Normative Intermittency: A Sociology of Failing Social Structuration 303106173X, 9783031061738

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Normative Intermittency A Sociology of Failing Social Structuration Gregor Fitzi

Normative Intermittency

Gregor Fitzi

Normative Intermittency A Sociology of Failing Social Structuration

Gregor Fitzi Centre Georg Simmel École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris, France

ISBN 978-3-031-06173-8    ISBN 978-3-031-06174-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 T  he Path to Critical Sociology  1 Bibliography 11 Part I Societal Symptomatic  15 2 T  he Manifold Crisis of Complex Societies 17 2.1 Missing Social Legitimation 17 2.2 Social and Environmental Risks of ‘Crumbling Late Capitalism’ 27 2.3 The Shifting Idea of Socialism 40 2.4 The Loss of the Welfare-State Compromise 56 Bibliography 65 3 T  he Malaise of Normative Societal Structuration 71 3.1 Normativity Beyond Defensive Modernity 71 3.2 Secularism and Its Adversities 80 3.3 Normative Intermittency in Qualitative Differentiated Societies 88 Bibliography100

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4 E  conomic Liberalism and Social Fragmentation103 4.1 Functional Neutrality Lost: Colonising Society Through Economic Logic103 4.2 Increasing Social Fragmentation111 4.3 Societal Self-Interpretation and Sociological Critique121 Bibliography129 Part II Sociological Diagnosis 135 5 E  vidences in Structure Theory137 5.1 Weakening Social Structuration137 5.2 Intermittent Legal Validity145 Bibliography153 6 T  roubles in Action Theory157 6.1 Participant Perspective157 6.1.1 Beyond the Hypostasis of Collective Action Subjects157 6.1.2 The Unsurmountable Fragmentation of Social Action Centres162 6.1.3 The Participant Logic of Social Action165 6.2 Observer Perspective174 6.2.1 Contract-Driven Social Action179 6.2.2 Consensus-Driven Social Action182 6.2.3 The Observer Logic of Social Action186 6.3 Conclusions in Action Theory190 Bibliography196 7 S  hifting Legitimacy: The Theoretical Issue of Social Validity199 7.1 Establishing Intermittent Social Orders from the Participant Perspective199 7.1.1 Competing Enforcement of Multiple Social Structures199 7.1.2 Intermittent Validity Beyond Lifestyle203 7.1.3 Creative Cultural Performance207

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7.2 Establishing Intermittent Social Orders from the Observer Perspective210 7.2.1 The Ratio of Social Order210 7.2.2 Asymmetric Consensus214 7.2.3 Conflict, Power and the Rule of Law222 7.3 Scholium 1: The Micro-sociological Limits of Institutionalisation225 7.4 Scholium 2: The Anthropological Limits of Validity229 7.5 Conclusions in the Theory of Social Validity234 Bibliography238 8 C  onsequences in Structure Theory241 8.1 Qualitative Societal Differentiation Revisited241 8.2 Modernity as Intermittent Destructuring Structuration246 8.3 Intermittent Foundation of Legal and Political Orders254 8.4 Social Integration Through Cultural Conflict260 8.5 Institutionalised Liquefaction Beyond Trust267 8.6 Consensus Conflicts and Societal Colonisation274 Bibliography281 9 C  onclusions in Sociological Diagnosis287 9.1 Failing Social Structuration as Regression from Legitimacy to Consensus287 Bibliography294 Part III Political Outcomes 295 10 R  ecovering Normative Social Structuration297 10.1 Seeking Social and Environmental Progress297 10.2 Transformative Social Action for the Twenty-First Century306 Bibliography314 Bibliography317 Index

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CHAPTER 1

The Path to Critical Sociology

There is a problem with modernity. The problem is capitalist society. That is the main statement of every critical reflection on society since the French Revolution. Early socialist thinkers as well as classical sociologists either search for the means to reintegrate the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, or else try to explain why the promises of the French Revolution cannot be kept in the frame of modernity. Contrary to all expectations, a rapidly differentiating society, which liberated economic enterprise from the straitjacket of the feudal corporate system, did not grant liberty and prosperity for everyone. Only those who owned the means of production truly enjoyed the liberating potential of a socio-economic arrangement, which otherwise generated levels of misery comparable to those of the Ancien Régime. Furthermore, it fostered social conflicts that inexorably threatened the cohesion of society. The history of industrial relations can be reconstructed as a sequence of attempts to find a provisional stabilisation of this imbalance. From time to time, compromises were found that took more account of one side or the other and were questioned as soon as a shift appeared in the balance of power between capital and labour. Step by step, however, a number of regulatory principles concerning labour protection and social rights were able to take root; they formed the nucleus of a normative structuration of complex societies that, to a certain degree, were capable of embedding the economy in a new way into the logic of the wider needs of society as a whole. In parallel, institutions of

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democratic control developed. They implemented social and, in recent years, also tentative environmental delimitations to economic enterprise as well as measures of compensation for the damage caused by the recurring crises of the predominant development model. The historical process, of course, always lacked thoroughness: women, precarious workforce, migrants and ethnical minorities continued to be discriminated. Social protection systems adopted in the motherland were complemented by the open exploitation regimes practised in colonial territories. An unequal treatment of the permanent labour force and industrial reserve armies always strongly delimited the universal validity of social legislation. Nevertheless, the principle was successfully established that even in complex societies normative structuration can, and to some extent must, be implemented to grant social justice and stabilise democracy. Accordingly, social rights were enshrined in constitutions and welfare policies, especially after WWII. As the history of the workers’ movement shows, fighting for the effective affirmation and extension of social, beneath civil and political rights has been, and continues to be, one of the cornerstones of a politics aimed at achieving progress with human living conditions. The question to be considered is why, in the wake of the so-called neoliberal revolution, for some decades now it seems difficult for this form of normative societal structuration to unfold. If social reality has become particularly opaque, the capacity of the social sciences to grasp its development has certainly not increased in the meantime. As a consequence of the ideological transformation that characterised the neoliberal age, a peculiar division of labour established itself between mainstream sociology and social philosophy that was not a matter of course in previous epochs (Bauman 1976; Fitzi 2019: 39–44). Sociology developed more and more into a simply empirical-descriptive science, leading to a decline of sociological theory, so that elements of theoretical orientation have since been increasingly imported from other areas of reflection, mostly from post-structuralist philosophy (Cusset 2005). As a kind of defiant reaction to that, the field of cultural studies expanded explosively, reducing to a minimum the reflexive distance between political militancy and social science analysis (Peters 1999; Warren and Vavrus 2002). The ability of sociological analysis to gain reflexive distance from societal self-interpretation to synthesise innumerable empirical studies into a comprehensive image of society and produce a diagnosis of current social developments has been diminished accordingly. On the other hand, social philosophy strongly specialised in an ethical reading of social reality with

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very selective, if any, exchange with the sociological framing of societal issues (Fazio 2020; Gordon et al. 2019). Because of increasing specialisation in languages and topics on both sides, the link and exchange between sociological analysis and social critique became increasingly tenuous. Of course, there are remarkable attempts at countermeasures. New debates rearticulated the field of critical theory and proposed updated definitions of social philosophy (Honneth 1994, 2016a; Jaeggi and Celikates 2017). On the other hand, critical sociology was made the subject of a wider reflection (Boltanski 2009; Fraser et al. 2014, Dörre et al. 2012, 2017), yet until now it does not seem to have induced an overall transformation of sociological praxis. To recover, critical sociology must be able to redefine itself in the tension field between ethicising social philosophy and empiricising social research. It must deliver a theoretical framework capable of understanding the state of art in normative social structuration—that is in the capacity or failure of contemporary societies to establish normative arrangements that govern the development of the economy and delimit its social and environmental costs. The epistemological refoundation of critical sociology thus depends to a large extent on the way it heuristically defines the issue of social normativity, its preconditions and the reasons for its failing. In this way, critical sociology must overcome the unreflected axiomatic assumptions and epistemological limitations of both critical theory and mainstream sociological theory that do not allow us to pinpoint the specific normative development of contemporary societies. Traditionally, critical theory addresses the normative shortcoming of complex societies from a viewpoint that has metabolised the crisis of the philosophy of history (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947). No objective automatism can be presupposed that fosters a transformation of modern society mending the fracture between the ideals of the French Revolution. Without being able to rely on a guarantee of progress which, according to Marx, stemmed from the very dialectic of the productive forces of the economy, the question to be considered is how the programme of the Enlightenment can be pursued (Habermas 1981). To answer the question, critical theory relies on a number of epistemological tools, while rejecting others according to a logic that already characterised Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s. This is why Hegel’s proto-sociology as well as elements of Heidegger’s existential analysis still assume a central role (Honneth 2016b; Jaeggi 2014; Marcuse 1987), while a closed attitude towards classical sociology is maintained. A notable effort to overcome

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this attitude was made by Habermas, who reconsidered elements of Durkheim’s and Weber’s sociological reflection to found the theory of communicative action (Habermas 1984). However, the fact that the scaffolding of sociological enquiry remained substantially tied to Parsons’ paradigm of action theory, and then integrated that of social structure analysis inspired by Luhmann’s radicalisation of system theory, denies the possibility of enhancing a more fruitful exchange between critical theory and classical sociology (Schluchter 2015: 471–533). This approach, which is typical of German sociology since the 1950s, remains common to all subsequent developments in critical theory up to Honneth’s Neo-Hegelian turn (2016b) and even Rosa’s theory of resonance (2019). Yet, critical sociology must overcome these epistemological closures to grasp the ongoing transformation of social reality. This calls into question the axiomatic assumption of system theory postulating the emergence of autonomous social systems that are capable of lasting self-­ reproduction, independently from legitimation issues (Luhmann 1997: 16–35). In contemporary societies increasingly intermittent structuration processes spread that must be assessed sociologically. The present book makes a contribution on this path of research by valuing, updating and further developing the wider theoretical heritage of sociological theory beyond the unreflected axiomatic assumptions of mainstream sociology that were established in the age of administered capitalism. The reasons for this critical examination are related to social history. After forty years of neoliberal societal restructuration, today’s societies have a widely different structure than societies of the age of ‘welfare-state compromise’. At the end of the nineteenth century, instead, sociological reflection developed within liberal-capitalist societies that had different traits in common with current social reality, so that classical sociology provides a certain range of theoretical tools that can be critically examined and updated for the analysis of the current precarisation of both social structure and agency. The main focus of research is the societal causes for the failing normative structuration of contemporary societies. In this respect, an analysis of established normative societal codes does not go far enough. Rather, the issue is to understand to what extent formally established normativity is maintained empirically in societies that undergo rapid and often irrational transformation cycles due to deregulated global capitalism. In a sociological sense, the issue of social normativity is thus twofold: what is formally codified is not automatically implemented empirically in everyday social praxis. Critical sociology must thus make the second aspect its subject of

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research to answer the question about which normative orders in a particular society are actually in force and to what extent they experience normative structuration or destructuration. To address these developments, their rhythms and speeds, it is important to provide a theoretical framework that overcomes Parsons’ axiomatic assumptions about the self-­ evident nature of normative social structuration (1951). Archer’s research programme has taken decisive steps in this direction (1995, 2014, 2016). Traditionally, morphostasis has been assumed as the precondition for a harmonious relationship between legal validity and normative consensus in society. Indeed, during a specific period of time after WWII, this was the socio-political basis for the development of the so-called post-WWII welfare-­state compromise (Fourastié 1979). Yet, after forty years of neoliberal societal restructuration, normative social integration has been radically challenged. The question thus arises as if a renewed normative societal structuration is possible, given the intensive structural morphogenesis of contemporary societies, which denies the durability of any new stable context of normative regulation. Sociology is thus confronted with the necessity of overcoming Parsons’ (1951) and Kelsen’s (2002) approaches who made shared normativity a precondition for social solidarity as well as for legal validity (Archer 2016: 2 f.). The question of ‘normative effectivity’ as a criterion of validity was already introduced in Gouldner’s critique of Parsons’ normative structuralism (1977). Yet, the crucial question for contemporary societies is to understand how normativity works as a social process at times of accelerated societal change rhythms. Sociology must thus frame the difficulties presented by the increasing incidence of morphogenesis (Turner 2010). Divergences between authorities and addressees of the law become more apparent, without whose complementarity legal orders lack stability. An analysis becomes necessary of the precondition for legal orders regarding their both normative validity and social effectiveness in today’s social reality. Habitual action, which was acquired in the family, neighbourhood and school, seems to be increasingly inappropriate as a guideline to social action in late modernity. The whole question of internalisation becomes problematic and can no longer be presupposed axiomatically as the source of normative conformity. Paradoxically, there is a reversal, turning on its head Bourdieu’s concern: namely that the extreme rigidity of habitus acquired through social reproduction becomes an unappealable vehicle of social stratification (1984). Social actors are compelled to steadily change habitualised action orientations and to readapt to the irrational

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developments of globalised economy and society. Furthermore, in morphogenetic societies less and less is shared, both materially and symbolically, so that a conventional ethical life (Sittlichkeit) develops (Koller 2014), whose validity is intermittent and spatiotemporally delimited, so that it demands to be analysed in its uncertain mechanisms of development. A successful synthesis of culture establishing social legitimacy becomes highly difficult and tends to be substituted by a precarious normative bricolage. Morphogenic cycles seem never to come to a conclusion so that today’s societies evidence phenomena similar to those that classical sociology addressed at the beginning of the twentieth century (Simmel 1918). Sociological research gives an account of the nascent tendencies in social regulation involving praxes, conventions and laws (cf. Archer 2016). Yet, it also registers the entropy of normative societal structuration at large, whose fragmentation and delimited spatiotemporal validity seem irresistible. A paradigm shift therefore becomes necessary—not only in the sociology of law but also in sociological theory in general. Crumbling morphogenesis cannot be seen as an accident on a physiological line of development that assures normative integration in complex societies. Instead, it must be understood as a constitutive factor of societal structuration that must become the subject of sociological inquiry. To diagnose normative intermittency and indicate possible transformation paths that socio-political praxis can adopt to recover normative social structuration thus becomes a core interest for critical sociology. This book develops a sociological conceptualisation of the issue that constitutes a precondition for further studies into the phenomenology of failing social structuration from both theoretical and empirical viewpoints. In analysing the political consequences of shifting societal structuration, the present approach takes into account that there is a specific methodological difficulty in switching from sociological diagnosis to the evaluation of its political aspects and eventually to praxes of societal transformation. Social science and politics constitute societal domains that are anchored in different structuration logics so that the transition from one to the other takes the form of a step from theory to praxis. Yet, in the awareness of the necessary methodological measures to avoid mixing up the two logics, societal analysis can proceed on a line that introduces the political assessment of questions of societal transformation. This is at least the reflexive path that critical sociology can follow in the current social reality.

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Accordingly, the following research articulates three axes: it draws up a symptomatology of normative intermittency; it establishes its sociological diagnosis and eventually, it evaluates its political consequences. The social symptomatology focuses on phenomena that illustrate the crisis of normative structuration in contemporary societies. These include the tensions in social legitimation, the questioning of public institutions’ secularity, the conservative demand for normative conformity and the progressive colonisation of different societal domains through economic logic. The symptomatology introduces the analysis of the social backdrop of normative intermittency and addresses the failures of social structuration from the viewpoint of sociological diagnosis. This focuses on the difficulties that social reality goes through to constitute individual as well as collective subjects of social and political action capable of triggering processes of normative social structuration. Beyond every mainstream sociological axiomatic, the stages of investigation are necessarily situated on the three complementary axes of sociological theory building: social action, social structure and social legitimacy. The major challenge of research is to establish a societal analysis capable of understanding: 1. what the dynamic is of the increasing fragmentation of social subjects, both individual and collective, that prevents the establishment of societal transformation; 2. what the mechanisms of shifting legitimacy are that generate normative intermittency and hinder a consistent normative social structuration; 3. what conflicts arise when normative structuration fails and how they can be framed beyond societal self-interpretation. The general aim is to reconstruct the processes that conduct the failure of normative social structuration, in order to assess the degree of structural regression that transforms social legitimacy into asymmetric consensus towards provisional normative societal arrangements. The sociological theory building that takes place in the following chapters is meant as a contribution to the understanding of contemporary societal change. On this path, it encounters a social reality whose characteristics challenge both the societal self-interpretation and the axiomatic assumptions of current mainstream social theory. Once the symptomatic and diagnostic work has been done, sociology deals with an untested scenario of social analysis. The crucial emerging phenomena are the precarity of social structure and the fragmentation of social agency. Both develop an intermittent character that overturns established mechanisms of social legitimation and societal transformation. An innovative conceptualisation of the ‘present age’ then becomes necessary. The ongoing ‘solid societal

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liquidity’ evidences consistent analogies with the uncontrolled unfolding of liberal capitalism that preceded WWI. What has been promoted as the groundbreaking news of the so-called post-modern age are in fact features that have characterised the modern age from its inception. Alongside these evidences, classical modern phenomena such as capitalism, economic crises, war and dictatorship present themselves in a rather cumbersome way. Moreover, currently we face an environmental catastrophe that presents the bill for the last 250 years of uncontrolled industrialisation. In the light of the current sociological diagnosis, post-modernism thus appears as being more the expression of an intellectual failure to deal with the ideological offensive of economic neoliberalism than a structural transformation of society. Modernity seems to be present more than ever—above all in its problematic aspects, and not only in sociological debates (Schmidt 2008). The sociological diagnosis developed in the present book highlights above all the inadequacy of unilinear evolutionary models of society and the epistemological crisis of the dialectical approach to the philosophy of history. An alternation of disordered phases of qualitative differentiation with phases of functional regression rather seems to characterise complex societies. Accordingly, sociology must emancipate itself from the oversimplistic axiomatic concerning the emergence and reproduction of social structure that characterised it in the age of administered capitalism after WWII. The sociological issue of ‘social legitimation’ takes (anew) centre stage in sociological theory building, namely the difficult and often conflictual relationship between the synthetic logic of social action and the fragmenting logic of social structure. Failing normative societal structuration, its mechanisms and the possible paths of recovery instead represent the issues of sociological theory building, to which this book aims to make a contribution. The individual and collective subjects are missing that could become the bearers of normative structuration, so that today’s societies experience a condition of normative entropy. Social agency is fragmented to the point that its qualitative differentiated domains are most of the time hetero-­ directed. On this basis, no dialectics between structure and agency can develop that furthers societal transformation. As a consequence, social-­ structuration processes become highly inconstant and do not offer sufficient margins for establishing social legitimation procedures in a communicative action style. Effective legal margins between social differentiation logics cannot be established, so that colonisation processes

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between societal domains are the order of the day. In an increased change rhythm, societies rapidly produce and destroy normative orders, so that processes of rational legitimation become ever more arduous, by giving way to spatiotemporally delimited asymmetric consensus relations. Correspondingly, the formation of effective collective action subjects is diminished and seems to be ineluctably declining. This is the condition of normative intermittency in which we find ourselves. Failing social structuration emerges from societal analysis as one of the major problems of the present age. Yet, sociological diagnosis leads to advancing the assessment of its causes, which opens new avenues of empirical and theoretical research. Furthermore, with all due respect to Weber’s methodology to preserve the intermingling of descriptive and normative judgement and the resulting loss of reflexive distance towards social events, an innovative theory building allows critical sociology to take the step from theory to praxis. The ability to analyse the legitimation crises of contemporary societies, rediscovered beyond the axiomatic assumptions of mainstream sociology, brings to light the emancipatory potential concealed in the rather opaque appearance of societal reality. From a structural viewpoint, complex societies evidence a strongly pronounced plasticity so that transformative action can definitely unfold in them. Yet, a special effort is needed to redirect plasticity in the sense of a normative societal structuration that is comparable with the welfare-state-building processes after WWII and that today must be compatible with an efficient environmental protection. Sociological diagnosis shows that even in the age of normative intermittency society has at its disposal an emancipation potential. This is the contribution of critical sociology to achieve the step from the reflexive theory of society to the praxis of its transformation. Yet, only processes of normative societal structuration can realise it. Their success or failure constitutes a social dynamics that no theory can replace. As regards the language used in the book, in general, this is sociological and switches to political terminology in the concluding assessment of the political outcomes of sociological diagnosis. The analysis of the societal symptomatic of normative intermittency is based on a critical reconstruction of a number of sources from social science, economic and historical research that deal with social data, yet also with the manifold expressions of societal self-interpretation. Here, there is a continuous effort to achieve sufficient analytical distance from ongoing social discourses. Furthermore, the book focuses on the common socio-economic issues that concern social actors in contemporary societies independently of their sexual,

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political, religious and cultural orientation or ethnical origin. This is again reflected in the language that is adopted. It is mostly not gendered, since every verbal or pronominal expression refers to all possible social actors that are concerned with the socio-economic issues in the case studied. The choice is related to a methodological research approach that aims to bring the social question back to the forefront of critical sociology. This does not mean that the analysis of issues related to gender rights, LGBT+ rights or the rights of ethnic, migrant and cultural minorities are not relevant. Rather, the focus of the study is on the question of what a wide variety of manifoldly different social subjects has in common in contemporary societies, even if societal self-interpretation does not let it shine through. The output of the sociological diagnosis is aimed at granting the analytical means to understand the condition of social and cultural fragmentation in which all social actors find themselves in today’s societies. By showing which lines of socio-economic conflict are common to a variety of social subjects, a critical reading of social reality can go beyond the epistemological fragmentation of current symbolic societal self-interpretation. On this basis, the analysis of the specific discrimination of different groups can be set up, without becoming means of conceptual and then political competition between opposing claims for civil, political or social rights. Reconciling the fight for universalist social rights with the struggle for the multiple rights of minorities—thus reconciling claims for recognition with the politics for equal dignity (Lukes 2007)—is one of the prerequisites for a normative social structuration in the twenty-first century. It will only be possible on this basis to meet the challenges facing contemporary societies, the most worrying of which is undoubtedly the need to find a synthesis between social integration and environmental protection (Holtmann 2017). This starts from the understanding of the structuration and destructuration processes that characterise societies in the age of crumbling late capitalism. In conclusion, I would like to thank so many friends and colleagues who contributed to the development of this book with discussion, commentaries, corrections and suggestions. They are too numerous to list them all by name. This book was written during the time of the global pandemic. On the one hand, this strongly restricted access to libraries and face-to-face exchange. On the other hand, the isolation from the daily routine of research and teaching allowed for a period of concentration on the task in hand, so making it possible to achieve a synthesis of very different strains of research. This would probably have been unachievable in

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‘normal times’. During this exceptional experience of distance, friends and colleagues intervened in a variety of ways to keep the debate alive. I am especially grateful to them. Last but not least, the unforeseen possibility for short summer meetings in our scientific and existential diaspora allowed a more direct exchange. While swimming together in the Mediterranean, key aspects of the book’s subject were also discussed. I think back with gratitude to these moments.

Bibliography Literature Archer, Margaret S. (1995). Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ——— (2014). Late Modernity: Trajectories Towards Morphogenic Society. Cham: Springer International Publishing. ——— (2016). Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity. Cham: Springer. Bauman, Zygmunt (1976). Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Common-­ Sense and Emancipation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Boltanski, Luc (2009). De la critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation. Coll. «NRF essais». Paris: Gallimard. English: Id. (2011). On Critique. A Sociology of Emancipation. Cambridge (UK): Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cusset, François (2005). French Theory. Paris: La Découverte. Dörre, Klaus, Sauer, Dieter, and Wittke, Volker (Eds.) (2012). Kapitalismustheorie und Arbeit: Neue Ansätze soziologischer Kritik. Frankfurt/M.: Campus Verlag. Dörre, Klaus, Rosa, Hartmut, and Lessenich, Stephan (2017). Soziologie  Kapitalismus - Kritik: Eine Debatte. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Fazio, Giorgio (2020). Ritorno a Francoforte: Le avventure della nuova teorica critica. Roma: Castelvecchi. Fitzi, Gregor (2019). The Challenge of Modernity. Simmel’s Sociological Theory. Abingdon-New York: Routledge. Fourastié, Jean (1979). Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard. Fraser, Nancy, Boltanski, Luc, and Corcuff, Philippe (2014). Domination et émancipation, pour un renouveau de la critique sociale. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Gordon, Peter E., Hammer, Espen, and Honneth, Axel (2019). The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School. New York: Routledge.

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Gouldner, Alvin W. (1977). The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann. Habermas, Jürgen (1981). ‘Die Moderne  – ein unvollendetes Projekt’. In: Id. Kleine politische Schriften (I-IV). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 444–464. ——— (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon. Holtmann, Dieter (2017). The Wealth and Welfare of Nations in Change: Prosperity Versus Environmental Sustainability, Innovation Versus Social Security, Equality of Participation Versus Womenfriendliness and Migrant-Friendliness, Social Integration Versus Autonomy in International Comparison. Aachen: Shaker Verlag. Honneth, Axel (1994). Pathologien des Sozialen: Die Aufgaben der Sozialphilosophie. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. ——— (2016a). Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— (2016b). Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory. Princeton University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor W. (1947). Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Friedrich Pollock zum 50. Geburtstag). Amsterdam: Querido-Verlag. English: Id. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jaeggi, Rahel (2014). Alienation. New York: Columbia University Press. Jaeggi, Rahel, and Celikates, Robin (2017). Sozialphilosophie: Eine Einführung. Munich: C.H. Beck. Kelsen, Hans (2002). Reine Rechtslehre. Wien: Verlag Österreich. Koller, Peter (2014). ‘On the nature of norms’. Ratio Juris, 27(2), 155–175. Luhmann, Niklas (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Lukes, Steven (2007). ‘Die Politik gleicher Würde und die Politik der Anerkennung’ (Translation of the unpublished lecture ‘The Politics of Equal Dignity and the Politics of Recognition’, 1993, Georg Simmel Visiting Professorship at the Humboldt University of Berlin), In: Moderne Staatsbürgerschaft. Ed. by Jürgen Mackert & Hans-Peter Müller. Wiesbaden: VS, 311–322. Marcuse, Herbert (1987). Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Parsons, Talcott (1951). The Social System. Glencoe: The Free Press. Peters, Michael (1999). After the Disciplines: The Emergence of Cultural Studies. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Rosa, Hartmut (2019). Resonance. A Sociology of the Relationship to the World. Cambridge: Polity. Schluchter, Wolfgang (2015). Grundlegungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht. 2. Edition. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck.

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Schmidt, Volker H. (2008). Modernity at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Simmel, Georg (1918). Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur. Ein Vortrag. Now in: Id. (1999), GSG 16, pp. 181–207. Turner, Stephen (2010). Explaining the Normative. Cambridge: Polity. Warren, Catherine A., and Vavrus, Mary Douglas (2002). American Cultural Studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

PART I

Societal Symptomatic

CHAPTER 2

The Manifold Crisis of Complex Societies

2.1   Missing Social Legitimation After decades of open taboo on the whole issue of the destructive, social and environmental consequences of a process of capital valorisation that is largely unleashed from any regulation, the problem is gradually returning to the public’s consciousness. As a result of the 2007/2008 financial and economic crisis, the merit of the prevailing development model had already attracted renewed attention (Crouch 2013). Although it was forgotten again rather quickly, it resurfaced at the latest with the concerns about the predictable consequences of the global pandemic of 2020/2021 (Bhattacharya 2020; ILO 2021; Nicola et al. 2020; OECD 2021; Saad-­ Filho 2021). Rewind to 1973 and Habermas could still ask whether even in ‘state-regulated capitalism’ social developments are contradictory and destined to enter a crisis (Habermas 1973: 9). Today, we are light years away from this scenario. Since the 1980s, a socio-political practice has prevailed of substantially dismantling both the state regulation of the economic development model and the welfare-state cushioning of its consequences. ‘Late capitalism’ thus entered its ‘neoliberal’ epoch (Mandel 1972; Harvey 2005). The debate on the relationship between the social spheres with ‘autonomous logic’ of economy and politics was hijacked by ideological beliefs, so setting up a progressive subordination of political decisions to conform to the logic of maximum economic advantage.

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Basically, the neoliberal worldview postulates three principles: 1. Real-­ existing global capitalism knows no alternatives (Thatcher’s famous dictum). 2. Its model of development does not tend to crisis, but rather only undergoes reasonable ‘adjustments’. 3. Consequently, any political regulation of the economy that is not dictated by economic interests is inadmissible. Despite its ideological leanings, neoliberalism has never refrained from letting the state intervene in a regulatory way in economy and society, yet only for the benefit of capital investment. As a corollary of the political principles of the neoliberal worldview, it is declared irrelevant who or what bears the social and ecological costs of the repeated ‘readjustments’ that characterise the development of real-existing global capitalism. This claim is linked to a completely uncritical faith in the ability of the market to regulate not only itself, but also the whole of society, so that in accordance with Adam Smith, time and again, it is supposed to find a new balance by an ‘invisible hand’ and not to require any regulation (Kennedy 2009). Thus, neoliberalism entered the stage of media-oriented politics with the promise that, thanks to the globalisation of uncontrolled capital investment, so much wealth would be released to generously compensate for its social and ecological costs. The belief in the miraculous power of a ‘linear development of the productive forces’ thus formed the basis of the ideological turn of the 1980s. In such an atmosphere, many politicians and intellectuals were seized as if by a spirit of religious conversion, driven by a non-reflected faith in the historical power of a zeitgeist that, in a Hegelian sense, had spoken with the failure of real-existing socialism. Thanks to this ‘social effervescence’ the neoliberal creed was able to make inroads so easily into the political culture of the left and to turn many social democrats and post-communists into ardent supporters of the globalist utopia (Appel, Orenstein 2016; Featherstone 2017). They naively expected that unregulated global economy would rapidly achieve maximum development of the productive forces, so leading ‘with scientific certainty’ to a post-capitalist age, or at least providing a cornucopia of resources for redistribution. Yet, the redistribution of globally produced wealth was by no means the objective of the neoliberal project, in whose favour the welfare-state legislation adopted since the New Deal and the regulation of the financial markets were to be dismantled. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the left was still dreaming of the prospects of democratic socialism beyond the mortgages of Stalinist dictatorship, the architects of the new global economic order were rapidly pursuing their political project. They knew that

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time was short to impose the neoliberal revolution before societies would fight back (Duménil and Levy 2004). So they interpreted the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a historic signal to finally overturn the entire regulation of capital and labour markets in both East and West. The aim was to impose an uncontrolled rollout of capital investment that went far beyond what the pioneers of neoliberalism had achieved in the 1980s. Any restriction to the limits of capital accumulation to protect society and the environment was to be blown up, and not only the real-socialist variant of the political control of the economy. What made the ideological revolution of neoliberalism so particularly successful was the ability to transfigure its economic-political project in such a way that it could appear as the latest variation of the modern Western belief in progress. Not only the one-sided assertion of the ideal of freedom without the addition of equality and fraternity, as it had been called since the French Revolution, was put in the service of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005: 39–42); the industrialist ideal of Saint-Simonianism also became one of its pillars (Durkheim 2011: 137–196; Taylor 2016). Anyone who wanted a better world had to go along with the project of globalisation. If capital investment had been granted a free and global path, a ‘win-win situation’ would have occurred for all the world, because the self-regulating market would have allowed everyone to participate in the promised capital valorisation. This ideological turn secured a broad consensus base for the political project of neoliberalism—far beyond the minority, which actually benefited from it. Global capitalism was thus given not only the attribute of being crisis-free but also of being socially progressive, so that after a moment of flat ideological triumphalism à la Fukuyama (1992), its project was implemented quietly and pragmatically as far as it went. Representatives of New Labour and Agenda Politics across Europe, as well as the Democratic Party in the US, adopted the principles of the neoliberal worldview. This was partly done out of political calculation to win elections by integrating the so-called new centre, thus the winners of neoliberal economic policies, into centre-left electoral coalitions (Giddens 1998). In part, however, the advocacy of the neoliberal project also resulted from genuine ideological conviction. Many in social democracy believed that the scientifically completely unproven promises of globalisation would create so much wealth that it would have been sufficient to be redistributed. Forty years on, the result is here for all to see. Much wealth has been produced, but very little has been redistributed (Piketty 2014). Instead,

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the living conditions of the working population have become worse and societies highly fragmented. The global economy looks increasingly like the climate change it has caused. It ‘occurs’ like an unpredictable and recurrent catastrophe that undermines its own chances of survival (Streeck 2016a). The social costs of economic change are severe. For workers in countries without welfare protection as well as in welfare-state systems, there is no trace of the great fortunes and progress promised by the ideology of globalisation. Economic crises, depression and dual labour markets are spreading. Even in successful economic powers like Germany, an increasing number of precarious workforces are working shoulder-to-­ shoulder with wage earners guaranteed by the welfare-state (Wehler 2013; Nachtwey 2019). They deliver the same work performance for wages that are reduced by a third, if not by half; besides, they can be fired at any time. In addition to an ever more precarious workforce, the losers of the technological revolution in the middle classes are experiencing not only symbolic but also material decline (Reckwitz 2020). Domestically, in many countries the socio-economic change of the global age has ushered in the decline of neoliberal social democracy because the most disadvantaged social groups feel betrayed by their former political representatives (Eribon 2009). First, they slip into non-­ voting; then they become supporters of new right-wing populist parties, promising to conjure up for them an ideal world again, if they would only subscribe to their racist and anti-migrant positions (Greve 2021). Social democracy fails to say openly and clearly that it was wrong to go along with the neoliberal utopia of globalisation and that strengthening welfare and capital regulation is more necessary than ever (Nachtwey 2009). Rather, the ‘new centre’ has found political referents elsewhere who better represent its material and ideological interests as globalisation winners (Walter 2010). In foreign policy terms, the world order that was laboriously built up during the Cold War era has come apart at the seams (Harrison 2014). To enforce economic interests, primarily concerning access to raw materials, the architecture of equilibrium has been gradually shattered. Today, the United Nations stands powerless in the face of the competition for geopolitical primacy between the three big global players China, Russia and the US. The European Union looks on perplexed and tries to glue together the pieces (Orbie 2016). In the background, capital investment with little regulatory control has free rein and continues on its irrational course, damaging the environment with irreparable consequences. Global environmental policy shifts the consequences of pollution

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onto the collective, without holding to account the large corporations in the oil, gas and cement industries, which since 1965 seem to have caused at least half of the global CO2 emissions (Licker et al. 2019). The scenario shows the extent to which societies as a whole have become incapable of bringing their differentiated economic sphere under normative control in a way that serves the common good without destroying the environment. Habermas’ original questioning today sounds like a throwback to the happy times when one could still afford to investigate whether social developments might be contradictory and crisis-ridden under state-regulated capitalism. Instead, nowadays we must ask whether our societies will ever emerge from the permanent economic, social and ecological crisis of the age by means of renewed normative structuration. This situation thus raises a completely new side to the question of what social crisis means. Back in 1973, Habermas formulated it from a sociological viewpoint as a matter of examining the ‘systemic crisis of complex societies’. Yet, it still remains to be clarified what this crisis consists of. It is worth returning to the key points of Habermas’ diagnosis to see what similarities and differences currently characterise socio-economic change. Marx’s publication of The Capital in 1867 heralded the sociological concept of social crisis (MEGA II/5) which gained renewed currency for the analysis of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In Habermas’ conception, the concept addresses the persistent disturbance in the ‘system integration’ of qualitatively differentiated societies, whose underlying cause lies in the conflict between the contradictory imperatives of economy and politics. According to Marx, this societal imbalance is to be classified as the structural expression of the unequal distribution of socially produced wealth arising from private ownership of the economic means of production. In the historical phase of welfare-state regulation for capital accumulation since 1945, societies proved capable of controlling the systemic tensions of modern capitalism, by ensuring economic and social development (Fourastié 1979). Yet, the massive deregulation induced by the neoliberal revolution again set in motion an uncontrolled crisis dynamics (Duménil and Levy 2004). One of the macroscopic symptoms of the continued disruption that affects system integration today is the ongoing process of colonisation, which leads to the steady subjugation of social spheres to economic logic. By and large, every attempt has failed to limit the imperialist tendencies of the economic sphere and bring it back under normative criteria that facilitate society’s common good. Contrary to what happened after the 1929 stock market crash, even as the damage of

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unbridled global capitalism became so obvious as to warrant fixing the consequences of the financial crisis in 2007/2008 with a massive injection of taxpayers’ money, no resilient regulatory framework was put in place to protect against its risks (Walby 2015). As Habermas pointed out in 1973, disruptions of ‘system integration’ can only be considered as threatening to the existence of societies to the extent that ‘social integration’ of societies is at stake. That is, when the basis of consensus for the normative structures of society is compromised to the extent that it rapidly loses legitimacy and social interaction becomes largely anomic. This diagnosis gets to the heart of the social and cultural crisis that affects the institutional framework of contemporary societies. Here, the prevailing socio-economic development model denies increasingly large social groups the spatiotemporal and social resources that they would need to engage in a reflexively rational, let alone critical, evaluation of the logic of social structuration. Hence, the legitimation of normative social structuration consistently weakens establishing a modus vivendi between qualitative-differentiated societal domains. Indeed, it is gradually replaced by the provisional acceptance of societal arrangements that are imposed by contingent economic-political imperatives. The alteration in the processes of normative social structuration has anomic consequences, because social actors temporarily accept this by means of a pragmatic consensus. However, they do not legitimise the compelling action frames imposed by the progressive colonisation of society through the economic logic. Accordingly, as Lockwood pointed out as early as 1964, the sociological concept of crisis must grasp the connection between systemic and social integration in its current historical specificity. Following Habermas, sociological theory speaks of social integration when social actors are socialised in symbolically structured contexts of action that make them rationally reflected bearers of normative social structures. However, if social integration suffers from a loss of legitimation caused by an increasing failure of normative structuration, the cohesion of society is fundamentally endangered. As will be discussed in more detail below, this state of crisis can be addressed under the heading of ‘normative intermittency’. In the structural-functionalist view of society that was still possible in the early 1970s, the focus was on the ‘control aspect’ that made society a consistent aggregate that might be controlled by the normative framework of ‘bureaucratic organised capitalism’. In this context, societies could be conceived as social systems capable of establishing a possibly

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conflictual, yet still coordinated overall logic that secured system integration. Here, institutional orders had to justify their claims to validity, by turning social actors into bearers of normative structuration processes that encouraged them to engage in critical-reflexive procedures of social integration. Today, social reality has radically changed shape. The dialectics that unfolds between the logic of social structuration and social action continues to mark the integration dynamics of complex societies. Yet, the crucial difference is that system integration has increasingly been replaced by colonisation processes between qualitatively differentiated spheres of society which fundamentally call into question the possibility of an ‘overall societal control’. The disorientation of a completely deregulated model of development and the resulting intensified rhythm of societal transformation thus generate strong tensions and conflicts that any systemic logic can hardly capture. The result is a fundamental delegitimation of the established normative framework of society so that social integration remains comprehensively undermined. Yet, the rapid and irrational socio-economic change does not lead to an abrupt collapse of society. The liquefaction trend of its institutional framework results instead in an increased recourse to asymmetric relationships of temporary consensus that prevent the resumption of normative structuration. Eventually, an entropic cycle looms in intermittent ‘perpetuation of provisionality’. In order to develop a characteristic of the ongoing societal transformation, Habermas’ investigation of the crisis of legitimacy in ‘welfare capitalism’ offers an analytical framework that can be contrasted with the current shaping of social reality (Habermas 1973: 19–30). Following Habermas, complex societies would evidence three universal characteristics. (1) A modality of exchange between the institutionalised social structures and their social as well as natural environment. (This interconnection would not only represent a sociotechnical aspect of societal reproduction, yet also raise the question of its normative legitimation). (2) The validity of the corresponding normative orders would depend on the orientation-power of prevailing worldviews, so that ideologies in Marx’s sense would exercise an important steering role for normative structuration. (3) Accordingly, it would be possible to determine a ‘normative level of societal development’, which corresponds to society’s capacity to face crises and dysfunctions through rational and scientific means, yet also by establishing normative criteria of the common good to overcome them. The assessment of Habermas’ approach not only makes it possible to diagnose the current state of societal structuration processes. Furthermore,

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it allows to evaluate the distance between the developments of normative orders then and now. As far as the question of the relationship between societies and their natural environment is concerned, we observe today that the crisis-prone aspects have multiplied many times over. Under the effect of the material production of human life, the destruction of the external environment of societies has progressed to a critical tipping point. With regard to the social environment of societies, it must be remarked that social life remains far below the potential of self-fulfilment and social security, which could be available in complex societies (Durkheim 1893: chap. I/3). Due to the consequences of the irrational development of the world economy and society, the organic exchange with nature is increasingly at risk of failure, and along with it, too, our socialisation processes. The development of the ‘productive forces’ thus no longer releases emancipation potential, yet increasingly transforms into a mechanism of its suppression. At the end of the day, the industrialist prognosis for the development of modernity, which Marx’s philosophy of history inherited from Saint-Simonianism, refutes itself (Taylor 2016). Accordingly, a theory of emancipation is needed that stands on the basis of today’s ‘post-­ metaphysical’ societal change, without recurring to any certainty concerning the ‘development of the productive forces’. In the early 1970s, Habermas could assume that the social systems based on welfare-state measures were legitimated by means of normative justification, because they interpreted and acknowledged social needs. Yet today, even in leading industrialised countries an increasing number of social actors are confronted with the experience of having to support normative frames of social action, without these ever fulfilling their needs. In the age of welfare capitalism, above all in the German ‘social market economy’, social science could assume with a clear conscience that societies can manage their exchange with the natural environment by techno-scientific procedures and regain social balance, thanks to the normative structuration potential of communicative action. Yet, after forty years of neoliberal societal restructuration, both aspects of ‘natural and social integration’ become increasingly problematic. The scientific-technological rationalism of world domination fails because of the exponential environmental risks provoked by the uncontrolled global profit-oriented economy. Social integration in turn is shipwrecked on the rocks of an increasing erosion of the social foundations of communicative action. On the one hand, normative social structuration can no longer rely on linguistically generated intersubjectivity, because the argumentative

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justification of social orders is gradually replaced by tacit relations of asymmetric consensus that secure a provisional passive acceptance of socio-­ economic imperatives. On the other hand, linguistically generated intersubjectivity increasingly takes the form of highly mediatised, if not of social media incapsulated discourses, which justify relations of social domination through the predominance of uncritical expressions of consensus or manipulated claims of dissent. Here, setting up intersubjective spaces of communicative action, which constitute a prerequisite for democratic, critical scrutiny and legitimation of normative orders, suffers from the structural lack of spatiotemporal and social resources that were necessary to carry them. This transformation of social structuration processes must be seen as an intensification of the symbolic violence that results from prevailing relations of social domination and use of language as means for their reproduction, by disarticulating the critical potentials of communicative action (Bourdieu and Passeron 1978). In order to avoid the conditions of their livelihood being substantially endangered, in recent decades an increasing number of social actors learned to limit the scope of social action to silent acceptance of systemic imperatives. This transformation increasingly equates current life conditions to the social reality that characterised societies before the instauration of welfare capitalism after WWII. The access to economic and social, yet also political resources is limited in a way that not only endangers the subsistence of the welfare-state, but also calls into question the prerequisites of democratic political systems. The result is a strong fragmentation of the social lifeworld that prevents it from becoming the cocoon of communication-­ based processes of transformative action. An insistent demand for a critical-discursive redemption of unattended claims of normative validity arises vis-à-vis the accelerated socio-economic change rhythm of the neoliberal age. Yet, it remains unfulfilled. Thus, social sciences face a new turn in the ‘dialectics of enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947). The critical potential of reason is undermined by social-structural matters, because communicative action cannot unfold in an overly fragmented lifeworld (Habermas 1976). This development leads to a serious delegitimation of the normative structures of society, since these can only be residually founded on non-reflective forms of passive consensus. A widely deregulated and irrational transformation of society negates in fact the latent need for normative justification as well as the reflexive potential that is available, thanks to the technical-scientific means of communication characterising the digital age. Accordingly, the political

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emancipation programme of the Enlightenment can only be resumed on heuristic premises that take account of the ongoing societal change and this requires a substantial renewal of the instrument of sociological analysis. Habermas’ analytical model builds on Marx’s sociological concept of ‘systemic crisis’ that refers to the societal formations of classical liberal capitalism. Its heuristic principle is grounded on the critical assessment of the relationship between wage labour and capital that is anchored in bourgeois private law. It thus focuses on the historical transformation that differentiated civil society, understood as the system of social needs expressed in economic action, from the undifferentiated political-economic system of pre-modern societies. Exchange became the dominant control medium of society so that the self-regulatory market exchange could only be controlled in a complementary way by the state as a monopoly of the legitimate use of power. According to Habermas, this new organisational principle opened up a wide scope for the development of the productive forces of economy, yet also for normative social structuration, so that it could eventually develop into welfare capitalism. Historically, one can assume that this assumption held true until the end of the 1970s (Fourastié 1979). Yet, since the spread of neoliberal policies from the 1980s onwards, the processes of ‘productive forces enhancement’ and ‘normativisation’ seem to have been widely decoupled from each other. For under the slogan of deregulation, it was the consistent dismantling of normative structures that relaunched capitalist accumulation processes (Duménil and Levy 2004). After forty years of neoliberal restructuration, societies thus seem to have entered a transformation that grounds the possibility of further capital accumulation on a permanent disarticulation of normative structuration. According to Habermas, as a rule liberal-capitalist societies must react very sensibly to contradictions between the development logic of the productive forces and normative societal structuration, so that the critique of bourgeois society could always unveil the ideological cover-ups of social inequality. A critical concept of systemic crisis could be developed at any time by inquiring into the logics of socio-economic transformation, which translates threats to system integration into shortages of social integration. Yet, in the neoliberal age, the relationship between critical social praxis and the capacity of social sciences to grasp the ongoing societal change has been substantially diminished. In the wake of recurrent economic crises, an irrational economic development model drags societies increasingly into disoriented attempts to relaunch capitalist accumulation processes.

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This uncertain and blind societal change demands the development of a crisis concept that goes beyond the heuristic premises that informed the inquiry into state-administered capitalism, so that it can cope with the failure of social structuration processes that characterise current social reality. An up-to-date diagnosis of societal crisis must explain how current social formations can reproduce themselves by replacing normative legitimation processes with intermittent asymmetrical contexts of consensus that decay before rational-critical reflection can question them. Only on the base of this knowledge can we evaluate the shift from legitimacy to consensus that determines the ‘normative level of development’ of contemporary societies. However, before this can take place, a closer look is necessary at the ‘economic development model’ that prevailed since the 1980s, since it was this model that systematically undermined social processes of normative structuration and disarticulated any democratic regulation of the economic sphere of society.

2.2  Social and Environmental Risks of ‘Crumbling Late Capitalism’ Speaking about the crisis of complex societies presupposes a distinction between the economic and the many different symbolic crises that characterise today’s mediatized social self-interpretation and often constitute the breeding ground for the rise of populist ideologies (Fitzi 2022). To evaluate ‘late capitalism’ after four decades of neoliberal societal restructuration means taking into account the weaknesses of the predominant development model that emerged since the beginning of the 1980s (Harvey 1989; Lash and Urry 1987; Offe 1985; Wallerstein et al. 2013). The issue is to understand if there are trends that can be evidenced, and if they have a logic that can be compared with the period of the major crisis that engulfed world capitalism in the twentieth century after the stock market crash of 1929. A flourishing debate about this topic persists at least since the financial crisis of 2007/2008. By referring to some positions in an ideal-typical way, the present reconstruction does not claim comprehensiveness, rather it aims to inquire into the aspects of the economic development that exhibit a structural homomorphy with the symptomatic that sociology draws up of the current societal change. The relevance of the issue is given by the fact that the dialectics between crisis and recovery, which could be observed in recent decades, undermines some crucial axiomatic

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assumptions that political economy and neoliberal ideology generally make about the ability of the economic system to restore its internal balance again and again (Turner 2008). In contrast to Marx’s analytical scheme of a persistent struggle between opposing social blocks with clearly defined interests and strategies, the present age evidences a generalised strategic disorientation. On the one hand, capitalist accumulation processes are characterised by high degrees of arbitrariness and insecurity. After dissolving the legal framework for the democratic regulation of the economy that conformed the age of administrated capitalism, accumulation processes seem to proceed essentially by trial and error, following whatever new fashion that promises high returns on investment. As the financial crisis of 2007/2008 has shown, this development tendency depends to a large extent on the increasing predominance of financial investment over industrial production. The result is a blind sequence of speculative bubbles and crashes. Accumulation processes seem to have become hostages to an irrational contingency, without any sustainable conception of long-term investments. On the other hand, the social strata that pay the highest price to the predominant development model find themselves in a condition of increasing difficulty in securing their livelihoods. They are highly fragmented in many different precarious, if not illegal labour regimes, and do not find ways to represent their interests in a united trade union front. Social democratic parties have widely abandoned the political representation of the most deprived, so that these either remain voiceless in the non-vote area or succumb to the fascination of right-wing populist propaganda. This manifold socio-economic phenomenology can be addressed under the label of ‘crumbling late capitalism’. In this societal arrangement, the environmental damages and social costs provoked by the predominant economic model are compounded by its increasingly irrational development. Given the prevailing neoliberal architecture of current political systems, states must repeatedly intervene with taxpayers’ money to bail out the consequences of investor’s mismanagement, yet without enjoying its revenues, because of substantial tax relief on financial profit. This is the economic frame, in which the shortcomings of normative societal structuration take place that form the subject of the present study, even if they cannot be addressed as a simple consequence of economic crisis mechanisms. Today’s social reality and, above all, the malaise of its normative structuration have their origin in a multi-causal mix of cultural (mostly

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also ideological) and economic factors that will be the subject of analysis in the next chapters. A preliminary appraisal of the societal and environmental risks of ‘late crumbling capitalism’ is nevertheless necessary to highlight the specificities of the current economic development, because no standard definition of capitalism alone can frame the ongoing dynamics of socio-economic change. The same methodological precaution applies to the issue of the further transformation of the predominant economic development model. The theorem of vulgar historical materialism, according to which it suffices to list the crisis symptoms of a socio-economic formation to be assured of its imminent collapse, belongs to the false consciousness of apocalyptic philosophy of history. This approach a fortiori does not apply to the particularity of current societal change. Given the flexible structure and the ability to rapidly adapt to the changing economic environment of globalisation, ‘late crumbling capitalism’ in theory can last forever. Yet, the issue is to ascertain its social and environmental costs. So it is worth understanding what its main characteristics and development trends are, by integrating the analytical approaches of economics and sociology. The starting question is whether the ongoing economic change shows trends that can be seized scientifically or whether its complexity is substantially indecipherable. In this respect, Piketty’s analysis of ‘capitalism in the 21st century’ gives a crucial contribution to the inquiry, because it comparatively reconstructs the long-term development of accumulation processes since the beginning of industrialisation (2014). According to this approach, a structural imbalance comes to the fore that characterises the predominant economic development model since the advent of the neoliberal societal restructuration in the 1980s. The comparison between the quantitative accumulation of private wealth and the development of national income shows that the capital/income ratio grows in a way which pushes income inequality to levels that characterised the age of uncontrolled capital concentration before WWI. Especially in societies with low growth rates, like Europe and Japan, the return on accumulated wealth rises in opposition to shifting national income figures so that financial capital increasingly plays a predominant role in the wider economy. This line of development intersects with the demographic decline, so that countries with lower population growth face an even more important increase of the capital/income ratio, because the active population shrinks. In the long run, this diagnosis is expected to extend to further economic

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regions, including the US and even China, where robust growth cannot be expected indefinitely. Thanks to the historical reconstruction of wealth development over the last two centuries, Piketty can show that wealth inequality increases anew since the 1980s, thus evidencing a trend of growing divergence between capital and income augmentation. This result denies the axiomatic assumptions of convergence between capital and income increase that widely disseminated in the form of the neoliberal utopia of globalisation. The trend to compression of inequalities observed by Kuznets between 1913 and 1948, and which then extended until the 1970s, was expected to continue indefinitely (Kuznets 1953; Piketty 2014: Introduction). Before Piketty’s historical-economic reconstruction, the idea was that an exponential growth of capital accumulation implies as a matter of course an equally strong increment of gross domestic product and therefore of income that would gradually scatter over all social strata. Yet, as Piketty shows, the low rates of capital/income ratio that could be observed between 1914 and the 1970s were not related to a constant tendency to economic democratisation. They were rather a consequence of consistent wealth destruction during world wars and to a minor degree of redistribution measures fostered by the taxation that took place in the wage of the New Deal and welfare-state legislation. As soon as the deregulation wave of the 1980s loosened state control over capital accumulation, economic democracy rapidly lost ground. The predominant economic development model thus evidences a structural imbalance, because there is no convergence between capital and income development. Even the exponential growth of highest incomes, which can be observed above all in the US, does not contradict the results of Piketty’s historical-economic reconstruction. The quantitative accumulation of private wealth is so relevant in the US that the growing income inequality does not introduce a decrease of the capital/income ratio. The US rather experiments with a mixed model, where the take-off of very high salaries accompanies the increasing divergence of capital and income development. According to Piketty, on a global level the figures indicate the return of a patrimonial society, comparable to that of the Belle Époque. Given the fact that economic growth rates are globally shifting, the imbalance between savings rates and income is expected to increase, with different socio-economic consequences. Capital concentration in the hands of the top 10% highest wealth holders at the beginning of the twenty-first century reaches after all 60 %, and the trend is rising. It is not as high as it was

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at the beginning of the twentieth century, because unlike then there is a patrimonial middle class that owns 20–30% of national capital in different countries. Yet, in the years ahead low economic growth rates connected with a consistent demographic decline must be expected, so it cannot be excluded that capital concentration returns to or exceeds late nineteenth-­ century levels, especially if it is sustained by policies that go on reducing the tax burden on capital income. Piketty’s historical-economic research on capitalism from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century thus does not draw a scenario as dramatic as Marx’s conclusions about the ‘tendency of profit rate to fall’ (MEGA II/15: 209–262). Yet, it evidences an expanding gap between global capital accumulation and income. This imbalance induces growing inequality, blocks social mobility and exponentially increases the weight of financial capital in comparison to that invested in the production of tangible goods. It is a development that confronts globalisation to a reedition of macroeconomic trends that characterised the historical period, which culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s, introducing the social and political tensions that were eventually to lead to WWII. Cyclically, overall unstable trends of development come to a head in financial viz. economic crises so that between the 1980s and 2020 only about thirty-five national and global crises can be counted. These were classically introduced by a stock market crash, where the imbalance of the economic sphere spread to the whole of society. Thus, the contradiction between increasing irrationality in economic development and failing normative societal structuration eventually finds an outlet in acute social and political emergencies that set off the latent shortcomings in societal integration. The major event of this kind after WWII was doubtless the US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/2008 that escalated into a global financial and economic crisis after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Piketty rightly observes that, in comparison with the stock market crash of 1929, this crisis had far fewer consequences. Indeed, the decline in domestic product in several countries and the increase in unemployment turned out to have been less dramatic and did not result in a 1930s-style long-time global depression, even if different countries went through a severe recession. Nevertheless, the 2008 crisis hit the living conditions of the majority of the global population in a substantial way, denying the twofold assumption of neoliberal ideology: namely, that markets can regulate themselves and that globalisation disseminates wealth to everyone via a spontaneous

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drop-down mechanism. Deregulated financial speculation shaped also the economic development that led to the stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s, yet these consequences could be largely subdued after WWII by implementing democratic control of the economy. Hence, the interest in a comparison between the two most relevant crises of the predominant economic development model in the twentieth and twenty-­ first century is well founded and consists in the question of the extent to which both have comparable structural features. Understanding the similarities and differences contributes to clarifying whether there is a correlation between the intensive deregulation policies adopted since the 1980s and the return of the critical aspects of capitalist accumulation processes that characterised the Belle Époque. The comparison between the two main crashes of modern capitalism characterises Walby’s approach in Crisis (2015). The central point of analysis here are the mechanisms that permitted the financial crisis of 2007/2008 to escalate and then cascade across different social realms, in order to compare them with the dynamics of the Great Depression. Global crises dynamics are seen as a progressive transfer of criticality from one social domain to another in a societal arrangement, where the grip of regulatory legislation has been dismantled that previously prevented crises from spreading. Walby thus understands the temporal development of global economic crises as a progressive violation of the systemic boundaries between societal domains that are grounded on presumed autonomous structuration logics. This aspect is of the highest importance for a renewal of the sociological frame of analysis necessary to understand the present societal transformation, because it opens the way to the assessment of the colonisation processes that take place between ‘open-boundary social systems’. This is the character of the structuration processes that go on in complex societies in the age of ‘late crumbling capitalism’. Caused initially by the deregulation of finance, which was part of the neoliberal government programme that diffused globally in the 1980s and onwards, the crisis had a long incubation period. This caused it to explode partly in different critical episodes, yet reaching its peak with the financial crisis of 2007/2008. In 2008/2009, this transformed into a crisis of real economy and cascaded into fiscal pressures, to which governments responded with policies of austerity. These eventually provoked manifold societal fractures around social, gender, ethnic and religious divides, which dominate the public sphere ever since. Walby’s analytical figure of the ‘crisis cascade’ is not intended in a deterministic sense, yet indicates an

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open process that must be reconstructed empirically, because no single step in the concatenation of the crisis is inevitable. The crisis cascade is no natural but a politically produced event. This assumption evidences the necessity of a reflection about legal rule and the relationship between societal domains, addressed here as ‘normative societal structuration’, which was overruled during the deregulation waves of the neoliberal revolution (Duménil and Levy 2004). No crisis step is in itself necessary, because normative societal structuration can delimit the transmission of the waves of crisis from one domain to the next, as it did in the age of the Trente Glorieuses from 1945 to 1975 (Fourastié 1979). Yet, if the former fails, crisis cascades. According to Walby, the societal transformation of the neoliberal age was a major democratic failure that ignored the lessons of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Deprived of the regulatory framework adopted to delimit its internal failure tendency, by 2007 the separated and uncontrolled social domain of finance had reached a critical imbalance, so that the downfall of Lehman Brothers could spur a systemic crisis. Yet, the political reaction to crisis did not consist in addressing its causes, but in transferring the turmoil into further societal domains. When the financial crisis cascaded into production, causing troubles for state budgets, instead of regulating and taxing finance, the neoliberal doctrine led governments to focus on fiscal crisis. Austerity was implemented, cutting public expenditure and privatising public services, thus exacerbating the social and gender divides. In the following step the crisis cascaded into a predicament of democracy, because the political system became unable to address people’s concerns caused by the increasing societal fragmentation. At the latest the alarm bell should have rung here, because the development took on contours that bore all too many similarities to the socio-political crisis of the 1930s, which led to the rise of totalitarianism. Yet, up till the debates on the consequences of the global pandemic of 2020/2021 policies did not change substantially. The question on the table is whether the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism prevents democracies from retaking control of the economic realm, despite the macroscopic evidence of the harms it provokes (Crouch 2013; Duménil and Levy 2013; Faux 2006). Economic democratisation depends on society’s capacity of normative structuration that reorganises its relationship with economy and finance as its subsystems. In the wake of the financial crisis of 1929, the complete sequence of crisis cascade took place in Europe, going through depression, totalitarianism, war and genocide (Arendt 1951). The issue today is whether a comparable crisis cascade

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could occur (or is occurring) again and which policy measures could prevent its development. After all, societal analysis must understand why the social structuration processes do not take place that could prevent the cascading impact of present and future crises. In this respect, sociological theory needs to explain why no collective social agencies arise that become bearers of a renewed normative societal structuration. Due to the victory of the neoliberal globalisation ideology over the social democratic arrangements of societies, since the 1980s the lessons apprehended during the Great Depression of the 1930s were rapidly forgotten. The safety mechanisms adopted to avoid the major harms of the predominant economic development model were dismantled during successive deregulation waves. The corresponding policies were often enacted with the active involvement of social democratic parties that had repositioned themselves ideologically in terms of new labour or agenda politics (Giddens 1998). The withdrawal of democracy from the economic realm provoked the unleashing of global financial capitalism with the consequences that became evident in 2008. Walby’s critique of the predominant consensus around the ideology of globalisation develops on the assumption that ‘crumbling late capitalism’ has a crisis sequence, which is related to the consistent deregulation of democratic control on economic enterprise that occurred in the 1980s. The ability of social sciences to reconstruct the logic of this dynamics opens to a scenario, where society can possibly find its way back to normative structuration, by adopting new legislation that tackles the causes of the ‘crisis cascade’. Something that this time shall occur above all on a global level (Walby 2015: chap. 8). The methodological prerequisite for the conceptualisation of the necessary policies is, however, that the logic of adding elements of normative regulation has a positive effect that is at least equivalent to the negative consequences deriving from their subtraction. If the origins of the socio-economic crisis experienced on a global level since 2008 can be traced back to the excessive deregulation of the financial sector, the issue becomes how democratic control of capitalism can be reconstructed to adapt it to the challenges of contemporary global world economy. Following Walby, societies could tackle this endeavour, on the condition that social sciences light up the complexity of the corresponding socio-economic arrangements, which lies beyond what traditional theories of systemic integration can grasp. This is one of the most controversial aspects in the debate. There is no guarantee that ‘late crumbling capitalism’ can be brought back to a level of system integration that is compatible

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with social integration (Lockwood 1964). A much more pessimistic scenario is indeed possible. This is the one that Streeck outlines in the collected studies on: How Will Capitalism End? (2016a), which substantially shift the axis of the debate. In this analysis the societal formation of ‘late crumbling capitalism’ has lost for ever the characteristics that motivated Habermas to call for a systemic integration of late capitalism, and that would grant its legitimation in terms of social integration (1973). Thereby, Streeck denies in nuce any effectiveness to communicative action, starting from the assumption that it has no influence on societal structuration. No ways to regulate economic action can be found, so that no systemic balance between societal domains can be established anymore. Consequently, there is no critical work of legitimation to carry out, because the endemic structural imbalance of society cannot be overcome, at least within the framework of capitalism as an historical formation of society. According to Streeck, capitalism has been in a critical shape for decades, so that its trend to failure did not first emerge with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Its long-term imbalance can be traced back essentially to three major developmental distortions: low growth rates, high debt and rising inequality. Streeck concords with Piketty that there is a persistent decline of income compared with the ongoing increase of accumulated wealth. Yet, for him this phenomenon correlates with an even more dangerous one: the spiral of debt that first involved states in the 1980s, then transformed into increasing indebtedness of private household and finally returned after 2008 in the form of exploding public debt steered by the central banks. These strategies result in buying time for an economy that does not find a way out of stagnation, so that they do not achieve anything else other than to postpone the systemic crisis of capitalism (Streeck 2017). Hence, since the social democratic arrangements of society, viz. for Streeck ‘democratic capitalism’, began to show first signs of crisis in the 1970s, one predominant trend reproduces itself. The insufficient wealth redistribution from the top to the bottom forces societies to restore the socio-political balance at the price of an economic imbalance. This trend at first took the shape of inflation, then of public and private indebtedness, and now of an exponential increase in the money supply. Yet, all these strategies are failing, because at the end of the day they do not compensate economic inequality, which on the contrary increases, while the systemic breakdown of ‘crumbling late capitalism’ is periodically postponed.

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In accordance with other analysts, Streeck underlines that crises of the capitalist production system are nothing new and in the long term can even contribute to the health of the system. Yet, the present age since the 1970s has a specific character for him. In historical retrospect, what we experience today appears to be a process of gradual, yet inexorable decay, because the basis of legitimation for democratic capitalism seems to be substantially undermined. The arena of distributional conflict gradually shifted from labour markets, in the inflationary phase, to social policy in the period of public debt, to private financial markets, in the era of financialisation, and eventually to international financial diplomacy after the post-2007/2008 crisis. Politics was transferred into increasingly abstract spaces of action that were ever more removed from human life experience and the grasp of democratic control. The economic trend of development was thus transformed into a consistent legitimation crisis of political institutions. For common people, there is a pervasive sense that politics no longer makes a difference in their lives, as reflected in diffused perceptions of deadlock, incompetence and corruption among what seems an increasingly self-referential political class. The consequent erosion of democracy would make any resumption of normative societal structuration difficult, undermining economic democracy and the possibility to protect society from the cascading effect of economic crises. Since the 1970s, even capitalism’s master technicians appear to have lost the means to make the system whole again. The increasing disorientation in the development trend of capitalism thus constitutes a further symptom that confirms the gravity of its epochal crisis. Stagnation, oligarchic redistribution of revenues, the plundering of the public domain, corruption and global anarchy appear to be the major troubles with the current arrangement of economy. This finding provides Streeck with sufficient reasons to reiterate the diagnosis of historical materialism. Capitalism is a contingent societal arrangement, which has a beginning, but also an end, and this point seems to be approaching. ‘Democratic capitalism’ that prevailed in the New Deal and welfare-state systems no longer fulfils its task, which was to realise a compromise between economic imperatives and the political principles of modern social democracy. Accordingly the Trente glorieuses from 1945 to 1975 cannot be considered representative to define late capitalism, but rather appear as being an exception in its development trend. The welfare-state compromise highly limited the profit margins of accumulation processes, yet, through the control of economy, it also limited the auto-destructive tendencies of capitalism. As

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soon as high economic growth came to an end in the 1970s, however, the endemic conflict between capitalist markets and democratic politics forcefully reasserted itself. Streeck is extremely sceptical about the possibility to re-establish a welfare-­state for the twenty-first century. He regards democratic capitalism as a strategy of political economy that is ruled by two conflicting principles or regimes of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity and the other based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics. The political manageability of this system has sharply declined in recent years, so that the risks seem to be growing, both for democracy and for economy, not to mention the environmental risks. As a result, after forty years of neoliberalism for Streeck it is impossible to launch a new edition of democratic capitalism. The question thus arises as to whether there is no alternative other than to give up without fight and to wait for the final collapse. Yet, confronted with this option, Streeck denies its viability and entitles sociology to meet the cognitive challenge of understanding ‘crumbling late capitalism’ by overcoming the disciplinary division of labour with economics, which was negotiated on behalf of the latter by Talcott Parsons. Sociology shall rediscover its classics and read them in the perspective of an inquiry into the intensive intertwining between the societal domains of politics and economics, which takes place in contemporary societies. The lesson to be learned from today’s crisis-ridden social reality is that capitalism constitutes economic, social and cultural reality, so that studying it requires a conceptual framework that does not separate one aspect from the others. Crumbling late capitalism is a system of social action and a set of social institutions that must be understood as a historical social order and not as a static and timeless ideal-type of an economic system, existing apart from society. Taking into account the main characteristics of contemporary capitalism includes the awareness of its endogenous instability, provoked by its restless impulse to expand whatever the social and environmental costs are. The inquiry into this phenomenon cannot be reduced to timeless mathematical modelling, but rather must take place within the framework of a historical-sociological analysis of society. This presupposes an inquiry into the ideological systems that provide the glue for the temporary stabilisation of its imbalance and the reactivation of a scientific imagination capable of assessing alternatives to its present development. There is a consistent amount of research done in this domain that will be at the heart of debates over the fate of late crumbling capitalism in

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the coming years (cf., among others, Karsenti and Lemieux 2017; Piketty 2020). Yet, to conclude, with regard to the present purpose, it can be maintained that for all other differences among specialists, there is consensus in highlighting three main classes of social risk concerning crumbling late capitalism. 1. The growing imbalance in the relationship between accumulated wealth and income production that fosters increasing inequality. 2. The ungovernable dynamics resulting from the failing qualitative differentiation between the societal domains of economy and politics, which allows cascading crisis processes. 3. The increased irrationality of economic action provoked by the substantial disorientation in the development of capitalist accumulation processes. The social risks of late capitalism are compounded by its macroscopic effects on the environment, the awareness of which is slowly coming to the fore (Club of Rome 2020). In this respect the debate on the so-called Anthropocene is of crucial importance, yet at the same time must be critically integrated. There is certainly a collective responsibility in the way societies shape what Marx called their ‘organic exchange’ with nature (Burkett 2016; Foster 2012; Peña-Ruiz 2018). Yet, this responsibility must be differentiated according to the unequal power of intervention that enterprises, governments and individuals have to hand. Marx’s concern with the ‘metabolic rift’ between society and nature generated by capitalist production led him to link the question of socialism with that of ecological sustainability. This opens the way to a reflection on the necessity of a normative societal structuration that not only restores social equity but also implements a model of development, which achieves an organic exchange between society and the environment, without destroying its balance and plundering its resources. In this respect, the concept of Anthropocene positively appeals to the responsibility of everyone. Humanity has become a geological factor, because through its activity of the last two centuries the age of relative stable climate conditions came to an end. The increase in the production of greenhouse gases, the extinction and worldwide migration of species as well as the widespread displacement of natural vegetation by agricultural monocultures leaves an unmistakable biostratigraphic signal of our time. The beginning of Anthropocene can be fixed with the onset of industrialisation, as ice cores showed that concentrations of methane and CO2 have been increasing ever since. The effects of the new age intensified with the great acceleration of economic activity and resource consumption since

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the post-WWII reconstruction, and once more at the beginning of the twenty-first century, raising even more urgently the question of a reorganisation in the relationship between human society and the environment (Crutzen and Müller 2019). The understanding of collective responsibility underlying the concept of Anthropocene, however, does not permit to indicate who are the main actors of the global pollution; they should be held legally accountable for the exploitative damages, by obliging them to finance the measures necessary to restore the lost ecological balance (Farmer et al. 2017). Comparable to what happens in the case of the recurring financial and economic crises, through an undifferentiated collective responsibility nobody is held responsible for anything, so that the costs for economic, social and environmental damages due to the activity of private economic enterprise are socialised at the expense of taxpayers. This perspective stays in marked contrast to what recent research established about the responsibility of global pollution for single industrial branches, as the oil, gas and cement industry (Licker et al. 2019). Still, social and environmental predicaments provoked by the restless impulse of capitalist accumulation to expand are declared natural calamities, so that no legal pursuit of the responsible actors follows and society at large—or rather the future generations—must settle the bill. Widening the field of vision from scientific analysis to social self-­ interpretation in the age of late crumbling capitalism, a further aspect appears in the orientation crisis of complex societies. It expresses itself in the widespread irrational perception of their impending predicament. Economic and environmental mishaps occur, to which the pandemic must be counted as a consequence of the breakdown in natural boundaries between ecosystems or irresponsible scientific experimentation. In the face of these events, no solid processes of normative structuration take place that could intervene in the crises’ causes, so that an irrational feeling of loss of control disseminates. Accordingly, a spasmodic and irrational search develops for the scapegoats of the misfortunes. From time to time, these are identified with migration, cultural pluralisation, interethnic and interreligious misunderstandings. The absence of normative social structuration thus gives rise to a cultural disorientation that constitutes the breeding ground for political populism (Fitzi et al. 2019). Only a deeper insight into the mechanisms that disarticulate normative structuration processes makes it possible to reconstruct the relationship between the irrational subjective perception of our time’s crisis and its

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socio-structural causes. Whatever scenario will prevail in the development of late crumbling capitalism, the task of social sciences consists in understanding why normative social structuration processes do not take place and why no collective agency emerges that should become their bearer. The necessary research programme thus mainly consists in two steps of inquiry. On the one hand, it must understand why a normative orientation is missing comparable to the one that guided the political process of social structuration during the Trente glorieuses. This presupposes understanding the reasons for the crisis of the political idea of socialism as well as of the socio-economic paradigm of welfare-state compromise. On the other hand, the social mechanisms must be described that impede normative structuration in contemporary societies. This must be done on the three levels of sociological analysis concerning social action, social structuration and social legitimation. Accordingly, to understand late crumbling capitalism, a consistent amount of social research must be tackled that cannot be entrusted to whatever axiomatic assumptions deriving from philosophy of history. This concerns also Gramsci’s concept of ‘interregnum’ (2014: 311) that Streeck invokes on occasion to capture the development perspective of crumbling late capitalism (2016b). Gramsci’s interregnum addresses the historical situation produced by the failure of the communist revolution in Western Europe and the rise of fascism in the 1920s. He was confident that the latter did not represent the definitive solution to the predicaments of modernity. Yet, he conceded that for fascism to fail it needed a certain number of years. That was the interregnum that his generation had to endure. The nature of the development of late crumbling capitalism, which is incumbent on the twenty-first century, must instead be reconstructed beyond every historical-philosophical certainty. Our age has an open-ended transformation perspective which is neither positive nor catastrophic by default. Social science shall thus analyse it by monitoring the single steps of the ongoing societal change.

2.3  The Shifting Idea of Socialism The impact of societal self-interpretation is widely underestimated on the development of predominant paradigms in political thought, and even in social science. In this context the zeitgeist often plays a crucial role as a pre-scientific and, at times, uncritical perception of ongoing societal trends that extends to scientific work and neutralises its reflexive potential. What

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happened around the symbolic date of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was widely welcomed by public opinion as well as by social democratic parties around the world as the long-awaited end of Stalinism. A new era was expected to evolve, eventually allowing for a better synthesis of freedom, equality and fraternity two hundred years after the French Revolution. Yet, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union this hope turned rapidly into an ideological justification of the status quo which paradoxically claimed to be devoid of any ideology (Fukuyama 1992). The interpreters of the zeitgeist presented what they regarded as an indisputable verdict. The fact that liberal democracy had defeated real socialism meant that, whatever claim was laid to limit the processes of capitalist accumulation, it had run out of historical time. The statement applied also for European social democratic models whose architects had fought against Stalinism for decades. The intellectual class had already begun several years before to mourn its lost fate in progress, by pleading for the instauration of a post-­ ideological age (Lyotard 1979; Niethammer 1989). Both tendencies resulted in an ideological mix that laid the foundations of the prevailing socio-political consensus that became the ‘pensée unique’ of the subsequent decades (Kahn 1995). After the end of the East-West confrontation, a better world was supposed to dawn of its own doing, thanks to the neoliberal utopia of globalisation, so that socialist criticism of capitalism was no longer supposed to be necessary. The motto of the new age was: There is no alternative, do not disturb the operator! Yet, the spread of the so-called post-ideological worldview (Bell 1988), especially in the ranks of the intellectual left, was also favoured by all-too-­ human material interests. Due to the restructuration of the intellectual class after the ‘end of history’, a number of ‘organic intellectuals’, who wanted to quickly shed their image of eternal Marxists and jump on the winner’s bandwagon, adhered in an overly superficial way to the rising globalist utopia (Featherstone 2017; Niethammer 1989; Vargas Llosa 2019). The patrimony of critical thought was rapidly dismissed to espouse the formalism of liberal analytical philosophy, which carried with it the charm of the winner in the historical challenge with the ‘old-European ideology’ of real socialism. A naive belief established itself that an ethical approach to social justice could achieve more than what a century of social democracy and welfare-state policies had accomplished. Rawls won as the hero of the day, because his philosophy seemed to realise a synthesis between the opposing needs of globalised capitalism and social justice, if everyone had only listened to their disinterested moral conscience (Rawls

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1971). Yet, dismissing crucial aspects of the political culture that founded modern democratic states in Europe after WWII brought political and economic democratisation to a standstill. Republican values like social equality, antifascism, international solidarity and antiracism that were the basis of democratic common sense after 1945 were accused of being part of the old European ideological ballast, and a post-ideological age must rid itself of this. The state-founding mythologies of the democracies that emerged after the catastrophe of WWII entered an irremediable crisis, fostering historical revisionism that threatened (and partly succeeded) in becoming the hegemonic culture. Italy’s case is paradigmatic in this perspective; the country transformed from a ‘Republic grounded on the values of Resistance’ to a country that hailed Mussolini as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century (Del Boca and Acone 2012). Yet, several countries around the world experienced a crisis of their basic ethic-­ political orientation that still lasts to this day. The self-depletion of the value orientation that legitimised the welfare-­ state systems fostered the rise of neoliberalism to emerge as the dominant ideology of the globalised age (Soborski 2013; Turner 2008). The idea that capitalist accumulation processes should be regulated by democratic political systems to curb their social and environmental risks was banned for years from societal self-interpretation, so that their representatives were forced to remain on the fringes of the public arena. As profoundly stupid as this historical development is, it took the financial and economic crisis of 2007/2008 for the question of the limits of the prevailing development model to be raised again at a level of global societal self-­ interpretation. Ever since that moment, a timid questioning restarted about the possible corrections to what Thatcher had defined as an alternative-­less economic system. Yet, it seems to be a conspicuous difficulty to pick up the thread of reasoning in a field where the critical knowledge accumulated during the twentieth century has hardly been transmitted between generations. Amnesia is of course a crucial instrument for the construction of a predominant consensus that cements relationships of social domination. Yet, here the impact was overwhelming. For the time being, a crucial task of social sciences thus consists in bringing to light the cognitive heritage that critically addressed societal transformation in complex societies. This includes the focus on the idea of socialism. Read independently of the historical-philosophical framework that was supposed to ensure its advent, socialism provides a regulative ideal that takes charge of the growing social injustice and environmental

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risks induced by modern capitalist accumulation processes. The historical and philosophical expectations of the socialist tradition were frustrated. Yet, the social emergencies that it addressed are still before our eyes and, to some extent, have even worsened, so that the issue becomes how society can be reorganised to avoid them. In this respect, neoliberalism claims that any limitation to capitalist accumulation processes means a mortification of personal freedom that leads directly to the development of Stalinism as one of the two faces of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Hayek 1944). Yet, by these means, neoliberal ideology conceals the deep illiberality that characterises the capitalist societal system. Here, the freedom of a few monopolistic economic concentrations condemns the majority of the planet’s population to living conditions that prevent them from exercising the most basic civic freedoms. The predominance of global neoliberalism has worsened the situation. If political and economic democratisation had progressed after WWII, since the 1980s the conditions of access to civil, political and social rights were substantially eroded (Turner 2016). Limiting the social and environmental damages of capitalist accumulation processes means instead restoring access to rights of citizenship for the majority of the human population, which is the opposite of illiberality. Yet, the difficulty to embark on this path of emancipation is related to the fact that the cultural hegemony on capitalism critique was taken over by neoconservative and right-wing populist worldviews stating that only a return to traditional orders of value could limit the derailment of modernity (Habermas 1985: 30–56). Analysing the debate on the meaning of socialism is, therefore, crucial to understand the criteria possibly facilitating a normative structuration of society that thwarts the risks of crumbling late capitalism. In the middle of the turmoil that characterised Germany’s reunification in 1989/1990, Habermas faced the challenge of formulating a critical balance and development forecast for socialism after the fall of Berlin’s Wall (1990). His assessment provides a benchmark that allows us to put into historical perspective the resuming debate on socialism. At that time the issue was how to address the trend of a complete liquidation of any critical approach to the prevailing development model in the wake of the bankruptcy of state socialism. Additionally, the particularity of East Germany was that here the voters did not ratify what the opposition to the regime had in mind when it overthrew the Stasi-oligarchy with the slogan, ‘We are the people’. All variants of socialism were put aside and the country was simply taken over by the West German social market economy. In the

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form of constitutional democracy, market economy and social pluralism, liberal ideas of social organisation thus prevailed. The overhasty prediction of the ‘end of ideology’ seemed finally to have come true and reached out towards Central and Eastern Europe (Bell 1988). Hence, the question arose as to whether beneath ‘actually existing socialism’ also ‘Marxism as a critique’ had exhausted its historical function. From a liberal viewpoint, the slogan of the day was that everything that was of any use in socialism had already been put into practice during the era of social democratic welfare compromise. So, it seemed that there was less to keep in the ideal heritage of socialism. Habermas’ strategic move in this respect was to show that critical theory had already been questioning the inadequacies of Marx’s theoretical-political programme for decades. The fixation of Marxian analysis on the idea of the unlimited development of productive forces, the centrality of the industrial working class as a revolutionary subject and a natural science conception of societal evolution had severely limited its ability to understand complex societies. This theoretical framework prevented Marx from valuing the emancipatory potential of constitutional democracy. The communist utopia thus maintained its original Saint-Simonian conception of politics as a pure administration of things, so that the need for a democratic forum to resolve societal conflict seemed superfluous (Taylor 2016). This encouraged the type of vanguardism that became predominant in Leninism and set the ground for the later development of Stalinism. These were the conclusions that Western Marxism had already drawn long before 1989 about the failures of ‘real existing socialism’. In opposition to that, for Habermas social democracy developed a viable alternative that managed to disengage from Marx’s evolutionary conception of societal transformation, even if the productivist conception of economic development was maintained for far too long. This form of socialism managed to establish the welfare-state compromise, which can be considered its main achievement, even if the recurring crises in the development of accumulation processes could not be completely averted. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, however, one question had to be faced. It was necessary to understand if people on the left had to retreat to a purely moral standpoint, keeping socialism as nothing more than a regulative ideal of purely private relevance. According to Habermas, this was not the case, because there were still good margins for concrete political action that aimed at bringing economic processes back under democratic control. Socialism was thus still required. Yet, its impetus did not have to

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focus exclusively on the shaping of the economic domain. Rather, it must fight against the systemic imperatives of capitalism, by expressing the normative claims of the lifeworld within several domains of qualitative differentiated societies. Through a wide range of democratic forums and institutions, the integrating function of solidarity could again become capable of enforcing its regulating potential over the social forces of money and administrative power. After the end of real socialism, radical democratisation thus constituted the core of every socialist political programme. Only through this commitment, for Habermas, would it be possible to restart a process of normative structuration capable of bringing the economy back under democratic control. To say the least, however, it must be admitted that seen from today’s perspective something in the practical implementation of this political programme did not succeed. Economic and political democratisation have suffered severely from neoliberal cultural hegemony. After a longer phase in which the debate on socialism has been almost absent from societal self-­ interpretation, in 2017 Honneth took over the question, enjoying a certain resonance. The motivation for a study on the ‘idea of socialism’ originated from the chain of events that characterised the rising tide of right-wing populism around 2016: Brexit, Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections, Marine Le Pen’s success as a competitor in the French presidential elections and the resurgence of a far-right party in Germany. After the financial and economic crisis of 2007/2008, for some years the dogma of the supposed beneficial effects of global unregulated capitalism had been questioned everywhere. Yet, although there was a growing discontent with the predominant economic model, hardly any serious consideration was given to the question of correcting, let alone overcoming it. In this sense, it could be said that four decades of neoliberal ideology had succeeded in making other models of economic organisation lose all credibility. Accordingly, for Honneth the doubts bubbling up in society are no longer supported by a collective courage to think beyond the crisis of crumbling late capitalism and imagine alternatives in concrete terms. The rise of right-wing populism thus appears to be a consequence of the lack of plausible and promising narratives on the part of the left, which could offer a political horizon of action to a working class that faces anxieties of downgrading and feels abandoned by the liberal establishment (Eribon 2009). Starting from this diagnosis, Honneth’s book intends to valorise the richness of theoretical reflection on socialism, which can contribute to

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restart the scientific examination of the possible alternatives to the predominant model of development. The aim of the study is to clarify that in the tradition of socialism, understood in a broad sense and not only in its Marxist variant, there has been a nuanced reflection on possible alternatives to capitalism, which can serve to revive the imagination on alternative institutional arrangements of society. Consequently, for Honneth the idea of socialism must be seen above all in its normative intentionality that has lost none of its meaning. It is grounded on a conception of individual freedom as a good that cannot be disposed of in a merely subjective way, but only realised intersubjectively, so that reciprocity and solidarity become the necessary preconditions of freedom in a sociological sense. The original and so far vital impulse of socialism thus consists in the principle of establishing an economic system that is not a sphere of private selfishness, as in competitive capitalism, but rather a domain where the ideal of ‘social freedom’ can be realised. The normative orientation of socialism must, therefore, shift from the battles for social justice to those for realising a value of freedom different from that of economic liberalism. It is in some sense Durkheim’s conception of moral individualism that returns here (Durkheim 1973). According to Honneth, socialism would have been far more persuasive from the outset, if it had presented itself as a movement for social freedom, disputing with ‘bourgeois liberalism’ for an adequate interpretation of individual freedom. In this context, social equality represents the necessary precondition for the institutionalisation of social freedom, yet it cannot be dissociated from the realisation of constitutional rights granting civil and political freedom. The renewal of the idea of socialism must therefore above all distance itself from the parable of Leninist avant-gardism. In its wake socialism dissociated the demand for social justice from the guarantee of substantial and not only formal access to civil and political rights for all, thus denying its primary historical mission. In a nutshell, the precondition for a renewal of the idea of socialism consists, following Honneth, in overcoming the limits of the historical horizon, in which socialism formed itself, and that strongly conditioned its subsequent theoretical development. There are in this respect three main elements of criticism: (1) the failure to connect social freedom, in the sense now specified, with ‘liberal rights’ of freedom, which the tradition of socialism has mostly rejected in toto as an ideological false consciousness; (2) the ‘transcendental link’ between socialist theory and a conception of the proletariat as a socio-political subject, which is considered to be the

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bearer of a permanently revolutionary consciousness—something that has deprived socialist theory of the capacity to develop a sociological analysis of social structuration; (3) finally, a sort of faith in the future, which led to the belief that the transition to socialism would be accomplished by historical necessity, in a way that conforms to objective laws of progress. For Honneth, these assumptions implied that too little room was granted to experimental social research aimed at exploring unused opportunities for a socialist transformation of society. The critical evaluation of the idea of socialism thus results in a reversal of Engels’ argument about the transition of socialism from utopia to science (Engels 1882). It would in fact be the ‘scientific socialism’ of Marx and Engels that clipped the wings of the utopian experimentalism of early socialism in the manner of Owen (1813). Yet, it is exactly this that would be needed today to understand what new avenues socialism could open up. Accordingly, Honneth’s critique of the formation horizon of Marxist socialism focuses in particular on the elements of ‘Saint-Simonian industrialism’ that endured in the Marxian conception of the natural growth of the productive forces and the centrality of the industrial working class as a revolutionary subject (Taylor 2016). This approach would have prevented the idea of social freedom from unfolding and favoured instead the spread of an authoritarian conception of social transformation led by an enlightened political elite that allegedly disposes of the knowledge of how to make society more just. After the pars destruens of his analysis, Honneth proposes to actualise the idea of socialism by recovering the Hegelian conception of society as an ‘organic whole’, in which a democratic public sphere oversees its relationship to the other two fundamental social spheres, that is, the spheres of intimate life and economic action. The guiding idea here is that each of the three distinct social spheres can best satisfy aspirations for social freedom, the more it is in a position to follow the specific norms that define it. Economy thus has a right to function on the basis of its own logic, yet not to colonise other societal domains so that society as a whole must be established on a normative regulated and possibly organic integration between three different normative languages: the norm of communicative will formation (political democracy), the norm of mutual solicitude and care for the concrete other (personal relationships), and, finally, the norm of cooperative satisfaction of needs (economic democracy). Of course, for Honneth it will never be possible to build a political community based on perfect harmony. There will always be conflicts over the form of social

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differentiation that should prevail in society, as well as about the question of how each social sphere can best correspond to its own action logic. The normative orientation towards the realisation of the ideal of social freedom would, however, allow for the realisation of acceptable levels of social integration. In conclusion, for Honneth, a renewed socialist idea of social cooperation should be based on a historical experimentalism, as advocated by John Dewey (Honneth 2017: 96 f.), which interrogates every historically given situation with regard to the opportunities it contains for the expansion of social freedom. This means nowadays to look for the possible transformation of societies in a more solidarity-oriented direction, by introducing legislation capable of overcoming the worst consequences of neoliberalism. Honneth’s political programme, therefore, advocates measures such a statutory minimum wage, co-determination in the world of production, increasing taxes on movable and immovable property, the elimination of the irrational speculation possibilities that are currently in the hands of finance, the introduction of internationally coordinated controls on capital flight and so on. This approach for the construction of a renewed idea of socialism, after four decades of neoliberal dominance, in a way revives Durkheim’s conception of the emancipatory potential of organic solidarity, which is made possible by the social division of labour in complex societies, but hindered by anomy and forced division of labour induced by the capitalist system of production (1893: chap. III/1&2). The question yet arises as to how the ethical perspective of ‘social freedom’ can be realised on the terrain of concrete social action. If it should not constitute a mere ethical ideal of individual life-conduct, it is necessary to understand which social subjects may become its bearers and which processes of transformative action must be implemented in a social reality, where normative societal structuration increasingly fails. On the one hand, it must be shown which legislative measures may be taken. On the other hand, it must be understood how sociological analysis can help to understand the social processes that are at work and may hinder or foster the empirical implementation of social freedom. It is to these two aspects of the question, respectively, that Piketty devotes his analysis of capital and ideology (2020) and Karsenti and Lemieux their reflection on socialism and sociology (2017). Piketty’s approach takes consistently into account the impact that the failure of the planned economy had on economic theory. Accordingly, to him a reflection on socialism can only make sense if the adjective

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‘participatory’ is added to it. The project of participatory socialism is based on the principle of a profound decentralisation, which is opposed to the idea of state ownership for the means of production, as it characterised the experience of real socialism. The social transformation triggered by participatory socialism is expected to focus above all on education and property, conceived as the two widespread social resources that facilitate the establishment of greater standards of justice in complex societies. Thus, Piketty breaks with the overall denial of the right to private property, which characterised socialist tradition, to affirm the possibility of its coexistence with measures of strong redistribution of economic resources in a just society. By such means the principles that characterised the New Deal policies in the US and the European welfare-state compromise return to centre stage. Yet, the question arises as to how they can be implemented in an age of global deregulated capitalism. As Bourdieu and Passeron have shown, everything that is related to educational justice, especially the access to higher education, is subject to great hypocrisy (1964). The US is the most striking example for a very close statistical relationship between family income and access to university (Piketty 2020: 35, 1012 f.). A similar gap can be observed in France, even though most schools and universities are public, as well as in many other countries of the world. For these reasons, Piketty’s project for participatory socialism demands first and foremost verifiable targets for greater equality in educational expenditure per capita, to guarantee at least equal starting opportunities for everybody. The second pillar of the project focuses on the question of access to property and its circulation. The model to which Piketty refers is that of the German and Nordic experiences of economic co-determination (Piketty 2020: 972). In contrast to France, the UK or Spain, here employees’ representatives participate with voting rights in companies’ boards of directors, even if they have no stake in capital. This favours a complete reorientation of entrepreneurial culture. To generalise this approach the concept of property needs to be reinterpreted in a sociological sense. The leading idea is that capitalist ownership is not simply a means of economic power but primarily a structure of political domination that must be democratised. Since capitalism is a social form of production for material life that increasingly absorbs the whole of society, economic democratisation requires fostering a greater circulation of ‘property power’. Accordingly, participative socialism must above all provide the legislative framework that makes these circulation processes possible.

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In Piketty’s perspective, during the twentieth century three main issues evidenced the limits of the classic social democratic welfare compromise: education, property and the missing transnational measures of taxation and social justice. Today, more than ever, a transnational political project of democratisation is thus needed to confront the globalised economic development model that jeopardises the environment and stands in the way of acceptable levels of social justice. The uncertainties that can be observed in the current process of European unification show how difficult a similar political perspective is. The European Union has created a large common market, yet without adequate measures of transnational social justice, taxation and environmental protection. This imbalance allowed for the resurgence of nationalist sovereignism, which deludes itself into regaining control over the processes of global capitalism, by retreating into socio-economic autarchy (Habermas and Streeck 2020). For Piketty, instead, the process of European integration must be relaunched as the touchstone of transnational social and environmental justice. This means to implement adequate instruments of common taxation and redistribution of property, for without these measures, the free movement of people, capital and services, which characterise the age of global capitalism, will continue to have disintegrating effects on single European societies. Instead of absolute equality, participatory socialism advocates the access to fundamental rights fostered by a new welfare-state legislation of global reach. The leading principle of its programme consists in increasing political and economic participation. This presupposes the extension of social ownership of capital in society at large as well as increasing shared control power between employees and shareholders in companies. Furthermore, participatory socialism fosters a transformation of legal and fiscal systems to grant an ongoing redistribution of property. Its principle is ‘temporary ownership’ that can be granted, on the one hand, by progressive taxation of property, income and inheritance to facilitate a constant circulation of capital. On the other hand, it presupposes the implementation of redistributive measures like basic income and fair wages. In summary, Piketty imagines participatory socialism as a progressive regulatory framework that integrates social and environmental justice. This concerns different measures, yet specifically the coal emissions taxation, which must grant relief for low- and middle-income households, in contrast to what the Macron government undertook in France by provoking the Gilet jaunes revolt. Beyond the national level, however, environmental protection

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needs the development of global legislation that curbs the competition between states to grant non-taxation for corporate profits, but on the contrary taking into account the social and environmental costs of their entrepreneurship. The transformation of the relationship between democracy and capitalism that would characterise the global welfare of the twenty-first century thus also requires a renewal of political procedures that limits the power of lobbyism—that is, the translation of economic imperatives into legislation, despite all the involved risks. In this respect, Piketty suggests the abolition of party donations from companies or other corporate bodies and a radical capping of contributions from private individuals. Instead, a system of vouchers for democratic equality shall be introduced, so that every citizen can decide on an annual basis which political party or movement to support (Piketty 2020: 1016). This proposition addresses a crucial question. When a political programme for participatory socialism is established or the ideal of social freedom is recognised as the ethic-political orientation for the long overdue societal transformation of the twenty-first century, the question arises as to what agency is going to become their bearer. In other words, in successive steps, how the programme and ideal can transform into cultural hegemony, successful electoral campaigns and innovative legislation. At the same time, the issue is why it was easier at certain times to take this path and why today the ‘normative structuration of society’ encounters greater difficulties. In his study Piketty refers to the historical inequality regimes that provide the ideological glue to legitimise and underpin unjust wealth accumulation systems, despite their social and environmental costs, and describes the type of cultural hegemony that characterises current societies (2020: 648–717). The results of this analysis raise the question about how the priority of the common good can be reintroduced as the guiding ideal of society in an age in which capital profit was elevated to the unique principle of government. The development of the European welfare-state during the so-called trente glorieuses was not only the expression of an ethical-political orientation or legislative praxis. It resulted from the constant pressure that trade unions exerted on political parties and governments that were willing to translate the instances of social justice in practicable legislation. This societal transformation process established a cultural hegemony of the ‘welfare-state compromise’, which was then also adopted by Christian democratic parties in different European countries. The turnaround in social policy fostered not only the overall improvement

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of social conditions, political and economic democratisation, yet it also provided capitalism with conditions of growth that limited its self-­ destructive tendencies (Streeck 2016a). Seen from a sociological viewpoint, today a similar transformation would only be possible, if a renewed normative structuration of society took place. The priority of a research programme on this issue is thus to understand why this has failed to happen over the course of roughly four decades. In this respect, the relevance of Piketty’s historical-economic reconstruction lies in the fact that it questions a number of non-reflected axiomatic assumptions that ground political economy and shows with a very robust base of comparative data that economic science needs to be recast in order to make objective assertions about present social reality. Yet, beyond this welcome renewal of economics, the societal structuration processes must be understood sociologically, which at least between the 1980s and the global pandemic of 2020/2021 impeded the development of alternatives to neoliberal societal restructuration. Therefore, the critical questioning about the ongoing societal transformation must be translated into a scientific analysis of the social preconditions of its practical possibility. This task falls within the remit of our present study. Yet, it also presupposes a resumption of a classic debate on the relationship between socialism and sociology. In France, the era of neoliberal cultural hegemony culminated in the electoral triumph of nationalist sovereignism, so that Marine Le Pen won a share of 33.9% in the 2017 presidential elections. In the face of this shocking development, which among other things forced the left-wing electorate to vote for a neoliberal candidate in order to avoid the worst, a critical reflection developed. Hoping that neoliberalism will prevail over the nationalist drift is clearly not a viable political alternative. Rather than resigning to the depletion of every oppositional practice, it seems necessary to reconstruct a critical intellectual evaluation of the processes at work, based on an objective sociological diagnosis. This is the intellectual exercise that Karsenti and Lemieux propose in their reflection on socialism and sociology (2017). In a country where the socialist party has been torn apart in the internal clash between neoliberal and left social democratic tendencies, the question is to rethink what socialism means and what its relationship to sociology is. Yet, this also implies a fresh understanding of the specific implication of that relationship in the context of social sciences: that is, how sociology can respond to the public demand for a scientific diagnosis of the current societal transformation.

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As a reaction to neoliberalism, in different countries the turn towards sovereignist nationalism rapidly took hold after the global financial and economic crisis of 2007/2008. Faced with this new cultural hegemony, left-wing politicians often believe that it suffices to discredit the nationalist idea by referring to its authoritarian drifts. However, in doing so, they fail to understand the social phenomena that lie behind the renewed success of sovereignism. Only a sociological approach to the self-interpretation of societies as nations would instead allow us to get to the bottom of the problem. According to Karsenti and Lemieux, it is Mauss’ analysis of the nation that must be taken up to proceed in this direction (2013). Understanding how the ongoing transformation of complex societies produces a fertile breeding ground for the ideology of sovereignist closure is only possible through a sociological assessment of nationalism that unveils the social preconditions of its possibility. The scientific diagnosis of the ongoing social processes offers dependable knowledge that can then be translated into practices of societal transformation. Accordingly, the relationship between socialism and sociology must be redefined based on the scientific performance that the latter can deliver. Mauss understands socialism as a specific sequence between theory and practice that faces social inequality and defines sociology as the means to gain reflexive distance towards societal change processes according to a specific epistemology. This methodological approach involves an objective analysis of the state, in which society finds itself, as well as a diagnosis of its possible development trends, so that it provides knowledge concerning societal transformation that may constitute the starting point for collective political action. Thus, Mauss’ conception of the relationship between sociology and socialism is not so far removed from what Weber advocates in his discussion of the objectivity of social sciences, although his formulation was necessarily more cautious because of the particular context of the German debate on social sciences (Weber 1904: MWG I/7, 142–234). Mauss’ approach is openly socialist because it intends to capture analytically the contradictions and conflicts that affect society at a given historical moment, by accounting for the experiences of injustice that characterise it. Yet, he sees socialism in its accomplished form as a political movement of societal transformation that is only possible under the condition of subordinating the will to act to the need to know. Socialism thus requires sociology, because only through its lens can it develop a useful understanding of the trends that transform society.

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To grasp social reality, a socialism of the twenty-first century should be led by this aim of scientific reflexivity, which presupposes the capacity of gaining distance from the concepts of societal self-interpretation. Yet, even if there is a macroscopic need to articulate in scientific terms the feelings of injustice and indignation that spread in societies, today’s social sciences, according to Karsenti and Lemieux, struggle to recognise the epistemological perspective that justifies their social function. Since the 1980s, the battle of neoliberalism has been waged against sociology as the social science that succeeds in making intelligible the tensions that traverse complex societies. The most obvious success of neoliberal cultural hegemony is the fact that even socialist and social democratic parties have abandoned sociological thinking and rather rely on political marketing, individual psychology and economics to explain social reality. There is thus a renewed need for a ‘struggle in theory’, because globalisation, economic crises and sovereignist populism still await the development of a comprehensive sociological assessment of their constitutive social processes. As Simmel already noted, the main epistemological errors induced by societal self-interpretation are linked to the reification of both the concepts of the individual and society as a whole (Simmel 1890: 115–138). Today, this takes the form of an ideological opposition between the idea of the homo oeconomicus, dedicated to optimising egoist self-interest, and the idea of the sovereign nation, detached from all international interdependence. Both concepts are ideological, rigid and immovable, so that they cannot grasp the complexity of concrete societal reality, its contradictions and conflicts. Only a kind of socialism that would become sociologically reflexive could bring these back into focus. Yet, a political praxis subordinated to the scientific understanding of society fails to establish itself in present social reality. For far too long, democratic socialism has been used as a rhetorical label to justify the adoption of neoliberal policies by centre-­ left parties that governed in recent decades. Thus, this form of socialism has completely squandered its political appeal. Above all, the most disadvantaged social strata could perceive the extent to which their historical representatives have abandoned the assertion of their needs (Eribon 2009). As a result, the demand for solidarity, equality and access to rights is no longer addressed to social democratic forces, but to right-wing populism or movements of spontaneous demands such as the Gilet Jaunes. This trend is confirmed by the socio-structural transformation of social democratic parties from parties of the working classes to representatives of state employees and educated classes (Piketty 2020: 863 f.).

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Society’s latent aspiration to greater social justice thus remains unfulfilled. It can only be recovered through a renewed dialogue between spontaneous protest, which highlights society’s contradictions and sociological reflexivity that analyses social phenomena without being crushed by societal self-interpretation. The sum of both, according to Karsenti and Lemieux, is what constitutes socialism in the sense that Mauss and Durkheim conceived it. In Durkheim’s perspective, no legislative action a priori can generate a process of social transformation but only a new division of social labour that induces a different normative structuration of society. This modality of societal change thus must become the subject of sociological inquiry in order to understand how it takes place and under what conditions it generates pathological developments. Durkheim defines socialism as the doctrines which call for the attachment of all economic functions, or some of them which are at present diffuse, to the governing and conscious centres of society (2011). Socialism is thus the political formula capable of preventing societal change from resulting in too much socio-economic disharmony. Yet, it must be first and foremost understood as a social fact, observable in modern societies. It is a collective tendency, whose appearance and development have a social cause: the acceleration of the division of labour that characterises complex societies and confronts them with socio-economic conflicts of an unprecedented scale and complexity. Today more than ever, it is up to sociology to study the framework of societal structuration, within which this collective tendency of modern societies does or does not take hold. Radical political and economic democratisation, a different ethical-­ political orientation, global welfare-state legislation, a renewed dialectics between the will to act and the need to know: different suggestions emerge in the debate on socialism after forty years of neoliberal cultural hegemony. Yet, the crucial issue that begs an answer is: what social agency can become the bearer of democratic socialism for the twenty-first century, and via which processes of societal transformation? Here, one aspect in particular could pave the way for a research programme capable of tackling the issue: namely the reflexive opening of socialism towards the sociological assessment of the present state of society and its development trends. Furthermore, the historical distance that separates the present era from state-administered capitalism as well as from the emerging neoliberal capitalism after the collapse of real socialism, invites a fundamental renewal of the analytical toolbox of sociology. Two symptomatic findings mould the respective process of ideal-typical theory building. The shared normative

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orientation that permitted the implementation of the welfare-state compromise after WWII seems to have little hold left on society. An increasing normative intermittency establishes itself on all levels of society, because there seems to be no social agency capable of becoming the driving force behind a renewed normative structuration of society. To face these issues, it is important to revive a concise ideal-typical reconstruction of the normative framework of the welfare-state compromise, which is somehow lost, so that it can set the scene for the sociological diagnosis of the failing social structuration that characterises contemporary societies. Forty years of neoliberal cultural hegemony provoked an enormous collective amnesia about normative societal orientation so that the first step for a renewal of sociological theory building is anamnesis.

2.4  The Loss of the Welfare-State Compromise The implementation of the welfare-state compromise after WWII had a long historical preparation. Some aspects of welfare legislation already developed since the second half of the nineteenth century in different countries (Esping-Andersen 1990). The awareness of the need to alleviate the living conditions generated by the expansion of capitalist production also induced economists of liberal or Christian-social orientation to adopt some of the claims made by workers unions and socialist parties. To this end, in Germany Gustav Schmoller and other influential economists established the Social Policy Association (Verein für Sozialpolitik) that laid the theoretical foundations for the adoption of social protection policies within the framework of the market economy (Thomas 1995). As Thomas H. Marshall remarks, in the UK the neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall broadly adopted socialist claims for the implementation of more social justice, while rejecting the idea of overcoming capitalism (1996: 5 f.). Thus, socialist demands slowly became part of a shared cultural heritage on which the welfare-state compromise could be based (Freeden 2011). After WWI and during the Great Depression, the critical reflection in economics developed a new conception of state intervention to alleviate the worst consequences of capitalist production cycles, above all concerning the issue of mass unemployment (Keynes 1936; Klein 1980). With the New Deal, since the 1930s social protection as well as financial regulation developed in the US that managed to avoid some of the worst socio-­ political outcomes of the economic depression triggered by the stock market crash in 1929 (Badger 1989). In Europe, instead, the traumatic

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experiences of dictatorship and WWII showed beyond doubt what can be the socio-political consequences of uncontrolled economic crises and depressions (Arendt 1951). This awareness cemented a wide consensus about the limits of the predominant development model that came to expression in the reform process that implemented the different European welfare-state systems after 1945. A historical transformation that started with the claims of workers unions and discriminated socialist parties succeeded some decades later in establishing the cultural hegemony of the welfare-state compromise beyond socialist and social democratic public opinion. It is important to note that this development implied a range of considerations, which took account of not only the social costs for the cyclical capitalist accumulation crises but also the political consequences of the great depression that Europe experienced with the rise of fascist dictatorships. Added to these considerations were the concerns about the possible expansion of the Soviet model in Western Europe, especially in divided Germany, as a consequence of the poverty caused by WWII (Schröder 1990). The conception of normative societal structuration that found expression in the principles leading the implementation of the welfare-state compromise thus had different sources and a specific historical form. Yet, it was characterised by the cultural hegemony of the idea that complex societies need a normative arrangement to compensate the socio-political damage provoked by the crisis cycles of capitalist economy. The question today is to understand in ideal-typical terms which normative principles guided the realisation of the welfare-state compromise and to evaluate if they can be transposed beyond the particular historical scenario in which they arose (Goodin et al. 2009). The sociological assessment of this aspect raises the debate about welfare-state systems beyond the level of a pure and simple evaluation of their economic output, which focuses on the fact that this was positive as long as the European national economies ran to catch up the US-American development levels, and become negative afterwards. Accordingly, the focus of analysis shifts to the capacity of the societal arrangement fostered by the welfare-state compromise to stabilise development, settle conflicts and grant higher standards of social justice by preventing societal change from resulting in too much socio-economic disharmony in a Durkheimian sense. This exercise becomes relevant to understand to what extent the welfare-state compromise allowed a free development of the organic division of labour without

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incurring the pathological developments of economic anomy and forced differentiation of social roles (Durkheim 1893: chap. III/1&2). Seen from a sociological viewpoint the orientation towards an ideal-­ typical conception of normative societal structuration is not sufficient to trigger social transformation, unless it is supported by a corresponding powerful social agency capable of realising its implementation. The sociological diagnosis in Chaps. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 deals in greater detail with this aspect of the question. Yet, without understanding the cultural mechanisms that led the political praxis of the welfare-state compromise to become hegemonic, no conception of renewed societal structuration can actually become possible that takes into account the social and environmental risks of the predominant economic development model. It is necessary to review in a historical comparative perspective the leading principles of the welfare-state compromise that (of course within determined limits) became a shared common approach in Europe after WWII. A concise appraisal of this issue is provided here, although it would deserve a monograph study in its own right. Nevertheless, the purpose is to show in a nutshell what is meant by normative societal structuration in the context of post-war politics. The development of the welfare-state in the UK has an ideal-typical character in this respect (Addison 1975). Under the leadership of Clement Attlee’s Labour Government, the post-war ‘Welfare-state’ already started in summer 1945; it built on the heritage of liberal thought and the awareness of the worst consequences of capitalist production cycles, while also integrating important measures of state intervention in the economy (Reeves and McIvor 2014). This societal structuration process, which started with the surprising landslide victory of the Labour party in the July 1945 elections, became a model of comparison for the different reform processes that started later around continental Europe, including the German ‘social market economy’ that developed instead in the spirit of Ordoliberalism (Ptak 2004). On the other hand, the development of the welfare-state in the UK is particularly relevant because it strongly influenced the sociological reflection on the ‘normative status’ of the citizen that is necessary to protect the social strata most exposed to the cyclical crises of capitalist accumulation processes, thus giving a crucial impulsion to the development of citizenship sociology. Labour’s welfare-state legislation of 1945 could build on the preparatory work of the so-called Beveridge commission that was set up by the previous all-party coalition government to understand the measures to be taken for

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post-war reconstruction (Beveridge 1942). Besides the sober assessment of facts and figures, the commission’s report exposes the normative principles that justify the vision of society that a reform and improvement of social protection services was supposed to realise. Mainly three principles are put forward (Beveridge 1942: 6). First and foremost, the Beveridge Report underlines the perception of the exceptionality of the time due to the war and the plans for reconstruction. This shall determine the normative orientation of the legislation to be adopted so that the organisation of social insurance must be treated as part of a comprehensive ‘policy of progress’ (ibid.). Its first goal was to provide ‘income security’, which above all required ‘an attack upon want’ (ibid.). Yet, the realisation of the necessary measures implied a reciprocal normative commitment of the community and the individual. This meant that the state should grant minimal social protection and the individuals take care of the further needs of themselves and their families. Thus, both were set a common goal: to move forward from an era in which deprivation represented a tolerated social condition. The third principle consisted, instead, in the formulation of a renewed social pact between state and citizens on the basis of substantial social legislation. This would not mean a waiver of responsibility on the part of individuals, because social security must be achieved by cooperation between the people and the state. However, individuals could count on the assurance that they would not be left alone. It can thus be seen that the report’s normative approach attempts to find a compromise between the principles of public and individual responsibility for improving the living conditions of the most disadvantaged social strata. Furthermore, the Beveridge Report provided a clear diagnosis of the causes of want, as it identified them in 75% of cases in the ‘interruption or loss of earning power’ and the whole of the remaining 25% as due to ‘failure to relate income during earning to the size of the family’ (ibid.: 7). The main conclusion that it drew was that abolition of ‘want’ required a double redistribution of income, through social insurance and by family. This meant primarily the improvement of state insurance—that is, provision against interruption and loss of earning power, which concerned specifically unemployment, illness, old age and widowhood (ibid.: 120). The principles that the Beveridge Report put forward were not specifically socialist, yet they testified to an acknowledgement of the demand for limiting the impact of income discontinuity, even if they underlined the idea of an obligation of the state to guarantee only the minimum necessary for survival. In any case, the idea that society should grant income

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continuity for everybody, because of the discontinuity of capitalist production cycles, had established itself as a shared normative principle, even within the circles of liberal economists. The Attlee government implemented to a wide extent the suggestions of the Beveridge commission, together with a number of further measures that characterised its reform politics in a social democratic way (Morgan 2002; Tomlinson 2004). It created the National Health Service, substantially increased pensions, strengthened the rights of trade unions and developed a social housing programme. Furthermore, the reform process extended to a wide policy of nationalisations. This included the Bank of England, coal, gas, steel and electric industry as well as public utilities like inland transports, overseas airways, the cable and wireless industries, without facing particularly strong opposition from Liberals and Conservatives (Brady 1950). Public investment in the economy fostered the implementation of Keynes’ conception of state intervention to control aggregate demand and grant full employment (Keynes 1936; Klein 1980). The achievements of the Attlee government in translating the idea of the welfare-state compromise into legislation established the so-called post-war consensus and made its political praxis a model that was carefully evaluated by the remaining European governments (Dutton 1994). The cultural hegemony of the welfare-state compromise lasted during the following three decades and only dissolved with Margaret Thatcher’s accession to power in 1979 that ushered in the neoliberal era. The implementation of the post-war consensus in different European countries initiated a social change that substantially improved the living conditions of the most disadvantaged social strata. This regulated transformation process changed European societies from predominantly agrarian to industrial societies with a highly developed tertiary sector; it realised a great leap forward in education and, last but not least, provided the economy with framework conditions that enabled three decades of growth. The consequences that this development had on people’s everyday lives are shown exemplarily by Fourastié’s reconstruction of the French case in the book whose title became a catchphrase—the ‘glorious thirty’ (1979). Sociological reflection quickly raised awareness about the extent of the institutional and cultural, besides the economic transformation that was taking place in the wake of the welfare-state compromise, as Thomas H. Marshall put forward in his 1949 ‘Alfred Marshall Cambridge Lectures’ (1996). They underline how in the UK by the end of the nineteenth century a tradition of economic thought had already developed, which started

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from liberal positions, and became receptive to socialist claims—particularly thanks to Alfred Marshall. The sociological assessment of this heritage starts from a consideration on human dignity—that is from the assumption that each human being has the potential and thus the right to fully develop all his capabilities, independently of his material living condition. In the face of this finding, the distinguishing features of modern capitalism were the uncertainty of life conditions and the burden of heavy and excessive labour that prevented working classes from achieving the goal of self-realisation, so that the framework conditions of their lives had to be changed. Expressed in a different scientific language, here we find again Durkheim’s idea that self-development is the necessary precondition for the realisation of the societal emancipation potential concealed in the organic division of labour (Durkheim 1893: chap. III/2.1). A common point of reflection is the issue of how the existence of the market economy can be integrated with the self-realisation of every human being. The direction of reflection thus moves away from the pure quantitative assessment of the standards of living in terms of goods consumed and services enjoyed towards a qualitative assessment of life in terms of essential elements in civilisation and culture. Marshall raises the question of the parameters granting effective membership in human society, which implies not only the juridical formulation but also a substantial access to specific rights. On this path of reasoning, citizenship sociology encounters its crucial social-structural normative issue. Legal concepts of full membership in a community—that is of citizenship—struggle to become consistent with the inequalities, which conform to the economic stratification of society. The inequality of the social class system can only aspire to social legitimation, if it is based on a redistributive system of rights that grants social justice (Walzer 1983). Otherwise, formal announcements of human and citizenship rights remain hollow, and the whole normative framework of society is deprived of any legitimacy (Moran 1988). In short, citizenship must become substantial and cannot remain purely formal. The reflexive impact of the political struggle for the welfare-state compromise comes thus to expression in the assumptions of Marshall’s citizenship sociology (1996). The debate comes back to Marx’s assessment of the conflict between formal citizenship status and socio-economic belonging to a particular social class (1844). What is relevant in this perspective is that Marshall addresses the issue by making reference to the degree of differentiation

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and institutionalisation that characterises citizenship rights in different historical societies. Hence, the discussion in principle is enriched with means of empirical evaluation that allow us to understand to what degree effective membership is granted in a society. Historically, the basic membership status in a community has been enriched with new substance, by adding to it a formidable array of three sorts of citizenship rights: civil, political and social rights. Yet, this societal transformation could not be achieved without intervening with strong regulatory measures into the uncontrolled freedom of competitive markets. The logics of social democratic market regulation thus represent the means to realise citizenship in a comprehensive sense. Yet for Marshall, this process of societal structuration is based on a conflict of principles which demands examination. Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All those who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed. There is no universal principle that determines in detail what those rights and duties shall be. Yet, societies in which citizenship becomes an institution orient themselves to an ideal of citizenship against which achievements can be measured and towards which aspirations can be directed. Social class, on the other hand, is a system of inequality. And it too, like citizenship, is based on a set of ideals, beliefs and values, which instead foster exclusion. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the impact of citizenship on social class structuration takes the form of a conflict between opposing principles. The crucial question of citizenship sociology—that is, of the welfare-state compromise—is thus how the opposing principles of membership in a community and belonging to a socio-economic class can grow and flourish side by side in the same soil. For Marshall in 1949, a scenario was about to become reality, in which basic constitutional equality, embodied in formal rights of citizenship and enriched in substance, could be consistent with inequalities of social class. This societal arrangement could eventually legitimate social inequality, because it was able to correct its consequences. With the post-war consensus this achievement seemed to become possible. As Marshall remarks in 1949, in previous decades, the institutional implementation of civil, political and social rights went different ways and had different speeds: ‘it is only in the present century, in fact I might say only within the last few months, that the three (…) have come abreast of one another’ (Marshall 1996: 9). The normative conception of a welfare-state compromise for complex societies, which was implemented through the pressure exerted by trade

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unions and political parties after WWII and constituted the historical basis for the theoretical reflection on citizenship sociology, has not survived the attacks of the neoliberal revolution. What Marshall called ‘social class’ has been widely fragmented and results today in a composite phenomenology of conflicts, whose understanding is much more difficult. Discriminated social groups composed of women, precarious workers, migrants and outcasts, who are not or only partially taken care of by social protection systems, constitute the members of society, whose membership is not recognised in a substantial and sometimes also in a formal way. These groups are characterised by socio-cultural features of a complexity that cannot be reduced to the person’s economic position in society, in the sense of Weber’s Klassenlage (MWG I/23 592–595). Accordingly, societal self-interpretation classifies the related conflicts as gender discrimination, lifestyle intolerance, cultural and ethno-religious tensions. Yet, thereby the common traits of these social phenomena remain underplayed, so that the overall social change induced by crumbling late capitalism is not sufficiently investigated. Here sociological research can contribute to regain a comprehensive understanding of the ongoing societal restructuration by showing which common traits of exploitation, exclusion and negated access to citizenship rights characterise the different groups. This reflexive work beyond the classifications produced by societal self-­ interpretation may deliver a knowledge basis for an up-to-date reformulation of the welfare-state compromise. On this basis, a renewed process of normative societal structuration could take place. Yet, if the awareness of this necessity seems to be reviving after the global pandemic of 2020/2021, the existing societal conditions are as distant as ever from this possibility. For historical reasons related to growing inflation and the so-called first ‘oil shock’ of 1973, the welfare-state compromise was called into question since the mid-1970s (Offe 1984). The crisis of the Bretton Woods agreement to stabilise the monetary relations among the principal industrial states induced renewed international economic competition (Johnson 1972). To overcome their shortcomings the social security systems could have been adapted to the emerging challenges of globalisation. Yet, their restructuration followed in an atmosphere of strong political controversy that, after prolonged theoretical preparation in neoliberal think-thanks, found its most relevant advocates in US-American Republicans and English Conservatives (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). As if a sudden explosion emerged of the long-simmering hatred of the reform processes introduced by the Roosevelt and Attlee governments, by aiming to undo

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everything that the New Deal and the post-war consensus had achieved, the social foundations of the welfare-state compromise were substantially eroded. The historical turning point that, nota bene, developed first on a super-structural ideological level, caused a conspicuous regression in access to citizenship rights even where these were not denied in formal terms. The limits to improving social equality, which the welfare-state systems already showed before their crisis, were magnified by the policies adopted in the wake of the neoliberal revolution. Piketty summarises the transformation in the following points (2020: chap. 11). A progressive withdrawal of public institutions from the ownership in industries of strategic interest, the dismantling of progressive taxation and a weakening of co-­ determination schemes between stakeholders and workers’ representatives resulted in a renewed growth of income inequality in Europe, the US, China and India. Added to this development were the massive deregulation policies that prepared the frame conditions for the financial and economic crises of the years ahead (Tymoigne 2009). The world economy was brought into a state that is comparable with that of the 1920s, so that a reflection on the coming depression started (Walby 2015). After the failure of neoliberal economics in 2007/2008, and once more after the global pandemic of 2020/2021, a fertile ground for the resumption of the welfare-state compromise thus seemed to be given. However, its implementation is faltering, apart from exceptional measures to address economic and health crises. This is due to the fact that the modalities of interchange between public sector and private economic enterprises established during forty years of neoliberal policies cannot be changed without consistent investments in resources and human capital to strengthen the state agencies that would be in charge of implementing a new welfare-state compromise (Crouch 2013). Yet, the deeper reason for the missing societal transformation is related to the societal incapacity of normative structuration. This depends primarily on the fact that societal structuration processes have acquired an increasing intermittent character and that the advanced fragmentation of complex societies prevents the rise of social agencies capable of becoming the bearer of societal transformation. Accordingly, a diagnosis of the missing normative structuration in complex societies is needed concerning both the institutional aspect of failing social structuration and the fragmentation of social action subjects.

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Peña-Ruiz, Henri (2018). Karl Marx, penseur de l’écologie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Piketty, Thomas (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (2020). Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Ptak, Ralf (2004). Vom Ordoliberalismus zur sozialen Marktwirtschaft: Stationen des Neoliberalismus in Deutschland. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2020). The Society of Singularities. Cambridge and Medford, MA: Polity. Reeves, Rachel, and McIvor, Martin (2014). ‘Clement Attlee and the Foundations of the British Welfare-State’. Renewal, 22(3–4), 42–59. Saad-Filho, Alfredo (2021). The Age of Crisis: Neoliberalism, the Collapse of Democracy, and the Pandemic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Schröder, Hans-Jürgen (1990). Marshallplan und westdeutscher Wiederaufstieg Positionen – Kontroversen. Stuttgart: Steiner. Simmel, Georg (1890). Über sociale Differenzierung. Now in: Id., GSG 2, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Dahme, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, S. 109–295. (No complete English Translation until today). Soborski, Rafal (2013). Ideology in a Global Age: Continuity and Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Streeck, Wolfgang (2016a). How will Capitalism end? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso. ——— (2016b). The Post-capitalist Interregnum: The Old System Is Dying, But a New Social Order Cannot Yet be Born. Juncture, 23(2), 68–77. ——— (2017). Buying Time. The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso. Taylor, Keith (2016). Henri Saint-Simon: Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Thomas, Sven (1995). Gustav Schmoller und die deutsche Sozialpolitik. Düsseldorf: Hans Böckler Stiftung. Tomlinson, Jim (2004). Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy: The Attlee Years, 1945–1951. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Rachel S. (2008). Neo-liberal Ideology: History, Concepts and Policies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Turner, Bryan S. (2016). We Are All Denizens Now: On the Erosion of Citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 20, 679–692. Tymoigne, Éric (2009). Deregulation, the Financial Crisis, and Policy Implications. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Jerome Levy Economics Institute. Vargas Llosa, Mario (2019). La llamada de la tribu. Barcelona: Debolsillo. Walby, Sylvia (2015). Crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Wallerstein, Immanuel, Collins, Randall, and Mann, Michel (2013). Does Capitalism Have a Future? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walter, Franz (2010). Gelb oder Grün? Kleine Parteiengeschichte der besserverdienenden Mitte in Deutschland. Bielefeld: Transcript. Walzer, Michael (1983). Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books. Weber, Max (1904/1905). Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Now in Id. (2016) Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/18. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp.  123–545. English: Id. (1992). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, T. Parsons (trans.), A. Giddens (intro), London: Routledge. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (2013). Die neue Umverteilung: Soziale Ungleichheit in Deutschland. München: Beck.

CHAPTER 3

The Malaise of Normative Societal Structuration

On a superficial level, the manifold crisis of contemporary societies is evidenced in an ongoing erosion of normative orders, as Bauman repeatedly underlined (2000). However, a deeper societal analysis shows a more complex phenomenology. Normative orders do not retreat in the wake of complete socio-structural anarchy. Rather, provisional societal arrangements seem to follow each other at an increasing pace to satisfy the socio-­ economic imperatives that at some point succeed in imposing themselves in the uncontrolled dynamics of globalisation. The competition between the legitimation of the rule of law and cogency of empirical frameworks of action, which the chances of material survival depend on, leads to a dramatic loss of prestige for established social normativity. The success of populism is in a sense the political expression of this legitimation crisis (Fitzi 2022a). These manifold developments thus raise the question of how to understand what social normativity means in the context of contemporary societies.

3.1   Normativity Beyond Defensive Modernity Normativity is perhaps the most classic theme of modern social theory. The impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars on the European continent led to a fundamental modification of its legal and regulatory structures. The ‘revolutionary law’ and its codification in the French Civil Code, the so-called Code Napoléon, remained in force—and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_3

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not only in France—after Restoration resumed political control of the situation from 1815 (MWG I/22-3: 416, 592, 631). This was a sign of the profound social transformation that had taken place. European societies functioned on a new basis; they were influenced by the rapid expansion of the monetary economy and the industrial revolution, so that they entirely changed their legal and regulatory framework. In the face of ongoing change, various attempts started to guide the transformation from above, by framing the anarchic development of the capitalist economy into projects of controlled social restructuration. This is what historians call ‘defensive modernity’ (Wehler 2008: 347–547). Attempts also flourished to rethink the normative framework of complex societies in theoretical terms. The question was to understand to what extent, by accepting its normative neutralisation, the disentanglement of economic activity from the control of society as a whole could be taken for granted. The theoretical proposal that certainly most profoundly influenced the subsequent history of social science in this sense is Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821; Schluchter 2015: 19–47). According to Hegel, the issue of modernity first and foremost requires bringing the deflagrating force of ‘civil society’ under control, where the mechanic of the ‘system of needs’ predominates, as political economy described it. The material interests that guide economic action are selfish by definition. The political and social change induced by the French Revolution triggered the uncontrolled pursuit of self-interest so that there were no means to restore the precedent institutional order. However, according to Hegel, the system of needs is not devoid of all normative potential. Cooperation and reciprocal relations bear valuable fruit to ensure the satisfaction of needs in the long term. Thus, the modern economy qualifies as a system of all-round dependencies with the potential for normative structuration. Yet, this happens only under specific conditions. If the ‘system of needs’ were left to itself, it would become incapable of control and eventually self-destruct under the impact of the accumulation laws of unbridled capitalism. In this frame, membership in civil society is strongly conditioned by the involvement in the process of capitalist production. Freedom and recognition depend on labour, so that the uncontrolled development pace of civil society leads to the exclusion of those who do not bow to capitalist production imperatives. To curb the self-destructive tendencies of the ‘system of needs’, on the one hand, in Hegel’s terms, the self-organisation of civil society is required in a corporate sense. Yet, in contrast to Durkheim’s idea of the normative

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self-regulation potential of modern organic solidarity, according to Hegel, this is not enough. The system of all-round dependence in civil society requires external control by the state in order to function, so that the renewed normative order of society must be enforced by state intervention in the sense of defensive modernity. The belief that civil society would eventually bow to this compulsion to escape its division is part of Hegel’s axiomatic assumptions. Yet, constitutive parts of modern historical experience showed that an overarching normative control of civil society is not effective to contain the forces of economic upheaval and furthermore mortifies the transformative potential of social action. Margins of normative plasticity are necessary to grant social and economic creativity. The question is, nevertheless, how this can take place without generating the social and environmental damages that can constantly be observed during the history of the modern economic development model. The assumption that a persistent normative integration of society is possible corresponds to a pre-modern conception of the social world. Modern societies are normatively complex due to the structural matters of qualitative social differentiation. They can only be understood in their constant dynamics of material and normative restructuration. The inquiry into the mechanisms that establish normativity in complex societies must thus go beyond the theoretical paradigm of defensive modernity. Through increasing societal differentiation, normativity becomes not only more pluralistic, because single domains of society follow different logics. Rather, it also acquires an intermittent character so that its validity is limited in spatiotemporal terms, above all in times of crumbling late capitalism. Furthermore, normative intermittency evidences a conflict between the formal definition of societal codes (de jure) and their substantial implementation (de facto). Moving away from the epistemological viewpoint of defensive modernity thus presupposes developing a valuable research perspective to approach the analysis of ‘failing normative structuration’ in complex societies. Durkheim’s research programme for ‘moral sociology’ grants a plausible entry strategy into this terrain of inquiry (Durkheim 2019), provided that one considers it as it was formulated and not in the way Parsons interpreted and canonised it (Fitzi 2022b). Following Parsons, to explain normative integration not only of undifferentiated but also of complex societies it is crucial to distinguish between ‘values’ and ‘differentiated norms’ (Parsons 1960). The latter must be regarded as a network of statutory role descriptions that formulate expectations of action for their possible bearers and constitute the main body of

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normative action orientation in modern societies. If individuals internalise the idea of their commitment to normative orders, they will meet the expectations of differentiated norm systems. However, to accept this axiomatic assumption means that the issue of the legitimacy, which empirically grants common patterns of social action, is faded out from sociological analysis. What is laid down in the ‘social code’ is seen as a normative pattern that would be automatically implemented through action orientation. Thus, Parsons formulates the crucial hypothesis of every theory of validity in the perspective of system theory. Furthermore, in highly differentiated societies individuals would be tempted to conform to norms as institutionalised expectations of action, because they internalised this attitude through socialisation. Thanks to this theoretical move, the sociological issue of ‘social integration’ loses its relevance and is substituted by ‘system integration’ (Lockwood 1964). If norms are established, it means that social actors find them ‘desirable’, so that they will conform to them by force of internalised attitudes (Parsons 1949: 710). As a consequence, sociological theory becomes one-dimensional. On the one hand, social action theory is no longer relevant, because social actors are expected to conform almost automatically to the codes of society. On the other hand, no social legitimation theory must be developed at all. The axiomatic of social emergence, allegedly establishing enduring normative social systems, eventually introduces a domain of theoretical reflection, where the description of social codes—and perhaps at most of minor trends to deviant behaviour—suffices to develop sociological doctrines. It is easy to observe empirically how unlikely the behaviour-­automatisms become in complex societies that are presupposed by the axiomatic of system theory (Campo 2020). These are not only culturally increasingly pluralistic. Furthermore, they have a composite normative structure, because of the ongoing qualitative differentiation of societal domains that are based on competing structuration logics. Yet, for Parsons, complex societies reproduce themselves in a process that easily institutionalises normative patterns of behaviour, by crystallising them into ‘accepted’ social roles (Parsons 1951: 201–248). Hence, modern, progressive social differentiation would not rule out common normative orientations of social action, since these would be ‘structurally implemented’ in social norms and role descriptions. In Parsons’ perspective these constitute the ‘functional ersatz’ of the collective consciousness that characterises mechanic solidarity in ancient societies, so that in modern conditions normative societal integration would be granted by the systemic crystallisation of

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social structure. Yet, this conclusion advocates a functionalist reductionism of the issue of social legitimation; it is based on unverified axiomatic assumptions about the increasingly complex relationship between the orientation of social action and normative societal structuration. It excludes from every theoretical consideration the conflict-prone legitimation dynamics that implements social structure through social action in the everyday social praxis of highly differentiated societies. Every inquiry in the sense of ‘moral sociology’, as Durkheim formulated it in his research programme, deviates from this perspective. It operates on a threefold level of analysis which brings its heuristic perspective closer to other classical sociologists like Simmel and Weber. The inquiry focuses on how social action can adapt to the expectations of social structure in complex societies and under which conditions it is destined to fail. This line of investigation is related to the cognitive interest that Durkheim, as well as other classical sociologists, devote to the ‘social issue’. In this way, Durkheim accounts for crucial aspects of Marx’s critique of political economy that are related to the issue of alienation (Marx 1887: 323 ff.); moreover, he transforms them into sociological instruments of analysis. The normative dysfunctions of modern social differentiation are conceived as a latent conflict between the logic of social action and social structuration that not only affects industrial production but also permeates modern society in its complexity. To borrow the terms of Max Weber’s sociology of religion, it is the question of ‘life-conduct’, and the difficulty it has to freely unfold under the impact of modern capitalism, which becomes a crucial topic of sociological analysis (MWG I/18: 258–260). Instead, in system theory there tends to be an attitude of substantial removal of this problematic from sociological theorisation. As a research programme, moral sociology aims to reconstruct the normative orientations that are not explicitly expressed but constitute the presuppositions for social action in the different domains of complex societies. Yet, beyond that, it also examines the pathological developments emerging due to the fact that, in particular circumstances, modern societal structuration impedes the deployment of normative orientations, which may reconnect the logics of social action and social structure. This normative complexity cannot be reduced to an alleged socialised conformity to social codes and role descriptions that are inscribed in social structure. The attitude towards normative codes results from a continuous and complex dynamics of readjustment between ‘role making’ and ‘role taking’, so that in social praxis roles are not simply assumed by means of interiorised

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normative adaptation, but negotiated in communication processes. There is a statics and dynamics of role models and their acceptance goes hand in hand with the possibility of their subjective design. Actors create their own identity outline (role-making) and do not limit themselves to taking on role models (role-taking). In rapidly changing complex societies, there is thus an incessant shaping effort, instead of a simple execution of role models inscribed in the code of social structure. Interaction partners must adjust their behaviour to the increased social plasticity and adapt their expectations, so that role models constantly change, because they are the subject of reiterated social negotiation processes. It is a merit of Habermas to have broken with the functionalistic conception of socialisation, by showing that role-taking processes, during socialisation and the more in adult age, are always dependent on subjective role-making (Habermas 1968; Veith 2002). This turn in sociological focus renewed interest in non-functionalist role theories and reopened the debate on Durkheim’s theory of organic solidarity. Yet, normative societal integration not only becomes relevant in the context of an analysis of social action. In complex societies, the construction of normatively rooted solidarity bonds is only possible if excessive imbalances can be avoided between different social groups. The growing social division of labour, especially under the conditions of modern capitalist accumulation, generates centrifugal tendencies that society has increasing difficulties to manage. The crucial question for moral sociology thus becomes how complex societies can overcome this shortcoming. The answer to the question cannot amount to seeking functional substitutes for collective consciousness in modern societal arrangements, as system theory does. Instead, moral sociology must understand why the integration potential of modern organic solidarity cannot be realised under conditions of strong and progressive social division of labour. Its challenge becomes to show how to get out of the social conflicts of complex societies. This starts from the conflict between capital and wage labour, on the one hand, by granting the modern division of labour a degree of spontaneity to allow a sufficient development of its solidarity potential. Yet, on the other hand, moral sociology must be able to show how it is possible to avoid the predicaments of advanced societal differentiation. Above all, these involve failing normative structuration (anomy) and the enslavement of social action under the imperatives of capital accumulation. A century after Durkheim formulated the programme for moral sociology, the pertinent question is about how it unfolds at a time of increasing

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normative intermittency. In seeking to avoid the traumatic experiences of the Great Depression in the 1930s, WWII and genocide in Europe, welfare measures were introduced from the mid-twentieth century in different countries to mitigate the consequences of recurring economic crises (Fourastié 1979). Thanks to the pressure that trade unions could exert, industrial relations became the subject of increasing consultation, both at company level and in whole productive sectors, so that collective contracts guaranteed less competition between labour force suppliers. Finally, the construction of welfare-state systems mitigated the worst consequences of modern economic dynamics, assuring that healthcare, unemployment benefits, pensions and housing would be accessible to all. Thanks to such measures, some significant aspects of Durkheim’s normative project have been realised, although without achieving the full relief of the social transformation potential of organic solidarity. The emergencies of the current socio-economic development after forty years of neoliberal societal restructuration illustrate the actuality of Durkheim’s research programme for moral sociology. Yet for this programme to be resumed, in particular, we must assess one aspect of the precarious regulatory structure of complex societies. Here, there is a substantial disconnect between the formal codification of citizenship rights, particularly social rights, and the empirical conditions of their fruition. Access to rights is increasingly precarious and intermittent, because of the ongoing fragmentation and accelerated restructuration of living conditions. Furthermore, it is conditioned to particular behaviours, as in the case of unemployment benefits, or else it is facilitated in phases of emergency, only to be relaxed again shortly afterwards, as the pandemic showed. An increasing number of social actors, who in formal terms have the means to develop all the potential of spontaneous social creativity that organic solidarity offers them, is in fact the subject of a forced division of labour. As was the case in the nineteenth century, it becomes necessary to reconstruct bottom-up movements for the enforcement of citizenship rights, especially social rights so that they can be implemented comprehensively and do not remain simple formal declarations of intent. In this respect, however, the shortcomings of normative structuration processes in complex societies reveal their most worrying consequences. The conditions of social fragmentation, in which social actors live, are so extensive that the constitution of proactive collective subjects of social action becomes increasingly difficult. Without active bottom-up support, existing or possible normative regulations enforcing citizenship rights

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remain a dead letter. To the priorities of moral sociology today, it thus belongs inquiring into the difficulty, the instability and intermittency that dominate the processes of normative structuration in the most different domains of society. On the basis of these investigations, social research can contribute to understanding the kind of processes of social transformation which can be implemented to reconstruct bonds of organic solidarity that have the capacity to unfold its integration potential. As Durkheim remarks, even if legislation can sustain societal transformation, its development cannot be forced by the legislative intervention of the state. Rather, it is the result of the pluralist normative structuration of complex societies and follows their qualitative differentiated normative logic. The actuality of moral sociology thus consists in the cognitive contribution it can make to understand these transformation processes, while always being aware that they can only be the work of the social dynamics itself. The theoretical acknowledgement of the structural plurality and normative complexity of modern societies that is linked to the research programme of moral sociology does not necessarily foster the idea that an uncontrolled compulsion to conflict must prevail in highly differentiated societies. Sociological theory shows that social integration through conflict is possible (GSG 11: 284–382; Coser 1956). The related societal change, however, requires consistent processes of normative structuration that transform the terms of conflict into a dynamic regulative framework capable of further adjustment. Its final goal is to allow the conflicts to be carried out, without destroying the relations of solidarity established not only through the organisations of the conflict parties but also between them, in terms of maintaining valuable patterns of a social action ‘against each other’. The task of social research is to reconstruct the mechanisms of societal structuration that enable social integration by means of conflict. This implies that no axiomatic assumptions can be made about the ‘forms of consensus’ that govern social integration, because these are the product of an ongoing societal conflict dynamics and can only be inquired into empirically. Yet, the evidence is that a procedural and pragmatic consensus takes the place of a substantial one grounded on common value orientations. It avoids fixation on particular contents, has an intermittent character and tends to establish formal sets of legal rules governing interaction between social groups with incompatible normative approaches. This development severely limits the possibility to establish any form of ‘overlapping consensus’ on normative contents as a basis for the acknowledgement of common social and political institutions (Rawls 1987).

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Rather, in order to avoid open conflicts, the predominant forms of consensus limit the search for common normative orientations based on agreements on values and establish pragmatic mutual understandings about normative neutral frameworks of behaviour. Hence, social reality overcomes the results of the debate in political philosophy between communitarian and liberal positions. The normative conflict line does not run between the traditional expressions of civil religion, including patriotism and predominant religious orientations, on the one hand (MacIntyre 1981; Sandel 1982), and the agreement on minimal overlapping normative orientations deriving from a common life within democratic political institutions, on the other (Rawls 1993). Contemporary societies are hit by a much deeper normative predicament. Because of the accelerated rhythm of both societal fragmentation and capitalist restructuration, social actors must steadily readapt to frames of common action that are independent from their will and normative orientation. They accept them by matters of passive consensus, but know that their validity is spatiotemporally limited, so that the precarity of normative action frames paradoxically becomes the means of their legitimation. Thus, not only the question of ethical pluralism, and of how democratic political systems can handle it, builds the core business of moral sociology. Furthermore, it must understand whether the integration of highly differentiated societies is still the function of common normative orientations among its members. In order to inquire into the normative transformation of contemporary societies, it is necessary to develop a new sociological theory of social validity, as well as of its subspecies of juridical legality and political legitimacy. Provided that the approach of sociological theory is reformulated and focuses on today’s social reality, the analytical tools permitting this achievement can be developed. In the section of the book dedicated to the sociological diagnosis of the current malaise of complex societies, we will see what kind of sociological theory building becomes necessary. Yet, in the context of the present symptomatic appraisal, the following remark shall suffice. In contemporary societies, normativity does not crystallise into shared frames of collective action. Instead, in an accelerating rhythm an ongoing heteroclite normative structuration is followed by phases of rapid destructuration of common action frames. In this context, a simple appeal to rediscover social morality cannot overcome the failing normative structuration and risks becoming an ideological justification for the status quo. Therefore, social research shall enhance the approach of moral sociology beyond its historical formulation and inquire into the social processes

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that substitute moral integration in complex societies, by mediating the relationships between the logics of social action and social structure. This means, among other things, to develop an analysis of the performance that the creativity of social action delivers in terms of cultural identity that replaces the failing normative integration of society and to explain under which conditions it becomes critical. In this frame, an inquiry into the current crisis of the secular societal arrangements, which establish the separation of qualitative differentiated normative domains like politics and religion, allows us to highlight some crucial aspects of the current crisis of normative societal structuration.

3.2  Secularism and Its Adversities Seen from a normative viewpoint, contemporary societies become culturally increasingly complex. Secularisation, multiculturalism and qualitative differentiation shape social relationships, yet also face strong opposing trends. Questions that come to the fore concern cultural pluralism, normative social integration as well as the pre-legal conditions for the rule of law and its secular legitimation. At the heart of the matter is whether the political institutions of complex societies are prepared for the risks and threats that an uncontrolled development of the world economy and society entails. The debate escalates into a normative dilemma. Can republican values, or maybe a ‘civil religion’, integrate society; or perhaps only a ‘post-secular state’ can reach this goal, because it is based on substantial, possibly religious values? Despite all the differences, the positions under dispute share certain premises in terms of social theory. These become evident if one scrutinises the way in which society and its normative foundations are conceived. In critical reference to these assumptions, it must be clearly specified how a traditional, normative understanding of societal foundations differs from the analytical frame that is necessary to grasp the ongoing intermittent normative social structuration. An ideal-typical example for the assessment of the ‘pre-legal conditions’ that shape modern secular state-building is given by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde’s early study on ‘The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularisation’ (Böckenförde 1967). Böckenförde’s analysis starts from the thesis that the establishment and consolidation of modern, secular states arose out of the necessity to overcome the religious civil wars brought about by the confessional divisions of the modern age. The idea of the ‘modern occidental state’ was born during these conflicts (cf. MWG

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I/17, 158 f.). It was then formulated theoretically by Thomas Hobbes and brought to completion by the French Revolution. This enabled a new arrangement of society to take shape, which since the end of the eighteenth century has been based on the Declaration of Human Rights as its legitimating normative set of universalist principles. Within this framework, the state is entitled to play the role of a political organisation of power to safeguard the natural and pre-state rights and freedoms of individuals. The ‘modern occidental state’ derives its legitimation neither from historical origins nor from divine endowment nor from a ‘service to the truth’, which it has to perform, yet solely and exclusively from the self-­ determined and free individual personality of the citizens. The fundamental human rights include not only freedom of belief and religion but also the right not to profess any religion. This transformation of the normative arrangement of society depoliticises religion and relegates it to the sphere of civil society. Accordingly, the state’s claim to legitimacy can no longer be based on religion. The ‘modern occidental, secular state’ thus harbours a fundamental problem of legitimacy which Böckenförde formulates in three ways. Firstly, since the binding force of religion can no longer be essential for the political community, it is important to understand the aspects in which the state finds the ‘cohesion-securing power’ it needs. Secondly, it is important to explore whether the state can be built on a ‘natural morality’ with a purely inner-worldly reference. Finally, clarification must be achieved about the extent to which state-united peoples can subsist solely on the basis of the guarantee of individual freedom, without a unifying bond that precedes this freedom. The Declaration of Human Rights leads to the individual falling back on himself and on his freedom. This completes the secularisation process and reformulates the problem of the normative integration of society, because the possibility of achieving it is situated on a higher level of complexity than that of conventional social integration by the normative forces of one predominant religion. Thus, the nationalism of the nineteenth century and the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century were doomed to failure since they offered nothing more than a functional ersatz for religion. The individualism of human rights emancipated itself from those functions of ‘social closure’ as well as from the democratic ones, which attempt to ground normative homogeneity on the basis of ‘shared value convictions’, in the communitarian sense (Honneth 1993, 2016). This criticism also applies to the current populist attempts to bridge the complexity of society by inventing new ethnical or racially

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based state-founding mythologies. The ‘fact of pluralism’ is one of the fundamental achievements of modern political structuration that expresses itself through the progressive increase of normative complexity in contemporary societies (Arendt 1958; Rawls 1993). Yet at the same time, normative cohesion factors that guarantee minimum levels of social solidarity seem to be increasingly lacking. Böckenförde’s famous dictum emerges from the analysis of these circumstances: ‘The liberal, secularised state lives on conditions which it cannot guarantee itself’ (Böckenförde 1967: 71). The secular state can only exist if a substantial freedom of citizens and the fact of pluralism go hand in hand with the ability of society to create sufficient solidarity relations to ensure its cohesion. After WWII, the construction of the welfare-state was considered the ideal way to promote social integration in complex societies and avoid the risks of authoritarian drift that had characterised the 1930s. Yet, if the welfare-state is weakened and economic crises hit societies with increasing frequency the social potential of solidarity based on the welfare-state reaches a dangerous bottleneck. This has been shown beyond every doubt by the consequences of the financial and economic crises at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The probable economic and social consequences of the pandemic, which developed since 2019, give rise to well-founded concerns about a resurgence of consistent social fractures in the absence of a renewed increase in normative social structuration. Hence, the recurrent quarrels on guiding cultures, sovereignism and the political binding force of religious faith must also be evaluated as symptoms of the societal transformation engendered by the shortcomings of the social protection systems (Greve 2021). The current debate on the future of the secular constitutional state reconnects with Böckenförde’s diagnosis. In this perspective the exchange between Habermas and Ratzinger on the ‘dialectic of secularisation’ shows the terms of the discussion in an exemplary way (Habermas and Ratzinger 2005). Habermas asks whether pre-political foundations of democratic constitutional states are necessary and defends the reasons of the secular position against the supposed constraints of a ‘post-secular age’ (Habermas 2005). The assumption that the constitutional states depend on autochthonous, ethnical or religious, yet in any case collectively binding ethical traditions, would put the rule of law, which is committed to ideological neutrality, in a critical situation. The question is, however, whether an ideologically pluralistic community can be stabilised at all beyond a mere modus vivendi. In brackets, it should be noted that with few exceptions the

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notion of modus vivendi has negative connotations in normative political theory (Larmore 1987). Nevertheless, its historical meaning cannot be underestimated, since measures to overcome open political-religious conflicts became the cornerstone for modern political systems and played a decisive role in the development of modern Europe. Political sociology must thus explore which socio-political arrangements are concealed behind the modus vivendi that permeates significant areas of contemporary societies which are becoming socially and normatively increasingly complex. With respect to social integration, Habermas assumes that pluralist political orders depend on citizens’ solidarity, whose sources dry up, as a result of the increasingly uncontrolled development of economy and society. This diagnosis, however, should not lead to abandoning the idea of the secular, that is, pluralistic legitimation of the rule of law. A non-­ religious and post-metaphysical foundation of democratic constitutional states is possible, but presupposes a critical and proactive attitude on the part of the citizens. Participation in democratic processes transforms political orders into procedures that legitimate the rule of law, so that no ‘moral correction’ of political legitimation is necessary, if one understands ‘political praxis’ as a method for generating legitimacy. Yet, the ‘activation’ of democratic citizens requires high standards of political participation that cannot be forced, because they depend on the citizens’ initiative and thus on the good health of democratic legitimation procedures. There is thus a vicious circle here that became highly problematic in recent decades. Between the strength of political legitimacy and high levels of social solidarity, there is a relationship of reciprocal dependence that constitutes one of the main challenges for the integration of complex societies. In the neoliberal era the social component of political legitimacy has been strongly mortified, so that today it represents one of the major issues to be addressed. The main concern of ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Sternberger 1990) is to promote the political activation of citizens that leads from the abstract perception of democratic statehood to its implementation in the everyday practices of a society based on democratic solidarity. The persistence of democracy presupposes ‘political virtues’ which civil society must produce on its own. Yet, if for structural reasons, society is not capable of creating a network of politically articulated solidarity relations that reduces social inequality, modern democracy is plunged into a crisis that paves the way for boundless exploitation, social fragmentation, populism and

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authoritarianism. In this context, religion can once again be instrumentalised as a means to legitimate political rule, as happened in Europe during the early modern period of history. Out of the consciousness of these risks arises the political project for the resumption of pluralistic and solidarity-­ based normative structuration in complex societies. Social practices that nourish the citizens’ awareness of norms and relations of reciprocal solidarity, including a non-fundamentalist understanding of religion, support democratic processes in generating political legitimacy. They can be stabilised by the secular state without mobilising pre-political legitimation resources. Yet, they cannot replace the declining strength of solidarity bonds among citizens. It becomes a crucial question for the diagnosis of our age to understand how strongly the current socio-economic change and the related normative intermittency influence the proactive political attitude of citizens. In 2007, Böckenförde responded to the debate on the dialectic of secularisation, which found its impetus in his early writing, with a study on the secularised state. It takes as its starting point the ethical-political contradiction of contemporary societies. The increasing individualisation and pluralisation of society leads to a decrease in the social impact of religion and morality. Accordingly, it is necessary to determine from where pluralist secularised states can derive the degree of pre-legal ethical common ground that is indispensable for a prosperous coexistence in a democratic order. Furthermore, it is important to ask how the state can continue to guarantee open religious neutrality when it is increasingly dependent on a normative binding basis in the face of growing religious-ideological pluralism and migration. Böckenförde’s diagnosis is inspired by Hegel’s conception of the dialectic between state and civil society (1821). The monopoly of legitimated use of force is not sufficient to ensure the continued existence of the state so that far-reaching measures in the form of public ethics seem necessary to guarantee its legitimacy. Yet, the idea of ‘civil religion’ does not offer a solution to the problems of contemporary secular states, as it requires citizens to make a commitment which they cannot make without giving up the right to freedom of belief. Thus, cultural factors, including religions, are particularly important in strengthening unifying bonds among citizens, provided that they accept the pluralistic basic principle of the secularised state. The success of a pluralistic political system would thus be better served if different religions could coexist as social integration agencies.

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In this respect, the question arises as to how far culture as a whole may serve as a supporting ethos and mediating bond for the integration of complex societies and the call for ‘guiding cultures’ becomes loud. Yet, the cultural roots of the public good must not be allowed to restrict the human right to religious and ideological freedom. Any existing ‘majority culture’ needs to ensure openness to the practices of other religious denominations and minority cultures. In view of this, members of minority religions live in a state of diaspora, which raises the question of whether and to what extent they can be integrated into the secular state. According to Böckenförde, this can only happen if the open secular order is based exclusively on the cross-cultural loyalty of citizens to the law. For all communities share in common their life under a rational legal order, which guarantees them freedom, under conditions of partial cultural heterogeneity. Thus, the ethos of ‘loyalty to the law’ takes the place of far-reaching acts of faith as the basis for coexistence and makes the state a common ground which enables a legal synthesis of social plurality. According to Böckenförde, this concept can also be applied to the groups that reject the separation of state and religion by demanding from them external loyalty to the law and accepting the ‘internal reservations’ they may have about the political order. The secular state, however, cannot give any religious belief the chance to dismantle its open pluralistic order. Sufficient pre-legal sources of integration—including the ones that are religiously motivated— can be mobilised by complying with the law, which in culturally and religiously pluralistic societies actively contributes to secure a common binding ground for civic coexistence. The normative structuration of contemporary societies does not ensure a sufficient diffusion of social solidarity bonds. With respect to this, the different positions in the debate on secularism and post-secularism recommend as a corrective the reactivation of ethical-religious practices, political participation or citizens’ consciousness for cross-cultural republican legality. Yet, by assessing their common ground, one notes that the loss of effectiveness characterising pre-legal normative integration factors is unanimously considered as the main danger for the maintenance of modern civic coexistence. A future world society without a common pre-legal basis of integration is expected to suffer from massive restrictions of human and civil rights as well as from threats of war similar to those that characterised the early modern period. The normative agenda of pluralistic, free societies therefore rightly includes the task of seeking ways to transfer the achievements of democratic civic coexistence into the new ‘globalised

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age’. Yet, seen from a sociological viewpoint, the question arises as to what happens in societies, if social actors find themselves in a state of coexistence that cannot be based on even minimal normative common ground. In this respect, the axiomatic of political theory, which has a decisive influence on sociological theory building, moves within a sharp dichotomy. If there is not only partial but substantial cultural heterogeneity between social and ethno-cultural groups, it assumes that the potential for social conflict is predestined to get out of control. Yet, relying on Hobbes’ theoretical programme for the foundation of unlimited political sovereignty is not sufficient to capture the present age in sociological categories (1651). The assessment of contemporary societies, which tend to be multi-ethnic and multicultural, traces a picture that transcends the dichotomies of political theory. Here, constellations of coexistence arise which do not presuppose normative integration, but at the same time do not lead to an escalation of the related conflict potential (Blasius et  al. 2008; Terkessidis 2010). Contexts of ‘social validity’ are brought into being that subsist beyond formally given legal frameworks and inform a temporary and precarious, but persisting, modus vivendi that grants social integration within certain spatiotemporal limits. Thus, social research encounters a layer of ‘proto-legal validity’ which is not based on any cultural, ethical or religious homogeneity of its bearers. This phenomenon depends to a large extent on the increased transformation pace of complex societies, which restricts the possibility of building stable frameworks for common action orientation, because of a lack of spatiotemporal and social resources granting normative structuration over time. Nevertheless, the feared dissolution of the social fabric does not occur, since intermittent forms of consensus grant provisional action orientations with temporally limited validity. Despite little consideration by political theory, this ‘social institutionalisation of uncertainty’ highlights a much greater resilience of complex societies as generally admitted. Thus, the crucial task for a sociology of ‘failing normative structuration’ consists in inquiring into the ‘conditions of possibility’ of proto-legal, yet intermittent frames of social action in complex societies, beyond the limitations induced by the classical dichotomies of political theory. ‘Intermittent contexts of validity’ do not presuppose the negotiation of rules of conduct, but derive from the acceptance, over a limited period of time, of specific individual or collective claims to validity. Thus, they can be traced back neither to the legal praxis of contract-driven social action nor to the subsistence of a substantial or minimal overlapping consensus

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concerning normative orientations. Such contexts of validity subsist between individuals or social groups who have no cultural and religious commonalities and do not have at their disposal the spatiotemporal and social resources to establish them. The claim to validity of these contexts of action has a ‘post-metaphysical character’; it is limited in terms of spatiotemporal scope, yet it can be successfully implemented within these limits. The tasks of a sociological theory of intermittent validity consist in investigating the procedures that make this possible. A prerequisite for developing this research approach is, however, that it proceeds beyond the praxis of thinking in dichotomies that characterise political theory, and rather focuses on the social phenomena located in the continuum between the extremes of normative integration and open conflict. In the wake of the cultural trends de fin de siècle, the idea might seem obvious to classify the development tendencies of contemporary societies under the heading of ‘post-normative sociation’. Yet, this perspective would be misleading, because it is unable to grasp the specific nature of the societal transformation that is taking place. The alleged liquefaction of normative structures does not induce a complete dissolution of social normativity; rather, it leads to the establishment of intermittent normative structuration processes resulting from the increasing heterogeneity of qualitative differentiated societies. This societal change does not trigger an unconditioned abdication of the ‘modern-occidental secular rationality’, yet it modifies it in pre-legal and pragmatic terms. An increasing divide can be observed between the formal spirit of legal orders and the pragmatic implementation of frameworks of normative modus vivendi in the most different societal domains. Thereby, individual and collective actors pay great attention to avoiding dispute on normative matters that could endanger provisionally established balances of coexistence and thus undermine in pragmatic terms any implementation of procedures of communicative action in Habermas’ sense (1984). Shared action-orientation patterns subsist on the basis of selective relations of consensus that support them ‘from A to B’, without requesting normative compliance. Their validity does not rely on any reference to specific value contents, yet it is established on minimal and often tacit expressions of consensus with limited temporal liability. The social fabric holds together, yet it slowly shifts from a normative structuration based on rationalised legitimacy to one based on pragmatic consensus. Under conditions of substantial normative heterogeneity of their bearers, the ‘micro-sociological underpinning’ of proto-legal validity contexts

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can be grasped within the framework of a theory of ‘intermittent social structuration’. Yet, this presupposes the development of a concept of ‘social consensus’ that differentiates itself from both Comte’s substantial category (1877) and Rawl’s idea of ‘overlapping consensus’ (1987). The inquiry must focus on the ‘limits of consensus-building’ that support the intermittent processes for the establishment of social validity in transnormative contexts of social action (Fitzi 2015). These result from the constant fragmentation and rebuilding of single social bonds that legitimate social structuration without universalising its validity in spatiotemporal terms. In order to grasp these processes, sociological theory must move from a static to a dynamic and relationist understanding of society building. Classical sociological theory provides crucial building blocks for this theoretical work, on condition that it is reinterpreted beyond the boundaries of the teleological-normative and functionalist bias of the sociological canon established by Parsons (1949). The development of an appropriate theoretical framework in this perspective is the task of the sociological diagnosis presented below. Before this can take place, however, it is necessary to clarify how the question of normativity must be addressed in a context of reflection, which starts from finding its intermittency, but undertakes to understand how normative societal structuration—for example, in the sense of the welfare-state compromise—can once again be made possible under these conditions.

3.3   Normative Intermittency in Qualitative Differentiated Societies For different historical reasons there have been repeated breaks in continuity that characterised the theoretical work of sociology (Fitzi 2015). After WWII, Parsons established a ‘sociological canon’, by selecting a certain number of early sociologists, elevating them to the rank of classics and interpreting their work according to his theoretical research project (Parsons 1949). In the wake of this epistemological construction, he presumed that functional differentiation must be considered the modern form of social differentiation (Parsons 1951). This is an ‘axiomatic assumption’ in the sense that Moritz Schlick points out in the General Theory of Knowledge with reference to geometrical and physical theories (2009). Accordingly, through Parsons’ further theoretical construction, the question of empirically verifying whether and what functional differentiation

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consists of is never addressed. It is sometimes surprising how irreflexively the mainstream of successive sociology and social philosophy adopted this axiomatic assumption and made it a cornerstone of the sociological canon. The consequent scheme of theoretical reflection consists of three main sentences: 1. society develops independent domains of structuration; 2. these are specialised in delivering a particular performance to the rest of society; 3. as a consequence, each societal sphere can be assigned to a specific ‘function of society’ as a whole. It is evident what kind of normative implications the scheme can have in interaction with societal self-interpretation. A preconstituted harmony or at least a ‘convergence in function logic’ of differentiated societal domains is stated as an axiomatic assumption, without asking how their reciprocal action develops empirically. The past few decades showed unequivocally that these assumptions are at least problematic and that major conflicts and colonisation processes take place between societal domains. Yet, sociological theory seems hardly well attuned to analyse these kinds of developments that have a major impact on normative social structuration. As was already argued by the early biological-inspired sociology of the nineteenth century, structural functionalism sees society as a living organism that consists of a number of organs that cooperate in assuring the life and wealth of the whole (Kistiakowski 1899; Schäffle 1875–1878; Spencer 1876/1882–1885). The implicit awareness that this assumption is at least problematic led the subsequent ‘radicalised functionalism’ of Niklas Luhmann to abandon the issue (Schluchter 2015: 535–561). At worst ‘irritations’ may arise between social systems, leading each to re-evaluate communicatively its relationship with its environment. No more can be said about the interaction between societal domains. This theory of ‘autistic social systems’ indeed introduces a further axiom, that of the reciprocal indifference between differentiated societal domains, so that their relationship is considered as being of secondary importance for the investigation of complex societies. Sociology reduces its analytical scale and focuses merely on the ‘internal functionality’ of societal domains as supposedly uninterrupted communication flows (Luhmann 1984). Classical sociologists, above all Simmel and Weber, had a quite different understanding of modern societal differentiation. In their approach, highly differentiated societies give rise to societal domains that follow autonomous logics, without amalgamating them under the leading function of a particular domain, as tended to be the case in pre-modern societies, for example, with religion or politics. Differentiation processes are

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regarded as contingent societal phenomena that do not follow a predetermined development path, including the laws of evolutionary biology. Accordingly, axiomatic assumptions cannot be made about the relationship between different societal domains. Neither the biological-functional character of society as a living being, nor a predetermined harmony between societal domains, nor open conflict, or the prevalence of one domain, like religion, politics or economy over and above the other, can be turned into the unscrutinised axiomatic premise of sociological theory. Whatever correlation persists between the different societal spheres is a question that must be cleared on an empirical level of inquiry. Cooperation and exchange, competition, conflict, colonisation or reciprocal disregard can be the case, but this can only be determined a posteriori. Accordingly, classical sociological theories must be considered theories of ‘qualitative societal differentiation’ and cannot be reduced to building stones of a conception of functional differentiation. It is important to bear in mind the indeterministic character of modern social structuration that classical sociological theory underlines, when addressing the question of normative integration in complex societies. Normative orders are not only the result of social structuration. They also constitute a crucial factor of consistent societal reproduction. Again and again, normative orders are implemented in the everyday practice of social action, so that they constitute the guidelines for the further weaving of the social fabric, as long as actors perceive them as legitimated. Yet, in times of social crisis, a specific dialectics comes to the fore that affects the validity of normative orders. The divergence increases between formally stated norms and their empirical implementation. This tension between de jure and de facto normativity results not only in failing legitimacy but also in a competitive relationship between the letter of the normative orders and the uncodified modus vivendi granting their empirical subsistence. An intermittent acceptance of ‘factual normativity’ becomes customary and establishes itself as a ‘functional ersatz’ for the legitimacy of formally institutionalised normative orders. Given that modern societies are qualitatively differentiated and consist of multiple structuration processes, which follow different logics and find themselves in a relationship of latent tension, normative complexity increases rapidly. Yet, differentiated normative orders collide not only with each other but also with their respective empirical implementation. The result is a multiple dialectics between competing normative structuration logics, their formal implementation and their factual subsistence.

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Its dynamics is intermittent. On occasions, institutionalised normativity and the modus vivendi that implements it happen to coincide empirically. Yet, otherwise, they substantially diverge from each other. If the divergence prevails over longer time periods, normativity slowly transforms into ‘transnormativity’ (Fitzi 2015). This is a societal arrangement, in which the legitimacy of normative orders is undermined on a structural level, because social actors perceive them as being intermittent and having delimited spatiotemporal validity. Recent decades deliver a number of examples for the dissemination of transnormative social orders from the uncertain implementation of environmental protection legislation to the shifting subsistence of social security systems, to the creeping erosion of social rights due to the development of dual labour markets. Singular aspects of this ongoing societal transformation process must become the subject of empirical inquiry. Yet, as a general remark it can be observed that depending on the rhythm of societal transformation and capitalist restructuration, nowadays normative orders qualify as having increasingly delimited spatiotemporal scope of validity. Consequently, social actors equip themselves by increasingly switching from reflexive legitimation to ad hoc forms of intermittent consensus, temporarily accepting the state of affairs that has come about. It is necessary to grasp in sociological terms the ongoing social change induced by intermittent normativity, because it holds consequences that often seem inexplicable in the cognitive frames of societal self-­interpretation. The complexity of real-existing normative modi vivendi can progress to the point where their subsistence challenges the principles that establish normative orders. It is a social determined variation and worsening of the classic conflict between legislation de jure and its implementation de facto. Processes of social structuration that legitimise formally established normative orders, grounded on the principles of the rule of law, conflict with processes of illegitimated normative structuration that seek to institutionalise an empirical modus vivendi. Social actors are confronted with the dilemma of whether to orient themselves to the formal or to the pragmatic order of normativity. This state of ‘normative intermittency’, in which social orders are implemented sometimes according to their formal letter, and at other times to an empirically established modus vivendi, spread the perception of a substantial fluidification of the regulatory framework of society. The result is a general loss in legitimation of stated social orders that results in a spiral of normative downgrading. Social actors ask

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themselves why they should conform to established normative orders that they perceive as losing empirical implementation power. It should be noted that this attitude cannot be classed as an expression of lacking civic virtues. Due to the accelerated and uncertain social change rhythm that characterises the age of crumbling late capitalism, citizens are increasingly confronted with the experience of being compelled to rapidly adapt to new socio-economic arrangements, without being asked for a rationally reflected and consciously expressed consent. In the course of this recurrent societal transformation, normative principles anchored in constitutions as well as in the Declaration of Human Rights persist formally, yet their factual capacity of determining social structuration processes is consistently eroded, so that they are perceived as being inconsistent. Countertendencies of renewed normative structuration can indeed be observed, as the emergency legislation shows that was adopted in response to the financial and economic crisis of 2007/2008, as well as the pandemic of 2020/2021. Yet, the further development of the uncontrolled globalised economy and society rapidly erodes the normative orders of the state of emergency by imposing new variations of modus vivendi that bypass their empirical enforcement. In summary, whoever decides on the state of exception is not sovereign. Only those who determine the everyday implementation of pragmatic, that is, transnormative frameworks of modus vivendi, have at their disposal the power to determine social structuration. It is thus necessary to understand in sociological categories how the dynamics of intermittent normative structuration unfolds. Only on the basis of this knowledge can it be shown which forms of ‘transformative social action’ could, instead, lead complex societies to achieve inclusive social integration grounded on a normative structuration attuned to the age of crumbling late capitalism. For a sociological framing of the dynamics of intermittent normative structuration to be possible, the phenomenon must be captured in ‘ideal-­ typical’ categories in Weber’s sense (Weber 2012: 100–138). Its main characteristics must be addressed in the multiplicity of their empirical variations and presented as if they had reached their fully development potential. These ‘one hundred per cent types’ constitute the analytical frame necessary to grasp the phenomenon of intermittent normative structuration, within the magmatic mass of contemporary social reality. Yet, these concepts are no ontological categories and must therefore be confronted with the empirical structuration processes that deviate from their ‘ideal-­ typical development pattern’, in order to understand which latent types of

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‘transformative social action’ operate for the resumption of consistent normative societal structuration. As should always be the case for sociological research projects, a preliminary step of ‘ideal-typical framing’ for established theories is necessary to implement the scientific categorisation of the research field into the analytical framework that must be developed. To reach a satisfactory ideal-typical conceptual reconstruction of intermittent normative structuration, its concept must thus be contrasted with the established theorisation for the phenomenon of ‘normative social structuration’. This can best be done in relation to the most significant current inquiry into the topic which takes place within the framework of the Frankfurt Research Cluster on ‘Normative Orders’ (Forst and Günther 2011). The discussion of this paradigm allows, among other things, to highlight one further crucial aspect of the problem. Until now, the focus was on the issue of transnormativity as a process of intermittent social structuration. Yet beyond that, the circumstance must be addressed that intermittent normativity is most often established on non-verbal, yet often tacit expressions of ‘pragmatic consent’ towards social orders with limited spatiotemporal validity. Here, the social resources are too scarce that would permit opening a ‘discursive space’ with the potential to found the legitimation of factual existing normative orders on reflexive and rational critique. Accordingly, social research must explain how the intermittent non-verbal legitimation of transnormative social orders comes about; this can only be done, by contrast, with the conceptualisation of the discursive implementation of normative orders. In the understanding of the Frankfurt Cluster, normative orders consist of normative assumptions that underlie institutional orders. They serve to justify social rules, norms and institutions, by establishing claims to govern and implement principles for the distribution of goods and opportunities in life. These assumptions introduce the theoretical definition of normative orders that accordingly must be regarded as ‘orders of justification’. These are embedded in narratives that emerge in singular historical constellations and are handed down, modified and institutionalised over long periods of time. It is thus Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ that serves here as a guiding theoretical paradigm (Durkheim 1912: 323–335). Historical phases of intense social transformation, often following traumatic events, consolidate new normative orders that persist over longer intervals. Durkheim’s classic example in this regard is the French Revolution that dismantled the socio-political inequalities of the

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Ancien Régime and legitimised the new social order, thanks to the formulation of the Declaration of Human and Civil Rights (Durkheim 1973: 173; 202; 226, note 22). In the mid-twentieth century, the normative foundation of modern society was joined by the idea of a necessary social balance. It emerged as a reaction to the traumatic experiences of the Great Depression, Totalitarianism, WWII, the Shoah, the Porajmos and the other chapters of extermination perpetrated by the Nazis in Europe (Arendt 1951), and it led eventually to the establishment of an inclusive welfare-state compromise (Fourastié 1979; Marshall 1996). Civil and political rights were thus integrated by social rights. They had been already partially established, thanks to unions’ struggles since the beginning of industrialisation, yet since 1945 they eventually became part of the officially acknowledged normative structure of complex societies. The institutionalised legal principles grounding the normative arrangement of modern societies have nevertheless been contested throughout their history. If conservative and reactionary political movements wanted to limit the access to citizenship rights to single social groups, in the worst case according to racial ideologies, the excluded social groups, primarily workers and women, or else minorities and migrants, steadily fought not only for formal, yet also factual recognition of their rights. Questions concerning the validity of normative orders have been discussed in the context of their disputed facticity that offered points of departure for criticism, rejection and resistance. There is thus a performative tension between claims of justification and established regulations, which is crucial for the understanding of the conflictual dynamics that forms and changes normative orders. In this respect, the research of the Frankfurt Cluster focuses on the reflexive meta-principles, procedures and institutions that open up a ‘discursive space’, in which claims of justification are made, contested or defended. Here, struggles over normative orders are primarily understood as disputes over justificatory arguments. The emphasis is on the ‘discursive orders’, in which justifications and counter-justifications are exchanged. The pronounced linguistic focus of the analytical frame that the Frankfurt Cluster develops is best suited to define what ‘intermittent normative structuration’ means in contrast to the idea of ‘discursive pragmatic’, which as a general rule is assumed to establish normative orders. In the research perspective of the Frankfurt Cluster, normative orders consist of ‘narratives of justification’ that emerge in the course of struggles over common action orientation. According to the definition, the narratives are embedded in cultural, economic, political, communicative and

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psychological contexts; are embodied in institutions, sedimented and habitualised in practices; and are expressed in conventions as the result of protracted compromise-building processes that are reaffirmed and stabilised in social rituals (Forst and Günther 2011: 11–31). By such means, the study of ‘justification orders’ moves onto the fairway of conflict sociology and outlines how social bonds ‘against each other’ result from conflict situations, in turn, compensating for social divisions by gradually embedding and stabilising them in procedures of normative structuration (GSG 11: 284–382; Coser 1956). Yet, in contrast to conflict sociology the guiding theoretical assumption here is that a ‘permanent coordination’ of social action emerges from conflict situations, which can be stabilised within normative orders. The influence from Parsons’ theorem of ‘normative emergence’ is evident, so that normativity is assumed to be the standard solution for overcoming ‘double (or even multiple) contingency’ (Parsons and Shils 1951: 16). Normative orders are understood as thoroughly reflected and consciously chosen mechanisms of generalised behavioural coordination that are established through negotiation between social actors or groups and adopted by anonymous thirds by virtue of recognition. Since they ideally derive their binding force from justification, norms are presented as being essentially ‘dependent on reflection’, although they can be coupled with sanctions. Out of this justificatory reference, normative principles develop a specific claim of validity and binding force. Yet, at the same time, they can be thematised intersubjectively and above all criticised. This is the regulatory ideal that also establishes parliamentary democracy on the principle of the rule of law. Within a ‘public space of justification’, norms are subjected to analytical criteria of rationality, so that they become the subject of communicative action. This, however, does not happen automatically. The Frankfurt Cluster research remarks that social orders are often promulgated by institutions like parliaments and governments, without being horizontally negotiated between citizens. Their justificatory reference is then limited to authoritative assertions supported by asymmetric relationships of power. Nonetheless, there is a ‘discursive re-entry function’: political power also needs to be legitimated and becomes the subject of justificatory orders, because it is based on claims of legitimacy. According to the heuristic assumptions of the Frankfurt Cluster, social research can thus seize an ‘embedded rationality’, on which claims to power attempt to be based, yet eventually become the subject of criticism.

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The guiding analytical scheme of research is based on the hypothesis that power is dependent on recognition and generates recognition conflicts that are fought out by discursive means. Based on this theoretical assumption, the research interest of the Frankfurt Cluster takes the path of examining macro-narratives which, like state-founding mythologies, are essential for the normative stabilisation of complex societies. A further main line of research is dedicated to the codification of normative orders regulating the relationship between states in the age of economic globalisation. A common assumption of the inquiries is that the conflict dynamics, which forms around normative orders, can be captured as a procedure that establishes a ‘specific consensus’ on a discursive exchange of justifications. The research focuses on the way in which participants, who are engaged in conflicts over normative claims, generate criteria for ‘acceptable justification’, as well as how these criteria can themselves be argumentatively justified and criticised. In doing so, the Frankfurt Cluster develops a sensitivity for the question of whether the plurality of normative orders, moulding complex societies, allow for consistent normative structuration or only for fragmentary and selective contexts of justification that are no longer held together by an overarching normative order. In addition, the research programme asks whether sectorial, issue-specific hybrid forms of private or (semi-)public normative orders emerge that are non-compliant with the principles of the rule of law. Yet, in all cases, the research concentrates on the discursive orders, in which justifications and counter-­ justifications are exchanged. Asymmetrical social relationships that do not become the subject of open discursive and justificatory claims are instead not part of the object of investigation. In the age of late crumbling capitalism, the rapid, yet uncertain societal change challenges the axiomatic assumptions guiding research on social normativity, because it substantially erodes the discursive space for the articulation of social conflicts. Intermittent normative orders openly deviate from the rules of discursive legitimation and establish frames of action coordination that are not negotiated, not consciously reflected and not embedded in rational justification orders. Instead, they are well- or ill-­ tolerated on the basis of asymmetric, non-verbalised relationships of consensus with spatiotemporal limited scope of validity. If these relationships are substantially precarious, they have the advantage to best adapt to changing socio-economic arrangements. This is why transnormative social orders spread and erode the long-term normative structuration of complex societies. The Frankfurt Research Cluster on Normative Orders is

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well within its rights to inquire into discursively articulated conflicts that arise in the dialectics between established and contested public orders of justification. Yet, to proceed further into the inquiry of the normative predicament of contemporary societies, a more determined step is necessary in the direction that allows us to grasp in sociological categories the intermitting regulatory contexts of contemporary societies as an expression of failing social structuration. Durkheim’s distinction between physiological and pathological social phenomena is best suited to understand the ideal-typical deviation between normativity and transnormativity (Durkheim 1895: chap. 3). In complex societies a further layer of legitimation emerges that is beneath the ‘discursive space’, where claims of justification are exchanged. This layer of legitimation is essentially non-verbal. It is based on pragmatic forms of consensus that most often accept states of things, which are not freely chosen and cannot be changed, by tolerating them in particular social contexts for a supposedly delimited period of time. The pathological aspect of the phenomenon consists in the fact that these ‘temporary conditions’ tend to expand and perpetuate themselves, thereby substituting the physiological processes that establish a rationally reflected legitimation of normative orders. The conditions that provoke this shift ‘from legitimacy to consensus’ are related to the scarcity of social resources that allow the establishment of discursive spaces, in which rational disputes on justification orders can unfold. Under the uncertain conditions of societal change, which characterise times of crumbling late capitalism, this contingency presents itself increasingly often, as an assessment of labour market transformation illustrates. The legitimation of normative orders that are based on intermittent consensus is highly precarious, yet it has the pragmatic advantage that it can adapt to changing socio-economic arrangements long before rationally reflected normative regulations can rise. It is the forced attitude such as ‘for the time being we accept this, even if we are not happy with it’ that predominates. Yet, seen from the viewpoint of a modern occidental and not Confucian rationality, normative legitimacy is downgraded from its physiologic, discursive-reflected, to its pathologic silent and non-reflected consensual form. Social orders slowly slide into normative regimes that are neither reflected nor verbally articulated and based only on the provisional refrain of social actors and groups from opening normative conflicts. There is no need to explain what and how many risks this normative downgrading generates for the subsistence of a consistent structuration of

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complex societies under the principles of the rule of law. Accordingly, it is crucial to evaluate in sociological categories how this ‘consensual ersatz’ for normative legitimacy comes about. The ‘intermittent dynamics of validity’ characterising normative orders in complex societies builds the focus of the present study. The heuristic approach required to develop the inquiry presupposes overcoming the axiomatic assumption that single epochs of ‘collective effervescence’ consistently stabilise social structuration over longer periods of time. Instead, normativity must be thematised in its everyday dynamics as a praxis granting legitimation to social orders that are not necessarily acknowledged by rational reflection, yet often simply accepted within certain spatiotemporal limits. In the perspective of the Frankfurt’s Cluster, social conflicts must be explained in terms of their discursive dynamics, because they unfold as a dispute about justification matters. This approach is crucial to address conflicts that reach the level of political representation and are carried out with the argumentative instruments of the political sphere. Yet, contested justification orders only represent the tip of the iceberg that characterises the legitimation crisis of current societies. Beneath the articulated claims there is cavernous magma chamber of unexpressed frustrations and unarticulated conflict lines produced by the unavoidable daily acceptance for normative demands of behaviour induced by rapidly changing socio-­ economic imperatives. The resulting social fragmentation, which often remains unvoiced in political discourse, needs to be appreciated in ideal-­ typical sociological categories, in order to provide an analytical grid that allows us to thematise its empirical occurrences. The main question to be addressed is what happens if normative claims are not made any more, not contested or defended, because the social and spatiotemporal resources are missing that would permit establishing an explicit line of conflict, so facilitating the articulation of reflexive and possibly also political justifications for missing normative orders. Today, this condition characterises the precarious workforce, the migrants and the losers of the technologically determined restructuration of revenue sources that erodes the middle classes. These social groups are compelled to accept normative frameworks of action determined by economic imperatives, without having the faculty to contest them, because any expression of criticism would jeopardise the continuity of the economic relations on which their survival depends. Thus, we come across a domain of social reality that is not regulated by discursive exchanges, yet is based on non-­ linguistically mediated modalities of consensus. The issue is which

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strategic-rational and non-rational orientation patterns of social action predominate here. They cannot be assessed by analysing the struggles for the power of interpretation defining the meaning of established normative orders. To reconstruct the motivation structure of these modalities of social action, social research must revert to the instruments of understanding sociology. It must describe the dynamics of intermittent normative structuration, by constructing the categories that are capable of grasping it in ideal-typical terms. The question is not what people say, while making claims, but how they act, if they cannot claim anything. A sociological framework of analysis is needed to classify the different empirical occurrences of this phenomenon, by reconstructing the correspondent forms of orientation and coordination of social action. Only in this way can we also consider the possible beginnings of renewed expressions of rationally reflected social action which hold a potential for social transformation. Transnormativity is characterised by post-metaphysical relations of validity with a limited duration and a precarious legitimacy. Yet, they can last and reproduce themselves over determined periods of time, as various social phenomena show. The same kind of considerations apply to the legitimation of political orders and institutions. The discursive level of conflict characterises the mediatised surface in which controversies are carried out about political justification matters. Yet, social research must dig deeper than this layer of normative structuration to disclose the underlying dynamics of intermittent legitimation for political domination and to explore the asymmetrical structures that ground it on non-verbalised consensus. Crumbling late capitalism reproduces itself by increasing the transformation rhythm of intermittent normativity and thus dismantles, or turns into a lost cause, the formal established normative orders. To borrow Durkheim’s language, paradoxically it is thus anomy that today becomes the ‘stabilising factor’ for the dynamics of society building. Once an ideal-typical conceptualisation of the phenomenon has been developed that allows for its theoretical framing, research can undertake the empirical study of its various occurrences. Yet first of all, sociology must become able to construct a conceptual framework that allows us to address the overall conditions of the emerging phenomena. This is the task of the following sociological diagnosis. It builds on the analysis of a further symptomatic layer of the current societal crisis. The historical development of the last four decades experienced the dismantling of the welfare-state compromise in favour of a substantial colonisation of several social domains

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through the logic of economy. This societal transformation generated exceptional levels of social fragmentation that must come into focus.

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Forst, Rainer, and Günther, Klaus (2011). Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag. Fourastié, Jean (1979). Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard. Greve, Bent (2021). Welfare, Populism and Welfare Chauvinism. Bristol: Policy Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1968). ‘Stichworte zu einer Theorie der Sozialisation’. In Id. (1973): Kultur und Kritik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 118–194. ——— (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon. ——— (2005). ‘Vorpolitische Grundlangen des demokratischen Rechtstaates?’ In: Dialektik der Säkularisierung. Über Vernunft und Religion. Ed. by Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger. Freiburg i. B.: Herder, 15–37. Habermas, Jürgen, and Ratzinger, Joseph (2005). Dialektik der Säkularisierung. Über Vernunft und Religion. Freiburg i. B.: Herder. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1821). Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechtes. Berlin: Nicolai. English: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2008). Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Common-­ Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. London: Crooke. Now: Ed. by. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: CUP, 1991. Honneth, Axel (Ed.) (1993). Kommunitarismus. Eine Debatte über die moralischen Grundlagen moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus. Honneth, Axel (2016). Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kistiakowski, Theodor (1899). Gesellschaft und Einzelwesen. Eine methodologische Untersuchung. Berlin: Liebmann. Larmore, Charles (1987). Patterns of Moral Complexity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lockwood, David (1964). ‘Social Integration and System Integration’. In: Explorations in Social Change. Ed. by George K. Zollschan and Walter Hirsch. London, 244–257. Luhmann, Niklas (1984). Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981). After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Marshall, Thomas H. (1996). Citizenship and Social Class [1950]. London: Pluto Press. Marx, Karl (1887). Capital: a Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (London). Now in: Id. (1990), Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, (MEGA) vol. II/9, Berlin: Dietz.

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Parsons, Talcott (1949). The Structure of Social Action. A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. Glencoe: The Free Press. ——— (1951). The Social System. Glencoe: The Free Press. ——— (1960). ‘Durkheim’s Contribution to the Theory of Integration of Social Systems’. Now in: Id. (1967), Sociological Theory and Modern Society. New York: Free Press, pp. 3–34. Parsons, Talcott, and Shils, Edward A. (Eds.) (1951). Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John (1987). ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 7(1), S.1–25. ——— (1993). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandel, Michael J. (1982). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schäffle, Albert (1875–1878). Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers. Encyclopädischer Entwurf einer realen Anatomie, Physiologie und Psychologie der menschlichen Gesellschaft mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Volkswirthschaft als socialen Stoffwechsel, 4th vol. Tübingen: Laupp. Schlick, Moritz (2009). Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918). Hans Jürgen Wendel and Fynn Ole Engler (Eds.). Vienna: Springer. Schluchter, Wolfgang (2015). Grundlegungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht. 2. Edition. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. Spencer, Herbert (1876/1882–1885). Principles of Sociology. London: Williams and Norgate. Sternberger, Dolf (1990). Verfassungspatriotismus. Frankfurt/M: Insel-Verlag. Terkessidis, Mark. (2010). Interkultur. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Veith, Hermann (2002). ‘Sozialisation als reflexive Vergesellschaftung’. Zeitschrift für Soziologie der Erziehung und Sozialisation, 22(2), 167–177. Weber, Max (2012). Collected Methodological Writings. Ed. by Hans Henrik Bruns and Sam Whimster. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (2008). Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erster Band. Vom Feudalismus des alten Reiches bis zur defensiven Modernisierung der Reformära: 1700 – 1815. München: C.H. Beck.

CHAPTER 4

Economic Liberalism and Social Fragmentation

4.1   Functional Neutrality Lost: Colonising Society Through Economic Logic The historical consciousness that neoliberalism is the hallmark of the four decades from 1980 to 2020 slowly emerged and transformed from the approach of a few, even if illustrious dissidents like Bourdieu (1998), to a consistent debate about the origins of contemporary socio-political disorientation (Monbiot 2017). The socio-economic consequences of the 2020/2021 pandemic will probably lead to a critical reflection about the predominant economic development model at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet, the sociological, and thus the ideal-typical, assessment of the societal structuration induced by neoliberal policies is still in the making. The difficulty of this analysis is that it is necessary to distinguish between the officially posted positions of neoliberal ideology (Hayek 1944) and the pragmatic implementation of the economic interests that used neoliberalism to get their way (Baccaro and Howell 2017). Taking up Hegel’s political philosophical categories, the central topic here is the relationship between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ (1821). Since the 1980s, the value sphere of the economy emerged as so independent from any political implementation of society’s common good that the ethical-political question re-emerges about how complex societies can avoid being torn into the environmental and social destructive logic of uncontrolled economic development. To face the issue in sociological terms means to understand © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_4

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how the neoliberal transformation of society moulds the relationship between societal domains, which follow different logics of structuration, and especially the economy and politics. In this respect, there is a glaring contradiction between neoliberal political theory and practice that can be addressed by assessing the twin step of the ‘neoliberal revolution’ (Duménil and Levy 2004). Leaving aside the first neoliberal experiments in Latin American dictatorships (Harvey 2005: 15 f.), and starting from the Thatcher and Reagan programmes for the transformation of parliamentary democracies, neoliberal politicians presented themselves as advocates of a minimal state. Only a substantial withdrawal of democratic control and public investments from the domain of economy would have permitted the unfolding of the globalised utopia that was supposed to grant unlimited wealth and progress by eliminating stagflation (ibid.: 64–67). The neoliberal discourse thus appropriated the metaphor of the ‘night-watchman state’ and adapted it to propagate its political views (Nozick 1974). Certainly, the examination of the political doctrines of neoliberalism reveals that its theoretical reflection has an articulated conception of the state role in complex societies (Plant 2012). Yet, for strategic reasons characterising its political agenda, the practical propaganda of neoliberal parties strongly focused on the issue of weakening public control over the economy. The goal was to remove the legislation that had been introduced to regulate financial investments and labour markets after the stock market crash of 1929 both in the context of the American New Deal and the English welfare-state since 1945 (Brady 1950). The focus was on reducing state investment costs and abolishing measures to contrast monopoly formation to reach higher valorisation rates of capital investment; all such questions were addressed under the propagandist label of ‘cutting red tape’. The affirmation of a necessary independence between the societal domains of the economy and politics thus became the flagship of early neoliberal propaganda. However, things changed as soon as neoliberal politicians came into office. Neoliberal policies never meant disinvestment of taxpayers’ money from the economy nor abstinence from the state’s intervention in market dynamics. Rather, the unspoken issue was the purpose of state intervention. The state should withdraw from the economy in three specific senses. (1) It should abandon the Keynesian policies introduced to foster full employment. (2) It should drop the legislation that controls financial speculation. And (3) it should terminate state intervention to secure

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industrial sectors with a strong impact on employment, as Thatcher’s battle against the miners paradigmatically showed. Yet, adopting measures to decouple the state and economy did not mean that, in general, the state should withdraw from the economy. What was required was to change its logic. Politics should not intervene to regulate the economy in the name of a normative conception of the common good of society, in the sense of the post-WWII consensus. Instead, the state should become the instrument to restructure society in order to adapt it to the changing systemic imperatives that the societal domain of economy dictated from time to time. Like all serious economists, neoliberal politicians were, in fact, aware that the late capitalist economy can never survive without massive support from public institutions. What had to change was the systemic hierarchy between the economy and politics. This purpose became the focus of a new normative conception that transfigured the common good of society by identifying it with the quantitative valorisation of capital investment. Achieving this paradigm shift by selling it as an emancipatory separation between societal domains was the ideological masterpiece of the neoliberal revolution. A number of social-democratic and post-communist politicians and intellectuals were won over by this worldview; they believed in it in a very naive way and became its most fervent propagandists. The ideological underpinning for the political strategy of neoliberalism was given with the reinterpretation of the social-ethical concept of ‘responsibility’. This allowed the inversion of the normative hierarchy between the political logic of the common good and the economic logic of material interest. The miners being laid off, as well as the unemployed in general, were relied upon to embrace their individual responsibility for the predicament that hit them. With a revival of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, the condition in which they found themselves was interpreted as the product of their own shortcomings (MWG I/18), so absolving the economic development model as well as its democratic control of any responsibility. The ‘new spirit of capitalism’ thus extended to the workforce which was forced to rediscover its ascetic vocation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018). The normative principle of the welfare-state compromise was denied, according to which society as a whole is responsible for those affected by the consequences of the irrational development and the crisis dynamics that characterises the capitalist system of production. Yet, this ‘reversal of values’, which was founded ideologically on the principle of responsibility, did not affect everyone equally, because at the same time, in the neoliberal age, large-scale bail-out operations were repeatedly launched

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to rescue financial institutions from the bankruptcies caused by their reckless speculations. The examples of this political praxis of de-responsibilisation range from the US savings and loans crisis in 1987/1988 to the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1997/1998 (Harvey 2005: 73) and up to the most striking case of the financial tsunami triggered in 2008 by the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment bank. Here, states must create and finance a number of ‘bad banks’ to absorb the debts that financial institutions had caused by disseminating so-called innovative products for the securitisation of the credit crunch. Under the eyes of several monitoring institutions, these products had redistributed the irresponsible risks of subprime mortgages to institutional investors and small savers in exchange for the promise of unproven high returns (Blackburn 2008). As the implicated financial institutions collapsed, they were not held accountable for tacitly passing the buck to the public. States were instead forced to invest taxpayers’ money to settle the score and avoid even worse consequences for society as a whole. Added to this crisis was the Euro-crisis and the Greek government-debt crisis that transformed the financial credits of the banks into draconian austerity measures and eventually into a hypothec on future generation indebtedness (Streeck 2017). Seen from a sociological viewpoint all these different, yet recurring events nevertheless have a common structure. A crisis emerges in the economic domain, generally because of irresponsible speculation through a completely uncontrolled financial system. Instead of holding those to account who were the cause of the situation, the task of fixing the problem is transferred to the political domain of society. Rulers then explain that the consequences of non-intervention would be too heavy for society as a whole, so that it is worth paying the bill ‘one last time’. The question is why no legislative initiative is taken to prevent private subjects unleashing economic and social damages so massive that taxpayers must be made generally accountable for them. A comparable approach can be observed in the field of the ecological consequences of the prevailing economic development model. Since 1965 the large corporations of the oil, gas and cement industries seem to have caused at least half of global environmental pollution (Licker et al. 2019). Yet, only the collective is made accountable for emission reduction. No legislation is adopted to hold those accountable who are largely responsible for the problem, because the normative hierarchy between the political logic of the common good and the

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economic logic of material interest would then be brought back to the architecture of the post-WWII welfare-state compromise. In summary, since the 1980s neoliberal revolution we are dealing with an arrangement of society which has the following structure. To the exclusive advantage of economic actors, the economy and politics stay in a relationship of hierarchical structuration that has specific consequences. On the one hand, the social and environmental costs for economic mismanagement and the reckless financial speculation of private investors are transferred to society as a whole. Contrary to the promises of the globalisation utopia, the predominant mechanism of neoliberal policies thus entails the characteristic that profits of accumulation processes are not socialised, while their losses are very well socialised. On the other hand, at every new turn of the crisis the remorseful representatives of business and politics announce new legislation to avoid such excesses in the future. Yet, after the emergence phase passes, no specific measures are adopted, so that the uncontrolled speculative dynamic starts again from the beginning. The promise that this was the last time of being betrayed, and of carrying the costs of the problematic relationship between economy and society, will soon be broken again. The submission of the political domain to the logic, the needs and even the costs of the economic domain, which the neoliberal revolution has enforced, is accompanied by a consistent number of further homotypic phenomena (Brown 2015). These design a map of the ongoing societal colonisation processes that require analytical framing from a sociological viewpoint. Since the 1990s, in a wide variety of areas a ‘logic of evaluation’ has set in, that is of economic assessment. Schools, universities, research institutions, administrations, hospitals, museums and so on are evaluated by external experts working for private companies specialised in this business model (Chiapello 2015). The whole pedagogical, social, cultural, political, let alone ethical criteria of valuation that constitute the specificity of particular social institutions are set apart to the advantage of a pure quantitative evaluation of their productivity. The primary question is not what and how highly different institutions provide service to their communities, yet only whether the amount of funding allocated for it is justifiable or should rather be cut instead. The resulting systemic pressure exerted on whatever institution leads to an exasperation of the economic criteria that structure its management, leading to the emptying out of its specific functions, the outsourcing of tasks to the advantage of private providers and the flourishing of precarious employment (Cefaï et  al.

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2015). The consequence is a strong qualitative de-qualification of the services provided and even a negation of the purpose of the institutions. In scientific research, for instance, the evaluation criteria are no longer what is scientifically relevant, but instead what the most significant funding can be obtained for. In health, the budgeting praxis of recent decades has introduced the shortcomings that were fatal during the recent Covid-19 pandemic (Sparke and Williams 2022). The art market has experienced consistent investment waves of financial actors coming from the fashion industry. These established certain artists as aesthetic trendsetters of investment, so determining the adaptation of the further actors within the field to the investment choices made by financial speculators and so piloting the moodboards of contemporary art (Glauser et  al. 2021). Many other examples could be recalled, where the ‘drive to enrichment’ progressively substitutes the sense-giving logic that establishes the specific nature of societal domains like politics, science, health, art, culture or public heritage (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017). Beyond that, however, we must mention a further development stage of the ongoing neoliberal transformation of society, because it gives rise to the authoritarian tendencies that are increasingly prevalent in the globalised world. These are related to the necessity of granting the recurrent enforcement of the ‘cybernetic hierarchy’ that reduces several societal domains under the weight of economic logic. It is Harvey’s merit to signal this structural feature that relies on such diverse phenomena as the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s, the modernisation strategy of China launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and the political programme of the Neocons in the US (2005). Today, one would probably add to the examples the neo-Caesarist adventure of Trump’s presidency and the authoritarian democracies in Russia and Turkey. Neoliberalism generally fears the capacity of parliamentary democracies to relaunch normative social structuration and invert the cybernetic hierarchy between the interests of society and those of the differentiated societal domain of economy. This attitude results in a political praxis that delivers the most striking empirical evidence for the divorce between capitalism and democracy, which denies one of the pillars of neoliberal ideological propaganda. The diffusion of capitalist productive systems on a planetary level does not imply political democratisation. On the contrary, authoritarianism emerges as the most efficient instrument to grant progressive societal colonisation under the logic of economic profit. In this respect, the rise of ‘neoliberal Confucianism’ probably represents the most successful attempt of the predominant

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ideology to rid itself of its democratic residue, by accompanying the new hegemonic economic power in its conquest of the world (Arrighi 2009; Bell 2010). Last but not least, there is the question of how the recent upsurge of right-wing populist political parties fits into the frame of the late neoliberal age. In democracies where social-democratic parties abandoned their historical task of representing the interests of the social strata that pay the highest price to capitalist production, populism officially qualifies as the representative of the left behinds (Eribon 2009). Yet, after a closer look at the political programmes of ‘welfare chauvinism’, which characterise right-­ wing populism, their role becomes evident as a fulfiller of the neoliberal agenda (Greve 2021). The political approach of populism denies the universalist definition of social rights of citizenship and claims that they cannot concern all social actors involved in the production process, yet only members of ‘native populations’. The delimitation of social rights by nationalist and racial criteria thus further narrows the basis for the redistribution of wealth in exchange for the empty promise to allocate its residual slice only to the population that might exhibit a greater evidence of autochthony. Instead of inverting the hierarchical relationship between economic imperatives and societal needs, the populist propagandist move allows further cuts in the redistribution of wealth, so that the attack on the democratic regulation of economy moves a consistent step forward. The manifold phenomenology of neoliberal societal transformation poses the challenge for sociological theory to pinpoint the uncontrolled ‘colonisation processes’ that mould societal structuration in contemporary societies. The corresponding analysis must be carried out on three levels of enquiry. 1. Concerning agency, sociological analysis must deliver an explication of the growing difficulty in constituting subjects of individual and collective action capable of dealing in a critical-reflexive way with neoliberal societal transformation (Troubles in action orientation). 2. In relation to the assessment of social structure, the shortcomings in normative structuration processes must become the focus, so that we may understand why there are major problems in re-establishing the priority of the societal common good vis-à-vis the irrational development of the economic domain (Weakening social structuration). 3. With reference to the issue of legitimation, sociological analysis must assess the mechanisms that progressively transpose the attribution of validity for normative action frames to non-reflexive, short-lived and asymmetric allocations of consensus (Shifting legitimacy). Yet, to face the task of adapting sociological

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analysis to current societal change, innovative processes of theory building are necessary, which critically revise a number of received ideas. Organicist models of society have too long influenced societal analysis. Politics and the economy, for instance, have been supposed to relate to each other in the form of an exchange between tax income granted to the political system by the economy and, in reverse, security for monetary institutions assured to the economy. The conflict and colonisation potential between societal domains was reduced to the idea of possible ‘irritations’ that would lead each social system to internally thematise the brushes with the logic of the others in terms of its own language (Luhmann 1997: 118 f.). By adopting this approach, the societal transformation observed in the course of the neoliberal era dissolves into an autistic dialectics of systemic self-observation that oscillates between autopoiesis and irritations within a single social-structuration logic. As a consequence, any crisis diagnosis of late capitalism becomes irrelevant, because the issue of legitimation that characterises the relationship between system and social integration becomes theoretically imperceptible (Habermas 1973). Especially in the optics of radicalised system theory, functional neutrality is postulated not only as an axiom of sociological theory, yet also as a self-­ evidence of social reality, so that colonisation processes between qualitative differentiated social domains cannot exist (Luhmann 1997: 776–801). As a result, social analysis becomes blind for the ongoing societal change. Contemporary societies, however, consist in competing open-ended structuration processes that constantly collide and mix up their qualitative differentiated logics, without being able to lock themselves into self-­ referential communication processes (Fitzi 2015: 455–482). Accordingly, the unverified axiom of functional systemic neutrality does not hold any longer. The ongoing dynamics of uncertain and conflict-prone social structuration induces manifold colonisation processes that have more or less margins of success, depending on the prevailing societal arrangements. Complex societies can indeed come to a normative structuration that legitimises a dynamic modus vivendi, which regulates the ongoing competition between social structuration logics and delimits colonisation processes. A similar result could be achieved during the historical phase that witnessed the construction of the welfare-state systems after WWII. Yet, every epoch is different and there is no model that can be transferred one to one to the current societal change. It is thus the task of social research to understand why normative structuration is not taking place today and under which conditions it could be possible once more. To explain what is

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the social meaning of the ongoing colonisation processes between societal domains, however, it is important to examine not only their possible causes but also their effects. The dynamic relationship between societal domains does not reach normative structuration, because social reality is so widely fragmented that it impedes individual, yet even more so, the collective social agency from becoming the motor of renewed structuration processes. To understand societal fragmentation at large presupposes an empirical investigation of the countless ramifications that the phenomenon has acquired in contemporary societies. This assessment would go beyond the scope of the present study. Instead, some exemplary developments are presented here with reference to the transformation of labour markets. This allows us to frame some crucial ideal-typical features of contemporary societal fragmentation.

4.2  Increasing Social Fragmentation It is a widespread perception that after the systemic failure of 2008 neoliberalism should have disappeared (Kotz 2015), yet if it resists, this is due to the economic logic that has permeated the interchange between the public sector and private enterprises for about forty years. The resources and competences that have been outsourced from the public sector make it dependent on private enterprise and impede it from developing democratic control over the economy (Crouch 2013). Yet, a further consequence of the neoliberal age is the predominant societal fragmentation that substantially reduces the capacity of individual and collective agency to restart normative structuration processes. This is why sociology must understand what fragmentation means in a social-structural sense. The transformation of labour markets in countries formally governed by welfare-­state systems gives an insight into this issue, for it shows how the separation took place between the sectors of permanent employment, which are still covered by protective legislation, and the vast prairies of wage labour that have been conceded to open exploitation (Holst 2017). The keyword here is ‘dualisation of labour market’ (Emmenegger et al. 2014)—that is, in general the process by which society’s insiders and outsiders are increasingly treated differently with respect to access to workers’ rights (Greve 2021: 57–75). Thus, over recent decades the dualisation of labour markets has established, in particular, an institutionalised divide between the permanent and precarious workforce (Standing 2011).

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Dualisation is not simply the effect of capitalist restructuration processes; rather, it implies that social policies endorse them by increasingly differentiating rights, entitlements and services provided to different categories of recipients (Emmenegger et al. 2014: 10). Accordingly, policies in labour markets, social policy and the political representation of economic imperatives are increasingly linked and involved in creating, widening and deepening insider-outsider divides. This transformation cannot be labelled as a simple consequence of production cycles, because it is the result of conscious political choice that translates the needs of capitalist restructuration into social policies, by deepening existing inequalities and creating new institutional dualisms. Changes in industrial relations structure, particularly the increasing number of precarious types of jobs, are converted into social and labour market policy measures, often in the form of exceptions to the overall legislation, so that provisional legal orders undermine the universalism of constitutional principles and social protection. The resulting normative conflict establishes the principle that social orders do not have a universal and necessary validity, but rather are intermittent in space and time—a condition that characterised pre-modern societies, as Weber’s classical study on urban illegitimate orders shows (MWG I/22-5). Besides dualisation, labour markets are increasingly segmented by divides between public and private work relationship, type of education, geographical position as well as following enterprise restructuration strategies that increasingly resort to loan labour (Greve 2021: 64). In several welfare-state countries, the precarisation of labour relationships is on the rise (European Union 2015; Peña-Casas et  al. 2019); it transforms the status of a growing number of society’s members from that of full citizens to that of simple denizens of the territory (Standing 2014). Added to these phenomena is an increasing conditionality in the access to social protection measures that establishes requirements for people to behave in prescribed ways in order to access cash benefits or other welfare support. Conditionality is typically enforced through benefit sanctions of various kinds, reflecting a new vision of welfare, which is more focused on promoting pro-social behaviour than on protecting people against classic social risks like unemployment (Watts and Fitzpatrick 2018). The social-­ structural output of the interlaced processes of dualisation, precarisation and conditionality is a growing intermittency in the access to citizenship rights, so that agency must struggle to align with this normative inconsistency. Established social orders—in this case, social security principles

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rooted in constitutions and overall social legislation—are formally still in force, yet not for everybody, not in all circumstances and under an increasing number of conditions. The consequences for social legitimacy are severe and come to expression in a growing loss of social cohesion, in political apathy, segregation and latent riot, as well as in the rising tide of welfare populism and chauvinism (Greve 2021). The normative transformation of societies disseminates the perception that the illegitimated factual order, often dictated by the changing economic imperatives of crumbling late capitalism, erodes the legitimated legal order. In labour markets different phenomena show to which degree normative intermittency has become an everyday reality. The successful assault on the legislation in force multiplies the exceptions to existing regulation (ILO 2006). Furthermore, there is wide toleration for the fact that labour legislation is often not implemented factually, so that the grey zone of illegal work expands that surrounds official employment contracts. As the respective studies show, the impact of normative destructuration is different in single welfare-state systems. Nordic European countries witness lower levels of insider-outsider divides, whereas in continental, liberal and southern welfare-states, these are more likely to constitute a core characteristic of development (Emmenegger et  al. 2014). Yet, their common aspect is ‘normative dualisation’. The legislative framework of society is formally still in force, yet factually it is increasingly disregarded by a socio-­ economic praxis that induces growing inequality and discrimination between social groups (Greve 2021: 39–55). An increasing number of society’s members suffers a status-loss or gets no full access to citizenship rights, so that the legitimation basis for the rule of law narrows. The rest of society fears slipping into such a condition and becomes sensitised for political narratives that promise to restructure the welfare-state on a restrictive ethno-racial basis. Contrary to popular perception, these changes affect both the winning countries in the global economic challenge and those which are suffering the most. At the same time, they extend not only to marginal or outdated sectors of production but also to the leading sectors of large-scale industry. If we return in what follows to the fragmentation of production processes, which on the one hand relates to the German automotive industry and on the other to the most precarious sectors of labour market in Italy, it is to show which common features the dualisation of the labour market has in its most diverse environments. For similar developments can be observed in various welfare-state typologies, for example, concerning

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zero-hour contracts (Böttcher 2020; Hultzsch 2019). After the end of the Fordist era in industrial production, four changes have left a lasting mark on wage labour: feminisation, flexibilisation, fragmentation and financialisation (Rubery 2015). For a long time, the main emphasis of research has been on flexibilisation. Furthermore, the division of labour has been examined in the frame of in-house restructuration processes. Due to this narrow view, the division of labour on a larger scale has long been neglected by labour sociology. Yet, a new focus of research is developing that applies in particular to the rationalisation strategies that foster outsourcing and recombination of work units on a larger scale, as they ideal-typically appear in the transformation of the automotive industry (Wolf 2019: 137). The overall transformation of production strategies has become increasingly important in recent decades and has enforced a far-reaching fragmentation of labour relations. These do not primarily aim at in-house disaggregation of work, but at the splitting off, redistribution and recomposition of a multitude of work processes in and between different work organisations and organisational fields. As a result, the value chains are reorganised in production constellations, where very different labour and employment requirements coexist, even if they are directly dependent on each other. It is therefore important to ask what effects these fragmentation tendencies have on labour and employment relations (Wolf 2019: 139). The cooperation dynamics between workers and work units changes completely, as it can be ideal-typically observed in the development of the automotive industry, where the fragmentation tendencies are particularly evident. Here the changed purchasing market concepts of the final manufacturers are a central factor for the change of production design and work structures. Thus, in past decades, a new social geography of the entire vehicle manufacturing production system has arisen through the associated tendencies towards outsourcing and changes in procurement linkages. This restructuration tendency is characterised, on the one hand, by internationalisation, in particular with wide-ranging global outsourcing. On the other hand, it fosters new types of local industrial agglomerations, so that development, production and logistics units are no longer based in the same company, but scattered in different companies that are organisationally closely linked to each other (Wolf 2019: 145). Such a development causes a constant back and forth between out and insourcing that keeps both options permanently open. The single process sections (and the people working in them) are always ‘in reserve’ and find themselves just temporarily in the replaceable shell, into which the factory

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has been transformed. Uncertainty thus becomes the keynote of industrial relations. For the time being, the individual has been able to prove himself as an efficient unit according to the applicable criteria. Yet, nobody knows what happens tomorrow. Every arrangement is under permanent evaluation and labour contracts last in the best case three years. (Do you have the impression that the same thing happens in universities and research institutions? Norkus et al. took stock of this matter in 2016). Most activities involve not only several organisations, but also a multitude of actors, with different objectives, power resources as well as labour and contractual status. The working dependency and conflictual relations between these multitudes of actors overlap and intermingle. All work is project-based within a limited time frame, so that the access to acknowledged social rights like full-time, regular labour contracts and the prospect of continuity in employment is questioned in a structural sense. The risks of the renewed global division of labour—above all its increasingly visible and pointed fragmentation—thus become evident to all actors and strongly limit the workers’ bargaining behaviour and trade union organisation. Since the mid-1980s, favourable opportunities for the implementation of flexibilisation strategies in the deployment of personnel in companies have increasingly emerged, mainly as a result of government measures to deregulate labour law, which were intensively used by companies in the automotive industry. This deregulation consisted not least of various measures to liberalise temporary loan labour (in particular by successively increasing the maximum duration of temporary employment), which in Germany culminated in the so-called Hartz reforms adopted by the Social Democratic-Green government between 2003 and 2005 (Wolf 2019: 160). As a result, from 2003 to 2010, temporary employment relationships in the German economy more than doubled to almost 900,000 and in the automotive industry (including supplier companies) about 150,000 temporary workers were employed in 2012, which corresponds to a share of almost 20% of all workers employed in this industry (ibid.). This trend can still be observed to this day, even though in recent years there has been a certain reversal towards a re-regulation of labour law, which provided for a reduction of the maximum duration of temporary employment and of wage differentials in the direction of ‘equal pay for equal work’ (ibid.). From the 1990s onwards, new ‘greenfield’ factories of German corporations were built in the east of Germany in a favourable environment, which functioned as an experimental field for extreme versions of factory planning with very low vertical integration. In Wolf’s case study, factory

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planning was based from the outset on the target of 25% of the total production volume for the final manufacturer’s own share, with simultaneous massive involvement of numerous onsite work-contractors. In these areas of automotive industry, which were quickly regarded as a success model, extremely fragmented work rapidly became the norm (Wolf 2019: 163). Around the year 2000, a company-strategic, fragmented construction kit had emerged throughout the German car industry, which made it possible to put together specific organisational and production solutions. These depended on local conditions and specific legal, collective agreement or labour market rules, which were then packaged in different ‘company shells’ and characterised to varying degrees by features of fragmented work (ibid.). Parallel worlds of work and employment thus emerged. The fragmented arrangements aimed not least at circumventing collective bargaining commitments and exploiting wage differentials, so that the use of loan labour gained particularly sharp contours in the automotive industry. The resulting dualisation of employment conditions, institutionalising different treatment for equal work, is perceived by workers as a failure of the overall labour market legislation, so that they call for its reinstatement (Wolf 2019: 168). Within existing welfare-state systems that legitimise social inequality through measures of social protection, growing islands of extra-legality establish themselves and thrive. Social fragmentation generates normative intermittency that is perceived as a failure of the formally stated legal orders. Claims for renewed normative structuration are formulated, yet collective social agency struggles to form itself and trigger processes of societal transformation in highly fragmented environments. With respect to this, it is often argued that this condition only concerns a minority of workers for restricted time laps. Indeed, this was what many Social Democratic and Green analysts thought in Germany as their government passed the legislation that introduced the measures of labour market flexibilisation around 2003/2005. Yet, the precarisation not only endured but also expanded as the transformation of the automotive industry in Eastern Germany ideal-typically shows (IG Metall 2015). The increase of the precarious workforce not only represents the twenty-first-century’s variation of the ‘industrial reserve army’ scheme that undermines solidarity among employees (Marx 1887: chap. 25). It also deepens social divides in the sense of a reedited version of the so-­ called two-thirds society that makes the negated access to social rights for the precarious into the condition of social protection for the remaining permanent workforce (Glotz 1984). This development disseminates fears

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of social decline, which grip not only large sectors of wage labour but also the middle classes that are less in step with the technological transformation of production processes (Reckwitz 2020). Suffering caused by living conditions transforms into an endemic loss of legitimation for the normative arrangements aimed at ensuring social integration of complex societies. Yet, social fragmentation cannot be simply classified as a side effect of current economic restructuration. It is rather the most visible aspect of an overarching societal transformation that can be observed in Europe’s industrial heart (Nachtwey 2019) and extends to the countries of Southern Europe that become increasingly dependent on it (Simonazzi et al. 2013). In Germany, real net earnings and productivity had been substantially growing in parallel from the 1950s until the beginning of the 1990s. Yet, since 1993 the two curves diverge; productivity continues to grow, but the annual real net earnings decrease. The average wages (a figure that also includes the highest salaries) have now been falling for nearly twenty years. The resulting social divide is attested by the development of household income between 1998 and 2014. The upper 60% record an increase in household income, whereas the lower 40% experience significant income decrease. The divide in living standards and in income enlarges, thanks to a snowball effect leading to losses in healthcare, welfare-state services and pensions contributions, which later provoke old-age poverty and intervention by the public sector to limit it. Phenomena that despaired in the golden age of the West German welfare-state reappear, including the increase in occupational discontinuity, the spread of the employed, who are in poverty, and the fact that a stable orbit of employment, if ever, is reached only in an individual’s forties or later. Nachtwey calls this development the ‘escalator effect’. People are working hard, but they do not make any progress, as if they were climbing a descending escalator. Social and generational mobility decreases, accompanied by the melting of the middle classes. In Germany, the export master and leading European economic power, two-thirds of market citizens thus enjoy increasing protection of their consumer rights, while one-third of society’s members have increasing difficulties to access their rights as social citizens. The overall societal normativity is characterised by an increasing divergence between the formally granted status of citizenship and the factual intermittency of its enjoyment, which becomes ever more difficult the more one’s working-life history is affected by the dualisation, precarisation and conditionality of labour market legislation.

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The situation in Italy—as the ideal-type of a declining industrial power (Gallino 2003)—is far more problematic, if compared with the social fragmentation in a country like Germany, which belongs to the winners of globalisation. Here, recent waves of flexibilisation in labour market relations easily combined with traditional trends towards illegal employment, so that the divide between the legal framework and the factual practices of wage labour reached an inedited scope (Pulignano 2017). Fana’s political critique of this development gives astonishing insights into the phenomenology of the Italian way to social fragmentation (2017). Beneath protected labour sectors such as the civil service and major industrial enterprises, where the union’s struggles of the welfare-state age achieved labour protection legislation (that lasted from 1970 until 2014/2015), Italy has always been a country with high rates of unemployment and illegal work (De Gregorio and Giordano 2016). Dual labour markets have a structural tradition here. Yet, the development since the 2000s has substantially speeded up the phenomenon (Fana 2017: 15–30). Since 2003 the legislation for the so-called jobs on call introduced intermittent work relations, first only for specific sectors like tourism, entertainment, call centres, surveillance services, and limited it to employees aged under twenty-five or over forty-five (later limited to the over 55s) who were already included on the unemployment register. In 2008, a system was added of ‘vouchers’ for care and assistance activities of short-­ term duration such as babysitting, caregivers, private lessons or gardening. Yet, in 2012 a new reform extended their use to all sectors with the declared intention of an easier regularisation of precarious labour relations, including social security contributions, to be delivered to the workers. The narrative of the reform was that of bringing to light Italy’s traditional illegal work. Yet, instead, it induced an increase of labour market dualisation, so that in 2016, 1.5 million workers were paid by means of vouchers. This development led to a trade union reaction that called for a referendum. Thus, in 2017, vouchers could have been abolished by popular vote, yet the centre-left government obliterated vouchers to avoid the referendum, only to reintroduce a very similar measure soon afterwards. The flexibilised labour market legislation of the centre-left government, led by Mr Renzi, which since 2014 also included the freedom to dismiss without just cause, was limited by the populist government that came into office after the 2018 election, yet without completely abolishing the changes that had been made.

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As in other countries, in recent decades several other phenomena developed in Italy besides ‘on-call’ work, including the expansion of the gig economy and the misuse of students on internships, or civilian volunteers to replace missing permanent employees in companies, museums and public administrations (Fana 2017: 57–90). The factual expansion of dual markets coincided with the measures intended to legalise marginal or illegal labour relationships, which existed alongside contractual work. However, in reality, this led to a massive extension of precarious work, by substituting and fragmenting regular positions in hundreds of low-cost precarious tasks. Perhaps the most striking example of how labour market dualisation expanded in Italy is that of service cooperatives. To circumvent labour legislation, these legal persons, whom the legislator imagined as a measure to increase social solidarity in industrial relations, have been increasingly diverted from their original intent. Tasks that used to be carried out within public services or companies, and not just cleaning or security services, have been more often contracted out to external cooperatives. Since their collaborators are not classified as employees, according to standard labour contracts, but as ‘partners of the cooperative’, their work performance can be subject to pay restrictions and shift extensions that would not be possible under the rule of sectoral collective agreements. In recent years, the gig economy added a number of underpaid jobs to the Italian phenomenology of dualised labour markets, so that piecework, which had been banned, thanks to decades of trade union struggles, celebrated its triumphant return (INAPP 2022). Furthermore, the measures for the flexibilisation of labour markets have made the legislation factually unenforceable for the protection of overtime, night and weekend work. The dualisation of labour markets became so important that it challenges the principles of equality among working citizens, proportionality of retribution and the right-to-fair working conditions, as stated in the Italian constitution under articles 1, 3 and 36 (Zagrebelsky 2013). Germany and Italy ideal-typically represent the two extremes in the scale of what can be observed concerning social fragmentation caused by labour market dualisation in countries of the European Union that still maintain a welfare-state system. Beyond the boundaries of the EU, let alone beyond OECD countries, the condition of wage labour continues to develop in a direction that makes the institutionalisation of welfare-state systems hardly achievable (ILO 2020, 2021). Convergence towards just and regulated work conditions is not the overall development tendency

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that can be ascertained at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, social rights are undergoing a consistent erosion, so that normative intermittency extends to important spheres of society. The colonialist attitude that downplays the seriousness of the phenomenon as something that concerns ‘development countries’ underestimates the globalisation potential that characterises the upcoming conditions of uncontrolled labour exploitation and the resulting social fragmentation (Fitzi 2020). The treatment reserved for migrants in ‘developed countries’ gives an insight into how more radical forms of labour market dualisation and social fragmentation infiltrate societies formally ruled by welfare-state systems. Here, the exploitation of the migrant workforce often establishes islands of open illegality within the frame of the rule of law. Typically, the condition of legal precariousness in which migrants find themselves is exploited to the advantage of native economic interests. In Southern Europe’s and US American agriculture, for example, the migrant population is compelled to work under conditions that qualify this sector as tolerated slavery, that reintroduces gangmaster systems for hiring day labourers (Brah Hema 2019; Palumbo and Sciurba 2018). Wider society does not remain impermeable to these transformations; they trigger phenomena of ‘under-stratification’ that generate new sources of socio-economic and cultural conflict (Hoffmann-Nowotny 1973). A labour market outside the margins of minimum welfare-state standards threatens to expand, by pulling the unskilled native workforce into the spiral of the precarious workforce. This develops fears of social decline as well as racist and xenophobic attitudes. The result is an ethnically implied conflict among the lower strata of society that do not find a common platform of claims and enter a dangerous spiral of competition for those willing to accept the worst working conditions to survive. Yet, the ongoing phenomena of social fragmentation tend to become opaque due to social self-interpretation, which often also affects the debates of the social sciences and critical theory, because it merely focuses on the formal normative structure of society and stops short of asking about its factual implementation. Critical sociology must be able to sustain further questioning; it must uncover the levels of normative intermittency, which societal fragmentation induces, and explain the mechanisms enabling its precarious, yet recurring validity. To achieve this goal, critical sociology must develop a reflexive methodology that overcomes the predominant representation of society and uncovers the processes that bring

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about the everyday shaping of social reality. This requires a greater effort of reflexivity with regard to socio-historical change. It also calls for the development of a methodology that is capable of grasping the nature of change by probing deeper into the predominant axiomatics of the social sciences.

4.3  Societal Self-Interpretation and Sociological Critique The critical analysis of social reality always struggles with the mechanisms of cultural hegemony, which aim to legitimise the status quo and conceal the causes of its contested development, in order to promote particular interests (Gramsci 2014: 1638, 2010). Since the neoliberal revolution permeated complex societies, spreading the illusion of a ‘post-ideological era’, neutrality in functional differentiation was increasingly lost, so that today societal transformation is characterised by unprecedented colonisation processes between value spheres. The economy not only became widely independent from the normative control that society as a whole exercised over it in the age of the welfare-state compromise. In addition to the classic Durkheimian scenario, in which the economy progressively escapes societal processes of normative structuration (Durkheim 2019: 1–43), since the 1980s the profit logic managed to successfully colonise other societal domains, starting with politics. The weakening of the reflexive potential and critical awareness of society depleted the capacity for normative reordering which Habermas could still rely on in the era of the so-called administered capitalism (1973). Yet, the ideological promise of globalisation to produce prosperity for the many, thanks to an unlimited market liberalisation, and starting with the labour market, remained unfulfilled. The economic and financial crisis of 2007/2008 showed starkly just how far social reality was from the predominant neoliberal narrative, whilst the first two decades of the new century endemically confirmed the perception. Forty years of neoliberal revolution have bequeathed an exponential increase of social inequality and a global ecological emergency (Piketty 2014). Today, both phenomena must be tackled in relation to each other so that the issue of a new normative structuration of complex societies becomes a crucial topic of the political agenda. Yet, a shared consensus on the regulatory framework

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is missing. This is vital to achieve societal structuration processes in a comparable way to the welfare-state construction after WWII. The present condition of social fragmentation and normative disorientation is certainly due to the progressive destructuration of the intermediate bodies of society and the shifting grip of welfare-state institutions on social inequality. Yet, it has also a deeper structural root, which must become the subject of sociological analysis. Social change in complex societies has taken on forms and, above all, a dynamics that makes it ever more difficult to set up subjects of collective social action that are capable of becoming bearers of normative structuration processes. The crisis of the societal transformation potential has its origins in a dual tendency towards fragmentation, which is inherent to the logic of modern social differentiation based on organic solidarity, to put it in Durkheim’s words. Highly fragmented social actors face increasingly precarious social relations, whose rate of normative intermittency reaches unprecedented levels. Accordingly, sociology must understand all these phenomena in their interaction. To achieve this goal, it must resume the interrupted path of theoretical construction that allows for developing a reflexive distance with regard to both social change and societal self-interpretation. On this methodological basis, sociology can develop a diagnosis of the current social transformation and deliver the analytical tools for a critique of the hegemonial culture that legitimises it. Achieving this research programme today is more difficult than it was in other topic phases for the epistemological refoundation of the social sciences. The current pace of societal self-interpretation is not only faster because of the intermittent dynamics of social transformation. It is also all the more uncertain, because the ongoing restructuration processes of crumbling late capitalism are highly disoriented. Hence, societal change induces the emergence of short-living narratives that are difficult to unravel because of their confused and provisional character. Shortly before the pandemic, the social conflict inherent to contemporary societies represented itself as an ideological clash between globalist neoliberalism and sovereignist nationalism. Yet, the pandemic has reshuffled the cards. The spirit of the welfare-state compromise seems to be making a comeback. Its stamina, however, is uncertain. The conflict lines are blurred and will be redefined over the coming decades. Faced with this development, the ability to enhance a critique of the dominant development model and reconstruct the terms of a new environmentally compatible welfare-state compromise appears substantially weakened, at least at the level of societal

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self-interpretation. The self-defence capacity of societies against the uncertain processes of economic restructuration, which characterises crumbling late capitalism, risks taking the path of the authoritarian drifts of the twentieth century, possibly revisited in a populist fashion (Polanyi 2001). Democratic public opinion thus rightly distances itself from this trend. Nevertheless, sociology must approach it in an analytical-reflexive sense (Karsenti and Lemieux 2017). Claims for a restrictive transformation of social protection systems in an ethno-racial, sovereignist sense must become the subject of a sociological critique capable of reconstructing the social divide between interests aimed at the valorisation of capital and the protection of the living conditions of the most disadvantaged social strata. In the so-called post-­ ideological era, this complex of social issues has experienced an interested oblivion by the predominant ideology. Yet, sociological critique cannot limit itself to advocating equality of social rights between male and female, the permanent and precarious, the native and migrant workforce. It must be able to explain the processes of social transformation that enforce precarisation, fragmentation and ethnocentric closure. In order to achieve this research programme social critique must thus transform into sociological analysis. This, according to the most recent exegesis, was already the outlet of Durkheim’s analysis of the historical and theoretical relationship between socialism and sociology (Callegaro and Lanza 2015; Karsenti and Lemieux 2017). The question, however, is how the transition from critical societal self-interpretation to reflexive social science can be accomplished in the present situation. This is crucial not least because putting social divides into fresh focus is only possible in close connection with the appraisal of normative societal structuration which is compatible with environmental protection. In order to achieve the task of analysing the social and environmental limits of the predominant development model, sociology must be able to reactivate its theoretical heritage beyond the stratified societal self-­ interpretation of the last few decades and readapt it to the analysis of the ongoing social transformation. This implies a consistent effort to go beyond the current state of art in social sciences. Societal self-­interpretation is characterised by cycles of oblivion that also expand to the social sciences and undermine their epistemological foundations (Connerton 2009). Since the 1980s this peculiar development was characterised by the fashionable success of the post-modern and deconstructive epistemology (Cusset 2005). The related breaking down of all methodological

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boundaries between literature and social science jeopardised in nuce the cognitive mission of sociology that the classics had invested considerable epistemological effort to substantiate scientifically (Habermas 1985: 219–247). The need to gain distance from societal self-interpretation so as to develop a reflexive-critical analysis of social reality must therefore remain unsatisfied, because any sociological examination of society was framed merely as one narrative among others. During the neoliberal age, the hegemony of this ideology of the ‘absolute hermeneutic circle’ in the best romantic tradition factually resulted in almost denying the right of sociology to continue as a subject of the academic canon (Berlin 2001). As a consequence, the epistemological domain of sociology was progressively reabsorbed into societal self-interpretation by the expansion of a legion of highly fragmented cultural studies (Peters 1999; Warren and Vavrus 2002). An approach of ‘activist critique’ developed for several social issues that was grounded on the lowest level of reflexive distance towards ongoing social events (Karsenti and Lemieux 2017). There is nothing wrong with this attitude in itself. It is just that this political engagement cannot substitute the knowledge function of sociological analysis that critically accompanies social movements, by giving more structured insights into the social reality in which they develop. If this function is identified with the activist classification of social issues, the possibility of gaining a reflexive distance towards political dynamics is consistently eroded. Through the two opposite, but parallel developing tendencies to narrativisation and politicisation, which characterised the neoliberal age, sociology was thus completely reabsorbed into societal self-­ interpretation and so becoming incapable of delivering its critical performance. Now that the grand narrative of neoliberal capitalism has entered a crisis, the time seems ripe to reverse this trend: by actualising and renewing the epistemological and categorial work of sociology and by tackling in an innovative way the question of the relationship between normative social criticism and descriptive sociological analysis that gains reflexive distance from societal self-interpretation. During this work-in-progress, sociology encounters the methodological approach, which, aside from all further differences, is common to the intellectual trends that founded it as a science. In its various facets it proposes strategies to disentangle sociological analysis from the ongoing production of social narratives. In this perspective, Durkheim bases the ability of sociology to achieve the transition to an objective reflection on social reality on the identification of the

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structures of collective action that govern individual agency (1895). Simmel initiates the analysis of the socio-epistemological conditions of possibility for social action and social structure from the viewpoint of its participant, in a way that mutatis mutandis would be later adopted by phenomenological sociology (1908). Weber integrates this approach with an analysis of social reality from the viewpoint of its observer and systematises the relationship between normative social criticism and objective social research in clearly defined methodological steps (1904a). These include making explicit the normative motivation of sociological research (Erkenntnisinteresse), analysing the value reference of social action and social structure as well as sociologically assessing the plausibility or difficulty in realising their purposes. Eventually, this methodological approach associates with a ‘re-entry strategy’ that allows the reconnection of scientific reflection and social action in the form of a cognitive service that the social domain of science grants to the social domain of politics in the sense of sociological reflexivity. There is thus no denial in the terms of classical sociological theory of the necessary interaction between the ethical, cognitive and political approach to social reality. Rather, what emerges is an epistemological structuration of the necessary steps to facilitate their conscious relationship, by simultaneously avoiding the colonisation of social science through the logic of societal self-interpretation. By applying this theoretical and methodological heritage to the analysis of today’s social reality, sociology has at its disposal the means to overcome its present intermingling with societal self-interpretation, which denies a reflexive awareness of the ongoing societal transformation. With regard to the current condition of social fragmentation and normative intermittency, the classical strategies of epistemological differentiation from societal self-interpretation allow sociology above all to remove a number of axiomatic assumptions that social science adopted in an unreflective manner in the past. The precondition of this performance is that sociology becomes capable of reconstructing itself as a tri-dimensional science of social action, social structure and social legitimation. Its starting point is an analysis of the precarious and intermittent structuration processes that characterise today’s societies. In this sense, the methodologically controlled use of both analytical perspectives of the participant in social action and structuration, and of its observer, helps to transform unquestioned assumptions into epistemological questions that a sociology of current societal change shall pose. Each approach is grounded on a specific sociological epistemology that can be reconstructed in the work of

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the classics (Fitzi 2004, 2019). They appear relevant for application in the following chapters to analyse different issues that affect agency as well as social structure in current societies. In addition to this, the analytical approach of the present study will focus on the third dimension of social reality that has been widely underestimated in mainstream sociology in recent decades: the contradictory relationship between the logic of social action and social structure. The fundamental juncture of social reality, which for classical sociology characterises the structural conflict of modernity, is constituted by ‘social legitimacy’. It implies that for society to exist a coordination must take place (precarious or stable, conflictual or consensual) between the divergent logics of social action and social structure. This third dimension of social reality constitutes both the main empirical problem of complex societies and the greatest epistemological challenge for sociology. It is therefore often dismissed, relying on the sort of axiomatic assumptions, which populate literature especially since the structural-functionalist turn in sociological theory. The ideas of the ‘spontaneous emergence’ of social structure or social systems, of the ‘structural coupling’ between psychic and social systems, or of the ‘desirability’ of the normative orders necessary to coordinate social action are just a few examples of how sociological theory building has sought to neutralise the fundamental epistemological issue of social science (Luhmann 1997: 778; Parsons 1949: 710). Yet, due to the high levels of deregulation that characterised the neoliberal era, the problematic nature of social validity (soziale Geltung in Weber’s terminology) has increased considerably. The spread of normative intermittency that characterises today’s social reality multiplies the effects of a ‘shifting validity’ that has a structural character in modern social orders. Accordingly, sociology must make the question of social legitimacy and its crisis (once again) the main focus of its interest. Here we address this complex of social structuration issues under the label of ‘shifting validity’. It constitutes the social backdrop for the wide phenomenology of loss in political legitimacy that permeates the neoliberal age and its aftermath. Yet, to understand the dynamics of the crisis, the sociological diagnosis of failing social structuration in complex societies goes through all three dimensions of social reality: agency, structure and legitimacy. The related number of questions is examined, by applying to them the necessary analytical concepts originating from the heritage of sociological theory, yet not without updating and adapting their ideal-­ typical construction to the present social issues. Methodologically, the

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analysis starts with the assessment of the weakening force of social-­ structuration processes and their consequences for the subsistence and transformation of social structure. This investigation leads to the examination of the uncertainties, the fragmentation and the loss of emancipation potential affecting social agency, individual and collective, in contemporary societies. The resulting state of normative intermittency in action coordination is then analysed in its current development that establishes social orders, yet with limited spatiotemporal boundaries of validity. So, the main implications of shifting legitimacy for social structuration can be addressed. Hence, the study comes to the conclusions of the sociological diagnosis that leads into political reflection, which is developed based on the awareness of the paradigmatic change of reference logic that therefore becomes necessary. The results of the sociological assessment for the current societal development can thus be translated into its normative-critical evaluation, yet grounded on an analytical-reflexive work that differentiates itself from societal self-interpretation. The presentation strategy for the sociological diagnosis envisages a methodologically guided transition from ‘theory of social structure’ to ‘theory of social action’, and after an important interlude in the domain of ‘theory of social validity’, it finally exposes the consequences of what becomes apparent from analysis of the other dimensions of social reality for the theory of social structure. Throughout the exposition there is an alternation between the analytical perspective of the ‘participant in’ and the ‘observer of’ social reality, to better illuminate different aspects of the agency’s social praxis and the structuration processes that are relevant for the understanding of current societal change. This modus operandi, some may say, is the classic sociological bathtub (Coleman 1990: 1–23), yet there are elements of essential analytical innovation that transcend the traditional conception of the scheme, which for its part does not take into account some crucial aspects of the sociological research legacy. In particular, Coleman’s argument is undermined by the fact that he reconstructs the way that Weber’s methodology was received in mainstream US American sociology, by dismissing two fundamental passages of Weber’s historical-sociological reconstruction in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1904b/1905, MWG I/18: 257–492, 493–547). Weber does not argue that the Calvinist religious dogmatic of predestination (religious values of society) generates modern capitalism (economic organisation of society) simply by inducing a transformation of economic behaviour. Decisive factors of Weber’s historical reconstruction

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are, on the one hand, the ‘troubles in action orientation’ that generate its unintended consequences—mainly because of its emotional component, so characterising the transposition of value systems into specific forms of ‘conduct of life’ (Fitzi 2022). On the other hand, Weber develops a reconstruction of the structuration processes that establish binding social orders and conform the transposition of innovative modalities in ‘conduct of life’ back into social structuration. The Calvinist religious dogmatic of predestination furthered a rationalised and pragmatic ‘life conduct’, in which professional life became an instrument of religious asceticism. Yet, the historical sources indicate that an unbearable psychic discomfort was generated by the fact that believers did not have the right to collect signs of their religious salvation, nor to recur to the relief of confession because of the predestination doctrine. Over time, this malaise compelled the Calvinist clergy to take measures to alleviate the suffering in their communities. Pastoral advice was disseminated that success in professional life could at least be considered a sign of not being unwelcome to God. This unintentional development of the ‘Calvinist life conduct’ gradually established the idea that material success was in some way correlated to the state of grace of the faithful. Through a subsequent historical transformation, from this approach emerged the maxim of life-conduct, according to which each individual has a duty to indefinitely increase his or her wealth; the ethical ideal, which constitutes the ‘spirit of modern capitalism’, as Weber finds it formulated in Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman (1940). Yet, the breakpoints of this socio-­ historical development can be grasped only if the emotional and not rational components of social action are taken into account that determined the transformation of the Calvinist life-conduct in concert with the purpose-­rational and value-based ones. Weber delivers a methodology of controlled analytical steps to develop this kind of research so that the transition from structure to action theory acquires clearly defined contours, covering the necessary dimensions, not only of social action but also of social legitimation. Once the descent from structure to action is complete, the Protestant Ethic reconstructs the passages that historically allowed the transposition of ascetic life-conduct into social-structural change. Weber addresses the issue in the chapter on the ‘Protestant Sects’, which is paradoxically ignored by Coleman. Here, Weber shows how the ascetic life-conduct was transformed into a collective praxis of social control by the social organisations who selected the personnel best adapted to follow their strict rules, gradually spreading

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maxims of behaviour that made the increase of personal patrimony its grounding value. Hence, Weber’s sociological-historical explanation comes back from the analysis of social action to social structure, by describing the corresponding processes of social structuration and thus concluding its itinerary. Coleman’s strategy to ground a sociology that is reduced to the axioms and the modelling praxis of economics, so reconducting the homo sociologicus to the homo economicus, resulted in a reductive and partially caricatured presentation of the sociological method of inquiry. Instead, if it is taken seriously in its three-dimensionality and in its ability to take account of the essential role of non-purpose-rational action for the structuration of social reality, it delivers the analytical instruments that are necessary to understand the contemporary transformation of social reality. Yet, to achieve this goal the analytical frame of sociology must be consistently updated. The methodologically driven transition from the investigation of weakening social structuration to the increasing troubles in social action orientation, up to the shifting legitimacy of social reality or the manifold transformation of social structure in complex societies, which characterise the next chapters, shall contribute to this renewal of sociology. Its purpose is to meet the theoretical challenges posed by the increasing normative intermittency of complex societies.

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PART II

Sociological Diagnosis

CHAPTER 5

Evidences in Structure Theory

5.1   Weakening Social Structuration The loss of legitimacy that affects shifting welfare-state systems, dualised labour markets and colonisation processes between societal domains results in a destabilisation of social structure. A widening gulf between factual, rapidly changing social structuration processes and the shifting effectiveness of institutionalised normative orientation and control drags social actors into repeated experiences of normative intermittency and social fragmentation. The wide-ranging phenomenology that previous chapters have outlined sets the task of understanding the social processes that increasingly weaken social structuration, by eroding its normative codification. At a first glance, three major aspects of the issue stand out: 1. The increasing powerlessness of face-to-face interaction to grant and control the function of social structuration in complex societies. 2. The accelerating alternation between processes of social structuration and destructuration. 3. The failure of social structure to consistently and permanently emerge from increasingly magmatic societal change. All three development tendencies call into question crucial axiomatic assumptions that establish the analytical framework of the social sciences. One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence, which characterised the lockdown phases during the global pandemic 2020/2021, was that complex societies seemed to go on functioning, despite a strong reduction of face-to-face interaction. This ‘new normal’ reality was a result of the state © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_5

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of exception caused by the pandemic, yet it gives an insight into a basic modality of ‘everyday social structuration’ in complex societies. With growing levels of societal differentiation, relationships with ‘anonymous thirds’ become increasingly relevant that are mediated by institutionalised interactive media. The classic example of the phenomenon is given by the social function of money, which becomes an institution all the more independent from its bearers, and reconnects them beyond face-to-face interaction (Simmel 1900). Social actors accept coloured sheets of paper (or numbers that appear on a computer or mobile phone screens) as a guarantee that, in future, anonymous third parties will provide them with performances comparable to the ones they delivered in exchange for those abstract means of payment. In Weber’s analytical frame, this kind of intermittent social relationship is based on passive and often unreflected ‘consensual action’ (Einverständnishandeln) (cf. Fitzi 2015: 267–279), which takes place in order to ensure the consistency of money on the temporal and spatial axis, that is in the future and in social interaction ‘beyond familiarity’ (MWG I/12: 389–440; Weber 2012: 273–301). Yet, this extension of social relationship beyond the spatiotemporal boundaries of face-to-face interaction not only characterises economic exchange. Social structuration in general increasingly involves a number of relationships with anonymous thirds that social actors are not aware of most of the time. This process relieves agency and grants high degrees of fluidification in social interaction, reducing the investment of emotional energies needed to enforce membership in society, yet it also determines a significant loss of control over networks of social relationship. Face-to-face interaction, which allows the exploitation of the full potential of communication between social actors, is progressively relegated to intimate domains of life, to the detriment of conscious social cooperation in the public sphere. The process is driven by relief mechanisms that marginalise active involvement between social actors, who rely all the more on passive consent towards pre-cast social structuration processes, instead of actively participating in shaping social relation frames. It is the complex of unreflexively consensual relationships with anonymous thirds that holds the structure of complex societies together, to the detriment of face-to-face contacts. By contrast, social actors manage to maintain a limited number of face-to-face relations, which have a high emotional significance and help to legitimise social life, even though their overall social weight tends to become negligible with increasing social complexity.

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The development of highly differentiated societies severely limits the possibility of social actors to shape the public sphere. Rules of common action can hardly be negotiated with anonymous thirds, whose reciprocal relation is mediated by institutionalised social media, such as money. Social relationship networks thus spread that are not based on communicatively established common rules, but on passive acceptance of anonymous systemic imperatives. An unreflective consensual adaptation to the status quo gradually replaces the conscious legitimation of social reality, so that a shift takes place from rational to passive and often uncritical orientations with respect to action. This habitual adherence to the rules of the social game, however, becomes problematic, if the rhythm of structuration processes accelerates and imposes an increased intermittency between the reproduction of familiar action frames, their deconstruction and the implementation of new ones under the impulsion of forced systemic imperatives. It then generates states of disorientation that do not possess the critical potential to frame the ongoing societal transformation; the result is in an irrational increase in fears that tend to lead to a search for scapegoats. The alternation between states of uncritical adherence to predominant frames of social action, often governed by passive consent, and states of profound disorientation produced by the rapid imposition of new systemic imperatives to adhere to, characterises the uncertain pace of development of crumbling late capitalism. It is a mix of unreflective social apathy and an obligation to activate ad hoc social structuration processes serving decisions that are not democratically shared, so that it structurally undermines the foundations of social legitimacy. The accelerating alternation between processes of social structuration and destructuration introduces a condition of ‘solid liquidity’ that characterises complex societies. These undergo a high degree of differentiation and thereby a multiplication of social relationships that individuals have to entertain. Accelerated life rhythms as well as intensified social exchanges on the basis of merely temporary contacts and collisions in urbanised environments give the impression of a progressive liquefaction of social life. Individual action orientations are increasingly dependent on each other, so that their objective validity becomes an expression of their reciprocal relativity. In consequence, normative structuration takes the shape of a fluid interdependence of relative and temporary value orientations. This transformation not only affects the monetary economy but also expands to other qualitative differentiated domains of society, starting from legal validity that increasingly subsists on the basis of circular enforcement

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procedures. The formation of the social fabric results from a competition between intermittent institutionalisation processes with contradictory normativity. This, in turn, is magnified by the reciprocal colonisation between societal domains. Social legitimation thus establishes itself in retrospect as the result of political processes that grant decision-making authorities the interpretive power to stabilise the intermittent unfolding of conflictual normative structuration. A vicious circle arises between primary and secondary legitimacy which multiplies the normative instability of complex societies. Political bodies endowed with interpretative power must deliver a legitimation ex post of the existing social reality, including its inequalities, yet they do not have the means to improve its factual conditions. In the wake of growing structural intermittency, an entropic development trend in social legitimacy thus spreads that induces the crisis of normative governance (Schäfer 2008). Shifting societal structuration, labelled by Bauman as fluidification (2000), however, conceals structural mechanisms that grant it a sort of precarious resilience. Accelerated restructuration processes that rely on strong normative intermittency replace the institutional implementation of the welfare-state compromise as it was observed after WWII. The long durée of normative structuration therefore gives way to a nervous alternation of institutionalisation and deconstruction processes that adapt to the increasingly uncertain pace of economic cycles. Normative frames of social action that seek timely solutions for environmental catastrophes, health emergencies or economic depressions can be rapidly established. Yet, they are ready to be abandoned as soon as the colonisation conflicts between societal domains impose a new equilibrium of forces. The overall result of the process is a liquid solidity of normative arrangements in complex societies. Normative structuration processes do not disappear by means of generalised social fluidification. Rather, they are highly fragmented and pursued in an accelerated process of hetero-directed restructuration, with increasingly delimited spatiotemporal boundaries of validity. The most eloquent example of the ongoing societal transformation is given by the dualisation of labour markets. Here, ever new measures of productive reorganisation together with legislation for higher contractual flexibility lead to a substantial emptying out of welfare-state principles protecting the workforce. Such principles are nevertheless formally maintained. Similar developments characterise other areas of complex societies. In politics, the increased volatility of electoral behaviour, due to the creeping social legitimation crisis, favours the spread of conflicts over the

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redistribution of accumulated political capital (Bourdieu 1981). Established political normativity that emerges from democratic electoral procedures is then fragmented in temporary reallocations of political influence characterising the conflict between established political parties and populist challengers (Fitzi 2019). A similar transformation also applies for the art market. An increased financial investment in art work not only transformed the valorisation mechanisms of a market that is now dominated by an oligarchy of major collectors, auction houses, international fairs and a small group of major galleries (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017). Artistic creativity gradually adapted to the systemic imperative of a contentless interpretability of artworks that can be associated with changing narratives, which corroborate speculative investments in highly differentiated market scenarios (Schultheis et al. 2015). As a result, the logic of the societal domain of art is so deeply colonised that its autonomous normative structuration is reduced to a functional minimum that narratively still justifies the existence of ‘artworks’, which can be distinguished from junk bonds dealt on the stock market. Residual normative structuration takes place, yet it is submitted to a hetero-directed fluidification of art as a sphere of culture. Under the label of solid liquidity, the accelerating alternation between processes of social structuration and destructuration can be reconstructed with reference to other processes of colonisation between logics of different societal domains as, for example, between politics and religion. The common mechanisms that underlie the different expressions of the phenomenon, however, reveal a further bottleneck of social structuration. In today’s social reality, whose symptomatic was discussed earlier, social structure fails to consistently and enduringly emerge from an increasingly magmatic societal change. The validity of any cultural form and social institution is undermined by the creativity of social action that ceaselessly flows on and continually creates new structural arrangements that claim permanence. This is the positive potential of modern societal differentiation that conforms to the fluidity of organic solidarity. Yet, a distinction must be drawn between physiological and pathological developments of the socio-cultural dynamics. Instead of replacing outdated societal structures with consistent new ones, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, historical change stagnates within the uncertainties of crumbling late capitalism, so that the creativity of social action does not convert to institutionalisation processes. The idling of social structuration processes accumulates a ‘distress of culture’ that undermines social legitimacy, so that

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societal life cycles assume a feverish character, which does not result in a normative stabilisation. The consequence is not only societal liquefaction in Baumann’s sense but also an active pathological development: the constant resumption of structuration processes that fail in their capacity to achieve ‘social emergence’ (Sawyer 2005). Social structure thus constantly coagulates and dissolves anew, compelling social actors to accept provisional normative arrangements, which they do not rationally choose, and these crumble long before a critical communicative action could modify them. This development undermines the basic axiomatic assumption of sociological structuralism. Sociological theory thus faces the task of reorganising its analytical categories to address the failing social structuration that characterises the age of crumbling late capitalism. The outline to develop this process of categorisation is given by the critical analysis of the axiomatic underlying the structuralist emergence theorem. Indeed, with the definition of ‘social facts’ Durkheim already introduced a postulate of social emergence (1895: chap. 1). Yet, he did not deny that the subsistence of social structure depends on the fact that it grants social actors the possibility of attaining self-realisation within the social fabric. Therefore, he distinguished between physiological and pathological arrangements of organic solidarity (1893: chap. III/1&2), so that the question of social validity was still treatable in terms of sociological theory. Later on, however, the removal of the question increasingly characterised sociological structuralism and social structure was analysed only in terms of its emergent logic, believing this to be sufficient to guarantee its reproduction. The AGIL schematism is in some respects the classical formulation of this theoretical programme (Parsons and Smelser 1956). Yet, the later radicalisation of sociological structuralism in its autopoietic variation is of specific interest here in that it explicitly formulates the axiomatic assumptions, which sterilise sociology, by affirming that it would never explicitly ask the question of social validity, having first postulated the emergence of ‘social systems’ (Luhmann 1997: 16–35). By critically reflecting the autopoietic axiomatic, sociology can examine the research questions that allow us to face the issue of failing social structuration due to the expanding mechanisms of normative intermittency which can be observed in contemporary societies. Luhmann’s argument moves from the romantic assumption of the absolute hermeneutic circle, according to which nobody can escape from his/her historical-societal imprint, so that the constitutive methodological move of sociology is

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negated in principle. Social science is assumed to be unable to gain any reflexive distance from its research subject matter. It only represents one linguistic game among others in a specific society. Autopoietic sociology thus embraces the main assumption of post-modern epistemology that breaks down the boundary between social science and societal self-­ interpretation (Habermas 1985a: 219–247). The fact that Luhmann later reclaims for his research programme the capacity of expressing the only correct analysis of society that negates the fallacy of societal self-­ interpretation—mainly of critical theory (1997: 866–958)—is not relevant at this stage of his argumentation. Here, the whole epistemological work of sociology must be set apart that aimed at legitimating the reflexive function of social science. Above all, the theoretical work must be forgotten that substituted the post-­ Hegelian abstract speculation on ‘society’, typical of the early German social science (Fitzi 2015: 61–77), with the research for an observable subject for sociology. This speculative move gives autopoiesis the prophetic flair that a specific type of structuralist social thinker holds in such high esteem. Thus, nothing that sociological epistemology has produced is worth dealing with. The narrative goes: we wipe the slate clean and find ourselves in an open space that no one has travelled before, and there we discover ‘society’. Yet, what must be avoided at all costs is the empirical finding of a conflict between the logic of social action and the logic of social structuration, from which stems the structural weaknesses of complex societies. Therefore, a number of further axiomatic assumptions are collected that allow the foundation of autopoietic sociology (Luhmann 1997: 24 f.). Sociology deals with ‘society’ as its object of research; it describes it as a whole as well as a specific interaction of its parts in the sense of the best old European speculative tradition. Yet, the question of social integration must be removed from sociology. Society does not consist of social actors or of their relationships. No issue of consensus is admitted, because ‘society’ consists in itself ontologically and does not depend on any question of validity (Geltungsfrage). Furthermore, ‘society’ must be conceived as a unitarian entity and has no articulation—neither territorial nor in the distribution of resources and nor in stratificatory terms. These phenomena could have played a role in the past, yet they no longer do so, since a mayor event of social emergence took place. An evolutionary step in the ‘natural history of society’ is thus postulated, which has the historical-philosophical power of the dialectical turns that characterise post-Hegelian systems of thought. Functionally

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differentiated social systems appear at a certain level of societal evolution. They organise their internal communication around a specific binary code and go on doing so, as long as its flow is connectable with itself. If an administration, for example, continues to produce acts that refer to other acts from the same source, according to its specific internal code, the corresponding administrative system continues to exist. Whether it actually regulates something in society, or is lost in autistic self-observation, is of no relevance. What becomes constitutive for autopoietic sociology is thus the distinction between system and environment. It is applied to social reality to detach the relatively unproblematic questions of sociological theory from the ones that might challenge the axiomatic assumption, stating that social systems persist in and of themselves. The most decisive effect of this theoretical move is the relocation of social action outside the domain of sociology. Luhmann articulates it in pure anthropological and not sociological terms. As consciously living and experiencing beings, humans must be assigned to the environment of social systems (Luhmann 1997: 29 f.), for these exclusively consist of their self-referential communication stream. Thereby, autopoietic sociology reintroduces the traditional distinction between social and psychic systems, which splits social reality into two domains, by assigning it to two different sciences of social structure (sociology) and social action (psychology). The issues of social agency and, as a consequence, that of social legitimacy are discarded from the mainstream of autopoietic theory building, only later to re-emerge in a minor tone, yet with all their unattended problematic potential, so that further surreptitious axiomatic assumptions concerning ‘structural coupling’ are needed (Luhmann 1997: 778). Nevertheless, consigning all challenging aspects of social reality to the environment of social systems allows a pervasive aestheticisation of sociological theory, which, as Luhmann explicitly states, becomes an autopoietic sociolinguistic game among others (1997: 34). In itself, it is not the most important problem that radicalised structuralism ignores the epistemological work achieved by generations of sociologists, and so brings the discipline back to the state that it was in during the 1860s. Rather, the theoretical damage it does to sociology consists in making it blind to analysis of the emergencies of contemporary societies. A way out of this epistemological deadlock must be sought by managing a critical and methodologically reflected reversal of the autopoietic axiomatic. As the symptomatic review of today’s complex societies shows, social structure reveals major difficulties in ensuring stable emergence and

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reproduction phenomena, above all where normative institutions exert a regulative function on social reality. From the viewpoint of social-­structural analysis, it is thus necessary to understand which societal arrangements intermittent normative structuration processes coagulate around with limited spatiotemporal validity, as well as the consequences of this for the legal domain of society. This assessment opens the way to the study of the reciprocal action that social structure entertains with the further dimensions of social reality—social agency and social legitimation. They remain an underestimated area of study in the structuralist simplification of social reality.

5.2  Intermittent Legal Validity Traditionally, societal self-interpretation generates an ontological conception of the world. Institutions, value systems as well as legal orders seem to subsist by inner necessity in such a way as they appear to the pre-­ scientific observer. This is basically also what system theory postulates. Yet, the uncertain societal development at the beginning of the twenty-first century also gives the opposite impression that social orders find themselves in an ongoing process of liquefaction. The tension-fraught relationship of these two opposite perspectives forms what appears as the non-transparent shape of contemporary social reality (Habermas 1985b). Thus, the dichotomous development of socio-political discourses often makes the social sciences blind for the understanding of the intermittent legitimation processes that hold complex societies together. Here, despite all liquefaction, but within clearly delimited spatiotemporal boundaries, the ordering power unfolds of dynamic social coordination mechanisms, which steadily quit and resume validity, to adapt to the ongoing societal transformation. Understanding the functioning of societies that become not only increasingly pluri-normative but also normatively unsteady thus requires a methodological approach capable of seizing these intermittent processes of society building. Regardless of the cyclic amnesia that characterises the relationship between sociological theory and societal self-interpretation, the intermittent normative structure of modern societies has been recognised, reconstructed and categorised in a timely fashion. The theoretical heritage of critical sociology must, therefore, be made fruitful, by drawing on the most classical sociological enquiry: the assessment of legal normativity. Due to its institutional character that mirrors the ongoing structuration of

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social reality, law has been a privileged object of sociological research, at the latest since Durkheim’s Division of Labour (1893). Sociology furthermore focused on the tension-fraught relationship between the claim of absoluteness and the spatiotemporal restrictions of legal validity that evidences structural similarities with the establishment of money as a generalised means of economic exchange (Simmel 1908: 98–120). The result is an assessment of modern legislation procedures as reciprocal foundations of validity between normative orders that establish ‘intermittent legality’. Apart from constitutional rights, in positive law no legal content can claim eternal legitimacy, so that its legal validity always relies on specific spatiotemporal boundaries, as long as legal orders do not develop to authoritarian arbitrariness. New legal norms obtain their validation from already existing law, and older legal contents are eliminated in the same legal spirit that established their legitimacy beforehand (Simmel 1900: 98). The normative model of positive law is thus ‘relationistic’ (Mannheim 1985: 71). No legal validity is entitled by itself, but it always derives from the relationship to other law. On a further level of normative legitimacy, human rights serve as a normative regulation for the rule of law. Yet, their effectiveness as an ethical-political orientation for positive law depends on empirical procedures of legislation and jurisprudence, which grant their application (Arendt 1951: chap. II/5). The task to check the constitutionality of single laws is delegated to supreme courts that decide in due time about their validity. On their side, the interpretation of constitutional principles depends on political consensus, so that parliaments can modify it with qualified majorities. The validity of normative orders is thus functional to the intermittent societal dynamics that empirically legitimates and supports socio-political institutions (MWG I/12: 389–440; Weber 2012: 273–301). At times when social legitimacy is in crisis, however, this dynamics overheats, calling into question the delicate balance of reciprocal normative enforcement between political and legal institutions. A lack of qualitative fixation in normative content that smooths out the conflict between opposing regulatory regimes erodes the foundations of institutionalised mechanisms of regulation. To get an idea of this societal transformation, it is useful to recall what has already been observed about labour market fragmentation. Irrespective of the manifold normative codifications that sustain legitimation procedures, the persistence of very different shades of practically oriented, ‘consensus-driven’ social action becomes crucial to hold together the building of societal legitimacy. Accordingly, social actors perceive

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normative structuration as a highly fragmented and rapidly changing social mechanism, without a clear basis of legitimacy. The question eventually emerges as to how this precarious societal framework can be grasped in theoretical terms. The sociology of law distinguishes analytically between two kinds of validity: normative and empirical validity which are mutually dependent. Yet, since the question of ‘legal validity’ plays a constituent role for the persistence of society, its significance extends beyond the boundaries of legal sociology as a sub-discipline (Schluchter 2000). It concerns the theory of society in principle, as every sphere of society establishes ‘regularities of social action’. These claim validity; they are institutionalised, sanctioned and reproduced. Besides Durkheim, Simmel and Weber are the classical authors who do not consider legal sociology merely as a hyphenated sociology. They agree that law belongs to the constitutive conditions of social life which must be examined within the framework of general sociological theory. The difference between their approaches, however, is that for Durkheim in the Division of Labour (1893) law is the constitutive precondition of social life, whereas for Simmel and Weber it is a condition among others, because in qualitative differentiated societies cultural spheres arise that follow autonomous logics (Schluchter 2000: 60). In the Division of Labour, Durkheim defines the subject and method of the sociology of law and offers a reconstruction for the origins of normative social structures (Durkheim 1893; Müller 1991). Traditional societies are conceived as producing a number of common mindsets, intertwining them into a ‘collective consciousness’, in Rousseau’s sense, and transmitting it from generation to generation (Rousseau 2014: 153–270). A certain set of ‘moral judgments’ thus assumes compulsive character and leads society to develop specific organs to ensure compliance. Accordingly, law constitutes the preferred subject for a comparative theory of normative validity. There is an ongoing debate about the extent to which, in the later work phase, Durkheim’s theory of society shifts from the assumption that in the beginning everything is law, or more precisely criminal law, to the assumption that in the beginning everything is religion (Durkheim 1912; Schluchter 2000: 62; Cotterrell 1999). Indeed, processes of sacralisation grant the rise of an extra-ordinary (außeralltäglich) normativity that stabilises social groups. The classificatory distinction between the sacred and the profane transforms social relationships to assertive ‘contexts of meaning’, so that the rise of religion can be considered as the evolutionary precondition of legal development.

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Whatever the interpretation is of Durkheim’s rationale for sociology as ‘sociology of law’, this can be traced back to five theses (cf. Schluchter 2000: 63).1 All social development is accompanied by a legal development (1. correspondence thesis), which is to be regarded as its symbol (2. representation thesis). Thus, legal development is particularly well suited to reconstruct social development (3. epistemological thesis). In the dutiful action, which constitutes law, ‘collective life’ is more decidedly expressed, so that customs take on a secondary status towards it (4. hierarchy thesis). Yet, all effective obligation in the collective sense requires compulsion (5. obligation thesis). The ensuing issue of sanction results in consequences that are decisive for the sociological theory of legal validity. Hence, Durkheim draws the conclusion that an action is criminal, because it violates the common consciousness, and not that it violates the common consciousness because it is criminal (Durkheim 1893: chap. 1/2). This analytical result raises the question of the source of legitimacy for the mindsets that condense into collective consciousness. Durkheim answers it by introducing the axiomatic assumption that the members of a society consider the ideas and feelings represented in legal rules to conform to the sense of their common life. Yet, the complexity of the issue of social legitimacy goes far beyond the circularity of this finding, so that axiomatic hypotheses about the well-founded aspect of normative orders must be problematised. Building legal validity, from the simplest rules of everyday social action to the overarching legal and political structures of society, stands and falls depending on whether its reiterated acknowledgement comes about or not. A more structured approach to the sociological assessment of legal validity is thus necessary and must move beyond Durkheim’s sociology of law. Weber, who develops his theorising on the sociology of law in exchange with the Neo-Kantian debate on legal validity, takes a different epistemological perspective. He analyses the legitimation procedures and the necessary relations of consensus that support the building of social validity. His sociological theory of legal validity is thus based on the question of whether social actors factually acknowledge the norms that are enshrined in the codified legal orders (MWG I/12: 389–440; Weber 2012: 1  Schluchter’s list also envisages a sixth point: the so-called legal development that is not relevant at this level of analysis. It is characterised by the unification of legal systems, their autonomy over other norms and their monopolisation by the state. On this point cf. Schluchter (2000: 81).

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273–301). In everyday social praxis, a gap unfolds between the codification and the course of action which only corresponding legitimisation procedures can close. Whether the latter succeed or not is a question that can only be answered empirically. Yet, sociological theory must deliver the analytical means to explain how the factual legitimacy of legal orders and relationships of domination come about, by working out their ‘conditions of possibility’; it cannot simply presuppose it on the basis of some undiscussed axiomatic assumptions. Following Weber, the question of legal validity belongs to the fundamental theoretical problems of sociology, although he does not make law the sole constitutive condition of social life. He examines the development of legal orders both as a question concerning the theory of ‘basic concepts in sociology’ (MWG 1/23: 147–215) and as a necessary precondition to establish social ‘orders and powers’ (MWG I/22-3: 191–247). His major concern is to overcome the traditional confusion of the deontological with the empirical concept of validity. The idea of legal orders’ validity, which derives from normative law theory, does not coincide with the empirically observable likelihood that social action orients itself factually towards its enforcement. The sociological approach to legal validity must thus be differentiated from the juridical one. The epistemological interest of legal studies is based on the question of what can be considered ideally valid in juridical terms. This means which normative sense should logically and correctly be given to a sentence that serves as a legal norm. The sociological interest deals, on the contrary, with the question of whether social actors ‘subjectively consider’ legal orders to be valid and practically orient their action towards them. Weber agrees with Durkheim that in modern societies the tension-­ fraught relationship between deontological and empirical validity can most of all be observed in the interaction of legal orders with the logic of the modern capitalist economy. This is based on the unregulated distribution of factual power over goods and economic services. In contrast, the legal domain is based on the ideal conception of what ‘ought to be valid’ (Geltensollen), to establish social relationships based on reciprocity. The meaning of the concept of ‘legal order’ thus changes completely if both aspects are related to each other within the epistemological approach of law sociology. Legality must be understood as the reciprocal action of deontological and empirical validity. Accordingly, the epistemological challenge becomes determining the ‘conditions of possibility’ which

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permit factual social action to enforce legal orders.2 The reasons for docility to the law can be the most diverse, so that their sociological analysis requires a typological reconstruction of ‘validity-action’ (Geltungshandeln). Hence, sociological theory is assigned the task of working out the ‘ideal-­ typical conditions of possibility’ that permit different kinds of validity acts, by simultaneously avoiding axiomatic assumptions concerning the psychological or ontological foundation of normative validity. At the level of simple social interaction, the question of legal validity arises where regularities of behaviour come into being that are kept and sanctioned. Increasing social structuration leads to the rise of specific organs of the social group that enforce the validity of codified norms. Legal systems eventually differentiate themselves from conventions, by establishing coercive apparatuses to implement their orders. They rely therefore on relations of political domination. Even in modern qualitative differentiated societies, the social spheres of law and politics are structurally linked to each other. Accordingly, especially in times of increasingly intermittent legal normativity and shifting political legitimation, sociological theory must work out the mechanisms that regulate the enforcement of their reciprocal validity. In the ‘basic concepts in sociology’ Weber examines the condensation of social regularities on the basis of the ‘multiple contingency’ that characterises social relationships and systematises their mechanisms with respect to the dichotomous concept-pair of ‘expectation and belief’ (MWG 1/23: 147–215). This enables us to analytically correlate the instrumental-rational and the value-oriented order of action to each other. The respective contribution of success- and validity-driven action to the continuity of social orders can thus be seized and outlined theoretically. If it is grounded on acknowledged normative legitimacy, the empirical validity of legal orders increases many times over. Yet, this depends on the belief in legitimacy—that is, on the ‘legitimacy-consensus’—that social actors devote to them. Thereby, the sociological question of consensus, namely the question of the asymmetrical relations of consensus that are necessary to grant the persistence of legal orders, inscribes itself at the centre of the sociological theory of legal validity. This aspect constitutes one of the key points for the diagnosis of normative intermittency that will be developed in the following chapters. It must reconnect the modalities of social action that grant the 2  Here Weber’s conception of factual legal validity can be compared to Bourdieu’s concept of ‘practice’ as the grounding dimension of the social (1977).

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shifting legitimacy of normative orders in contemporary societies and therefore adopts the explanatory scheme of the critically revised ‘sociological bathtub’ (cf. Sect. 4.3). On a structural level of analysis, a final remark is nevertheless necessary. Empirically, legal orders never regulate social action in a comprehensive manner. They interact and often conflict with the remaining economic, political, scientific, ethical, religious, etc., imperatives that conform to the logic of other societal domains. Thus, their expectations of legitimacy are delimited. Yet, there is also a further order of complexity that shapes legal normativity in qualitative differentiated societies. The transition to modern social structuration is characterised by the dissemination of both rationally codified normative orders and bureaucratic organisations in form of institutions. The latter manage the major part of the normative expectations rising from social agency. Nevertheless, there is no overall rationalisation of social reality, because institutional action depends on consensual relationships that empirically secure the legal validity of established normative orders. Between bureaucratised institutions and corresponding ‘consensus-­ driven social groups’ granting them day-to-day legitimacy develops a functional interaction, which draws the limits of the modern process of rationalisation. A dualism of legal validity characterises all social structures based on codified procedures of accountability, preventing them from fully conforming to the abstract ideal-type of bureaucracy. Modern rationalisation thus turns out to be a process that differentiates some highly rationalised areas of social action coordination from the whole of social reality, rather than forcing the suppression of consensus-driven by bureaucratised institutional social action. Institutions and consensus-driven social groups do not stay in a relation of mutual exclusion, but integrate each other in securing the intermittent legal validity of rationally codified normative orders. Institutions represent the bureaucratised domain of an overall consensus-driven social action that is needed to enforce the validity of their rationalised orders. Without the support of timely consensus, normative structuration loses its grip on social reality, as the crisis symptomatic of complex societies shows. A phenomenon that sociological knowledge would never attain, if it continued to be guided by the axiomatics of autopoietic sociology. With respect to contemporary societal transformation the question thus arises as to how the current trend towards ‘intermittent normativity’ can be addressed within a sociological theory of legal validity. To seize the

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ongoing change of social structuration processes, the approach of sociological analysis must be updated. Traditionally, critical sociology moved from the assumption that modern societies develop overarching bureaucratic rationalisation (Weber), reification (Marx, Lukács, Critical Theory), or reproduce acquired habitual attitudes and established positioning mechanisms in the different fields of society (Bourdieu). The leading perception of societal development in late capitalism was grounded on the hypothesis that established social structures increasingly harden in an effort to ensure the reproduction of existing relationships of domination. Yet, in this respect social reality seems to have changed dramatically. It is not that the most advantaged social classes have ceased to be successful in imposing their particular interests over the common good. Rather, the novelty seems to be different. Social structuration processes are compelled to adapt to the increasing speed and shifting conditions of accumulation processes in an economic world that is undermined by multiple crisis factors and needs to be constantly reinvented to remain profit-oriented. In the uncertain societal context of the early twenty-first century, the fight against every kind of societal rigidity opposing economic imperatives thus becomes an even more crucial concern of capitalist societal restructuration. This refers sociology to the social transformation of the era before the development of the welfare-state (Polanyi 2001). The irrationality that conforms to the predominant economic development model far exceeds any control threshold, so that starting with the weakening of legal regulations, social normativity is undermined and substituted with precarious structuration processes on an unprecedented scale. Capitalist accumulation is structurally disoriented and just tries to adapt to repeated states of exception. As a consequence, all normative orders are attacked that could delimit the blind and unbridgeable implementation of emerging accumulation imperatives. It does not matter what the environmental or social consequences are, the main thing is to ensure profitability, no matter how small the chances of survival are of a completely blind development model. Yet, thereby, capitalism jeopardises its own chances of survival. It is stuck in a vicious circle between the decline in the rate of economic growth, the increase in the overall indebtedness of the major capitalist states and the growing economic inequality of income and wealth (Streeck 2016: 47). Only by establishing an up-to-date version of the societal arrangement that made ‘democratic capitalism’ possible after the WWII could the deadlock be overcome. However, this development does not come about, because under the current conditions of intermittent legality the

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individual and collective subjects fail that could become the bearers of a new ‘welfare-state compromise’. Without active and conscious citizens, who form a strong public opinion, and without political parties and trade unions that advocate a clear vision of social justice and economic redistribution, no legislation is adopted for the reorganisation of the economy. The question that confronts sociology is thus what are the analytical tools that may help to comprehend the ongoing normative transformation of social reality. Hence, the most classical problem of social reality finds a new formulation. Sociology must explain how intermittent legal validity comes about as a tension-fraught interaction between formal and factual normativity. It must identify, on the one hand, the social mechanisms that enable a sustainable normative structuration of social action and, on the other hand, it must address the disruptive processes that prevent the consolidation of normative orientation structures. Yet, furthermore, the investigation must afford the description of the ‘functional ersatz’ that enables transitory social structuration under conditions of intermittent normativity. Accordingly, the discontinuous fixation and depletion of normative codes must be addressed on the three levels of sociological analysis. This implies the development of a theory of social action, of social validity as well as an assessment of the structural consequences of intermittent legal validity. On the basis of this typological record, which accommodates the shifting conditions of social structuration in contemporary societies, the mechanisms can then be evaluated insofar as they permit the establishment of innovative normative arrangements capable of enforcing a new basis for social legitimacy.

Bibliography Literature Arendt, Hannah (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New  York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Boltanski, Luc, and Esquerre, Arnaud (2017). Enrichissement: Une critique de la marchandise. Paris: Gallimard. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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——— (1981). ‘La représentation politique. Éléments pour une théorie du champ politique, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales’, 36–37, February/ March, La représentation politique-1, 3–24. Cotterrell, Roger (1999). Émile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain. Edinburgh and Stanford: Edinburgh University Press and Stanford University Press. Durkheim, Émile (1893). De la division du travail social. Étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Alcan. English: Durkheim, Émile (2014). The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. ——— (1895). Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris: Alcan. Engl. Durkheim, Émile (2014). The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. New York: Free Press. ——— (1912). Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie. Paris: Alcan. Now: Id. (2014). Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie. Paris: CNRS éditions. English: Id. (2016). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Dinslaken: Anboco. Fitzi, Gregor (2015). Grenzen des Konsenses. Rekonstruktion einer Theorie transnormativer Vergesellschaftung. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. ——— (2019). ‘Populism: An Ideal-Typical Assessment’. In: Populism and the Crisis of Democracy. Vol. 1. Concepts and Theory. Ed. by Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert, and Bryan P. Turner. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 47–61. Habermas, Jürgen (1985a). Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ——— (1985b). Kleine politische Schriften 5: Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Mannheim, Karl (1985). Ideologie und Utopie (1929). Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann. Müller, Hans-Peter (1991). ‘Die Moralökologie moderner Gesellschaften. Durkheims ‘Physik der Sitten und des Rechts’’. In: Physik der Sitten und des Rechts. Vorlesungen zur Soziologie der Moral. Ed. by Émile Durkheim. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, S. 307–341. Parsons, Talcott, and Smelser, Neil J. (1956). Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Polanyi, Karl (2001). The Great Transformation [1944]. Beacon Hill: Beacon Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2014). The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The two Discourses and the Social contract. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Sawyer, R. Keyth (2005). Social Emergence. Societies as Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Schäfer, Armin (2008). ‘Krisentheorien der Demokratie. Unregierbarkeit, Spätkapitalismus und Postdemokratie’. Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung. Discussion Paper 08/10. Schluchter, Wolfgang (2000). ‘Rechtssoziologie als empirische Geltungstheorie’. In: Id., Individualismus, Verantwortungsethik und Vielfalt. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 59–85. Schultheis, Franz et  al. (2015). Kunst und Kapital: Begegnungen auf der Art Basel. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. Simmel, Georg (1900). Philosophie des Geldes. Now in: Id. (1989), GSG 6, ed. by Klaus Christian Köhnke and David Frisby, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ——— (1908). Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Now in: Id. (1992), GSG 11, ed. by Otthein Rammstedt, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Streeck, Wolfgang (2016). How will Capitalism end? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso. Weber, Max (2012). Collected Methodological Writings. Ed. by Hans Henrik Bruns and Sam Whimster. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Troubles in Action Theory

6.1   Participant Perspective 6.1.1   Beyond the Hypostasis of Collective Action Subjects The tradition of socio-political ontology was based on the hypostasis of macrosocial structures to the status of actors endowed with the speculative features of subject philosophy: self-referentiality, reflexivity and moral judgement. This approach to social reality is reproduced in an unreflective way by societal self-interpretation; it is also adopted at times by sociological theory building, as the autopoietic axiomatic shows (Habermas 1987: 368–385). The loss of knowledge associated with the perspective of socio-­ political ontology was recognised early on (Simmel 1890). Nevertheless, the foundation of a theory of social action in the participant perspective still presupposes a methodologically guided deconstruction of social ontology. The amnesic process, characterising the reproduction of academic knowledge, as well as the recurring colonisation of the social sciences through the socio-political discourse time and again, supplants the achievements of sociological theory building, so that they must be reactivated. With a retrospective view to the argument of Durkheim concerning the project of the Année sociologique (Fitzi 2017), Simmel formulates a critique of the ontologising tendency in sociological theory, implicitly addressing Durkheim’s rationale for sociology grounded on collective © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_6

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social psychology (Simmel 1908: 625–632). By asking the question of a ‘sociological theory of validity’, and so, too, the contribution of social action for the preservation of social structure, one exposes oneself to the reproach of developing an individual psychology. Yet, a sociological epistemology focusing on the logic of social action from the viewpoint of its participants can unequivocally show that the sociological approach neatly separates itself from individual psychology (Simmel 1908: 35 f.). Societal processes take place ‘in the mind’ of the social actors, thus intertwining their motivations and goals in social action. If this were not the case, society would look like a lifeless puppet show. All the same, the analytical perspective of sociology is not compelled to focus on the layer of psychic phenomena, which motivate social action, by investigating the rules of the psychological processes accompanying social interaction. Rather, it can seize the ‘formal configurations of consciousness’ which characterise the knowledge of ‘being involved in social relationships’. It thus adopts the method of modern Kantian-inspired epistemology (Kant 1781, 1783). However, an epistemological problem arises instead through the application of the method that makes ‘social facts’ the object of sociology, by asserting that they constitute ‘collective ideas with compulsive character’ (Durkheim 1895: chap. 1). Social phenomena are thus hypostatised and provided with an institutional character, which in reality depends on intermittent relationships of consensus amongst social actors, in a sense that must be described typologically. The sociology of social facts treats social macro-structures, such as states, classes, churches and parties, as ‘super-­ individual formations’ with a subject character. This misunderstanding is no coincidence. The insurmountable lack of insight into the mental activity of social actors leads to connecting together different individual psychological actions into an ‘indifferent mass’, building the possible unity of a collective psychic subject that appears to be its bearer (Simmel 1908: 628). Yet, the emergence of ‘collective social subjects’ requires the existence of a plurality of psychic unities interacting with each other, so that sociology has to inquire into the reciprocal action of the social actors to show how the collective formations come into being and are maintained, as opposed to hypostatising their apparent unity. The epistemological misunderstanding derives here from the fact that the seemingly uniform external result of many subjective psychological processes is interpreted as the result of a uniform psychological process of a supra-individual subject. Park developed this argument further in his German dissertation on mass psychology (1904). The apparent unity of

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the result is mistaken for the unity of its cause. Instead of following this approach, a sociology of intermittent consensus processes must focus on the specific contents of consciousness that become meaningful for shaping social reality, rather than on the psychic activities—individual or collective—that accompany social action. This epistemological approach draws a dividing line between social psychology and a methodological, as well as culture theoretical well-attuned sociology that is necessary to address the intermittent structures of validity characterising complex societies. The interest is in the formal configurations of consciousness which characterise the knowledge of being involved in social relationships. Thus, attention focuses on the contents of objective culture, which are relevant for social science, because they become a subject of consciousness for the social actors as long as they entertain social relationships. Social action is part of the research domain of sociology, without requiring the use of methodologies borrowed from social psychology. According to Durkheim, in spite of advanced social differentiation, complex societies can be integrated, thanks to the institutionalisation of some ‘common normative orientations’ that gain institutional character (Durkheim 2019). Their liability is explained by the fact that they were internalised by the actors during primary socialisation, so that this would secure their empirical validity. Whether this alleged internalised habit suffices to sustain the institutional building of society is not further discussed. Yet, the transition of society from mechanical to organic solidarity poses a problem for this assumption, because it restricts the scope of collective consciousness, raising the question of its possible functional replacement. Following Parsons’ reading, Durkheim’s concept of collective consciousness derives from a ‘substantialised notion’ of consensus as the basis for societal integration, which goes back to Comte (Orsello Montanari 1971), and marks a contrast to the ‘utilitarian theory’ of the division of labour that characterises political economy (Parsons 1960). This makes the development of a sociological conception for the normative integration of complex societies difficult. Yet, the axiomatic assumptions stating the existence of collective social subjects and common normative orientations can be problematised, without falling back on either the axioms of the theory of social contract or on the fiction of the ‘invisible hand’ characterising political economy. The question of the legal validity of collective action orientation moves into focus and introduces the epistemological challenge of theoretically relating to each other the intersubjective action structures and the subjective orientation of the social actors.

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The empirical tension between individual and collective action orientation is mirrored in sociological theory by the ‘micro-macro question’, which introduces a differentiation-theoretical discussion of a possible functional ersatz for the idea of collective consciousness (Coleman 1990). The assumption is that complex social structures hold together through the increased qualitatively differentiated interdependence of different interaction contexts. In terms of action theory, this means that social actors can only dedicate specialised aspects of their personality to a single type of social relationship (Simmel 1890). On this basis, complex societies persist, even though they do not become established on stable networks of solidarity, because social actors intertwine ever more rapidly as well as more and more intermittently, by developing qualitative differentiated social networks. The dissolution of single strands of social relationship thus damages society only to a limited extent, since it involves innumerable other partial connections. The durability of single strands of social relationship is thus replaced by the acceleration in the spinning process of very different visible and invisible relationships in qualitative differentiated domains of society. Only a generalised breakdown of the intertwining rhythm of social relationships would provoke a crisis in the ordering structure of complex societies. Yet, this is what happens during economic and financial crises, inflation and deflation syndromes, as well as partially in the case of a pandemic, as we recently learned. Thanks to the intensification of the sociation process, the more the social whole gains structural independence from its components, the less collective consciousness is necessary. The liability of individual actions can no longer be extended to the entire person, nor to a ‘collective responsibility’ of the social group, as the transformation of modern criminal law testifies (Durkheim 1893). The increased quantitative frequency of social interaction, rather than the common normative orientation, stabilises modern, qualitative differentiated societies. A constant creation, reconnection and termination of social relationships bring about complex societies as the product of countless processes of accelerated sociation and dissociation (Simmel 1900: 696 f.). Accordingly, sociology must move from the status of a science of social statics to that of a science of social dynamics. It does not analyse social buildings, which are structurally based on shared patterns of action orientation, but inquires into social networks that persist as long as they develop coherently in a dynamic process of relentless change. Establishing enduring social relationships in this context constitutes an achievement that defies the unstable and hastened rhythm

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of interaction in complex societies. Nevertheless, intermittent institutionalisation processes allow specific patterns of social action to persist within defined spatiotemporal limits. In conditions of scarcity of spatiotemporal resources, which would permit socialisation practices to flourish, social institutions like money contribute to secure the continuity of interaction in complex societies. They relieve social actors from negotiating and making decisions, and perform a function of ‘social exemption’. Yet, the question as to how money and the other ‘symbolic media’ of interaction persist cannot be simply answered by asserting their function on an axiomatic basis. Rather, it is important to explain the nature of the procedures of recurrent validation that allow their social function to be maintained. This is all the more urgent in a context that registers an increasing spread of normative intermittency that degrades the ‘basis of trust’ in monetary exchange, as economists tend to say, and not only since 2008. Classical sociological research programmes offer consistent approaches to answer this kind of question, as long as they are not read from the perspective of Parsons’ structuralist and moral-­ sociological approach. There are two possible sociological approaches to the reconstruction of the recurrent validation of established social functions through the orientation of social action: the participant and observer perspective of sociological theory building. Max Weber’s multi-level theory of social action, social orders and social institutions, offers the means to develop a theory of intermittent social structuration from the sociological perspective of the observer of social action (MWG I/23, 147–215). Its theoretical integration from the analytical perspective of the participant in social action is provided by Simmel’s epistemological research programme for grounding understanding sociology (Simmel 1908: 42–61). However, it is useful to start with the reconstruction of the logic of intermittent social structuration from the participant perspective. This reveals some fundamental aspects of the fragmentary nature of social action centres in complex societies that must be taken into account by every reconstruction of social action from the observer perspective. Following this path, sociology can go beyond the dichotomy between individual and collective psychology, and leave behind the theoretical burden of hypostatised collective subjects, which has been a recurring handicap for sociological theory building since the age of early positivist social science.

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6.1.2   The Unsurmountable Fragmentation of Social Action Centres A methodologically guided process of typological theory building must draw analytical categories that differentiate social science from societal self-description, by taking into account the social complexity of normative intermittency. This presupposes the development of a sociological theory approach that dissolves the conventional, hypostatised socio-political concepts in terms of discontinuous reciprocal social action. The theory of normative intermittency thus emerges from a ‘meta-theoretical assessment’ of social reality and provides a critical viewpoint to deconstruct hypostatised socio-political discourses. Accordingly, a ‘social science in the making’ develops whose object constantly undergoes a historical transformation, so that it cannot postulate spatiotemporal neutral laws of social life. Its task is to capture social regularities in the form of ‘intermittent interaction patterns’ in individual and collective action. Based on these epistemological premises, no substantial concept of transnormative society will be established, but instead a theory of the processes of normative intermittency. This conclusion may lead us to suppose that individual action, as an aggregate, becomes the object of the theory of normative intermittency. Yet, this is not the case, since the concept of action in turn dissolves into the many sub-processes that make up social life in highly qualitative differentiated societies and characterise the accelerated sociation rhythm of normative intermittency. Therefore, the analytical focus lies instead on the processes of intermittent attribution of validity, which establish themselves in the meso-sociological stratum, mediating between qualitative differentiated domains of social action and their coordination through social agency. Consequently, a theory of normative intermittency can neither be founded holistically, on the basis of a micro- or macro-sociological oriented emergence-thesis, nor be on the basis of a methodological-­ individualist and substantialist concept of social action. Instead, interaction conglomerates become the subject of investigation that consist in concurrent structuring and destructuring processes. These are sequences of action coordination based on intermittent procedures of validity. Focusing on these processes makes it possible to overcome the hypostasised categories of individual and society as well as of action and structure. Accordingly, they can be understood as the result of the empirical interaction of their elements within an intermittent structuration process of social reality.

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The theoretical premise for grasping the processes of intermittent validity attribution that inform normative intermittency is based on the idea that a reciprocal action takes place between two different, yet parallel developing differentiation processes at the level of social structure and social agency (Simmel 1890). The smaller the number of social threads binding together the actors, controlling all directions of their acting and feeling, the closer the link becomes with the group. The social pressure results in important procedures of moral and legal validity control. Mirroring this, the greater the number of relationships that the social actors maintain, the easier it is for them to break away from single relationships in favour of others. This circumstance is evidenced in the differentiation-­theoretical limits of political communitarianism. The lower the complexity of the social group, the deeper it can be integrated, with each member having to contribute all the more to its preservation. However, the increasing complexity of social groups allows—and also forces—the actors to cultivate a fullness of social bonds. Consequently, they can hardly indulge in specific relationships with their entire person, but dedicate them only single qualitative differentiated areas of personality. Social actors thus gain independence. Yet, at the same time, they are increasingly confronted with an overwhelming fragmentation of their role patterns, which induces a progressive drifting apart of the related domains of their personality. The ongoing change in the web of relationships between actors and groups thus instigates a process of socially determined differentiation of the personality structure. An insurmountable fragmentation of the ‘centres of social action’ and the utopian task of uniting them into a consistent social identity become an integral component of social complexity. In social contexts that correspond typologically to political-­ communitarian scenarios, the circles of social activity are arranged in a concentric form around the individual (Sandel 1982: 179 f.). The smaller they get, the closer they embrace the complete personality (Simmel 1890). On the contrary, ongoing processes of social differentiation improve significant individualisation tendencies. Historically, they took the form of a transformation of the legal systems ‘from status to contract’ (Maine 1861). By establishing civil law on the principle of individual responsibility, since the so-called Code Napoleon around 1800, the compulsion to individualisation became the basis for the establishment of liberal democratic political systems (Rawls 1993). The socio-historical basis for the development was granted by the transition from the principle of compulsory belonging

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to the extended and autarchic managing household (Oikos) to that of the legal independence of the individual (MWG I/22-1: 114–160). The sacralisation of the person, which, according to Durkheim, promotes the fundamental ethical development of modernity (Durkheim 1898), thus stays in a relationship of reciprocal causation with the historical processes that fostered qualitative differentiation in complex societies (Simmel 1890). In terms of differentiation theory, however, the subjective and objective aspects of such historical change processes are in a relationship of deep tension. The advanced fragmentation of the social actors’ personality can no longer be easily overcome in a meaningful synthesis, by constituting the self-conscious and responsible subject, which the legal and political systems of complex society require. The formal principle of the ethical-­ political autonomy collides with the advanced fragmentation process of modern role patterns, which results from the intersection of ever more disconcentric circles around the zero point of the social action centres. Accordingly, alienation processes not only take place in the worker’s relationship with the economic production process, but also affect all areas of qualitative differentiated society. Social actors are confronted with a growing heterogeneity of action expectations and have greater difficulty in reconciling them in a meaningful picture of their positioning into the social fabric. Life-conduct in the Weberian sense becomes a utopian task (MWG I/18: 258–260). Yet, the centrifugal fragmentation of the action subjects not only presents them with the Sisyphean task of steadily rebuilding the missing self but also challenges social structuration with the entropy of the action-coordinating knots that legal and political systems require to be able to exist. The foundations of liberal and social democracy are thus called into question. Both the meaningful constitution of social action orientation and its coordination in social structuration processes depend on the recurrent production of reliable action centres. The increasing sociation rhythm of qualitative differentiated societies, however, leads to a progressive draining of the action centres. Both from a participant and an observer perspective, to grasp analytically the tension between the fragmentation of the social actors and the intermittent functional requirements of social structuration is one of the central challenges facing the theory of normative intermittency. First and foremost, the temporal logic of social action collides with the progressive fragmentation of the modern action subject. In less complex social networks, agency constitutes itself by intertwining different social roles in a more or less meaningful and individually unique way. Social

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agency arises following the cycle of culture that develops in a rotation of subjective and objective stages (Simmel 1900: 617–654). The competent subject of social action emerges as the point of intersection of innumerable social threads. The possibility of closing the cultural cycle, however, decreases as the qualitative societal differentiation progresses. Not primarily because of the pluralisation of life plans, yet because of the difficulties in building autonomous action subjects capable of negotiating common value orientations, the normative fabric of complex societies becomes increasingly precarious. Social integration must proceed far beyond the formation of autonomous action subjects and becomes increasingly dependent on intermittent procedures of legitimation that strengthen the interlacing of qualitative differentiated social domains around increasingly fragmented centres of action. Yet, the question arises as to how the intermittent dynamics of social action can be grasped that enables increasingly fragmented action centres to meet the expectations to which they are exposed without succumbing to multifarious alienation. The theory of the participant logic of social action under conditions of high social fragmentation develops an answer to this question. 6.1.3   The Participant Logic of Social Action Simmel’s epistemological theory of the ‘conditions of possibility’ for social interaction offers the most classical heuristic approach to the study of the participant logic of social action and constitutes the premise for the later research programmes of phenomenological sociology and sociology of knowledge (Fitzi 2019: 98 f.). The major advantage of the approach consists in the fact that from the beginning it sets aside the subject-object perspective of natural science, starting instead with the question of how social interaction with other ‘highly fragmented action centres’ is processed in the consciousness of the social actors. In order to develop this pioneering accomplishment, Simmel had to develop a complex epistemological reflection. To familiarise ourselves with the sociological theory building from the viewpoint of the participant logic of social action, it is helpful to follow his argumentation until the relevant point for the present approach. Simmel’s initial question is whether sociological epistemology is possible at all. Starting with a comparison between the approaches of natural and social science, he distinguishes both research perspectives from each other, by evaluating their epistemological premises and develops a

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critical assessment of Kant’s epistemological foundation of modern natural science. Kant could ask the question ‘how nature is possible?’ because from his epistemological viewpoint nature meant nothing more than ‘the human idea of nature’. Nature exists in itself, of course, independently of the means whereby the individual perceives it. Yet, the ‘concept of nature’ represents the particular way in which human intellects assemble, order and shape their perceptions of the world into an overall picture, which in modern science is called nature (Simmel 1908: 42–61). However, whether a similar epistemological perspective can be applied to the concept of society depends on an explanation of the conditions that enable social actors to form an ‘image of the sociation processes’ in which they participate. Like the concept of nature, the concept of society is thus a product of the synthetic capacity of the social actors to process their experience of the world. Nevertheless, there is an unbridgeable difference between the images of nature and society that sociological epistemology has to consider. The ‘synthetic momentum’ of knowledge in natural science lies exclusively with the examining subject—this is not the case in society. The image of society already arises ‘in its elements’, that is, within the empirical sociation processes of the involved individuals. Thus, social actors do not remain in any ‘subject-object relationship’ to each other, rather they interact as equipotent action centres. Accordingly, the comprehensive image of society does not arise first by the intervention of an examining subject, because it is already produced within his cognitive object. For this reason, sociological epistemology cannot be based on the perspective of the observer of social action. Instead, it has to engage with the participant perspective of the fragmented action centres, even though it has no direct access to their experiences of the world. This is what Weber later calls the ‘subjectively meant sense’ of social action (MWG I/23, 147–215). Thus, sociological epistemology breaks with the hermeneutic tradition. Social action centres remain ‘black boxes’ which are inaccessible to an interpretative method grounded on the assumption of empathy. Instead, a theory of social action from the viewpoint of its participants asks the question of the ‘conditions of possibility’ for social interaction. Its aim is to seize the mechanisms of practical knowledge whereby social actors produce their common notions of ‘being sociated’ (vergesellschaftet sein), starting with the individual’s awareness of being part of social interaction. The focus of inquiry lies in the experience of the other action centre as a ‘you’ that stands behind the perceived differentiated fragments of the fellow social

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actor. This cannot be ‘known’ in the meaning of natural science. Yet, empirically it has to be presupposed by social actors to make social interaction possible. The social construction of the other therefore becomes the starting object for the inquiry into sociological epistemology. As a counterpart of social interaction, the ‘you’ does not constitute an ordinary experiential content, since it can never be fully grasped by an ‘observing subject’.1 The unexpected anti-solipsistic experience that other action centres exist, which can perform in the same way as one’s own, constitutes the starting point for the establishment of the participant perception of social reality. Fellow social actors are not recognisable, unless this is through the intermediation of objective culturally codified means of perception. Under these circumstances, the question of how society is possible takes on a completely different methodological meaning than the question about how nature is possible. The latter can be answered by reconstructing the forms of knowledge through which the subject accomplishes the synthesis of given contents of experience into an image of a ‘portion of nature’. In contrast, the elements of knowledge that unite in the synthesis of a ‘portion of society’ are already present in the content of social experience, because social actors are confronted with other centres of social action. This is why it becomes necessary to take into account the viewpoint of the ‘participant’ in social action to establish sociological epistemology. The conscious being part of social relationships is the result of the mutual perception of social actors for whom fellow humans remain counterparts, of whom one has to ‘get a picture’, because they can never be known like an object in natural science. The way in which that picture of the other is constructed depends on the ‘social distance’ that is maintained between actors; it is decoded differently, depending on the quality of the available symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984). Independently of the goodwill of the actors to interact and communicate with each other, the image that one gains of the other through personal contact is always conditioned by certain shifts that ‘shape the other’ to a fellow actor. This fact can be considered the first premise of sociation from the viewpoint of sociological epistemology from the participant perspective (Simmel 1908: 47). 1  In order to illustrate the approach of sociological epistemology from the participant viewpoint, here the semantics is kept as simple as possible. Of course, other and later approaches deserve attention, albeit not at this point. No excursus is presented here regarding the sociological debate on pronouns like ‘me, you and we’. See further Buber (1970), Mead (2015).

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Generalisation and typification come into play to balance the imperfect knowledge about the ‘fellow fragmented centres of social action’. Even in intimate relationships with a minimal social distance, something of the ‘you’ remains beyond the experiencing capability of the ‘me’ and must therefore be compensated for. The mutual experience among social actors is typified and reified until it grants enough consistency to stabilise social relationship over time. ‘Social perception’ exerts a relieving effect on the process of sociation by allowing individuals to face the complexity of their social environment, thanks to established, often unconscious classifications of individual and collective actors. In order to interact, individuals do not see each other according to their personality. Instead, they are carried, raised or diminished by the general type under which they class each other. Beyond their fragmentary conformation, social actors as well as social structure frames are thus formed into ‘permanent characters’ that facilitate the maintenance of social relationship. The empirical material of perception is enhanced and generalised according to the needs of social interaction. The fragments of the experienced ‘you’ cannot simply lie side by side, but must be supplemented to form the meaningful image of the fellow human, with whom one can maintain a social relationship beyond the fleeting moment. As we supplement the blind spot, which we are unaware of in our field of vision, we make of the random and fragmentary appearance of the other the completeness of individuality, by forming it into the stabilised stereotype of the ‘you’. These are the social roots of the socially induced individualisation processes that take place in complex modern societies and gain increasing importance in societal self-reflexion (Beck et al. 2007). Multiple contents of social knowledge result from the ‘mutual generalisation and typification’ between fragmented social action centres. This incessant production of stereotypes delivers the cognitive bricks to establish the dominant ‘image of society’. Yet, social actors as well as relationships are regarded from different perspectives, through which the logic of different societal domains comes to expression. Actors are confronted with manifold expectations as well as with contradictory images of their social personality, so that they perceive the hiatus between their social appearance and their being beyond the social roles they exert. Hence, to take part in sociation processes, they have to learn how to deal with their manifold fragmented social personality. They must take a position towards themselves as action centres. This fact builds the second premise of sociation in the participant perspective (Simmel 1908: 51). Self-perception is

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necessary to make social actors the bearer of their social relationships and not only passive objects of social processes. If a strong contradiction emerges between self-perception and social roles, this not only leads to alienation but also provokes a crisis in the network of the social relationship. In complex societies action centres become a necessary fulcrum of social structure, because of the increased tempo of societal change. Patterns of social action are rapidly substituted by new ones, so that actors have to be very performative in adapting their behaviour. If they fail, this has an effect on the social fabric they contribute to weaving. As an example: if a certain percentage of school teachers in a particular region experiences burn-out, this is a difficult issue. However, if the majority experiences it, the function of schools is called into question as a social institution of education. The lingering aftermath of the ongoing pandemic in 2021 means that everyone can generally appreciate the implications of this kind of development. The fact that complex societies experience a breakdown of their function in times of crisis, yet also an increase in alienation phenomena in normal times, makes it essential to take a closer look at the mechanisms of intermittent ‘social validity’. The fragmented centres of social action become a factor of contingency for the processes of sociation, so that the crossing point between social structure and social action becomes the focus of social integration and the subject of sociological epistemology in the participant perspective. This must develop a multidimensional theory building that considers in a coherent sense social action, social structure and social validity. The different socially determined domains of activity of the fragmented centres of social action compete with the non-socialised ones. To take part in the sociation processes, social actors are forced to continually establish a relationship between these different dimensions of their existence. This requires ‘cultural work’ that repeatedly grants a meaningful synthesis of the competing logics, according to which social actors behave in the different domains of complex societies. As long as they deliver this performance, individuals are socialised and become the bearers of their social bonds. Yet, given a social reality that becomes increasingly dependent on rapid changing and intermittent social relationships, the difficulty of granting this cultural performance is only magnified many times over. The fact that action centres consist beyond the limits of the social imperatives they have to follow has an important effect on the processes of social legitimation and gives interaction the particular meaning without

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which it would be a lifeless technical role-play. Yet, the increasing tension between the logics of the different qualitative differentiated societal domains reduces the scope for the active shaping of social relations. This shortcoming concerns all social actors independently of their positioning in the scale of social inequality. Better-off individuals can fall back on financial resources to intermediate between the conflicting logics of social action and social structure. Money, however, functions only as a technical ersatz that can combine different domains of activity into a lifestyle but does not release social actors from the cultural work of giving a comprehensive meaning to their social existence. The risk of alienation is thus a global phenomenon of complex societies and not only affects industrial workers. Accordingly, the question arises as to how much increasing social heterogeneity is compatible at all with the establishment of social integration. The ‘precondition of possibility’ for social validity is, thus, that the action centres are not unconditionally delivered to the fragmentation of qualitative differentiated societal domains. If social actions were not capable of merging time and again into provisional meaningful syntheses, an unlimited carrying out of the centrifugal tendencies produced by modern intermittent sociation processes would imply the dissolution of the societal fabric. Complex societies can only be socially integrated, as long as the ‘creativity of social action’ weaves new relationships between the objectified social logics (Simmel 1908: 33). To seize the tension-fraught relationship between social action and structure as a constitutive layer of social reality, action theory, in the participant perspective, develops the analytical transition to a sociological theory of validity. The creative dynamics between sociated and non-­ sociated domains of highly fragmented action centres founds the validity of intermittent social structures. The premise is that action centres deliver a performance with the capacity to grant intermittent social structures a sufficient degree of meaningfulness within acceptable spatiotemporal boundaries. Complex societies amount more and more to a dynamic fabric of intermittent sociation processes, of which highly fragmented action centres constitute the junctions, so that the tension of the opposite differentiated logics crosses the personality of social actors. Accordingly, the epistemological record of the rather antagonistic relationship between social action and social structure develops in lockstep with the examination of the categories of consciousness that perform as their ‘conditions of possibility’, so ensuring the validity of intermittent social structures in the temporal sequence. In itself, no matter how fragmentary, every action

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centre is established on the basis of a unitary flow of consciousness. The fact of social interaction, however, presents it with the challenge of multiple, at times contradictory social engagements that it has to maintain, without entirely giving up its autonomy. Moreover, social orders require action centres to deliver this performance to become valuable interaction partners. Yet, to act at the same time as a reliable member of a multiplicity of qualitative highly differentiated social circles and as a coherent autonomous centre of action means that the corresponding flows of consciousness somehow merge into a meaningful correlation. As a result, sociological action theory in the participant’s perspective regards the forms of consciousness that allow social actors to interconnect socialised and non-socialised regions of their personality as the precondition of all process of sociation. The necessary ‘cultural work’ that repeatedly provides a meaningful basis for the merging of social action and social structure constitutes the fundamental ‘condition of possibility’ of sociation processes, because it establishes their validity (Simmel 1908: 59). The objective structure of society makes anonymous positions available that can be occupied arbitrarily by different individuals, whereas the single person endeavours to fill them on the basis of an ‘inner calling’. Empirically, its most classical example is the idea of the profession which Weber put at the centre of his studies on the protestant ethic (Fitzi 2021; Weber 1904/1905, MWG I/18: 123–491). Yet, the cultural work of the profession only exists inasmuch as the structure of society matches the needs and attitudes of the individuals. If social complexity produced by the intermittent rhythm of normative validation overcomes certain limits, action centres and social structure logics do not merge anymore. The relationship of validity between the attitudes of social action centres and the expectations of the social relationship networks constitutes the necessary condition of possibility for social integration. In intermittent social relationships such as, for example, in highly precarious employment conditions, the convergence between the logic of social action and social structure becomes increasingly difficult. The analysis of social validity through cultural work enables the theory of social action in the participant perspective to provide a qualified response to the problem of ‘double contingency’ (Parsons and Shils 1951: 16). Social actors meet with each other and cannot assume that they know which particular intention guides the other’s action. To stabilise their relationships, they need external, that is, social, means. The answer to the problem of double contingency from the viewpoint of Parsons’ moral

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sociology is that social actors produce ‘common normative frames’ of social action. These enable them to know how the other individual will act. Thus, the normative prospect of social philosophy takes the place of sociological analytical-descriptive inquiry. Yet, the social reality of qualitative high differentiated societies cannot be grasped by these means. Here, a multiplicity of competing realisations of social relationship, which follow different logics, join the same social space. Handling their conflicts in conditions of increasing normative intermittency becomes very difficult. Different typologically generalised representations of social reality overlap and negate each other. The complexity of these processes cannot be reduced to durable common normative patterns of social action. Social structuration follows an accelerating dynamics whose intermittency substitutes normative integration. The social actors’ performance that confers validity on action frames cannot be taken for granted as the outcome of habit or custom, possibly acquired during primary and secondary socialisation, because the terms of legitimacy change incessantly in complex societies. Social actors must stabilise their reciprocal social relationships by other means. So, they repeatedly construct new stereotypical images of each other and their interrelations. Yet, this accelerated and short-lived performance of cultural work erodes the foundation of societal legitimacy. It relies on the capacity of social actors to reconstruct, on an ever-changing basis, a meaningful synthesis between socialised and non-socialised domains of their highly fragmented existence. Yet, this performance is no automatism. The production of social meaning can receive the most varied existential, ethical, political or religious validations. In its formal shape, however, it is the everyday ‘cultural work’ of the social actors that delivers the necessary performance holding complex societies together. When the scope of this performance reaches its limits, when its rhythm is unsustainable, the legitimating foundations of societies crumble. To seize the manifold modalities of everyday cultural work and to describe them in their empirical development constitute the major challenge for the theory of social action in the participant perspective. It must understand the continuous establishment, depletion and intersection of qualitative differentiated logics of social action in complex societies. These lead social action by producing the objects of different domains of socially determined culture. The products of the cultural work gather into clusters of objective culture and develop an intrinsic logic which claims to be followed by the social actors (Simmel 1900: 617–654). Yet, in turn, different

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social action stances can differently relate the objectified contents of social life to each other by following a particular logic. The result is a permanent tension between the subjective logic of action creativity and the objective logic of social structuration, which characterises qualitative differentiated societies. Accordingly, complex societies cannot develop one static and perennial hypostasised social structure, whose functioning can be traced back to a pre-cast axiomatic explanation. Rather, they consist of multiple, alternative and competing perspectives in shaping social structure that fight for predominance. In this context of complexity, there is no emergence of social systems, because their communication flow is constantly disrupted and can only be restored on the precondition of a repeated intervention of the cultural work performed by social action. The intermittent systemic architecture of social validity that stabilises social structures within limited spatiotemporal boundaries, constitutes a main challenge for the persistence of complex societies. A sociological theory that crowds out this issue by axiomatic postulating of a self-referential communication flow granting the acquired emergence of social systems is not attuned to serious consideration of the complexity of modern societies. The idea of self-stabilising and re-­ equilibrating social systems belongs to the patrimony of the societal self-­ interpretation that stated the self-regulating power of the markets in the age of neoliberal ideology. Yet, if this was ever necessary, this perspective found its definitive negation during the financial crisis of 2007/2008, when states had to bail out banks with taxpayers’ money to avoid a global economic crash (Walby 2015). The dynamics of complex societies is intermittent in principle. Its mechanisms must be inquired into empirically and cannot be hindered behind axiomatic assumptions about the static relationship between different societal communication flows, thus ignoring the tense relationship between social action and social structure, that characterises modern societies. Due to the growing tempo of social life in complex societies, the shaping of social action comes under increased pressure of fragmented, accelerated and intermittent sociation processes. Under these conditions, it becomes increasingly difficult to produce consistent images of action centres and social relationships. The scarcity of spatiotemporal resources that allow the construction of cooperation and solidarity relationships prevents stabilising common value orientations as well as the ongoing qualitative fragmentation of the social world in domains that follow different logics. Action centres and normative legitimated action patterns acquire the

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character of intermittent social colloids whose contours fray and have limited spatiotemporal validity. Parsons’ answer to the question of ‘double contingency’ thus does not match the complexity of the ongoing production process of ‘solid liquidity’ that characterises complex societies. Discontinuous rhythms of sociation limit the scope of self-supporting structures whose validity is taken for granted after an original emergence process. Their communication flows remain fragmented and no reiterated systemic self-observation loop can arise. Hence, extraordinary measures are required to stabilise the intermittent validity of high differentiated social structures as well as to grant fragmented action centres a sufficient consistency to establish social relation. A post-ontological sociology must take into account these discontinuous reproduction rhythms of complex societies by completely renovating sociological theory building. Albeit intermittently and within limited space-­ time limits, complex societies incessantly produce social fabric. A hypertrophic establishment of competing networks of social relation takes place with very limited capacity of stabilisation. For social action theory in the participant perspective, an incessant synthetic performance of the social actors essentially gives the precondition for its endurance, because it delivers the necessary cultural work to interrelate the manifold contrasting logics of social action and social structure. Yet, to develop further, the theory of normative intermittency must also consider the logic of social action from the observer perspective. This brings into sharper focus the mechanisms granting the construction of social relationships under conditions of high intermittence in sociation processes.

6.2   Observer Perspective Sociological theory from the observer perspective asks the question about the relevant features of social action that can be categorised as its motivations, objectives and reasons of validity. It thus integrates the inquiry of social action from the participant perspective, because it asks how social interaction appears not to the involved centres of action, but rather to an observer who is also part of social reality, yet not of the described interaction. This approach implies a different section through the multiplicity of social reality, which addresses other epistemological issues, and allows us to emphasise specific aspects of the interaction dynamics. In particular, the mechanisms can be worked out and inquired into that grant validity to social action and so stabilise the action orientation and coordination.

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Taking into account the observer perspective, the focus of research is not on the psychic processes, which accompany the social interaction. Rather, attention is on the meaningful contents of consciousness that emerge in the process and orient, coordinate and stabilise social action. The black boxes of the observed psychic systems are recognised as such, yet the meaningful contents of their reciprocal orientation and coordination are not ignored. Rather, they are made the subject of investigation. Social action theory from the participant and the observer perspective thus share a common methodological approach that goes beyond social psychology, but direct their research focus in two different directions. The approach of ‘understanding sociology’ is necessary to come to terms with the complexity of social reality beyond its simplification in terms of axiomatic assumptions about the perennial validity and legitimacy of social structures. Therefore, action theory from the observer perspective distinguishes between different modalities of action orientation, depending on 1. whether it pursues goals of success or principles of validity; 2. whether it follows strategic or cooperative interests; 3. Whether it is grounded on intentions of proactive negotiation or on attitudes of acceptance and consensus towards the other’s action. The latter classification recuperates a classical distinction made in political theory between contractual and consensual action, yet it reinterprets it critically and makes it fruitful for sociological theory building (Horton 2010; Fitzi 2004: 58 f.). Typologically, this methodological approach can be associated with Max Weber’s action theory as he presents it in the first study on this topic, the so-called categories-essay (MWG I/12: 389–440; Weber 2012: 273–301). Before approaching the conceptual reconstruction of action theory from the observer perspective, however, an epistemological clarification is necessary. Schluchter has rightly warned against the simplistic viewpoint adopted by Habermas in approaching this paradigm (Schluchter 2000, 86–93; Habermas 1984). Weber’s ‘understanding sociology’ is grounded on a ‘multilevel model’ for an action, order and culture theory, and does not need any ‘system-theoretical’ integration, as Habermas claimed (Schluchter 2015: 234–272). Furthermore, it delivers a typology of action orientation and coordination that enables us to develop a sociological theory of validity, that is, of the legitimacy of social structures from the observer perspective. This approach constitutes its major advantage compared with system theory and proves particularly efficient to explain the function of the intermittent sociation processes that characterise contemporary social reality. These can be reduced neither to recurrent cycles of

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social autopoiesis nor to patterns of rational choice orientation, because they imply wide elements of intermittent consensual action that do not match the logic of systemic communication flows or of interest-based utility-­maximising behaviour (Becker 1976; Coleman 1990; Luhmann 1984; Schluchter 2005: 221–228). Analytically, action theory from the observer perspective assumes the equal dignity of purpose-rational and validity-rational interpretative approaches, and the ‘non-reducibility’ of the latter to the former. It distinguishes between rules-guided action following ‘purpose-maxims’ or ‘maxims of validity’. Accordingly, purpose is defined as ‘the idea of a success, which becomes the reason of an action’, whereas ‘action-orientation according to maxims of validity’ is conceived as ‘the idea of a validity, which becomes the reason of an action’ (Schluchter 2005: 28). Action theory from the observer perspective regards success and intrinsic-value (Eigenwert) orientation as differing from each other in that they combine with different rules of action: on the one hand, with ‘technical rules’ of practical intelligence, and on the other hand, with ‘normative rules in a broader sense’. Both types of action orientation cannot be based on each other, yet they constitute two ineliminable dimensions of social reality. Value-rational social action is not a deficient mode of purpose-rational social action, and this cannot be defined as a deficient type of comprehensive rationality. Both analytical categories are necessary to map the basic tension between the self-referential and the hetero-referential orientation of social action which the theory of social action from the participant perspective categorises under the first two a priori of sociation (Simmel 1908: 47, 51). The multi-level theory of social reality from the observer’s viewpoint inquires into the divergence between action orientation and coordination that is increasingly pronounced in modern societies, and which cannot be neutralised in functional terms (Schluchter: 2000, 96). As long as social actors act with reference to technical or normative rules, their behaviour can be determined in analytical terms by an observer. Yet, understanding the compliance with the rules presupposes an estimation of the ‘performance of validity’ (Geltungsleistung), which the actors have to deliver, and that can only be grasped, thanks to a theory of the orientation of social action through validity. This performance results in the ‘cultural work’ that action theory from the participant perspective calls the ‘third a priori of sociation’ (Simmel 1908: 59). Although empirically purpose-rational and value-rational social action are always interlocked, action theory from

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the observer perspective distinguished analytically between them in order to understand what is the predominant character of action orientation. If the first must be explained in teleological terms, the second differs from this action pattern, because it strictly focuses on the course of action starting from a specific idea of its validity. From the viewpoint of a theory of normative intermittency, the question therefore arises about what are the modalities of social action in environments where the value-oriented action is increasingly intermittent and subordinated to tighter spatiotemporal boundaries. The mechanisms granting validity to action orientation, the limits of consensus towards social orders and the relationships of domination come into focus, which characterise social reality in complex societies. The traditional, ontologically fixed concept of social structure dissolves in relationships of intermittent validity that can be analysed by sociological methodology, if it is well attuned to addressing them. In this regard, the observer approach must adopt the processual viewpoint of the participant perspective in social action theory and apply it to the inquiry into action orientation and coordination patterns. Social structure endures as long as meaningful oriented social action can be factually induced through its mechanisms. Social relationship becomes independent from the single actor, by giving rise to the formation of social orders and social groups. Yet, these are increasingly dependent on the consensus of greater numbers of social actors. Social emergence does not deliver a guarantee of persistence that would allow axiomatic assumptions about the autonomy of social structure. The analysis of action coordination, that is, of the recurrent production of social validity, thus becomes the major challenge of sociological theory in complex societies. In this respect, the multi-level theory of social reality from the observer perspective distinguishes between action coordination by virtue of interest constellations or by virtue of authority, which cannot both subsist without procedures of legitimation. Yet, the premise of their understanding is a reconstruction of the mechanisms making possible action orientation according to ideas of validity. Weber’s so-called categories-essay makes a decisive contribution to this effort and develops a typological classification of the grounding forms of social action that make social validity possible (Weber 2012: 273–301; MWG I/12, 389–440). Theory building here is not limited to the conceptual oppositions that are familiar to the sociological transformation of classical conceptions of political obligation: status and contract (Maine 1861), cooperation and domination (Gierke

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1868–1913), constraint and contract (Spencer 1876/1882–1885), or community and society (Tönnies 1887). The ‘categories-essay’ distinguishes between the procedural modalities of social action, which are based on the principle of negotiating a common coordination of action from the ones grounded on the toleration of an existing one, and thereby the coordination by virtue of interests’ constellations from that by virtue of authority. The approach delivers a critical integration of contractualist theory with the sociological theory of consensus that represents the culmination of the entire tradition of social thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. Methodologically, the essay applies a sociologically reflected ‘regressive method’ that first considers the typologically most evident occurrence of social phenomena, which is ‘to be expected from experience’, and reconstructs its rational logic. Then, it enquires into the aspects that cannot be grasped in this sense, because they deviate from the most evident typological reconstruction and presuppose a deepening of the ideal-typical concept building towards less evident layers of social action motivation. This methodologically controlled assessment serves, on the one hand, to capture social complexity and, on the other hand, to gradually refine sociological theory. Seen from the observer’s viewpoint, social action entails a complexity that cannot be reduced to its most usual sequence, yet it can be explained only by starting from its understanding. It is necessary to first examine the orientation of action centres that are theoretically assumed as rational and free, that is, independently of all other components and constraints of action. The theory of social action from the observer perspective thus evaluates which reconstruction of action coordination in complex societies is provided by the ‘contractual paradigm’ of modern political theory and which aggregates of social action remain excluded from its understanding. In a second analytical sequence, it assesses the orientation of social action that does not follow the pattern of negotiating common action orientations, but endure, or express consensus towards, existing common action patterns, ‘as if’ they were the result of a negotiation process. This leads to the coining of the ideal-typical concept of ‘consensus-driven action orientation’, which is of decisive importance for the understanding of intermittent processes of normative structuration. The methodological starting point for action theory from the observer perspective is the definition of social action as a behaviour with a meaningful reference to other action centres. Hence, the approach becomes compatible with the

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findings of action theory from the participant perspective and overcomes the subject-object approach of the observer’s perspective in natural sciences. ‘Action’ must be considered in its not only active but also passive components, by including the ‘omission of reaction’ and enduring, that is, the acceptance of natural and social factors of constraint inducing the renunciation to counteract. Because it is related to the behaviour of other action centres, ‘social action’ becomes the subject of action theory from the observer perspective. ‘Passive consensual relations’ based on a deliberate omission of reaction or toleration towards the actions of others are a constituent part of it. Thanks to this analytical approach, the theory of intermittent sociation processes goes beyond the limits of a sociology that orients itself towards the contractualist paradigm of political theory. Social action theory from the observer perspective aims to lead back the validity of the institutionally fixed action contexts to the empirical action of the individuals, which on a daily basis become their bearers. In contrast to Durkheim’s moral sociology, it not only reconstructs normative patterns of social action but also traces them back to the mechanisms of action that support their validity, whether they are active or passive (Durkheim 2019). 6.2.1   Contract-Driven Social Action To examine the basic forms of action orientation, which are expected to be rational on the basis of experience, means for action theory from the observer perspective to focus on attitudes that try to stabilise the subjective experience of the other persons’ behaviour. It therefore follows a methodological principle that is compatible with the assumptions of the first a priori of social action from the participant perspective (Simmel 1908: 47). The analytical question of what the social actors can expect from the behaviour of the other actors thus precedes the moral-­sociological question of what they must do to support social relationships. Rational expectations of the behaviour of other action centres can only be established due to the fact that actors ‘believe’ the other to act in an intelligible (sinnhaft) way. Yet, this belief proves to be fundamentally unstable, unless it is confirmed by the certainty that interaction proceeds in the expected way. The contingency of the rational action logics thus induces the negotiation of common action coordination. Considered from the viewpoint of contract theory, subjective expectations of the action of others can be stabilised by establishing agreements, stipulations and contracts, so that actors afterwards ‘can expect’ them to be maintained. This is the point

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where all of Parsons’ inspired sociology leaves the explanation (Parsons and Shils 1951: 16). Yet, social action theory from the observer perspective goes further. The high diffusion of social action oriented towards negotiating ‘common frames of behaviour’ is a specific feature of modern societies and its origin is due to the need to control the growing contingency of social interaction (Tönnies 1887). Therefore, social action theory from the observer perspective reconstructs the mechanisms that stabilise the action sequences starting from their most evident case of ‘contractual action’. This occurs thanks to the ideal-typical concepts of ‘associated action’ (vergesellschaftetes Handeln) and social order (soziale Ordnung). ‘Associated action’ is the social action whose expectations are intelligibly oriented towards social orders, as long as their establishment and the compliance towards them follow a purpose-rational logic (Weber 2012: 282 f.). After this first analytical step, however, social action theory from the observer perspective focuses on the assessment of the heuristic limits characterising the contract theory approach. Empirical research shows in sufficient detail that social orders can be ‘negotiated’ as well as ‘imposed’ by the governing organs of social groups (from the patriarchal structures of aboriginal clans to the democratic elected governments of modern states). Ideal-typically ‘social orders’ thus mean either a one-sided explicit request of people (rulers) to other people (ruled) or a mutual declaration of people to each other, that the compliance with certain kind of action frames can be expected. The first requirement for the orientation of social action towards orders is that empirical behaviour ultimately conforms to the prospective action sequence, even if the social actors subjectively interpret its meaning in very different ways. A ‘common overarching consensus’ granting the order’s validity thus exists only in the abstract theoretical limit case. From the viewpoint of the theory of intermittent validity, the persistence of contract-­ driven action coordination is thus based on the average expectation of the involved social actors that ‘the order exists’. Yet, there is a complete scale of transitions between the existence and the disbanding of associated action based on social orders. Orders subsist as long as social action, which is oriented towards their average meaning, takes place in an empirically relevant number of cases. Due to the normative pluralism of qualitative differentiated societies, however, actors are increasingly confronted with overlapping and competing social orders. The issue of validity thus becomes critical.

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The persistence of normative orders is based on the fact that social actors on average not only can count on the respect of the rules ‘by the others’, but also themselves conform to the normative expectation of their behaviour. To ensure the empirical validity of social orders, these two aspects of the ‘consciousness’ of being part of the social fabric should match with sufficient likelihood. Social action theory from the participant perspective leads the issue of social validity back to the three a priori of sociation (Simmel 1908, 47–59). Yet, formulated in the terms of the observer approach, the issue is how decidedly the contradictory orientations of social action match. What must be taken into account is not only the goal-oriented attitude of social actors towards the behaviour of the other but also the way in which social actors deal with the normative expectations of their own behaviour. Accordingly, the issue of obligation can be treated analytically and is not founded on axiomatic assumptions about ‘internalised attitudes’ that social actors may have acquired through socialisation. First, the procedures must be reconstructed whereby social actors try to stabilise the expectations concerning the behaviour of others. A stereotypical image arises of their social personality and acting style. Afterwards, the way in which the actors meet the expectations of their behaviour is traced back and, so too, the stereotypical image of themselves. The emerging reciprocity of social action, which is the product of the dynamic interconnection between goal- and value-oriented behaviour, allows the development of social relation. To behave in conformity to others’ expectations constitutes the basis of every normative codified behaviour. Yet, its motivation can be the most diverse, so that the theory of social action from the participant perspective typologically classifies the possible ‘determining grounds’ (Bestimmungsgründe) of social action. Here, the purpose-­ rational, interest-driven action only constitutes the unstable borderline case. A theoretical integration of the explanatory model based on contract-­ theoretical (Locke, Rousseau) and interest-based action frames (Marx) becomes necessary. The ‘liability of legality’, that is, the orientation towards social orders, has to be explained in sociological terms. If social actors not only orient their behaviour towards the expectation of the other’s action, but consider the legality of the established social orders as binding, the social fabric becomes significantly more stable. Yet the question is how this attitude can be grasped in terms of action theory and not simply in terms of moral sociology.

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From the observer perspective, action theory adopts a descriptive strategy to record the possible variations of liability action and focuses on their typical action sequence. The moral-sociological category of the ‘binding validity of values’ is thus translated into action-theoretical terms and seizes the mechanisms leading actors to accept the legality claim of the established social orders. The ideal-type of contract-theoretical action illustrates the possibilities, yet also the limits in ensuring the validity of social orders through pure purpose-rational action patterns. Its approach is based on the idea that all persons involved participate in negotiating the common action coordination. Its legal model is the incorporated association. Here every participant relies on the statutory assumption that the other will respect the agreement. Yet, from an empirical viewpoint, the expectation can only be empowered, if actors can assume that every violation of the agreements meets with physical or psychological compulsion. This is the precondition of ‘pure rational contractual action’, which turns out to be established on premises that it cannot afford on its own. The social foundations of legal obligation must, therefore, become the object of further inquiry. The most critical dimension for the persistence of social orders, and so of legality in general, is time. The ‘average uniform order’ must be able to reproduce itself beyond the lifetime of its founders and gain the support of other social actors who were not involved in its starting process. To grasp the mechanisms that allow the empirical validity of social orders—from the unwritten laws of custom to the legal course of laws and to the legitimacy of political domination—the theory of social action from the observer perspective must develop further analytical categories. 6.2.2   Consensus-Driven Social Action The question with regard to social action is which of its structures are not the product of purpose-rational negotiation producing ‘associated action’, yet still develop patterns that assume a similar shape. Manifold complexes of social action show regularities, even if they are not grounded on rational agreed orders. They come into being ‘as if’ a negotiation would have taken place. The most classical example of this type of action frame is the monetary economy. Money (especially paper and even more electronic money) can only subsist as a generalised means of exchange, as long as social actors can expect that, in the future, unknown third parties will accept the means of payment they receive in exchange for commodities or work performances (MWG I/23: 172). The monetary economy thus

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depends on action types that are not based on the orientation towards a commonly negotiated order, but ‘as if it would exist’. The expectations of future action of unknown third parties can be stabilised through non-­ negotiated agreements in the following sense: ‘If I accept these banknotes today for this number of commodities or work performances, in the future unknown third parties will deliver me a comparable number of commodities or work performances for the same banknotes’. On the other hand, economic exchange mediated by money is not based on absolute arbitrariness, because it matches with ‘regularities’ of social action that are reproduced under specific conditions. Sociology has the task of explaining these mechanisms. As economics shows, markets are characterised by a latent orientation towards the satisfaction of social needs. This process occurs within an existing legal frame, yet (with the exception of the planned economy) it does not follow a sanctioned order for the ‘action on the market’. Moreover, the very fact that this order is missing, constitutes the premise for the development of economic action in the market. Yet in terms of the overall effect, as can be observed empirically, economic action occurs ‘as if’ it would be oriented to an unwritten order for the need-satisfaction of the involved people. Language follows a similar logic. Actors expect the other to understand the symbols they use. As a mass-phenomenon language thus presupposes the use of speech-acts ‘as if’ actors would have been rationally negotiating the grammar rules in use. Nevertheless, neither the monetary economy nor the communication density of complex society can be explained in contractual terms. As can be further observed empirically, political legitimacy evidences similar mechanisms. The governed support the action of the rulers as if they had participated in the stipulation of the proposed laws, while in reality they have at best expressed themselves in the choice of the rulers. In summary, complex societies are based on a multiplicity of social relations that subsist without developing a negotiation between all the involved actors. They are crucial for the function of monetary economy, politics and communication. All social domains become increasingly normatively intermittent because of the accelerated development rhythm of social reality. Defining complexes of social action that deviate from the ideal-type of ‘negotiated social action’ requires distinguishing them from other modalities of ‘apparent societal regularity’. Social action ‘as if there were a negotiated order’ is not based on mass action or imitation. The latter constitute the subject of social psychology (Laucken 1998) in the vein of Gustav Le

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Bon (1895) and Gabriel Tarde (1890), yet they do not match the criteria that constitute ‘social action’. Its precondition is the persistence of a ‘meaningful reference’ to the behaviour of others, so that subjective action orientation can be analysed, whereas mass psychology focuses on its apparent aggregated result. If it starts to rain and everybody opens an umbrella, this is not ‘social action as if there were a negotiated order’. The ideal-­ typical assessment of such action enquires into the subjective attitude that leads social actors in their orientation towards non-negotiated orders. This constitutes a particular form of ‘consensus’ that accepts the other’s action, without opening a negotiation about the terms of common action. It is thus an implicit acknowledgement of the other’s expectations, which renounces the development of communicative action, and appears like a conformity to a non-explicated common order of behaviour. The reasons underlying ‘consensual action’ show a wide variety of modalities and must be empirically inquired into. Yet, an overarching typological definition of ‘consensus-driven social action’ is needed on the conceptual level of sociological theory. Seen from the viewpoint of the active side of interaction, ‘consensus’ means that the expectation of the (re-)action of others is based on an objective probability of empirical fulfilment. The others shall treat the ‘claims for consensus’ as meaningfully binding for their behaviour, despite the absence of an agreement concerning this matter. Hence, consensus-­ driven action can be defined as an asymmetrical relationship between social actors, according to which the expectations of the one side are treated as ‘valid’ by the other even without agreement to that effect. There is no preliminary communication concerning common action and often even no conscious understanding of its terms. Consensus-driven action simply implies the idea that social actors regard others’ expectations as ‘practically binding’ for their (re-)action, whatever are the reasons for accepting this claim. Consensus comes about because social actors tolerate others’ expectations; they refrain from opposing as well as from negotiating agreements regarding common action. Consensus-driven action, therefore, is no interaction on equal terms. The one side acts on the basis of ‘expectations of consensus’, while the other side proceeds on the basis of ‘acceptance of consensus claims’. This asymmetry characterises the domains of social action that are located beyond the boundaries of negotiated contractual action. It becomes decisive in conditions of scarce space-­ time resources for the handling of common action, as is the case for intermittent normative orders. Hence, the analytical focus of sociology

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must be directed to the asymmetric structure of consensus-driven interaction, by leaving the determination of the manifold motivation for the ‘acceptance of consensus claims’ to empirical inquiry. The factual persistence of consensus does not mean ‘satisfaction with’ or ‘approval for the other’s action’. Rather, it simply implies refraining from acting against or claiming for negotiation. In the extreme case, consensual actors may disagree completely, yet they decide to act as if they would approve claims of consensus and postpone counteraction to a later moment. Accordingly, different shades of consensus-driven action are decisive for the persistence of social and political structures that are established on minimal accepted standards of approval, whereas an overarching spread of disapproval would jeopardise their legitimation. The crucial question is how expectations of consensus can be stabilised. They are all the more objectively justified, the more the active side can count on the fact that the re-acting social actors regard the claims of consensus as ‘binding’. Hence, ‘consensus-driven social action’ becomes the cornerstone for the construction of the entire building of societal legitimation, in the three dimensions of validity, legitimacy and legality, including not only the societal domains of politics and law but also the trust relations that make the monetary economy possible. In its typological form, consensus-driven social action has nothing to share with a stipulation, not even in the sense of a ‘tacit agreement’, which could be interpreted as a modality of contract-driven action. As the investigation of the structure of action in the monetary economy shows, social actors exchange, but do not know enough about each other. They act spatially as well as temporally, beyond face-to-face relationship. Yet, they are ‘connected through consensus’, despite remaining mutually anonymous. Accordingly, consensus-driven action advances to a general equivalent for negotiated agreements and constitutes an empirically efficient means to carry out binding forms of social action in conditions of intermittent legitimacy. In this respect, the transition to legal validity requires the establishment of a coercive apparatus that grants its effective enforcement. Legality can thus be understood as a stabilised rhythm of consensus-­ driven social action that accepts the ‘consensus claims’ characterising a specific societal apparatus; in complex societies it is the legal system. Between complete normative intermittency and the institutionalisation of effective legal system, there are infinite transitions that can be grasped empirically by assessing their deviation from the two ideal-typical extremes of contract- and consensus-driven social action.

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Established consensus-driven social action may become an ‘institution’ grounded on negotiated or imposed rational orders to regulate common behaviour. Yet, different complexes of consensus-driven social action emerge from every institution; they reach beyond its rationalised borders and reproduce the validity of its orders. A structural limit of the modern processes of rationalisation thus comes to the fore. The increased emergence of statutory orders, which transform societal communities into legal associations, does not put an end to the persistence of consensus-driven action. The rationalisation process leads instead to an increasing differentiation of the areas of action that are oriented towards rationalised orders from those that are simply regulated by consensus-driven social action. Yet, this process has a downside. Bureaucracies are indeed the most efficient means to regulate social action in complex societies. Beyond the borders of their organisations, however, consensus grants the conformity of the ‘rational regulated’ social action to the expectations of the bureaucracy. The issue of validity thus characterises every institutionalised normative order and sets limits to an overarching transition from habitual consensus-driven to rational contract-driven action forms. In qualitative differentiated societies social actors are constantly drawn in a multiplicity of social relationships regulated either by consensus- or contract-driven action frames. The higher the number of rationalised societal domains, the more social differentiation advances. The further ‘rational social organisation’ develops, the more societal domains take on the character of contract-­ driven associations. Yet, the imperative of their empirical persistence reproduces in equal measure the need for consensus-driven action that secures their validity. 6.2.3   The Observer Logic of Social Action The theory of social action from the observer perspective reaches its decisive theoretical conclusion based on the historical finding that contract-­ driven social action intensively disseminates in modern societies; yet, by doing so, it simultaneously induces the rise of consensus-driven social action that grants its empirical validity. Accordingly, the analytical distinction between the two main forms of social action builds the core of social action theory from the observer perspective, without expressing an aprioristic historical-philosophical judgement on the supposed prevalence of contractual over consensual modalities of social action in complex societies. In conditions of increasing normative intermittency, the

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interdependence between contract- and consensus-driven social action becomes even more important to ensure the continuity of social structuration processes, so that the topic moves into the focus of ideal-typical sociological theory building. However, in order to fully develop the heuristic potential of the approach, some common prejudices must be overcome. The theory of social action from the observer perspective has two different formulations that have been often played off against each other: the ‘categories-­essay’ (MWG I/12: 389–440; Weber 2012: 273–301) and the ‘basic concepts in sociology’ (MWG 1/23: 147–215). Yet, a closer comparative examination evidences a substantial equivalence in conceptual structure. Only the narrative strategy and the adopted semantics differ. Both formulations distinguish between action orientation and action coordination, by combining the study of social structure with that of social action in a multi-level theoretical model of analysis. The reflection on the inadequacy of the reduction of every social action to the analytical model of the homo oeconomicus encourages the development of an extended action motivation’s typology from the observer perspective that allows us to ask the question of social validity. This is the starting point for the second formulation of the theory of social action from the observer perspective. A notion of the action orientation towards success or material interests does not suffice to investigate which types of action ensure the legitimacy of social structuration processes. Hence, in the ‘basic concepts in sociology’, the distinction between two forms of action rationality (goal- and value-rationality) takes the place of the distinction between contract- and consensus-driven action in the ‘categories-essay’. This move initiates the semantic transformation of the theory. Value-rationality is conceived as ‘validity-driven’ social action. Hence, it cannot be reduced to ‘communicative action’ or ‘value-oriented rational choice’, because it neither means behaviour striving to establish relationships of solidarity nor goal-oriented action aiming to achieve a value instead of an instrumental purpose (Habermas 1984; Schluchter 2005: 221–228). ‘Validity-driven’ social action is a sociological type in its own right that addresses a crucial vehicle of social structuration: the unconditional adhesion to a particular action sequence for the sake of the action in itself, whatever the (economic, ethical, religious, political or emotional) reason is. Thus, in contrast to success-oriented action, value-oriented action does not constitute a form of teleological action, but an action orientation towards ‘its intrinsic value’. It concentrates on the preservation of the action meaning, so that its highest ideal-typical expression is religious

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witnessing. Yet, the everyday realisation of value-oriented action can have the most profane shades needed to legitimate manifold structuration processes. In the ‘basic concepts in sociology’, the idea of value-rational action takes over the characteristics of consensus-driven action in the former formulation of the theory of social action from the observer perspective, inasmuch as this was concerned with the aspect of the action’s validity. The further meaning of the notion of consensus-driven social action, instead, re-emerges in the following investigation of the structuration of social orders. Here the asymmetrical, not negotiated, that is, non-contract-­ driven social action, including the passive toleration of the other’s action, is traced back to the notion of the validity-driven ‘belief in legitimacy’. The semantic shift, which is dictated by didactic purposes, as Weber explicitly states (MWG 1/23: 147), induces the foundation of the entire building of normative societal structuration (from validity through legitimacy until legality) on the sociological category of ‘belief’ rather on that of consensus. As the concept of belief has a great number of religious and ethical implications in pre-scientific language, this choice has induced various misunderstandings. Yet, in its sociological meaning, the analytical category of belief simply indicates the presence of a non-negotiated adhesion to foreign action or decision in the sense of ‘validity-driven social action’. The object of belief is legitimacy, if the relationship between ordering instances and ordered social actors is seen as justified by habit, emotional relationship or rational reflection. The two formulations of the theory of social action from the observer perspective evidence a substantial analytical equivalence. Yet, the specificity of the ‘basic concepts in sociology’ consists in the fact that they result from the arrangement in tabular form of three different sets of ideal-­typical categories. They reconstruct the social world starting from the observation of ‘subjective action orientation’ and build on it several social structuration processes, following the path of a methodologically controlled increase of complexity. Thus the ‘basic concepts in sociology’ establish a three-dimensional theory of social action, social orders and social groups with a specific ‘geometrical architecture’ (Fitzi 2004: 88). Successive inquiries into the ‘determinants of social action’, the ‘reasons of validity for legitimate orders’ and the structuration typology of social groups highlight the processes of action orientation, coordination and subordination that eventually introduce the separately presented typology of the ‘reasons of validity for legitimate domination’. By doing this, the theory of social action from the observer perspective puts at the centre of its ideal-typical

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assessment the crucial issue of social order in complex societies, that is, the persistent tension between the logic of social action and social structuration processes. The result is an extremely efficient heuristic instrument to overcome the epistemological taboos of social sciences that are increasingly subjugated by the internalisation of alienated approaches to social reality, deriving from societal self-interpretation and impeding the examination of empirical structuration and legitimation processes. The analytical focus of the theory of social action from the observer perspective extends to the inquiry into the often hardly meaningfully oriented habitual action and its relationship to the traditional powers of everyday life. Especially when the settlement of action coordination does not result from proactive negotiation, but is based on orders promulgated by increasingly distant government bodies, ‘passive acceptance’ determined by habit plays a crucial role. Hardly consciously oriented social action enforces social structuration processes that are grounded on an unreflected legitimation of the existing orders. Habitualised states of social structuration seem to be based on autocratic evidence, yet they are essentially weak, because their legitimation is widely unconscious. Under the pressure of unforeseen events, it does not matter if they are social, economic, political or environmental, habitualised social structuration can rapidly collapse. Disrupted consensus-driven relationships thus redirect towards irrational communities of charismatic domination. The dialectics between the unconscious consensus of traditional action and unreflected consensus of emotional action characterises every political process. Yet, at times of growing normative intermittency, it becomes a generalised trait of social structuration. The inquiry into the legitimation issue of social orders leads to a methodological transition in analysis from the horizontal to the vertical dimension of social reality. There is thus a fluid transition from the theory of social action to the theory of social validity and the sociology of domination. Enforcing ‘legitimate orders’ means to sanction deviant behaviour and requires the establishment of social structures of domination. Accordingly, without a legitimation of the governing and sanctioning instances, the ‘objective validity’ of social orders crumbles. The ‘basic concepts in sociology’ deal with the subjectively perceived binding nature of orders, which grounds their validity, from the angle of the ‘belief in legitimacy’ that orients social action. This not only depends on the content of the social orders but also on the relationship between governed and promulgating instances. Hence, the reconstruction of the positive

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establishment of social orders is linked to the assessment of the legitimacy of the ‘political instances’ that grant this performance. The ideal-typical theory building of the ‘basic concepts’ flows into the sociological investigation of domination processes. The legality of the social orders draws either on the fact that it was agreed upon after negotiation or that it was imposed by a ‘legitimately valid rule’. The modern legitimacy form for social orders is the ‘belief in the legality’ of governing instances chosen following transparent and just criteria of selection. So the question arises about which mechanisms of political legitimation characterise highly intermittent social structuration processes at times when decision-making instances seem to be more and more distant from the involved social actors. To improve in this line of analysis, social action theory must develop a theory of validity and political domination at times of shifting legitimacy.

6.3  Conclusions in Action Theory Societal self-interpretation hypostasises collective action subjects. Yet, particularly in recent decades, the process of societal reification was accompanied by an increased tendency to impose a taboo on the inquiry into social action. This attitude widely extended to the social sciences. The knowledge-­ sociological backdrop of the phenomenon relates to the difficulty in acting under conditions of high social alienation. Rapidly developing intermittent social structuration compels actors to substantial passivity. Accordingly, societal self-interpretation takes it for granted that an active impulsion to innovative social structuration is impossible when moving from fragmented action centres. Whatever their empirical validity, institutionalised social structures are provided with an ontological status, negating even the possibility of a sociological inquiry into their rise, persistence and shifting legitimacy mechanisms. Far beyond its economic origins, ‘social fetishism’ thus becomes an ideology of the status quo that hides the crisis of societal structuration and hinders social research. It develops in conditions of social action that increasingly surrenders to alienation and adopts passive attitudes towards societal dynamics. Yet, this approach cannot build the starting point for a scientific inquiry into contemporary society. It is the result of an uncritical internalisation of societal self-interpretation that denies at its root the critical mission of sociology. A deeper analysis of intermittent social structuration, instead, reveals the ambivalence of reified and passive legitimation contexts.

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On a factual level, the constitution of proactive social action centres is negated by the alienation resulting from the increased fragmentation of rule patterns in complex societies. Yet, on the other hand, social structuration processes require social actors to perform as reliable bearers of social relationships. This contradiction traverses the fragmented action centres and amplifies ambivalence towards the accelerated change automatisms characterising the logic of qualitative differentiated societal domains. The spatiotemporal resources are missing that would permit a critical evaluation of social relationship networks and introduce negotiation on common action frames. Thus, the general conditions of social life thwart any reflexive attitude towards the dynamics of social structuration. The missing critical attitude in social reality induces uncritical approaches in social science. Yet, understanding the crisis of contemporary societies requires breaking this deadlock and restarting the inquiry into the mechanisms that intertwine fragmented action centres in intermittent processes of social structuration. The research effort presupposes an emancipation of social science from the predominant hypostatised ontology of societal self-interpretation. Developing a critical attitude towards the reification of collective social actors, however, does not allow indulging in the opposite hypostatisation of social actors by developing an idealistic philosophy of the social action subjects. Both concepts must be seen as regulative ideals of normative social philosophy, yet they cannot apply to the analysis of the empirical reality of social action. This unfolds in a relational field where single areas of fragmented actors’ personalities are remotely driven by the logic of qualitative differentiated societal domains. The latter engage in a struggle against each other in rapidly developing reciprocal colonisation processes aimed at achieving dominance over social structuration. In this context, the fight of the fragmented action centres to rebuild themselves into reliable bearers of social relationship must be described empirically in its full ambivalence. To form themselves into a dynamic unity and satisfy the expectations, which social structuration imputes to them, social actors are under a constant pressure to perform. This dynamics may encourage the formation of autonomous action centres able to synthetise manifold social roles within a subjective meaning. Yet, it can also end in the most unreflected passivity, so that the processes of social integration are never granted and cannot be analytically hypostasised in ontological terms. Social research must instead reconstruct the intermittent mechanisms that establish meaningful connections between fragmented social action

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centres and discontinuous social structuration processes, by requiring social actors to endure in recurrent cultural performance. A well-attuned cultural-sociological theory building becomes necessary. Culture cannot be considered as a secondary result of economic or social action, as Marx or Durkheim argue, but has to be explained as the constitutive performance of social integration that intertwines the logic of social structure and social action. In an age of failing social structuration, the concept of ‘cultural performance’ thus becomes a grounding category of sociology. Meaning in a sociological sense must be (re)considered as the cohesive material of social reality, starting from the labouring of social action centres to provide validating syntheses for intermittent constellations of social structuration. This ‘cultural performance’ allows for the steady production, reproduction and transformation of the social fabric required by rapid developing societies in crumbling late capitalism. Accordingly, sociology must inquire into the mechanisms that succeed or fail in enforcing this performance by reconstructing the everyday cultural work that interrelates social action and social structure. Furthermore, processes of intermittent social structuration must be analysed in their accelerated rhythm. Action centres strive to establish valuable syntheses of role expectations and subjective action motivations, permitting to cyclically reacquire the profile of reliable bearers of social relationship. Yet, the ongoing processes of social structuration steadily change the terms of synthesis between the logic of social action and social structure, so that the cultural work of fragmented action centres enters an endless loop of renewal. As a result, the legitimacy of social action structures is substantially diminished. Formally acknowledged normative action frames often remain a lost cause, since a deviant dynamics of intermittent social structuration constantly develops that is based on normless pragmatic action patterns. Anomy thus ceases to be a simple manifestation of societal crisis and becomes a structuring factor of social reality. In this context, sociology must be able to grasp the mechanisms that permit or impede social action centres to go on delivering the cultural performance that integrate social action and social structure into conditions of declining normativity. The issue is to understand to what degree of alienation the acceptance can persist for social action frames, when their normative statutes are increasingly contradicted by intermittent social structuration practices. It is necessary to inquire into this aspect of the ongoing societal transformation from the viewpoint of social action theory from the participant

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perspective, because it discloses fundamental aspects of the fragmentary nature of social structuration in complex societies. In a nutshell, it gives access to the logic of the unsurmountable fragmentation of social action centres beyond the hypostasis of collective action subjects. Following this path, sociological theory goes beyond the artificial playing off against each other of social action and social structure, and leaves behind the theoretical confusion produced by reified societal self-interpretation. Social action centres constitute the crossing point of innumerable social threads in complex societies. The competent and legally liable subject of social action is thus required to emerge as a valuable point of intersection in the societal fabric. Yet, in intermittent social structuration processes, social action centres are hardly in a position to provide this performance. By missing the autonomous action subjects capable of negotiating common value orientations, the normative fabric of complex societies becomes increasingly precarious. Too many different and steadily changing structuration processes compete in the same social space, impeding the stabilisation of a consistent normative action frame. Imperatives of complexity reduction and energy saving induce social action centres to passively adopt pro tempore the rapidly changing stereotyped shapes of their common life. Accordingly, social integration is increasingly dependent on intermittent procedures of legitimation sustaining action frames, whose validity is spatiotemporally limited. The theoretical assumption postulating the individual life history that crystallises into the habitus and thus grants social reproduction seems to lose grip on reality. Ethical and religious conducts of life, professional morals, lifestyles, yet also established political practices cannot cope with social reality’s increased change dynamics. Failing social structuration oscillates between thrusts of social liquefaction and social condensation, so that social action centres are increasingly compelled to lower the profile of their investment of meaning in social relationship. Improvisation talents are required. Social action must conform to the unstable rhythm of social structuration in intermittent normative environments. Yet, albeit within limited space-time legitimation and intermittently, complex societies incessantly produce social fabric. A hypertrophic establishment of competing networks of social relationship takes place, with very limited scope of stabilisation. It becomes thus an urgent issue to understand how this social construction of unstable alternations between societal solidification and liquefaction can reproduce society at all. Furthermore, it is necessary to explore the mechanisms that might ground strategies to overcome this

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entropic development. Here, social action theory from the observer perspective significantly integrates the findings obtained in the participant perspective. Historically, specific strategies of social action have prevailed to cope with the increased plasticity of complex societies. The transformation of juridical institutions shows that the diffusion of negotiated social action frames must be considered as the driving force behind the spread of modern forms of sociation. From this assessment arises the classic sociohistorical thesis of modernity as transition ‘from status to contract’ (for further discussion of the Maine-Tönnies Model, cf. Fitzi 2015: 113–123). Yet, in the frame of increasingly intermittent structuration processes, this assumption seems no longer to apply. Late modernity shows the prevailing of passive consensus-driven social action over proactive negotiation. The incessant and chaotic reshaping of social reality in crumbling late capitalism largely impacts the capability of social action centres to influence structuration processes. This development questions the heuristic potential of the contractual explanation scheme of social integration both on a descriptive and on a normative plan. Instead of establishing consistent normative action frames, societies increase their interaction rhythm to a level where every proactive coping with social complexity meets its limits. Fragmented action centres enter a process of social entropy. They cannot recompose into active subjects of social interaction and are unable to develop negotiation about common normative action frames. As a consequence, they increasingly adopt attitudes of passive acceptation for alien consensus-pretentions. Hence, the analytical dichotomy between the two basic types of contract- and consensus-driven social action must be put back at the centre of sociological theory building and revisited from the viewpoint of the increasing shift from proactive to passive social action patterns that is taking place. Plasticity and consolidation processes cooperate and compete in granting the persistence of the social fabric. Contract-driven social action enables establishing innovative common action frames legitimated by formally established rules that claim normative legitimacy. Yet, in complex societies the number of regulations increases that are not negotiated by social actors, but rather imposed by decision-making bodies, which are increasingly remote from their lifeworld. Furthermore, in conditions of failing societal structuration, social actors are forced to accept intermittent frames of social relationship with poor or even absent normative legitimacy. These conditions of scarcity in legitimating (spatiotemporal, social

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and economic) resources force actors to switch from negotiation to unreflected acceptance of given action frames. The conflict between proactive contract-driven and passive consensus-driven social action becomes even more virulent, because of the increasing rhythm of sociation imposed on complex societies by the accelerating change of accumulation strategies in crumbling late capitalism. Here a growing intermittency of normative action frames is to be observed. Yet, this neither implies one-sided liquefaction nor one-sided reproduction of domination relationships. Instead, the dynamics of solid liquidity imposes itself on society (Fitzi 2016). Increasingly frequent cycles of construction and dismantling of social structures show up. Intermittent social orders thus take the place of the traditional dialectics between the democratic societal construction through contract-driven and in the best case communicative action, on the one hand, and authoritarian societal structuration by emerging autopoietic social systems, on the other (cf. Habermas 1984: 113–198). Intermittent social structuration is based on a more and more short-lived consensus-­ driven social action, so that one questions how these processes can ever stabilise themselves. It is the task of the ‘transnormative theory of intermittent social structuration’ to find answers to this question, and this aspect remains the focus of the next chapters. Its main challenge consists in developing an analytical frame for a ‘theory of social validity’ capable of explaining the mechanisms that factually allow fragmented social action centres to go on legitimating intermittent social action frames and become their bearers within limited spatiotemporal boundaries. This theory building effort is based on the results of the research on the theory of social action in environments of failing social structuration, which include the analytical reconstruction from the participant perspective of two main aspects: the dialectics of alienation and passivity, on the one hand, and the creativity of the cultural performance of the social actors, on the other, that is, their competence to keep on answering the expectation of being reliable carriers of intermittent social relationships. The ideal-typical concept of ‘cultural work’ thus grants the crucial category for further developing the inquiry into shifting social legitimation contexts. It points to three particular aspects: (1) The reciprocal stereotyping between social action centres. (2) The perception of the tension between the social determined fragmentation, the aspiration to dynamic unity and the social expectations for consistency of the social actor. (3) The effort to synthetise these elements in a meaningful action praxis. Thanks to this analytical framework, research on social action from the

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participant perspective can reconstruct the process of cultural work that ensures the integration between action centres and structuration processes in specific social fields. Starting from this basis, the focus on social action from the observer perspective can show, if the processes taking place orient themselves to an action line based more on a proactive contract-­ establishing attitude or on a passive acceptance of consensus pretentions. The inquiry into the empirical dialectics between contract-driven and consensus-driven action can therefore answer the question about which processes of legitimation characterise the shifting social structuration processes in the accelerated societal rhythm of crumbling late capitalism. Developing the analytical categories (i.e. the ideal-typical frame of analysis) to carry out this investigation constitutes the core of ‘sociological theory of validity’ during periods of intermittent normativity.

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Rawls, John (1993). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandel, Michael J. (1982). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schluchter, Wolfgang (2000). ‘Handlungs- und Strukturtheorie nach Max Weber’. In: Id., Individualismus, Verantwortungsethik und Vielfalt, Weilerswist: Velbrück, S.86–103. ——— (2005). Handlung, Ordnung und Kultur. Studien zu einem Forschungsprogramm in Anschluss an Max Weber. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ——— (2015). Grundlegungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht. 2. Edition. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. Simmel, Georg (1890). Über sociale Differenzierung. Now in: Id., GSG 2, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Dahme, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, S. 109–295. (No complete English Translation until today). ——— (1900). Philosophie des Geldes. Now in: Id. (1989), GSG 6, ed. by Klaus Christian Köhnke and David Frisby, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ——— (1908). Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Now in: Id. (1992), GSG 11, ed. by Otthein Rammstedt, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Spencer, Herbert (1876/1882–1885). Principles of Sociology. London: Williams and Norgate. Tarde, Gabriel (1890). Les lois de l’imitation. Etude sociologique. Paris: Alcan. English: Id.: (1962). The Laws of Imitation. Trans. by Elsie Clews Parsons and introd. by Franklin H. Giddings. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith. Tönnies, Ferdinand (1887). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Abhandlung des Communismus und des Sozialismus als empirische Kulturformen. Leipzig: Reisland. Now in: Bettina Clausen (†) and Dieter Haselbach (2019, Eds.). 1880–1935: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Walby, Sylvia (2015). Crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Weber, Max (1904/1905). Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Now in Id. (2016) Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/18. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp.  123–545. English: Id. (1992). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, T. Parsons (trans.), A. Giddens (intro), London: Routledge. ——— (2012). Collected Methodological Writings. Ed. by Hans Henrik Bruns and Sam Whimster. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 7

Shifting Legitimacy: The Theoretical Issue of Social Validity

For the generation of intellectuals who grew up during times of dictatorship and war, or in the early post-war period, the deconstruction of outdated and repressive societal normativity was an essential motivation for social research. After forty years of neoliberal policies that substantially deconstructed the post-war consensus about the welfare-state compromise, today’s sociology in some respects faces the opposite problem. The main critical factor of contemporary societies is their difficulty to establish shared normative frames of solidarity that substantially establish citizenship rights, and not only in formal terms. Shifting normativity, its intermittency and at times its inconsistency represent one of the main development trends of society. To understand what normative intermittency looks like we adopted a symptomatic perspective on the development of the labour market and environmental protection legislation. It is now necessary to analyse the issue from the viewpoint of sociological diagnosis. This involves addressing the issue of (failing) social validity from a theoretical perspective.

7.1   Establishing Intermittent Social Orders from the Participant Perspective 7.1.1   Competing Enforcement of Multiple Social Structures At the core of action theory from the participant perspective is the notion of the parallel differentiation process of social structure and agency (GSG © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_7

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2: 109–295). In undifferentiated societies, there is no consistent separation between action centres and the social group. Yet, social bonds attaching to the single person loosen up with the qualitative unfolding of societal complexity. The higher the number of relationships that social actors entertain, the easier it is to emancipate from each one. Personal subjugation weakens, but dependence increases on the social body as a whole. Consequently, the unfolding of social structure and agency must be assessed in terms of reciprocal relations of determination. In complex societies action centres become ‘crossing points’ of highly diverse social circles, so that their specific interweaving also structures the personality of the social actors. They entertain manifold networks of relationships in professional, economic, political, religious, leisure or intimate circles that involve different groups of persons. The quantitative development of social groups so induces a qualitative differentiation of social structure and a fragmentation of the action centres’ experience of social reality. Society becomes an increasingly complex interconnection of social circles. Yet, this process is characterised by a double dynamics. On the one hand, social action’s creativity recombines the fragmented social reality in manifold different syntheses, by interlacing different social circles in a unique way. A multiplicity of parallel realisations of social structure with different meaning and legitimation joins the same societal space. Accordingly, a plurality of competing normative orders emerges that can hardly be stabilised into common action patterns, unless this is through mechanisms of intermittent consensus relations with shifting legitimacy. On the other hand, a fierce struggle develops between different qualitative reified domains of society that induces continuous phenomena of colonisation in which the logic of one social domain extends to the others. The crusade of neoliberalism in recent decades is one of the most striking examples of this process. All societal sectors, starting from politics, had to be brought back to the ideological dogma of market logic. The accelerated antagonistic tension between societal domains thus steadily fills the fragmented personalities with new expectations; it increasingly complicates every effort to realise a meaningful synthesis between their logics. Hence, the challenging relationship between social differentiation, personality’s fragmentation and the need to grant social agency the dynamic unity, which is requested by social structuration processes, becomes a crucial problem for the legitimation and persistence of the social fabric. Social structuration dynamics exerts a powerful influence on social action and selects the personal attitudes that fit into the reproduction of its

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objective imperatives. Yet, social actors are no robots. They adopt, reject and intertwine different societal logics following the impetus of their social creativity. Because of the opposition between the synthesising logic of social action and the fragmenting logic of social structure, the integration of complex societies cannot be granted on a purely structural level: ‘system integration’ fails without ‘social integration’ (Lockwood 1964). Yet, in the current frame of societal transformation the question of social validity has to be reformulated in terms of social structuration based on intermittent transnormative orders. Only as long as the creativity of social action keeps on weaving (more or less) meaningful relationships between social circles can their objectified logic lead social action, by providing social structuration processes with the necessary empirical validity. The creative performance of social agency occurs in the everyday dynamics of construction, reproduction and deconstruction of social reality. Action centres retain in their hands the multitudinous threads of their social belonging, thus ensuring the cohesiveness of the societal fabric on a performative base. Yet, every action centre brings forth a different variation in the process of interweaving various social circles, so combining subjective action logic and the objective imperatives of different societal domains. This performance provides the ever-changing social structure of complex societies with a validity that subsists within defined spatiotemporal boundaries and makes it possible to achieve the intermittent social integration of highly differentiated societies. Under these terms, competing social orders can subsist in complex societies, even if under precarious and limited conditions. Yet, no persistent social structuration emerges that could be stabilised in the long run and could give rise to communicative processes of autopoietic system building. Instead, multiple intermittent social structures subsist, as long as social actors go on delivering their cultural performance that transforms the fragmented reality of social life into a sufficiently meaningful, although provisional and multifarious, social structuration. Without these ‘communicative bridges’, no societal structuration takes place in complex societies. The creativity, the rhythm and the tempo of social action replace the declining normative integration of complex societies, because the manifold and constantly changing interconnection of social circles, which social agency grants, can hardly be reduced to overlapping common action patterns. In short, the ongoing societal differentiation makes a normative integration of society impracticable. Rather, what holds together the social fabric is the increased frequency of social exchanges that replaces its

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missing homogeneity. Instead of establishing enduring solidarity bonds, social agency produces an infinitude of faint lines of relation with delimited spatiotemporal validity, so granting social integration an intermittent transnormative basis. If some social threads tear, the social fabric endures for others, until social action builds new ones in an increased rhythm of volatility. Thereby, complex social reality benefits from the highest plasticity and can adapt to the most unexpected and rapid societal changes. Yet, it also misses more and more a normative foundation that can integrate social relationship into a legitimated framework of solidarity. Accordingly, highly differentiated societies cannot be approached theoretically as ‘social buildings’ that are durably founded on clearly defined patterns of social action. Instead, they must be assessed as ‘organic fabrics’ that subsist, thanks to an ongoing, accelerated and open-ended dynamics of building, severing and rebuilding social relationships beyond every teleological or functional conception of ‘social organisms’. In this context, social agency constitutes not only the crucial structure-­ generating factor but also the pillar for the intermittent building of social validity in qualitative differentiated societies. Yet, at the same time, action centres become less and less capable of performing a meaningful coordination of the social roles, which they have to play in different societal domains. This constitutes a major societal risk factor, because the fragmentation and alienation of the action centres directly undermines the legitimacy of social structure. Of course, consumerism and governance techniques try to grant a functional ersatz for the integrating performance of social agency. Yet, a society that renounces the legitimating output for the cultural work of social agency is a society that has clay feet. Highly fragmented action centres become pure alienated objects of social processes, so that social validity misses a reliable foundation from the simplest orders of everyday life to the legitimacy of the legal and political systems. Persistent cultural work is necessary to integrate qualitative differentiated societies. Yet, the internal conflict of culture makes it increasingly difficult for social actors to deliver the performance that secures social validity. Culture is the product of socially mediated human action, the Tätigkeit of the human as a species-being (Marcuse 1965). The creativity of social action centres produces cultivated objects, including social institutions, which obtain the dignity of autonomous clusters of significance. Conversely, the acquaintance with objectified contents of socio-cultural action becomes the source of new social creativity. Yet, with increasing societal complexity the objectified socio-cultural world becomes so

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sophisticated that social actors fail to control it and lapse into alienated social passivity. The modern development of society thus witnesses the triumph of factual culture. Its quantity and multiplicity make the acquisition and the meaningful synthetic connection of its fragments increasingly arduous, so that the discrepancy between objective and subjective culture broadens to an unmanageable level. The crisis of the cultural process finally jeopardises the integration of complex societies, by augmenting the tension between the logic of social structure and social action. To position itself in complex societies, social agency is compelled to embrace more and more the reified objective culture, which increases alienation. On the other hand, an active and sovereign intervention of social actors into objective culture is increasingly demanded to legitimate social structuration processes. Hence, the ongoing divide between the hypostatised logic of qualitative differentiated societal domains and the creative logic of social agency threatens to tear apart the social fabric, because the increasingly complex dynamics of objective culture becomes unmanageable. New approaches emerge in granting the legitimacy of intermittent structuration processes. 7.1.2   Intermittent Validity Beyond Lifestyle Qualitative societal differentiation represents the most powerful motor for the development of modern societies. Its dynamism is comparable with Marx’s idea of productive forces in the capitalist economy. Yet, it also reveals decisive differences because it has no dialectical movement. Furthermore, it neither strives to realise a plan of evolution nor a final goal. It merely produces increasing complexity that can hardly be led back to a structured order, despite all the economic theories of systemic equilibrium. Qualitative societal differentiation does not overcome the ‘current structural arrangement’ of society in a superior form. Instead, it alternates between phases of strong differentiation and rapid regression that implicate a wide destruction of human, societal, natural and cultural resources, such as happens during wars, economic crises, environmental disasters (including epidemics) and cultural entropy (GSG 16: 181–207). The quantity and multiplicity of societal fragmentation makes it increasingly arduous to interconnect into any process of subjective synthesis due to cultural work. The discrepancy between the amount of objective socio-­ cultural fragments, which have to be managed, and the synthetic

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performance required of social action centres thus broadens to an unmanageable level. On the one hand, the reification of life contents is augmented, and on the other, the logic of the different societal domains becomes increasingly autonomous from the will of the action centres. To express it in terms of role theory, the number of roles, which social actors are compelled to play, makes it extremely difficult to achieve any process of autonomous role-­ making. Connecting the disparate objective fragments of social reality becomes increasingly problematic, so that the creativity of social action is seriously challenged. The ‘legality’ of social orders and the ‘legitimacy’ of domination relationships, which are based on creative performances of ‘social validity’, only become possible in the form of a tension-fraught intermitting merging of social structure and social action. The conflict between the action centres’ synthetic logic and the fragmentation produced by qualitative societal differentiation threatens to tear apart the social fabric. Traditionally, ‘lifestyle’ constitutes the institution that regulates the relationship between social action and social structure. Fashion intermediates its changing rhythm on the temporal axis. Lifestyles are a technical surrogate for the titanic effort demanded of the modern personality to build a meaningful synthesis out of the random combination of social circles that it is engaged in. Every domain of society proposes pre-formed life-conduct patterns, yet the most effective are granted to the action centres by belonging to specific professional groups. Furthermore, consumerism plays a decisive role in dealing with the contrast between social action and social structure through monetarily mediated patterns of social interaction. Social actors choose different objective contents of social life and put them together in an apparently meaningful synthesis by purchasing commodities and activities that qualify the alleged social consistency of their action centres as members of particular social milieus. Consumerism thus becomes a decisive means of social integration in complex societies. By contrast, not having money at one’s disposal not only implies material deprivation but also a lack of opportunity for social integration. Hence, social inequality allows the privileged social strata to rule out the alienation of modern life, thanks to the deployment of money, yet only on an apparent and sociotechnically led level. Instead, economically discriminated groups miss out on this instrument and are more severely exposed to alienation and social disintegration.

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The ongoing qualitative differentiation of modern societies, the increasing rhythm of sociation and the fragmentation of social reality seriously challenge the integration strategies operated through lifestyles. Social actors are forced to improvise individual solutions to solve the conflict between social action and social structure in everyday practices, because otherwise they are compelled to capitulate in the face of the increasing external control of their social life. To understand how the integration of social structure and social action can be achieved in complex societies, these tentative and open-ended processes of social integration beyond lifestyle routine need further inquiry. Countless microsocial, apparently negligible and often imperceptible interaction threads persist between social actors. They make the existence of macrosocial formations possible. Accordingly, sociology deserves more than a descriptive morphology of social structure. It must inquire into the ‘fine societal connecting tissues’ holding macrosocial formations together and so preventing society from breaking apart into a multiplicity of discontinuous systems. The inquiry into these formations reveals society in its day-to-day building and legitimating process, whereby social ties are constantly established, loosened and substituted by new ones. Hence, the historical beginnings of the social formations do not constitute the main point of interest for the theory of intermittent structuration processes. Rather, the theory concentrates on the relentless everyday dynamics producing the fine societal connecting fabric which grants the ongoing factual flexibility and normative adaptability of highly differentiated societies. However, the question is how to proceed methodologically in order to work out the intermittent mechanisms granting the persistence of social validity in complex societies. To establish their typology, the theory of social validity from the participant perspective must distinguish between the matter and form of their empirical realisation. Underlying the legitimation of social ties through value orientation, it is important to appreciate the intermittent effort of cultural work that links the manifold streams of experience, which in turn are connected to the different fragments of social action in complex societies. Thus, a processual conception of validity, legitimacy and legality can unfold, by tracking back the macrosocial formations to the microsocial strands of intermittent validity that permit their everyday persistence. In a second step, the theory of social validity in the participant perspective traces back the mechanisms of intermittent validity to their ‘conditions of possibility’ in the consciousness of social action centres. In this way, the latter become bearers of macrosocial

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formations by ‘holding in their hands’ the intermittent strands of sociation which they entertain in the most diverse domains of qualitative differentiated society. Hence, the theory of social validity in the participant perspective responds to the interrogative concerning the intermittent transnormative structuration of complex societies by going beyond the traditional approach of moral sociology. It focuses on the formal ‘conditions of possibility’ that allow the social actors to become bearers of intermittent social relationships. The principal task for a sociology of intermittent legitimacy is to comprehend the preconditions of social action, which permit the coordination of the manifold logics of qualitative differentiated societal domains within a more or less meaningful subjective synthesis. The conflict-ridden relationship between active participation and passive adaptation to the social fabric is seen as applying in different scales to every social action centre in complex societies, and not only to the members of the economic, social and culturally discriminated groups (Park 1960, 2005). Social integration succeeds, as long as social action centres are not only included in social relationships as a random sum of various stereotypical role descriptions and expectations, which are produced by the logics of social structure. In a nutshell, social action centres are not completely alienated only as long as they are able to connect the fragments of their social existence in a synthesis, from which the logic of their own social action emerges. An enduring mismatch between social structuration processes and action logic instead provokes a progressive entropy of the social fabric that jeopardises social cohesion. Social structuration is possible as long as the performance of cultural work continues, even if only in an intermittent mode and within given spatiotemporal boundaries. Taken to its extreme, the conflict between the logic of social action and social structure leads either to a completely alienated reduction of social actors to the logic of social structure (robotisation) or to the blasé rejection of every sociation process (privatisation). Yet, what lies in-between is an infinite variety of dynamic forms of intermittent social structuration that holds together qualitative differentiated societies. As long as social actors are able to endure structuration processes in a way that is somehow meaningful for them, the network of social relationship, which they entertain, can persist. The building of societal validity in transnormative societies rests on this thin, yet extremely flexible basis of legitimation.

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7.1.3   Creative Cultural Performance The sociological theory of validity from the participant perspective deals with the intermittent normative mechanisms granting the dynamic persistence of complex societies. Its fundamental assumption is that every social action centre builds the crossing point of multiple qualitative differentiated domains of society and becomes the bearer of a network of sociation processes that enforce the ongoing continuity of the social fabric. Yet, action centres are not only a part and function of society. There is an essential conflict line, which characterises social structuration and affects the consistency of social action centres. In highly differentiated societies, social actors not only contend with the ongoing fragmentation of their personality, yet also with the antagonism between its socialised and non-­ socialised domains. Consequently, a recursive creative performance is required of the social actors to overcome the conflict between opposite centripetal and centrifugal streams of consciousness. This effort has a cultural character. It employs, and must employ, the objective cultural resources that arise from social interaction and bind them into a subjective cultural synthesis. To integrate society, social action centres must be able to deliver their socialising cultural performance on an everyday basis. Yet, this is no automatism and constitutes the decisive challenge for social life in rapidly changing and highly differentiated modern societies. Social integration cannot be taken for granted as the outcome of habit or custom, which social actors acquire during primary and secondary socialisation. Rather, it must be seen as a cultural work that occurs every day on a different basis and demands a profound talent of improvisation and invention of new social meaning. This performance is founded on the capacity of the consciousness to relate moving socialised and non-socialised flows of experience in a synthesis that makes sense from the viewpoint of the social action centres. Cultural work thus generates an ever-changing social meaning that can receive the most varied existential, ethical, political or religious validation. The result of structuration processes is therefore by definition multifarious, iridescent and instable, so that in sociological terms the idea of social structure remains a regulative ideal. Yet, what matters for social integration is the output of the creative performance of social action centres that generates the consciousness of being more or less actively engaged in social relationship. Social action centres can become the bearers of multiple social structuration processes only by linking manifold fragments of

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social interaction in a meaningful synthesis that overcomes the contradictory condition of being simultaneously socialised and not socialised. The everyday cultural accomplishment in coordinating the synthetic logic of social action and the fragmenting logic of social structure must be seen as the crucial performance that grants social integration. Accordingly, the theoretical questioning on social validity identifies culture as the foremost binding force of society. Culture can be conceived as a consequence of neither the economic relations of production (Marx) nor social relationship (Durkheim). Instead, it must be seen as the structuring factor that grants stability, plasticity and transformation potential to the everyday building process of the social fabric. The cultural work provided by social action centres enables highly differentiated societies to hold together, develop and change, despite their complexity. Hence, the inquiry into the manifold cultural expressions that characterise modernity becomes an absolute priority of every sociological research agenda. The matter of what is to be considered as modern, and therefore culturally ‘up-to-date’ (Simmel), must be examined sociologically in terms of the different ways in which social actors deliver the everyday cultural performance that grants the social integration potential of complex societies. The concept of culture becomes the grounding category of sociology, so that culture sociology cannot count as a special sociology among others, but rather becomes the central pillar of sociological theory. Meaning or sense must be (re)considered as the cohesive material of social reality that allows for the steady production, reproduction and change of the social fabric (Weber). Sociology is to inquire into the mechanisms that permit these transformation processes by reconstructing the everyday cultural work that interrelates social action and social structure. This approach promotes the study of the manifold cultural effort that holds together social reality. Yet, by doing so, the research must also take into account the fact that in highly qualitative differentiated societies cultural work gets more and more fragmented in the sectorial logics of the different societal domains and threatens to stagnate, by jeopardising social integration. The synthetic performance of cultural creativity can hardly keep up with the reification of objectified culture, so that its attitude becomes increasingly intermittent. It passively accepts claims of consent made by reified societal logics, by limiting the redefining synthetic performance to single domains of life experience. The autonomy of the social action centres thus becomes restrained and sectorial. Under the pressure of the ongoing colonisation processes between societal domains, it delivers partial cultural syntheses

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that extend particular reified logics to further societal domains. Alienated and social unconscious attitudes extend. The fragmenting impact of structuration processes on social reality results in a selection of partial cultural work that is a function of the imposition of specific sectorial logics on the whole of the social fabric. In this respect, crumbling late capitalism has its own specific characteristics. Following the ideological vision of neoliberalism, according to which only markets integrate society, it induces a submission of all domains of social action under the logic of accumulation. Yet, the colonisation processes led by sectorial imperatives significantly weaken the resilience of society as a whole. The financial crisis of 2007/2008, the following recession, and even more evidently the pandemic of 2020/2021 and the resulting risks of ‘great economic depression’ underline this point. The dynamic building of societal validity in intermittent relationships of social action coordination, the legitimation of social orders and relationships of domination can no longer rely on the solid ground of active cultural synthesis of subjective and objective action logics. Cultural performance becomes entropic and completely overgrown by monetarisation and consumerism. Even where creativity is a professional matter, like in art, the colonisation through the economic logic is so extremely advanced that the success of new stylistic tendencies is strictly determined by the accumulation strategies of the financial investors that took over the art market (Glauser et al. 2021). Social creativity experiences important weakening and strong sectorialisation that adds up to alienation resulting from increased reification processes in qualitative differentiated societies. To overcome this stalemate requires a reinvention of social structuration processes that enforces a comprehensive transformation of society. It cannot be foreseen which historical processes shall take place to encourage this development. Hence, it makes little sense to exploit the interrogative and invent new philosophies of history. Instead, we should consider the social preconditions that can trigger a revitalisation of social creativity. Social actors face a double level of complexity in contemporary societies. On the one hand, within the timescale of their action performance, they must deliver a consistent positioning towards the singular societal logics. On the other hand, they must combine the opposing logics of the different societal domains into a synthesis that is capable of granting legitimation to social fabric as a whole. Thus, it seems impossible to give an impetus to the everyday social praxis that breaks through the reification and alienation processes, so that it reactivates the transformative potential of social action. Nevertheless, studies

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about art praxis, yet also religious- or politically driven social action, show that social creativity has the potential to translate different sectorial logics into a language ‘across the board’ and thus to relate to each other the relevant contents of social life. As long as it sets itself the goal of realising an innovative synthesis of the fragmented social life’s contents, the endeavour of cultural work, which professionally follows single logics of social action, thus constitutes the model for an overall and content-independent transformation of social structuration processes. A main incentive for social research at times of intermittent societal normativity is therefore to analyse the tentative unification logics that induce transformative structuration processes.

7.2   Establishing Intermittent Social Orders from the Observer Perspective 7.2.1   The Ratio of Social Order At first glance, the coordination of social action seems not to present any particular difficulty regarding an explanation from the viewpoint of social validity theory (observer perspective) (MWG 1/23: 147–215). Social relationship intertwines the reciprocal action-orientation modalities of two or more action centres. However, within the horizon of expectations, which lead social actors empirically, the coordination of social action poses specific problems. These become particularly evident in two respects: the empirical validity and the non-negotiated genesis of social orders. Common action depends on manifold temporally changing conceptions of the meaning of social relationship, thus on the ‘multiple contingency’ of mutual action reference. In this regard, social action coordination subsists in so far as every actor can (perhaps erroneously) presuppose a certain attitude of the partners conforming more or less to his horizon of expectation. A contract-theoretical investigation of the consolidation of social action into common social structuration processes can be taken as a starting point for understanding action coordination. Yet, it does not suffice to explain it (Cf. Fitzi 2015: 113–176, 237–303). To postulate the stabilisation of common action frames through contract-driven social action in an axiomatic vein (Parsons and Shils 1951: 16) is merely a smokescreen not to face the theoretical issue of action coordination (Fitzi 2015: 25–60).

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The meaning that is to support social relationship in the longer term can be formulated in maxims, whose average maintenance can be expected from the concerned action centres. However, the empirical subsistence of social action coordination depends on a ‘dynamics of validation’ that enforces the common action frames on an everyday basis and thus is based on consensus-driven action. For a wide variety of reasons, each actor can feel more or less committed to respecting the agreement, especially its exact formulation in written maxims. The resulting multifaceted shift in action meaning imposes double coding of coordination frames according to both abstract expectation and empirical validity. All the concerned parties of negotiated agreements—as far as they consider them rationally— first count on the others orienting their action towards the agreements’ meaning, as they understand it (expectation). Only in a second instance do they orient themselves to what they consider to be their duty (validity). Hence, social action coordination is in part purpose-rationally and in part value-rationally oriented, so conferring a double meaning to the stipulated agreements, which continue as long as the two action patterns converge. Yet, this depends on specific dynamics of empirical validity, so that contracts endure only as long as they are backed by consensus-driven social action. In social environments based on increasingly intermittent normativity, the letter of private contracts as well as collective regulations becomes more and more empty and abstract, whereas the respective consensus-­ driven validating action turns to passive unreflected acceptance. The legitimacy of the normative framework of action is then essentially weakened. In the ideal-typical communication situation, social orders can be established by negotiating agreements between equal participants. They commit to adapting their action to common rules, which are applicable a fortiori, if the meaning of the established order no longer corresponds to the interests that guide purpose-rational action. Orders thus emerge possibly to stabilise common horizons of expectation. Yet, they can subsist only on the condition that they will be supported for a long time during validity-driven action. Empirically, this means that the conformity towards their maxims must endure to a significant extent and without decisive deviation in meaning, because actors regard them as ‘valid, binding or exemplary’ for their action’s orientation. To explain the empirical subsistence of legitimate orders, a typology of their ‘grounds of validity’ must be established, which highlights the prevailing modality of compliance. The conformity to established orders that is based only on purpose-rational action—in a positive sense through calculation or in a negative sense

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through fear—only permits a very low level of legitimacy. This eventually leads to a consistent transformation in meaning for the orders’ maxims, until a complete emptying of sense intervenes. Social action theory from the observer perspective distinguishes between internal- and external-driven motivations that grant the subsistence of social orders. The balance of validity, however, hangs more in favour of inner motivation. The threat of sanctions alone does not grant the same stability to established orders as if this were guaranteed by inner motivation of validity, whether it be value-rational, emotional or traditionally determined. A social order that appears legitimated with the prestige of exemplary status or commitment is far more stable than one that is only adhered to by an evaluation of opportunity. Hence, legitimacy must be established to a consistent degree on validity-driven action. Different kinds of ‘social regularities’ emerge in society, which are based on statutory or unwritten rules and regulations. They can be guaranteed internally or externally. Yet, from the viewpoint of a theory of social structuration, above all two types of social orders based on externally enforced legitimacy have to be distinguished from each other: convention and law. They constitute two forms of social regularity, which are not merely based on habit or interest, but are sanctioned by the social group. Thus, they reveal a dialectics between legitimating and sanctioning action that must be further assessed. The sanction of legitimated orders can be based on the sound disapproval of the social group or of specific bodies that are responsible for the assessment of social behaviour: the council of elders, the clergy, the protectors of morality or party orthodoxy and so on. As long as the reaction is limited to disapproval, we are dealing with conventions. To become law the control organs of an order must be provided with an apparatus that enforces compliant behaviour and sanctions any deviance from this by using coercion. Its main expression in complex societies is to deprive people of liberty. The analytical assessment of convention and law from the viewpoint of social validity theory from the observer perspective lays down a number of conceptual definitions that are crucial for the understanding of the rationale of social order. Law is a factor of structuration for social reality. It evolves under the condition that administrative staff can be engaged for the everyday enforcement of established rules in social action. The inquiry into the subsistence of the related structuration processes raises theoretical questions about the stabilisation of socially organised and sanctioned normativity. Only a sociology of domination can conclusively

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answer these. The crucial element for social validity theory from the observer perspective is the way in which it constructs the analytical transition from the assessment of legitimated social orders to the typology of domination. The maintenance of a coercive apparatus of justice requires the establishment of particular organisational and legitimating procedures that adopt and enforce the law. In other words, in complex societies this relates to the institution of parliaments, governments, courts of justice and prison systems. A manifold social structuration is involved, which is based on a number of legitimating processes, whose specific character must be explored. Here, an analytical transitional leap is needed, which in fact no abstract model of negotiation between equal legal subjects can adequately deal with. Rather, sociological theory must clearly assess the evidence that in this context the margins are objectively restrained for establishing legitimated orders by means of the active negotiation between equal social actors. Under usual circumstances, competent bodies legitimated by formal procedures adopt and enforce the laws, which are binding on all social actors who belong to the corresponding domain of social action. Not negotiation, but criteria of ascription are thus decisive like jurisdiction, territoriality or nationality. Accordingly, specific modalities of legitimation come into play that make allowance for the problem of the ascription and obligation of legal orders. To examine these matters introduces the analytical transition to political sociology and serves as a pivotal connection between sociological action and structure theory. The ideal-typical assessment of the ‘reasons of validity for legitimate orders’ closes the gap between the action-theoretical investigation of the ‘determinants of social action’ and the structural-theoretical analysis of the ‘reasons of validity for legitimate rule’. What it reveals is that a stabilisation of the common horizons of expectation leads to a social structuration that implies the rise of vertical social relationships of subordination and legitimation. The key point of the transition is the problematic field of legality. Legal systems endure as long as social orders are accepted that are promulgated by legitimate authorities, although without being the result of negotiation between all the involved or ascribed social actors. This qualifies societal normativity based on ‘legal orders’ with a specific legitimation problematic that implies acceptance for obligation underpinned by legitimated rule and compliance to foreign decisions in the form of legal acts. In short, it demands ‘consensus in legality’. To determine how this specific consensus performance can be delivered at times of increasing normative

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intermittency constitutes a crucial issue for current sociological theory building. The social distance between legitimate authorities and social actors, who are subject to their jurisdiction, can be more or less important, thus varying the quantity and quality of passive consensus-driven action, which social actors have to invest in enforcing social orders. Yet, at times of growing legal distance and intermittent uncertainty of normative orders, the amount of consensus-investment exceeds limits that are compatible with the increased scarcity in active negotiated social action. This imbalance has serious consequences for the fragmentation of social fabric, because it exponentially increases the persistent tension between the logic of social action and social structuration. 7.2.2   Asymmetric Consensus The methodological goal of the theory of social validity from the observer perspective is to explain the ongoing legitimation of the ordering structure of social reality. The starting point is the social action of highly fragmented action centres in qualitative differentiated societies. The inquiry into social action thus flows into the examination of the procedures that enforce the persistence of social orders and coordinate social action in a more or less persistent or intermittent way. The distinction between contract- and consensus-driven social action is decisive to establish an analytical typology of the coordinating mechanisms that grant the subsistence of social orders. These can either take the more structured shape of social institutions (Anstalten) or maintain the character of intermittent ‘associative grouping’ (this is the choice of terminology in the English translation) that is, in more precise terms, of ‘consensus-driven grouping’ (Verband) (Weber 2012: 296). The latent and sometimes open conflict between the logic of social action and social structuration processes is a special focus for the theory of social validity from the observer perspective. Through procedures of ‘political obligation’ towards social groups (family, clan, state, nation, etc.), social action centres are necessitated to follow action imperatives that they have not freely chosen or negotiated. In complex societies, different fragments of the social actor’s personalities are compelled to conform to the logic of qualitative differentiated societal domains that often remain in conflict with each other. Hence, in direct contradiction of the contractualist idea of voluntarily joining in political obligation, by means of legal imputation that concern the whole or fragments of their

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personality, social actors are involved in consensus-driven action without their explicit willingness. This happens mostly through the simple fact that they find themselves in the territory of a specific predominant ‘political community’ (MWG I/22.1: 208 f.). Yet, in complex societies this obligation logic also extends to other domains—notably economic action, which is cross-territorial. It applies increasingly to differentiated fragments of the actors’ personality and follows the specific logic of single societal domains. A frame of multiple, qualitative differentiated obligation thus drives social action in a way that is more subtle and less traceable than in traditional societies. It has no personal face, but an anonymous structural force that develops a stronger impact on social actors. They must adhere to a consistent number of externally led social relationships, often without being conscious that these are based on a passive acceptance of non-­ negotiated rules. These asymmetrical consensus-driven social relationships are a fundamental characteristic of intermittent social structuration processes. Here, the abstract objective side dictates the rules to follow and the concrete subjective side follows by means of unreflected passive consensus. The interest in this topic makes a reconstruction of the legitimating mechanisms possible that grant the persistence of social orders, which are not established through a voluntary negotiation of the common rules in force. In rapidly changing qualitative differentiated societies, an increasing number of social orders take the shape of intermittent action coordination mechanisms built on asymmetric consensus-driven social action, thus becoming a desideratum of sociological research. In the political domain, social actors are drawn into the territorial regulating field of institutions without their explicit agreement. As a rule, the ‘imputation’ (Zurechnung) goes back to the mere existence of certain objective circumstances such as parentage, birth or residence in a particular territory, compelling social actors to conform to the existing orders here. On average, the related expectations of action are presented as legitimate. The social actors concerned are expected to feel ‘morally obliged’ to participate in the consensus-driven action, which is constitutive for the political community. This presumption opens the debate on the legitimating grounds for political obligation. We will come back to this in more detail later. Yet, as their general precondition the theory of social validity from the observer perspective holds that social actors are expected to deliver a performance of consensus-driven social action regardless of its reason. This assumption is reinforced by the finding that within political

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communities social actors might be urged by a coercive apparatus to conform to consensus expectations. In modern states, the dialectics between consensus-driven legitimation and constraint is normatively regulated by the citizenship status of the person that defines the rights and duties of the social actor towards the legitimated legislative and executive instances of the political community. Yet, the legal status of citizenship defines a normative framework of action that depends on social practices of day-to-day implementation and shows a specific legitimation problematic. In contrast to the special-purpose association established by a contract, the decisive characteristic of the social entities with political character is that social actors do not join voluntarily. Rather, they are ‘born’ or ‘drawn’ into them by procedures of imputation. Legitimation thus consists in a conflictual dialectics between objective consensus expectation and subjective acceptance of their pretentions. At times of accelerated normative intermittency, which characterises crumbling late capitalism, the uncertainty of the common frames of social action results in an increasing divide between the established letter of consensus expectations and the empirical praxis of legitimation. In recent decades, further societal domains beyond politics, especially the economy, developed comparable expectations of obligation towards social action centres. As a result, the latter must simultaneously conform to different and often conflicting qualitative differentiated logics on an intermittent consensus-driven basis. The differentiation of societal domains thus induces not only a fragmentation of the actors’ personality but also the decomposition of their political obligation into competing consensus-­ driven action streams. Methodologically, the theory of social validity from the observer perspective initially focuses on the formal characteristics of the mechanisms of legitimation and imputation that permit social structuration (MWG I/12: 389–440; Weber 2012: 273–301). It puts in brackets the different substantive reasons, driven by interest, value-orientation, charisma or tradition that accompany and reinforce their existence. The issue is to understand how ‘asymmetric legitimacy-consensus’ can arise and persist. From the viewpoint of social validity theory (observer perspective), constraining relationships between social action centres and social action aggregates take the shape of ‘political communities’, in which the imputation of social actors occurs on the basis of pure objective facts and independently of every agreement. Yet, in contrast to amorphous consensus-driven grouping (Einverständnis-Vergemeinschaftung) without

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any rational order, they are established on rationalised orders and have a coercive apparatus implementing their rules. They can thus be addressed as institutions (Anstalten). Institutions are asymmetric vertical complexes of social action with stipulated orders, to which social actors are imputed on the basis of specific objective characteristics. They have to meet their action expectations, otherwise they face sanctions. However, not every community, into which one may be born or drawn, reaches this level of structuration. States and churches are institutions, yet not households, markets or linguistic communities. In the everyday social praxis within qualitative differentiated societies, ‘institution-driven action’ is increasingly flanked by asymmetric vertical complexes of social action that go on ‘as if’ there were a stipulated order. The accelerated rhythm of societal transformation, above all in crumbling late capitalism, impedes the formal establishment of enduring social orders and compels social action centres to rapidly adapt to unstable social normativity. These intermittent social structuration processes take the shape of ‘consensus-driven grouping’. Hence, the examination of social structuration processes in complex societies needs a distinction between action orientation towards more formally established or rather intermittent social orders. Social action oriented towards rational agreement between equals (contract-driven social action) remains in a relationship of dialectical opposition to consensual action without agreement (consensus-driven social action). In a similar way, the ideal-type of the institution with a rationalised statute (Anstalt) opposes that of consensus-driven grouping (Verband). Social action in consensus-driven grouping is not meant to be oriented towards rationalised and written statutes. Nevertheless, by implicit criteria of imputation it compels action centres to conform to informal established asymmetric social relationships on the basis of simple consensus-driven action. Furthermore, despite the absence of rationalised and written statutes establishing this, certain persons (power holders) are endowed with the authority to promulgate orders that regulate the common consensus-­ driven action. Finally, they or other persons stand ready to exert physical or psychical coercion against members whose behaviour contravenes the established consensus, if necessary (coercive apparatus). So here we have all the functions of political communities, although without the written compilation of the rules that formally establish their asymmetric relationships of consensus and legitimate their structuration processes. The classical example of consensus-driven grouping is given by the family clan with

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its traditional unwritten rules as a means to ensure the persistence of the social group that concern intergenerational behaviour, relations between genders, marriage, honour and revenge. Social and political movements often have the form of unstructured and fluid consensus-driven grouping. The power structure of organised criminality, especially if it is in the form of a latent administration that controls the territory, as for example is the case for the regional variations of the Italian Mafia, is also based on a specific form of asymmetric consensus-driven grouping. Here, the rules of behaviour are mostly unwritten. Yet, nobody dares to act against them, because there is a very effective, albeit illegal coercive apparatus, which stands ready to exert psychical and physical compulsion against anybody whose behaviour contravenes the consensual rules established by the unofficial power holders. In rapidly transforming qualitative differentiated societies, many different societal domains increasingly take the shape of intermittent consensus-­ driven grouping, which never reaches the level of structuration permitting the establishment of rationalised written statutes for the behaviour of the imputed action centres. This is the source of their force and weakness. Social actors are compelled to passively adapt and legitimate intermittent consensus-driven grouping, yet only temporarily. Under the condition that social structuration processes keep on rapidly changing, they thus can very easily adapt to new circumstances, because their legitimacy is grounded on spatiotemporal delimited consensus-driven social action. Yet, if the accelerated societal change rhythm comes to a standstill under the pressure of economic crisis, environmental catastrophes or pandemics, the inconsistent legitimation basis of intermittent social structuration processes provokes consistent fractures of the social fabric. The conceptual opposition of institution- and consensus-driven grouping has not only a structural-theoretical but also a development-­theoretical meaning. The transition to modern societal forms is characterised in general by the spread of rationally established orders in the form of institutions. The rationalisation process, however, does not lead to a comprehensive transformation of consensus-driven grouping into institutions, as naïve modernisation theories claim. Instead, it induces a structural differentiation of institutions and consensus-driven grouping from each other that produces a specific logic of legitimacy. In complex societies, almost all consensus-driven grouping activity is controlled, at least partially, on the basis of rational orders, including the heteronomous regulation of the household community. Yet, on the other hand, the necessity

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of granting validity to the established rational orders leads to the emergence of consensus-driven grouping that assures their organisational implementation and legitimation on an everyday basis. This dynamics constitutes a major limit of modern rationalisation processes. The issue of empirical validity concerning social structuration processes that are based on procedures of imputation prevents them from fully meeting the ideal-type of institutions. Around every institutional action cluster, above all with respect to the regulative function towards its social environment, consensus-driven groupings arise to grant its legitimation. Institution and consensus-driven grouping thus does not remain in a relationship of reciprocal exclusion. Rather, they integrate each other as two structural mechanisms that are necessary for the persistence of more complex social structuration processes in modern societies. The imperatives of action coordination differentiate them from each other, yet at the same time, they mutually reproduce each other. Hence, on average, institutional action simply constitutes the rationally ordered part of consensus-­ driven grouping in a dialectics of reciprocal enforcement. From the viewpoint of historical sociology, institutions generally constitute new rational creations, which nonetheless do not arise in a social space devoid of consensus-driven grouping action. Yet, as a rule, a process of progressive expropriation for the existing consensus-driven grouping takes place through the emergent institutions. As the emergence of the modern occidental state in Europe shows, traditional territorial consensus-­ driven groupings were progressively submitted to new overarching institutions imposing orders on the people, who were expected to be loyal to them (MWG I/22-1: 208–215). This concerned among others the governing structures of the Medieval European cities that were characterised internally by an endemic conflict between competing consensus-driven grouping and externally by the tension with the feudal powers ruling the overall territory (MWG I/22-5: 59–299). The privileges and exceptions characterising the legal systems of the stratified societies were dismantled by the emergence of the modern occidental state that progressively imposed universal principles of legislation. Its institutionally established power monopoly thus expropriated the sway of all other political bodies that claimed regulative societal function (MWG I/22-1: 208). This process of ‘political expropriation’ that took place in modern European history is comparable with the expropriation of the economic means of production that Marx describes in the chapter on the so-called primitive accumulation of The Capital (MEGA II/9, 619–659).

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The sociological-historical reconstruction of the modern statehood emergence shows that it cannot be captured in contract-theoretical categories. As a normative model of social order, contract theory indeed represents a powerful means of ethical-political critique. That was its purpose in modern political thought. Yet, considered from the analytical-­descriptive perspective of sociology, it is not capable of depicting the historical processes that led to the emergence of modern political communities. Therefore, the aim of the theory of social validity from the observer perspective is to capture in an ideal-typical way the procedures that structure social action up to the establishment of political communities. It takes into account the asymmetric relationships of action coordination characterising the building of institutions as well as of consensus-driven grouping. On the one hand, the rise of social structures is equipped with the power to proclaim and enforce social orders as valid for internal-administrative as well as for external-regulative purposes (organisational issue). On the other hand, the performance of legitimation is required from the imputed social actors, which more or less loyally comply with the established statutes (legitimation issue). Thereby, the theory addresses the main constituents of political domination as a biunivocal social relationship between structuration processes of subordination and legitimation, so underlining their mutual interdependence. Seen from a social-historical viewpoint, there is no unilineal development towards the predominance of rationalised power-administration functions (institutions), because their subsistence and legitimacy is based on consensus-driven structuration processes (consensus-driven grouping). In this context, consensus means the ‘average chance’ that those affected by imputation procedures treat them as actually valid for their social action. From an analytical-descriptive viewpoint, it makes no difference whether this results from rational consideration, interest orientation, fear, piety, religious faith or other reasons. Political communities establish orders of social action and ascription criteria determining which individuals have to comply with their rules. Yet, the factual validity of the normative orders, and thereby their chances of subsistence, presupposes a sufficient investment of consensus from the side of the persons affected, without which they lose grip on social reality. In a nutshell, this occurs because certain groups of social actors can successfully establish their ‘consensus-­expectations’ towards the majority of the imputed action centres. So, within certain spatiotemporal limits they are entitled to promulgate social orders and prevail with their claims of validity (executive power). In turn, this is possible because the imputed social actors tolerate

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more or less consciously these claims and refrain from resistance or negotiation, so acknowledging their power by consensus-driven action. In this context, the sociological consciousness of the necessary distinction between analytical-descriptive and normative approaches to socio-­ political reality must be taken particularly seriously. The analytical-descriptive assessment of political legitimacy cannot be transposed into a normative one. In the following section, we will see how the analytical-descriptive inquiry into the function of modern politics shows which transformation of the political domain permits its structuration in a sense that implements the rule of law or in sociological terms what is called the reduction of legitimacy-consensus under the logic of legality. From the viewpoint of the analytical-descriptive assessment of political legitimacy, democratic political procedures like general elections, parliamentary legislation and constitutional governments also express the prevailing legitimacy-­consensus characterising a political community at a particular moment. The decision-making power, even if democratically legitimated, is based on the specific ‘influence’ of real persons, typically political party leaders, who can count on a wide consensus-grouping sustaining their action. Thanks to parliamentary procedures that ‘overrule the minority’ and grant the unity of the political body, valid normative social orders are established in the form of enforceable legislation. Hence, also in democratically constituted political communities, expectations of compliance depend on legitimacy-consensus, so that struggles for determining the boundaries of valid political consensus are the order of the day. Political legitimacy is based on tolerance of external action expectations and refrains from resistance or negotiation. It consists in asymmetrical social relationships, according to which one side acts on the basis of ‘consensus-expectations’ and the other side conforms via ‘legitimacy-­consensus’. How strong, persistent or intermittent these relationships are in the individual case are issues that can only be inquired into empirically. The crucial question is what kind of legitimacy-consensus prevails against the others. Empirically, the acceptance for political leadership can be based on the most varied motives, including irrational fears of crisis or the threat of coercion. Yet, these cases just represent the unstable borderline of ‘legitimacy-consensus’, so that this will be all the more robust, the more the complying side conforms to legitimacy-expectations, because it regards the relationship of domination as somehow ‘subjectively binding’, whatever the reasons for this commitment. This introduces the analytical assessment of asymmetric legitimation procedures as a constitutive pillar of the political building.

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7.2.3   Conflict, Power and the Rule of Law Contemporary societal analysis raises the question of which legitimation mechanisms characterise highly intermittent social structuration processes when there is increasing political distance between decision-making instances and the social actors involved. To answer the question, the distinctive character of modern political structuration processes must be tackled in contrast both to pre-modern political arrangements and to the current fragmentation of political communities. It is crucial to explain from an analytical-descriptive viewpoint what ‘territorial power monopoly’ and the ‘rule of law’ mean as the prevailing modern organisation and legitimation mechanism for political communities. Both imply an enduring rationalisation of normative orders that, in the end, also invests the procedures of political legitimacy and introduces the rule of law. Accordingly, political-sociological theory from the observer perspective develops analytical criteria to distinguish the modern occidental forms of politics, including territorial state and parliamentarism, from other political arrangements of society (cf. MWG I/17, 157–9; Weber 1994, 309–369; Fitzi 2019b). The existence of social units capable of autonomous action presupposes the subsistence of a leading function (by a person or body) and a staff enforcing social orders. Crucial processes of social structuration are established on the basis that societal violence is successfully organised and disciplined, so that it can be progressively extracted from everyday social interaction and concentrated in organised apparatuses devoted to the threat and eventually the use of coercion. The diffused deployment of violence in society is progressively transformed into a recourse to force that is subject to specific legitimation criteria. This transformation of the societal arrangement does not completely eliminate violence from social reality, especially in its domestic use within patriarchal domination. Yet, it changes the dynamics of the political use of violence and thus alters the structure of political communities. Their historical development shows that processes of pacification take place, which delimit the legitimated recourse to physical violence to specific public institutions in particular situations, and sanctions the private recourse to political violence. Accordingly, the societal domain of politics establishes itself gradually to a structured monopoly of the legitimate use of force, by withdrawing it from the remaining domains of society. Open recourse to private and political violence thereby does not disappear from social reality and

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regularly returns during societal crises. Yet, between the crises, violence is structured in a societal arrangement that allows the existence of modern forms of social relationship. These can count on the fact that the use of force is subject to legal review, so that legality becomes the main source of political legitimation. The crucial question that emerges is, however, what are the societal preconditions that permit the arrangement of the legitimated use of force under the rule of law. As historical sociology shows, the establishment of a monopoly for the legitimate use of force is the product of lengthy processes of political expropriation that transform one of the multiple centres of power within a specific territory to the predominant one. It is a history of the political use of violence, as the genesis of the modern states in Europe shows. Yet, this development has specific structural consequences on society. To facilitate the control of wider territories, legal cases are standardised and rationalised, so that subjective privileges are dismantled to the advantage of the central power administration. The political community that established itself as the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence enforces a legal system that reduces the traditional panoply of legal facts to a rational casuistic. The aim is to exert its regulating function more efficiently and to impede processes, which re-establish parallel power centres, like those characterising the stratified societies of the Ancien Régime. Historically, it can be shown that once a paramount centre of regulation is established on the basis of a legitimate monopoly of force, societies develop legal systems with ‘universal formal character’. The final output of the process is the edification of rationalised legal typologies that become a benchmark for the assessment of any social relationship. Hence, even if not without the massive political conflicts that characterised the modern era in Europe, juridical legalism eventually also extends to the evaluation of governmental authority. What in the beginning was a pure matter of social structuration in the interest of a more efficient control over wider geographic territories, in the end induces a paradigm shift in political legitimation. The monopoly of the legitimated recourse to force within a specific territory and the submission of political power under the criteria of the rule of law thus enter a relationship of reciprocal causation. Indeed, the bourgeois revolutions brought the modern political transformation process to completion, yet its sociological preconditions are based on the societal structuration induced by the rise of territorial monopolies for the legal use of force in modern Europe.

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The analytical-descriptive inquiry into the function of modern relationships of domination shows which transformation of the political domain permitted its structuration in a sense that implements the rule of law. Yet, this transformation of the political domain, which extracted political violence as much as possible from the further domains of society and established legality as the sole legitimation criteria of political rule, is no irreversible achievement of societal development. If legal established normativity becomes more and more precarious, because of the increasing intermittency of social orders, the rule of law that controls the recourse to force by its legitimated monopoly also weakens and loses grip on social reality. The major consequences of this failing societal structuration are either the dissociation of the governmental functions from their legal control or the crumbling of their territorial domination. So, the tyranny of technocratic elites can flourish out of every democratic and parliamentary control, and different social subjects, from regional autonomy movements to territorially based organised criminality, can privatise the legitimate recourse to political violence beyond its legally acknowledged territorial monopoly. The sociological fact that societies develop political power as a regulative function demands a classification of the processes structuring political associations on the basis of specific ‘legitimation grounds’ and ‘organisational forms’. This is the purpose of Weber’s well-known typology of domination (MWG I/23, 449–497). It shows that the establishment of the leading and order-enforcing functions of social groups can be based on three different structuration mechanisms. The usual arrangement of political matters in complex societies rests on the establishment of rationalised procedures of power legitimation that permit its administration on the basis of bureaucratic apparatuses. Two main deviations from this pattern are possible. On the one hand, the establishment of administrative habits that reproduce themselves, thanks to mostly unreflected acceptance of consensus-pretention raised by traditionalised bearers of domination functions. On the other hand, the panic-stricken recourse to would-be rescuers from predicaments with their promise to revitalise the faltering decision-­ making ability of lame social groups. Social reality mostly consists of an intermittent mixture of the three different modalities of political structuration, although at times of crisis it fluctuates more between the two deviations from the rule of law. These mechanisms characterise every social group capable of autonomous action, from families and clans, to churches, parties and economic enterprises, which claim to exert a regulatory function within and beyond their spatial and organisational boundaries (MWG

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I/22.1, 204–8). Their coexistence thus results in a condition of political competition between social groups, provoking an endemic conflict between different ‘illegitimate political associations’ for the supremacy over a certain territory or a social function (MWG I/22.5, 200 ff.). As the historical genesis of the ‘modern occidental state’ in Europe shows, a territorial monopoly of power becomes established only after longer processes of power concentration. Political sociology from the observer perspective deals with the result of this historical development through the ideal-typical concept of the ‘political community’ (MWG I/22.1, 208 f.; Fitzi 2004). Hence, it can present a concept of sovereignty in the sense of modern political thought, by reconstructing in pure analytical-­descriptive terms the establishment of the monopoly of legitimated use of force. What must be seen in its social origins as a contingent predominance of one political group over the others within a certain territory eventually becomes not only a legitimate form of government but also a ‘legal form’ of rule. The drive of transformation is given by the processes of rationalisation triggered by power concentration. Modern forms of domination not only conform to the rule of law, because their prestige is based on the ‘belief in legality’, but also because they are based on a specific societal arrangement that permits their existence. Yet, if the corresponding institutions are jeopardised by failing societal structuration, a question-mark lingers over the results of the complex historical process that established modern political legitimacy, by submitting it to the rule of law. In the long run, intermittent political legitimacy cannot grant the legality of political orders. They can only persist, if every entity in the political building, from its lowest to its highest level of power scope, is submitted to the rule of law. The greatest risk of intermittent social arrangements such as those of crumbling late capitalism is therefore that of causing an irreversible shift from the rule of law supported by strong collective legitimacy towards a condition of widespread precarious asymmetrical consensus.

7.3  Scholium 1: The Micro-sociological Limits of Institutionalisation From a sociological point of view, to understand legal validity involves the typology of expectations underlying social interaction, as well as the strategies employed to cope with disappointed expectations. The temporal

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intermittent consolidation of the ‘social horizons of expectation’ must be analysed; this is the foundation stone for the persistence of social orders. Expectations that ensure a reliable selection of practicable action scenarios in the face of social contingency condense into temporary reservoirs of experience (Schutz 1973–1976: 207–259). Yet, they are not enough to ensure the permanence of expectation horizons. The immanence of other social actors constantly updates both the variety of expectations and their schemes of action. To cope with this complexity, multifarious stereotyping processes take place, which strive to stabilise the social image of the other as well as of the established relationships. However, this is without being able to simplify them once and for all. The multiple contingencies of social interaction are mastered through everyday cultural work that nonetheless produces a manifold and ever-changing world of objective culture that constantly increases in complexity. At the same time, no social structures emerge that would be able to deliver a reliable reduction of complexity in the long run. Hence, it is illusory to expect the establishment of dependable expectation scenarios, which should relieve the contingency of a mere orientation on expectations through generalisation and depersonalisation. The validity of regulatory systems presupposes a temporal endurance that is confronted with the difficulty to adapt the abstract context of meaning that underpins social orders to the contingency of empirical social facts. Thus, as soon as the rules orientation is established, it develops a problematic of validity, which must be overcome by intermittent consensus-­ driven action. Furthermore, normative expectation structures are repeatedly disappointed. In this case, the disappointment is dealt with either by insisting on the initial expectation via pretensions of conforming action or by initiating a process of adjustment that leads to a change in the expectation horizon. This alternative between ‘consensus-pretensions’ and ‘consensus-­ driven adaptation’ results in the distinction between social normativity and transnormativity. Norms are counterfactual stabilised action expectations. Trans-norms, on the contrary, are consensus-led transformation processes that modify consensus-expectations. For social orders to become compatible with high social contingency and complexity, a compromise is necessary between counterfactual stabilisation and the adaptation of the horizons of expectation. Thus, normativity and transnormativity always correct each other and allow a permanent dialectic between condensation and liquefaction of social orders. Institutionalisation processes make this normative intermittency possible; they presuppose a repeated recourse to

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spatiotemporally limited consensus-based legitimation of normative expectations. Hence, the kind of normative conceptions that prevail in a society depends on the empirical outcome of the dialectic between the establishment and dismantling of regulatory environments. The institutionalisation of normative contexts in the form of social orders represents the primary stage of legalisation. Institutionalisation processes require a sufficient degree of consensus that can be mobilised in favour of counterfactually stabilised action expectations. Depending on social complexity, a sufficient multiplicity of normative expectations must yet be conceded in order to cushion potential normative conflicts generated by the increased rhythm of societal change. As the emergence of the social function of money shows, institutionalisation implies that ‘potential third parties’ can be added to the interaction between the expecting and the acting part, on the premise that they can be assumed to be consensual with the ‘counterfactual stabilised action expectations’. Third parties do not have to be physically present. On the contrary, many a time they are absent and anonymous, as the use of paper or electronic money illustrates. Yet, their existence and action can be assumed to be in accordance with expectations maintained by the present interaction parts. In monetary economies, for example, social actors accept dyed paper sheets (today even numbers that appear on computer or mobile phone screens) as a guarantee that, in future, anonymous third parties will provide them with a performance comparable with what they have delivered in exchange for the money. It can never be clearly determined how many third parties are necessary to confirm the consistence of expectation structures by consensus. Here lies the crucial ‘actualisation problematic’ of social structuration processes. Social institutions depend on the structural scarcity of conscious consensus from the side of anonymous and unknown third parties that they try to mobilise. Therefore, consensus can be understood neither as a consolidated collective orientation in Comte’s sense (Orsello Montanari 1971) nor as a simultaneous ‘way of feeling’ characterising a consistent set of third parties (Durkheim 1893). Minimal common degrees of normative orientation cannot be theoretically assumed in complex societies without committing a petitio principi (Rawls 1987). ‘Factual consensus’ must instead be classified as the statistical limit case. The attempt to artificially increase minimal consensus stocks of possible third parties provokes overstimulation and exhaustion of conscious attention potential. Rather, the stability of institutionalisation processes is based on the competence to

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best exploit and manage the empirically existing minimal stock of consensus. Social structuration is established on minimalist ‘actualisation processes’ that take for granted the consensus of anonymous third parties with regard to counterfactually stabilised action expectations. However, as contemporary societies become more complex, the difficulty increases of successfully carrying out institutionalisation processes. The need to overlay, counterfeit and replace missing factual consensus becomes more acute as the variety of possible stereotyped action modalities increases. It is no longer possible to seriously expect consensus of any third party for specific expectations and certainly not to foresee which new types of consensus expectations arise. Ultimately, this development leads to an institutional praxis that simulates the opinion of anonymous third parties and presents it as a self-evident consensus-expectation. Furthermore, qualitative social differentiation induces a wide fragmentation of consensus expectations towards anonymous third parties. The number of these that apply to everyone decreases (collective consciousness), whereas the amount of expectations that apply only to certain social roles and societal domains increases disproportionately (normative pluralisation). These transformation processes put a strain on institutionalisation mechanisms from a twofold perspective. On the one hand, there is a quantitative and qualitative multiplication of consensus expectations. On the other hand, realising a coherent synthesis of multifarious pretentions of consensus becomes increasingly difficult in a valid system of social normativity. Thus, the structural limits of institutional consensus building in complex societies become evident; every attempt made by establishing social orders must face these. In terms of social technology, institutions try to cope with the multiplicity of consensus requirements in complex societies by elevating themselves to the representatives of anonymous third parties and imposing consensus expectations on all social actors, which they can impute to this function. Yet, institutions can hardly generate, but only represent and manage existing consensus. Thus, a complex economy dealing with presupposed consensus-reserves emerges in which institutionalisation bodies attempt to profile themselves as banks of consensus, by investing the same scarce acceptance potential on different issues and expecting to redistribute single positive feedbacks in multiple directions (Parsons 1968). Furthermore, the lack of consensus resources is becoming a serious challenge and a risk factor for the social arrangement of complex societies. The quantitative and qualitative increase in societal complexity tends to phase

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out the raw material ‘consensus’, so that institutions are confronted with the issue of protecting dwindling stocks of consensus from the dangers of inflation. Hence, spatiotemporally limited forms of passive-adaptive consensus are established, which enable the provisional validity of empirical legitimation contexts. They temporarily compensate the lack of effective social consensus and fill up the normative interstitials of society, which threaten to break apart under the pressure of complexity. Yet, these precarious regimes of validity carry the risk of completely dissolving social normativity. System-theoretical approaches were originally aware of the problematic related to the micro-sociological limits of institutionalisation (Luhmann 1972). Later, however, they repressed the issue of normative complexity characterising qualitative differentiated societies, by elevating autopoiesis to an undiscussed axiom of their theory building. By formulating the institutionalisation theory from a too narrow micro-sociological viewpoint, they thus obstruct the understanding of the dynamics of validity characterising complex societies. The consequence is an aestheticisation of hypostasised collective action subjects (Habermas 1987: 368–385). This is a comfortable simplification of the theoretical challenge related to the understanding of complex societies. Yet, it means at the same time transforming sociology into a self-referential semantic game that no longer confronts the conflicts and problems that characterise social reality.

7.4  Scholium 2: The Anthropological Limits of Validity The mainstream of philosophical anthropology in the twentieth century tended to represent the modern human condition, which is the product of advanced societal differentiation, as a grounding over-historical dimension of existence. Hence, some aspects of the speculation in philosophical anthropology compare to a substantial ontologisation of the modern conflict between fluidification and institutionalisation of social mechanisms. This theoretical option is typically represented by the conservative variation of this discipline in the work of Arnold Gehlen (1988). Yet, before Gehlen, this stream of thought also developed a sociologically better-­ informed variation, which is represented by the lesser known reflection of Helmuth Plessner (1981–1985). He considers the complexity of modern societal arrangements and asks the epistemological question about their

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anthropological preconditions. On a critical and non-speculative track, thus, the aspects of the human approach to sociation can be isolated that are crucial for the persistence of qualitative differentiated societies. By such means, Plessner’s research project reconnects with and develops Simmel’s theoretical work on sociological anthropology (Fitzi 2019a: 123–143). According to Plessner’s sociological-anthropology approach, the main precondition making human life in society possible must be found in the ‘dialectics of the psychic life’ (Dialektik des Psychischen), which is based on two opposite impulses. On the one hand, the will to obtain recognition in the public sphere and, on the other, the research of shelter in intimacy (Plessner 1999). The ambivalence of psychic life results in the two lines of its relationship to the world: the urge for expression, that is, the need for recognition, and the urge for restraint or shamefulness. Human beings take part into sociation processes on condition that at any moment they can withdraw from public exposition into a sphere where psychic life is protected from external view. The pleasure of developing social relationship and making claims for foreign acknowledgement is accompanied by the resistance to excessive requests for consensus. Individuals seek to obtain recognition and at the same time want to protect their existence as entities that also subsist beyond social bounds. This anthropologically determined attitude to social action thus sets boundaries to every appeal for unlimited adhesion to institutionalised consensus expectations. The particularity of Plessner’s sociologically well-informed research project in philosophical anthropology is that starting from the ascertainment of the ‘dialectics of the psychic life’ it assesses the human as a living being in comparison with the other ‘stages of the organic’. Hence, it can eventually address the human attitude to sociation by the concept of ‘eccentric positionality’, as the grounding human approach to the world and life (Plessner 2019; for details see Fitzi 2015: 380–392). Political ideologies often demand unlimited allegiance from their followers. This, however, remains in contradiction to empirical social reality. According to the psychic attitude to sociation processes that characterises humans as ‘eccentrically positioned’ living beings, trust remains a scarce resource. Foreign pretensions of consensus cannot obtain reckless acknowledgement, because they cannot penetrate the deepest layers of consciousness. The reason for this is the dynamic structure of human consciousness that reveals an ongoing dialectics between reality and possibility, and can hardly be fixed. The unfathomable ‘source-character’ of

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human consciousness implies more than just an endless stream of impressions or its coagulation into a permanent form. Human beings must live a double life between expression and concealment, publicity and intimacy, responsibility and liberty, because their positionality towards life and the world is, in principle, ambivalent. The psychic sphere wants to take shape to be able to escape the shaping process again. The dynamics of stereotypical reciprocal perception between social actors thus not only provides the means to bridge the limits of empathy in social interaction but also protects the dialectics of the human psyche from social predetermined fixation. Accordingly, role-making must be understood as an anthropological fundamental reaction to the societal appeal to role-taking. The way that human beings perceive the world and social bonds makes them resistant to any fixation towards particular consensus-pretensions. So, they can maintain social commitments only under the condition that they always develop at least partially beyond role fixation. On the one hand, the psyche strives for form and significance and is willing to accept social engagement. It is only in this way that it can redeem itself from its unbearable ambivalence. On the other hand, it wants to endure in its endless stream of variability and deviates from shaping, to enjoy the ‘unspeakable possibilities’ of being different that lurk behind every determination. Hence, the dialectic of the psychic between reality and possibility reflects itself in the constant oscillation of social action between the urge for recognition and the retreat into discretion. As a living being, the individual personality can only appear in embodied form and is drawn into an antagonism between physical appearance and psychic expectation, reality and illusion, without being able to fully escape it. Its double existence is based on the fact that the body serves her and him as a surface to express the psychic sphere. However, what is revealed of the psychic by expression is always too little or too much. The appearance of the human being seems shadowy, as a simplified and coarsened representation of something that can never be fully discovered. The ambiguous interaction between the body and psyche within the social space induces the stereotypical perception of the socialised among each other (Simmel 1908: 42–61). The fact that the process of sociation is mediated through the use of the bodily surface of expression, however, enables the psyche also to preserve the dialectics between revelation and concealment in the exchange with fellow human beings. This attitude leads to the development of the social manners characterising the public sphere, the whole apparatus of tact and diplomacy, which enables social

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actors to deal with interaction. The urge for expression and the fear of overexposure can thus be brought into a dynamic equilibrium, although without ever reaching stability. The entry into consensus-driven social groups (community) relieves the person of the constant self-scrutiny as a ‘psycho-physical unit’, but also diminishes the freedom of self-realisation. In contrast, autonomous shaping of the body-soul relationship not only leads to individuation and thereby to conscious negotiation of common social action frames (society) but also exposes to existential uncertainty. It is indeed tempting to throw off the burden of individuation and to perish in the communitarian mass. Yet, the social subject then loses its dignity and becomes an alienated object of foreign control. A clear delimitation of any institutionalised consensus pretension thus emerges, which characterises the formation of consensus-­driven social groups. To live according to eccentric positionality means to be able to gain distance from oneself in order to compensate the instability of psychic life, without completely renouncing it. The human condition implies the adhesion to external consensus pretensions in the form of social roles that, even so, cannot overwhelm social actors by impeding evasion in extra-social dimensions, which allow self-observation and role-making. Hence, humans are not caught in the social ‘here and now’, but stay behind it, placeless, in nothingness. They are simultaneously body, psyche and psycho-physical unit, without the latter becoming the third dialectical element reconciling the opposition. Rather, as a psycho-­physical unit the human constitutes the empty passage of mediation between the social body and extra-social psyche. Its existence is truly set on nothing. This ‘constitutive homelessness’ can be compensated for in different ways. However, the individual person never attains the peace he or she strives for, so that in cultural history the corresponding ideal repeatedly takes on the form of the unattainable and the utopian. As an eccentrically positioned living being, the human must first make himself what he is. To ignore this anthropological necessity in social interaction implies a consensus-­based capitulation to an alienated social integration and to be carried away by the objectified dynamics of qualitative differentiated societal domains. The apologists of consensus dictatorships preach this attitude under different ideological pretexts. Hence, their utopia denies some basic needs of the human positioning in life, which necessitate spontaneous cultural performance to ensure social integration. To lead their life, human beings require a ‘non-natural complement’ to the fundamental

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ambiguity of their psyche. They must get out of the unbearable eccentricity of their being, by compensating the half-heartedness of their positionality. Yet, they can achieve this goal only by actively and independently establishing socio-cultural objects that are enough demanding to balance the weightlessness of their positioning in life. They must become ‘something’ in order to achieve a balance within the eccentric positionality; they cannot simply be passively driven by the objective societal mechanisms. This is the anthropological basis for the cultural work that holds complex societies together beyond every institutionally compelled common consensus. Yet, its activation is anything but self-evident. We are eccentrically positioned living beings that control our common social life by creating an artificial world through the mediation of expressiveness. The direction of the cultural process thus runs outwards from the eccentric positionality. Placeless, timeless, set on nothing, the eccentric living being fights for a balance and finds in cultural work the means to cope with its condition. The moving factor and the ultimate reason for the emergence of culture lie in the neediness and nakedness of the human being. In order to compensate for the ambivalence of the psychic, to bridge the gap between consciousness and the world, between intention and fulfilment, the individual is exposed to a constant tension, a compulsion to shape and express. Accordingly, a person can never be fixed on a rigid (no matter how strongly institutionalised) consensus performance. By nature, human beings do not find a clear-cut relationship to their fellow humans, and yet they must establish unambiguous conditions of common social action in order to get out of the unbearable contingency of social interaction between eccentrically positioned living beings. Hence, the cultural sociality of mankind obtains its ‘anthropological explanation’ from the examination of the tension-fraught relationship between the urge for expression and recognition, and the need for restraint. Yet, the artificiality and the indirectness of the human form of life also trace the limits between the public sphere and intimacy, so that the sociologically well-informed philosophical anthropology comes to a conclusive criticism of consensus dictatorships. If the forms of sociation lose their meaning, social actors have the right to ‘revolutionise’ them. Political turmoil thus becomes the means to renew society. Just as community and society are interdependent as forms of the realisation of human nature in intimacy and publicity, ultimately communitarian utopianism serves no other purpose than societal renewal. It helps to overcome the entrenchment of institutionalised consensus expectations, by enforcing innovative negotiation processes.

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7.5  Conclusions in the Theory of Social Validity In reviewing the different lines of the sociological theory of validity, which we have so far explored, the issue to be addressed is how strongly the general preconditions for the legitimacy of social orders change at times of increasing normative intermittency. Here, social actors face an environment that forces an intensified fragmentation of the personality under the pressure of the conflicting logics that inform qualitative differentiated societal domains. The rhythm of structuration, which establishes social orders with limited spatiotemporal validity, increases steadily to adapt to social change provoked by the precarious development of crumbling late capitalism. Through the resulting societal transnormativity, formally established common action frames appear to be legitimated, whereas in reality their legality remains a lost cause, because intermittent normative orders undermine their empowerment and impose unofficial practices of how things are done empirically. Of course, this dynamics occurs in every society (and institution, as organisation sociology underlines). Yet, the crucial question of the current societal (de-)structuration is the quantitative amount of the divide between legal and factual orders that evolves into intermittent qualitative societal transformation. Instead of consolidating into legal orders established through democratic procedures, common social action frames increasingly take the shape of intermittent normative orders that are established on temporary legitimation, in turn, based on asymmetric consensus-driven action. As a consequence, a recurrent substantial conflict between official legitimacy and unofficial effectiveness determines the way that social normativity is handled. Transnormativity as a conflict between officially established social orders and factually existent intermittent social structuration processes thus adds to the two founding conflicts of complex societies: on the one hand, the antagonism between the logic of social action and social structure, and on the other, the opposition and reciprocal colonisation between the sectorial logics produced by qualitative societal differentiation. This manifold mix of conflict dynamics is basically what holds complex societies together, without being able to reach a stable societal structuration that is legitimated by the legality of the rule of law. Yet, for it to result in social integration quand même, it requires an extraordinary performance from the social actors in terms of cultural work. Above all, because the temporary establishment of spatiotemporally limited frames of legitimated social action occurs in an ever more accelerated rhythm. The legitimation of

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social orders depends on an intensified everyday cultural work performance that visibly becomes more difficult as normative intermittency is enhanced in contemporary societies. The risk, and yet also the attractiveness of alienation, increases in the form of a passive surrender to the consensus-­pretentions of bureaucratic apparatuses, technocratic political domination and consumerist economic behaviour. Seen from a structural viewpoint, social actors face a condition that compels them to enforce multiple social structuration processes that are controlled by conflicting logics. In this respect, the colonisation processes that try to impose one societal logic over and above the others (in recent decades, the logic of capitalist accumulation) represent an attempt to reduce social complexity on a structural level. However, simplification strategies are doomed to fail, because society constantly produces new variants in the conflict of social logics, so that the rhythm of complexity becomes too fast-paced to manage. Since social actors are constantly requested to become the bearers of rapidly changing mixes of normative frames produced by inconstant structuration processes, they are forced to face their inconsistencies. Institutionalised mechanisms to manage normative complexity, like habits or lifestyles, reach their limits, so that based on the creative potential of cultural work social actors must revert more and more to normative improvisation. The dialectics of the psychic life must move away from the usual balance between exposure and concealment, as is codified in the established rules of tact and diplomacy, which structure the public sphere. The combination of the expressive impulse with the need for shelter in intimacy must leave its usual parameters. Because of the increasing rhythm of tentative social structuration, the management of normative complexity enters an experimental domain that alters the usual dynamics of the eccentric positionality. Social creativity is challenged by the intensified requests of cultural work, yet it does not have at its disposal the spatiotemporal resources to unfold its potential. The self-reflection needed by eccentric positioned living beings to structure social action is mortified under the pressure of increasingly accelerated and precarious social interaction. Compelling requests of consensus-driven social action therefore clash with the anthropological limits of validity. Neither having available the necessary social and spatiotemporal margins to implement negotiations on common action frames, nor being able to develop active consensus motivation, social actors acquiesce to foreign consensus-pretensions in the form of mere passive adaptation, which is the absolute opposite of

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communicative action. The resulting social alienation triggers a hardship for the dialectics of the psychic life that completely undermines the legitimacy of social structuration processes. In this respect, every strategy aimed at activating latent social resources of consensus loses out, because the inflation of consensus-pretensions reaches its highest level. The dynamics of crumbling societal structuration implies, on the one hand, the invention of provisional frames of sense that can hold together otherwise meaningless combinations of intermittent normative action orientation. On the other hand, it induces an increasing recourse to consensus-­driven forms of social action that, for a limited time, permits adherence to institutionalised and private pretensions of consensus. It is evident that these fluid and intermittent processes of social structuration do not have a sufficient basis of legitimacy to endure. Yet, the tendency that can be observed in contemporary societies is that of a rapid substitution of provisional frames of common social action through new ones, before their limits of legitimation become critical. Since nobody can effectively control the crumbling structuration dynamics of transnormative societies, the transformation of intermittent normative frames of social action does not occur because of a deliberate manipulation strategy. Rather, the provisional established structuration becomes obsolete and is substituted by new normative mixes, even before a conscious debate can start about their diminished legitimacy. As the quarrels show about the weakening of the welfare-state, the accelerated and chaotic changes in rhythm of complex societies make the critical assessment of single normative societal arrangements extremely difficult. The efforts to address controversial issues and organise the societal forces, which are necessary to modify the state of art, are too demanding to succeed in a timely manner before the situation has already changed again. The only effective way to critically address the problems of current societal change seems thus to thematise in itself the condition of normative intermittency as failing societal structuration. The conflict-prone dynamics of intermittent social structuration shows that contemporary societies do not merely subsist on the basis of a progressive dismantling of social orders. The theorem of liquidity clashes with the circumstance that complex societies continuously produce provisional social arrangements that claim legitimacy, even if in intermittent terms. The need for social order, societal structuration, still comes to expression and requires consensus from social actors, even if this is in a spatiotemporally delimited form. Yet, the subsistence of social orders is increasingly

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based on asymmetric consensus-driven social relationships, in which one side is active and sets the terms of common social action, while the other side is essentially passive and compelled to adapt to action frames that it did not negotiate. The imbalance in asymmetric consensus-driven social relationships is coped with by increasing the pace of intermittent social structuration processes. The consequence, however, is an increasing inflation of the already low consensus potential in complex societies that triggers overall trust crises, calling into question the legitimacy of institutionalisation process in principle. Transnormativity spreads, because officially acknowledged and legitimated social orders are increasingly mismatched with empirical social praxis. In political terms, the normative imbalance of complex societies takes the shape of a loss of control on political power through the normative structures of the rule of law. At the highest end of the scale, under the pressure of the temporal urgency of economic, societal and environmental emergencies, the institutional mechanisms of domination established through the monopoly of the legitimate use of force increasingly escape the democratic control of parliaments. At the other end of the scale, unrestrained private recourse to violence in social relationship increasingly appears and takes the shape of patriarchal, gender, ethnic and organised criminal violence. Instead, at least before the 2020/2021 pandemic, organised political violence, such as in the form that was usual in the 1970s, still seems not to spread in OECD countries. Yet, it is strongly present in other regions of the world, even if this is often in the external presentation of religiously or geopolitical motivated violence. What Russian aggression against Ukraine may lead to will only become clear in the coming years. The effective control of the open recourse to violence within the social space, thanks to the monopoly of the legitimated use of force, is the result of complex historical processes that characterised modern Europe. At the peak of their development, they allowed the monopoly of the legitimate use of force to be subjugated to rationalised legal orders by allowing the existence of the rule of law and parliamentary democracy. In contemporary societies, this historically evolved domestication of concentrated political power seems to be in serious danger. The rule of law loses its foundation on solid social structuration, so permitting the subsistence of social normativity, which emerges from democratic decision processes involving social actors in active negotiation processes. Decision-making bodies move away from the social actors, from whom they expect to

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become the bearers of the social orders they promulgate. In the light of the growing intermittence of social structuring processes, the democratic legitimacy of political institutions through electoral processes thus seems to be substantially eroding.

Bibliography Literature Durkheim, Émile (1893). De la division du travail social. Étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures, Paris: Alcan. English: Durkheim, Émile (2014). The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. Fitzi, Gregor (2004). Max Webers politisches Denken. Konstanz: UVK-UTB. ——— (2015). Grenzen des Konsenses. Rekonstruktion einer Theorie transnormativer Vergesellschaftung. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. ——— (2019a). The Challenge of Modernity. Simmel’s Sociological Theory. Abingdon-New York: Routledge. ——— (2019b). Max Weber’s Concept of ‘Modern Politics’. In: Max Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’. Ed. by Gregor Fitzi and Bryan S. Turner. Special Issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology, 4/2019, 361–376. Gehlen, Arnold (1988). Man, his Nature and Place in the World. New  York: Columbia University Press. Glauser, Andrea et al. (2021). The Sociology of Arts and Markets: New Developments and Persistent Patterns. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Habermas, Jürgen (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lockwood, David (1964). ‘Social Integration and System Integration’. In: Explorations in Social Change. Ed. by George K. Zollschan and Walter Hirsch. London, 244–257. Luhmann, Niklas (1972). Rechtssoziologie (19873). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Marcuse, Herbert (1965). ‘Über die philosophischen Grundlagen des wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Arbeitsbegriffs’. In: Id. Kultur und Gesellschaft, vol. 2. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 7–48. Orsello Montanari, Franca (1971). La teoria del Consensus in Augusto Comte. Padova: Marsilio. Park, Robert E. (1960). Human Migration and the Marginal Man. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, College Division. ——— (2005). Race and Culture. London: Routledge. Parsons, Talcott (1968). ‘On the Concept of Value-Commitments’. Sociological Inquiry, 38, 135–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-­682X.1968. tb00679.x

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Parsons, Talcott, and Shils, Edward A. (Eds.) (1951). Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plessner, Helmuth (1981–1985). Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. by Günther Dux, Odo Marquard und Elisabeth Ströker unter Mitwirkung v. Richard W. Schmidt, Angelika Wetterer und Michael-Joachim Zemlin, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ——— (1999). The limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism. New York: Humanity Books. ——— (2019). Levels of Organic Life and the Human. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology. New York: Fordham University Press. Rawls, John (1987). ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 7(1), S.1–25. Schutz, Alfred (1973–1976). Collected Papers: 1. The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Simmel, Georg (1908). Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Now in: Id. (1992), GSG 11, ed. by Otthein Rammstedt, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Weber, Max (1994). Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2012). Collected Methodological Writings. Ed. by Hans Henrik Bruns and Sam Whimster. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Consequences in Structure Theory

8.1   Qualitative Societal Differentiation Revisited Under the influence of Parsons’ conception of structural functionalism, mainstream contemporary sociology refers to functional differentiation as the modern form of social differentiation (Parsons 1951). The predominant idea is that society develops independent domains that are specialised in delivering a particular performance to the rest of society, so that each societal sphere can be assigned to a specific ‘function of society’ as a whole. In this way, a preconstituted harmony, or at least a common function logic of differentiated societal domains, is stated as an axiomatic assumption, without asking how their reciprocal action develops empirically. Recent decades have shown unequivocally that there are major conflicts and colonisation processes between societal domains. Yet, sociological theory seems hardly well attuned to analyse this development of society. Classical sociologists, above all Simmel or Weber, had a different understanding of modern societal differentiation. In their approach, high differentiated societies give rise to societal domains that follow autonomous logics, without amalgamating them under the logic of a supposed societal organism. Whatever correlation persists between the different societal spheres must be clarified on an empirical level of inquiry. It may be a case of cooperation and exchange, competition, conflict, colonisation or reciprocal disregard, but this can only be determined a posteriori. Accordingly, classical sociological theories are theories of ‘qualitative societal differentiation’ but not of functional differentiation. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_8

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Weber gave his classical assessment of qualitative societal differentiation as a commentary on the degrees and directions of the religious denial of the world in the ‘intermediate reflection’ (Zwischenbetrachtung) of the Economic Ethics of the World Religions (MWG I/19: 479–522; Weber 2004). The rationalisation of religion provoked by the rise of redemption prophecies in the axial age differentiated them, on the one hand, from the influence of the mundane spheres of economy and politics, and let religion assert the claim of subordinating the whole world to its ‘ethics of fraternity’. On the other hand, the self-differentiation of other societal domains, following an intrinsic objective logic, inspired their growing resistance against every attempt of external regulation, including religious ethics. Due to the qualitative differentiation of societies, religion eventually was caught in a conflict with the ‘secular orders and powers’ that established their autonomy. During a long historical development, modern societies differentiated into the autonomous spheres of economy, politics, law, art, science, sexuality and religion. These domains are characterised by a relationship of competition for the leadership on social action. Social actors must thus come to terms with the substantial ‘polytheism of values’, that is, with the perpetual antagonism between different action orders in qualitatively differentiated societies (MWG I/17: 99). Weber’s assessment of the issue of social differentiation focuses first on the structural element of competition between action orders. Then, he analyses the consequences for action orientation and specifically for the individual conduct of life. In contrast to Weber, Simmel undertakes an analysis of the parallel qualitative differentiation of societal structure and individual personality in complex societies, by strongly accentuating the creative potential of social action (GSG 2: 109–295). In highly differentiated societies, social life is subordinated to a number of external powers that take the shape of objective culture (GSG 5: 560–582). The result is a wide fragmentation of the social actors’ personality, whose different spheres are driven by the autonomous logic of the respective societal domains. Apparently, there is no escape from the modern fragmentation of the social action centres (GSG 6: 446 f.; GSG 13: 202–216). Seen from a different perspective of analysis, however, the creativity of social action has the potential to overcome the modern human condition and regroup the disparate contents of social life under a particular ‘approach to the world’. This attitude, which aims to make sense of life experience, is an expression of the cultural work that realises the necessary coordination between social action and structure. It does not grant an automatic

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reversal of the fragmentation of modern life, although it can overcome it under specific conditions. Social actors can choose a ‘predominant logic’ that shall govern their social action, so that the fragmented contents of social reality are reordered under the particular perspective of one specific approach to the world, like the economy, politics, law, art, science, religion, sexuality and so on (GSG 10: 42). As a consequence, the intersection of social domains, in which social actors are active, acquires a meaning that overcomes societal fragmentation and enables transformative processes of social structuration to take place. The allocation of the world fragments to a particular perspective depends on the subjective logic of social action. Fragmented action centres have the potential to become social connection poles that relate to each other the disparate life contents characterising qualitative differentiated societal domains. Following the most diverse impulses, emotions and choices, social actors let a specific qualitative action-leading attitude predominate and paint social experience with a specific colour. Accordingly, subjective action orientation draws its specific complexion over the objectified logics of qualitative differentiated societal domains; it contributes to their transformation by translating their manifold contents into its own language. This is a socially determined way to transform objective culture into a subjective synthesis. Qualitative societal differentiation persists, but it is subjectively subsumed under a predominant logic of social action. This applies notably to religion that conveys all world contents through its language, even if its oddest result is a ‘negation’ of the secular world orders (GSG 10: 46). Yet, the same dynamics involves the logic and language of every societal domain, if it becomes the overall focus of subjective social action. Different meaningful ‘stances to the world and life’ clash with each other, claiming the right to model all the disparate contents of social life in qualitative differentiated societies. Whatever approach prevails for social action depends proportionately on the attitude of the single actors who decide which logic (or logic mix) in principle guides their cultural work. Hence, social action can influence social structuration by establishing a predominant logic that colonises the remaining spheres of qualitative differentiated societies. On the other hand, established societal domains select the attitudes of social action that enforce their logic, by imposing it on the other societal domains. By such means, the selection of socio-anthropological types takes place that characterises the development of particular historical societies (Hennis 2000). More religiously, politically or economically

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attuned socio-anthropological types determined the destinies of modern societies, and there is no clear indicator of the nature of the predominant type in the twenty-first century. According to the naïve stance towards the world, only the reality of everyday practical life experience exists. Yet, by examining the simultaneous shaping of social reality through the dominant logics of qualitative differentiated societies (the economy, politics, law, science, art, religion and sexuality), the awareness emerges that ‘practical reality’ is only a provisional compromise in the ongoing competition between different action logics. In contrast to the phenomenology of social life (Schutz 1973–1976: 207–259), therefore, the sociology of intermittent societal structuration regards the everyday lifeworld as a result of the manifold qualitative shaping processes of social life in highly differentiated societies. The apparent practical order of reality, which is reified into the coordinate system of the lifeworld to stabilise social action frames, is just a snapshot of the momentary balance in the eternal antagonism between different societal logics. In contrast to less complex societies, in this fluid environment, social action has the potential to reorder the world contents following different shaping principles. It enters into a conflict with dominant institutionalisation processes, yet it does not succumb as simple deviant behaviour, because it can rapidly spread to the life-conduct of a wide number of social actors, so generating societal transformation processes. The task of a sociology of intermittent societal structuration is thus to reconstruct how social action reorders social reality by applying qualitative differentiated action logics to the fragmented contents of social life. Sociological theory must provide an explanation for the continuous establishment, depletion and change of dominant qualitative differentiation streams in complex societies. Different subjective logics can lead social action by producing objects of different socially determined domains of experience. The products of this sectorial cultural work gather to form clusters of objective culture. Moreover, they develop an autonomous reified logic that claims to be followed by social actors. Subjective social action stances, nevertheless, differently relate the objectified contents of social life by following their logic of preference. The result is permanent tension between the subjective logic of action creativity and the objective logic of fragmented social structure which characterises qualitative differentiated societies. They never develop one static and perennial hypostasised social structure, whose functioning can be traced back to a pre-cast metaphor of organic societal life, borrowed from the scientific domain of

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biology. Rather, they consist of multiple, alternative and competing perspectives about the arrangement of social structure that fight for predominance. A multiplicity of structuration processes reworks the same social space. Due to the acceleration of the structuration and destructuration rhythm of complex societies, the character of these processes becomes increasingly intermittent. It is based on contradictory appeals to asymmetric consensus-­ driven social action patterns. A latent conflict takes place between different perspectives for reordering social reality with limited spatiotemporal validity. Social actors are involved in a passive and alienated consensus performance as long as they do not reactivate cultural work that makes them conscious producers of innovative syntheses in social structuration. The resulting manifold conflicts in social structuration take the form of struggles for the boundaries of consensus that determine the dominating adhesion of social action centres to a specific mix of predominant action logics. In every particular epoch of societal transformation, the dynamics of qualitative social differentiation must be reconstructed empirically and cannot be subsumed under some axiomatic assumptions about the relationship between statical societal domains. The theory of intermittent social structuration shows that qualitative societal differentiation develops a particular dynamics of ‘cultural conflict’ between different logics of structured social action. Because of the increased intermittency in social structuration processes, a multiplicity of parallel arrangements of social structure competes continually for primacy. Yet, their predominance remains provisional. Structuration thus acquires an increasingly limited spatiotemporal character. Processes of social fluidification alternate at an increasing pace with processes of social solidification. The result is a substantial condition of solid social liquidity. By way of comparison, it is as if phases of monetary inflation and deflation would rapidly alternate in the economic cycle. This intermittency of social structuration processes gives rise to a substantial crisis of normative regulatory structures, even if these are legally institutionalised, because it erodes their foundations of legitimacy. Social action centres are too often compelled to redirect their consensus-driven legitimating behaviour to respond to changing institutionalised and private consensus-pretention that its content loses more and more significance. By triggering a number of risks for the legitimation of societal arrangements, a generalised condition of transnormativity thus imposes itself on society.

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The societal transformation outlined by the theory of intermittent social structuration cannot be taken seriously without developing a new approach to the theory of modernity. Critical sociology shows that the alleged characteristics of the post-modern age in reality are constitutive for modernity, otherwise society would be depicted from the static viewpoint of a biologically inspired model of functional differentiation. Only a superficial belief in progress (a widespread attitude on both sides of the ideological confrontation during the Cold War) could make intellectuals completely insensitive to this problematic. Yet, the intermittent properties of societal modernity were already in the focus of sociological theory building at the beginning of the twentieth century. This period reveals several similarities with the uncertain times that followed the (apparent) rigidity of a world system influenced by the binary logic of the Cold War.1 As time goes by, sociological theories are easily forgotten because social science is cyclically reabsorbed into socio-political discourse. The history of the social sciences is thus determined by cycles of oblivion and rediscovery that question the underlying capacity of this realm of knowledge to establish critical autonomy in the face of ongoing societal self-­interpretation (Connerton 2009). Nevertheless, from time to time phases of critical anamnesis have also intervened and permitted a revaluation of the theoretical patrimony of sociology. Under the pressure of the current economic, social and environmental crises, currently we seem to experience a phase that allows for this theoretical work. Accordingly, a different understanding of modernity has to be developed which sees it as an intermittent process of destructuring structuration. This is a key to understand current societal change.

8.2   Modernity as Intermittent Destructuring Structuration In the nineteenth century, social theorists were confronted with the impetuous and merciless development of industrial capitalism. Traditional structures of social solidarity, local communitarian networks, mechanisms of redistribution of wealth that were anchored in the rural constitution of traditional societies (Commons, Allmende, Obshchina, Mir) were rapidly 1  Societal-historical comparative studies of the Gilded Age, the Belle Epoque or the Victorian Era, on the one hand, and the development between the 1980s and 2007/2008, on the other, are thus an important desideratum of research.

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destroyed with devastating consequences for the lower social classes. The historical change that Marx described in his epoch-making analysis of primitive accumulation with a case study on England between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (Marx 1887: 619–660) took place at an accelerated pace during the rapid catch-up industrialisation of Germany. The proletarianisation of the peasantry and the impoverishment of the industrial workers were hard to miss, so that the ‘social question’ became the crucial political issue not only for socialist but also for Christian social teaching (Grebing 1981). Societal self-reflection on the one hand led to a flourishing of social critical and social romantic literature (Fitzi 2015: 91–102). On the other hand, constitutive parts of classical sociology were dedicated to understanding the great transformation that imposed the loss of traditional social forms and the irresistible emergence of new societal arrangements that facilitate capitalist accumulation. The theories of the transition ‘from community to society’ (Tönnies 1887), social differentiation and monetarisation (Simmel 1890, 1900), division of labour (Durkheim 1893) and disenchantment (Weber 1904b/1905) are the most typical results of this era of sociological theory building. In societal self-interpretation the critical examination of the issue was echoed by the growing controversy between the diagnosis of modernity as progress (Comte 1844; Spencer 1860/1862) or decadence (Nietzsche 1887). The idea of a ‘line of development’, no matter how it was then interpreted, became the natural starting point for every theory of the modern industrial age, its socio-political and cultural consequences for society (Guiducci 1993). The critique of the negative consequences of industrialisation produced intensive reflection on the possible ways to overcome the modern social rifts and establish a society capable of integrating liberty with social justice (Fourier 1807; Owen 1813; Saint Simon 1817). This reflection in turn resulted in a critical reinterpretation of the modern philosophy of history (Hegel 1837) from the viewpoint of socialist social science (Engels 1882). Modernity was conceived as an epoch concealing the potential for an ‘alternative development’ that may result from dialectically overcoming its contradictions. Yet, naive social criticism also developed based on the idea that under the rubble of the crisis-torn industrial society, there is an intact communitarian structure that could be revived to bid farewell to the ‘aberrations of modernity’. Thus, a conservative, backward-looking motif found its way into the assessment of industrial society, which was typical of the restorative critique of the French

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Revolution (Burke 1790; De Maistre 1794; Haller 1820–1834). This approach enabled a contiguity between the left- and right-wing political critique of modernity which underwent an unbridled development in the communitarian ideologies of the 1920s (Plessner 1999). Based on a systematic examination of the social foundations of qualitatively differentiated societies, critical sociology in this regard develops a different conception of modernity. It sees the transition to complex societies as associated with a structural break with pre-modern societal arrangements that cannot simply be dialectically overcome. The increasing fragmentation of social action centres, the spread of asymmetric consensus-­ driven social relationships and the ongoing colonisation conflicts between qualitative differentiated societal domains are regarded as phenomena that mould social structuration in high differentiated societies. They shape the social fabric, irrespective of the subjection of economic production processes to the iron law of capitalist accumulation, or to socialist planned economy; they take place as soon as societies reach a critical degree of differentiation. Accordingly, the analytical results of sociological research allow us to adopt a different approach to the theory of modernity. They introduce critical scrutiny for the conceptions of its linear development (progress, decadence) as well as for its dialectical reading through the philosophy of history (overcoming contradictions in superior societal formations). On the one hand, the idea of a linear development of modern society is problematised to the advantage of an inquiry into its fluctuating change rhythm, which is characterised by sequences of economic upswings and crises, alternating societal differentiation and regression phases. On the other hand, the reflection on post-capitalist society is embedded into a sociological assessment of the structural complexity of modern societies. A crucial result concerns the finding that even by overcoming capitalism accumulation processes in a socialist society, the manifold structuration dynamics of complex societies would not be simply dialectically surmounted. Increasing fragmentation of social action centres, the spread of asymmetric consensus-driven social relationships and colonisation conflicts between qualitative differentiated societal domains are phenomena that societies would still have to face. The emancipation of the theory of modernity from its romantic ballast of civilisation critique indeed presupposes a profound comprehension of the social transformation that characterises the transition to a qualitative differentiated society. This implies two layers of investigation: Firstly, a critical assessment of the analytical typologies that reconstruct the historic

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change from pre-modern to modern forms of sociation (Fitzi 2015). This is classically addressed as a transition from communitarian to societal forms of common life (Tönnies 1887), assuming that contractual forms of association prevail over status-based forms of coexistence (Maine 1861). In this respect, modern societal transformation produced by the submission of wider portions of social action under rational statutory orders is seen as an expression of the comprehensive process of occidental rationalisation (MWG I/22-3: 301–305). However, this evidence, which characterises the modern era, is subject to inconsistencies. The established forms of bureaucratic-institutional action undergo empirical practices of validation that lead to a rebound of consensus-driven frames of social action to grant their legitimacy (MWG I/12: 389–440; Weber 2012: 273–301). There is no consistent transition from communitarian, consensus-driven to societal, contract-driven social relationships. On the contrary, the two arrangements of social action support each other to grant the subsistence of the complex social structures that conform to modern societal structuration rhythms. Hence, the bureaucratisation thesis must be integrated with the assessment of the ‘reciprocal integration’ between rational institution-­ building and asymmetric consensus-driven legitimation processes. This calls into question the diachronic interpretation models stating a linear transition from consensus-driven grouping to bureaucratic institutionalisation in the form of a development ‘from status to contract’ and introduces a second layer of investigation into the ambivalence of societal modernisation. Modern institutional and technical rationalism does not need social actors to be aware of the rational principles according to which they act. Indeed, their approach is often unreflected. They follow embodied habits and expect technical-bureaucratic apparatuses to react ‘as usual’, yet without knowing why. Money offers a paradigmatic example of this situation, so critical sociology treats it as the prototype of modern institutionalised social action. In exchange for their performance, economic actors accept dematerialised goods (coloured paper slips or electronic transactions) as a guarantee for the future behaviour of anonymous third parties, so rematerialising symbolic money into commodities or services. Yet, they hardly reflect the reasons for this acceptance. A similar characterisation applies for legislation, above all for the change in the meaning of law. It can be assumed (although it need not be) that legislators are aware of the rational meaning of regulations and norms when they adopt them. Yet, once the law comes into force, its meaning is subject to a process of continuous

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reinterpretation. A wide majority of the involved people orients itself only according to the need to avoid the inconveniences caused by a violation of the established norms. The spread of modern societal rationalisation and differentiation thus increases the distance between rationalised social orders (institutions) and practices of social action (consensus-driven grouping), rather than decreasing it. This is not a case of a universalisation of knowledge about the structuration of social reality, but rather the opposite. What makes up the rational tenor of modern everyday life is the settled belief that its grounding conditions are fundamentally rational, so that they could be explained, if necessary, and do not need to be ‘magically controlled’. Yet, this ‘physiological shift’ between the formal and empirical validity of technical-bureaucratic social structuration and normative action frames becomes pathological, if the social structuration processes become ever more intermittent. The resulting societal transnormativity requires a constant increase in the investment of asymmetric consensus performances towards temporary arrangements of social structuration, which are hardly understandable and cannot be founded on rational legitimacy. This dynamics strongly characterises the current development of modern societies. Unlike previous eras, individual freedom and autonomy tends to become possible for everyone in modern social reality. Thanks to a higher level of qualitative societal differentiation, the choice and combination of the social roles one plays is much freer than ever before. That was the great promise of the French Revolution. This progress, however, is no automatism, because of the difficulty in overcoming the alienation resulting, on the one hand, from the economic imperatives of capitalist accumulation; yet on the other, from the high levels of societal fragmentation. Modernity in itself is thus neither positive nor negative in character. It bears not only emancipation potentials but also alienation risks. The prevailing aspect depends on which practices of social action predominate in a particular societal frame. The fundamental quality of modernity is thus ‘ambivalence’, so that its diagnosis must take into account its contradictions that do not resort to dialectical mediation. Critical sociology offers an assessment of three major trends in modern social (de)structuration that are relevant in this respect. The current societal change highlights them with particular clarity. Yet, they already conformed to modernity in the industrial age, even if their visibility was clouded by the reading of societal transformation from the viewpoint of the philosophy of history.

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First, and in contradiction to Bauman’s thesis of liquid modernity (2000), the founding condition of societal modernity is constituted by a state of ‘solid liquidity’ (Fitzi 2016). The intermittent rhythm of social structuration characterising qualitative differentiated societies steadily produces multiple variations of common action patterns with limited spatiotemporal validity that compete with each other for legitimation. As a consequence, the social resources to stabilise interaction frames become weaker, so that social actors are no longer able to establish resilient social ties. Due to the increasing pace of sociation processes, individuals rather maintain a large number of precarious and intermittent social relationships. These represent a fragile substitute for the bonds of solidarity that would guarantee social integration. Yet, they allow modern societies a high degree of flexibility, making amongst others the social fabric suitable for the intensified rhythm of social change imposed by the repeated crises of crumbling late capitalism. A substantial crisis of qualitative differentiated societies arises only if the major part of the intermittent social fabric collapses. The financial and economic crisis following the banking crash down of September 2008 and the recession due to the 2020/2021 pandemic show that this eventuality is not just a theoretical borderline case that is worthy of academic discussion. Secondly, modern, qualitative differentiated societies are characterised by specific modalities of normative structuration. Classical sociology described their emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century, yet their major development is attained in contemporary societies. Due to the increasing rhythm of social life, the constant recombination of social action logics devoted to different societal domains impedes stable normative integration of society. Instead, a functional ersatz establishes itself that sustains the social fabric, thanks to the frequency whereby it constructs and deconstructs intermittent action frames. This is the final sense of Weber’s classical dictum on the modern ‘polytheism of values’ (MWG I/17: 99). The logics of different societal domains increasingly intersect, confront and colonise each other, so that individuals fail in reorganising the fragmented action frames into stable conducts of life. These phenomena lead to the transnormative dynamics of failing structuration that characterises the modern social fabric (Fitzi 2015). The increasing gap between the multiplicity and growing instability of social structure, on the one hand, and the difficulty of social action to trace its fragments back to a consistent logic of normative orientation, on the other, constitutes one of the major risks for the subsistence of qualitative differentiated societies.

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Yet, the third and perhaps most serious problem of modern social structuration is that the societal fabric progressively crumbles, because single frames of common social action are rapidly abandoned for others and do not coagulate into stable social structure. The result is an accumulation of latent patterns of social action and contents of culture in the quest for legitimation that do not generate new societal structuration or cultural synthesis. Modern societies thus bend under the weight of a quantitative accumulation of competing illegitimated social structure fragments, until they reach a breaking point. Historically, the awareness of this fact was linked to the painful experience of the WWI, which marked the end of classical sociological reflection. In a retrospective view, it was possible to observe that the era of very strong capitalist expansion and social differentiation, characterising the end of the nineteenth century, resulted in destructive tendencies of functional regression. The war had been the main example of this tendency because of its intensive annihilation of human life, social ties and cultural goods. Yet, in a typological perspective a similar trend could be observed throughout the whole development of modernity. Not only the recurrent crises of the capitalist production system highlighted this, but also the changing cultural trends that had followed one another in the modern era. Phases of impetuous societal differentiation, social and cultural creativity alternated with destructive phases, in which the modern qualitative social differentiation fell into pure and simple colonising conflicts between societal domains. Times of cultural stalemate were followed by times of devaluation and liquidation of the cultural values acquired. Thus, the WWI, with all its consequences, also had to be analysed not in terms of a break with modernity but along the lines of one of its most typical expressions that revealed a structural analogy with the modern crisis of culture. The study of modern cultural development in the long phase of European peace from 1872 to 1914 showed the substantial incapacity of modern societal structuration to overcome fossilised and pathological forms of social life (Simmel 1918). By failing to produce a new synthesis of culture and society, modernity generated the destructive potential that eventually took shape in the WWI. Marx was the first to recognise this crisis mechanism in the development of capitalist societies and formulated it in terms of a conflict between economic ‘productive forces’ and ‘relations of production’. Yet, despite the Marxian diagnosis, the history of European societies until the WWI showed the absence of a dialectical movement that would lead to the rise of a new type of society. This was in

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Simmel’s eyes the main analytical novelty that the sociological reflection on the experience of WWI retrospectively projected onto the diagnosis of modernity (1918). Its analytical result could be formulated in the following terms. As a historical age, modernity does not follow a clear development line. On the contrary, it oscillates between phases of rapid development, characterised by strong qualitative social differentiation and phases of regression, in which society becomes incapable of progressing further and tends to destroy its human emancipation potential and cultural heritage. The war had exemplified in a dramatic way what the intermittent development pace of modernity meant. Accordingly, social and political theory had to provide new analytical tools to understand its empirical functioning beyond the axiomatic assumptions of the philosophy of history. The critical sociological assessment of structuration processes in qualitative differentiated societies thus introduces a new definition of the concept of modernity that makes every discussion of the possible rise of post-modern ages superfluous (Lyotard 1979; Beck 1986; Giddens 1990). Since the beginnings of qualitative societal differentiation, ‘postmodern inconsistencies’ have always been an integral part of modernity. What changed since the 1980s was merely the attitude of the intellectual class towards the concept of modernity, which was mainly conceived as a normative ideal and not as an analytical-sociological category. For interpreters of the zeitgeist, there was a sense that the alleged historical-philosophical certainty of progress, which characterised the simplified confrontation between world systems during the Cold War, had slipped out of their hands. So, they postulated the emergence of a ‘time of pure uncertainty’. Hence, the mourning of the intellectual class about the lost historical-­ philosophical certitudes moulded the debate on societal change at a time of rising neoliberal ideology, without recurring to any comparative assessment of social structuration processes in industrial and post-industrial societies. The dispute acquired a purely political-normative character and focused on the opportunity to abandon the struggle for emancipation that characterised the modern era to embrace the neoliberal and post-historical ideology of the alleged winners of the geopolitical confrontation ending the ‘short 20th century’ (Hobsbawm 2003). Habermas was thus right in criticising the post-modern liturgy as an anti-emancipatory movement and in addressing it as a variation of neo-conservatism. In his perspective, the ethical-political idea of modernity had to be relaunched. So in the lectures on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity he defined modernity as the

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‘unachieved emancipation project’ of the Enlightenment that was worth being continued (Habermas 1987). Yet, the political-normative reading of the idea of modernity does not deliver the instruments to explain the particularity of the intermittent and contradictory historical development of qualitative differentiated societies. For this purpose, a sociological, analytical-descriptive categorisation of modernity is necessary and this is included in the tasks of critical sociology. ‘Modernity’ means neither progress nor decadence. Instead, it involves a substantial intermittence of social structuration, characterised by an alternation between phases of qualitative differentiation and functional regression. This pulsating societal environment is irreducible to any a priori historical-philosophical conception of development. The challenge of theoretical sociology thus consists in grasping, in an innovative way, the intermittent logic of the uncertain and failing societal structuration dynamics at every stage of the transformation of complex societies. In doing so, sociological theory must be able to outline the reciprocal action between the tendency of qualitative differentiation and societal regression that characterises the unfolding of complex societies as qualitative differentiated societies. In brief, it must seize the intermittent destructuring structuration of modernity. Developing this knowledge, and sharing it collectively, amounts to the necessary preconditions for every resumption of normative societal structuration processes.

8.3  Intermittent Foundation of Legal and Political Orders Historically, the instability and fragmentation of legal and political orders is no novelty that just appeared since social structuration underwent increased normative intermittency. Pre-modern societies deliver the typological example of what constitutes an overall conflict of competing, yet spatiotemporally delimited legal and political orders. One major achievement of modern societal structuration was the transition from this condition of diffuse asymmetric consensus to the establishment of comprehensive political legitimacy and, eventually, to grounding socio-political orders on legality. At times of crumbling late capitalism, however, qualitative differentiated societies risk falling into processes of normative regressions, which gradually impose the predominance of intermittent asymmetrical consensus relationships, by reducing the scope for legality and legitimacy.

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To identify the tendencies of intermittent (de)structuration that contemporary societies are facing, it is thus necessary from a typological perspective to understand the historical waves of societal structuration that made possible modern legitimation and legalisation processes. In medieval European cities, the corporative organisation of the wealthiest handicraft and commercial professions led to an exclusive codification for the rights of their members (Weber 1982). Later on, these rights were gradually extended to members of the minor corporations, but they still excluded the simple wageworkers of the different professions. Only through the formation of an autonomous political and military organisation of the lowest strata of the city-inhabitants under the label of ‘the people’ could the wageworkers eventually impose the institutionalisation of their rights. Yet, this achievement depended on the existence of an openly illegitimated social group within the overall commonwealth of the city that struggled against the equally armed organisation of the craftsmen’s corporations. Typologically seen, this condition of latent civil war, which especially characterised the Italian cities of the Middle Ages, could only be overcome by the establishment of the modern occidental state as the monopolist of the legitimate use of force for a wider geographical territory (Weber 1994: 310). The institutionalisation of the monopoly of force caused a series of transformational processes that characterise modern societal structuration. These mainly concern, on the one hand, the rationalisation of the legal framework of society (MWG I/22.1, 214 f.) and on the other, the establishment of legal definitions for membership in the political community (Brubaker 1992). Once a paramount centre of regulation is established on the basis of the legitimate monopoly for exerting (or threatening) the use of force, societies gradually develop a legal system with ‘universal formal character’ (MWG I/22.3, 500–550 and 592–614). The privileges and exceptions characterising the legal systems of pre-modern stratified societies are progressively dismantled. Yet, the historical processes fostering the extension of legalised rights beyond their corporative delimitation are not at all self-­ evident. In early modern times, a latent and at times open conflict shaped the relationship between rulers, bureaucratic apparatuses and corporative organised social strata for the expropriation of traditional institutions endowed with political powers and granting specific rights and privileges (MWG I/22.1: 208). Rule increasingly assumed the form of an institutionalised struggle for power, its exercise and its legitimation. A ‘political expropriation process’ took place in modern European history that is

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comparable with the expropriation of the economic means of production that Marx describes in the chapter on the so-called primitive accumulation of The Capital (MEGA II/9: 619–659). To exert its regulating function more efficiently and to impede processes that re-establish parallel power centres, such as those characterising the stratified societies of the Ancien Régime, the established political community, as the monopoly of the legitimate use of force, enforced a legal system that reduced the panoply of traditional legal facts to a rational casuistic. This process of formalisation and rationalisation within the law systems had crucial consequences for the development of the modern political arrangement of society. Indeed, progressively, the exercise of executive power was also subjected to formal and rational legal rules (MWG I/23, 456). Eventually, the ‘rule of law’ became the grounding criterion for the legitimation of modern forms of domination under the precondition that a legally legitimated monopoly existed for the use of force with a territorial delimitation. Thanks to this historically determined transformation of societal structuration, an extension of the legislation codifying citizenship rights became possible for all the inhabitants of a specific territory. Such rights conformed to exclusive criteria like birth or origin which were classically codified as Jus soli or Jus sanguinis (Conrad and Kocka 2001). Hence, the idea was born of ‘membership in a wider legal community’ beyond the physical borders of the city wall. The institutions that had been developed in the ‘bourgeois laboratory’ of the medieval cities in the occident could be formally universalised by extending the spirit of the ‘urban way of life’ to complete territories. The most symbolic passage consecrating this societal transformation was the anchoring of the Declarations of Human Rights in the constitutions that emerged from the American and French Revolutions. Here the human, civil and political rights of the citizens were formally institutionalised. Yet, the result of this emancipation process was contradictory, because it was based on rigid functions of social closure, giving rise to modern national states by excluding ‘non-nationals’ (Brubaker 1992). Alongside this tendency of social closure, another tendency was the discrimination of the lower societal strata that only gained substantial access to citizenship rights after protracted and repeated social conflicts. These produced integrated citizenship rights with a consistent social component that was enshrined in legislation. Similar discrimination tendencies deriving from a conspicuous shift between formal acknowledgement and factual access to citizenship rights characterised gender relationships and the exclusion of ethnical minorities in modern national states. Nevertheless,

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further social conflicts enforced the introduction of more and more elements of social-, gender- and minorities-focused protection legislation. In the long run, a comprehensive normative architecture could be established that regulated societal structuration under the rule of law in an inclusive and solidarity-oriented perspective. This was no perfect world (Dale and Foster 2014). However, at least in a certain number of countries it permitted the establishment of social integration, wealth and democratisation in the thirty-year period that has gone down in history as ‘Les Trente Glorieuses’ between 1945 and 1975 (Fourastié 1979). Nowadays, however, the transformation of social structuration processes in an increasingly intermittent way calls this historically grown societal arrangement into question and undermines the political-normative orders of modern society. This is all the more the case because the social and political collective subjects, who ensured that the formal recognition of citizenship rights was followed up by their substantive implementation, have fundamentally lost their capacity to act due to progressing social fragmentation in the age of neoliberalism. Normative societal arrangements, like welfare systems, are questioned by the modified balance of forces between labour and a capitalist accumulation process that entered its crumbling late phase (Streeck 2016a). The result is a substantial erosion of citizenship rights. In particular, social rights are in decline, yet this is not to the advantage of political rights, because of the increasing distance between electors and decision-making bodies that act beyond parliamentary control and operate in a constant emergency due to economic, health and environmental crises. The divide between the formally acknowledged status of citizenship and the factual erosion of the access to citizenship rights becomes increasingly important, because of the rising rate of the population living in highly precarious socio-economic conditions (ILO 2020). Furthermore, the social group of those, who are or feel left behind, faces growing numbers of discriminated immigrant workers without citizenship rights, so building an industrial reserve army that is deeply divided internally along ethno-cultural fault lines. This condition prevents labour from presenting a common front of claims that can be translated into new social protection legislation; it also encourages the emergence of racially driven conflicts. In addition, the middle classes undergo a dramatic development, instead of becoming a stabilising factor of societal cohesion. On the one hand, the economic base of their social positioning is consistently eroded. On the other hand, the emerging highly qualified representatives of the

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knowledge economy separate themselves off from the traditional middle classes, which are among the biggest losers of the current socio-economic transformation. Their wealth and social prestige are questioned and the political representation of their concerns becomes increasingly unsure. A conflict potential accumulates that demands interpreters. The failing societal structuration processes in increasing intermittent social environments has major consequences for the conduct of politics, as is shown among others by the emergence of a panoply of populist political enterprises in contemporary societies (Fitzi et al. 2019). Here, there is a significant risk due to the current societal transformation that undermines the historically established normative arrangement of qualitative differentiated societies. Politically, the greatest concern is for the future of parliamentary democracy as a societal institution that faces up to the social divide, by transforming socio-economic conflicts into legislation that grants social inclusion in universalist terms. The political system that suits the modern, qualitative differentiated structuration of society is based on the preservation of a monopoly of the legitimate use of force, in turn, limited to a geographical territory and subordinated to the rule of law. Under these conditions, there is only one possible understanding of politics. Namely, the activity of ‘sharing power’ and ‘influencing its redistribution’ within the institutional framework of politics structuring complex societies. Accordingly, ‘modern politics’ is defined sociologically as a political competition that makes parliamentary democracy the only political form which is compatible with the complex structuration of modern societies. Abandoning modern societal structuration by means of increasing normative intermittency thus bears concrete political risks. It means sliding into a societal regression that re-joins pre-modern forms of politics without territorial and legal delimitation of legitimated monopolies in the use of force and opens up two rather worrying perspectives. Firstly, there is the formation of competing illegitimate social groups pretending to exert the legitimate use of force. This is the perspective of civil war, which Max Weber tried to warn his audience about in his 1919 speech on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (Fitzi 2019b). During the twentieth century, the interwar period offered sufficient experience of this scenario, and in the end resulted in the emergence of totalitarian political regimes. However, the historical development perspective that appears to prevail in contemporary societies instead resembles a scenario of ‘crumbling modern politics’. It is characterised by the increasing fragmentation and intermittency in socio-­political

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normative arrangements and at first appears to be less dangerous than a ‘Weimar syndrome’. Yet, the current levels of alienation between the electorate and the decision-makers, as well as the substantial erosion of formally acknowledged citizenship rights, question the endurance of modern parliamentary democracy. Hence, the resulting normative disorientation and disenchantment with politics do not exclude the possibility that the crisis of political legitimation develops into ‘Caesarist adventures’ in the style of contemporary populism or geopolitical imperialism. A dynamic balance between normative-administrative rationalisation (bureaucracy) and political innovation (charisma) permits the existence of modern parliamentary democracy, provided that parliaments are the substantial core of political power (Weber 1994: 130–270). The precondition of this balance is that the political-normative arrangement of society has empirical consistency and lives within manifold everyday political praxes. Yet, in contemporary societies this expression of social action’s creativity is undergoing a substantial crisis. Intermittent normativity due to failing social structuration processes mortifies the capacity for building collective subjects of political action. Hence, there is no adequate representation of social demands that reaches the institutional bodies of political deliberation. In addition, the accelerated pace of political decision-making due to the intensified rhythm of economic, sanitary or environmental crises widens the gap between the political class and the electorate. Political systems are based increasingly on spatiotemporal delimited, asymmetric consensus-­ driven relationships and lose legitimation. In this scenario, the populist political agenda has an easy game of propagating ideological simplifications of the societal dynamics by addressing marginal social groups or ‘external enemies’ as scapegoats. Yet, modern populist recipes only carry on the logic of the neoliberal policies that were aimed since the 1980s at dismantling the welfare-state. The novelty is that the restrictive criteria advocating delimited access to social rights are no longer of an economic nature. Rather, they are based on ethno-cultural, racist conceptions of social closure. Accordingly, the regression of the political-normative arrangement of complex societies is extended by worsening their qualitative structural crisis. Furthermore, the racist-­sovereigntist political trends and the aggressiveness of populist political programmes call into question the institutional architecture put in place to limit the expansionist tendencies of the territorial monopolies for the legitimate use of force. As a reaction to the dramatic experiences of WWII and the National Socialist genocide, since the 1950s the European states followed

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the logic of a progressive economic, social and political integration in order to avoid the transformation of national economic and political crises into expansionist war adventures. The loss of political legitimacy in the era of crumbling societal structuration erodes the foundations of the European institutional architecture and gives rise to autonomist experiments without any durable socio-economic foundation. As Brexit shows, the immediate consequences of this political adventure affect a country that takes this path. Yet, in the long run, this loss of political rationalisation destabilises the whole institutional architecture that has so far allowed the longest period of peace, democratisation and development in Europe. The final part of the book, which focuses rather on political reflection, proposes an assessment of possible practical ways to deal with this scenario of political delegitimation and legal deregulation. What can be observed in the context of a sociological diagnosis is instead the fact that any transformation of ongoing societal change into normative structuration is the result of a renewal of the creativity of social action. Such a renewal is capable of constructing collective subjects of representation which translate social instances into political programmes. Diffuse protest, as shown by the movement of the Gilets Jaunes in France, does not suffice to establish socio-political representation. This raises the question of what the ‘ideological orientation’ of social transformation movements might be today (Soborski 2018). Historically, the transformation of societal structuration has often been the consequence of a worsening in living conditions so critical that large sectors of the population have been forced to engage in the construction of collective political actors. It is possible that the current functional regression of wealthy societies that emerged from the era of the Trente Glorieuses and then underwent forty years of neoliberal restructuration, will lead back to an economic and social scenario that forces the rise of the collective subject of socio-political action.

8.4   Social Integration Through Cultural Conflict The crisis of culture is one of the essential characteristics of modernity. A hypertrophic production of cultural contents (the Internet being one of its current expressions) prevents the individual from forming a subjective cultural synthesis. The cultural work of social action thus encounters major limits. Today, however, culture also raises questions in the form of

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increasing conflicts provoked by an accelerated tendency to pluralisation in societies that were used to a narrative of alleged cultural homogeneity. This development is not exclusively, though in large part related to intensified migration flows and above all to the way in which they are perceived by populations representing themselves as native. A sociological examination of the socio-structural function of culture in the age of multiculturalism must thus focus on the multiplication effect that cultural pluralisation exerts on the failing cultural work of social action. Above all, a growing tendency is observed that substitutes the integration of individuals into the overall framework of societal relationships with a sort of separated socialisation into ethnic communities of belonging, no matter whether they are the home or migrant population. The result is a conspicuous social and cultural fragmentation. After establishing the mythologies of the ‘melting pot’ and the ‘ethnic mosaic’, contemporary societies thus risk developing a ‘multi-communitarian’ integration model, which prevents individuals from moving beyond the narrow socio-cultural framework of their communities of origin. This is no physical ghetto in the traditional sense, but represents a tendency to culturally driven ghettoisation that fragments the public sphere of complex societies and hinders collective emancipation processes. The socio-political debate registers the pluralist transformation of contemporary societies as a risk of ‘failing normative integration’. The normative foundations of societies become again a political topic and trigger the questioning on ‘cultures of reference’ that characterises the reflection on communitarianism (Honneth 1993; Mason 2000). In this context, literature often refers back to Böckenförde’s 1967 dictum on the pre-political normative conditions, which form the basis for the existence of the modern state, but the modern state itself fails to provide (Böckenförde 1967: 71). It is within this framework that Habermas defends the reasons of the pluralist and secular position against the idea of a forced transition to post-­ secular identities that would base political institutions on a cultural and religious orientation that should be binding on society as a whole (Habermas 2005). However, doubts arise as to whether a pluralistic constitutional state can be stabilised beyond the level of a simple juridically driven modus vivendi without relying on shared assumptions of value. It should be noted here that the idea of modus vivendi is usually negatively connoted in political theory (a solitary exception is Larmore 1987, 1990). However, its importance should not be underestimated, as it represents overcoming policies based exclusively on a modus pugnandi. Processes for

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settling and institutionalising cultural-political conflicts played an essential role in the pacification of modern Europe after the divisions of the religious wars. The result of this socio-historical transformation consists in the subordination of religious rights to the rule of law and the elevation of constitutions, including the Declaration of Human Rights, to the normative foundation and basic regulating instance of modern societies. The legal arrangement of social and cultural complexity thus plays the crucial role in stabilising qualitative differentiated societies in a normative perspective. Yet, this occurs under the condition that legality persists and is not eroded by increasingly intermittent processes of social structuration. Hence, part of the analytical tasks of critical political sociology consists today in exploring which mechanisms of societal structuration are concealed behind the modus vivendi of cultural pluralism that moulds contemporary societies. Empirically, it can be observed that the institutional structure of contemporary societies is much more capable of adapting itself to the ongoing cultural pluralisation than social and political theory would admit. Intermittent legitimation procedures are being put in place, without falling back on common normative orientations. ‘Transcultural modalities’ of consensus-driven social action conform social structuration processes, by establishing contexts of normative validity that are not ephemeral, but persist within spatiotemporal limits that become increasingly narrow, so that the rhythm of normative change accelerates (Fitzi 2015: 25–33). The institutional structure of society persists, by making normative intermittency a crucial instrument of social integration. Paradoxically, a precarious and conflict-prone cultural pluralism thus becomes a strength of complex societies. It delivers dynamic foundations of legitimacy for social orders and substitutes traditional cultural heritages and shared pre-political experiences, in granting the persistence of the institutional framework of society. Yet, this development is not without structural consequences. Normative pluralisation transforms the foundations of legitimacy sustaining the rule of law, because it establishes alternative social orders that obtain empirical legitimation, even if in a precarious and intermittent frame. A competition thus arises between formally and informally legitimated patterns of social action that can be reabsorbed by new legislation in a timely manner. Yet, it can also last longer, by diluting and eroding modern standards of legal monopoly. Processes of increasing normative flexibility in social structuration have a historical development and show positive as well as negative aspects that

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are worth analysing to understand the polyvalent impact of cultural pluralisation. Historically, since the 1970s in a number of immigration countries the assimilationist model has been increasingly rejected by the adoption of more tolerant and pluralistic policies that allow immigrants to safeguard different aspects of their cultural heritage. Yet, this transformation did not lead to a dissolution of the home cultures, so that ‘multicultural societies’ are confronted with conditions of tolerated poly-ethnicity, yet within the framework of dominant native legal institutions. The use of the term multiculturalism must thus be problematised (Kymlicka 1995), so that sociological analysis focuses on the empirical modalities, following which cultural work takes place in culturally pluralist societies. As a social institution, ‘culture’ offers a reservoir of instruments for achieving social integration in complex social-structural environments. Yet, with the acceleration of qualitative societal differentiation, cultural heritages that are ever more manifold become unmanageable for the creativity of social action. The resulting alienation is handled by adopting technical-­ bureaucratic, commercial as well as ideological simplifications of cultural complexity, yet without being able to eliminate the feeling of a loss of control on the pluralisation of cultural contents and languages that is social-structurally induced. In this context, the otherness of migrants’ cultural heritages can easily be presented as a scapegoat and transformed into the alleged cause of a phenomenon, while in reality it is only a symptom. The failure of cultural work due to the excessive complexity of modern societal structuration is an internal fact of society, yet societal self-interpretation translates it into a feeling of stress with incoming cultural inputs and transfigures it ideologically into the fear of cultural colonisation. The modern conflict between the productive forces and the failing forms of culture thus enters a new round, this time mutually opposing ‘hypertrophic qualitative multiplicity’ and ‘ideological simplification’ of culture on all levels of social structuration. The fragmentation of cultural work increases with the growing irrationality of accumulated objective culture, so making cultural synthesis on an overall societal level more and more unreachable for the everyday praxis of social action. In this context, the most practised unconscious strategy for reducing cultural complexity consists in moving backwards from overall societal complexity towards scenarios of communitarian integration that appear to be easier to govern. The socio-structural function of culture is thus called into question. As a reaction to cultural complexity the horizon of cultural work is

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progressively diminished, so preventing its function of social integration from taking shape. Because the cultural tools have shortcomings, the intelligibility of social structuration as a whole is thus profoundly diminished. The increasing qualitative differentiation and the accelerated, but intermittent pace of social structuration impede the sediment of innovative socio-­cultural arrangements capable of actively integrating individuals into legally legitimated social orders. The result is a cultural entropy that fosters growing levels of alienation and facilitates the political manipulation of public opinion. In this scenario, cultural pluralisation due to immigration serves as a catalyst of societal self-interpretation for the distorted perception of failing socio-cultural structuration and appears to be the cause for an uncontrollable proliferation of societal complexity. It seems to force individuals to take more and more account of allogenous cultural contents in the formation of their identity, thus making the crisis of culture even more acute. This is the image that, alongside the irrational fear of hybridisation, became the subject of media attention and is cultivated by the populist political agenda (Wodak 2021). It remains, however, the product of an altered perception of the social space and depends on an escapist management of cultural complexity due to increased qualitative societal differentiation. As a consequence, consistent tendencies to social immunisation arise that believe in the possibility to withdraw into societal enclaves that are allegedly exempt from growing social complexity, enforcing political tendencies to communitarianism and sovereignism. In the same vein, immigrant communities tend to update their identity by reaffirming distinctive aspects of their cultural heritage, which would probably not have played such a significant role in the original environment. The politicisation of religion and the recourse to terrorism represent an extreme development of this trend. Instead of opening up to reciprocal exchange, cultural barriers are reactivated and reinforced on both sides (Tilly 2016). Natives and migrants lock themselves into the roles that the very first sharing of a common social space would assign them. The result is a dual trend towards ghettoisation and self-ghettoisation, which affects both native and migrant communities. Accordingly, the dynamics of societal structuration stagnates. In order to establish a societal arrangement that stabilises qualitative social differentiation by granting substantial access to the whole bundle of citizenship rights for every social actor, complex societies need to be integrated beyond the boundaries of imagined ethno-cultural communities

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(Anderson 1983). This presupposes an advanced societal structuration that goes beyond individual or collective status privileges. Yet, this development is the result of a reiterated enforcement and adjustment of legally legitimated social orders that are not at all an automatism. Whichever scenario prevails depends on the outcome of ongoing socio-cultural conflicts. At the end of the scale, entrenched ethno-cultural conflicts can foster regressions towards stratifying differentiation, building ethno-religious sub-monopolies of illegitimate use of force and opening in the extreme case to the prospect of ethnic civil war, as the dissolution of former Yugoslavia showed. Yet, whether they have more or less experience with immigration, the majority of contemporary societies find themselves between the two extremes of the regressive and the structuring scenario of ethno-cultural pluralisation. A strong tension occurs between the three levels of social integration characterising individuals, ethnic communities and society in its complexity. The resulting conflicts have a remarkable impact on the social fabric and constitute a sensitive issue for the diagnosis of pluralist societies. In a normative perspective, the precondition of multicultural societal structuration consists in the assumption of the fundamental equal right of all cultures. Following this path, regressive tendencies towards immunisation could be limited by a proper social-ethical approach. Overcoming an excessive homogenisation that follows the standards of indigenous societies would require an effort of understanding and a readiness to ‘merge cultural horizons’ (Taylor 1994). By intermediation of an ‘open-minded hermeneutics’ ethno-cultural communities could be seen as guarantors of acceptance in host societies, so making the integration of individuals into trans-communitarian social circles inessential. An integration between intermediate social groups, based on open-minded ethno-cultural identities and guaranteed by a process of mutual recognition, would allow the conflict potential of cultural pluralisation to be overcome. By shifting the focus of analysis from the integration of individuals into the overall social fabric to the relationship between intermediary social entities, the growing difficulty of the subjective synthesis of culture seems resolvable in favour of a transformation into an ethical question of respectful interaction between social groups with an asserted identity. It becomes thus a question of tolerance between lifestyles that can be approached on the level of the representatives of different ethno-cultural communities. The benevolent ethical-political will associated with this vision of multicultural hermeneutics, namely the goal of a better integration for

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migrants, is, however, exposed to the risks provoked by the renunciation to every trans-communitarian synthesis of culture. The result is a retreat of social actors from the public sphere and an impulse to societal fragmentation that conceals the reasons for the crisis of the socio-structural function of culture in complex societies. Hence, the political demand for the realisation of the ideals of welcome, tolerance and recognition can be founded on a social-ethical level. However, this has unintended paradoxical consequences in everyday societal praxis. Within a framework of recognition, ethno-cultural communities may obtain a protected ‘social niche’ to develop their lifestyle in accordance with formal rules of coexistence in an atmosphere of reciprocal tolerance. This positive vision, however, risks becoming the ideological cover for a more complex social reality. Against the backdrop of multi-ethnic society, the native culture remains dominant, especially with regard to political institutions, while the socio-structural function of innovative cultural creativity through social action weakens. The realisation of ideals of recognition in terms of interaction based on political correctness between intermediary groups can thus facilitate the marginalisation of migrants as ‘social persons’. Instead of having at their disposal the social scope to become active members of society as a whole, they find themselves locked into culturally driven ghettoisation and suffer the loss of societal public space because of the failing integrative function of culture. Transcultural social integration thus takes place on a pre-­ political level, yet not through the substantial exercise of citizenship rights on a societal level. The pre-politicisation of cultural pluralism could be considered as one phenomenon of socio-political regression among others that characterise complex societies. Yet, it calls into question some of the social-structural achievements that form the basis of the modern rule of law. The transition to modernity involves the development of spaces of social action that extend beyond the limits of ethno-cultural communities. The institutionalisation of the status of the ‘social person’, acting beyond the ties of its community of origin, belongs to the structural prerequisites for the development of qualitative societal differentiation (Durkheim 2019). On its basis the cultural work of social action becomes possible that intertwines the opposite logics of qualitatively differentiated societal domains into a social fabric capable of withstanding the increasing tensions of socio-­ cultural pluralisation. This ever-renewed achievement, however, is only possible if individuals have sufficient scope of action to develop their own subjective synthesis of culture, irrespective of the control that a culture of

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reference tends to impose on them according to their belonging to a specific ethnical narrative. If social creativity prevails over the tendencies towards closure within the limits of ethno-cultural familiarity, then a trans-communitarian synthesis of objective culture becomes possible that is capable of safeguarding the original cultural identities. Cultural work takes place, which has the potential to renew social structuration processes and to develop them on the level of the cultural complexity of qualitative differentiated societies. Yet, this perspective is most likely linked to an accentuation of cultural conflicts both between as well as within ethno-cultural communities, especially concerning intergenerational relationships. A scenario of diffuse socio-cultural conflict, however, should not be intimidating, because contrary to all appearances in the long run it does not induce the destruction of social ties. On the contrary, it highlights latent socio-cultural tensions and gradually enforces social structuration not only on both sides of the conflict, yet also between them, by organising their antagonistic relationships ‘as a conflict’ that can be transformed over time into social institutions (GSG 11: 284–382; GSG 18: 288–354; Coser 1956). Hence, socio-cultural conflicts represent one of the most important drivers of social integration in complex societies. They produce major levels of reciprocal knowledge and antagonistic cooperation that give birth to innovative processes of social structuration, thanks to the legal formalisation of the terms of conflict. The history of industrial relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivers the best example of a similar development and can offer an ideal pathway to build the institutions of pluralist societies. This scenario of ‘social integration through cultural conflict’ gives complex societies the opportunity to overcome the specific crisis of culture that characterises the age of cultural pluralisation induced by advanced qualitative societal differentiation.

8.5  Institutionalised Liquefaction Beyond Trust In the frame of multicultural communitarianism, ethno-cultural heritage can become an obstacle for the integration of social actors outside the community of belonging. Yet, this is only the most apparent mechanism that hinders the construction of social relationship beyond the boundaries of familiarity in crumbling qualitative differentiated societies. Accordingly, it is necessary to understand the social praxes that arise as a functional ersatz for the failing construction of social bonds on a trans-­communitarian

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level, as these become increasingly difficult to manage for the creativity of social action. The focus of analysis is on the institutions of interaction that emerge in times of intermittent social structuration, when the societal fabric is constantly reshaped, without providing social actors with sufficient spatiotemporal and cognitive resources to construct social relationship. Here the transformation of structuration processes induces a concurrent formalisation and ‘irrealisation’ of social interaction modalities. Formalism relieves social action centres from investing mental energies into social exchanges that become increasingly casual and ephemeral. This societal arrangement protects social actors from being involved in too many intermittent social relationships, making social interaction necessarily superficial and separating the sphere of intimacy and its immediate materiality from an increasing range of substantially anonymous social structuration processes. That may be called the ‘public sphere’ in sociological terms. As a consequence, in qualitative differentiated societies with accelerated, but intermittent structuration rhythm, the formalisation of social reality beyond the limits of familiarity expands and easily encounters a general appreciation. Familiarity can only be realised at all in the dynamic opposition to the unfamiliar. The formal definition of the public sphere’s boundaries serves as a prerequisite for the procedures that allow the boundaries to be traced that define the sphere of intimacy. Thus the question arises under what conditions social structuration processes, which are characterised by increasingly scarce time-space resources, can make possible relationships of trust based on a liquefied threshold between familiarity and the unfamiliar. In place of a traditional community-building based on belonging, intermittent processes of sociation take place that constantly break up and rebuild social relationships beyond familiarity. By such means, the threshold-­like structuration processes that delimit membership from alienation open on the side of an increasingly unfamiliar public sphere. A wide horizon is available to build precarious and risky relationships, yet without the resources that would allow social creativity to progress in building innovative social structuration processes. A reduction of the resulting contingency is only possible, thanks to a dynamic approach of social formalism as a means for the ‘administration of the unfamiliar’. Yet, this implies an increased dematerialisation of social relationships in the public sphere. Social interaction at large becomes increasingly independent from its bearers and imposes an ‘irrealisation’ of the social fabric, making it hardly accessible to the performance of cultural work. This societal

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transformation confers a new quality on alienation processes, which can be easily removed from conscious cycles of social creativity, yet by enclosing social action within spheres of ‘perceived familiarity’ that become more and more tight. As a result, social actors are compelled to afford complex networks of social relationship beyond the boundaries of communitarian familiarity, yet without the possibility of actively shaping them through cultural work. This formally relieved, but substantially blocked access to social interaction at large generates a constant tension in the flow of social action, because it impedes conscious management of social bounds. The dialectic between crumbling societal structuration and the fragmentation of social action centres reaches its peak in the everyday social praxis and induces conflicts between frustrated social creativity and cultural alienation. The consequence is a crisis of trust as a diffused means of social legitimation that traditionally compensates the loss of familiarity in social interaction on the level of social action as well as on that of institutionalised trust agencies (Luhmann 1968). To trust means to anticipate the future and operationalise uncertain horizons of expectations, by reducing complexity on the temporal axis of social action. Its precondition is that social actors have at their disposal a world of familiarity that serves as a stepping stone for acting beyond its limits. In contemporary societies, however, the material anchoring of trust collides with increasing fragmentation processes that liquefy the threshold between familiarity and strangeness. This tension results in a stronger formalisation and dematerialisation of trust modalities which can hardly be based on familiarity in the conventional sense. Trust and familiarity enter into a dialectic of mutual fluid stabilisation, which can no longer offer a clear demarcation from unfamiliarity, alienation and hostility. The transformation of traditional frames of familiarity raises irrational fears of social relegation and finds expression in a latent xenophobia, so that presumed newcomers are made responsible for a situation that instead has its causes in failing societal structuration. At times of increasing social irrealisation, the distress for the lost demarcation lines between known and unknown, the things that are manageable, thanks to cultural work and unmanageable social terrains, forces the personification of its alleged causes. The offer of political ideologies that characterises the current development of public debates intervenes in this tension, by promising turned-back utopias as fictive substitutes for effective social structuration, instead of starting processes of societal transformation.

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As the sociological diagnosis shows, in complex societies the transition from primary emotional to legitimated expectations of trust increasingly collides with the micro-sociological limits of institutionalisation. Numerous areas of social action move beyond the sphere of familiarity, so that the stock of trust based on familiarity tends to become a vanishing factor for societal structuration. The acceleration of sociation rhythms increasingly liquefies the threshold between familiar and unfamiliar social environments and provokes the transition from established relationships of legitimation based on trust to an increasing investment of ‘asymmetrical consensus-driven’ trust. Short-lived procedures of trusting ‘beyond the threshold of familiarity’ are adopted that consist in establishing, revoking and renewing an infinite number of punctual relationships of consensus-­ driven social action. Institutionalisation processes strive to stabilise this shifting foundation of legitimacy by adding ‘fictive co-experiencing third parties’ to asymmetric relationships of consensus and claiming that they confirm alleged ‘rising expectations of trust’. An immaterialised virtual reality establishes itself, which can hold the social fabric together, yet only within delimited spatiotemporal and social boundaries grounded on an increasing number of asymmetric consensus-driven social relationships. The risks of an inflation of short-term trust concealed in this development can hardly be overestimated. The definition of interactive thresholds, which provide some unfamiliar action areas with tentative trust, is decisive for the subsistence of its consensus-­driven variation. Where trust cannot be based on a mutual normative orientation in the sense of ‘expectations of expectations’, enforced social formalism makes it possible to build relationship beyond familiarity. Thanks to irrealised action-approaches, action frames beyond the boundaries of familiarity emerge that are marked as provisionally trustworthy. Yet, they fail, when the increasing intermittency of social structuration makes the margins for their consolidation too tight to transform experimental consensus-driven trust into a more permanent form of legitimation. As a consequence, trust can no longer be institutionalised. Social agencies that stabilise trust with respect to the alleged expectations of anonymous third parties are increasingly replaced by an overarching ‘solid liquidity’ of social structuration processes. The social fabric is constantly built up and dismantled according to contingent criteria of adjustment that do not allow for the establishment of lasting trust-relationships. The consequences of the 2007/2008 financial crisis on the real economy have shown this development in an ideal-typical way. The refusal of monetary

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transactions between banks, which were quite trivial in ‘normal times’, and the widespread crisis of payment morality are just two examples of the crisis of trust that hit complex societies. However, trust crises are not limited to the economic sector. They result in an overarching fragmentation of social relationship that frustrates innovative social structuration, by imposing an intermittent rhythm of liquefaction and condensation in social structure. This constitutes one of the crucial transformations of complex societies and must be analysed as a phenomenon of increasingly failing institutionalisation of social relationships that are highly irrealised. The development of capitalism in its late crumbling phase imposes continuous reshaping of societal frames permitting further valorisation of invested capital. Yet, despite the amount of deregulation reached in the neoliberal era, the accumulation process becomes increasingly uncertain in the long run. Time and again, capital investment takes new paths that land in the next economic crisis a few years later (Streeck 2016a). The increasing rhythm of restructuration and crisis, however, does not lead to a dialectical overcoming of the dominant development model as the philosophy of history presupposes. No innovative societal structuration emerges that establishes transformation processes capable of re-framing the domination of the economic sector within society and delimiting its destructive effects on human development and the environment. Following an economic reductionist approach, increasingly intermittent social structuration could thus be explained as a consequence of the crisis-prone development of crumbling late capitalism. Yet, sociologically the overall societal development and the colonisation conflicts between societal domains, above all the aggressiveness of the economic logic, stay in a relationship of reciprocal causality. The increasing disorientation of the dominant economic model of development has without doubt heavy costs for societal structuration, which must incessantly adapt to precarious, crisis-ridden and rapidly changing scenarios of further capital valorisation. The result of these tensions is normative intermittency grounded on asymmetric consensus-­ driven social action, so that the legitimation of social structuration is substantially undermined. An impact of accelerated capitalist restructuration processes so conspicuous, however, is only possible, because in qualitative differentiated societies social structuration processes are in themselves thoroughly weakened. Sociological diagnosis shows how conspicuous the consequences of this development are on the three levels of analysis concerning social action, social structure and social legitimacy. The

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accelerated societal re/structuration mechanisms that have gained the upper hand force the highest flexibility of social orders to achieve a dynamic, even if precarious stabilisation of ‘common action frames’. They must reach the highest efficiency in the here and now, yet be ready to be dismantled at any moment. A neurotic frequency of societal structuration processes thus becomes the functional substitute for their consistency, by sacrificing to contingency any establishment of social normativity. The resulting precarisation of social frames granting a modus vivendi between competing logics of social action favours intensified colonisation processes between societal domains. As a consequence, the acceptance for failing social structuration becomes a habit of social action at large. If behaviour expectations towards individuals, institutions and social processes, as for example ‘the market’, are disappointed, social actors do not insist on their maintenance. The social costs of this attitude were too high and do not find appropriate support through the institutional frame of society. Normative social action declines in favour of passive-adaptive consensus. Since the deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s, and above all during the recurrent economic crises since Black Monday of 1987, experience has shown that tolerating and adapting to disappointment promises at least less disadvantages than resisting them. Social structuration still establishes norms and regulation, which are necessary for society to function, yet with increasingly limited spatiotemporal warranty. Hence, these do not enjoy the legitimation of the rule of law, because everybody knows that they will rapidly adapt to the next compromise of interests or to any arising emergency situation. The development of legislation in the last thirty years, for instance, in the field of labour or environmental law gives an eloquent example of this transnormative development. By changing the focus of analysis from the macro- to the micro-social dimension, this dynamics shows a fundamental change in legitimation action. Social legitimacy is increasingly grounded on a pro tempore attitude, which is structurally shifting and disseminates precarious social relationships. To function complex societies need normative structuration, so that they do not face a condition of increasing liquefaction of normative structures in absolute terms. Yet, by being based on asymmetric consensus-­ leaded social action with limited liability, normative social structures are increasingly delegitimised. Social structuration becomes a process that neither thoroughly liquefies normative structures nor simply consolidates them. It becomes the shape of an ‘institutionalised liquefaction’ that is set

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up to alternate both tendencies in an increasing change rhythm, in order to grant complex societies a precarious but still practicable stabilisation dynamics in the face of a substantial instability in social structuration. Normative social structures are there, yet nobody knows how consistently they will be empirically implemented and how long they will last. The most evident consequence of this normative precarisation is the progressive disconnection between the formal level of societal normativity and its empirical implementation. Sets of citizenship rights, above all social rights, are stated in constitutions, labour protection and social security legislation. Nevertheless, in everyday social reality they remain a lost cause, because the legitimating praxes that are to implement them are undermined by the urgencies of adaptation towards accelerated and uncertain societal restructuration rhythms. Labour market legislation gives the ideal-typical example of this phenomenon. Initially, the flexibilisation of employment contracts was intended as a temporary adaptation means, allowing enterprises to face intensified competition on global markets, by rapidly increasing or decreasing labour force in production. Over time, however, flexible labour measures were increasingly used to replace the core workforce at the cost of lower wages. This led to the emergence of a dual labour market. Side by side with workers safeguarded by the welfare-state, there now exists a whole host of precarious workers. Mostly women. Temporary contracts, part-time jobs, subcontracted employment, up to the extremes of ‘zero-­ hour contracts’ (Böttcher 2020; Hultzsch 2019) are constitutive part of everyday working life not only on construction sites, in workshops, industrial halls and pubs, but also in administrations, universities and government departments (Holst et al. 2017). In addition, migrant workers are found in even more precarious and even illegal employment to increase capital valorisation. These deteriorated conditions of life were introduced by legislation that claimed to facilitate the orderly transition from precarious to stable conditions of labour that a ‘self-regulating market’ would offer, if the legal frame of employment contracts would be enough flexible. Yet, at the end of the day, those measures have established a situation, which undermines the principles of the welfare-state labour market legislation that are formally stated in the constitutions of the respective countries. This divide of formal and substantial normative structuration, the social fragmentation that it induces, prevents the victims of this evolution from organising themselves into collective subjects capable of initiating normative

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structuration. Without the active support of socio-political movements, the wording of the protection legislation formally in force remains basically ineffective. Transnormative societal structuration reaches its peak. The solid liquidity of contemporary social structuration processes enters a new phase, in which every social normativity, no matter how formally anchored in constitutions and legislation, is put at the disposal of contingent political conflicts, real as well as staged by political entrepreneurs. The result is an uncontrolled development of the institutionalised liquefaction processes characterising the neoliberal era into generalised ‘struggles for the boundaries of consensus’ that establish who, in a particular situation, becomes the master of the political ‘sovereignty of interpretation’.

8.6  Consensus Conflicts and Societal Colonisation Increased intermittent normative structuration leads to growing incertitude in promoting shared social practices that are not the effect of systemic imperatives (Habermas 1984), resulting from the cybernetic hierarchy between the economy and politics that neoliberalism established. Individual and collective action subjects miss the reference frames necessary to improve intersubjective orientations, on which claims for recognition can be grounded (Honneth 1992). Established legal orders loose their grip on the magmatic unfolding of factual pretentions of validity, so that the dialectic is disrupted between the collective actors requesting recognition and the official bodies that are called upon to guarantee it, by anchoring claims in the official normative structure of society. The gap between instances of recognition and their political representation widens, so that the tension-fraught relationship of the logics of social action and social structure, above all in its economic component, is politically increasingly overlooked. The failing structural improvement of society is thus accompanied by a paradoxical subjective development of politics that increasingly focuses on struggles for recognition of specific civil rights, taking for granted the well-founded nature of fundamental social rights, which have instead been progressively eroded during the neoliberal era (Habermas 1994). The socialising function of interpersonal and social conflicts cannot unfold (GSG 11: 284–382; Coser 1956). Latent social tensions do not

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transform into normative structuration processes, so inducing the accumulation of unattended conflict potentials that remain in a state of unclearly normative codification and wait for interpreters. Thus, the moral grammar of social conflicts is profoundly disarticulated. The political axis of public debates shifts away from the welfare-state compromise and fragments into a thousand manifold claims for recognition, allowing the neoliberal emptying out of the politics for equal dignity (Lukes 2007). An improper divide establishes itself between the struggles for civil and political rights of minorities and the increasingly disregarded struggle for the social rights of the most disadvantaged social strata, which becomes one of the main lines of conflict in contemporary societies. The feeling of being left behind in difficult times of societal transformation spreads; it often sanctions the divorce between the popular strata and their historical representatives, as Eribon well described for the French case (2009). A fluid mass of unstructured societal consensus stirs in search of redefinition. Having been detached from a practice of social legitimation, such as that of the welfare-state compromise, it lends itself to all kinds of interpretative revisions. What were before processes of normative social structuration become uncontrolled struggles for the redefinition of a societal consensus that is devoid of any rational codification. An emotional tension unfolds that is no longer taken care of by the compensating praxis of social rights implementation. Resentments and fears spread, affecting not only outcasts and lower social strata that are the direct victims of economic restructuration processes. Traditional liberal professions lose ground to new professions in step with technological development (Reckwitz 2020). An increasing loss of material resources, yet above all of social prestige, plagues the middle classes as well as fears of future social relegation. Education, which used to be the main driver of social advancement, clashes with the new divides emerging in society. Moreover, a complex new social stratification takes place that is established neither on a regulatory framework nor on adequate compensatory welfare measures. As increased migration flows lead to phenomena of under-stratification, these generate new sources of conflict (Hoffmann-­ Nowotny 1973). Discriminated migrants must accept living conditions that are far beyond the welfare-state parameters of social protection, because the enforcement of their social rights is not taken in charge as it should be, above all in increasingly dualised labour markets. As a consequence, the native lower social strata fear slipping into the social condition of migrants and wrongly identify them with the cause of growing

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downward social mobility. The unattended demand for a normative societal structuration capable of ensuring acknowledgement to manifold and contradictory expectations generates a hypertrophic need for the redefinition of societal consensus. Yet, shifting welfare-state regulations deprive the research for a common consensual ground of the necessary normative guidelines that would allow for its transformation into rational legitimation procedures. This scenario constitutes the best breeding ground for uncontrolled struggles on the shifting boundaries of consensus emerging from the expanding societal legitimation crisis. Membership in society and access to citizenship rights become highly disputed matters as part of the uncontrolled magmatic processes of social semantics production, aiming at re-establishing by any means a shared ground of social coexistence. Social media has become its current locus of culture (Moffitt 2019), yet its cause is the lack of normative societal structuration. In this primordial soup of social consensus invention, the most diverse ideological adventures can be launched, which result in the restrictive redefinition of social closure functions (Murphy 2001). Yet, as long as a crucial subjective factor does not add to this, the objective factors of the social legitimation crisis would not suffice to trigger open struggles on the boundaries of consensus. In a socio-political reality, in which for different reasons several social groups feel that their demands go unheard, a political instance must arise that promises hearing and recognition. Due to shifting welfare-state guarantees accompanied by a poor level of political representation for the needs of the social strata hit by socio-economic decline, this development qualifies as the late output of the legitimation crisis that characterises societies with growing levels of normative intermittency. It is the expression of a societal transformation process that takes the shape of a rising tide of social consensus withdrawal that seeks interpreters. The latter are not long in appearing on the scene. The kind of political professionals, who embark on open struggles on the boundaries of consensus, have a keen sensibility for the critical side of political representation and intervene in it; they aim at gaining as much political power as possible in the shortest time. Their enterprise is thus above all a fight for the redistribution of accumulated political capital in Bourdieu’s sense (1981). Struggles on the boundaries of consensus start with a violent attack on legitimately elected political representatives, stigmatising them as an ‘illegitimate power elite’, exploiting society for their own ends. The polemic has an important semantic side. It aims at disarticulating the collective

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frameworks of political language that legitimise the public institutions enforcing the existing social order that no longer manages to contain the conflictual tensions it generates. The manoeuvre can succeed, if within society there is a sufficient degree of consent that a major legitimation crisis is actually taking place. If the first move in the struggles on the boundaries of consensus proves successful, the reciprocal delegitimation expands between established parties and emerging political entrepreneurs. In this context, the label ‘populist’ first comes to the fore. The expression is used to counterattack the forces that do not adhere to the institutional rules regulating the political game in parliamentary democracies, including the principle of the governing prerogatives of elected majorities. Hence, the first phase of the fight on the boundaries of consensus is characterised by the abandonment of shared codes of political communication. Political entrepreneurs break with the institutional rules of regulated democratic competition, because in times of societal legitimation crisis this move can deliver an increase of political capital. A new political language is born that introduces the second phase of the struggles on the established boundaries of consensus. Growing social fragmentation results in an increase of claims requiring political recognition and awakens fears that the already meagre material and symbolic resources must be redistributed to a wider range of needy people. Political entrepreneurship exploits these factors of diffused social conflict, by overemphasising their divisive symbolic appearances and obscuring the common interests of the different groups. The political semantics is thus reorganised into symbolic, religious and cultural oppositions between ‘them and us’ that impede the understanding of the underlying socio-economic divides, which would rather find the speciously opposed groups (e.g. native and migrant workforce) on the same side (Marzouki et al. 2016). The production of this new social categorisation results in the ideological performance par excellence of the struggles on the boundaries of consensus. The idea is coined of the ‘honest autochthon nationals’, allegedly free of any internal divisions, fighting against the corrupt elite that exploits it in cahoots with its external enemies. The ‘people’ of the ‘populists’ enters the scene. This worldview results in the plea for a restrictive, pre-legal and pre-­ political redefinition of societal membership criteria that entitle people to enjoy citizenship rights and access to welfare-state protection. The continuous weaving of this divisive narrative that activates latent societal conflict lines represents the crucial subjective result of the struggles on the

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boundaries of consensus (Tilly 2016). It promotes restrictive conceptions of social closure and citizenship that are incompatible with a pluralist and inclusive arrangement of society (Murphy 2001). Established political parties partially adopt the related slogans to score points in election campaigns, so that the social-political classifications arising through the struggles on the boundaries of consensus spread in official political culture. At the end of the day, the mobilisation of political entrepreneurs that allegedly rises in opposition to the ‘dominating political elite’ grants the continuity of neoliberal policies, by encouraging further dismantling of welfare protection. Yet, this time it does not happen on the basis of purported economic rationality, but of ethno-racial restrictive conceptions of citizenship that became shared boundaries of consensus. The manifold transformation of socio-political semantics takes place on the level of societal self-interpretation and hides the dynamics of social structuration conflicts and colonisation processes that occur behind the scenes. Yet beyond the phenomenology of socio-political semantics, this is one of the most important developments shaping contemporary societies. From a theoretical point of view, the relevance of the conflict and colonisation processes taking place in contemporary societies lies in two major development tendencies. On the one hand, social analysis must determine the extent and depth of the colonisation power that single social logics exert on other societal domains. This implies the capacity to understand whether colonised domains implement strategies to reassert their own, albeit surreptitious, autonomy. On the other hand, social analysis must assess if social colonisation processes find or understand themselves as being in a conflict relationship with each other. In contemporary societies this applies above all to two major colonisation processes; however, it may also extend to others. An empirical survey of social reality could help to show this, so that it is one of the current tasks of social research. With regard to societal theory, and thus observing the phenomenon on a global level, the most visible colonisation processes taking place between societal domains today occur between the economy and politics and between politics and religion. The assessment of these developments has a preliminary character and raises questions that would only be possible to answer through dedicated empirical research. Yet, in a theoretical appraisal, it can be observed that the condition of normative intermittency, which prevents the success of normative structuration processes, results in a specific conflictual escalation of colonisation processes. In complex societies different societal domains gather around a predominant logic that allows

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them a certain degree of autonomous structuration, yet without completely relieving them from the interference of further structuration logics. Since the 1980s the crisis of the post-WWII welfare-state consensus reopened the contests between competing societal logics. The predominance of the political over economic logic had been completely swept away in the so-called real socialism systems or transformed into a Confucian cybernetic hierarchy between the economy and politics in the Chinese mixed capitalist system (Arrighi 2009; Bell 2010; Harvey 2005). In societies characterised by the social market economy and welfare-state systems, the transformation took the shape of a progressive colonisation of political decisions by economic logic (Harvey 2005: chap. 3; Ives 2015). The resistance against this transformation was very feeble, not least because the social democratic parties, who were supposed to contrast the ideology of the self-regulating market and ‘good’ globalisation, often became their most convinced representatives. The welfare-state compromise had not been able to bring the economic sphere completely under the control of society—that is, under the guidance of democratic parliamentary institutions. However, by means of extensive legislation, which drew on the negative experiences of the Great Depression and its socio-political consequences, the economy was placed within a regulatory framework that limited its self-destructive tendencies. The dissolution of the regulatory framework of the welfare-state compromise led to the uncontrolled development of such tendencies, starting from the hypertrophy of the financial system to the detriment of the real economy, and accompanied by a progressive adaptation of political decisions to economic logic and interests. Through the globalisation of unregulated markets, this development had an impact on a global scale, affecting the most diverse countries. Political power was thus often reduced to a mere administrative lever of economic imperatives, greatly losing in legitimacy. In countries with parliamentary democracies, as long as possible this loss was compensated for through the promise of widespread economic prosperity that would ‘naturally’ result from the globalised liberalisation of markets. As this proved to be false following the repeated economic crises since 2007, the self-protective reaction of societies took the form of protectionist populist mobilisations. Yet, these were characterised by their inability to challenge the process that subordinate politics under economic imperatives. The consequence was a continuation of restrictive policies under a new ideological guise, instead of a normative structuration of society in the sense of a new welfare compromise.

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In many countries with a weaker or non-existent parliamentary-­ democratic political tradition, however, a further major phenomenon of colonisation between social logics emerged. The loss of legitimacy affecting a political sector, which was increasingly functional, to the systemic imperatives of the economy has been compensated for by a political use of religion as a source of legitimation. Especially countries with a former nationalist-Marxist, anti-colonial matrix went through this transformation, leading to a strong colonisation of religious attitudes by the imperatives of the political domain (Rivet et  al. 2004). As a reaction to this development, the opposition to the existing political power relations qualified themselves through a political-religious logic (Hamid and McCants 2017). The breaking down of the boundaries of meaning between the domains of politics and religion thus increasingly assumed a reciprocal dimension. Politics legitimised itself, thanks to religion, while religion increasingly became a political practice. Historic achievements of qualitative social differentiation were dismantled in different societies, so that their common trend of developments can be addressed by the keywords of ‘colonisation between societal domains’. An uncontrolled intermingling of the social semantic results in an overlapping of different social structuration logics and shapes the relationship between the economy, politics and religion. A functional regression takes thus hold of contemporary societies, turning back the clock of social differentiation to pre-modern conditions. As regards the diagnostic interest of these processes, it consists principally in the fact that they show a relationship of latent conflict between the progressive colonisation of broad sectors of society by economic logic, on the one hand, and the processes opposing it in the name of a politicisation of religion or a pre-political ideology of societal membership, on the other. The loss of the normative structuration potential of society, including the ability to achieve a qualitative differentiation between different logics of structuration, results in manifold forms of backward-looking societal self-defence, which in turn take the form of a process of colonisation between different social domains. The breaking down of boundaries between politics and religion, and thus the crisis of the political-constitutional arrangement of complex societies, is coupled with the colonisation of politics by ideologies aimed at re-­ founding it on pre-political, ethno-racial or cultural-religious criteria in an exclusive sense. In both cases, social arrangements are severely challenged that allow for the peaceful coexistence of different communities in a pluralistic society.

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Yet, the prospect of stemming the mutual colonisation of politics and religion, viz. ethno-religious worldviews, without intervening in the ongoing colonisation process of politics through the economy seems to be completely illusory. The current drift of differential regression could only be overcome, if complex societies were capable of restarting an overall normative structuration, which delimits all types of colonisation processes between social domains. In order to address these developments the social sciences must, in turn, recover from the process of colonisation through the social self-interpretation that has characterised their development in recent decades. The blurring of the boundaries between the social sciences and social narratives has prevented sociology from gaining the necessary critical distance to address social reality in a reflexive sense, so that its transformations became scientifically unintelligible. Empirical societal analysis now has the possibility to reverse this trend.

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CHAPTER 9

Conclusions in Sociological Diagnosis

9.1   Failing Social Structuration as Regression from Legitimacy to Consensus In contemporary societies, social structuration increasingly involves a number of relationships with anonymous third parties. The centrifugal fragmentation of social action centres not only presents them with the Sisyphean task of steadily rebuilding, through cultural work, the missing self that society requires of them. It also challenges social structuration with the entropy of the action-coordinating knots required for the legitimation of the legal and political systems. The idling of social structuration processes accumulates a ‘distress of culture’ that undermines social legitimacy on the temporal axis, so that societal life cycles assume a feverish character, which does not result in normative stabilisation. Instead, structuration processes follow an accelerating dynamics whose intermittency substitutes normative social integration. Complex societies consist increasingly of multiple, alternative and competing perspectives in shaping social structure that fight for predominance. Intermittent legitimation is thus more than ever in demand. Consensus-driven social action spreads as a means to establish provisional asymmetric relationships between social actors, according to which the expectations of the one side are treated as ‘valid’ by the other side, even without agreement to that effect, yet only within narrow spatiotemporal limits of legitimacy. Social actors regard each other’s expectations as ‘practically binding’ for their (re-)action, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_9

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whatever the reasons are for accepting those claims. The one side acts on the basis of ‘expectations of consensus’, and the other side on the basis of ‘provisional acceptance of consensus claims’. Within institutionalisation processes action expectations are increasingly raised in the name of anonymous third parties, whose relationships are intermediated by impersonal communication means, like money or trust. Social actors must inevitably refrain from opposing expectation claims as well as from negotiating agreements regarding common action. Consensus-driven action advances to a general equivalent for negotiated agreements and constitutes an empirically efficient means to carry out binding forms of social action in conditions of intermittent legitimacy. Yet, the ongoing provisional processes of social structuration steadily change the terms of synthesis between the logic of social action and social structure, so that the cultural work of fragmented action centres enters an endless loop of renewal. As a result, the legitimacy of social action structures is substantially diminished and becomes a time-limited social fiction. The theoretical issue is thus to understand to what degree of alienation the acceptance can persist for social action frames and which normative statutes are increasingly contradicted by intermittent social structuration practices. A hypertrophic establishment of competing networks of social relationship takes place, which only affects qualitative differentiated fragments of action centres, with very limited scope of stabilisation. Too many different and steadily changing structuration processes compete in the same social space, so impeding the construction of any consistent normative action framework. The number of regulations increases that are not negotiated by social actors, but imposed based on claims of imputation by decision-­ making bodies, which are ever more remote from the lifeworld of the persons affected. A dialectics of alienation and passivity conforms to an increasingly short-lived consensus-driven social action legitimation. The vertical asymmetry of social relationships overlaps with the uncontrolled qualitative societal differentiation that characterises contemporary societies. There is a clash of a multiplicity of parallel realisations of social structure that follow different and at times opposing logics, so that a fierce struggle sets in between different qualitative reified domains of society and leads to continuous phenomena of colonisation. The creativity, the rhythm and the tempo of social action replace the declining normative integration of complex societies. What holds the social fabric together is the increased frequency of largely anonymous

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social exchanges rather than its missing homogeneity. Thereby, complex social reality brings benefits of the highest plasticity and can adapt to the most unexpected and rapid societal changes caused by the restructuration rhythm of crumbling late capitalism. Social heterogeneity can be processed. Yet, societies also increasingly lack a normative foundation that can integrate social relationships into a legitimated framework of solidarity. Qualitative societal differentiation alternates between phases of strong uncontrolled differentiation and rapid regression that implicate a wide overproduction and destruction of human, cultural, societal and natural resources. The ‘legality’ of social orders and the ‘legitimacy’ of domination relationships, which are based on creative performances of ‘social validity acknowledgment’, only become possible in the form of a tension-­ fraught intermitting merging of social structure and social action. Taken to its extreme, the conflict between the logic of social action and social structure leads either to a complete alienated reduction of social actors to the logic of social structuration processes (robotisation) or to the blasé rejection of every sociation (privatisation). Due to legally relevant issues concerning the whole or fragments of their personal status, social actors are ever more involved in consensus-­ driven action networks without their explicit willingness. This happens mostly because of the simple fact that they find themselves on the territory of a specific predominant ‘political community’ and so it affects their political rights of citizenship. Yet, in contemporary complex societies this obligation logic also extends to other domains—notably economic action, which is cross-territorial. A frame of multiple, qualitative differentiated obligation relationships drives social action in a way that is more subtle and less traceable than in traditional societies, so that single actors are often unconscious of their passive acceptance of non-negotiated asymmetric relationships of domination. If their economic variant calls social rights into question, their political variant undermines the foundations of democracy. In democratically constituted political communities, expectations of compliance increasingly depend on rather fluid legitimacy-consensus, so that struggles for determining the boundaries of valid political consensus are the order of the day. Political legitimacy is established on provisional toleration for external action expectations and refrains from resistance or negotiation. It consists in asymmetrical social relationships, according to which one side acts on the basis of ‘consensus-expectations’ and the other side conforms via ‘legitimacy-consensus’.

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Modern forms of political domination not only conform to the rule of law, because their prestige is based on ‘belief in legality’, but also because they are grounded on a specific societal arrangement that permits their existence. If the first appears to be strongly diminished today, the second traverses a substantial crisis that is often overlooked. The social fabric progressively crumbles, because single frames of common social action are rapidly abandoned for others and do not coagulate into stable social structure. The result is an accumulation of latent patterns of social action and contents of culture in the quest for legitimation that do not generate any enduring synthesis. Modern societies thus bend under the weight of a quantitative accumulation of competing illegitimated social structure fragments, until they reach a breaking point. Spatiotemporally limited forms of passive-adaptive consensus are established, which only enable the provisional validity of empirical legitimation contexts. These precarious regimes of validity carry the risk of completely dissolving social normativity, because fluid and intermittent processes of social structuration do not have a sufficient scope of legitimacy to endure. In a kind of forward flight, the predominant tendency is rather to rapidly substitute temporary frames of common social action with new ones, before their limits of legitimation become critical. Transnormativity spreads, so that officially acknowledged social orders are increasingly mismatched with the empirical social praxis of legitimation. Failing societal structuration thus jeopardises regulating institutions. The increasing intermittency of social orders makes legal established normativity ever more precarious, so that the rule of law, which controls the recourse to force by its legitimated monopolist, weakens and loses its grip on social reality. In political terms, the normative imbalance of complex societies takes the shape of a loss of democratic control over policy-making decisions. Under the pressure of the temporal urgency of economic, societal or environmental emergencies, the institutional mechanisms of domination established through the monopoly of the legitimate use of force increasingly escape the control of parliaments. Hence, in contemporary societies, the historically evolved domestication of concentrated political power seems to be in serious danger. This development, accompanied by the increasing social and environmental risks of crumbling late capitalism, raises the question of the historical framing of contemporary times. The question arises as if we are experiencing an ‘interregnum’ before a further transformation of society, in the sense that Gramsci proposes (2014: 311) and Streeck recently addressed (2016b). In this regard,

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sociological diagnosis suggests that we are rather undergoing cyclical oscillations between uncontrolled qualitative social differentiation and differential regression. In analytical-descriptive terms, ‘modernity’ thus means neither progress nor decadence a priori. It consists instead in a substantial intermittence of social structuration, characterised by an alternation between phases of uncontrolled and at times chaotic production and loss of social differentiation. This pulsating societal environment is irreducible to any historical-philosophical conception of development—or respectively dissolution. Nonetheless, during the period of crumbling late capitalism, qualitative differentiated societies face the risk, over longer time lapses, of falling into processes of normative regressions, which gradually impose the predominance of intermittent asymmetrical consensus relationships, by reducing the scope for social legality and legitimacy. Due to the growing social fragmentation in the age of neoliberalism, social and political collective subjects who ensured that the formal recognition of citizenship rights was followed by their substantive implementation, have fundamentally lost their capacity to act. A widely recognised welfare-state compromise has been substituted by the parochial representation of egoistic interests motivating single social strata. The deterioration of the implicit social contract in complex societies generates the social, cultural and political consequences that are before everyone’s eyes. The winners of the normative societal destructuration are the top 10% highest wealth holders, who in recent decades achieved almost complete tax avoidance, so generating a loss of revenue and sacrifices of the implementation of welfare-states measures. In this context, as we have widely discussed, ideological orientations that seemed consigned to the museum of twentieth-­century horrors come back, spread under the aegis of populism, facilitating the development of forms of crypto-fascism and geopolitical imperialism that are waiting to shed their disguises and unfold. The modern conflict between productive forces and failing forms of culture thus enters a new round, this time opposing ‘hypertrophic qualitative differentiation’ and ‘ideological simplification’ of culture to each other on all levels of societal structuration. In this scenario, cultural pluralisation due to immigration often serves as a catalyst for societal self-interpretation for the distorted perception of failing socio-cultural structuration and appears to be the cause of an uncontrollable proliferation of societal complexity—of which it is in reality a consequence. The increasing rhythm of social restructuration and crisis does not lead to a dialectical overcoming of the dominant development model as the

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philosophy of history proposes. No innovative societal structuration emerges that establishes transformative processes capable of re-framing the domination of the economic sector in contemporary society and delimiting its destructive effects on social life and the environment. Social structuration still establishes the norms and regulation, which are necessary for society to function, yet with increasingly limited spatiotemporal warranty. Hence, such regulations do not enjoy the legitimation of consistent normative structuration processes, because social actors know that they will adapt to the next compromise of interests in scenarios of sudden economic emergencies. Eloquent examples for the establishment of such creeping regulatory intermittency are given by the continuous back and forth of social, labour and environmental legislation over the last forty years. Individual and collective social actors are involved in passive and alienated consensus performances, as long as they do not reactivate cultural work that makes them conscious producers of innovative syntheses in social structuration processes. Yet, the sociological diagnosis is severe concerning the margins of realisation for innovative processes of societal structuration. Fragmented normative action pursued in an accelerated process of hetero-directed societal restructuration with delimited spatiotemporal boundaries of validity, increasingly induces shifting legitimacy. Nevertheless, if we grasp in sociological categories how the dynamics unfolds of intermittent normative structuration, we can still show which forms of ‘transformative social action’ could possibly lead complex societies to achieve inclusive social integration on the basis of innovative normative structuration processes and conceptions of societal solidarity. Communicative action, in its classical formulation, cannot unfold in a scenario in which social fragmentation and destructuration rhythms have reached levels of scarcity in spatiotemporal and social resources that do not permit the establishment of the ideal communication situation (Habermas 1984). The resistance of the lifeworld towards irrational economic imperatives is extremely reduced and does not lead to renewed normative societal structuration. Yet, also social system building as an autonomous, continued and self-referential communication flow fails because of the increased intermittency, multiplicity and reciprocal colonisation characterising the precarious social structuration processes of complex societies (Luhmann 1984). The social transformation that characterises contemporary societies thus generates an unprecedented scenario for both social theory and political practice.

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A number of unstable realisations of social structure competes for predominance in social reality, generating an overflow of uncontrolled claims of consensus legitimation. In this context, a simple appeal to rediscover social morality cannot overcome failing normative structuration and risks becoming an ideological justification for the status quo. Enhancing the approach of moral sociology beyond its historical formulation rather presupposes reinventing the ‘cultural work’ that replaces failing normative societal integration in order to overcome the blockade of transformative social action. The failing social integration of complex societies cannot be grounded on a possible ‘overlapping consensus’, because this has been lost due to forty years of neoliberal societal restructuration (Rawls 1987). The fragmentation of legitimacy conforming complex societies can only be reassembled into processes of normative societal structuration at the price of transforming the current conflicts over the limits of consensus into new societal arrangements. These result from a relaunch of cultural work on both the individual and collective level that redefines the relationship between social action and social structure and overcomes the alienation that characterises asymmetric consensus bonds. Sociology understands citizenship as a developing institution of reference that establishes a regulative ideal of social integration against which achievements can be measured and towards which aspirations of progressive societal arrangement can be directed (Marshall 1996). More than being enunciations of achievements in the struggle for citizenship rights, political constitutions are thus rather programmes of normative societal structuration that must be continuously reimplemented in everyday societal praxis (Calamandrei 2019). In contemporary societies, instead, an intermittent destructuring structuration of temporary normative arrangements takes place, so that the legitimation crisis acquires a very peculiar meaning in crumbling late capitalism. Two basic factors of societal transformation are missing. 1. A shared normative conception to be realised, which today would consist in a new welfare compromise capable of coordinating social with environmental protection. 2. Social driving forces capable of exerting sufficient pressure on decision makers to implement citizenship and environment rights in a substantial way, beyond the simple enunciation of their letter. Here, individual and collective cultural work is demanded and new forms of social structuration, despite its objective difficulty, must emerge that are capable of reconstructing networks of solidarity and push for renewed normative societal arrangements.

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The positive side (if any) of late crumbling capitalism as a societal formation resides in the fact that it continually establishes new forms of social ‘modus vivendi’. Here lies the potential to ground and develop transformative social action. The social and spatiotemporal limits of consensus building that support the intermittent processes establishing social validity in transnormative societal contexts can thus become the breeding ground for relaunching dynamic normative structuration in complex societies. Here, the necessary scope is available for social experimentation and construction. The respective socio-political praxis, however, must grow beyond its limits of a marginal societal phenomenon. Therefore, a renewal of transformation cultures is necessary as well as the building of collective action subjects capable of becoming their bearers and putting pressure for a renewed normative societal structuration. These are the main conclusions that can be drawn from the sociological diagnosis of contemporary societal change. The further discussion of the strategies and the historical processes that would permit an exit from social destructuration and embarking on a new societal arrangement realising both social and environmental protection, is a topic that must be dealt in the context of a sociologically well informed, though in principle, political reflection on the topic.

Bibliography Literature Calamandrei, Piero (2019). Opere giuridiche: 3. Diritto e processo costituzionale. Roma: Roma TrE-Press. Gramsci, Antonio (2014). Quaderni dal carcere. 4 Volumes. Ed. by Valentino Gerratana. Torino: Einaudi. Habermas, Jürgen (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon. Luhmann, Niklas (1984). Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Marshall, Thomas H. (1996). Citizenship and Social Class [1950]. London: Pluto Press. Rawls, John (1987). ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 7(1), S.1–25. Streeck, Wolfgang (2016b). The Post-capitalist Interregnum: The Old System Is Dying, But a New Social Order Cannot Yet be Born. Juncture, 23(2), 68–77.

PART III

Political Outcomes

CHAPTER 10

Recovering Normative Social Structuration

10.1   Seeking Social and Environmental Progress After spending forty years living under the slogan that ‘there is no alternative’, in some way it seems like breaking a taboo to speak of social and environmental progress (Salvadori 2008). Since the 1990s left-wing political intellectuals interiorised the ideological interpretation of the failure of the so-called real-socialist model to such a degree that all social democratic societal arrangements were also obliterated that had successfully navigated the relationship between the economy and society during the so-called trente glorieuses. At a time of hegemonial culture founded on the principle of compulsory societal adaptation to economic imperatives, no matter how irrational they might be and whatever the social and environmental consequences, reflecting on social and environmental progress was seen as a sort of residual historical-philosophical ingenuity (Niethammer 1989), if not worse. So, the question today is how the issue can be addressed. The events of recent decades include economic crisis, recession, austerity, war, increasing climate change with dramatic consequences, ungoverned migration flows and a pandemic. These indicators lead to pessimism. Yet, they also show that society structurally never left the problematic frame of modernity, despite all the debates about having overcome it. Accordingly, a series of questions confronts socio-political diagnostics. It is a matter of understanding how in the current context we can develop a transformation of society towards more social equality and environmental protection. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5_10

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This involves investigating how a balance between qualitative differentiated social sectors can be re-established that brings the economy back to the functions that it performs for society as a whole, thus reducing its destructive impact. The sociological diagnosis of the current societal transformation is severe and could easily be attacked as a ‘pessimist conception’ of the globalised age as a blind and irrational development model. As a medicine does for a patient’s condition, however, sociology must describe social reality objectively, even if the hegemonic forces of social self-interpretation would tend to justify or gloss over the status quo in whatever sense. The more that scientific diagnoses are able to capture pathological developments, the greater the prospect of finding ways out of the pathology. To turn now to the political outcomes of the sociological diagnosis developed above also means to discuss the emancipation potential that social reality implies, despite its severe contours. In this context, the question is whether at a time of accelerated fluctuation between uncontrolled societal differentiation and regression, social transformation can be framed using the category of progress. It is undeniable that ‘progresses’ in the plural have taken place over the last decades.1 For example, these concern technological development, even though its irrational commercial use, or ground-­ breaking medicine which allowed a progressive extension of human life, and so on. Yet, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, working conditions, access to citizenship rights, women and minority rights, environmental conditions, to say the least, have not really improved in recent decades. Moreover, there is a widespread perception that living conditions in general are worsening, if not for oneself, then certainly for the next generations.2 Accordingly, a mixed image of progress and decadence, combined with its polemical emphasis due to populist political enterprise, spreads the feeling of an increasing opacity and ungovernability of social reality. Nevertheless, the debate on societal transformation resumes ‘within the folds’ of social reality. This indicates that there is a definite need to overcome the blind irrationalism of crumbling late capitalism. An important and eloquent proposal to grow aware of the issue and to ‘rethink 1  In a certain sense, society is taking the opposite path to that characteristic of early modernity: from the concept of overall historical progress, we are returning to the perception of individual advances. Cf. Koselleck (2005). 2  Yet, the crisis of progress does not seem to be a new problem, but rather, like other symptoms of ‘postmodernity’, seems to be a recurrent phenomenon of the modern era. Cf. Campo (2020: 136–152).

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society for the 21st century’ has been made, thanks to the work of the International Panel on Social Progress (https://www.ipsp.org/resources). The panel’s stated aim was to overcome neoliberalism as the ideological matrix of globalised social Darwinism that still prevails and prevents the development of forms of social progress adapted to the contemporary era (Fleurbaey et  al. 2019: 13–17). This line of socio-political debate has important implications and is worth developing further for different reasons. Among other things, it allows the Durkheimian and Simmelian questioning to come back into focus, concerning the realisation of the ideals of the French Revolution in modern social reality. A reflection restarts about the need to harmonise the greatest possible individual freedom, which (despite the fragmentation of social action centres) is structurally necessary for the functioning of qualitative differentiated societies, with formal rights of equality founded on the guarantee of substantive equal access to resources. The solution of the problem is sought in the institutionalisation of regulating processes allowing the establishment of (civil, political, social and cultural) citizenship rights on a planetary level, with particular attention to the fact that these not only involve human beings but also include the protection of all species of the terrestrial ecosystem. The overall objective of a political programme for the just society of the twenty-first century thus becomes a renewed normative structuration of complex societies capable of carrying out a harmonisation of social progress and environmental protection. This perspective implies a particularly difficult exercise of societal transformation, since it presupposes overcoming the industrialist axiomatic that characterised socialism since Saint-Simonianism, according to which social justice is a function of a linear increase of economic productive forces that generates enough wealth for redistribution. Here the ‘reflexive forces of progress’ are demanded to critically reformulate the frames of societal transformation praxes that possibly give rise to an ecological welfare-state compromise on a planetary level. The unavoidable precondition for these praxes is that the qualitatively differentiated societal sector of economy is brought back within the ranks and the limits of its necessary function for society as a whole. It is Durkheim’s theme of the social and therefore democratic control of the economy that returns to the centre of attention (2019: 1–43), together with Polanyi’s warning that societies, which are not cared for by a social arrangement that grants them protection, turn to irrational ways of protection including dictatorship (2001). The classical series of questioning

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concerning modernity must thus be reformulated and answered for. These have been erased from collective consciousness during forty years of cultural brainwashing under the aegis of neoliberalism. Given the fact that the economy in itself is unable to develop without provoking major social and environmental damage, above all in the age of crumbling late capitalism, the issue is how it can be reconducted within a global legal regulative framework. In a nutshell, this means a reversal of recent decades’ development trends that wipes out the neoliberal policies by focusing on the issue of global economic governance. It is widely known that this is a matter of the utmost importance and gravity, because it cannot be expected that a majority of economic actors, especially if they are market monopolists, will be willing to accept without resistance a substantial reduction in profit margins for the sake of a fairer society with a lower environmental impact. Seeking ‘social and environmental progress’ will thus be related to major socio-political conflicts, so that the forces who choose social transformation must be aware of the necessity to keep them in a frame that induces normative societal structuration and not destructuration. The International Panel on Social Progress pursues the project of a new form of social democratic welfare-state with enhanced environmental sensitivity (Fleurbaey et al. 2019: 23). Yet, the challenge is that this has to be done on a global level. Due to the absence of legislative instruments that can be implemented at a supra-state level, this implies particular difficulties and calls for the development of innovative praxes of governance. Some room for manoeuvre exists due to the growing interdependence between nation states at a regional and global level, as is partly demonstrated by the efforts to bring global warming under control. This opportunity raises the question of how globalisation can be managed by overcoming the ideological conception of self-regulating markets exempt from any need of regulation. Controlled by inter-governmental institutions of regulation and taxation, a new global social market economy can emerge. It must, however, be understood which social processes constitute the necessary bearers for this demanding normative structuration of world society and how it can be articulated at a national and local level. This implies among others understanding how to relaunch the negotiating praxes that historically characterised the social democratic compromise between capital and labour, and how this relaunch can start from the grassroots-level of social movements and extend to all further levels of socio-political action. This development implies a reversal of the current disordered fragmentation and intermittent acceleration processes of social

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structuration, permitting the formation of collective subjects capable of ‘sitting at the negotiating table’. In the social reality of complex societies, these processes of social transformation are anything but a foregone conclusion. They presuppose the reactivation of a widespread practice of stable normative structuration and a parallel redistribution of resources that entails a progressive expropriation of their monopolistic holders. A similar societal restructuration takes place at the cost of major social conflicts, which must be managed by means of appropriate legislation that institutionalises the necessary means of social legitimation. Legislation, however, means not only parliamentary majorities that must be guaranteed by successful electoral campaigns. Furthermore, it presupposes a bipartisan sharing of an innovative normative conception of the social contract and the persistence of organised collective subjects of social and political action that exert the necessary pressure to grant its day-to-day implementation. All these elements of a possible renewed normative societal structuration are the result of a successful social reconstruction that finds adequate political representation beyond fragmentation and normative intermittency. In the transition from sociological to political reasoning, it is therefore necessary to understand what might be the starting points of such a renewed societal structuration. Both in the work of the International Panel on Social Progress as well as in Piketty’s analyses (2014, 2020, 2021, 2022: 325–351), there are a number of valuable proposals to achieve a substantial democratisation of the economy and better access to political decision-making processes in today’s societies. Social, political and economic democracy could improve anew and harmonise with environmental protection. Yet, the question is how these socio-political projects could be implemented empirically. As Marx already showed in The Capital (MEGA II/9, Chap. 25), capitalist economic enterprise is, and increasingly becomes, a comprehensive social structure that tends to take up the entire social fabric in which it develops. The opposition of the related economic imperatives against democratic control can thus become extremely intense. Societal and environmental protection, instead, implies a decided reorientation of economic enterprise under democratic control, both within its established forms as well as in economic action at large. This approach demands an up-to-date resumption of the New Deal and welfare-state legislation that was obliterated in recent decades and the invention of completely new instruments of regulation and guidance for economic enterprise. The proposals range from strong employee participation in management decisions, extending

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existing co-determination models (Germany, Scandinavia) to all spheres of corporate decision-making, up to the design of legislative frameworks that facilitate the development of micro-enterprises and start-ups capable of generating a widespread horizontal economic fabric accessible to everyone. In addition to the social, the environmental compatibility of economic enterprise must be strongly improved, which implies the development of global legislation for the regulation and taxation of financial markets, to reorient investments towards sustainable economic innovation. This reorganisation of the economic sphere entails a major redistribution of resources and will not take place without provoking major political and social conflicts. The crucial question of the upcoming decades is thus how the praxes and processes of normative societal transformation can be implemented, without generating the violent reactions that characterised the history of the twentieth century, especially in Europe. Seeking ‘social and environmental progress’ presupposes a methodology that transforms reflexive social science, in Durkheim’s sense (2011), into transformative social praxis. This means regaining the full awareness of what it is involved in realising a reciprocal exchange without colonisation between the societal domains of social science and politics in Weber’s sense (1904a). Sociologically, the transition ‘from theory to praxis’ implies a change of social role in the complex fabric of qualitative differentiated societies, which cannot be faced superficially, without losing the necessary reflexive distance from the development of social events. Repositioning societal analysis from analytical descriptive to normative value judgements, by continuing to take into account the results of sociological diagnosis, presupposes avoiding overlapping the observation of reality and the enunciation of political projects. The sociological consciousness of the contradictory and sometimes conflictual boundaries between societal domains thus delivers the means to handle in a methodologically controlled way the classical issue of the relationship between theory and praxis. What characterises intermittent normative societies, which are based on asymmetric consensus relationships and do not enjoy consistent social legitimation, is on the negative side: disorientation of social action, colonisation between social spheres and crumbling societal structuration. This status quo impedes societies from reaching stable normative arrangements and exposes them to social deconstruction and authoritarian political drifts. Yet, on the positive side, because of their enhanced solid liquidity and intermittent structuration, contemporary societies have reached an unedited degree of plasticity, which can be redirected in the sense of a

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renewed normative social structuration. This latent shaping potential allows the unfolding of societal arrangements that constitute the best breeding ground to realise a just and environmentally compatible society for the twenty-first century. Its political-practical preconditions, however, reside in the already mentioned basic factors of societal transformation that comprehend: (1) a shared normative conception of society to be realised, and one that is capable of coordinating social with environmental protection; (2) social driving forces capable of exerting sufficient pressure on decision makers to implement new societal arrangement in a substantial way. The sociological assessment of the qualitative differentiated spheres of religion, art or love in complex societies shows that the creativity of social action has the potential to achieve a transformation of established social structuration patterns by reinterpreting the contents of social reality from an innovative perspective (GSG 10: 39–118. Fitzi 2019a: 103–117). Social action stances can differently relate the objectified contents of social life to each other by following diverse creative logics. The result is a permanent tension between the subjective logic of action creativity and the objective reified logic of social structure, characterising qualitative differentiated societal domains. Yet, this conflictual relationship allows the expression of the totality of possible world contents through specific differential languages and breaks through societal fragmentation by relating social contents and relationships to each other in a synthetic manner. This variation of cultural work contrasts the reification of qualitative differentiated societal domains by opposing a creative reweaving of the social fabric to the ongoing social fragmentation. Synthetic social creativity can thus establish innovative relationships between different logics of societal structuration and delimit the ongoing processes of colonisation between societal domains, provoked by the objective logics of structural autonomisation. By selecting, interpreting and relating the manifold contents of the world to each other through a common semantics, the everyday cultural work of individual and collective social actors has the potential to overcome intermittent social reification under a particular perspective. Qualitative societal differentiation persists in its structural fragmentation, yet it is subsumed under a predominant creative logic of social action that develops its specific synthetic socio-cultural reconstruction. This also applies to a renewed normative societal structuration aimed at realising an environmentally compatible welfare-state compromise on both national

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state and interstate levels. The competition and tendential colonisation between opposing social structuration logics represents an unavoidable structural feature of complex societies. Yet, the particular approach that prevails on social action at large also depends on the attitude of the single individual and collective actors, who decide which logic guides the cultural work relating the world fragments together within new syntheses of social structuration. This innovative emancipation potential lurks in the interstices of intermittent normative societal arrangements and waits for transformation processes to be activated. The issue is thus how to trigger a semantic reformulation of all contents of social life from the standpoint of a renewed culture of welfare that coordinates societal and environmental protection. Overcoming the alienation imposed on the creativity of social action by the mix of social reification and normative intermittency that characterises contemporary societies belongs to the precondition of this synthetic cultural work. Fixed on their objective differentiation track, societal domains get into an increasing ‘self-referential entropy’ because alienated day-to-day cultural work cannot actualise societal semantics, so that their differentiated compartments stagnate. Yet, the dynamics of extreme plasticity that conforms to social change in complex societies sediments a transformation potential that can be seized by the creativity of individual and collective social action. From this perspective, recurring social conflicts for the boundaries of consensus can be transformed into processes of renewed societal structuration that re-establish a normative modus vivendi between opposing societal logics and introduce new models of social and environmental welfare. The subjective reshaping of society through conscious individual and collective social action unifies reified socio-cultural fragments anew into a meaningful synthesis that can become the subject of legitimation processes. This is the main difference compared with the uncontrolled fragmentation of the world along the lines of the objective logic of societal differentiation, which prevails in the age of highly intermittent social structuration. Conflicts between material interests, social groups and different structuration logics persist within the resulting societal arrangement, yet a democratically controlled reorganisation of the relationship between societal domains allows for the development of a renewed welfare-­state compromise that grants social and environmental protection. Normative societal structuration is a social process that restarts every day and cannot be realised simply on the grounds of a catalogue of maxims of individual behaviour, not even by integrating the Declaration of Human

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Rights with a theory of ‘human duties’ (Ratzinger 2005). An innovative moral attitude and changes of life-conduct are ineliminable preconditions of societal transformation, yet they do not suffice to realise it. Organised collective societal praxes of normative structuration are necessary that can face the intermittent differentiation rhythm and the fragmentation of contemporary societies. The spirit of a just and environmentally compatible society for the twenty-first century can be implemented, yet only at the price of its transposition from individual morality into law, which implies an extensive effort of democratic legislation both on a state and on an interstate level. Instead of a simple formal extension of natural law, to implement societal transformation in a substantial way, a scientific theory is thus necessary of the social and environmental limits of the predominant development model. Rational natural law provided the basis for an understanding of the ethical principles of law in a secular and pluralistic society, thus granting the Declaration of Human Rights a normative force that constituted a powerful corrective to the relentless modern development of positive and international law. In the neoliberal age, however, its ability to delimit the social and environmental consequences of capitalist exploitation has lost strength. Renewed processes of normative structuration for complex societies, not only formal but substantive, became necessary that require a shift from individual moral life-conduct to collective praxes of social transformation capable of institutionalising a welfare-state compromise for the twenty-first century. This must be able to realise social justice both on a global and environmentally compatible level. What it requires is scientific reflexivity about as well as political engagement for societal transformation. Accordingly, the political programme for a just society of the twenty-­ first century implies the formulation and legal implementation of specific competence frames and development limits for each social domain, in order to delimit the societal colonisation processes registered over the last decades and to avoid the environmental damage they provoked. A legal code of normative delimitation must be supplemented by the formulation of compensatory measures in the classic spirit of welfare-state compromises, in order to repair the environmental and social damage caused by the development of single social spheres as well as of society as a whole. Yet, to achieve these goals of normative societal structuration, specific social practices are required that are capable of setting up political projects of transformation in the spirit of social and environmental progress. These

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can be addressed as forms of individual and collective ‘transformative social action’.

10.2  Transformative Social Action for the Twenty-First Century To realise the necessary preconditions for a new welfare-state compromise means to develop the synthetic cultural work of social action in three main directions: economic democratisation beyond neoliberalism, political democratisation beyond the philosophy of history and normative social structuration for social and environmental protection. In this frame, the illusions of globalisation ideology must be subjected to a rigorous critique. Since the 1980s, deregulation has produced the uncontrolled autonomisation of financial capital, a wide precarisation of working humanity and the explosive exploitation of natural resources that resulted in the social, economic and environmental crises recurring in recent years. Breaking the deadlock of the late neoliberal regime thus implies a critical revision of the leading assumptions in the philosophy of history that characterised recent decades. This does not simply apply to some kind of leftish conceptions of progress, but to the mainstream neoliberal globalisation utopia, which increasingly replaced the social and environmental critique that had been consistently developed until the mid-1980s (Scherer and Vilmar 1984; Strasser and Traube 1981). A social democratic compromise for the twenty-first century can thus only be re-founded beyond the historical-philosophical assumptions that characterised the so-called Third Way. Under the address of an alleged ‘revolutionary centre’, this tactical move was intended to win over globalisation-­enthusiastic social strata for a social democratic variant of the neoliberal project that dismantled the welfare-state compromise since the 1980s. The corresponding political praxis, however, reduced itself more and more to a mere subservience to the utopia of globalised progress, resulting in a divorce between the social strata most exposed to the processes of social restructuration and social democracy (Eribon 2009), while the ‘new centre’ soon became linked to new political horizons, as, for example, in Germany, Merkel was quick to understand (Walter 2010). The question thus arises as to why the majority of the social democratic elites could become so uncritical about the globalisation ideology and did not try to develop further conceptions for alternative models of development.

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Today’s reader of Giddens’ The Third Way cannot avoid noticing the repeated reference to the notions of ‘old-style’ and ‘new-style social democracy’ (1998). This positioning on the threshold of the alleged epochal historical caesura, celebrated by the theorists of American triumphalism (Fukuyama 1992), was a peculiar way to digest the historical defeat of the so-called real socialism. A wide range of left-leaning intellectuals internalised the crisis of the USSR as disqualifying every idea of delimiting the dominant development model, instead of claiming that the authoritarian variant of socialism had failed because, unlike social democracy, it was incapable of democratising the economy and society. This major failure in social critique permitted the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism to gradually take control of society. A surprising number of social democrats, let alone of post-communists, became the most ardent supporters of the globalisation ideology. In order to understand the phenomenon, it can be assumed that this ‘conversion’ occurred mainly because of two specific factors in their mindset. On the one hand, by adopting the globalisation utopia they could keep faith with the old Hegelian habit of bowing to the zeitgeist. ‘History’ had decreed the end of history, so the imperative was to keep up with the times. On the other hand, thereby they could retain the belief in industrialism, by convincing themselves that ungoverned globalisation would bring a cornucopia of material resources for redistribution. The consequences of this trahison des clercs are there for all to see. The utopia of globalised progress, despite all its social and environmental costs, became the mainstream ideology of crumbling late capitalism. Taking an uncritical position towards globalisation and so-called free trade, however, was not only a capital political error. It also led to the reversal of the ethical judgement on social responsibility that constitutes a cornerstone of neoliberal cultural hegemony. A selective, asymmetric principle of responsibility was established by shifting, on the one hand, responsibility for economic and social crises form society onto individuals, who ever since must steadily ‘optimise themselves’ to adapt to new economic imperatives. On the other hand, the shift in ethical judgement established the de-responsibilisation of the economic sphere as a whole for the social and environmental consequences of its development. Whatever damage it provokes, not the economic actors, but society as a whole has to take responsibility. As everyone can observe, the consequences of this double value reversal on social legitimation were serious. Today’s social, political and cultural fragmentation of complex societies finds its roots here.

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Disenchantment with politics, unwillingness to engage in solidarity bonds and a creeping social Darwinist mentality prepared the breeding ground for the triumph of ‘on- and off-line demagogues’ promising to conjure back lost homelands, no matter how esoteric they are (Taggart 2000). In recent decades, crumbling late capitalism grew to an irrational, disoriented and self-destructive—that means society and nature destroying— development model, which today has got completely out of control. Confronted with the consequences of recurring economic crises and increasing climatic emergencies, the debate thus resumes about the margins of a possible societal transformation beyond the dominant development model. This should establish economic democracy in a threefold environmentally compatible sense by ensuring the widest possible access to economic resources and combating monopolies, by fostering solid democratic control over the societal domain of economy and by developing compensatory measures, in order to repair its social and environmental damage. Thus, the question arises as to which paths transformative social action can take to establish environmental compatible welfare-state compromises in contemporary intermittent normative societies. Transformative social action can be conceived as an individual life-­ conduct as well as an experimental form of socialisation characterising precarious social groups and political or lifestyle avant-gardes (Fleurbaey et al. 2019; Honneth 2017; Wright 2010). In this sense, its unfolding has an exemplary character and can lead to significant changes in mentality as well as to the development of an innovative eco-social cultural hegemony. As Weber shows in the study on ascetic Protestantism, however, this dimension of transformative action per se is not sufficient to change entire societal arrangements. Forms of normative social structuration are necessary for social transformation to consolidate, as the organisation of ‘inner-­ worldly asceticism’ into religious sectarianism shows, which took about two hundred years to develop a consistent societal impact, even if not the desired one (MWG I/18: 123–545). The transition from innovative life-­ conduct to social structuration is always the most difficult step for societal transformation to take, so that the establishment of a renewed welfare-­ state compromise, which is both socially and ecologically compatible, also runs into this problem. Innovative ways of life, produced by synthetic cultural work, must become culturally hegemonic and then crystallise into social and political organisations able to become political majorities and gain elections in order to transform their societal praxis in legislation with

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a substantial empirical validity—that is, in durable normative societal structuration. If Saxer’s politological reflection on the so-called ‘transformative realism’ becomes the subject of analysis here, it is because it is particularly representative of the debate that is developing in this context (2021). Saxer’s thesis is that the real cause for the current weakness of transformative forces lies in a false political epistemology that characterised the opposition to the neoliberal revolution and replaced politics by ineffective moral appeals. Instead, transformative social action must return to a realistic strategy of political struggles—a strategy which, by the way, both neoliberal forces and the reborn right-wing populism have never abandoned. According to Saxer, the fact that during the neoliberal age left-­ wing politics transformed into a moralising discourse is due to the cultural amnesia that made it forget its own theoretical heritage. So, at the beginning of the resurgence for any societal transformation project, there must be a theoretical paradigm shift of democratic eco-socialism, which implies a return to the critique of political economy. From the perspective of the present book, this appeal is interesting insofar as here we advocate a return to sociological theory at large. This is not understood as an alternative to the critique of political economy, but as a deepening and problematising scientific reflection on this subject (cf. pars pro toto Fitzi 2019a: 39–44). It was in effect only since 1921, when Bukharin postulated the existence of a ‘Marxist sociology’, that an opposition was established in principle between the critique of political economy and sociology (1978). This ideological move, which was part of the political strategy to inaugurate a Marxist orthodoxy necessary to develop socialism under the cultural hegemony of Bolshevism, thwarted the entire subsequent reception of the two theoretical arsenals of critique, so that ever since it often only had half of its resources at its disposal. The history of the Frankfurt School is in some ways an essay to overcome this handicap among the other theoretical difficulties of 1920s Marxism and its institutionalisation as the mainstream of critical theory (Villa 2018). Today’s return of critical social and environmental analysis to its full potential, which is denied in so many quarters, is therefore one of the necessary measures to enable social science to perform its reflexive work in exchange with the unfolding of transformative social action in Durkheim’s sense. Yet, this effort presupposes a double theoretical paradigm shift able to recuperate the instruments of critique both in the wide tradition of socialism and in sociological theory.

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That said, on the basis of the analytical tools that the sociological diagnosis of the current societal change makes available, possible development paths of transformative social action can be evaluated as part of a realistic strategy of political struggle. Societal transformation implies a modification of social order, which means a shift in the ownership structure as well as in the distribution of political power, so that those who profit from the existing societal arrangement protect their interests by opposing change and building ‘status quo alliances’ (Saxer 2021: chap. 15). Despite the structural social volatility of crumbling late capitalism, these can succeed in stabilising the solid liquidity of existing societal arrangements, at least temporarily, through a series of adjustments that maintain or even expand their positions. If, however, transformative social action prevails, it can establish an innovative dynamics of normative structuration that faces social and environmental crises at their root and changes societal arrangements at all systemic levels. For Saxer, the cornerstone of transformative realism is, therefore, the formation of ‘transformative alliances’ that are capable of reordering the social balance of power, by establishing narratives that describe alternatives to the status quo and become a driving force of social rearrangement. Thereby, transformative realism adheres to the sociological reading of modernity as an indeterministic social environment. The problem solutions that societies subscribe to are not determined by objective criteria of rationality. They are the result of interpretive struggles between competing normative narratives. Which solution prevails depends on how many communities subscribe to one interpretation. Accordingly, there is no social arrangement that can prevail under the simple impulsion of communicative action. Whatever normative narrative imposes itself is the outcome of the everyday synthetic cultural work of social actors, groups and institutions within an overall condition of open-ended struggles on societal consensus. The precondition for the subsistence of transformative social action at times of high societal fragmentation is thus first of all the willingness to embark on a path of struggles for cultural hegemony, so the question arises about how, in this societal frame, potential allies can be brought together on a common political platform. Saxer’s proposal in this respect is dictated by the ratio of political praxis. Transformative realism is a matter of ‘building bridges’, by developing shareable narratives about a possible common future, instead of spreading nostalgia for lost homelands. This political strategy is by far the more fruitful than retrenching single

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social groups into their opposite defensive interest-logic. Yet, it can only succeed if it is empowered by an already existing societal transformation praxis that leads to the establishment of innovative social arrangements resulting from the manifold everyday social creativity of highly differentiated societies. To this end, the galaxy of fragmented social strata and classes constituting contemporary social reality must enter a dynamics of transformative social structuration that weaves new social fabric, by establishing solidarity bonds that contrast the irrational imperatives of economic restructuration characterising crumbling late capitalism. By such means societies can institutionalise normative frames of self-protection that eventually result in an environmental sustainability of their development. Sociological diagnosis shows that current societies develop an accelerated change rhythm, which grants them high levels of plasticity, by increasingly shifting the logic of social structuration from legitimacy to provisional asymmetric consensus. Until now, this potential is only committed to passive-adaptive reactions towards recurring social and environmental crises provoked by the uncontrolled development of capitalist accumulation processes. It can nevertheless be redirected under the leadership of synthetic cultural work that defines a new social contract grounded on an environmentally compatible welfare-state compromise. Thanks to the capacity of complex societies to rapidly establish new provisional social arrangements, transformative social action can develop from the individual, experimental and exemplary level of life-conduct to social structuration processes that redefine the relationship between social strata as well as societal differentiated domains. A renewed normative structuration dynamics of qualitative differentiated societies thus can eventually generate praxes of social legitimation that have the potential of addressing today’s social issues by making their solution compatible with an effective environmental protection. In opposition to the axiomatic assumptions of traditional theories of social transformation, however, a political praxis for the welfare-state compromise of the twenty-first century must be constructed in a historic frame that cannot claim its success as a necessary development of societal evolution. More than ever, modernity qualifies as an intermittent destructuring structuration process, so that the horizon of transformative social action finds itself beyond the certainties of the philosophy of history. A new social contract for contemporary societies thus constitutes a potential, yet not an assured development of the ongoing social change. This topic must become a major focus of reflection for the social sciences accompanying

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processes of societal transformation today, because all too often unspoken evolutionistic assumptions still characterise the political strategies both of the globalisation ideologies and of the opposing socialist theories. The deference to the Hegelian heritage is perhaps also the reason why Honneth relegated the discussion of Bernstein’s social democratic revisionism to a footnote (2017: 63). Nevertheless, Bernstein’s critical reflection on the philosophy of history constitutes one of the most essential starting points for the reconstruction of transformative social action in the age of crumbling late capitalism (1909). Economic and political democratisation is a process that is based on structural societal transformation. Its praxis can succeed or fail depending on the capacity of transformative social action to exit the intermittent spiral of solid liquidity by reinsuring resilient normative societal structuration. This presupposes that above all the renewed struggle for social rights will be able to transcend the social fragmentation to which it is relegated today and that it will be able to find representation in political parties that are willing to defend the needs of the social strata most exposed to capitalist restructuration. Furthermore, the political representation of the social hardship of the twenty-first century must be able to transform itself into a cultural hegemony that generates the common sense of a renewed welfare-­ state compromise and establishes the full range of citizenship rights with particular attention to those of women and minorities. This new social contract must then be extended to the protection of the rights of the planet and its living species, transforming all economic production into circular processes with zero ecological impact. Accordingly, there is lots of social construction work to be tackled, which has been abandoned during the neoliberal era, because of the predominance, even on the left, of elitist concepts of the political. Transformative social action must extend the logic of normative structuration, which limits the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism and delimits its social consequences, to the delimitation of its environmental consequences. Only a socially aware politics can thus also become an environmentally aware welfare politics. The logic of democratic control, protection of the weak and delimitation of colonisation processes between societal domains must extend from the intra-societal perspective of normative social structuration to the relationship between society and its natural environment. Yet, the second process will not take place if the first one is not implemented. Only if the societal domain of the economy is reoriented to the functions that it grants to society and submitted to

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democratic control through welfare-state measures protecting society, can it also be redirected to respect the imperatives of environmental protection. This double logic of normative structuration must develop itself by re-­defining, on the one hand, the relationship and the exchange modalities between the economy and the remaining qualitative differentiated societal domains, and on the other hand, those between human society and planet earth. Instead, achieving environmental protection on the basis of the systemic irrationalism of crumbling late capitalism is impossible. Transformative social action must thus have a clear formulation of its political priorities. Only if the worsening social issues, both in single societies and on a global level, once again become the main focus of normative societal structuration can the further aspects of its political programme succeed. This raises the question of the resilient relevance of the political distinction between left and right in the age of crumbling late capitalism. As Bobbio unequivocally clarified, left-wing politics is characterised by its focus on the issue of social inequality (1996). Facing the unjust distribution of and the unequal access to societal resources represents its crucial characteristic and core business. Impeding redistribution and democratic control of resources, favouring privileges, position incomes and monopolies is instead the opposite of left-wing politics. This distinction and the related need to return to the origins of social democracy as a movement for the improvement of the living conditions of the social strata, which are most exposed to capitalist restructuration, thus represent the necessary starting point for the transformative social action of the future. It is thus time to extend the political orientation towards equal rights for different life-forms to the environmental issues as well, instead of renouncing it as, for example, Latour suggests (2018). Identifying the ‘progressive forces’ with the uncritical endorsement of the modernisation ideology means to interiorise uncritically the turnaround of new labour to the globalisation ideology in the 1990s. Socialist and social democratic traditions expressed and express a much wider multiplicity of positions and offer a number of critical approaches to industrialism that must be made fruitful to trigger transformative social action. In the age of the ‘new climatic regime’, there is no hidden good order to find in the depths of the ‘terrestrial’ that can be reinstated. This is just old romantic nostalgia. Only if normative societal structuration can progress enough to weave social protection, substantial access to citizenship rights and environmental rescue in the social fabric of a new societal arrangement on a global level, the risks of the irrational historical development of crumbling late capitalism can be thwarted.

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Walzer, Michael (1983). Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books. Warren, Catherine A., and Vavrus, Mary Douglas (2002). American Cultural Studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Watts, Beth, and Fitzpatrick, Suzanne (2018). Welfare Conditionality. New York: Routledge. Weber, Max (1904a). ‘Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’. In: Id. (1988). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (19221). 7th ed. by Johannes Winckelmann, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 146–214. ——— (1904b/1905). Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Now in Id. (2016) Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/18. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp.  123–545. English: Id. (1992). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, T. Parsons (trans.), A. Giddens (intro), London: Routledge. ——— (1982). The City. New York: Free Press. ——— (1994). Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2004). ‘Intermediate Reflection on Economic Ethics of the World Religions’. In: The essential Weber. A Reader. Ed. by Sam Whimster. London: Routledge, pp. 215–244. ——— (2012). Collected Methodological Writings. Ed. by Hans Henrik Bruns and Sam Whimster. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (2008). Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erster Band. Vom Feudalismus des alten Reiches bis zur defensiven Modernisierung der Reformära: 1700 – 1815. München: C.H. Beck. ——— (2013). Die neue Umverteilung: Soziale Ungleichheit in Deutschland. München: Beck. Wodak, Ruth (2021). The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wolf, Harald (2019). ‘Fragmentierte Arbeit im Postfordismus: Übersehene Wechselwirkungen zwischen betrieblicher und überbetrieblicher Rationalisierung in der Automobilindustrie’. In: Blick zurück nach vorn. Sekundäranalysen zum Wandel von Arbeit nach dem Fordismus. International Labour Studies. Ed. by Wolfgang Dunkel, Heidemarie Hanekop, and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja. Frankfurt/M: Campus Verlag, pp. 135–174. Wright, Erik (2010). Envisioning Real Utopias. London and New York: Verso. Zagrebelsky, Gustavo (2013). Fondata sul lavoro. Torino: Einaudi.

Index1

A Acceleration, 38, 55, 160, 245, 263, 270, 300 Accumulation, capitalist, 19, 21, 26, 28, 30–32, 38, 39, 41–43, 57, 58, 76, 152, 235, 247, 248, 250, 257, 311 Accumulation, primitive, 219, 247, 256 Action, communicative, 4, 8, 24, 25, 35, 87, 95, 142, 184, 187, 195, 236, 292, 310 Action, consensual, 138, 175, 184, 217 Action, consensus-driven, 178, 184–188, 196, 211, 215–217, 226, 234, 288, 289 Action, contract-driven, 180, 185, 186 Action, coordination, 96, 127, 151, 162, 177–180, 182, 187, 189, 209–211, 215, 219, 220

Action, orientation, 5, 74, 86, 87, 94, 109, 128, 129, 139, 159, 160, 164, 174–179, 184, 187, 188, 210, 217, 236, 242, 243 Action, transformative, 9, 25, 48, 308 Agency, social, 7, 8, 34, 55, 56, 58, 64, 111, 116, 127, 144, 145, 151, 162–165, 200–203, 270 Alienation, 75, 164, 165, 169, 170, 190–192, 195, 202–204, 209, 235, 236, 250, 259, 263, 264, 268, 269, 288, 293, 304 Amnesia, 42, 56, 145, 309 Ancien Régime, 94, 223, 256 Anonymous third parties, 138, 227, 228, 249, 270, 287, 288 Anthropocene, 38, 39 Autopoiesis, 110, 143, 176, 229 Axiomatic, autopoietic, 142, 144, 157 Axiomatic, unreflected, 3, 4

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Fitzi, Normative Intermittency, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06174-5

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INDEX

B Berlin Wall, 18, 41, 44 Beveridge Report, 59 Bureaucracy, 151, 186, 259 C Capital, political, 141, 276, 277 Capitalism, administered, 4, 8, 121 Capitalism, crumbling late, 10, 27–40, 43, 45, 63, 73, 92, 97, 99, 113, 122, 123, 139, 141, 142, 192, 194–196, 209, 216, 217, 225, 234, 251, 254, 271, 289–291, 293, 298, 300, 307, 308, 310–313 Capitalism, democratic, 35–37, 152 Capitalism, neoliberal, 55, 124 China, 20, 30, 64, 108 Citizenship sociology, 58, 61–63 Co-determination, 48, 49, 64 Collective action subjects, 9, 157–161, 190, 193, 229, 274, 294 Colonisation processes, societal, 107, 305 Common good, 21, 23, 51, 103, 105, 106, 109, 152 Communitarianism, 163, 261, 264, 267 Community, political, 47, 81, 215–217, 220–223, 225, 255, 256, 289 Complexity, cultural, 262–264, 267 Complexity, normative, 75, 78, 82, 90, 229, 235 Conditionality, 112, 117 Confucianism, 108 Consciousness, collective, 74, 76, 147, 148, 159, 160, 228, 300 Consensus, asymmetric, 7, 9, 25, 214–221, 234, 237, 245,

248–250, 254, 259, 270–272, 293, 302, 311 Consensus, boundaries of, 245, 274, 276–278, 304 Consensus, for legitimacy, 150, 221, 289 Consensus, limits of, 177, 293, 294 Consensus, overlapping, 78, 87, 88, 293 Consensus, passive, 25, 79, 194, 195, 214, 215 Consensus, political, 146, 289 Consumerism, 202, 204, 209 Contingency, double, 171, 174 Contingency, multiple, 95, 150, 210, 226 Crisis, cascade, 32–34 Crisis, economic, 17, 28, 31, 42, 45, 53, 92, 218, 251, 271, 297 Crisis, financial, 22, 27, 28, 32, 33, 121, 173, 209, 270 Crisis, systemic, 21, 26, 33, 35 Critical theory, 3, 4, 44, 120, 143, 152, 309 Cultural studies, 2, 124 Cultural work, 169–174, 176, 192, 195, 196, 202, 203, 205–210, 226, 233–235, 242–245, 260, 261, 263, 266–269, 287, 288, 292, 293, 303, 304, 306, 308, 310, 311 Culture, crisis of, 252, 260, 264, 267 Culture, objective, 159, 172, 203, 226, 242–244, 263, 267 D Declaration of Human Rights, 81, 92, 262, 304–305 Delegitimation, 25, 260, 277 Democracy, 2, 19, 20, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 47, 51, 83, 95,

 INDEX 

104, 108, 109, 164, 237, 258, 259, 277, 279, 289, 301, 306–308, 313 Democratisation, economic, 30, 33, 42, 43, 49, 52, 55, 306 Democratisation, political, 45, 108, 306, 312 Deregulation, 21, 26, 30, 32–34, 64, 115, 126, 260, 271, 272, 306 De-responsibilisation, 106 Destructuration, 5, 10, 79, 113, 122, 137, 139, 141, 245, 291, 292, 294, 300 Differentiation, qualitative social, 8, 38, 73, 74, 80, 164, 200, 205, 228, 242, 244, 245, 252–254, 264, 280, 291 Differentiation, qualitative societal, 90, 165, 203, 204, 234, 241–246, 250, 253, 263, 264, 266, 267, 288, 289, 303 Discrimination, 10, 63, 113, 256 Disorientation, 23, 28, 36, 38, 39, 103, 122, 139, 259, 271, 302 Domination, 24, 25, 42, 49, 99, 149, 150, 152, 177, 182, 188–190, 195, 204, 209, 212, 213, 220–222, 224, 225, 235, 237, 256, 271, 289, 290, 292 Dualisation, 111–113, 116–120, 140 E Eccentric positionality, 230, 232, 233, 235 Emancipation, 9, 24, 26, 43, 61, 127, 191, 248, 250, 253, 254, 256, 261, 298, 304 Enlightenment, 3, 25, 26, 254 Entropy, social, 6, 8, 164, 194, 203, 206, 264, 287, 304 Environmental catastrophe, 8, 218

337

Environmental protection, 9, 10, 50, 91, 123, 199, 293, 294, 297, 299, 301, 303, 304, 306, 311, 313 Equality, 1, 19, 41, 42, 46, 49–51, 54, 62, 64, 119, 123, 297, 299 European Union (EU), 20, 50, 112, 119 Expropriation, 219, 223, 255, 256, 301 F Face-to-face, 10, 137, 138, 185 Familiarity, 138, 267–270 Fascism, 40, 291 Financialisation, 36, 114 Flexibilisation, 114–116, 118, 119, 273 Fluidification, 91, 138, 140, 141, 229, 245 Fragmentation, social, 77, 83, 98, 100, 103–129, 137, 165, 257, 273, 277, 291, 292, 303, 312 Fragmentation, societal, 33, 79, 111, 120, 203, 243, 250, 266, 303, 310 France, 49, 50, 52, 72, 260 Fraternity, 1, 19, 41, 242 French Revolution, 1, 3, 19, 41, 71, 72, 81, 93, 247–248, 250, 256, 299 G Gender, 10, 32, 33, 63, 218, 237, 256, 257 Genocide, 33, 77, 259 Germany, 20, 43, 45, 57, 115–119, 247, 302, 306 Ghettoization, 261, 264, 266 Gilets Jaunes, 260

338 

INDEX

Globalisation, ideology of, 34, 306, 307, 312, 313 Globalisation, utopia of, 18, 41, 104, 107, 306, 307 Great Depression, 21, 31, 32, 34, 56, 57, 77, 94, 279 Grouping, consensus-driven, 214, 216–221, 249, 250 H Habit, 159, 172, 188, 189, 207, 212, 224, 235, 249, 272, 307 Hegemony, cultural, 33, 43, 45, 51–57, 60, 121, 307–310, 312 Heterogeneity, cultural, 85 Homo oeconomicus, 54, 187 I Imperialism, geopolitical, 259, 291 Imputation, 214–217, 219, 220, 288 Industrialisation, 8, 29, 38, 94, 247 Industrial relations, 1, 77, 112, 115, 119, 267 Industrial reserve army, 2, 116, 257 Inflation, 35, 63, 160, 229, 236, 237, 245, 270 Institutionalisation, 46, 62, 86, 119, 140, 141, 159, 161, 185, 225–229, 237, 244, 249, 255, 266, 270, 271, 288, 299, 309 Integration, normative, 5, 6, 73, 80, 81, 86, 87, 90, 159, 172, 201, 251, 287, 288 Integration, social, 5, 10, 22–24, 26, 35, 48, 74, 78, 80–84, 86, 92, 110, 117, 143, 165, 169–171, 191–194, 201, 202, 204–208, 232, 234, 251, 257, 260–267, 287, 292, 293 Integration, system, 21–23, 26, 34, 74, 201

Intimacy, 230, 231, 233, 235, 268 Invisible hand, 18, 159 Irrealisation, 268, 269 Italy, 42, 113, 118, 119 L Labour, division of, 2, 37, 48, 55, 57, 61, 76, 77, 114, 115, 159, 247 Legality, 79, 85, 149, 152, 181, 182, 185, 188, 190, 204, 205, 213, 221, 223–225, 234, 254, 262, 289, 291 Legitimacy, belief in, 150, 188, 189 Legitimacy, intermittent, 185, 206, 288 Legitimacy, normative, 97, 98, 146, 150, 194 Legitimacy, political, 83, 84, 126, 183, 221, 222, 225, 254, 260, 289 Legitimacy, shifting, 7, 109, 127, 129, 151, 190, 199–238, 292 Legitimation, crisis of, 36, 71, 98, 140, 276, 277, 293 Liberty, 1, 212, 231, 247 Life-conduct, 75, 128, 164, 204, 244, 305, 308, 311 Lifestyle, 63, 170, 193, 203–206, 235, 265, 266, 308 Lifeworld, 25, 45, 194, 244, 288, 292 M Marxism, 3, 309 Membership, 61–63, 72, 138, 255, 256, 268, 276, 277, 280 Middle classes, 20, 31, 98, 117, 257, 258, 275 Migrants, 2, 10, 63, 94, 98, 120, 123, 261, 263, 264, 266, 273, 275, 277 Minorities, ethnical, 2, 256 Modernity, defensive, 71–80

 INDEX 

Modus pugnandi, 261 Modus vivendi, 22, 82, 83, 86, 87, 90–92, 110, 261, 262, 272, 294, 304 Money, 22, 28, 35, 45, 104, 106, 138, 139, 146, 161, 170, 173, 182, 183, 204, 227, 249, 288 Multiculturalism, 80, 261, 263 N Neoliberal, age, 2, 25, 26, 33, 105, 109, 111, 124, 126, 305, 309 Neoliberal, ideology, 28, 31, 43, 45, 103, 173, 253 Neoliberal, revolution, 2, 19, 21, 33, 63, 64, 104, 105, 107, 121, 309 Neoliberal, societal restructuration, 4, 5, 24, 27, 29, 52, 77 Neoliberal utopia, 20, 30, 41 New Deal, 18, 30, 36, 49, 56, 64, 301 O Obligation, political, 177, 214–216 Ontology, 157, 191 Order, intermittent social, 195, 199–225 Order, legal, 5, 85, 87, 112, 113, 116, 145, 146, 148–151, 213, 234, 237, 274 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 17, 119, 237 P Pandemic, 10, 17, 33, 39, 52, 63, 64, 77, 82, 92, 103, 108, 122, 137, 138, 160, 169, 209, 218, 237, 251, 297 Passivity, 190, 191, 195, 203, 288

339

Patriotism, constitutional, 83 Philosophy of history, 3, 8, 24, 29, 40, 247, 248, 250, 253, 271, 292, 306, 311, 312 Philosophy, social, 2, 3, 89, 172, 191 Plasticity, social, 9, 73, 76, 194, 202, 208, 289, 302, 304, 311 Pluralisation, cultural, 39, 261–265, 267, 291 Pluralism, 44, 79, 80, 82, 84, 180, 262, 266 Pluralism, cultural, 80, 262, 266 Political theory, 83, 86, 87, 104, 175, 178, 179, 253, 261, 262 Populism, 20, 27, 28, 39, 43, 45, 54, 71, 81, 83, 109, 113, 258, 259, 264, 277, 279, 291, 298, 309 Post-war consensus, 60, 62, 64, 199 Precarious workforce, 2, 20, 98, 111, 116, 120 Precarisation, 4, 112, 116, 117, 123, 272, 273, 306 Productive forces, 3, 18, 24, 26, 44, 47, 203, 252, 263, 291, 299 Progress, social and environmental, 297–306 Public sphere, 32, 47, 138, 139, 230, 231, 233, 235, 261, 266, 268 R Rationalisation, 114, 151, 152, 186, 218, 219, 222, 225, 242, 249, 250, 255, 256, 259, 260 Recognition, 10, 72, 94–96, 230, 231, 233, 257, 265, 266, 274–277, 291 Reflexivity, 54, 55, 121, 125, 157, 305 Regression, functional, 8, 252, 254, 260, 280 Reification, 54, 152, 190, 191, 204, 208, 209, 303, 304

340 

INDEX

Religion, civil, 79, 80, 84 Responsibility, 38, 39, 59, 105, 163, 231, 307 Rights, civil, 85, 274 Rights, human, 81, 85, 146 Rights, political, 2, 46, 94, 256, 257, 275, 289 Rights, social, 1, 2, 10, 43, 62, 77, 91, 94, 109, 115, 116, 120, 123, 257, 259, 273–275, 289, 312 Robotisation, 206, 289 Role-making, 75, 76, 204, 231, 232 Role-taking, 75, 76, 231 Rule of law, 71, 80, 82, 83, 91, 96, 98, 113, 120, 146, 221–225, 234, 237, 256–258, 262, 266, 272, 290 Russia, 20, 108 S Scarcity, 97, 161, 173, 194, 214, 227, 292 Secularisation, 80–82, 84 Self-interpretation, societal, 2, 7, 9, 10, 40, 42, 45, 54, 55, 63, 89, 91, 121–129, 143, 145, 157, 173, 190, 191, 193, 263, 264, 278, 291 Social action centres, fragmentation of, 162–165, 193, 248, 269, 287 Social action, creativity of, 80, 141, 170, 201, 202, 204, 242, 260, 263, 268, 303, 304 Social action, logic of, 8, 75, 126, 143, 158, 164–174, 186–190, 192, 201, 206, 208, 214, 234, 243, 288, 289, 303 Social action, transformative, 93, 292–294, 306–313 Social class, 61–63, 152, 247

Social closure, 81, 256, 259, 276, 278 Social complexity, 138, 162, 163, 171, 178, 194, 235, 264 Social creativity, 77, 201, 202, 209, 210, 235, 267–269, 303, 311 Social critique, 3, 123, 307 Social democracy, 19, 20, 36, 41, 44, 164, 306, 307, 313 Social emergence, 74, 142, 143, 177 Social freedom, 46–48, 51 Social institution, 37, 107, 141, 161, 169, 202, 214, 227, 263, 267 Socialisation, 24, 74, 76, 159, 161, 172, 181, 207, 261, 308 Socialism, democratic, 18, 54, 55 Socialism, real existing, 18, 44 Social justice, 2, 41, 46, 50, 51, 55–57, 61, 153, 247, 299, 305 Social legislation, 2, 59, 113 Social legitimation, 7, 8, 17–27, 40, 61, 74, 128, 140, 145, 169, 195, 269, 275, 276, 301, 302, 307, 311 Social market economy, 24, 43, 58, 279, 300 Social mobility, 31, 276 Social normativity, 3, 4, 71, 87, 96, 152, 217, 226, 228, 229, 234, 237, 272, 274, 290 Social solidarity, 5, 82, 83, 85, 119, 246 Social stratification, 5, 275 Social structure, logic of, 8, 22, 23, 143, 173, 192, 201, 203, 206, 208, 289, 303, 311 Social transformation, 47, 49, 55, 58, 72, 77, 78, 93, 99, 122, 123, 152, 248, 260, 292, 298, 300, 301, 305, 308, 311 Society, capitalist, 1, 43, 152, 252

 INDEX 

Society, civil, 26, 72, 73, 81, 83, 84, 103 Sociological analysis, 2, 3, 26, 37, 40, 47, 48, 74, 75, 109–110, 122–124, 150, 152, 153, 263 Sociological bathtub, 127, 151 Sociological epistemology, 125, 143, 158, 165–167, 167n1, 169 Sociology, classical, 1, 3, 4, 6, 75, 88–90, 125, 126, 145, 161, 241, 247, 251, 252 Sociology, critical, 1–11, 120, 145, 152, 246, 248–250, 253, 254 Sociology, mainstream, 2–4, 9, 126 Sociology, moral, 73, 75–79, 171–172, 179, 181, 206, 293 Sociology, understanding, 99, 161, 175 Solid liquidity, 139, 141, 195, 251, 270, 274, 302, 310, 312 Sovereignism, 50, 52, 53, 82, 264 Sovereignty, 86, 225, 274 State, modern, 80, 81, 180, 216, 219, 223, 225, 255, 261 State, secular, 80–82, 84, 85 Structuration, crumbling societal, 236, 260, 269, 302 Structuration, failing normative, 4, 73, 86, 293 Structuration, failing social, 6, 9, 56, 64, 97, 126, 142, 192, 193, 195, 259, 272, 287–294 Structuration, intermittent destructuring, 246–254, 293, 311 Structuration, intermittent normative, 145, 274, 292 Structuration, intermittent social, 161, 190, 192, 193, 195, 206, 215, 217, 218, 222, 234, 236, 237, 245, 246, 268, 271, 288, 304

341

Structuration, normative social, 3, 5–7, 10, 22, 24, 26, 39, 40, 108, 275, 297–313 Structuration, normative societal, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 26, 28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 48, 57, 58, 63, 71–100, 123, 188, 254, 276, 292–294, 300, 301, 303, 305, 309, 312, 313 System theory, 4, 74–76, 110, 145, 175 T Third Way, 306, 307 Totalitarianism, 33, 43, 94 Transnormativity, 91, 93, 97, 99, 226, 234, 237, 245, 250, 290 Trente Glorieuses, 33, 36, 40, 51, 260, 297 U Under-stratification, 120, 275 United Kingdom (UK), 49, 56, 58, 60 United States of America (USA), 19, 20, 30, 31, 45, 49, 56, 57, 63, 64, 106, 108, 120, 127 Use of force, 84, 222, 223, 225, 237, 255, 256, 258, 259, 265, 290 V Validity, intermittent, 87, 163, 174, 177, 180, 203–206 Validity, legal, 5, 139, 146–151, 150n2, 153, 159, 163, 185, 225 Violence, 25, 222–224, 237 W War, Cold, 20, 246, 253

342 

INDEX

War, First World (WWI), 8, 29, 56, 252, 253 War, Second World (WWII), 2, 5, 8, 9, 25, 31, 32, 42, 43, 56–58, 63, 77, 82, 88, 94, 110, 122, 140, 152, 259

Welfare capitalism, 23–26 Welfare chauvinism, 109 Z Zeitgeist, 18, 40, 41, 253, 307