This volume will be of great interest to 2nd- and 3rd-year students in sociology and social theory, politics and political theory, as well as to the generaI reader. Anthony Giddens . and Christopher Pierson Making Sense of Modernity Conversations with 90000> 1111111111 ~56-2049-3 UPPSALA UNIVERSITETSBIBLIOTEK 111111111""1111 16000 002267337 t'ollTV ness 'J "flSUf45 620497 In this series of extended interviews with Christopher Pierson, Giddens lays out with customary clarity and directness the principal themes in the development of his social theory and the distinctive political agenda which he recommends. Anthony Giddens has been described as 'the most important English social philosopher of our time'. Over twenty-five years, and even more books, he has established himself as the most widely-read and widely-cited social theorist of his generation. His ideas have profoundly influenced the writing and teaching of sociology and social theory throughout the English-speaking world. In recent years, his writing has become much more explicitly political, and in 1996 he took up his high-profile appointment as Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. It is in this new position and with these new political ideas that he has been described as the key intellectual figure of New Labour in Britain. Following the astonishing success of Labour in the 1997 General Election, his ideas have been the focus of intense interest. Anthony Giddens is Director of the London ~chool of Economics and Political Science. Christopher Pierson is Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. Copyright © Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson 1998 The right of Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 1998 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Editorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Marlleting and production: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or.by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwIse, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated \~ithout the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. ISBN 0-7456-2048-5 ISBN 0-7456-2049-3 (pbk) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in lIon BY, pt Berkely Medium by Ace Filmsetting Printed and bound by TJ International Lld, Padslow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements xi The Sociology of Anthony Giddens: An Introduction (Martin O'Brien) 1 Interview One: Life and Intellectual Career 28 Interview Two: The Sociological Classics and Beyond 52 Interview Three: Structuration Theory 75 Interview Four: Modernity 94 Interview Five: From the Transformation of Intimacy to Life Politics 118 Interview Six: Politics Beyond Left and Right 151 Interview Seven: World Politics 170 Centre Left at Centre Stage 194 The Politics of Risk Society Beyond Chaos and Dogma ... Risks, Scares, Nightmares vi Contents 204 218 227 Preface As Martin O'Brien's introductory essay makes clear, Anthony Giddens is something of a social science phenomenon. Over a quarter of a century of unrelenting productivity, he has be- come established as one of the world's most authoritative and widely cited social theorists. His interests are remark- ably diverse, from the driest of Continental philosophy to the therapy-speak of the self-help manual, and his work builds upon a critical engagement with an extraordinary array of texts from within and way beyond the canon of the social sciences. He has helped to develop a whole new lexicon with which we can grasp what it means to live in the rapidly chang- ing world of modernity: structuration, practical conscious- ness, time-space distanciation, manufactured risk, life politics. As if this were not quite enough, Giddens has also made the time to co-found his own publishing house, head up the new Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and still bear witness to the failure of his be- loved Spurs football team to recreate the successes ofhis north London youth. In 1997, Giddens took up his most significant challenge as Director of the London School of Economics. Giddens has a very clear view of the special role of the LSE. The School has always been engaged in a special way with the real world of politics and policy-making, especially in periods of system- atic reform. In recent years, Giddens has himself shown an increasing interest in and engagement with the world ofmain- stream politics and, since arriving at the LSE, has rapidly set about creating the links that will make the School's 'special relationship' with the wider world of political practice work That the arrival ofa new and activist Director at the LSE should be so closely followed by the election of the first centre-left government for a generation has made for exciting times. And Giddens's belief in the importance of the 'radical centre' and of a 'Third Way' that goes 'beyond right and left' has made him a popular and influential figure at the top of the New Labour hierarchy. The interviews which make up the greater part of this book were all conducted within months of Giddens's arrival at the LSE and in the aftermath of the New Labour success of 1 May 1997. They seek to cover the full range of his thought since the early 1970s, beginning with his engage- ment with the makers of 'classical' sOciology and conclud- ' ing with his thoughts on the nature of world politics under 'reflexive modernity', The style is conversational and tech- nical jargon is kept to a minimum. I have tried to ask the questions which any interested reader might pose and left Giddens to answer in his own, uniquely clear and concise voice. Giddens remains a controversial figure. His critics insist that his work is not just Wide-ranging and diverse but shallow and eclectic. They argue that he never stays in one spot long enough either to be pinned down or to establish the truth ofwhat (for them) remain largely unsubstantiated conjectures. But even his fiercest critics would find it hard to deny that Giddens"s work fizzes with challenging ideas and provocative sugges- tions. Others will simply want to admire and learn from this intellectual tour de force, viii Preface Preface ix Chris Pierson Nottingham March 1998 Acknowledgements The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: London Review ofBooks for Anthony Giddens, 'Risks, Scares, Nightmares' (review: 'Why sounding the alarm on chemical contamination is not necessarily alarmist'), London Review oj Books, 5.9.96; Polity Press for Anthony Giddens, 'The Politics of Risk Soci- ety' ('Risk Society: the Context of British Politics') in Jane Franklin, ed., The Politics oj Risk Society (1997) pp. 23-34; New Statesman Ltd for Anthony Giddens, 'Beyond chaos and dogma.. .', New Statesman, 31.10.97; and Anthony Giddens, 'Centre left at centre stage', New Statesman, May 1997, Special edition. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first op- portunity. The Sociology of Anthony Gidde11s: An Introduction Martin O'Brien Anthony Giddens is one of the leading British sociologists of the post-war period. His writings span more than three dec- ades of social and political change and have been at the fore- front of the development of sociological theory and practice in the 1980s and 19905. His interpretations of the classical sociological traditions have been a central pillar of much un- dergraduate and postgraduate teaching in sociological theory for twenty years (and continue to be so) and his imaginative reconstruction of sociology's central concerns has stimulated academic debate and intellectual controversy in equal meas- ure. He is an agenda-setting social theorist, a virtual one-man publishing industry, and a political philosopher of growing influence, and he has now taken on the professional challenge of directing the London School of Economics and Political Science in the uncertain era of the first Labour government since the 1970s. In introducing the extraordinarybreadth of Giddens's think- ing to the new reader, I will focus on the outlines of his over- all project, rather than on the critical details ofany ofits specific The sociological enterprise aspects. In particular, I will emphasize the connections be- tween the different strands of his diverse output in order to provide a conceptual map ofhis theoretical and philosophical thinking. In this way, I want both to give a sense of the impor- tance of his work and to disclose some of the critical ques- tions that his reconstruction of sociology raises. I begin with some comments on Giddens's understanding of the discipline of sociology before going on to sketch in some of the main contours of his work 3 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens they are disputing the complex intersections between dif- ferent layers of social experience and action. Sociologists must develop alternative kinds of explanation for each of these social forces because there is not one unique cause and character of the basic relationships between individuals and society. To take another example, a chemist, in seeking to under- stand the properties ofwater, need not wonder whether some atoms of hydrogen intended to bond with some atoms of oxygen to produce a pond, a lake or an ocean; even less what it means to the different hydrogen atoms to get together with oxygen atoms to make water. Asociologist, on the other hand, is faced precisely with the problem that people have motivations and purposes for doing what they do, that (mostly) they know why they are doing the things they do, and that the meaning of their actions and interactions is, at least to some degree, transparent to them. Whilst the hydro- gen and oxygen atoms did not intend to produce the lake or the ocean, people manifestly do intend to get married or divorced, live in town or countryside, work for wages or employ others to do so for them. It may be that some people get married or go to work in spite of the fact that they do not want to, but they could not marry or work uninten- tionally. Thus, unlike the natural sciences, sociology must seek to understand the relationships between people's inten- tions and purposes and the character of the social world they inhabit. The sociological problem, however, is yet further compli- cated by the fact that sociologists belong to the world they research: they employ the same kinds of everyday routines to manage their lives and engage in meaningful actions and interactions with the people and institutions which are the objects of their study. The social being of the sociologist, The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 2 According to Giddens, sociology is a special kind of intel- lectual discipline. Unlike physical scientists, a sociologist seeks to understand a world that is already understood by its members. The 'objects' of sociological inquiry - what people say and do, what they believe and desire, how they construct institutions and interact with each other - are unlike the objects ofnatural sciences, such as physics, chem- istry or biology, in so far as people's actions and inter- actions, their beliefs and desires, are a central feature of the world that the sociologist investigates. Moreover, this world cannot be reduced to one 'correct' set of meanings or ex- planatory system. The social world is irreducibly character- ized by competing and sometimes conflicting frames of meaning, understandings, and patterns of belief. When physicists dispute with each other about whether (and why) the universe is expanding, they are disputing the single, unique cause and character of the basic physical relation- ships between energy and matter. When sociologists dispute with each other about whether (and why) society is divided by relationships of class, gender, ethnicity or personality; Settling accounts with the classics 5 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens Giddens began writing and publishing on classical socio- logical theory in the late 1960s. At the time, the disciplines understanding of the works of classical theorists (notably 'charisma' of religious and political leaders, or 'moral pan- ics' - are now widely used in the media and in ordinary; everyday discussions. Social research into divorce rates, the distribution of health and illness, income and lifestyle, the effects of the media, patterns of family formation and much more is now a central pillar of local and national policy for- mulation. Sociological knowledge is destined to become 'what everyone knows' because sociological knowledge is precisely one of the main means by which members ofmod- em society come to understand and account for the work- ings of that society. Sociological knowledge enters into, becomes a part of and.helps to transform the very world that it seeks to explain and analyse (see Giddens, 1996: 4-5, 77). In this respect, the sociological enterprise is a critical endeavour: it draws upon the ordinary meanings shared by people in society but reformulates and expands them in or- der to assist in the process of positive social change. It is a conscious exercise in what Giddens calls social reflexiVity (which I explain in more detail below): the reflective appli- cation of knowledge about the social world to meet the challenges of new circumstances and conditions in the social world. Stated thus, the idea appears alluringly simple, but its emergence in Giddens's work and its diffusion throughout professional sociology have involved a long and arduous expedition through the jungles ofclassical and contemporary sociological thought. 4 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens including what the sociologist knows about the objects of her research1 is il1escapably mediated by the social world she inhabits. In accoUl1ting for that world the sociologist must draw upon the common-sense understandings and the so- cially embedded beliefs and meanings that make it what it is. Whereas the chemist in my earlier example does not and cannot draw upon the hydrogen atom's account of its physi- cal existence, the sociologist must draw upon people's ordi- nary accounts of their social existence. The sociologist is first and foremost an ordinary member of the world she investi- gates whose explanations of that world, like those of every other individual within it, are part and parcel of its basic character. In this respect, the sociologist's task - of explaining how the social world works or how and why a society is organ- ized in one way rather than another - appears, at first sight, as a second-order account, or gloss, on how all of us ordinar- ily explain the world for ourselves. After all, if people know what they are doing and why, at least most of the time, if they know and understand the causes and consequences of their daily, routine activities, then the sociologist's account merely adds to the total number of explanations of the world that can be given and is neither more nor less inSightful, rigorous or accurate than any other. What, then, does the sociologist do that might lead anyone to suppose that a profeSSional sociologist's account of the world had any value? Giddens's response is to propose that sociology performs a 'double hermeneutic': it spirals in and out of the knowledges of everyday life. Its fate is always to become entangled in the common-sense accounts by which people explain their world. Concepts and ideas that have been extensively de- veloped in sociology, notes Giddens -like 'social status', the Marx, Weber and Durkheim) was dominated by American traditions - and, in particular, by the writings of Talcott Par- sons. Not only were these traditions dominant in interpret- ing the classics, they also tended to be dominant in determining how these should be applied to practical prob- lems such as deviance, health and illness, mass media ef- fects, or social integration, for example. During the 1960s Giddens addressed both of these tendencies simultaneously. In relation to the first, he reconsidered the sociologies of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and SimmeL In relation to the sec- ond, he expended a great deal of energy on reconsidering the sOciology of suicide. The choice of this problem as a vehicle through which to explore sociological theory was significant in a number ofways. It was significant because it led Giddens to a systematic reappraisal of the work of Emile Durkheim - whose own study ofSuicide in 1897 (Durkheim, 1897) had represented an attempt to cast the new discipline of sociology as a positive, objective science of society. It was Significant also because, as Durkheim had recognized, the study of suicide exposes a fundamental theoretical task of sociological inquiry. That task is to reveal how a social sci- . ence which deals with social forces, social structures and social action can understand an event that, common- sensically, appears intensely personal and private. A third way in which the problem of suicide was Significant was that, in his treatment of the topic, Giddens was forced to address a radical division within sociology between two ap- parently opposed and mutually exclusive approaches to the study of a common problem - the 'positivist' approach and the 'phenomenological' approach representing two distinct sociologies inhabiting the post-war academy (see Dawe, 1970). In brief, the positivist approach, drawing on Durkheim's 7 The SOciology ofAnthony Giddens methods and guidance, attempted to show the objective correlations between rates of suicide and various external factors such as urban isolation (Sainsbury, 1955). The phenomenological approach, drawing on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, investigated how the event of a death is given the subjective meaning of 'suicide', under what circumstances and with what consequences. Whilst the posi- tivist view accepts official data on suicide rates as present- ing, more or less, an accurate picture of its social reality, the phenomenological view undermines this idea by showing that cultural and subcultural factors influence whether any particular death will or willnot be classified as suicide- either officially or otherwise (see Douglas, 1967). The 'two sociologies' division, in relation to the suicide problem, can be summed up in the form of two contrasting questions: is the sociological concept of suicide equivalent only to what is officially recorded as suicide by coroners and other functionaries? Alternatively, is it the task of sociology to probe the cultures and subcultures in which people under- stand and give personal significance to deaths as suicidal events? In spite of expending much intellectual energy on this co- nundrum, Giddens's approach to the specific question ofsui- cide in sociological theory has not been widely adopted by the social science community, partly because the analytical problem ofsuicide dropped offsociology's intellectual agenda. But his exposure to the problems that it throws up have re- verberated throughout his work ever since. From the early 1970s, the suicide problem begins to drop off Giddens's own theoretical agenda and he takes up, instead, some of the broader theoretical issues that were raised by his encounter with it. In particular, the effort to interweave the positivist strand of Durkheim's thought with the phenomenological The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 6 strand of Husserl's philosophy, although often not explicit, characterizes his writings throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1971, Giddens published Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, a book which remained his best-known work for some ten years and which - remarkably, given the numerous texts on the same topics that have appeared since - remains one of the most valuable sources on Marx, Weber and Durkheim. The book signalled the beginning of an exten- sive assessment of the complex layers of sociological theory in which Giddens is still engaged. In 1972 two related books appeared. One was an edited collection of Durkheim's writings (Giddens, 1972a), the other a short reflection on Max Weber's social and political writings (Giddens, 1972b). The next year saw the publication of The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (Giddens, 1973), which was followed in 1974 by an edited collection on positivism and sociology (Giddens, 1974) and a collection on elites in British society (Giddens and Stanworth, 1974). Throughout this time Giddens was also busy writing articles for the professional press and in 1977 a collection of these essays appeared un- der the title Studies in Social and Political Theory (Giddens, 1977). These essays extende~ Giddens's treatment of the sociological classics and also engaged with other important and emerging traditions in social science represented by, amongst others, Talcott Parsons and structural functional- ism, Jurgen Habermas and critical theory, and Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. In this period of theoreti- cal and philosophical reflection, Giddens established the basis on which his later writings would propose a new sociologi- cal paradigm, structuration theory, whose outlines were ten- tatively hinted at in New Rules of Sociological Method (Giddens, 1976). The title of this (1976) book is instructive for several rea- sons. Like Giddens's earlier focus on the suicide problem in sociology, the title of the 1976 book recalls the significance of Emile Durkheim to contemporary sociology. In 1895, Durkheim published his statement ofwhat sociology should be in The Rules ofSociological Method (1895). For Durkheim, sociology is a systematic, disciplined, empirical science which treats the world as a source of objective data, compa- rable to the natural sciences and uninfluenced by the sub- jective beliefs and intentions of its members. For Giddens, in contrast, renewing sociology's outlook in the second half of the twentieth century requires that the subjective be brought back into the sociological fold although in ways not envisaged by Durkheim. In short, for Giddens, sociol- ogy should attend to the world as a world that holds mean- ing and personal significance for its members, whose intentions, in one way or another, are central to sociological understanding. Otherwise, the discipline has no hope of explaining how each individual contributes to and helps to shape the collective history of society. New Rules of Socio- logical Method is at the same time an acknowledgement of the importance of Durkheim to Giddens's sociology and a settling of accounts with the Durkheimian tradition. Al- though the focus of the book is a critique of interpretative (or, loosely, phenomenological) sociologies, it is also a con- scious acknowledgement of the need to go beyond Durkheim. After the publication ofNew Rules, a fresh chap- ter in Giddens's sociology begins and his new paradigm, structuration theOlY, is given its first systematic outline, three years later, in Central Problems in Social Theory (Giddens, 1979). 9 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 8 I have spent some time on Giddens's relationship to Durkheim's sociology, in particular, because it is central to his - or any proposed reconstruction of the discipline. This is not to say that other classical sociologists Marx and We- ber, in particular - have not been important in his work, for they have. But Durkheim is the most important classical in- fluence in structuration theory because his legacy leads Giddens to adopt a highly fonnal and abstract idea of 'social structure'. Whereas Marx, for example, described the struc- tures of the capitalist system often in the most vivid and graphic detail - the factories, the slums and warrens, the engines of production, the opulence of the bourgeois class, the inevitable denigration and degradation of the proletariat, the formation of working-class movements and parties, and so on Durkheim described structures indirectly, by anal- ogy with the cells and organs of living bodies. Social struc- tures were held together by 'the glue of 'social bonds' that were only visible to the sociologist abstractly as more or less stable and ordered patterns ofsocial integration. Giddens takes. up a comparable formali!St approach, but he argues that the concept of 'structure' in itself is of no use to sociology and that sociologists should speak of the 'structuring prop- erties' of social interaction as media through which people achieve their purposes and goals. IfsOciology is to understand the world as a world that both holds meaning for its members and is, at least in part, repro- duced and transformed by them, then any sociological ac- count of that world must recognize, so Giddens argues, that ordinary people's own accounts of it are themselves sociolo- gies ofa kind. Sociological knowledge and understanding are not the sole privilege of professional SOciologists. People's routine behaviour both exposes and expresses the importance of sociological knowledges in the conduct of everyday life. Conversational rules, behavioural expectations or intimate interpersonal rituals, for example, are embedded in know- ledge about how and why social life happens: who speaks or is silent and when, who stands or sits and why, who belongs or does not and where, who is revered or reviled and how - these are mundane constituents of everyday sociologies. Knowledge (however partial or fragmented it may appear) of how the social world works is embedded in the day-to-day actions and interactions of people living out their lives. It forms 'practical sociologies' that people use without, usually, consciously thinking about them. Such knowledge of how the world works is analogous to the rules of language use. Competent speakers of a language can use rules of grammar in order to communicate with each other but they do not need to make their grammatical knowledge an explicit fea- ture of what they are saying. Indeed, if speakers and hearers always had to establish rules ofgrammar every time they com- municated something, they would communicate very little at all. In using rules of grammar in order to communicate what they intend, speakers unintentionally reproduce them as rules of grammar. When I speak, my intention is to communicate a meaning and I may manipulate certain grammatical rules in order to make what I say more plausible, convincing or poetic, for example. However, whilst I may consciously ori- ent to grammatical rules in order to realize my intentions, it cannot be said that my intentions include the reproduction of those grammatical rules. The reproduction of the rules of grammar is, from the point of view of my use of them, an unintended consequence of my effort to communicate a mean- ing. 11 The SOciology ofAnthony Giddens The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens The theory of structuration 10 The elaboration of structuration theory after 1979 takes some very complex and divergent routes. It is pitched against As I shall employ it, 'structure' refers to 'structural property', or more exactly, to 'structuring property', structuring properties providing the 'binding' of time and space in social systems. I argue that these prop- erties can be understood as rules and resources, recursively impli- cated in the reproduction of social systems. Structures exist paradigmatically, as an absent set of differences, temporally 'present' only in their instantiation, in the constituting moments ofsocial sys- tems. (Giddens, 1979: 64) 13 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens Marxist sociologies of social change in A Contemporary Cri- tique ofHistorical Materialism. Volume 1: Power, Property and the State (1981). Here, Giddens rejects the linear view of his- torical progress proposed by Marx - in which one mode of production ineVitably gives way to another under the com- bined weight of its internal contradictions and a revolution- ary class itching to overthrow existing conditions. Instead, Giddens develops a novel typology of social systems as ar- rangements oftime-space relations a theme that is extended in The Constitution of Society (1984), which is the formal (and, at least so far, final) statement of structuration theory. In brief, each historically located society encodes relations of time and space in its institutions, habits and practices. Social action of any kind is always situated in time and space but it also gives substance to time and space. In premodern societies, time and space are connected intrinsically to 'place'. Activities which occur at particular times - working, exchang- ing goods and services, even conversing - all transpire in limited and tightly bounded spatial contexts. The 'when' of activity is intimately connected to the 'where' of activity. In the modern world, in contrast, time and space are organized independently ofeach other: today, economic exchanges may take place across continents and time zones at the press of a computer key; telecommunications media make it possible to converse across vast distances and also to beam images of events from anyone part of the world onto a screen virtually anywhere else in the world instantaneously or, as in Match of the Day, in endless replay. Time and space in the globalized modern world have been 'disembedded' from their tradition- ally local contexts of action. All social action occurs in time and space but the ways that time and space are organized through social action differs between modern and traditional societies. The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 12 Comparably; suggests Giddens, people also know 'rules' of social action and interaction that they do not need to formu- late explicitly in order to live in society or to deal with social institutions. People draw on rules of action and interaction as resources that enable them to get things done on an everyday level. But this 'draWing on' has the consequence ofreproducing those rules as structuring properties of their action and inter- action. The apparent objectivity of the social world, the ways that it appears, from the point of view of any individual, or- dered and rule-governed, are in reality an unintended conse- quence - an outcome neither premeditated nor designed by anyone person or group of the routinized practices that all individuals must employ in order to conduct their daily affairs. Giddens does not deny that there are differences between rules of language use and social rules. His point is that the structuring properties of social action, like the rules of lan- guage use, are not only constraints on what can and cannot be achieved: social structures are not simply 'facts' that are exter- nal to or constraining upon the use that pe~ple make of them. Rather, they are conditions ofsocial action that are reproduced through social action. In simplified form, this is what Giddens means when he writes: Are we modern? Structuration theory is also applied to the question of the state and state violence in The Nation State and Violence (1985) (volume 2 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Material- ism) and underpins diverse essays on contemporaneous so- ciological problems - including questions of ideology, space and time, revolution, social class, and power. At this stage of his writings, however, the question of the 'modern' becomes increasingly and explicitly central to Giddens's project. In fact, the later texts that are addressed specifically to this question, which I discuss next, are all rooted in the concepts and per- spectives put forward as the theory of structuration during the late 1970s and early 1980s. 15 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens But what is it to be 'modern'? What makes contemporary society more modern than the societies of our forebears? Our great-grandparents themselves believed that they were mod- ern in comparison to their own forerunners. In what ways is society today so different from its past that we can claim to be modern in contrast to them? In some version or another, these questions have underpinned a very large part of the discipline of sociology: working out the unique characteris- tics of the present vis-a.-vis the past has been central to soci- ology's understanding of itself. In a series ofbooks addressed specifically to this question (Giddens, 1990; 1991; Beck, Lash and Giddens, 1994) Giddens's contribution to this under- standing has been to make that uniqueness the distinction of the present from the past - one of the central problematics of contemporary sociology. According to Giddens, the mo- dernity of the world, what it is to be modern, is precisely the social arrangement of contemporary society as a world that has superseded its past, as a society that is not bound by the traditions, customs, habits, routines, expectations and beliefs that characterized its history. Modernity is an historical con- dition of difference; in one way or another a displacement of everything that has gone before. Note, here, that Giddens is not saying that there are no longer any traditions. Nor does he claim that people do not believe things that were believed by our forebears. On the contrary, Giddens proposes that the world today is a 'post-traditional' world to the extent that uncountable traditions, beliefs and customs mingle with each other. In this world, as Durkheim had claimed in 1898, no one tradition can hope to hold sway and no one customary mode of action can stand as the foundation for living one's life in the complex and ever-changing circumstances of the present. Traditions and customs, beliefs and expectations, today are adaptable, bendable, 'plastic' resources in a glo- The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 14 The idea that the world today is a 'modern' world is an em- bedded part of common-sense ways of thinking: it seems an obvious, indisputable fact. By all common-sense measures and standards, the contemporary worfd is incomparably modern, more intensively and extensively modern than early twentieth-century modernist artists and architects could have dreamed. Any simple comparison between life in the 1990s and life in the 1890s would suggest that there have been very many technological and social developments. Jet engines, video-recorders, microwaves, computers, nuclear power, space shuttles, genetic manipulation, a welfare state (for the time being), television, antibiotics, and so on all appear to confirm how much more complex, sophisticated and advanced is the world today than in the past. In comparison to the 1890s, then, life in the 1990s appears to be indisputably 'modern', so much so, in fact, that for some it is even more than modern, it is 'post-modern'. balized, cosmopolitan world ofintersecting cultures and life- styles. Thus, the modern world does not bring about the death of tradition. Instead, it locates and contextualizes traditions as alternative contexts of decision-making and as alternative sources of knowledge, value and morality. If once we lived in a traditional world, today we live in a world of traditions. In simplified form, this is what Giddens intends when he writes: 'Where the past has lost its hold, or becomes one "reason" among others for doing what one does, pre-existing habits are only a limited guide to action; while the future, open to numerous "scenarios", becomes of compelling interest' (1994: 92-3). This transformation of tradition is unique to modernity. It is central to the distinction between the modern form of so- ciety and the premodern form of society and is institutional- ized through the former's bureaucratic, commercial and technological systems. Although, today, the transformation is more clearly visible than ever before, this is because its long-term consequences are now more extensively experi- enced and more intensely engaged. Our great-grandparents were, indeed, modern but their society comprised a form of 'simple modernization' whereas, today, we have entered an age of 'reflexive modernization'. This term means that the contemporary era is characterized by a high degree of what Giddens calls 'social reflexivity'. Social reflexivity refers to a society where the conditions in which we live are increas- ingly a product of our own actions and, conversely, our ac- tions are increasingly oriented towards managing or challenging the risks and opportunities that we ourselves have created. In earlier stages of history, human beings lived in conditions that were dependent to a large degree on external forces. The rhythms of the seasons, the cycles of night and day, the extremes ofweather and the impenetrability of natu- ral environments (the depths of the ocean or the heights of the skies, for example) comprised external limit points to human action. In our own society, night and day or the rhythms of the seasons are arbitrary temporal divisions in the context of a twenty-four-hour, three-hundred-and-sixty- five-day-a-year global economy. The depths of the oceans and the heights of the skies are resources that provide marine food or enable sea and air mobility and cable and satellite communication. Furthermore, what used to be 'limits' to social action are now saturated with the consequences of that action. On the bottom of the ocean and in the outer limits of the atmosphere the environmental consequences of modern industrial soci- ety continue to accumulate. Whether one believes in the real- ity of global warming or not it cannot be denied that the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat are satu- rated with the chemical contents of industrial society. If the meteorological office issues urban air pollution warnings, if the labels on our food list the (known) chemical additives in what we eat and if the water that pours from the tap is, vari- ously, filtered, chlorinated and fluoridated, then it must be acknowledged that the environmental conditions of modern society are heavily mediated by the technological and expert systems of that society. Today, hardly any aspect of what used to be 'nature' escapes the influence of human technological and social inventiveness. From beef production to human re- production, from nature reserves to 'experimental' sheep, from rivers running with oestrogen to valleys dusted with nuclear radiation, human beings live in environments ofour own crea- tion: environments that are no longer simply a constraining limit to what we can do but are increasingly infused with what we do. Where premodern societies faced the threat of natural risks, modern society faces the threat of manufactured risks- 16 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 17 risks to personal and planetary life that arise from the way that we live today. The modernity of the world comprises all of these things - it is a characteristic less of any particular technology, insti- tution or belief system than of the seemingly limitless op- portunities and risks that contemporary societies appear to offer. The modern technoscientific culture has cloned life and revolutionized agriculture, it has reduced the world to a few hours' flying time and photographed volcanoes from space, it has introduced the microchip into the daily rou- tines of millions of people and automated everything from acquiring money from a hole in the wall to 'neutralizing' an enemy with an (often not so) 'smart' missile. Contemporary scientific and bureaucratic procedures have provided us with both central heating and global warming, with two-minute microwave meals and ten-year-incubated ClD. The wonders of the world are matched step for step by the horrors of the world in every domain oflife from eating potentially danger- ous meat to swimming in the sun-kissed waters of polluted seas. The peculiarly modern character of this paradox - the means of sustaining our collective life is the major threat to plan- etary (and, therefore, collect~;ve) life - is repeated in each in- dividual's relationships to modern society. Whereas in premodern times my relationship to society, or, in other words, my social identity, was constrained and limited by tradition, kinship and locality, today this relationship is much more ambiguous. I am surrounded by traditions of every conceiv- able kind, I no longer inhabit the locality of my birth, and my name - and the particular kinship connections it ostensibly denotes - means nothing at all to readers of this text. Here, I am a name on a page; there, I am a web-site address; else- where I am a national insurance number in a government com- puter. My relationship to modern society - my social identity - has become unglued from the contexts, communities and expectations that once circumscribed my (and your) knowl- edge of who I am and how I live. Today, I am responsible and liable for my own identity. No longer bound by external refer- ence points, my identity is a moving projection through the complex social and institutional contours of a globalized cul- tural system. In this world, all individuals must strive to rec- oncile the modern paradox for themselves by undertaking a 'reflexive project' of the self: each person is required to steer his or her own, individual course between the threats and the promises of modern society. Yet, this risky scenario is not only a source of anxiety. True, the pace and diversity of contemporary social life, the uncer- tainty about the impact of sophisticated technologies like genetic engineering and the environmental problems of pol- luting societies may create conditions for Widespread appre- hension and psychological turmoil. At the same time, their very social visibility indicates that people are contributing to a redefinition of what modern society should be like: how animals should be treated, how pollution should be tackled, how different cultures should interact. The public resonance of questions relating to ethical matters - human and animal rights, the responsibilities of rich nations to poor nations, the status and social organization ofsocial differences ofsexu- ality, ethnicity, embodiment or gender, for example - indi- cates that modern society, no less than traditional society, continues to encounter and struggle over issues ofmoral con- duct. This struggle, which Giddens refers to as a process of 'remoralization' of social life, suggests that politics today re- mains as salient as ever but the foundations of contempo- rary political action have undergone some profound changes. No longer appealing to socialist or neo-liberal traditions in 19 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 18 The personal and the political order to ground politics in morality, the new politics of re- flexive modernity is moving, in the title of Giddens's (1994) major work on political philosophy, Beyond Left and Right (volume 3 of A Contemporary Critique ofHistorical Material- ism). 21 The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens ties are valued in return. Whilst the personal column exposes a highly visible trans- formation in the languages of intimacy it is merely a tiny detail of much more extensive changes in the organization of emotional attachments. Intimate relationships, their for- mation and management are associated with communal norms and socially grounded expectations and obligations. Changes at this level of social organization provide clues to wider changes in those norms, obligations and responsibili- ties. They hint at more extensive social trends in contempo- rary society and some of the political problematics that accompany them. These trends include changes in the patterning of relationships; for example, increases in single- parent households, rising divorce rates, the spread of 'con- tractual' marriages and the tendency to substitute serial monogamy (Le. moving from one partner to another in se- quence) for commitment to a life-long partner, and changes in sexual norms and mores, visible both in the rising number of teenage Single parents and in the tendency for many es- tablished couples to put off child-bearing in order to pursue careers (the DINKS - Double Income No Kids syndrome), as well as in a wider acceptance of same-sex relationships. Moreover, many social and taxation policies are grounded in assumptions about particular types oflong-term relationship and the norms which govern them. Some contemporary trends have generated alarmist policy responses - the Child Support Agency, intended to secure the financial obligation of absent fathers towards their children; Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, intended to prevent local gov- ernment from promoting homosexuality in an equal light with heterosexuality; and even certain dimensions ofthe 1989 NHS and Community Care Act are all targeted at ameliorat- ing the impacts of changes in intimate relationships and per- The Sociology ofAnthony Giddens 20 The rapid transformations that characterize the modern world are not simply things that are 'out there', beyond the experiences, intentions and desires of ordinary people. The concept of modernity refers to the private and passionate as well as the public and rational. For example, few would disa- gree that the languages of intimacy have undergone some profound changes in recent times: 'Wild child f. seeks sim. slim nls m. 28-35 with GSOH for cosy nights in and fun nights out Box 12345' is a language of the emotions that differs radically from that of Shakespeare, Tennyson or Wordsworth. The public code of the personal column ex- presses a language of emotional negotiation: it sets out ones stall in a swap-shop of intimate transactions and communi- cates desire across time and wace. It declaims the most fa- miliar sentiments to complete and total strangers whilst at the same time specifying a limited constituency (for exam- ple, 'wild', 'slim', 'nls" 'm.', '28-35', 'GSOH') among them. At the end of a telephone line is' a voice-mail system that collects any responses to the emotional appeal for later pe- rusal, ranking, action or disposal. If the personal column pronounces a desire for intimacy; it does so publicly in the context of an exercise of choice. Intimacy, here, contrives to be an exchange relationship: each person offers certain quali- ties to an audience ofstrangers and each specifies what quali-