Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Outline • Introduction • Giddens’s intellectual linkage to the classical theories • Structuration theory: what’s new? • From theory as such to theory of modernity • Issues of modernity: (a) institutions; (b) intimacy; (c) trust; (d) self as project • Political implications of Giddens’s theory • Criticisms and conclusion

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Suggested Readings* • A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. • A. Giddens, Runaway World. • A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory. • A. Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy. • U. Beck, A. Giddens & S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization. • W. Hutton & A. Giddens (eds.), On the Edge. • D. Held & J. Thompson (eds.), Social Theory of Modern Society: Anthony Giddens and his Critics. * Full references could be found in the useful introductory essay by Lars Bo Kaspersen, in Heine Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen (eds.), Classical and Modern Social Theory. Blackwell 2000.

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Suggested Readings, cont’d • C.G.A. Bryant & D. Jary (eds.), Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments (4 volumes) Routledge 1997 (This is probably the most comprehensive collection of reviews, critiques and development of Giddens’s concerns and theoretical framework.)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • 1. Introduction • Giddens as a ‘household’ name: prolific writer, intellectual powerhouse, travelling lecturer, adviser to leading politicians… • Giddens as a contemporary theorist: broad-fronted and critical response to intellectual traditions as well as more contemporary debates; i.e. offering the basis of a new, and more adequate, language/theoretical framework • Giddens as picking up where the classical masters have left off: grappling with the issue of capitalism, modernity, and globalizaton, viz. the broad contours of our society • Giddens as contributing to critical understanding of selected contemporary social issues • Our approach

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Giddens and the Founders • G took them all on board; particularly critical of Marx, while drawing more resources from Weber • the inadequacies of the Marxist tradition • at the level of history of human society (or philosophy of history), there is no necessary overall mechanism of social change, no universal motor of history, such as class conflict; history is not teleology but contingency • it makes no sense to fit societies into universal stages of development (periodization), because inter-society conflicts and their different abilities in controlling their environment (time – space) mean that no two societies would undergo the same stages of development

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity Inadequacies of the Marxist tradition, cont’d • Marx assimilated industrialism and capitalism, and mistakenly believed that the transcendence of the capitalist society will lead to a fundamental change in the organizational and technical conditions or requirements of industrial society; state-socialist societies equally relied on a mass of workers controlled on top by the technocrats and the party • Marx is right that class conflict is central in capitalist societies, but he is wrong in thinking that therefore the working class will emerge in all capitalist societies as a revolutionary (universal working) class; it does not follow that class conflict will inevitably lead to an emergent class that replaced the dominant class • G is against the ‘vulgar’ ‘economic reductionism’ in Marxist theories, which stipulates that political activities (state) and cultural matters (ideology) are to be explained in terms of class domination or economic power relations

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • there are forms of domination which pre-dated capitalism and which still existed in capitalism, i.e. racial domination and sexual exploitation; they could not be accommodated within or explained by class domination alone • the Marxist orientation is outdated in the mid-20th century, where there are great differences among both industrial capitalist (e.g., Germany vs. Japan) and state-socialist societies (Soviet Union vs. Czechoslovakia) • there are also inadequacies in regard to ‘class’, ‘power’ and ‘domination; this will be revealed when it comes to Giddens’s own orientation

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Giddens’s linkage to Weber • G’s world view is closer to Weber than to Marx: history as more an infinitely complex reality, in flux, and could only be grasped by the use of analytical devices, underlaid by the researcher’s theoretical interests • G took it from Weber that social sciences should not be seen as immature (natural) sciences, but should be seen as something completely different; what is distinctive about the social world (and thus the subject matter for sociology) and that should serve as the point of departure of our thinking is social action (thus implying intentions, meanings, purpose, reflexivity…) • G also inherited Weber’s insistence that generalizations in sociology are not so much to confirm or disconfirm general and overarching laws as in the natural sciences; this is too narrow a conception of empirical research (deep and thick description of the forms of life of social agents is equally important)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity Giddens’s linkage to Weber, cont’d • G is skeptical of any imputed universal trend of development, or motor of history; thus he is equally skeptical of the thesis of ‘rationalization’, or the ‘iron cage’ • G’s concept of power and domination draws insights from Weber; power is a relational concept, in which resources drawn upon by one party would be used to overcome the resistance of the other party (in securing compliance despite the agency of the other party) • G took seriously Weber’s conception of authority, and saw this as a serious gap or inadequacy of Marx, who emphasized the power over objects at the expense of the power over persons; G elaborated this into allocative power vs. authoritative power

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Giddens’s orientations to the ‘how’ and ‘what for’ of sociological explanations (G’s response to contemporary functionalist theories) • functionalist theory sees social systems as possessing system needs, and social institutions (in particular the tasks of socializing each new generation of social beings) as fulfilling these needs (performing functions) • functionalist theory often explains by invoking the unintended consequences of social phenomena (thus social stratification serves the latent function of motivating people to take up tasks that are often difficult and incurs a lot of investments; or social deviance as performing a more positive function of reaffirming the core values of the society)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Giddens is against this mode of explanation/research: societies do not possess needs; only individuals do; explanation in terms of unintended consequences (latent functions) does not explain at all (what or where is the link or mechanism that connects deviance and the bolstering of common values?); ultimately, system’s functional needs is a fiction, and there is no need to make it more plausible by using the analogy with biological organisms • All in all, G is against both the evolutionary (e.g, in the Marxist strand) and the functionalist modes of sociological explanation • G proposes a new language (new concepts, or new ways of defining concepts), a different way of looking at the logic of sociological explanation, and a way of doing sociology that would make sense to both the observer and the observed (i.e. what we learn and impart to the observed may then change the behaviour of the latter, as the conditions of the social actions are changed by our knowledge)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Structuration theory: Giddens’s new language • G sees social life as a continuous flow of our interventions in the world in our capacity as autonomous agents; these interventions are social actions, which are (following Weber) meaningful, purposeful (with clear goals in mind) or at least purposive (as we monitor our actions when we survey what we are doing) • This level G called practical consciousness; it is what we know about our social world, but which we cannot articulate (Bourdieu’s practical mastery without symbolic mastery); practical consciousness is distinguished from discursive consciousness and the two as a whole from unconsciousness • The first two levels of consciousness have no fixed boundary; the boundary is vague and fluctuating; the implication being we are skilful, knowledgeable actors, and we are not just faceless carriers or supports of culture, class interests, etc.; in other words, agency is reinstated clearly and firmly by G

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • The level of unconsciousness belongs to those things that form the unacknowledged conditions of our action; thus repressed desires (as sources of our motivation) and the impact of material conditions beyond our cognition are examples • G also retained the functionalist insight that social actions have unintended consequences (though he would deny that they are latent functions), and these consequences could in turn become part of the unacknowledged conditions of action (e.g., material deprivation leading to poor schooling leading to low level employment leading to material deprivation (a loop, feedback)) • But the unintended consequences become part of the conditions of our action more directly by helping to reproduce the structure which makes further action possible

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Giddens’s notion of structure • First, G emphasizes that structure should not be seen as a static, external thing imposed from the outside on the social actors (this is his gripe with the Durkheimian social fact); rather, structure should be seen more as a processual concept, thus structuration • Actor and structure thus should not be seen as constituting dualism; rather, they should be seen as part of a duality of structure: ‘social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution’ • G likens structure to grammar; speech is something localized and concretized (specific speaker and his object of communication), but language is something virtual, existing outside time and space, not monopolized by the subject or the object (thus ‘subject-less); grammar being the rules of language is likened to structure: it is being activated whenever we use the language in our speech, and by using the language (or by speaking) we help to reproduce the rules/structure

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Structure thus consists of rules and resources, that are implemented in interaction (thus structuring interaction), and that are, in that very process, reproduced; structuration refers to this situation and this process • Here, we may want to consider some problems (to be dealt with later in Section 7): • if structure does not exist in concrete time and space, but are simply moments in the constitution (implemented, activated by knowledgeable actors) of social systems, does this diverge too greatly from our more ordinary conception of structure (as meaning the distinct mode of interactions which ‘compose’ organizations or collectivities)? • if structure consists of rules and resources, are there rules and resources that are more determining that others? If so, what is our conception of the society that justifies these criteria?

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • G suggested three dimensions (modalities) of rules and resources, pertaining to three types of action systems (the analytical exercise of making distinctions, constructing types, etc. is reminiscent of Weber) Interaction Communication Power Sanction (modality) Interpretive schemes Facility Norm Structure Signification Domination Legitimation (After J. Thompson in Held & Thompson (eds.) The communication action system has rules, at the level of structure, which are semantic in nature; the power action system has facilities that are analyzed as resources at the level of structure; and cultural action system has rules that are moral in nature.

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Social systems are regularized patterns of interaction; they are not ‘structures’, as G defined it; rather, they ‘have’ structures, implying that rules and resources are properties of the social system • When the regularized interactions structured by rules and resources are ‘sedimented’ in time and space, G talked about institutions; and institutions could be classified according to the primacy of the three ‘action systems’: cultural, communicative or domination (political and economic, with power further distinguished into allocative and authoritative power • Thus G has formulated a comprehensive framework, a basis for a new social theory, by conceptualizing (and sometimes giving quite novel meanings to) the key concepts of actor/agency, structure, social system and institution

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • From theory of structuration to theory of modernity • G’s insistence that actors are not just supports or bearers of social structures; rather, they are knowledgeable agents invoking rules and resources in specific contexts, and by doing so, they ‘implicate’ structure in their action • G is thus wary of any claim that sees any specific context or its factors that determines all other contexts and their actions; he is against any reductionism, especially the Marxian economic reductionism, or the functionalist claim that social action could be explained by their fulfilling certain systemic needs or functions • next questions are thus (a) what are the characteristics or parameters of the contexts of action, and (b) what are the decisive rules and resources for a specific society

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • G’s response to the first question: time and space as the parameters of social action; the tremendous changes that happen to time-space relations in modern society then lead him to an exploration of the nature of modernity • G’s response to the second question: Marx may have rightly focused on the material/economic conditions of production as the most decisive factors shaping modern capitalist society, but this argument is weak on two fronts: (i) class relations are not necessarily prominent in all societies; (ii) even in capitalist societies, economic power is not the only dimension that shapes modernity; other dimensions of power are equally necessary and important • G thus keeps his distance from a materialist account of the emergence of modern society, just as he would dissociate himself from any universalizing accounts of human history • For G, modernity is not exhausted by capitalism, despite the latter’s obvious significance; modernity is as much a transformation in the parameters of time-space relations, in the way institutions relate to one another, in the way people relate to authority, etc.

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • G’s theory of modernity is thus framed by these considerations: • Capitalism: competitive, market-regulated, price-driven, productive system in search of profit; a system characterized by private ownership of property, and the selling/buying of labour on the market • Industrialism: the widespread and inevitable use of inanimate sources of energy in production; it presupposes regularized coordination of a wide range of human activities • Surveillance capacities: this is not just physical control (schools, mental hospitals, etc.), but also the control of information, the increase in social supervision in a wide range of institutional contexts • Control of the means of violence: the monopoly within the nation state of such means, and the industrialization of warfare

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • These four dimensions G called the institutional dimensions or mechanisms of modernity; each is closely linked to the others, e.g., surveillance is closely tied to the expansion and increasing administrative power of various key spheres/nodes of industrialized society, such as schools, factories; or industrialism is closely tied to capitalism’s inherently expansionist tendencies; or industrialism made it possible for the nation-state to industrialize warfare, thus making total war both possible and unlikely • there is both insulation and dependence among these four mechanisms (e.g., without the growth of surveillance capacities of the nation-state, capitalism could not have a supply of ‘docile’, ‘complying’ labour force) • Underlying these considerations, it is the transformation in time-space relations that seems to be the key driving force in the rise of modernity, i.e. that drastically demarcates the modern from the pre-modern

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • All of the four institutional mechanisms have contributed, or indeed made possible, the revolution in time-space relations, as all of them made it possible to coordinate a larger amount and complexity of activities across time and space (transport, communication, modern state-to-state connections, the expansion of the capitalist logic of production, etc.) • G’s theory of modernity then orients more to the problems and promise of this transformed time-space terrain, rather than to the more orthodox concern with resources and constraints associated with socio-structural changes • Example: Giddens’s arguments on class • G saw power as resting on two kinds of control over resources: allocative (control over distribution of material resources) and authoritative (control over the coercive power over other people) • It is in capitalist societies that the allocative control becomes dominant; by this he referred to his conception of class as domination created by private ownership of property

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity Giddens on class, cont’d • Class is thus the central basis of power in modern capitalist societies; in this sense, modern societies are ‘class societies’ • By contrast, when societies are mainly governed by the dominance of the authoritative (coercive) control of resources (i.e. political rather than narrowly economic), the central basis of power is very different; but as such power would have implications for the access to economic resources, G called them ‘class-divided societies’ • The most important qualitative break is then between class-divided societies (e.g., feudal societies) and class societies • This is still very much a classificatory exercise; when G brought class to the level of explaining phenomena, he saw class more definitely in Weberian terms

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • G sees the central class problem as the translation of an economic category into a socio-political group; similar to Weber’s idea of ‘social class’ (or in Marxist terms, the problem of class formation) • Class is thus examined in terms of structuration: what are the factors that help to bring about this socio-political entity? • Two kinds of structuration: mediate structuration (market position determined by one’s assets, occupation and education, with the overall regulation governed by the amount of social mobility in the society), and proximate structuration (‘localized’ factors consisting of occupation-specific characteristics, authority relations at workplace, and other social distributive groupings like ‘housing class’, residential zoning (community) or general consumption patterns (life-styles)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • This makes for a great diversity, although G thought that it makes sense to distinguish the upper, middle and working class; the distinction between manual and non-manual is to him major and is reinforced by e.g., workplace authority, consumption patterns, residence, etc. • However, G argued that the link between these positions and class as an actor is not automatic; there is no mechanism that translates class positions into groupings that have self-identity/awareness and agenda • Class awareness vs. class consciousness; class identity, conflict consciousness and revolutionary consciousness: all these distinctions point to one thing, viz. G did not believe that class as a structural constraint is as important as the time-space extension of allocative and authoritative control/power

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Thus Giddens’s theory of modernity places emphasis often on the enabling side (rather than the constraining side) of this great transformation (time-space distanciation) • The three key features of modern society all add to its dynamic nature: • Time-space distanciation or separation: unlike pre-modern society, where the ‘when’ of social actions are often universally associated with the ‘where’ (sunrise, ploughing in the field..), modernity has time and space separated by the standardization and globalization of time; social interactions no longer simply take place at localized space (place or locale), but are infused with distanciated relations • Disembedding mechanisms: this follows from the distanciation; these mechanism ‘mean the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space’; two such mechanisms are money and the expert systems; the disembedding capacity is characteristic of modern institutions

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Reflexivity: this is about the crucial role played by knowledge in our activities; modern society is reflexive because there is a continuous and constant application of knowledge to our activities, thus monitoring its course, adjusting along the way, and thus changing the outcome; reflexivity is facilitated by communications, and is something practiced by both institutions and individuals (thus governments take census to collect information on its people and shape its policies; or individuals become more health-conscious once they know more about the side-effects of medicine, and so on); but reflexivity does not necessarily mean greater control over our lives, for our knowledge also includes the recognition of what we don’t know, or that what we know is not certain….

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • These three features of modernity point up one important lesson in G’s works: the transformative and reflexive capacity of both institutions and individuals have expanded tremendously in modern society; tradition (religion, custom, faith, ideology) could not be taken on faith, but is always subject to the scrutiny and approval of knowledge; nation-states, corporations and individuals have social interactions spanning a much wider time-space terrain, resulting in more goods and more reflexivity; the dynamism of modernity is more an open and enabling environment than an iron cage or class conflict-ridden situation • G’s verdict on modernity is ultimately more on the opportunity side rather than on the dark side, a distinction he applied to the founding fathers

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Specific issues of modernity • Institutions and trust • Modern institutions all involve the problem of trust, for the reason that they are closely connected with the disembedding mechanisms; thus we place trust in an institutionalized risk environment such as the stock-market; in our everyday life, we trust that our money will be honoured by others; or in modern travel, we trust that the air travel will be safe, because we place trust in the expert system, etc.; this trust is necessary because we are no longer living in a familiar, secure, co-presence setting as in the traditional community • Trust is some kind of faith; we are not unaware of the alternatives, but having weighed them, we nevertheless place trust in these modern institutions

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Trust is something other than confidence; confidence often requires some knowledge (as derived from past performance, what G called weak inductive knowledge) to back up, but trust often takes place without any knowledge of what’s happening in, say, the plumbing system, the train system, the stock-market, the way medicine works, government administration, etc.; in other words, we put faith (sometimes even blind faith!) in the principles, expertise and practices of modern institutions, in regard to what we expect from them • Trust is thus an essential ingredient – but something that can’t be comfortably taken-for-granted – in modern living • The vulnerability of modern institutions: (i) trust in abstract systems must be preceded by and sustained by trust in interpersonal interactions (in those systems); thus trust in the expert system of modern medicine could be sustained or undermined by good or bad encounters with one’s doctors (G called these encounters the access points in system trust)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity Vulnerability of modern institutions, cont’d (ii) Trust by nature is needed precisely because there is no clear or trustworthy knowledge; such ignorance breeds the grounds of skepticism and ambivalence; thus lay persons attitude to experts is often a mixture of deference and skepticism; trust could thus lapse or subside/reduce into some passive acceptance of the state of affairs; trust cannot be taken as necessarily a positive integrating mechanism (‘leap to commitment’) in modern society; it could lapse into passivity and cynicism • The sources of trust: (i) socialization (e.g., school curriculum teaches not so much concrete knowledge as the respect for and trust in knowledge);

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity Sources of trust, cont’d (ii) science’s respectability spills over into many spheres of social life; through publicization and popularization of scientific knowledge (iii) the experience of mutuality (from childhood, the close (and consistent, reliable, and routine) relations between care-provider and children builds up a sense of trust; it is also a basis for ontological security (confidence in the continuity of self-identity, and one’s surrounding environment) G’s psychology of trust is important, because trust nurtured in this way enables children (and later, adults) to deal with time-space separation (children trusting that the mother will return, that there will always be love to reassure, etc.), and A faith in the caretaker’s love is the essence of that leap to commitment which basic trust --- and all forms of trust thereafter – presumes.(Consequences, p. 95)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Intimacy and self • For Giddens, the modern self is a project, a reflexive project; self is liberated from tradition and its taken-for-granted assumptions • The modern self applies knowledge to both its environment and itself; the self, like the environment, is to be the object of knowledge-overseeing and knowledge-guided action; action for better adapting to circumstances or for fulfilling values and goals • The self in modern society craves for sociability, loyalty, etc., and for these to happen, it requires a personal trust • But personal trust in modern society is very much overshadowed by system trust (impersonal, and consisted of abstract principles and expertise)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Abstract systems do not answer our needs for interacting with people with human faces and who share mutually meaningful relationships with us (abstract systems as empty and unmoralized, p.120)) • Traditionally, social relationships like friendship is institutionalized, embedded in the strong institutions of the family, kinship and community; ‘friend’ has a clear opposite of either ‘enemy’ or ‘stranger’; the boundaries are re-affirmed by customs, rituals, practices (such as marriage patterns) • In modern society, these relationships are no longer institutionalized in that way; each self is to find the niche for specific others; thus ‘friend’ is arrayed alongside ‘acquaintance’, ‘someone I know’, ‘neighbour’, etc.; it makes for a more unstable and fleeting environment for the self • In modern society, the self experiences the most intimate and the most distant in the most connected and simultaneous way (nursing a child in Germany as potentially affected by reactor incident in Ukraine)

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • In these circumstances (fleeting, impersonal, feeling that things are not within one’s control), personal trust is something that one could not take for granted; it has to be won; it is something that has to be worked at, constructed and maintained • The implication for intimacy: in relating oneself to intimate others, one needs to see it as a project; a project of disclosing one’s self, of entering or maintaining a relationship • When this is combined with the reflexive character of self/modernity, it means intimacy is not just gaining intimate, shared experience; it is also about self-disclosure, self-enquiry and self-fulfillment • The self in modern society is thus as dynamic as the system which enables and constrains it: ‘constrains’ in the sense that the self is no longer given the comfort or reassurance of tradition, or that system trust does not meet the needs of personal trust

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity ‘constrains’ in the sense that the self is no longer given the comfort or reassurance of tradition, or that system trust does not meet the needs of personal trust ‘enables’ in the sense that reflexivity and the availability of disembedding mechanisms give the self resources which tradition could not provide • For Giddens, there is the tendency for modern intimate relationships to become what he called ‘pure relationship’, i.e., relationship whose main or only reason to exist is that it will satisfy both parties; no other considerations (obligations, parents’ wishes, etc.) are regarded as important • Such pure relationships have an important political implication; for what they demand, no more and no less, is the total opening of one’s self to the other party; openness, respect for the other, dialogue, self-reflections, adjustment, rights as well as obligations, etc. are the key ingredients in such intimate relationships, just as they are in public political life

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity • Giddens’s theory of modernity thus ‘ends’ with this close intermeshing of the personal and the political: the democratization of the emotions being a prelude and a prerequisite to social democracy • G’s vision for the future is thus, with globalization, some kind of cosmopolitan citizenship, could appear, based on this ‘ground zero’ matrix of self, intimacy, trust and reflexivity, in a world where nation-states are ‘too big for the small problems, and too small for the big problems’, and where our personal biographies are inevitably tied up (with all the risk, danger, transformative capacity) with distanciated people and events

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity 7. Criticisms and Conclusion • the novelty of seeing social change in terms of time-space separations; G reinstated important components in the emergence of modern industrial capitalism • reasserts the importance of keeping in sight the nature of social relationships, and not lose one’s way in the jungle of structures and macro factors • argued convincingly that there are other forms of domination that could not be reduced to class/economic domination; but the latter could and did impose the range of options and variations in the former • the meaning of structure in the theory of structuration has seemingly lost sight of the ordinary meaning of ‘structural constraint’

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity Criticisms and Summary, cont’d • the gap between the structuration theory and the theory of modernity: the theory should have led to the examination of modernity in terms of the different mixtures of rules and resources that actors in different societal/organizational contexts invoke or confront with, and what this entails for the self, for interpersonal relationships and system integration • theory of modernity proposed tried (through, e.g., the discussion of personal trust and system trust, or how democratization of emotions is a prelude/basis for broader democracy) to forge linkages between the personal and the public, but during the process, G lost sight of ‘structure’ • Ultimately, G retained his hope in the future of this juggernaut; he has faith in the reflexivity of modernity: is this faith justified?

Anthony Giddens: Diagnosis and Prognosis of Modernity