The Theory of Structuration & the Politics of the Third Way

Reflexive Modernity

Giddens theory is a theory of the uniqueness of modernity. The foundations of Giddens’ theory (structuration, the historical and political alternatives to historical materialism) are employed in The Consequences of Modernity (1990) and Beyond Left and Right (1994) to theorise the contemporary social world. The main difference between modernity and traditional social formations is the dynamism of the modern. A second feature is the existence of modern institutions: the nation state, modern political systems, mechanised and technological production, wage labour, commodification and urbanisation. Three processes generate the dynamism of modernity:

Modernity begins in Europe at the start of the 1600s. The organisational forms of modernity are conditioned by a four dimensional process (already seen in the analysis of the nation state): surveillance potential, military power, capitalism and industrialisation. The diagram below represents the institutional dimensions of modernity:

The precondition for the efficient operation of a modern enterprise or institution is “space-time distanciation,” that is, the ability to coordinate the actions of persons distributed through time and space, and not necessarily present for face-to-face interactions. Time is standardised and globalised, while space is reconfigured politically and mapped as an abstract terrain. Technological processes “shrink” time and space, creating a global social environment, while at the same time making these autonomous domains of human experience: the instant of the “here and now” is potentially separable and transmissible.

In modernity, social relations are lifted from their context and “disembedded” on the basis of space-time distanciation. Two mechanisms create disembedding: symbolic tokens and expert systems. Symbolic tokens are independent media of exchange which create abstract mediations between individuals - money being the paradigm. Symbolic tokens transpose standardised social and political relations from their original context into new contexts and thereby function as intensifiers of space-time distanciation and forms of disembedding or decontextualisation. Expert systems similarly work to shift social relations between contexts, this time by the employment of abstract knowledge systems. Expert systems are constituted by transport and communications networks, social and political institutions, media and economic networks, banks, and so forth. They enable agents to locate themselves and operate within technological and social systems environments that the agent cannot comprehend or reproduce. Therefore they work to disembed agents from the context of the local community and lifeworld.

Reflexivity exists, for Giddens, in two forms: the reflexive monitoring of action is characteristic of all forms of practical consciousness, but the second form of reflexivity, the regular and constant deployment of knowledge as a condition for agency (and therefore for social continuity, institutional duration and the maintenance of actors) is characteristic of modernity alone. This means that social practices in modernity are reflexive practices, continuously modified on the basis of what another tradition would call “the dialectic of theory and practice”. It is the profoundly self-reflexive character of the social practices of modernity that invest history with its decisive meaning: modernity and history as a concept and as a category of social life are intertwined. As Marx emphasised, world history is the creation of a determinate moment in the history of social formations - it did not always exist. Indeed, this historical knowledge entails historicism, that is, the relativisation of the truth claims of knowledge because of the fundamental uncertainty as to the truthfulness of a knowledge which we can be reasonably sure will be shortly superseded. Moreover, the reflexive character of social practice means that social agents in modernity “make history” (as opposed to being affected by history) and they do so on the basis of knowledges relating to the “meaning of history” or the “lessons of history”. While increased reflexivity does not automatically entail better knowledge, complete control of social processes or higher intelligence, it leads in Giddens’ term to the emergence of “clever people": social agents whose capacities are fundamentally constituted not by manual skills but by technical knowledges.

The reflexivity of modernity and the plurality of the institutional dimensions of modernity are, for Giddens, related. Where for Marx, Weber and Durkheim, society could be explained with reference to a single explanatory principle and the dominance of one factor in history and society (the productive forces and capitalism, rationalisation, industrialisation, respectively), Giddens believes that the monocausality of classical social theory rendered it profoundly reductionist and therefore prone to over-simplification. In opposition to classical social theory, Giddens proposes are four-dimensional, multi-causal model of explanation of the institutional dimensions of modernity. This represents a synthesis of the positions of classical social theory with Giddens’ emphasis on the external relations of social formations in the form of war and international relations. This is Giddens’ central thesis in social theory - fundamental even to structuration theory - that the institutions of modernity contain four independent but inter-related dimensions: surveillance and control, military power and the monopoly of violence, industrialisation and capitalism. I reproduce the diagram referred to earlier once again:

Industrialism means the deployment of nature as raw materials and as an inanimate source of power in the production or circulation of goods and services. The mechanisation of production and the industrialisation of warfare are consequences of industrialism, which transforms the workplace, transport and communications and affects domestic life.

Capitalism is regarded as a system of generalised commodity production centred on the relations between private ownership of capital and the propertyless wage labourer. Capitalism means a competitive market system and the drive towards technological innovation in the endless quest for profit.^[43] The institutional separation between economics and politics is constitutive of private property rights and also serves to prevent economic democracy from being anything more than a slogan. Capitalism is vital for the expansion of industrialism, since the process of the accumulation of capital and the development of technology are intertwined.

Surveillance explains the necessity of the national state form for the inherently transnational processes of capitalism and industrialism: capitalism and industrialism are rooted not in the national territory but in the national state. This is regarded by Giddens as an independent entity and not fundamentally a capitalist state (or a technocratic state). This effectively means that bureaucracy and the growth in the power and efficiency of the administrative apparatus represents an autonomous dynamic in modernity. The supervision and control of administered and docile populations is essential for capitalism (the management of class conflict through its institutionalisation).

Military force is an extension of the dimension of surveillance. The state’s development of a national territory with demarcated borders and the surveillance of the population parallel the growth of military power. With the complete monopoly over the means of violence, inter-state warfare assumes the dimensions of total war and the industrialisation of the military becomes the critical determinant of military success.

The claim that modernity represents a radical historical break with traditional social formations is the effect - according to Giddens - of a unique interaction between the four institutional dimensions of modernity during the 1600s and subsequently. The individual dimensions all possess independent logics and their own dynamics, which cannot be reduced to that of any of the others. None of the four conditions determines the others nor the social totality. They form a dense and interconnected network where they mutually affect and reinforce each other.^[44] For Giddens, the core definition of modernity is exactly this interrelation between capitalism, industrialism, and the nation state (surveillance and violence) - this is historically unique and constitutive of the dynamics of modernity, especially self-reflexivity.

The distanciation of time and space in modernity - through abstract symbols and expert systems - lead to the processes of disembedding and increased reflexivity. The globalisation of modernity therefore represents an intensification of these relations through their worldwide diffusion and reinforcement.^[45] This process penetrates the entire social fabric, right down to the local community, everyday life and the domestic environment. The process of the globalisation (unsurprisingly) has four dimensions, corresponding to the institutional dimensions of modernity.

The Dimensions of Globalisation.^[46]

Two phases of the globalisation of modernity.^[47] The whole postwar era - but with increased dynamism from the 1970s onwards - has witnessed the globalisation of the four dimensions of modernity. This process has to be viewed in relation to the disembedding consequences and abstract systems that generate the decentred processes of a complex and multi-dimensional nature. This means that globalisation in the second phase is not solely a continuation of the first phase of the international extension of the institutional forms of modernity. The most important index of the globalisation of modernity entering a new phase is the development of instantaneous electronic communications worldwide. The communicated knowledge is a necessary component of the reflexive modernisation process. Globalisation is more than economic globalisation. Globalisation means the transformation of time and space, and “action at a distance”. ^[48] This means that we live in one world bound by economic networks, interstate relations, military alliances and the global division of labour.

Giddens stresses that globalisation does not only mean the development of vast economic, political and cultural networks. Local and personal activities and experiences are profoundly shaped by the processes constitutive of globalisation. Daily life is increasingly mutually related to events happening internationally and it is more and more mediated by remote communications systems. Lifestyles have global consequences - the inequalities of the distribution of the consumption of resources, for instance, and the effects of the international division of labour, for another illustration.

Where the first stage of globalisation was a unitary process of dissemination, proceeding from Europe and North America outwards across the globe, the second stage is increasingly a reciprocal process of mutual recognition and influence. These global influences simultaneously fracture, unify and restructure the social order. Millions of communities, unified by taste, customs, beliefs and practices, exist internationally and transcend the borders of the nation state system. Religion is an obvious example, but electronically mediated Internet communities are another. Far from homogenising cultural formations worldwide, Giddens believes that this creates diversity, because the dialectics of lifestyle affiliations means that new lifestyle options continuously emerge within the old. “Globalisation leads to an insistence on diversity, a search to recover lost local traditions and an emphasis on local cultural identity - seen in a renewal of local nationalisms and ethnicities”.^[49] The transformation processes reinforce and are reinforced by the institutional dimensions of globalisation. Globalisation, time-space compression and distanciation, the disembedding of local communities and lifeworlds by abstract symbols and expert systems, and the increase in social reflexivity, are taking society beyond modernism and into a post-traditional society.

The post-traditional society is a part of modernity but no longer defined by the dialectics of modernism (the modernisation of tradition). Giddens opposes the term “post-modern,” believing that we are still within modernity, and regards the formulation “post-traditional” as more precise than his earlier term, “late modernity”.

Tradition is a means for the organisation of time, through ritual practices that constitute a material embodiment of cultural memory. It is constituted by a special orientation towards the past which is structurally decisive for the present, namely, tradition contains an integrity and continuity that resists many forms of change.^[50] There are five major characteristics of tradition:

tradition is an organising medium for collective memory. We find neither private traditions nor private language. The integrity (authenticity) of a tradition is not derived from the repetition or the persistence of tradition over time, but from the continuous work of interpretation by a group which seeks to “identify the strands which bind present to past”.^[51]

Traditions involve rituals which are practical means to the preservation of traditional forms: rituals manifest traditions in practice (and conversely, the form of a traditional practice is always ritualised). Rituals connect the continuous reconstruction of the past with concrete activities and enactments.

Traditions involve a formulaic truth which attributes causal efficacy to ritual. Formulaic truths are often expressed in rituals and cannot be disagreed with or contradicted. They are an efficient means of removing or preventing dissent.

Tradition has guardians who interpret tradition and function as mediators between tradition and its causal powers. Guardians are not experts in the modern sense. They have special arcane powers, and they are the only person with access to the causal powers. This access is not communicable to the outsider. Its efficacy resides entirely in the traditional society and not in the competence of modern experts. Indeed, the decisive social marker in traditional societies is not expert competence but status, and this status rather than expert competency as such characterises guardians.

Tradition has a normative or moral content which gives it a binding character.^[52] Tradition is not only what is done, but even more what ought to be done. Traditional social forms and personal habits are therefore legitimated as the sole valid way to do something: an act is not evaluated with reference to its effectiveness or unintended consequences, but in relation to its adequacy to traditional norms.

Therefore Giddens does not understand tradition as a static social formation and stresses that active social agents create, through interpretation and rituals, social solidarity and practical guidance. Despite the Enlightenment’s efforts to extirpate tradition, Giddens argues that tradition and modernity coexisted in a special symbiosis for nearly four hundred years, until the 1960s. Indeed, science itself became a sort of tradition. Concepts such as nation, community and education replaced the roles played by custom, without transforming the traditional forms of the associated practices and institutions. Giddens also mentions new family traditions, namely, the stabilisation of the nuclear family in Western modernity.

It is crucial to contemporary society that tradition has been interrogated, problematised and undermined to the extent that no social actions can today be carried through solely under the guidance of tradition. Even though we may act from a point of departure in tradition, we are always conscious at some level that it might be done differently. To act in accordance with substantive tradition today therefore requires rational justification and a reflexive account of why this is right - that is, it breaks decisively with the form of tradition.

Tradition therefore becomes detraditionalised. Detraditionalisation - rather like disembedding - involves a form of “setting free,” as theorised by Ulrich Beck and endorsed by Giddens. When the tie of tradition is loosened and the compulsion to repeat disappears, new opportunities are created for the individual in society, but also risk and the anxiety associated with risk increases, for now decisions have to be made. Thus emancipation from the yoke of tradition is experienced by the subject as a paradoxical vertigo and loss.

Detraditionalisation does not entail the disappearance of tradition, but its reflexive incorporation within modernity, or its emergence as a fundamentalism, in opposition to modernity. Fundamentalism happens when traditions are defended by traditional means; this is always dogmatism, since tradition relies for its efficacy and authority on the unquestionable status of its premises, which are transmitted as truths through rituals. The reference to ritual truth is the decisive characteristic of fundamentalism and definitive of its status as a refusal of dialogue in the context of reflexive modernisation.^[53] Giddens therefore subscribes to the standard contemporary mainstream Left position: the defence and extension of “cosmopolitan democracy” against excessive corporate power and bureaucratic opacity, but also against fundamentalism and the forces of “anti-globalisation”.

Giddens proposes that the “second modernity” brings an increase in social reflexivity - that is, a society of “clever people” in possession of more information. This knowledge confronts human beings with an intensive and extensive proliferation of options. This constitutes a disembedding or “setting free” of the individual. Yet, for Giddens, this is not a process of narcissistic individualisation or egocentric isolation. Instead, individuals have to actively work for trust in their social relations. Social reflexivity means the interrogation and undermining of tradition, and consequently, tradition can no longer provide a firm set of norms and beliefs that can be used to create trust. All social relations are negotiable and norms are subject to social practices of scrutiny and reflexive justification. We negotiate about the norms and ethics which form the basis for business, social, and personal relationships. The post-traditional society is a society in which social bonds are actively and consciously created and renegotiated, rather than given, accepted and inherently authoritative. This means that the second modernity is a dangerous and difficult project, but also one that Giddens sees as full of new opportunities and rewards. It is a society where authority is decentred. In interpersonal relations, an opening towards the other is necessary, and as a consequence, new forms of social solidarity can be created. Both violence and dialogue are inherently possible outcomes: nothing determines before the fact that the second modernisation will lead to increased democracy, solidarity and trust.

In line with the theory of structuration, Giddens believes that the second modernity or post-traditional society is created and reproduced in social practice - that is, in reciprocal interactions between individuals’ actions and social institutions. Society’s institutions and structures are the means and outcomes of the agent’s actions. Hence, globalisation of institutions is only one dimension of the problematic of the second modernity. Another aspect concerns the transformations of everyday life and the modifications to intimacy and personality that this process engenders. Giddens characterises this as a dialectic between “extentionality” (the global effects) and “intentionality” (changes caused by personal dispositions and choices). In recent works, Giddens has surveyed the shift in the nature and dynamics of selfhood, in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) and the changes to sexual and romantic relationships, in The Transformation of Intimacy (1992).

The “hinge” upon which the analysis of the institutional dynamics of the post-traditional society and the transformations of subjectivity turn is the concept of “trust”. Trust and ontological security link the agency of the individual to the existence of social institutions. Recall that the social is conceptualised by Giddens as social practices with spatial extension and temporal duration. The many actions and interactions constitutive of social existence are bound together by relations of trust. Giddens makes a distinction between two basic types of trust relation: “facework” - or face-to-face interactions where the co-presence of actors is a necessity - and “faceless commitments” - manifested in our trust in the abstract systems that constitute the specific institutional dimensions of modernity. The concept of trust is connected to the trustworthiness or reliability of a person, institution or system. This reduces to the predicability of the person, institution or system. Trust is a means for the reduction of complexity by making the response of the other relatively predictable, therefore eliminating the problem of “double contingency” and the paralysis that comes with the dilemma of having to make a decision that depends on the unknown response of the other. Confidence in a person’s love or integrity, or trust in the adherence of an institution to certain abstract principles, creates the context for trust relations.

This means that the nature of trust has changed in the transition from traditional society to modernity. In traditional societies, kinship, local communities, religion and tradition create and maintain trust relations. The framework for these relations is fundamentally the family and the locale. With the emergence of the disembedding mechanisms of modernity, this framework is radically relativised and disintegrated. The essence of modern institutions is connected to trust in abstract tokens and expert systems. The market, for instance, presupposes certain forms of trust (exchange relations supervised by contractual obligations). This example helps us to see that Giddens is not talking about “trust” in the sense of total confidence or naïve belief in the essentially beneficent character of impersonal institutions. Rather, trust refers to a relationship of reflexive confidence informed by specific parameters: the market does not prevent forms of institutionalised deception or hidden persuasion, but all the same, it does not reduce to a swindle. The degree of trust that an agent holds in a particular social system, other person or social institution is informed and modified by the actions of representatives of the abstract relations and expert systems underpinning modern life. The concept of accountability acquires therefore a normative force, insofar as social cohesion and the agency of persons depends - as is explained below - on a basic minimum of trust between agents and institutions. Giddens refers to these persons as the “access points” to the institutional fabric of modernity, these system representatives are decisive for the legitimation of the institutional context of modernity. The destruction of trust by the failure of access points to legitimate the system is what leads to a turn towards fundamentalism, to the emergence of alternative social agendas, or to powerlessness.

The concept of trust is related closely to the concept of the “risk society” of second modernity elaborated by German social theorists, Niklas Luhmann and Ulrich Beck. Modernity, with its increasing institutional complexity and framework of the proliferation of decisions, creates risk. This risk is coupled to anxiety, for the nature of a decision is that it has to be made on undecidable terrain. (Actions conducted in the context of predictable outcomes are not referred to here as decisions.) Agency in modernity involves a constant awareness of the limitations of reflexive knowledge and therefore cognisance of the existence of risk; actions in modernity are conducted within the framework of calculations regarding the probability of outcomes and the possibility of risk, that is, of “counter-finality” or unintended consequences.

Theories of social complexity - as developed by Niklas Luhman and Ulrich Beck - are applications to social theory of concepts developed in the field of information theory (systems theory) and artificial intelligence research, which draws upon the mathematics of determinate chaos. Luhmann defines complexity as a threshold marking the difference between simple systems (every element can be related to every other element) and complex systems: “we will call an interconnected collection of elements “complex” when, because of immanent constraints in the elements’ connective capacity, it is no longer possible at any moment to connect every element with every other element ... Complexity, in this sense, means being forced to select; being forced to select means contingency; and contingency means risk”.^[54] Another way of theorising the distinction between simple and complex systems is to state that a complex system cannot be theorised by a single description. There are three reasons for this. A complex system is an open system, and the peculiarity of open systems is that they interact with other systems outside of themselves. This interaction has two components: input, that what enters the system from the outside, and output, that what leaves the system for the environment. In order to speak about the inside and the outside of a system, we need to be able to distinguish between the system itself and its environment. System and environment are in general separated by a boundary. A complex system therefore requires at a minimum two descriptions: the variations in the boundary conditions and the description of the various states of the system.

The second reason can be grasped by examining the meaning of the term “complexity” in relation to internal structures of complexes. The original Latin word complexus signifies “entwined,” or “twisted together”. This may be interpreted in the following way: in order to have a complex you need two or more components, which are joined in such a way that it is difficult to separate them. Similarly, the Oxford Dictionary defines something as “complex” if it is “made of (usually several) closely connected parts”. Here we find the basic duality between parts that are at the same time distinct and connected. Intuitively then, a system would be more complex if more parts could be distinguished, and if more connections between them existed. More parts to be represented means more extensive models. Since the components of a complex cannot be separated without destroying it, the method of analysis or decomposition into independent modules cannot be used to develop or simplify such models. This implies that complex entities will be difficult to model, that eventual models will be difficult to use for prediction or control, and that problems will be difficult to solve. This accounts for the connotation of difficult, which the word “complex” has received in later periods.

The aspects of distinction and connection determine two dimensions characterising complexity. Distinction corresponds to variety, to heterogeneity, to the fact that different parts of the complex behave differently. Connection corresponds to constraint, to redundancy, to the fact that different parts are not independent, but that the knowledge of one part allows the determination of features of the other parts. Distinction leads in the limit to disorder, chaos or entropy, like in a gas, where the position of any gas molecule is completely independent of the position of the other molecules. Connection leads to order or negentropy, as in a perfect crystal, where the position of a molecule is completely determined by the positions of the neighbouring molecules to which it is bound. Complexity can only exist if both aspects are present: neither perfect disorder (which can be described using standard statistical methods), nor perfect order (which can be described by traditional deterministic methods) are complex. It thus can be said to be situated in between order and disorder, or, using a recently fashionable expression, “on the edge of chaos”. As a rule of thumb, a system with three or more bifurcation points within any process will display properties of complexity. Beyond 4.699 bifurcation junctions, the system will be chaotic. Giddens’ theoretical model of modernity involves four relatively autonomous sub-systems (capitalism, industrialism, the nation state and military power). The sub-systems are interdependent but possess independent internal dynamics. This model is therefore complex, but not chaotic.

The third reason why no complex system can be adequately theorised under a single description is that a complex system displays the property of “scale independence": different frames of reference or levels of detail of analysis of a complex system must be handled under separate descriptions, and these descriptions might not necessarily be able to be collapsed into a “unified field theory,” due to the “graininess” of a complex. This property relates to the characteristic of emergence: at higher levels of complexity, the unpredictability that is inherent in the evolution of complex systems can yield results that are totally unpredictable based on knowledge of the original conditions. Such unpredictable results are called emergent properties. Emergent properties show how complex systems are inherently creative ones, since although emergent properties are a logical (but unpredictable) result, they can include higher level phenomena which cannot be reduced to simpler constituents or origins.

The evolution of complex systems is marked by contingency - that is, by the possibility that it might have been otherwise - and the constraints and dynamics of system evolution (the nature of the elements and the relations they make possible, the contingent paths of system formation, the specific degree of complexity of the system-environment relative to the system) are internalised through self-reflexivity. The difference between system and environment is then theorised in terms of complexity. The environment is necessarily more complex than the system, and systems manage environmental complexity by a reduction of complexity, effected through the selective capacity of system elements and relations.

The reduction of complexity can be theorised relatively precisely: reduction happens when an environment having a certain number of relations is reduced by a system having a smaller number of relations. This reduction can be external (for instance, the labour process is seen as a reduction of natural complexity) or internal (a myth is a complex sub-system that reduces the complex environment faced by a tribe (a complex system) by relating categories of the natural world to social categories within a system of permutations and combinations of mythemes, or mythical elements). The corollary of this proposition is that differential complexity is a lack of information or fundamental indeterminacy: the system has insufficient information regarding the complexity of its environment (by definition, since the system may have any number of relations that is less than but not equal to the number of relations in the environment) and this means an aspect of uncertainty, contingency and risk. “The system produces and reacts to an unclear picture of itself”.^[55]

This is extraordinarily important for Marxism. If it can be demonstrated that contemporary capitalism displays complex characteristics, then it follows that any theoretical description that relies upon an expressive model (where all social phenomena are generated by “the general contradiction of capitalism, between labour and capital,” by the “world capitalist crisis,” or whatever) is ipso facto false. This is aside from the very good philosophical reasons for suspecting that such monocausal theoretical descriptions are metaphysical. In my view, the fact that all recent social theory provides complex, polycausal models of the social is already sufficient evidence to demonstrate that contemporary capitalism is a complex system. The principle of inference to the best explanation, in relation to the phenomenon that contemporary social theory is complex, leads me to the conclusion that this is because the object of social theory is a complex system. This, I believe, completely eliminates from the theoretical field the standard Marxist objection to theoretical pluralism (polycausal or multi-factorial models), namely, that this is a “bourgeois theoretical pluralism as opposed to Marxist monism,” or similar. (I mean, theoretically polycausal, not necessarily politically pluralist - that is not in question here.) Any Marxian theory today that is not pluralist is wrong.

The second modernity is a risk society in which modern systems force us into a permanent state of risk. The difference between modern and pre-modern societies is not exposure to risk as a consequence of action, but the risk profile associated with the social formation. Where in traditional societies, risks are associated with the vagaries of nature, in modern society risks are created by humanity. Certain sorts of risks become globalised and intensified: war, environmental destruction, risks connected to the international division of labour, and so forth. Given the reflexive character of modernity, we can possess knowledge of the inherent risks in certain categories of actions. For instance, the limitations of expert systems are explicitly recognised by their designers. In addition, the modern risk profile entails an acknowledgment that “God is dead,” that the Big Other no longer guarantees the success of human actions, and Giddens also claim that there are risks which do not respect the boundaries between rich and poor, powerless and powerful, young and old. The unintended consequences of nuclear war, environmental damage and economic catastrophe are examples.

The modern human being lives with the duality whereby we both respect and trust systems while at the same time experiencing a generalised scepticism towards institutions and abstractions. The modern worldview, Giddens suggests, is fundamentally pragmatic, and instead of totally rejecting a system, prefers to elect a different system representative. The list a generalised risks is today too well known: nuclear war, environmental destruction and global economic meltdown evoke reactions of cynical despair or apathetic indifference. Giddens classifies responses into three bands: pragmatic acceptance, sustained optimism, and cynical pessimism. The new social movements are instances of a sustained optimism, necessary, Giddens argues, for political action.

The increased reflexivity of modernity contributes to radical doubt at both the institutional and personal-existential levels. This radical doubt blocks any blind (non-reflexive) trust in systems, and any belief in certainty is therefore finished. Knowledge becomes a set of hypotheses subject to validation, modification and eventual supersession. This radical doubt has great significance for the concepts of trust and risk elaborated by Giddens. Under conditions of insecurity or of a proliferation of options, trust in a person or system is decisive for the decisions being made. Relations of trust are therefore absolutely critical for a person’s developmental potential and political effectiveness. The concept of trust is therefore central to Giddens’ social theory and political strategy.

Trust in Giddens’ theoretical universe is closely connected to “ontological security”. The foundation for ontological security evolves in the infant in relation to their primary carers (which Giddens does not hesitate to identify with the mother and father). The child possesses a strong ontological security system. This ontological security and trust in the mother and father (following Giddens’ designations for the moment) forms a protective shield within which the self matures: trust is a necessary precondition for the emergence of modern selfhood and therefore for the agent being an effective operator of symbolic systems and social interactions.

Trust in systems and the risk connected with this trust are critical for ontological security. Ontological security constitutes the foundation of identity and confidence in the social and material world which appears before us. Trust in abstract expert systems creates trust in everyday life, but it cannot replace the mutuality and intimacy of personal and private relations. Trust in impersonal principles and anonymous others becomes an unavoidable and necessary component of modern existence, but this is unthinkable without intimacy, friendship and family, according to Giddens.

Giddens argues that “the self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences; in forging their self-identities ... individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications”.^[56] The foundation of this “forging” of self-identity is ontological security. A strong ontological security equips the agent with the capacity to create a self-identity able to recognise the existence and identities of other persons and objects. An agent, in Giddens’ theoretical universe, is a person who possesses the ability to intervene in the world, make decisions and thereby make a difference. The precondition for making decisions is a self-identity. Self-identity with a high level of ontological security provides the foundation for the ability of the agent to construct models, supply answers and respond to the existential dilemmas and action problems that arise in everyday life in the modern world.

Self-identity is not given but a process. Self-identity arises when the person, in relation to their biography, is able to view the self as a reflexive project constructed by means of a narrative of identity-formation. “A person with a reasonably stable sense of self-identity has a feeling of biographical continuity which she is able to grasp reflexively and ... communicate to other people”.^[57] The person’s identity is not found in behaviour and actions or in others’ reactions to this behaviour. Rather, self-identity is the ability to construct a unique narrative about the person. This narrative, which constitutes the person’s biography, cannot be purely fictional. It must constantly incorporate events which take place in the external world and simultaneously filter these, so that they can enter into this continuous narrative of the self.

Stable self-identity, besides this ability to “chain onto” the ongoing life narrative, requires aspects of ontological security - especially in relation to the mutual recognition of persons and the existence of material objects external to the self. Self-identity is therefore inherently fragile, in that this biographical narrative is a narrative - that is to say a symbolic construction selected from a mass of cultural and social elements and encounters, which inherently could have been otherwise. The very uniqueness of the individual’s biographical narrative implies its contingency, the way that the same person’s narrative might have been constructed very differently. Self-identity is at the same time robust, in that this sense of continuity within change prevents the conflicts and changes encountered by the self from undermining the feeling of identity.

Self-identity is therefore a reflexive project, in that the reflexivity characteristic of modernity invades the core of the self. For traditional agents, external conditions and traditional determinations constitutive the self inflexibly as the result of social location. With modernity, self-identity becomes the task of the individual, who carries through this task as a reflexive project. Confronted by the inability of tradition to respond to the decision-related questions posed by modern life, the individual is confronted by the characteristic field of questions posed within existentialist philosophy: to be or not to be, what is to be done, what should I become, and so forth. Action, existence and selfhood are thereby raised to the discursive level as explicit subjects of reflection in philosophy and literature. The body is integrated within this sense of self-identity as part of the self’s reflexive considerations. The body is not viewed by Giddens as a passive object to be manipulated by the omniscient consciousness, but rather as integral to the field of conscious subjectivity. Regimes of bodily control over organic functions and needs are crucial to selfhood.^[58]

This means that the individual has to choose a specific lifestyle which is integrated with their physical existence and their sense of selfhood. Giddens understands lifestyle to be broader than consumption patterns, and determines “lifestyle” to mean:

“a more or less integrated set of practices which an individual embraces, not only because such practices fulfil utilitarian needs, but because they give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity ... Lifestyles are routinised practices, the routines are incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity”.^[59]

Giddens’ claim is that with the advent of modernity, the agent is forced to choose a lifestyle as part of one’s self-identity. Lifestyle contains a special set of practices which create the routines necessary for maintaining ontological security. Class differences enter the range and extent of lifestyle choices that an agent can make: Giddens gives the example of the factory worker and the bank manager, suggesting that where the worker cannot choose the cars and luxuries, the manager might well determine a pattern of underconsumption as part of their lifestyle choices (for instance, dieting).

The appearance of a post-traditional society means that tradition is no longer the referent for lifestyle choices and self-identity. The disappearance of tradition, and its normative component, means the pluralisation of social norms. Additionally, the second modernity and globalisation means that the individual confronts an immense array of potential contexts for their decisions regarding lifestyles, and therefore both the complexity of modern identity and its immensely pluralised possibilities. The generalised extension of methodological doubt means the existence of a multiplicity of competing authorities (for instance, fashion commentators and leaders, as well as subcultural millieux). Finally, the mass media and electronic communications means that effectively, lifestyle choices are subject to constant revision and global parameters of choice. The rejection of all these abstract systems and lifestyle possibilities is simply not an option. Instead, they are incorporated in to the reflexive project of the self, in the characteristic modes of pastiche and preferential selection of one system over other alternatives. The selection of a lifestyle implies trust in one abstract system instead of another. It also implies patterns of trust in persons, especially friends and (sexual and familial) partners. For Giddens, this latter area of intimacy is being transformed by the second modernity.

The selection of narrative elements in the reflexive project of selfhood extends ‘all the way down’ to intimacy. Abstract systems cannot replace the ontological security generated within the sphere of personal relations, beginning with the family. With the collapse of traditional family and personal relations, the burden of the creation of a sphere of ontological security in personal relations falls onto the individual. This sphere is described by Giddens and the sphere of “pure relations”. This terms refers to the conditions “where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each individual from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only insofar as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it”.^[60] Close relations of trust with “significant others” which generate ontological security evolve in contexts where the pure relation is the prototype. Pre-modern relations of this kind were subordinated to the fixed rules of tradition. It is unique in history that intimate relations are potentially subject to renegotiation on a daily basis and are not bound to fixed normative frameworks. Not only the partner, but also the rules governing the conduct of the relationship are chosen by the participants, and constantly subject to renegotiation.

Giddens argues that marriage has become effectively a contractual relation. In traditional society, “friend” referred to all non-strangers. With modernity, friendship becomes an elective affinity entered into for its own sake and counterposed to the commercial relations entered into for the purpose of beneficial exchange. The mutual benefits in friendship are precisely non-pecuniary - this is constitutive of friendship in modernity, and so the “social contract” of friendship and marriage is a non-commercial contract. Community of interest, romantic desire, homosocial affection and the commonality of lifestyle choices (“personal style”) bind pure relations, as opposed to political engagements, economic ties, sexual need and status networks.

Within this concept of friendship in modernity, commitment becomes crucial, since the relation is that precisely which does not have immediate material benefits as its object. Mutual commitment is the key term in pure relationships. Intimacy, Giddens argues, is subordinated to the reflexive project of the self. This includes sexuality - for Giddens, sexual needs is effectively regulated by romantic desire and therefore integrated within the reflexive project of the self.

The modern individual Giddens argues, displays a “plastic sexuality” (something different from that demonstrated by Michael Jackson, one hopes): the individual’s sexuality is no longer fixed, but subject to mutability of object, gender characteristics and even aspects of biological sexuation. Citing the various reports on sexuality to the effect that human sexuality is neither fixed in time nor constant in orientation, Giddens argues that the transgression and opening of sexual norms to critical scrutiny after the 1960s means that the individual confronts a sea of possibilities for testing sexual limits and options for sexual conduct.^[61]

The individual incorporates various expert systems into their reflexive and elective sexual and emotional conduct, from sex reports and popular psychological advice on romantic problems, through to expert counselling and mediated formulations of explicit contracts for partnerships. Individuals therefore take a degree of reflexive control over their sexuality and use this to extend their range of options.

Increasing institutional reflexivity, the development of more abstract systems, and the restructuring of social relations are all key aspects of the transformation of modern society. Giddens divides the main political strategies into emancipatory politics and life politics, where life politics is a supplement to emancipatory politics. Emancipatory politics is concerned with inequality and exploitation, while life politics is centred on lifestyle and life decisions. Emancipatory politics is fundamentally the break with the bonds of the past so as to create the conditions for the emergence of increased individual autonomy. Exploitation, inequality, oppression and injustice are barriers to individual freedom, for Giddens, to be removed within the framework of representative parliamentary democracy. Life politics presupposes a certain level of emancipation and material prosperity.