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NETWORK SOCIETY THEORY

springs from the present and even less can it arise from future history – from
a sense of the prospects which the future may hold. The point to note also
is the opposition made between ‘the home’ and ‘the world’ between
which twenty-first-century Belleville is now said to uneasily sit – not as
communitarian as when Castells first moved there as an exile from Fascist
Spain in 1962 but still clinging to some vestige of ‘placeness’. Castells does
not, in the manner of Giddens, for example, present ‘the home’ as thor-
oughly penetrated by and integrated into the bourgeois ‘world’ such that
the Thatcherite project of affirming ‘Victorian values’ while pursuing mar-
ketization with unprecedented vigor was caught in a fundamental contra-
diction. Indeed, the entire argument of Giddens around the unviability of
‘tradition’ in the culturally conservative sense and the need for tradition
to be made rationalistic, rests upon the notion that such oppositions as
that of ‘home’ and ‘community’ to ‘the world’ are simply a figment of the
romantic conservative imagination. Deeply rooted as he is in British
history and its early development of capitalism, for Giddens, ‘home’ and
‘community’ have long been captured for bourgeois culture and the pri-
vate life. To think otherwise is simply yet another example of the forlorn
attempt (frequently made by sections of the capitalist class itself) to ideal-
ize an earlier phase of capitalist society in contrast to the economic, polit-
ical, social and cultural Sturm und Drang of the current phase. It is as if the
capitalist class itself takes fright at the volatility and contradictions of the
world which they themselves have made and recoils from them. Giddens
rightly sees that, from the point of view of an upholder of civil society, this
approach is counter-productive because it ends up aggravating the con-
tradictions which are already acute enough. Like it or not, all ‘homes’ and
‘communities’ have for centuries been in and of this capitalist world – the
more so since the aggressive marketization project of the Thatcherites in
the 1980s. Yet it is precisely on this anti-modernist notion that the struc-
ture of Castells’ thought rests. This is yet further proof – if proof were
needed – that Castells does not belong to the rationalistic civil society
tradition from which Giddens, Lash and Urry obviously spring. Let us
pursue this point further.
Castells, in the elaboration of his thesis on the centrality of identity pol-
itics to the world today, distinguishes between three types of identity.
According to him there is ‘legitimizing identity’, ‘resistance identity’ and
‘project identity’ – a framework obviously borrowed from Weber’s typol-
ogy of domination. 11 These distinctions are critical to Castells’ entire
analysis of the present moment in world social development as well as his
notion of the direction world development is likely to take as a result of the
spread of the ‘informational’ society. At first sight, ‘legitimizing identity’

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