Social acceleration is more fundamental than rationalization, individualization, and other modernization processes

Evidence

From a conceptual point of view, time cannot simply be placed next to culture, structure, nature, and personality, since it is rather a central and constitutive dimension of them. Furthermore, acceleration proves to be an aspect and element of each of the four types of development linked to it. Indeed it actually seems to represent the principle that connects and drives them, in which respect it appears now as a cause and then as an effect of the other tendencies of modernity. In part 4 I will pursue various indications that acceleration is more fundamental than the other categories insofar as processes of differentiation, rationalization, or individualization come to a standstill or even turn into their opposite just in case they become dysfunctional for further social acceleration. It does not in fact seem implausible, as we will see, to interpret those four modernization processes as (unintended) consequences of social acceleration: social disintegration would accordingly be a consequence of growing societal desynchronization, environmental devastation an effect of overtaxed natural regeneration times, the loss of “qualitative” individuality a side effect of the increased pace of life, and the surrender of rational autonomy the result of the “temporalization of time.” From this perspective, the other modernization tendencies thus appear to be, as it were, modes of functioning or manifestations of acceleration. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 221

Categorization

• QUESTION: The four named processes (differentiation, rationalization, individualization, domestication of nature?) map to the four modernization categories — worth tracking how part 4 actually argues the causal priority claim.
• XREF: Contrasts with Weber’s rationalization-centered or Durkheim’s differentiation-centered accounts of modernity — the rival grids named in paragraph 220. — connects to: Deceleration tendencies are secondary reactions to, not equals of, acceleration in modernization. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 125; Social acceleration is the irreducible master principle of modernization — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 762; Social acceleration compresses the present across all institutional spheres — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 261

Broader Connections

• Social acceleration is the irreducible master principle of modernization #corroborates (0.95) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 762