Against ‘modernity’: a dissident rant

Woodiwiss, Anthony

doi:10.1080/03085149700000001

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Notes 1 For such a critique of Giddens' politics see Callinicos, 1999. See also Rose 1999, Anderson 1994and Woodiwiss 1997 For an early formulation of this notion of modernization/modernity see Bendix 1969Bendix , 1978 There are no teleological implications in Giddens' tradition ^simple modernisation ^reflexive modemization scheme. If anything Giddens (as well as U. Beck) argue that at present we are living in a run-away world that is moving with great speed into the unknown.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflexive Modernization and the Third Way: The Impasses of Giddens' Social-Democratic Politics

Mouzelis

2001

The Sociological Review

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In the light of a critical account of Giddens' three recent books on politics (1994,1998, 2000) this paper argues that it is possible to formulate a third way, that is different both form the ad hoc mixture of neo-liberal and conventional social-democratic recipes found in the Blair/Schroder type of discourse, as well as from Giddens' utopianism that is blind to political economy realities. This alternative version of the third way, guided by a non-economistic holistic framework should stress the continuous relevance of the Left-Right divide, ie, the continuities between early and late modernity and between the old and new emancipatory struggles against tyranny, exploitation and cultural/symbolic manipulation. It should also attempt to elaborate new reform proposals (in the area of the work, welfare, democracy, the life world) that take seriously into account the contradictions and present distribution of economic, political and cultural power, both on the national and the global level.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflexive Modernization and the Third Way: The Impasses of Giddens' Social-Democratic Politics

Mouzelis

2001

The Sociological Review

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“…It is true, of course, that social philosophers often structured their thinking on the axis of time and by means of a kind of metaphysics of history: Burkhardt, Condorcet, Godwin, Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, Durkheim all operate within a kind of historical a priori, not to mention the evolutionary sociologies of Herbert Spencer and the English sociologists of the early 20th century. It is also true that much of this temporal imagination was built into later, and more mundane, social and cultural writing: for example, in the themes of modernisation and modernity that run from postwar North American sociology to the more recent writings of Anthony Giddens and Stuart Hall (Woodiwiss, 1997). But if we turn from such quasi-philosophical deliberations, and look at the earliest social' thinkers, we find that, as Foucault himself recognised elsewhere, they werè specialists of space ' (1980, page 151).…”

Section: Spatial Empiricismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial Phenomenotechnics: Making Space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes

Osborne

Rose

2004

Environ Plan D

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There are many ways in which humans articulate themselves through their ‘spatiality’. One neglected aspect of a historical anthropology of spatial relations and modes of existence concerns the role of the human and social sciences. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's multifaceted distinction between ‘smooth’ space and ‘striated’ space, we propose some ways to analyse the logics of spatialisation at work in the social sciences. We take as case studies the writings of two ‘technicians of space’, Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes, together with some of their contemporaries. The paper is intended as a contribution not to the ‘history of ideas' but to contemporary debates about human spatiality. Whilst some postmodern ‘affirmations' of space counterpose abstract disciplinary ‘striated’ technologies of spatial regulation to nonabstractionist ‘smooth’ modes of spatiality, we take a different perspective. In doing so, we suggest some non-‘historical’ uses to which we might put the history of the social sciences today. We also try to demonstrate some of the merits of an empiricist approach rather than a postmodernist approach to questions of spatiality.

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“…Thus, because of the discourse's implicit evolutionism, the only way in which, to use Jeffrey Harrod's (1987) term, the 'unprotected' will gain full access to their rights is when the societies in which they live reach western levels of development. However, it cannot be assumed, as the concept of programmatic rights implicitly suggests, that in time and as they develop all of them will or should converge on the kind of 'modern' society that the specification of the object of application instances (Woodiwiss, 1997). This is for two main reasons: first, the operation of the global economic system is as likely to prevent development in some societies as it is to encourage it; second, the environing routines are often culturally specific, very different from those associated with the supposed 'modern' archetype, and presumably protected by both the right to self-determination as developed in the UN's 1970 Declaration on Friendly Relations and, by implication at least, the much more recent acknowledgement of indigenous rights.…”

Section: Conclusion: the Need For A More Cosmopolitan Human Rights Regimementioning

confidence: 99%

Human Rights and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism

Woodiwiss¹

2002

Theory, Culture & Society

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The article outlines the diverse willed and unwilled developments which have attenuated international human rights discourse so that it still cannot be used to hold governments to account for their failures to respect the economic and social rights of their citizens. These developments range from geopolitical manoeuvres, through changed modes of enunciation (that is, the displacement of political theory by law as the source of human rights language), to the absence of appropriate governmentalist techniques for measuring economic and social compliance. It then questions and counters the doctrine of `justiciability' (i.e. the claim that only civil and political rights are legally enforceable) that is the discursive node of this structure of impotence. It concludes by proposing a strategy for the development of a more truly cosmopolitan international human rights discourse.

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Against ‘modernity’: a dissident rant

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

Reflexive Modernization and the Third Way: The Impasses of Giddens' Social-Democratic Politics

Reflexive Modernization and the Third Way: The Impasses of Giddens' Social-Democratic Politics

Spatial Phenomenotechnics: Making Space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes

Human Rights and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism

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