Page 71 - Culture Society and Economy

Robotham-04.qxd 1/31/2005 6:23 PM Page 64

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

developing countries (for example, in Africa) is qualitatively of an altogether
different order. The ‘risk’ here is not recession or a temporary reduction
in living standards: one is dealing with the subordination and immisera-
tion of billions of people on a global scale.
Giddens’s work is a synthesis of the ideas of Max Weber and Emile
Durkheim, with a marked leaning in the functionalist, Durkheimian
direction. The Weberian influences are expressed in his emphasis on the
concept of ‘risk’ with its deeply rationalistic overtones. It is also expressed
in the emphasis given to the single actor’s point of view in the well-known
manner of Weber’s sociological methodology. This focus on risk and the
need for calculation to assess and minimize risk gives his most recent
writings a pessimistic, modernist cast which is also reminiscent of Weber’s
lamentations on the ‘iron cage’ of modernity. This modernist pessimism
about the humanly ‘manufactured’ dangers of globalization and moder-
1
nity suffuses his Reith lectures published as Runaway World. Giddens
balances uneasily between cautious optimism and this heightened sense
of pessimism. This pessimism springs from this heightened sense of the
fragility of the contemporary global social and political order and the
need to shore this up with ‘tradition’ of some kind. It is as if Giddens sees
clearly all the national and global contradictions generated by the global
capitalist system – the injustices and virulent hostilities which it gener-
ates. At the same time he remains wedded to this system, warts and all.
Growing anxiety over the potential for social and political chaos in con-
temporary global and national society therefore more and more becomes
the main concern of his work. Hence his preoccupation with the issue of
‘structure’ or what used to be called ‘the problem of order’.
Others have observed that Giddens’s notion of structure in his ‘struc-
turation’ theory is very much derived from Durkheim. ‘Structure’ is con-
ceived of as a social-psychological code of norms and values free of deep
class contradictions and not based on an economic-political structure in
the materialist sense. This is yet another example of the unmooring of
social analysis from political economy which is one of the themes of this
work. Unsurprisingly, Giddens’s solution to the perceived problem of
order is also the Durkheimian (and very French) one. What is needed is
the invention of ‘tradition’ but on a rationalistic basis: in plain language
a kind of modern civic religion, but of a British not French variety.
Giddens wrote this about the importance of tradition: ‘In my view, it is
entirely rational to recognize that traditions are needed in society. We
shouldn’t accept the Enlightenment idea that the world should rid itself
of tradition altogether. Traditions are needed, and will always persist,
because they give continuity and form to life.’ 2

64