Anthony Giddens — The Consequences of Modernity

147 published claims from this book.

• A capitalist society is a society only because it is a nation-state
• A declining West must divide rivals and unite itself to limit losses
• A future-oriented unconscious drives creation forward into the not-yet-existent
• A singular focus on labour movements misreads modernity’s multidimensional dynamics
• Abstract systems do not colonise the life-world but interact dialectically with it
• Agrarian states never achieved the internal pacification of modern states
• All trust is blind trust, being the link between faith and confidence.
• Authentic selfhood requires enduring anxiety rather than escaping it through self-justification
• Basic trust must be maintained against perpetual feelings of loss.
• Business-as-usual stabilises trust by letting individuals feel risks are negligible.
• Capitalism becomes a whole way of life only through the state’s ethical civilizing work.
• Capitalism created the first global economy based on economics rather than politics
• Capitalism is defined by private capital, propertyless wage labour, and competitive markets
• Capitalism’s non-political nature enabled its global penetration beyond state reach
• Confidence in expert systems can be catastrophically misplaced
• Conflicting expert claims make it hard to know how much trust to vest.
• Contemporary transformations are modernity’s self-radicalization, not its ending
• Cultural displacement may genuinely be the mechanism behind human rights adoption
• Disembedding mechanisms remove control from individuals and create collective risk
• Economic concepts actively constitute the economic behavior they describe
• Emancipatory politics must be paired with life politics
• Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning
• Enlightenment reason reshaped religious providence rather than displacing it
• Even committed system insiders need facework to sustain their own internal trust.
• Even pragmatic acceptance conceals unconscious existential dread about global catastrophe.
• Even pragmatic faith in expert systems still implies trust
• Expert knowledge reflexively creates the very universe of events it calculates.
• Expert systems cannot validate deterrence, so uncertainty reaches even the laity.
• Facework sustains basic trust through monitoring gaze, posture, and gesture.
• Failed trust at access points breeds cynicism but rarely full disengagement.
• Fate returns as a psychological support in secular modern risk environments
• Giddens describes how trust in abstract systems develops as ‘faceless commitments,’ yet notes relations of trust are always ambivalent because confidence is needed amid fundamental ignorance of…
• Global interdependence weakened national economic control and Keynesian policy
• Global modern institutions depend on pooled shared knowledge via news
• Globalisation is the networked stretching of social relations across the earth’s surface
• Globalisation produces mutually opposed tendencies, not uniform worldwide change
• Globalised weaponry has collapsed the Third World’s military weakness
• Great-power patrons pushed their kin governments toward restraint in the Yugoslav wars
• H.G. Wells predicted nuclear weapons and atomic warfare in 1914 on Soddy’s physics
• Imagining alternative futures can help bring them into being
• Impersonal modern systems paradoxically enable reembedding of local personal life
• In modernity tradition is justified only by knowledge not derived from tradition.
• Incorrect for practical endeavors is revealed through catastrophic failure rather than mere anomalies
• Industrialism is machinery-based production affecting far more than factories
• Industrialism’s communication technologies shaped humanity’s global self-awareness
• Industrialized weaponry and fixed borders make territorial conquest obsolete
• Institutionalised arenas create risks through their sanctioned activity itself
• Kin-based solidarity in China hindered modern capitalist development
• Kinship provides reliable trust bonds regardless of personal sympathy.
• Knowing divorce statistics changes how lay people approach marriage
• Knowledge of social life does not produce greater control over fate
• Knowledge of the social world makes that world inherently unstable
• Large-scale systems enable rather than merely threaten individual self-actualisation
• Lay trust in expert systems founders when experts’ own ignorance surfaces
• Local place-based relations gave pre-modern communities solidity
• Market control tradeoffs dissolve once basic goods are no longer scarce
• Mass culture and mass markets were integral to corporate capitalism’s ascendancy
• Mechanised communication is the bedrock of modern cultural globalisation
• Modern dangers are produced by socially organized knowledge, not nature
• Modern displacement integrates people into globalised communities rather than estranging them
• Modern expert systems allow no one to opt out of their influence.
• Modern intimate trust demands self-revelation that produces permanent psychological tension
• Modern kinship no longer structures daily life for most people
• Modern knowledge is more opaque to individuals than pre-modern local knowledge was
• Modern organizations routinely connect local and global, affecting millions of lives
• Modern place is a local expression of distant, disembedded relations
• Modern self-discovery is intrinsically bound up with reflexive trust-building
• Modern trust is vested in abstract capacities, not individuals
• Modernity does not replace intimacy with impersonality but transforms it through distancing
• Modernity institutionalises doubt, making all knowledge claims inherently circular
• Modernity is a runaway engine that permits partial steering but never full control
• Modernity is defined by wholesale reflexivity, not merely love of the new.
• Modernity shifts meaning-seeking inward as public life over-institutionalizes
• Modernity transforms both global interconnection and the most intimate personal life
• Modernity transforms friendship’s opposite from enemy to mere acquaintance
• Modernity transforms the stranger from a whole suspect person into a fleeting contact.
• Modernity’s core is an irreducible enigma that cannot be overcome
• Modernity’s globalising tendencies connect individuals to large-scale systems
• Modernity’s reflexivity makes its own rational grounds ultimately puzzling
• Modernity’s reflexivity rests on cultural commitment and power, not pure reason
• Modernity’s reflexivity subverts reason’s claim to certitude.
• Modernity’s trust requires the awareness that human activity is socially created, not divinely given.
• Monetary sovereignty is a precondition for capital accumulation and full employment
• Money is an impersonal standard that negates the content of goods
• Monopoly of violence within precise borders is distinctive to the modern state
• Most scarcity is socially defined rather than intrinsic to resources
• New social knowledge alters the social world rather than merely describing it
• Normal modern trust is a pragmatic bargain mixing deference with scepticism.
• Nuclear weapons make war as an instrument of policy obsolete
• Official statistics constitute state administrative power rather than merely recording it
• One can be subject to inherent risks while unaware of the dangers run.
• Only the modern nation-state can transform private debt into standard payment
• Operator failure in abstract systems is ineradicable because humans err
• Postwar affluence and mass culture threatened Labour’s class base
• Power and language are not disembedding mechanisms like money
• Pragmatic acceptance gives way to active engagement when danger touches one’s own life.
• Pre-modern life was itself fraught with anxiety and risk
• Pre-modern trust is anchored in local place rather than abstract systems.
• Professionals conceal their backstage practice to hide the gap between expertise and the expert.
• Radical Enlightenment critique targets religion rather than reason itself
• Security rests upon a balance of trust and acceptable risk.
• Self-fulfilment can positively appropriate globalised influences rather than retreat
• Self-identity is now a reflexive project conducted amid abstract systems
• Shattered routines strip away firmly founded aspects of personality.
• Social knowledge alters its subject, unlike natural-science observation
• Social order is fundamentally about how systems bind time and space
• Social science is more deeply implicated in modernity than natural science.
• Social science knowledge changes the social world it studies.
• State power derives from sovereign capabilities, not merely economic wealth
• State sovereignty is constituted by the nation-state system, not prior to it
• States gain global influence only by surrendering some sovereignty
• Superpowers wage wars abroad through proxies rather than their own troops
• Surveillance is administrative power, mostly indirect via information control
• System trust cannot supply the mutuality that personal trust provides
• System trust is faceless while personal trust and reembedding depend on facework.
• System trust underwrites ontological security but yields no psychological reward
• Technological innovation is pushed from behind, not pulled toward a goal
• Technology develops a self-sustaining momentum beyond its original drivers
• Terms like peace and democracy are contested concepts in struggles
• The feeling that systematic knowledge is impossible stems from uncontrollable modern events, not epistemology
• The genuine antithesis of basic trust is existential dread, not mere mistrust.
• The gravest modern dangers are counterfactually unreal and thus numbing
• The West’s peace signals a mature golden age preceding decline
• Three mechanisms drive modernity’s dynamism and process of time-space distanciation
• Total war makes warfare useless as a political instrument
• Totalitarianism concentrates state powers in ways traditional despotism could not
• Totalitarianism is inherently, not just contingently, connected to modernity
• Tradition does not resist change but lacks markers to give change meaning.
• Tradition sustains ontological security by giving routine intrinsic meaning
• Traveling via abstract systems requires no technical mastery, only filtered lay knowledge
• Trust arises not from powerlessness but from lack of full information about others.
• Trust differs from confidence in that trust acknowledges alternatives and risks, confidence does not.
• Trust in abstract systems is tacit routine, not conscious choice.
• Trust in another’s return brackets absence and blocks existential anxiety.
• Trust in persons and things sustains ontological security.
• Trust is a faith-like commitment, not mere cognitive calculation
• Trust is confidence expressing faith in others’ probity or in abstract principles.
• Trust is required only amid ignorance, which always grounds scepticism as well.
• Trusting a person gives a moral hostage to fortune, making trust psychologically consequential.
• Trusting others and trusting oneself develop together.
• Truth-telling critical work produces new knowledges rather than circular confirmations of known positions.
• Under modernity no knowledge is certain, in any science.
• Unfettered reason leaves all knowledge merely provisional until further notice
• Universal maps established space as independent of any particular place
• Utopian futures cannot be assumed and each institutional dimension carries life-threatening risks
• Western decline stems from the global spread of Western institutions, not their fading
• Where risk is greatest, fatalism paradoxically returns