Bauman, Beck, Giddens and our understanding of politics in late modernity

Abstract

This article considers the political sociology of three prominent thinkers who describe a phase of ‘late modernity’: Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. It is argued in the case of Giddens and Beck that these ideas are faulty since they do not provide full conceptual space for agency, which they argue in their sociological work is central to understanding late modernity. Bauman's work does not suffer this problem. Nevertheless, his political framework is incomplete due, most notably, to his wish not to legislate. It is suggested that one common problem for all three is an inadequate or incomplete conception of power. This article also suggests problems with favouring a ‘disembedded’ over an ‘embedded’ definition of individualization for theories of late modernity.

Keywords:

• Zygmunt Bauman
• Ulrich Beck
• Anthony Giddens
• individualization
• power

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers and Mark Haugaard. My thanks also to Luke Martell, who kindly looked at multiple drafts of this article and offered invaluable comments.

Notes

1. A shortened version of this article was given as a paper at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference in Cardiff on 17 April 2009.

2. Bauman refers to ‘echo words, reverberating long after the crash that caused them has died down’ (Bauman 2008a, p. 62). As the following argument shows, he is not as comprehensive in the rejection of such categories as Beck.

3. These are my classifications (whose labels were suggested to me by Charlie Masquelier), not Elchardus', although they slightly overlap with his two, unnamed definitions.

4. By ‘institutional’ I mean not only societal institutions of modernity, but also the discourses these institutions draw upon.

5. Governmental action being the purview of government and state (i.e. legislation, communications, budgeting, etc.) and political action being actions carried out by non‐governmental actors or not directed towards the state/government (i.e. protests, new social movements, workplace‐based disagreements or consumer choices). While I accept that this division ignores many of the different aspect of government and non‐government I am using it here to point out a shift in focus in the work of Giddens, rather than make empirical claims about society.

6. It is unsurprising that, like Giddens, Beck sees previous ideologies such as socialism, liberalism and conservativism to be redundant: ‘these political theories are like blind people discussing colours’ (Beck 1997, p. 137).

7. The effectiveness or reality of recognizing cultural differences in Beck's cosmopolitanism has been criticized (cf. Bhambra 2007 for such a critique).

8. Emphasis within quotation marks in this article should be treated as the original authors', unless stated otherwise.

9. Here I refer to Giddens' (2001, p. 1) assertion that even governments who reject The Third Way model are ‘Third Way governments’ regardless.

10. It is true, however, that Bauman sees individualization as ‘universal disembedding’ (Bauman 2000a, pp. 29–38). However, he also emphasizes the unequal nature of this (Bauman 2000a, p. 34) and, in effect, his discussion becomes one of the embedded definition (cf. Bauman 2005, 2007a, 2008a).

11. Defined by Giddens as ‘authoritative resources’, namely the ability to organize one's life chances (Giddens 1984, pp. 258–262).

12. While Beck also argued for the universal minimum wage, this was not linked to individualization in the same way as Bauman's advocacy, but to considerations of a ‘flexible’ labour market (Beck 1992, p. 149).

13. A good, ‘non‐political’ example of this is The transformation of intimacy. Much of the explanation for this ‘transformation’ is focused upon increased gender equality (Giddens 1992, pp. 1–2, ff.).

14. In a similar fashion to Giddens' ‘double hermeneutic’. This is defined as ‘slippage’ between the ideas and vocabulary constructed by academics, and those of the lay public. Machiavelli's The Prince is offered as an example (Giddens 1984, pp. 350–354, 374).