Review of “Late Modernity in Crisis: Why We Need a Theory of Society”

Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa are two prominent German sociological theorists, both in the their fifties, occupying key positions, often translated, and the winners of multiple prizes. Here, they describe, in turn, their positions and then debate each other in the final part of the book. The subtitle of the book underlines a shared claim, namely that sociologists must and can provide a general view of the state of society if the discipline is to continue to be taken seriously. It must be said immediately that the separate theories they offer are grand and abstract, seen in the fact that no country is mentioned, let alone discussed. Against this, however, can be set the remarkable and commendable clarity of exposition, making this a very useful introduction to one of the few the intellectual worlds not dominated by American social science. Reckwitz’s doctoral work was supervised in Cambridge by Anthony Giddens, as can be seen in the continual determination to avoid binaries of all sorts—something that leads to the advocacy of “practice theory,” a merging of cultural and material matters that leads to theory itself being seen as an active tool both in life and research. Still more important is the distinction between social theory and theory of society, the former providing concepts, the latter providing the general picture. The social theory of modernity for this author rests on radical contingency, the awareness that nothing is permanently fixed, but with movement resulting from two conflicts—between the general and the singular, and between rationality and cultural value. An extraordinary table then distinguishes between bourgeois modernity, industrial modernity, and late modernity, stressing the sources of novelty and experiences of loss. This is interesting, but there are problems with taken-for-granted views of historical development. Bourgeois modernity is held to have established parliamentary democracy, together with a nation state that encouraged imperialist expansion in the form of colonialism—a set of claims that simply falsifies the history of late nineteenth century Germany.

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