneous and fragmented bits and pieces of information and opinion is churned out in an endless stream: political events, social statistics, human-interest journalism, interviews, scandals, personal commentaries. At the same time, the Internet is an affective medium that can effortlessly link information to states of emotion – not least to negative emotions such as indignation or hate – or, conversely, provides the information – the necessary “fuel” – for every new outrage. In light of this mixture of ever new, atomized information and short-lived emotions, however, the need to comprehend the overarching contexts of social and historical developments becomes all the more urgent. Sufficiently large numbers of citizens are weary of mere snippets of information and wish to understand broader social contexts in an academically grounded, empirically informed, and theoretically sophisticated manner. This process of social self-understanding thus requires holistic, integrated formats of analysis and explanation; these formats are expected, desired, and demanded by the intellectual milieu. However, if sociology, despite its potential and competency in this very field, refuses to supply these desiderata, it shouldn’t be surprised when other “providers” step in to fill the gap.

There has been no shortage of such interpretations, and they have been well received internationally. Prominent in the field of history, for instance, are the books by Yuval Harari, who has written no less than a total history of the human species from prehistoric times to the present and has drawn political conclusions on the basis of this panorama.2 Noteworthy, too, are proponents of Big History such as David Christian, who has attempted to integrate natural history and cultural history.3 The field of economics has recently produced several incisive and comprehensive syntheses of social developments, and these works have found an international audience. This is true, for instance, of Thomas Piketty’s books about the transformation of the economy, the state, and the distribution of wealth; of Branko Milanović’s work on global inequality; and of Shoshana Zuboff’s work on the consequences of digitalization.4 In addition, there have been successful works of more general nonfiction – albeit firmly supported by scholarly research – that provide synthetic overviews and have been discussed intensively by the public. Such books include Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger, which explains today’s global culture of resentment, and Maja Göpel’s Unsere Welt neu denken, in which the author reflects on the political consequences of climate change.5

And sociology? Here we encounter the aforementioned discrepancy. As desirable as interdisciplinarity may be, and with all due respect to the explanatory powers of other disciplines, the whole point of sociology is to work on the “big picture” of a theory of society and to provide a comprehensive theory of modernity. Since its beginnings as a scientific discipline, the project of sociology has been to reconstruct the structural features and structural dynamics of modernity – or even of societal models in general – and thus to investigate the context of economic, technological, cultural, political, and social change. The disciplinary project of sociology therefore also, in a sense, consists in analyzing the crises of any given present; it is a crisis science. The theoretical and empirical foundation of sociology, which is constantly being renewed and enriched by other disciplines, is indeed lavishly endowed. We are convinced that sociology has the empirical, conceptual, and theoretical means to function as a systematic science of society in its totality.

Although sociology seems to be in a very good position to produce a theory of society, the discipline is nowadays oddly reluctant to fulfill this task. This is true in particular at the international level, where English-language sociology continues to be dominant. At sociology departments in the United States and Great Britain, the willingness to produce a theory of society and to formulate theories of modernity or late modernity has, in our opinion, noticeably declined over the past two decades. This is rather remarkable, because things used to be otherwise. As recently as the 1990s, social scientists from the Anglophone sphere published an abundance of influential and much-discussed contributions to the theory of society, and these studies resonated deeply in the international discussion. One only need think of Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, Scott Lash and John Urry’s Economies of Signs and Space, Anthony Giddens’s The Consequences of Modernity, or Manuel Castells’s magnificent trilogy The Information Age.6

What explains this unwillingness among sociologists to formulate a theory of society? The first and most important reason is certainly the push toward more and more empirical specialization in the social sciences. This trend has been reinforced by the expectations of a competitive scientific world in terms of quantifiable research findings, publications in peer-reviewed journals, and the acquisition of third-party funding. The radical differentiation of sociology into a bunch of hyphenated subfields, each with its own qualitative and quantitative data and studies, has undoubtedly led to more productivity, but it has also meant that there is now less room for work on broader theoretical syntheses within the institutionalized field of sociology. Any ambition to work across these hyphenated subfields, to subject their findings to theoretical analysis, and to unify them has thus been restricted on an institutional level. Moreover, within a system oriented toward rewarding empirical research – a system governed by the “new public management” of universities – it has become increasingly unattractive to write books (which are still the preferred format for theory). According to this system, a whole book often “counts” no more (if not less) than a single article published in a top-tier journal, which is now the gold standard of empirical research. An ambitious project such as that proposed by Niklas Luhmann in the late 1960s at Bielefeld – “Topic: the theory of society; Duration: 30 years; Costs: none” – would seem highly anomalous in today’s academic environment.

A second cause of the rather weak status of the theory of society within contemporary sociology lies in the effects of the aforementioned postmodern critique of science that has been widespread, especially in the Anglophone sphere, since the 2000s. In its current iteration, this critique can be summarized as follows: In light of the interpretive and selective nature of science, and in light of the heterogeneity and plurality of discursively produced realities, doesn’t every holistic theoretical claim, every effort to comprehend “the whole” seem futile – or, even worse, necessarily one-sided and biased? Is it even possible to write about modernity or late modernity as singular concepts? This way of thinking has considerably discouraged and restricted theoretical work, even though, upon closer inspection, it is unconvincing. In the end, all scientific research – from a single case study of certain statistical correlations to an entire theory of society – is selective, regardless of whether it deals with “minor” or “major” phenomena. While it is undoubtedly true that scientific self-reflection is a good thing – this is one of the important conclusions of the postmodern critique of science – it would be unproductive to abstain from working on comprehensive theories for this reason alone. Nowadays, the fact that any effort to present an overview of society’s formations as a whole immediately provokes considerable – and apparently a priori – opposition from so many different camps, each of which is quick to point out the theorist’s inevitable “gaps” and “blind spots,” seems to deter many social scientists from engaging in theory at all. In Anglo-Saxon sociology, the confluence of empirical specialization (modeled after the natural sciences), postmodern fragmentation, and the “new public management” of universities has brought us to this point. With respect to theory, the implications are clear: it is under pressure and in danger of disappearing entirely.

Because today’s historical and cultural situation has generated so much demand for social theory, at least some sociologists – given the aforementioned fragmentation of their discipline – ought to stand up and take on the challenge. Because the Anglo-Saxon social sciences still set the pace on the international level, the impediments discussed above have affected the entire European continent, the German-speaking world included. It is no coincidence, however, that this book has been written by two German sociologists, for it is also true, in general, that social theory tends to be pursued more vigorously here than in the United States or Great Britain, for example. There are reasons for this as well. In Germany, from a historical perspective alone, there has long been a stronger connection between sociology and social philosophy (particularly in the theories of the Frankfurt School). Because of this, the question of social context has remained an important issue in German sociology. In addition, there is also the tradition here of understanding sociology in terms of lifestyle patterns and their historical transformations. This tradition goes back to Max Weber and Georg Simmel, and it encourages sociologists to view “the whole” from the perspective of cultural theory. Beyond this, one can also point to the approach of systems theory, which is still viable, and to the theory of modernity associated with it (as developed by Niklas Luhmann). Finally, there is the fact that the German-speaking world is more welcoming to public intellectualism than the Anglophone world. Here, public intellectuals – sociologists among them – are respected and given a voice, not only in the media but also in the broader realms of politics, culture, and even business, which helps to explain why it is somewhat easier here to develop systematic theories of (late) modernity than is the case in the international mainstream.7Were this not the case, this book would probably not exist in its present form.

All national differences aside, it remains the case that, within modern sociology as a whole, social theory does not occupy a secure position. Instead, such a position has to be fought for. The present book seeks to respond to this situation by asking “What is achieved by a theory of society?” In doing so, it seeks to explore the conceptual means with which a theory of society can operate in order to accomplish what is expected of it. It is no surprise that, despite the many commonalities between us, we ultimately reach very different conclusions in our respective answers to this question. In order to examine the possibilities, difficulties, and limits of working on a theory of society from our different perspectives in a systematic way – and in a way that facilitates comparison between our views – we have each composed our opening text so as to present our approaches in a step-by-step manner: First, we present our views on what is meant by “theory” and how social theory (Sozialtheorie) and the theory of society (Gesellschaftstheorie) differ from one another. Next, we develop our specific perspectives on modernity in general and on late modernity in particular. Finally, we each discuss the implications of the relationship between a theory of society and its object, and why this relationship should be of a critical nature. It is our common belief that the theory of society should ultimately serve to diagnose the crises of the present. We each consider late modernity to be in a state of crisis, and we are convinced that determining the manifestations, causes, and consequences of this crisis is the central goal that a modern theory of society can and should achieve. We have endeavored to do so in this book.

The condensed presentations of our two perspectives form the bulk of the text, but they are also the starting point for the final section of the book, which contains an intensive conversation about our approaches. This conversation, which took place in March of 2021 at the Suhrkamp Verlag in Berlin, was moderated by Martin Bauer, to whom we owe considerable thanks for taking on this task (which was far from simple) and for presiding over the event with such aplomb. Even though theoretical work remains dependent on the medium of writing, orality is still the best medium for speaking not about one another, but to one another in a constructive interaction. Even theory cannot do without face-to-face encounters if it is to be debated and remain resonant. For it is only in this form that it is set in motion and brought to life, that it loses its abstract rigidity and begins to take on color and create sparks.

Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa

Notes

 1

  Jean-François Lyotard,

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

 2

  Yuval Noah Harari,

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

(London: Harvill Secker, 2014); Yuval Noah Harari,

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

(London: Jonathan Cape, 2018). For a similar approach, see Robert L. Kelly,

The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future

(Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

 3

  David Christian,

Big History

(New York: DK Publishing, 2016).

 4

  Thomas Piketty,

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Thomas Piketty,

Capital and Ideology

, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Branko Milanović,

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Shoshana Zuboff,

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

(New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

 5

  Pankaj Mishra,

Age of Anger: A History of the Present

(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017); Maja Göpel,

Unsere Welt neu denken: Eine Einladung

(Berlin: Ullstein, 2020).

 6

  Zygmunt Bauman,

Modernity and Ambivalence

(Cambridge: Polity, 1991); David Harvey,

The Conditions of Postmodernity

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Scott Lash and John Urry,

Economies of Signs and Space

(London: SAGE, 2002); Anthony Giddens,

The Consequences of Modernity

(Cambridge: Polity, 2015); Manuel Castells,

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–8).

 7

  It seems as though the tendencies of our European neighbors in France are similar to those in Germany. The fragmentation of the discipline has not fully discouraged French sociologists from contributing to the theory of society. Consider, for instance, the sociological tradition established by Pierre Bourdieu, the prominent books by Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thevenot, and Ève Chiapello, not to mention Bruno Latour’s monumental book

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence

, and the work by Bernard Lahire and Alain Ehrenberg. The Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, whose books provide an important contribution to the theory of late modernity, has been strongly influenced by the discourse in France. The establishment of independent research institutions, the interdisciplinary orientation of the

sciences humaines

, and the prominent role – even more prominent than in Germany – of public intellectuals in France clearly smooth the way for French sociologists to work on large-scale theories of society.

Part IAndreas ReckwitzThe Theory of Society as a Tool

1Doing Theory

Theory is itself a practice or, to be more precise, it is an ensemble of practices. One would have to conduct a detailed sociology of the social sciences to gain a full picture of all the practices that are used in what we call “doing theory.” Practices of reflecting on and trying out concepts, collecting and juxtaposing empirical material, excerpting, assembling card indexes and databanks, discussing ideas, visualizing arguments, and, not least, writing and composing texts – whether by hand or with a computer – are all important in this regard. Relevant too when doing theory is the struggle between orthodoxies and heterodoxies that takes place in the field of social science. The personal experiences of theoreticians, moreover, influence their questions and basic intuitions, while current political debates, historical sensibilities, and contemporary cultural problems are also reflected in theoretical work. Theory inevitably develops within a social context. The word theoria – literally the “observation” of reality from a distance – suggests that this activity takes place from a neutral standpoint, or that it is the expression or result of “pure thinking.” In fact, however, theory is a thoroughly practical and interpretive affair – in a sense, it is a cultural technique for producing a generalized understanding of the world. The productive practices of theory, for their part, are tied to variable practices of reception: to working through theories as part of one’s academic socialization, reading for the sake of furthering one’s education, reading freely out of a desire to understand the world or effect political change, or reading with the aim of bringing about a subjective transformation, after which “one is no longer the person one used to be.”

From antiquity, it was philosophy that first provided an institutional home to the practice of theory in Europe. With the gradual differentiation of the modern sciences, however, interest in theory has moved into specialized academic disciplines, the social sciences included. Because the latter, like all modern disciplines, regard themselves as sciences of reality that derive their propositions from real-life experiences, this raises the question of the precise place of theory in relation to empiricism. In order to understand the specific value of theory for sociology, however, that which is subsumed in Germany under the category of “sociological theory” must be distinguished from what is called “social theory” in the English-speaking world. Within social theory, in turn, there is a central distinction between social theory and the theory of society.1 Essentially, sociology as a science of reality focuses primarily – in terms of everyday research – on what Robert K. Merton called “middle-range theories,” that is, on sociological theories. Within the framework of sociology’s internal division of labor, these theories pertain to specialized questions and individual social phenomena, and they rely on a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. In general, it can be said that such theories demand the immediate empirical validation of their descriptions and explanations; at the same time, and as the name implies, the range or scope of their statements is limited.

By comparison with the numerous middle-range sociological theories, social theory operates on a more abstract level. Here we are dealing with theory in the stricter sense, and this is true of both of its branches. Both social theory and the theory of society provide the general and fundamental vocabulary for answering two elementary questions. Social theory asks: “What is the social?” and “From which perspectives can it be analyzed?” The theory of society asks: “What are the structural features of society and particularly of modern societies?” and “What are the concepts with which these societies can be investigated?” To answer its questions, social theory has developed basic concepts such as action and communication, norms and roles, power and institutions, the order of knowledge, practice and discourse. Max Weber’s Basic Concepts in Sociology and Émile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method are classic works that seek to establish the vocabulary of social theory; more recent books of this sort include Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems, Anthony Giddens’s The Constitution of Society, and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social. The theory of society, in contrast, formulates basic assumptions about overall societal structures, phenomena, and mechanisms as they have unfolded in the course of history. It is interested above all in the structures of modernity, which it examines via theories of capitalism, functional differentiation, individualization, or aestheticization (for example). Karl Marx’s Capital and Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money are two classic examples of books that present such approaches to the theory of society, while more recent examples include Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction and Manuel Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society.

The twin contexts of the question of sociality, on the one hand, and the nature of modern society, on the other, were constitutive of the emergence of sociology in the nineteenth century. They guided the authors of the founding generation – Marx, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim – who are still influential today. Despite the gradual fragmentation of the discipline, these problems also remain significant to sociology in the twenty-first century – and, from my perspective, they should remain foundational, given that they provide the framework that holds together sociology’s numerous and multifarious empirical analyses. Without social theory, sociology would lose itself in the extreme specialization of its undoubtedly necessary detailed studies. The tools of social theory and the theory of society maintain a reference point to the totality of the social or to society in its entirety – a reference to the whole, to the big picture traditionally cultivated by philosophy. At the same time, social theory and the theory of society provide the cultural and political public sphere with comprehensive and incisive interpretations that lead society toward self-enlightenment.

In this chapter, I intend to explain more precisely what social theory and the theory of society mean, what distinguishes them from one another, and to whom they are directed. In doing so, I will emphasize my understanding of theory as a tool. In my second chapter, I will outline the particular version of social theory that I use as a toolkit for analyzing society: the theory of social practices. The third chapter will work through the three dimensions of modernity that are central according to my perspective on the theory of society: the dialectic between opening and closing contingency; the rivalry between a social logic of the general and a social logic of the particular, and between rationalization and culturalization of the social; and, finally, a paradoxical temporal structure characterized by a regime of novelty, a dynamic of loss, and a hybridization of time. In light of these categories, I will explain, in my fourth chapter, a model of historical transformation and how it pertains to modernity: from bourgeois modernity through industrial or organized modernity up to late modernity. Here, the causes of the specific crises of present-day late modernity will also be made clear. In the fifth chapter, I will elaborate the ways in which, in my view, theory should pursue a critical orientation, without becoming “critical theory” in the narrower sense. The project in question could be called “critical analytics.” Finally, in a coda, I pose the question of how one can best work with theories, and I argue in favor of engaging with them in an experimental manner.

1.1 Social Theory

First, it is important to clarify that both social theory and the theory of society combine two functions, each of which addresses different audiences. On the one hand, they are oriented toward empirical research in the social sciences, which they process and to which they provide impulses; on the other hand, they circulate as comprehensive theories within the intellectual sphere and are thus addressed to the sciences as a whole and to the non-academic public.

I would like to demonstrate this first of all in the case of social theory. The latter poses elementary questions about the form of the social – that is, it asks about the concepts with which the social can be understood. Here, “the social” designates a collective level – a level beyond individuals, their individual action, and their particular interests. This assumption is the basic outlook of the sociological way of thinking. But what, exactly, are the elementary features of the social world? Sociology has never been able to agree on a single theory of the social; instead, it has developed a plurality of different perspectives on sociality. This is understandable, because a pluralistic (scientific) culture, which modernity has tended to produce, offers space for the development of various vocabularies for theorizing the social. In their understandings of the social, these theoretical languages can be culturalist or materialist, holistic or individualistic, structuralist or process-oriented, and they can revolve around various guiding concepts (action, interaction, communication, practices, structure, etc.).

In this way, social theories develop basic conceptual frameworks, and these essentially have the status of a heuristic that guides the empirical analyses of sociology. They also provide a basic conceptual orientation for the empirical research practices of other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, for instance history and cultural anthropology. Like so-called “sensitizing concepts,” social theories point the way toward the phenomena and connections that empirical research ought to investigate – toward practices, communication, power dynamics, discourses, artifact structures, dispositifs, social systems, and so on. In the sense of a heuristic, they assume the role of a search-and-discover technique for empiricism. Without any social-theoretical perspective of this sort, empirical analysis would remain blind or would be based on unsophisticated assumptions about everyday life.2 This also means, however, that a good social theory will have to meet certain standards of quality: it must provide the tools with which empirical researchers can analyze a variety of different phenomena from a rich perspective.

In addition to its heuristic function for empirical research, however, social theory also has its own autonomous significance – namely, that of social ontology. On this level, it acquires, as it were, its own “reflective value,” which is independent of empirical research; it is the locus for reflecting about the social world in a fundamental way. Social theory thus provides the human sciences with an elementary vocabulary for understanding the human world as a sociocultural world by formulating a social ontology of action, culture, language, affectivity, materiality, structures, and processes. With respect to this task, it is engaged in an intensive exchange with philosophy, which, for its part, has also promised since its beginnings to develop a social ontology of the human world. Moreover, there are also close connections between the social theory of sociology and the social-theoretical considerations of other disciplines, such as the cultural theories formulated in the fields of cultural anthropology and media studies. In general, social theory – as a site for contemplating the sociocultural world – is thus an interdisciplinary undertaking of the human sciences, and it is only seldom constrained by disciplinary boundaries.3

As an ontology of the sociocultural world, social theory earns its independent reflective value not only from the inner sanctum of academia but also from the broader, non-academic public sphere. Secularized modernity, in which religion and theology have lost their monopoly on interpretation, is confronted with the challenge – chronically underdetermined and controversial as it is – of enlightening the conditio humana. Although philosophy has traditionally risen to this task, social theorists from John Dewey to Bruno Latour, from Helmuth Plessner to Jürgen Habermas, have also made fundamental contributions to this endeavor of self-enlightenment. In this regard, social theory competes especially with the natural-scientific approaches of the life sciences – evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, neurophysiology, etc. – to offer non-academic readers a basic vocabulary with which to understand themselves.

1.2 The Theory of Society as a Core Task of Sociology

In the social sciences, however, “theory” means not only social theory; it also means the theory of society. What distinguishes the two? The short answer to this is: the universality or historicity of their object. Admittedly, social theory often (though not always) conceptually reaches the macro-dimension of the social, the level of institutions, classes, orders of knowledge, or society as a whole. It can thus make claims about society, though in doing so it largely remains within a universalistic conceptual framework. Social theory is concerned with sociality and the nature of society in itself. That is, it is concerned with the structure of human practice unbound by time and space. The theory of society, in contrast, is concerned with specific societies and how they exist at specific times and in specific places. In short, it makes general statements about particular societies. At the heart of the sociological theory of society stands modernity, that type of societal configuration whose roots go back to the beginning of the European modern era. Over the course of industrialization, democratization, secularization, individualization, and the rise of science, modernity has been developing in Europe and North America since the eighteenth century, and it has since had formative effects – peacefully or violently – in different varieties and hybrid mixtures across the globe.4

In order to determine the nature of this modern, (at first) Western society, the theory of society can, so to speak, look far beyond it, in terms of both time and space. The modern society of the Western sort can thus be compared to those forms of society that existed before the early-modern and modern eras (nomadic and agrarian societies, as well as feudal kingdoms), and to those that existed and continue to exist beyond the European and North American context. The theory of society thus offers the possibility of developing a general theory of societal change and of global interrelations from the earliest human societies to the present, and it also offers the possibility of making systematic comparisons between different types of societies.5

Despite this interest in the long-term transformation of society, the modern Western society remains at the heart of the sociological theory of society in Europe and North America. In other words, the central task of the theory of society is to formulate a theory of this modernity.6 The reason for this is obvious. Although the theory of society has its share of historical ambition, it is guided first and foremost by its interest in the present. It aims to understand the structures and dynamics of present-day society. This theoretical goal of elucidating “our” society provides the background for the practical efforts that sociology engages in directly or indirectly. These practical efforts can strive to alter the political configuration of societal institutions or even to change the ways in which individuals evaluate their own forms of life. Both efforts necessarily take place in the present, or with an eye toward the future. From a sociological perspective, of course, present-day society is just one society. It is the society characterized by modernity; it is modern society, as it developed from feudal, traditional, and religiously oriented “pre-modernity.” It is only to modernity understood in this way that the aforementioned nexus of theory and practice is applicable. Only modern society presumes that its institutions and forms of life are not immutable but are, rather, susceptible to being formed or configured by political and sociocultural factors. Without this political or personal interest in shaping society – a basic motivation that presupposes the possibility of change – the theory of modernity cannot be understood.

If, however, the theory of society is essentially a theory of modernity, then this presents a few historical complications. Whereas authors such as Weber, Durkheim, Tönnies, and Simmel – who were active around the year 1900, when the final vestiges of traditional society were disappearing – were still able to regard their own present as the modernity, what we call modern society has since transformed considerably. By now, as of the year 2021, modernity itself has at least 250 years behind it, and thus it is by no means exclusively the epoch of our present day. Upon closer inspection, it becomes obvious that the structural features of society in the year 1800 were different from those in the year 1900, whose own features were no longer identical to those around the year 1950, which in turn differ from those of our current society. This does not mean that, within the history of modernity, there are not also continuities and unifying features that have recurred over the centuries. In light of modernity’s great ability to transform itself, however, it is hardly surprising that several of its basic structures have changed profoundly. In any case, the fact that modernity itself has a history poses challenges for the theory of society in the twenty-first century.

Particularly since the mid-1970s, it has become clear that the “new” present – which was at first referred to as “postmodernity” or “high modernity” but by now largely goes by the name of “late modernity” (an umbrella term with some flaws of its own) – has, over the course of globalization, post-industrialization, digitalization, and liberalization, brought about new structures that fundamentally differ from those of the previous two versions of “classical modernity,” that is, from the structures of bourgeois and industrial modernity. This has also influenced how one goes about “doing theory.” Only those who believe that modernity is timeless and unchanging – that we have arrived at a sort of posthistoire – assume that today’s society can be understood with reference to the same abstract features (capitalism, functional differentiation) that had defined early stages of modernity. Paradoxically, it is precisely this insight into the fundamental historicity of modernity – not only its origins but also its broad course of development – that lends intellectual consistency to the realization that the present version of modernity is itself highly specific and singular. In this light, the theory of society has developed, beyond a general theory of modernity, a more specific contemporary “offshoot”: the theory of late-modern society or, in short, the theory of late modernity. In its more pointed and publicly accessible manifestations, this theory can appear as though it belongs to the genre of so-called “diagnoses of the times,” but as a version of the theory of society, it is decidedly more than such a diagnosis.7 Of course, the theory of late modernity must operate in close contact with the theory of modernity as a whole, be it in a historically comparative manner or with an eye toward identifying continuities. Without any comparisons to what has come before, it is impossible to appreciate what is new.

From my perspective, working on a theory of society as a theory of modernity in general, and on a theory of late modernity in particular, is not an ancillary or specialized problem of sociology. It should ultimately be its core task. The multitude of empirical studies provides set pieces that can and must be processed within the framework of the theory of society. The challenge of analyzing the structures of contemporary society in their particularity – precisely because this society is new, unusual, and even surprising, and because the appropriate terms for understanding it are lacking – is a challenge that characterized the primal scene, so to speak, that gave rise to the social sciences in the nineteenth century. The open question with which sociology has wrestled from the beginning is this: What is modern about modernity? This is the problem that motivated all the early studies: Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of capitalism, Weber’s examination of formal rationalization, Durkheim’s study of the ongoing social division of labor, and Simmel’s investigation of individualism were all essentially propelled by an epistemological interest in coming to terms with the novelty and uniqueness of the structures of modernity, which were at first difficult to understand. This primal scene has recurred again and again throughout the history of sociology; from it, the discipline derives its lasting fascination with the novelty of modernity.8 The theories of late modernity and postmodernity that have been appearing on the intellectual stage since the last quarter of the twentieth century – Daniel Bell’s Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chapiello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, or Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire (to name just a few works) – are motivated by the exact same theoretical goal: the goal of making the historical otherness of contemporary society comprehensible in its basic structures and dynamics.

This situation also helps us to answer the question of how to think about the relationship between social theory and the theory of society. Although, in terms of basic concepts, nothing is more elementary to the discipline than social theory, the end game of the entire undertaking known as sociology is nevertheless to understand modern society. Now, it goes without saying that, without social theory and the fundamental conceptual insights that it brings to our understanding of the social, of culture, power (etc.), there could be no empirical analysis and no theory of modernity. The social-theoretical vocabulary provides the conceptual background that allows certain phenomena and certain connections to become visible in the theory of society in the first place. A specific social-theoretical vocabulary – think of the role of world images in Max Weber’s work or that of the sacred in Durkheim’s, or consider the role of communicative action in Habermas’s philosophy and the idea of communication as observation that is so crucial to Luhmann’s theories – sensitizes researchers to see particular social contexts (while also, implicitly, sensitizing them not to see others). The theory of society thus needs the preparatory insights of social theory in order to do its work. Conversely, however, it is also true that a social theory without a theory of society would be like swimming on dry land. Social theory is not an end in itself; it is not a self-sufficient undertaking. Ultimately, it paves the way for the theory of society. That said, a particular theory of society cannot simply be derived from a social-theoretical vocabulary. The theory of society cannot be a mere product of social theory, and this is because the connections that the theory of society focuses on never emerge purely from a general vocabulary of the social, but rather – and more importantly – from efforts to ascertain a particular historical or contemporary reality.9

1.3 Functions of the Theory of Society

As in the case of social theory, it is possible to identify some basic features of the theory of society. The latter has a two-sided relationship with empirical analysis. On the one hand, it is built on the basis of empirical research and experience, and its intrinsic value depends on observations and studies of the concrete phenomena of change as these pertain to economic structures, political systems, family relations, or cultural currents. A good theory of society must take into account the available knowledge about all the main facets of society – economics, politics, culture, and so on. The theory of society thus brings together studies and observations from various dimensions of society – studies and observations that would otherwise be compartmentalized in various branches of empirical research – and then relates them to one another in an effort to create a synthesis that brings to light the connections that exist among different phenomena and individual structures. It sees the forest, not just the trees. Ideally, and in order to present a full picture of modernity, such a theory should be able to make pronouncements about the structures and transformations of the following major elements of society: first, the economy; second, the state and politics; third, the social structure (the configuration of social groups); fourth, culture (systems of ideas and orders of knowledge); and fifth, technology. Finally, one should expect this theory to address, sixth, the relationship between society and individuals – that is, the way in which the society in question subjectivizes individuals and thus also the way in which the individuals in this society typically conduct their lives.