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Politics in a Small World 57

with liberation from exploitation, inequality, and oppression, and as
seeking justice and participation through democratic participation (con-
servatism is seen as a reaction to these ideals in radicalism and liberalism).
It works with the conventional, modern notion of power as the capability
of an individual or group to exert its will over others that we have encoun-

tered as the dominant definition in political sociology (Giddens, 1991 :
210 – 14). By contrast, “ life politics ” is a politics of individual lifestyle. It
involves the individual in continually making choices in a refl exively
ordered environment where tradition no longer provides the parameters
of everyday life. It is closely connected to globalization, according to

Giddens, “ where globalizing influences intrude deeply into the refl exive
project of the self, and, conversely, where processes of self - realization
influence global strategies ” (1991: 214). The consumer choices we exam-

ined at the end of the previous section would also be a good example of
Giddens ’ s ideas about “ life politics ” ; as a result of the efforts of environ-
mentalists, there is now extensive public awareness of the impact of
lifestyle decisions that people make in the over - developed West on the
environment here and elsewhere. There is also awareness of the differ-
ences that could be made to global environmental risks if people made
lifestyle changes.
Giddens does not see the nation - state as irrelevant in life politics. The
state remains crucial to democratization, emancipatory rights are still
important, and issues of life politics are likely to become increasingly
significant in the public and juridical arenas of states. However, life poli-

tics are currently more prominent outside the state, often carried by social
movements. The feminist slogan, “ The personal is political, ” exemplifi es
this kind of politics, as does the environmental slogan, “ Think global, act
local. ” Such forms of politics may, therefore, Giddens argues, lead to new
forms of political organization, both within states and at the global level,
that are more appropriate to their concerns (Giddens, 1991 : 226 – 8).
Discussion of these new forms of political organization is further
advanced in Ulrich Beck ’ s work on “ risk society. ” Beck ’ s theory of cul-
tural politics is similar to that of Giddens in many respects, despite their
different starting points (Beck, 1992 : 78). Beck ’ s understanding of “ risk
society ” draws sociologists ’ attention to the way in which contemporary
social life is characterized by an unprecedented degree and number of
fabricated risks, many of which are global in scope, such as environmental
pollution or nuclear war, and which are likely to become more so as the
overproduction, which is currently a feature of advanced industrial societ-
ies, intensifies across the world. Risk society is necessarily global, in Beck ’ s

view, because the dangers we must now deal with are not clearly limited