Reflexive Modernization

Reflexive Modernization

Social theorists are prone to see world-historical significance in the key events of their own lifetimes. In our time, the theorists of ‘post-modernity’ are the most obvious examples of this. There are others, however, who acknowledge the importance of many of the changes described by the postmodernists, but see them as symptoms of transformations within ‘modernity’, rather than as marking the emergence of a wholly new historical epoch. These theorists have advanced the idea of ‘reflexive modernization’ to characterize this new phase of ‘modernity’. The best-known advocates of this notion of reflexive modernization are Ulrich Beck (born 1944) and Anthony Giddens (born 1938).

According to these theorists, the major sources of social and political identity and conflict which characterized earlier phases of ‘modernity’ are in process of being displaced as a result of the advance of modernity itself. In the view of these writers and those influenced by them, these changes make established political ideologies and divisions obsolete, and Giddens in particular is noted for his advocacy of a ‘third way’ in contemporary politics, beyond the old opposition between Left and Right. In their view, the process of radicalization of modernity itself, and the ‘sub-politics’ of new social movements holds out the prospect of a democratized and sustainable ‘new’ modernity. In particular, these writers have taken from Green social and political movements an awareness of the significance of ecological destruction and large-scale hazards in transforming the moral and political, as well as the physical landscape.

While I have some sympathy with the value-perspective of these writers, and indeed, for their project of fully incorporating the socio-ecological [Page 98]dimension into social theorizing, I shall be arguing that the analytical concepts they use to explain the rise of ecological politics are deeply flawed, and that this has important implications for their view of the future of radical politics. Perhaps the key difference between the position I shall be advocating and the ‘reflexive modernization’ school lies in the rival frameworks of ideas through which they locate the present historical period. For the advocates of reflexive modernization, history is understood as a sequence of stages, from traditional, or pre-modern, society through ‘simple’ to ‘reflexive’ modernity. Modernity is characterized in terms of a list of characteristic institutional forms or ‘dimensions’, none of which is assigned overall causal priority. My own, contrasting, view is one which attempts to grasp the qualitatively different ways in which different societies, at different historical periods, socially organize their interchange with nature. These patterns of social relationship to nature have two inseparable aspects. They are, at one and the same time, both the way people act together upon nature to meet their needs, and relations of power, through which dominant groups control this process and acquire the surplus wealth created by it. This theoretical approach is derived from Marx's concept of modes of production, but it gives more emphasis than Marx did to modes of production as ways of interacting with nature, and it is not committed (as Marx sometimes seemed to be) to any notion of necessary relations of succession from one mode to another in the course of historical ‘development’: on the view I am advocating there are no such relations of necessity, and history is understood as an open-ended process in which contingency plays a very large part in such transformations as do occur.

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