Second modernity

Abstract: By focusing on the Cartesian subject, this text explores ways in which to reformulate the politics of the Left in the area of global capitalism. In the process, the author touches on the work of prominent thinkers: Heidegger's attempt to overcome subjectivity; the post-Althusserian elaborations of political subjectivity (Ernesto Laclau, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou); deconstructionist feminism (Judith Butler); and the theories of second modernity and risk society (Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck).

Abstract: How can one distinguish the concept of second modernity from the concept of postmodernity? Postmodernists are interested in deconstruction without reconstruction, second modernity is about deconstruction and reconstruction. Social sciences need to construct new concepts to understand the world dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century.Modernity has not vanished, we are not post it. Radical social change has always been part of modernity. What is new is that modernity has begun to modernize its own foundations. This is what it means to say modernity has become reflexive. It has become directed at itself. This causes huge new problems both in reality and in theory. There has been a pluralization of the boundaries within and between societies, between society and nature, between Us and Other, between life and death. This pluralization also changes the inherent nature of boundaries. They become not so much boundaries as a variety of attempts to draw of boundaries. Border conflicts become transformed into ...

Abstract: This article explores the rise of the individual and the consequential individualization of society which should be viewed as a reflexive part of China's state-sponsored quest for modernity. It traces the origin of the individualization process to the Maoist era, arguing that some collectivist programmes of social engineering and the socialist path of modernization under Maoism ironically resulted in a partial individualization of Chinese society. Examining profound social changes during the three decades of the post-Mao reforms, the article reveals a number of similarities with the individualization process in Western Europe but also demonstrates some important differences. In the last section, the theoretical implications of the Chinese case in light of Ulrich Beck's theory of individualization and second modernity are discussed.

Abstract: The theme of this special issue is the necessity of a cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory. The question at the heart of this introductory chapter takes the challenge of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’, already addressed in a Special Issue on Cosmopolitan Sociology in this journal (Beck and Sznaider 2006), an important step further: How can social and political theory be opened up, theoretically as well as methodologically and normatively, to a historically new, entangled Modernity which threatens its own foundations? How can it account for the fundamental fragility, the mutability of societal dynamics (of unintended side-effects, domination and power), shaped by the globalization of capital and risks at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What theoretical and methodological problems arise and how can they be addressed in empirical research? In the following, we will develop this ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in four steps: firstly, we present the major conceptual tools for a theory of cosmopolitan modernities; secondly, we de-construct Western modernity by using examples taken from research on individualization and risk; thirdly, we address the key problem of methodological cosmopolitanism, namely the problem of defining the appropriate unit of analysis; and finally, we discuss normative questions, perspectives, and dilemmas of a theory of cosmopolitan modernities, in particular problems of political agency and prospects of political realization.