In March 1986, a nine-page article about the Chernobyl nuclear installation appeared in the English-language edition of Soviet Life, under the heading of Total Safety'. Only a month later, over the weekend of the 26–27 April, the world's worst nuclear accident—thus far—occurred at the plant.

QUESTION: How deliberately ironic was the timing of the Soviet Life piece? Worth investigating whether it was pure coincidence or blinkered confidence.

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an 'other' among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilisations as if through vestiges and ruins.

XREF: This echoes themes of cultural relativism and the loss of grand narratives familiar from anthropology and postmodern theory.

The disorientation which expresses itself in the feeling that systematic knowledge about social organisation cannot be obtained, I shall argue, results primarily from the sense many of us have of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control. To analyse how this has come to be the case, it is not sufficient merely to invent new terms, like post-modernity and the rest. Instead, we have to look again at the nature of modernity itself which, for certain fairly specific reasons, has been poorly grasped in the social sciences hitherto. Rather than entering a period of post-modernity, we are moving into one in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalised and universalised than before.

DEFINE: Giddens reframes the current era not as post-modernity but as a radicalization of modernity itself, correcting a common mislabeling.

The modes of life brought into being by modernity have swept us away from all traditional types of social order, in quite unprecedented fashion. In both their extensionality and their intensionality the transformations involved in modernity are more profound than most sorts of change characteristic of prior periods. On the extensional plane they have served to establish forms of social interconnection which span the globe; in intensional terms they have come to alter some of the most intimate and personal features of our day-to-day existence.

Totalitarianism is distinct from traditional despotism, but is all the more frightening as a result. Totalitarian rule connects political, military, and ideological power in more concentrated form than was ever possible before the emergence of modern nation-states.

The problem of order is here seen as one of time-space distanciation—the conditions under which time and space are organised so as to connect presence and absence.

DEFINE: Introduces 'time-space distanciation' as the framework for understanding social order.

The "discovery" of "remote" regions of the world by Western travelers and explorers was the necessary basis of both of these. The progressive charting of the globe that led to the creation of universal maps, in which perspective played little part in the representation of geographical position and form, established space as "independent" of any particular place or region.

DEFINE: Explains how universal maps with perspective-free representation of position established the concept of independent, abstract space.

Modern organisations are able to connect the local and the global in ways which would have been unthinkable in more traditional societies and in so doing routinely affect the lives of many millions of people.

Marx spoke of money as "the universal whore," a medium of exchange which negates the content of goods or services by substituting for them an impersonal standard. Money permits the exchange of anything for anything, regardless of whether the goods involved share any substantive qualities in common with one another.

I do not accept the main framework of their analyses. Neither power nor language is on a par with money or other disembedding mechanisms. Power and the use of language are intrinsic features of social action on a very general level, not specific social forms.

DEFINE: Clarifies the distinctive ontological status of power and language as general features of social action, contrasted with 'disembedding mechanisms' like money.

This movement to money proper involves the intervention of the state, which acts as the guarantor of value. Only the state (which means here the modern nation-state) is able to transform private debt transactions into a standard means of payment—in other words, to bring debt and credit into balance in respect of an indefinite number of transactions.

Trust is therefore involved in a fundamental way with the institutions of modernity. Trust here is vested, not in individuals, but in abstract capacities. Anyone who uses monetary tokens does so on the presumption that others, whom she or he never meets, honour their value. But it is money as such which is trusted, not only, or even primarily, the persons with whom particular transactions are carried out.

Trust exists, Simmel says, when we “believe in” someone or some principle: “It expresses the feeling that there exists between our idea of a being and the being itself a definite connection and unity, a certain consistency in our conception of it, an assurance and lack of resistance in the surrender of the Ego to this conception, which may rest upon particular reasons, but is not explained by them.” Trust, in short, is a form of “faith,” in which the confidence vested in probable outcomes expresses a commitment to something rather than just a cognitive understanding. Indeed, and I shall elaborate upon this later on, the modes of trust involved in modern institutions in the nature of the case rest upon vague and partial understandings of their “knowledge base.”

DEFINE: Simmel's distinction between trust as 'belief in' (a commitment or faith) versus mere probable-outcome confidence clarifies a key analytical concept for political and institutional analysis.

An element of Simmel’s “weak inductive knowledge” is no doubt very often present in the confidence which lay actors sustain in expert systems. There is a pragmatic element in “faith,” based upon the experience that such systems generally work as they are supposed to do. In addition, there are often regulatory agencies over and above professional associations designed to protect the consumers of expert systems—bodies which licence machines, keep a watch over the standards of aircraft manufacturers, and so forth. None of this, however, alters the observation that all disembedding mechanisms imply an attitude of trust.

Where trust is involved, in Luhmann’s view, alternatives are consciously borne in mind by the individual in deciding to follow a particular course of action. Someone who buys a used car, instead of a new one, risks purchasing a dud. He or she places trust in the salesperson or the reputation of the firm to try to avoid this occurrence. Thus, an individual who does not consider alternatives is in a situation of confidence, whereas someone who does recognise those alternatives and tries to counter the risks thus acknowledged, engages in trust. In a situation of confidence, a person reacts to disappointment by blaming others; in circumstances of trust she or he must partly shoulder the blame and may regret having placed trust in someone or something.

DEFINE: Luhmann's distinction between trust and confidence hinges on whether the individual consciously considers alternatives and shoulders blame for risks.

Trust is related to absence in time and in space. There would be no need to trust anyone whose activities were continually visible and whose thought processes were transparent, or to trust any system whose workings were wholly known and understood. It has been said that trust is “a device for coping with the freedom of others,”30but the prime condition of requirements for trust is not lack of power but lack of full information.

QUESTION: If trust is required only where information is incomplete, does better surveillance or transparency erode trust rather than build it? This connects to modern debates about institutional transparency.

Trust is basically bound up, not with risk, but with contingency. Trust always carries the connotation of reliability in the face of contingent outcomes, whether these concern the actions of individuals or the operation of systems. In the case of trust in human agents, the presumption of reliability involves the attribution of “probity” (honour) or love. This is why trust in persons is psychologically consequential for the individual who trusts: a moral hostage to fortune is given.

Trust is not the same as faith in the reliability of a person or system; it is what derives from that faith. Trust is precisely the link between faith and confidence, and it is this which distinguishes it from “weak inductive knowledge.” The latter is confidence based upon some sort of mastery of the circumstances in which confidence is justified. All trust is in a certain sense blind trust!

DEFINE: Distinguishes trust from both blind faith and 'weak inductive knowledge,' which is confidence grounded in mastery of circumstances.

Trust may be defined as confidence in the reliability of a person or system, regarding a given set of outcomes or events, where that confidence expresses a faith in the probity or love of another, or in the correctness of abstract principles (technical knowledge).

DEFINE: Provides a working definition of trust that spans both personal relationships and confidence in abstract systems or technical knowledge.

In conditions of modernity, trust exists in the context of (a) the general awareness that human activity—including within this phrase the impact of technology upon the material world—is socially created, rather than given in the nature of things or by divine influence; (b) the vastly increased transformative scope of human action, brought about by the dynamic character of modern social institutions. The concept of risk replaces that of fortuna, but this is not because agents in pre-modern times could not distinguish between risk and danger. Rather it represents an alteration in the perception of determination and contingency, such that human moral imperatives, natural causes, and chance reign in place of religious cosmologies.

DEFINE: Clarifies the modern concept of trust by contrasting it with pre-modern fortuna, situating it within risk perception and human agency.

Danger and risk are closely related but are not the same. The difference does not depend upon whether or not an individual consciously weighs alternatives in contemplating or undertaking a particular course of action. What risk presumes is precisely danger (not necessarily awareness of danger). A person who risks something courts danger, where danger is understood as a threat to desired outcomes. Anyone who takes a “calculated risk” is aware of the threat or threats which a specific course of action brings into play. But it is certainly possible to undertake actions or to be subject to situations which are inherently risky without the individuals involved being aware how risky they are. In other words, they are unaware of the dangers they run.

DEFINE: Distinguishes risk from danger, clarifying that risk presumes danger without requiring awareness of it.

Risk is not just a matter of individual action. There are “environments of risk” that collectively affect large masses of individuals—in some instances, potentially everyone on the face of the earth, as in the case of the risk of ecological disaster or nuclear war. We may define “security” as a situation in which a specific set of dangers is counteracted or minimised. The experience of security usually rests upon a balance of trust and acceptable risk.

DEFINE: Defines 'security' as a situation where a specific set of dangers is counteracted or minimized, distinguishing it from individual risk-taking.

In traditional cultures, the past is honoured and symbols are valued because they contain and perpetuate the experience of generations. Tradition is a mode of integrating the reflexive monitoring of action with the time-space organisation of the community. It is a means of handling time and space, which inserts any particular activity or experience within the continuity of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices. Tradition is not wholly static, because it has to be reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it. Tradition does not so much resist change as pertain to a context in which there are few separated temporal and spatial markers in terms of which change can have any meaningful form.

DEFINE: Defines tradition as a mode of integrating reflection with time-space organisation, rather than as mere static resistance to change. XREF: Connects to Giddens' broader social theory of time-space distanciation and reflexivity in modernity.

With the advent of modernity, reflexivity takes on a different character. It is introduced into the very basis of system reproduction, such that thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one another. The routinisation of daily life has no intrinsic connections with the past at all, save in so far as what “was done before” happens to coincide with what can be defended in a principled way in the light of incoming knowledge. To sanction a practice because it is traditional will not do; tradition can be justified, but only in the light of knowledge which is not itself authenticated by tradition. Combined with the inertia of habit, this means that, even in the most modernised of modern societies, tradition continues to play a role. But this role is generally much less significant than is supposed by authors who focus attention upon the integration of tradition and modernity in the contemporary world. For justified tradition is tradition in sham clothing and receives its identity only from the reflexivity of the modern.

DEFINE: Clarifies that modern reflexivity reframes tradition's basis — justified tradition is tradition 'in sham clothing,' authenticated by knowledge rather than by itself.

The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character. We should be clear about the nature of this phenomenon. All forms of social life are partly constituted by actors' knowledge of them. Knowing “how to go on” in Wittgenstein's sense is intrinsic to the conventions which are drawn upon and reproduced by human activity. In all cultures, social practices are routinely altered in the light of ongoing discoveries which feed into them. But only in the era of modernity is the revision of convention radicalised to apply (in principle) to all aspects of human life, including technological intervention into the material world. It is often said that modernity is marked by an appetite for the new, but this is not perhaps completely accurate. What is characteristic of modernity is not an embracing of the new for its own sake, but the presumption of wholesale reflexivity—which of course includes reflection upon the nature of reflection itself.

XREF: This echoes Giddens' reflexive modernization thesis and connects to broader social theory on how self-monitoring reshapes institutions.

Probably we are only now, in the late twentieth century, beginning to realise in a full sense how deeply unsettling this outlook is. For when the claims of reason replaced those of tradition, they appeared to offer a sense of certitude greater than that provided by preexisting dogma. But this idea only appears persuasive so long as we do not see that the reflexivity of modernity actually subverts reason, at any rate where reason is understood as the gaining of certain knowledge. Modernity is constituted in and through reflexively applied knowledge, but the equation of knowledge with certitude has turned out to be misconceived. We are abroad in a world which is thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge, but where at the same time we can never be sure that any given element of that knowledge will not be revised.

DEFINE: Clarifies 'reflexivity of modernity' — the idea that knowledge applied back onto society is inherently revisable, so certitude is unreachable.

No knowledge under conditions of modernity is knowledge in the “old” sense, where “to know” is to be certain. This applies equally to the natural and the social sciences. In the case of social science, however, there are further considerations involved.

DEFINE: Contrasts the old sense of 'to know' (being certain) with modern knowledge as provisional and conditional.

In the social sciences, to the unsettled character of all empirically based knowledge we have to add the “subversion” which comes from the reentry of social scientific discourse into the contexts it analyses. The reflection of which the social sciences are the formalised version (a specific genre of expert knowledge) is quite fundamental to the reflexivity of modernity as a whole.

Because of the close relation between the Enlightenment and advocacy of the claims of reason, natural science has usually been taken as the preeminent endeavour distinguishing the modern outlook from what went before. Even those who favour interpretative rather than naturalistic sociology have normally seen social science as the poor relation of the natural sciences, particularly given the scale of technological development consequent upon scientific discoveries. But the social sciences are actually more deeply implicated in modernity than is natural science, since the chronic revision of social practices in the light of knowledge about those practices is part of the very tissue of modern institutions.

XREF: Connects to reflexive modernization theories and discussions of knowledge-driven social change.

Modern economic activity would not be as it is were it not for the fact that all members of the population have mastered these concepts and an indefinite variety of others. … Concepts such as these, and the theories and empirical information linked to them, are not merely handy devices whereby agents are somehow more clearly able to understand their behaviour than they could do otherwise. They actively constitute what that behaviour is and inform the reasons for which it is undertaken.

From its inception, the collation of official statistics has been constitutive of state power and of many other modes of social organisation also. The co-ordinated administrative control achieved by modern governments is inseparable from the routine monitoring of "official data" in which all contemporary states engage.

DEFINE: Defines the constitutive relationship between data collection and governance — statistics aren't neutral records but are generative of administrative control.

Anyone in a Western country who embarks upon marriage today, for instance, knows that divorce rates are high (and may also, however imperfectly or partially, know a great deal more about the demography of marriage and the family). Knowledge of the high rate of divorce might affect the very decision to marry, as well as decisions about related considerations—provisions about property and so forth. Awareness of levels of divorce, moreover, is normally much more than just consciousness of a brute fact. It is theorised by the lay agent in ways pervaded by sociological thinking. Thus virtually everyone contemplating marriage has some idea of how family institutions have been changing, changes in the relative social position and power of men and women, alterations in sexual mores, etc.—all of which enter into processes of further change which they reflexively inform. Marriage and the family would not be what they are today were they not thoroughly "sociologised" and "psychologised."

XREF: This echoes the structure/agency and reflexivity debates in social theory — the double hermeneutic Giddens himself is famous for. SEED: A piece could explore how knowing divorce rates alters actual marriage decisions — a self-fulfilling or self-negating statistical loop.

Hence the thesis that more knowledge about social life (even if that knowledge is as well buttressed empirically as it could possibly be) equals greater control over our fate is false. It is (arguably) true about the physical world, but not about the universe of social events.

XREF: Echoes the principal-agent and reflexivity problems familiar from social theory; contrasts with the physical sciences where prediction enables control.

The point is not that there is no stable social world to know, but that knowledge of that world contributes to its unstable or mutable character.

Knowledge claimed by expert observers (in some part, and in many varying ways) rejoins its subject matter, thus (in principle, but also normally in practice) altering it. There is no parallel to this process in the natural sciences; it is not at all the same as where, in the field of microphysics, the intervention of an observer changes what is being studied.

XREF: Relates to Giddens's double hermeneutic; knowledge in social sciences re-enters and transforms its subject matter in a feedback loop unlike physics.

Enlightenment thought, and Western culture in general, emerged from a religious context which emphasised teleology and the achievement of God’s grace. Divine providence had long been a guiding idea of Christian thought. Without these preceding orientations, the Enlightenment would scarcely have been possible in the first place. It is in no way surprising that the advocacy of unfettered reason only reshaped the ideas of the providential, rather than displacing it. One type of certainty (divine law) was replaced by another (the certainty of our senses, of empirical observation), and divine providence was replaced by providential progress.

If the sphere of reason is wholly unfettered, no knowledge can rest upon an unquestioned foundation, because even the most firmly held notions can only be regarded as valid “in principle” or “until further notice.” Otherwise they would relapse into dogma and become separate from the very sphere of reason which determines what validity is in the first place.

QUESTION: Does this imply that any foundational belief is inherently dogmatic? Worth probing what 'until further notice' knowledge looks like in practice.

Modernity turns out to be enigmatic at its core, and there seems no way in which this enigma can be “overcome.” We are left with questions where once there appeared to be answers, and I shall argue subsequently that it is not only philosophers who realise this.

QUESTION: What specific questions replace the old answers of modernity? This framing suggests the author will elaborate on what precisely remains unknowable in modern experience.

Rather than these developments taking us “beyond modernity,” they provide a fuller understanding of the reflexivity inherent in modernity itself. Modernity is not only unsettling because of the circularity of reason, but because the nature of that circularity is ultimately puzzling. How can we justify a commitment to reason in the name of reason?

The disjunctions which have taken place should rather be seen as resulting from the self-clarification of modern thought, as the remnants of tradition and providential outlooks are cleared away. We have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalisation.

XREF: Echoes Latour's 'We Have Never Been Modern' and debates about postmodernism, suggesting continuity rather than rupture.

The declining grip of the West over the rest of the world is not a result of the diminishing impact of the institutions which first arose there but, on the contrary, a result of their global spread.

The separation of time and space. This is the condition of time-space distanciation of indefinite scope; it provides means of precise temporal and spatial zoning. … The development of disembedding mechanisms. These “lift out” social activity from localised contexts, reorganising social relations across large time-space distances. … The reflexive appropriation of knowledge. The production of systematic knowledge about social life becomes integral to system reproduction, rolling social life away from the fixities of tradition.

Yet, writing in 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War, H. G. Wells did make such a prediction, influenced by the physicist Frederick Soddy, a collaborator of Ernest Rutherford. Wells’s book, The World Set Free, recounts the story of a war which erupts in Europe in 1958, from there spreading throughout the world. In the war, a terrible weapon is used, constructed from a radioactive substance called Carolinum. Hundreds of these bombs, which Wells called “atomic bombs,” are dropped on the world’s cities, causing immense devastation.

XREF: Wells's 1914 prediction predates the atomic bomb's real-world development by three decades, a notable example of fiction anticipating technology.

Capitalism is a system of commodity production, centred upon the relation between private ownership of capital and propertyless wage labour, this relation forming the main axis of a class system. Capitalist enterprise depends upon production for competitive markets, prices being signals for investors, producers, and consumers alike.

DEFINE: Provides a precise definition of capitalism centered on the capital-wage labor class relation and market-determined prices.

Industrialism presupposes the regularised social organisation of production in order to coordinate human activity, machines, and the inputs and outputs of raw materials and goods. Industrialism should not be understood in too narrow a sense—as its origin in the "Industrial Revolution" tempts us to do. That phrase conjures up an imagery of coal and steam power and of large, heavy machinery clanking away in grubby workshops and factories. No less than to such situations, the notion of industrialism applies to high-technology settings where electricity is the only power source, and where electronic microcircuits are the only mechanised devices. Industrialism, moreover, affects not only the workplace but transportation, communication, and domestic life.

DEFINE: Clarifies that industrialism refers to regularized social organisation of production broadly, not just coal-and-steam imagery.

But why is capitalist society a society at all? This question is left unanswered if we simply characterise the capitalist social order in terms of its main institutional alignments. For, given its expansionist characteristics, capitalistic economic life is only in a few respects confined to the boundaries of specific social systems. From its early origins capitalism is international in scope. A capitalist society is a "society" only because it is a nation-state. The characteristics of the nation-state in some substantial part must be explained and analysed separately from discussion of the nature of either capitalism or industrialism. The administrative system of the capitalist state, and of modern states in general, has to be interpreted in terms of the coordinated control over delimited territorial arenas which it achieves.

Surveillance refers to the supervision of the activities of subject populations in the political sphere—although its importance as a basis of administrative power is by no means confined to that sphere. Supervision may be direct (as in many of the instances discussed by Foucault, such as prisons, schools, or open workplaces), but more characteristically it is indirect and based upon the control of information.

DEFINE: Establishes surveillance as political supervision of subject populations, clarifying that its administrative use reaches beyond the political sphere and typically operates indirectly through information control.

There is a fourth institutional dimension to be distinguished: control of the means of violence. Military power was always a central feature of pre-modern civilisations. Yet in those civilisations the political centre was never able for long to secure stable military support and typically fell short of securing a monopoly control of the means of violence within its territories. The military strength of the ruling authorities depended upon alliances with local princes or warlords, who were always liable either to break away from or directly to challenge the ruling groups. The successful monopoly of the means of violence within territorially precise borders is distinctive to the modern state. So also is the existence of specific links to industrialism, permeating both the organisation of the military and the weaponry at their disposal. The "industrialisation of war" radically changes the character of warfare, ushering in an era of "total war" and later the nuclear age.

XREF: Connects to Weber's definition of the state as the entity holding a monopoly on legitimate violence.

War, for Clausewitz, was diplomacy by other means: it was what is used when ordinary negotiation or other modes of persuasion or coersion fail in the relations between states. Total war blunts the use of war as a political instrument, since the sufferings inflicted on both sides tend to far outweigh whatever diplomatic gains may be achieved through it. The possibility of nuclear war makes this obvious.

XREF: Recalls Clausewitz's 'On War' and the concept of war as a continuation of policy by other means; connects to debates about whether modern weapons have eliminated that logic. QUESTION: Does this imply diplomacy becomes more viable when war is too destructive to use, or does it just shift coercion to other domains (economic, cyber)?

Globalisation refers essentially to that stretching process, in so far as the modes of connection between different social contexts or regions become networked across the earth's surface as a whole. … Globalisation can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.

This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local transformation is as much a part of globalisation as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space. … The increasing prosperity of an urban area in Singapore might be causally related, via a complicated network of global economic ties, to the impoverishment of a neighbourhood in Pittsburgh whose local products are uncompetitive in world markets.

DEFINE: Clarifies the meaning of dialectical process in the context of globalization — that local happenings can run counter to global-scale relations.

The sovereign power of modern states was not formed prior to their involvement in the nation-state system, even in the European state system, but developed in conjunction with it. Indeed, the sovereignty of the modern state was from the first dependent upon the relations between states, in terms of which each state (in principle if by no means always in practice) recognised the autonomy of others within their own borders.

XREF: Connects to constructivist IR theory and the notion that states and the interstate system are mutually constitutive rather than sequential.

What he refers to as "world economies"—networks of economic connections of a geographically extensive sort—have existed prior to modern times, but these were notably different from the world system that has developed over the past three or four centuries. Earlier world economies were usually centred upon large imperial states and never covered more than certain regions in which the power of these states was concentrated. The emergence of capitalism, as Wallerstein analyses it, ushers in a quite different type of order, for the first time genuinely global in its span and based more on economic than political power—the "world capitalist economy."

DEFINE: Distinguishes Wallerstein's world economies (regional, imperial) from the modern world capitalist economy (genuinely global, economic power).

"Capitalism was from the beginning an affair of the world economy and not of nation-states… . Capital has never allowed its aspirations to be determined by national boundaries." Capitalism has been such a fundamental globalising influence precisely because it is an economic rather than a political order; it has been able to penetrate far-flung areas of the world which the states of its origin could not have brought wholly under their political sway.

DEFINE: Clarifies that capitalism's nature as an economic order rather than a political one explains its uniquely global penetration.

All nation-states, capitalist and state socialist, within the “developed” sectors of the world, are primarily reliant upon industrial production for the generation of the wealth upon which their tax revenues are based. The socialist countries form something of an enclave within the capitalist world economy as a whole, industry being more directly subject to political imperatives. These states are scarcely post-capitalist, but the influence of capitalistic markets upon the distribution of goods and labour power is substantially muted. The pursuit of growth by both Western and East European societies inevitably pushes economic interests to the forefront of the policies which states pursue in the international arena. But it is surely plain to all, save those under the sway of historical materialism, that the material involvements of nation-states are not governed purely by economic considerations, real or perceived. The influence of any particular state within the global political order is strongly conditioned by the level of its wealth (and the connection between this and military strength). However, states derive their power from their sovereign capabilities, as Hans J. Morgenthau emphasises. They do not operate as economic machines, but as “actors” jealous of their territorial rights, concerned with the fostering of national cultures, and having strategic geopolitical involvements with other states or alliances of states.

One aspect of the dialectical nature of globalisation is the “push and pull” between tendencies towards centralisation inherent in the reflexivity of the system of states on the one hand and the sovereignty of particular states on the other. Thus, concerted action between countries in some respects diminishes the individual sovereignty of the nations involved, yet by combining their power in other ways, it increases their influence within the state system.

DEFINE: Explains the dialectical tension in globalisation between state sovereignty and centralisation inherent to reflexivity.

In the current period, the two most militarily developed states, the United States and the Soviet Union, have built a bipolar system of military alliances of truly global scope. The countries involved in these alliances necessarily accept limitations over their opportunities to forge independent military strategies externally. They may also forfeit complete monopoly of military control within their own territories, in so far as American or Soviet forces stationed there take their orders from abroad. Yet, as a result of the massive destructive power of modern weaponry, almost all states possess military strength far in excess of that of even the largest of pre-modern civilisations. Many economically weak Third World countries are militarily powerful. In an important sense there is no “Third World” in respect of weaponry, only a “First World,” since most countries maintain stocks of technologically advanced armaments and have modernised the military in a thoroughgoing way. Even the possession of nuclear weaponry is not confined to the economically advanced states.

XREF: Connects to the author's broader argument about how military technology reshapes state power and sovereignty in the modern nation-state system.

In an era of nuclear weaponry, the industrialisation of war has proceeded to a point at which, as was mentioned earlier, the obsolescence of Clausewitz’s main doctrine has become apparent to everyone. The only point of holding nuclear weapons—apart from their possible symbolic value in world politics—is to deter others from using them.

While this situation may lead to a suspension of war between the nuclear powers (or so we all must hope), it scarcely prevents them from engaging in military adventures outside their own territorial domains. The two superpowers in particular engage in what might be called “orchestrated wars” in peripheral areas of military strength. By these I mean military encounters, with the governments of other states or with guerilla movements or both, in which the troops of the superpower are not necessarily even engaged at all, but where that power is a prime organising influence.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'orchestrated wars' — conflicts where a superpower organizes but does not necessarily directly field troops.

There has undoubtedly taken place a major expansion of global interdependence in the division of labour since the Second World War. This has helped to bring about shifts in the worldwide distribution of production, including the deindustrialisation of some regions in the developed countries and the emergence of the “Newly Industrialising Countries” in the Third World. It has also undoubtedly served to reduce the internal economic hegemony of many states, particularly those with a high level of industrialisation. It is more difficult for the capitalist countries to manage their economies than formerly was the case, given accelerating global economic interdependence. This is almost certainly one of the major reasons for the declining impact of Keynesian economic policies, as applied at the level of the national economy, in current times.

The diffusion of industrialism has created “one world” in a more negative and threatening sense than that just mentioned—a world in which there are actual or potential ecological changes of a harmful sort that affect everyone on the planet. Yet industrialism has also decisively conditioned our very sense of living in “one world.” For one of the most important effects of industrialism has been the transformation of technologies of communication.

XREF: Connects to global environmental interdependence discussions and the relationship between technological and perceptual change.

This comment leads on to a further and quite fundamental aspect of globalisation, which lies behind each of the various institutional dimensions that have been mentioned and which might be referred to as cultural globalisation. Mechanised technologies of communication have dramatically influenced all aspects of globalisation since the first introduction of mechanical printing into Europe. They form an essential element of the reflexivity of modernity and of the discontinuities which have torn the modern away from the traditional.

DEFINE: Introduces 'cultural globalisation' as a foundational dimension lying behind institutional dimensions of globalization, rooted in mechanized communication technologies.

It is that the global extension of the institutions of modernity would be impossible were it not for the pooling of knowledge which is represented by the “news.” This is perhaps less obvious on the level of general cultural awareness than in more specific contexts. For example, the global money markets of today involve direct and simultaneous access to pooled information on the part of individuals spatially widely separated from one another.

DEFINE: Clarifies how 'pooling of knowledge' via news underlies modernity's global extension, using global money markets as a concrete example.

We can find a starting point for this discussion in the familiar sociological observation that in modern social life many people, much of the time, interact with others who are strangers to them. As Simmel pointed out, the meaning of the term “stranger” changes with the coming of modernity. In pre-modern cultures, where the local community always remains the basis of wider social organisation, the “stranger” refers to a “whole person”—someone who comes from the outside and who is potentially suspect. There may be many respects in which a person moving into a small community from elsewhere fails to receive the trust of the insiders, even perhaps after having lived in that community for many years. In modern societies, by contrast, we do not characteristically interact with strangers as “whole people” in the same way. Particularly in many urban settings, we interact more or less continuously with others whom we either do not know well or have never met before—but this interaction takes the form of relatively fleeting contacts.

XREF: Connects to Simmel's sociology of the stranger and the character of urban anonymity, resonating with literature on the modern metropolis and urban alienation.

It is extremely important to be clear about what this involves. The reliance placed by lay actors upon expert systems is not just a matter—as was normally the case in the pre-modern world—of generating a sense of security about an independently given universe of events. It is a matter of the calculation of benefit and risk in circumstances where expert knowledge does not just provide that calculus but actually creates (or reproduces) the universe of events, as a result of the continual reflexive implementation of that very knowledge.

DEFINE: Clarifies the distinctive character of reflexive modernity: lay reliance on expert systems goes beyond reassurance about a pre-given world, instead constituting that world through the implementation of expert knowledge.

One of the things this means, in a situation in which many aspects of modernity have become globalised, is that no one can completely opt out of the abstract systems involved in modern institutions. This is most obviously the case in respect of such phenomena as the risk of nuclear war or of ecological catastrophe. But it is true in a more thoroughgoing way of large tracts of day-to-day life, as it is lived by most of the population. Individuals in pre-modern settings, in principle and in practice, could ignore the pronouncements of priests, sages, and sorcerers and get on with the routines of daily activity. But this is not the case in the modern world, in respect of expert knowledge.

Control of the threshold between the frontand backstage is part of the essence of professionalism. Why do experts keep concealed from others a good deal of what they do? One reason is quite straightforward: the exercise of expertise often requires specialised environments, as well as concerted mental concentration, which would be difficult to achieve in public view. But there are other reasons. There is a difference between expertise and the expert, which those who work at access points ordinarily wish to minimise as far as possible. Experts can get things wrong, by misinterpreting or being ignorant of expertise they are presumed to possess.

XREF: Connects to Goffman's frontstage/backstage dramaturgy and the sociology of professional discretion.

Trust mechanisms do not relate only to the connections between lay persons and experts: they are also bound up with the activities of those who are “within” abstract systems. Codes of professional ethics, in some cases backed by legal sanctions, form one means whereby the trustworthiness of colleagues or associates is internally managed. Yet even for those who might seem most intrinsically committed to the abstract systems they sustain, facework commitments are generally important as a mode of generating continuing trustworthiness. This forms one type of example of the reembedding of social relations. Re-embedding here represents a means of anchoring trust in the trustworthiness and integrity of colleagues.

Trust in systems takes the form of faceless commitments, in which faith is sustained in the workings of knowledge of which the lay person is largely ignorant. … Trust in persons involves facework commitments, in which indicators of the integrity of others (within given arenas of action) are sought. … Reembedding refers to processes by means of which faceless commitments are sustained or transformed by facework.

DEFINE: Giddens distinguishes faceless commitments (trust in expert systems) from facework commitments (trust in persons), with reembedding as the process connecting them.

However, at the same time, lay attitudes to science and to technical knowledge generally are typically ambivalent. This is an ambivalence that lies at the core of all trust relations, whether it be trust in abstract systems or in individuals. For trust is only demanded where there is ignorance—either of the knowledge claims of technical experts or of the thoughts and intentions of intimates upon whom a person relies. Yet ignorance always provides grounds for scepticism or at least caution.

DEFINE: Defines trust in terms of its precondition: ignorance or lack of direct knowledge creates the space in which trust becomes necessary.

Many people, as it were, make a “bargain with modernity” in terms of the trust they vest in symbolic tokens and expert systems. The nature of the bargain is governed by specific admixtures of deference and scepticism, comfort and fear. Though we cannot escape the impact of modern institutions altogether, within the broad scope of attitudes of pragmatic acceptance many possible orientations can exist (or coexist, in true ambivalence). An individual may choose to move to a different area, for example, rather than drink fluoridated water, or drink bottled water rather than use that from the tap. It would be an extreme attitude, however, to refuse to use piped water altogether.

In conditions of modernity, attitudes of trust towards abstract systems are usually routinely incorporated into the continuity of day-to-day activities and are to a large extent enforced by the intrinsic circumstances of daily life. Thus trust is much less of a “leap to commitment” than a tacit acceptance of circumstances in which other alternatives are largely foreclosed.

XREF: Connects to Giddens on trust in abstract systems and to broader sociological work on tacit knowledge and routine in modernity.

In some cases, a person who has unfortunate experiences at a given access point, where the technical skills in question are relatively low-level, may decide to opt out of the client-layperson relationship. Thus someone who finds that the “experts” she employs consistently fail to fix the central heating properly may decide to fix it herself by learning the basic principles involved. In other instances bad experiences at access points may lead either to a sort of resigned cynicism or, where this is possible, to disengagement from the system altogether* An individual who invests in certain shares on the advice of a stockbroker and who loses money might decide to hold money in a credit account instead. That person might even resolve to hold assets only in gold in the future. But once again, it would be very difficult to disengage from the monetary system completely, and this could only be done if the individual were to try to live in self-sufficient poverty.

Ontological security is one form, but a very important form, of feelings of security in the wide sense in which I have used the term earlier. The phrase refers to the confidence that most humans beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action. A sense of the reliability of persons and things, so central to the notion of trust, is basic to feelings of ontological security; hence the two are psychologically closely related.

DEFINE: Giddens defines ontological security as confidence in the continuity of self-identity and constancy of surrounding social and material environments, closely tied to trust.

Trust in others is developed in conjunction with the formation of an inner sense of trustworthiness, which provides a basis of a stable self-identity subsequently. Hence very early on trust implies a mutuality of experience.

But, even under the most favourable circumstances, this stage seems to introduce psychic life (and become prototypical for) a sense of inner division and universal nostalgia for a paradise forfeited. It is against this powerful combination of a sense of having been deprived, of having been divided, and of having been abandoned that basic trust must maintain itself throughout life.

DEFINE: Erickson frames basic trust as a lifelong achievement maintained against deprivation, division, and abandonment — recasting trust not as a given but as a hard-won equilibrium.

Crucial to the intersection of trust with emergent social capabilities on the part of the infant, therefore, is absence. Here, at the heart of the psychological development of trust, we rediscover the problematic of time-space distanciation. For a fundamental feature of the early formation of trust is trust in the caretaker’s return. A feeling of the reliability, yet independent experience, of others—central to a sense of continuity of self-identity—is predicated upon the recognition that the absence of the mother does not represent a withdrawal of love. Trust thus brackets distance in time and space and so blocks off existential anxieties which, if they were allowed to concretise, might become a source of continuing emotional and behavioural anguish throughout life.

XREF: Connects to object relations theory (Winnicott) and the 'good enough mother' concept, and to developmental psychology on attachment and object permanence.

Trust, ontological security, and a feeling of the continuity of things and persons remain closely bound up with one another in the adult personality. Trust in the reliability of nonhuman objects, it follows from this analysis, is based upon a more primitive faith in the reliability and nurturance of human individuals. Trust in others is a psychological need of a persistent and recurrent kind. Drawing assurance from the reliability or integrity of others is a sort of emotional regrooving which accompanies the experience of familiar social and material environments. Ontological security and routine are intimately connected, via the pervasive influence of habit. The infant’s early caretakers normally place an overriding importance upon the following of routines, a matter of both intense frustration and reward for the infant. The predictability of the (apparently) minor routines of day-to-day life is deeply involved with a sense of psychological security. When such routines are shattered—for whatever reason—anxieties come flooding in, and even very firmly founded aspects of the personality of the individual may become stripped away and altered.

In facework engagements themselves, the sustaining of basic trust is accomplished through the chronic monitoring of the gaze, bodily posture, and gesture, and the conventions of orthodox conversation.

DEFINE: Defines how 'facework engagements' operationally sustain basic trust through non-verbal cues and conversational conventions.

Obviously there are circumstances where the absence of trust could be adequately characterised as mistrust, either in respect of abstract systems or persons. The term “mistrust” applies most easily when we are speaking of the relation of an agent to a specific system, individual, or type of individual. In respect of abstract systems, mistrust means being sceptical about, or having an actively negative attitude toward, the claims to expertise that system incorporates. In the case of persons, it means doubting or disbelieving the claims to integrity their actions embody or display. However, “mistrust” is too weak a term to express the antithesis of basic trust, the focal element in a generalised set of relations to the social and physical environment. The forging of trust here is the very condition of acknowledging the clear identity of objects and persons. If basic trust is not developed or its inherent ambivalence not contained, the outcome is persistent existential anxiety. In its most profound sense, the antithesis of trust is thus a state of mind which could best be summed up as existential angst or dread.

DEFINE: Distinguishes mistrust (of specific systems/persons) from the deeper antithesis of basic trust, which psychologists conceptualize as existential dread.

In all pre-modern cultures, including the large agrarian civilisations, for reasons already discussed, the level of time-space distanciation is relatively low as compared with conditions of modernity. Ontological security in the pre-modern world has to be understood primarily in relation to contexts of trust, and forms of risk or danger, anchored in the local circumstances of place. Because of its inherent connection with absence, trust is always bound up with modes of organising “reliable” interactions across time-space.

The first context of trust is the kinship system, which in most pre-modern settings provides a relatively stable mode of organising “bundles” of social relations across time and space. Kinship connections are often a focus of tension and conflict. But however many conflicts they involve and anxieties they provoke, they are very generally bonds which can be relied upon in the structuring of actions in fields of time-space. This is true on the level of both fairly impersonal and more personal connections. In other words, kinspeople can usually be relied upon to meet a range of obligations more or less regardless of whether they feel personally sympathetic towards the specific individuals involved. Moreover, kinship often does provide a stabilising network of amicable or intimate relations which endure across time-space. Kinship, in sum, provides a nexus of reliable social connections which, in principle and very commonly in practice, form an organising medium of trust relations.

Much the same can be said of the local community. We should avoid the romanticised view of community which has often surfaced in social analysis when traditional cultures are compared to the modern. I mean here to stress the importance of localised relations organised in terms of place, where place has not yet become transformed by distanciated time-space relations. In the large majority of pre-modern settings, including most cities, the local milieu is the site of clusters of interweaving social relations, the low spatial span of which provides for their solidity in time.

Tradition is routine. But it is routine which is intrinsically meaningful, rather than merely empty habit for habit's sake. Time and space are not the contentless dimensions they become with the development of modernity but are contextually implicated in the nature of lived activities. The meanings of routine activities lie in the general respect or even reverence intrinsic to tradition and in the connection of tradition with ritual. Ritual often has a compulsive aspect to it, but it is also deeply comforting, for it infuses a given set of practices with a sacramental quality. Tradition, in sum, contributes in basic fashion to ontological security in so far as it sustains trust in the continuity of past, present, and future, and connects such trust to routinised social practices.

DEFINE: Giddens defines tradition as intrinsically meaningful routine, contrasting it with modernity's contentless time and space.

To specify these various contexts of trust in pre-modern cultures is not to say that traditional settings were comforting and psychologically snug, while modern ones are not. There are some definite respects in which levels of ontological insecurity are higher in the modern world than in most circumstances of pre-modern social life, for reasons I shall try to identify. Yet the settings of traditional cultures were in a generic way fraught with anxieties and uncertainties. I refer to these, taken together, as the environment of risk characteristic of the pre-modern world.

To the unstable nature of social life in relation to the physical world we have to add, as a further source of insecurity, the prevalence of human violence. The major contrasts to be drawn here are between the larger pre-modern social orders and the modern social universe. The level of violence within and between hunting and gathering cultures appears generally to have been quite low, and there were no specialised warriors. With the appearance of armed soldiery, the situation is quite different. Most agrarian states were based in a very direct way upon military power. Yet, as was mentioned earlier, in such states the monopoly of control of the means of violence on the part of the ruling authorities was always far from complete. Such states were never internally pacified by the standards of modern nation-states.

The primacy of place in pre-modern settings has been largely destroyed by disembedding and time-space distanciation. Place has become phantasmagoric because the structures by means of which it is constituted are no longer locally organised. The local and the global, in other words, have become inextricably intertwined. Feelings of close attachment to or identification with places still persist. But these are themselves disembedded: they do not just express locally based practices and involvements but are shot through with much more distant influences. Even the smallest of neighbourhood stores, for example, probably obtains its goods from all over the world. The local community is not a saturated environment of familiar, taken-for-granted meanings, but in some large part a locally-situated expression of distanciated relations.

DEFINE: Introduces 'phantasmagoric place' and 'time-space distanciation' as key concepts describing how locality is reconstituted by global forces.

In conditions of modernity, the dangers we face no longer derive primarily from the world of nature. Of course, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters still occur. But for the most part our relations with the physical world are radically different from those of previous ages—especially in the industrialised sectors of the globe, but in some degree everywhere. At first glance, the ecological dangers that we confront today might seem similar to the hazards of nature encountered in the pre-modern era. The contrast, however, is a very marked one. Ecological threats are the outcome of socially organised knowledge, mediated by the impact of industrialism upon the material environment. They are part of what I shall call a new risk profile introduced by the advent of modernity.

DEFINE: Introduces 'new risk profile'—ecological threats as socially organized, industrialized hazards distinct from pre-modern natural dangers.

Where risk is known to be risk, it is experienced differently from circumstances in which notions of fortuna prevail. To recognise the existence of a risk or set of risks is to accept not just the possibility that things might go wrong, but that this possibility cannot be eliminated. The phenomenology of such a situation is part of the cultural experience of modernity in general, discussed in more detail below. Even where the hold of traditional religion becomes relaxed, however, conceptions of fate do not wholly disappear. Precisely where risks are greatest—either in terms of the perceived probability that an unwelcome happening will occur or in terms of the devastating consequences that ensue if a given event goes awry—fortuna tends to return.

QUESTION: Modernity's risk framing coexists with fate; where exactly does the boundary between them break down in practice?

Abstract systems have provided a great deal of security in day-to-day life which was absent in pre-modern orders. A person can board a plane in London and reach Los Angeles some ten hours later and be fairly certain that not only will the journey be made safely, but that the plane will arrive quite close to a predetermined time. The passenger may perhaps only have a vague idea of where Los Angeles is, in terms of a global map. Only minimal preparations need to be made for the journey (obtaining passport, visa, air-ticket, and money)—no knowledge of the actual trajectory is necessary. A large amount of "surrounding" knowledge is required to be able to get on the plane, and this is knowledge which has been filtered back from expert systems to lay discourse and action. One has to know what an airport is, what an air-ticket is, and very many other things besides. But security on the journey itself does not depend upon mastery of the technical paraphernalia which make it possible.

XREF: Connects to sociological theorizing on trust in expert systems (Giddens' own framework of disembedding) and how modern institutions function on distributed ignorance.

Trust in abstract systems is the condition of time-space distanciation and of the large areas of security in day-today life which modern institutions offer as compared to the traditional world. The routines which are integrated with abstract systems are central to ontological security in conditions of modernity. Yet this situation also creates novel forms of psychological vulnerability, and trust in abstract systems is not psychologically rewarding in the way in which trust in persons is. I shall concentrate on the second of these points here, returning to the first later. To begin, I want to advance the following theorems: that there is a direct (although dialectical) connection between the globalising tendencies of modernity and what I shall call the transformation of intimacy in contexts of day-today life; that the transformation of intimacy can be analysed in terms of the building of trust mechanisms; and that personal trust relations, in such circumstances, are closely bound up with a situation in which the construction of the self becomes a reflexive project.

DEFINE: Introduces Giddens' concepts of abstract systems, time-space distanciation, and ontological security in connection to trust mechanisms.

In the early development of the human individual, basic trust in stable circumstances of self-identity and the surrounding environment—ontological security—does not in the first instance rest upon a sense of the continuity of things or events. Rather, as we have noted, it derives from personal trust and establishes a need for trust in others which no doubt endures, in some form or another, throughout life. Trust in persons, as Erikson emphasises, is built upon mutuality of response and involvement: faith in the integrity of another is a prime source of a feeling of integrity and authenticity of the self. Trust in abstract systems provides for the security of day-to-day reliability, but by its very nature cannot supply either the mutuality or intimacy which personal trust relations offer. In this respect traditional religions are plainly different from modern abstract systems, because their personalised figures allow for a direct transfer of individual trust, with large elements of mutuality. In the case of abstract systems, by contrast, trust presumes faith in impersonal principles, which "answer back" only in a statistical way when they do not deliver the outcomes which the individual seeks. This is one of the main reasons why individuals at access points normally go to great pains to show themselves to be trustworthy: they provide the link between personal and system trust.

Established sociological accounts of what I am terming the transformation of intimacy have mostly juxtaposed the communal character of traditional orders with the impersonality of modern social life. In capturing this conceptual distinction, Ferdinand Tönnies's contrast of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is the classic source; whether they have used this specific terminology or not, others have drawn a very similar opposition. We may distinguish three main ways in which the contrast has been further fleshed out, each roughly linked to different political positions. One view, broadly associated with political conservatism, portrays the development of modernity as breaking down the old forms of "community," to the detriment of personal relations within modern societies. This standpoint was prominent in the late nineteenth century and still claims its representatives today. Thus Peter Berger, borrowing a notion from Arnold Gehlen, argues that the private sphere has become "deinstitutionalised," as a result of the dominance of large-scale bureaucratic organisations and the general influence of "mass society." The sphere of public life, on the other hand, has become "overly institutionalised." The result is that personal life becomes attenuated and bereft of firm reference points: there is a turning inward toward human subjectivity, and meaning and stability are sought in the inner self.

A parallel conclusion must be reached about kinship, for reasons already adduced. The demonstration that kin ties of certain kinds remain strong in some contexts in modern societies hardly means that kinship plays the role it once did in structuring day-to-day life for the majority.

In traditional cultures, with the partial exception of some larger city neighbourhoods in agrarian states, there was a quite clear divide between insiders and outsiders or strangers. The wide arenas of nonhostile interaction with anonymous others characteristic of modern social activity did not exist. … The opposite of “friend” is no longer “enemy,” nor even “stranger”; rather, it is “acquaintance,” “colleague,” or “someone I don’t know.” In accompaniment with this transition, honour is replaced by loyalty which has no other support save personal affection, and sincerity is replaced by what we can call authenticity: the requirement that the other be open and well-meaning.

QUESTION: What exactly distinguishes authenticity (openness and good intentions toward strangers) from sincerity? Worth understanding the genealogy of this shift.

Personal trust, therefore, has to be established through the process of self-enquiry: the discovery of oneself becomes a project directly involved with the reflexivity of modernity.

DEFINE: Explains how personal trust and identity construction operate in modernity as a self-enquiry project.

The construction of the self as a reflexive project, an elemental part of the reflexivity of modernity; an individual must find her or his identity amid the strategies and options provided by abstract systems.

DEFINE: Defines the reflexive self-project concept central to Giddens' theory of identity in modernity.

5. A concern for self-fulfilment, which is not just a narcissistic defence against an externally threatening world, over which individuals have little control, but also in part a positive appropriation of circumstances in which globalised influences impinge upon everyday life.

All disembedding mechanisms take things out of the hands of any specific individuals or groups; and the more such mechanisms are of global scope, the more this tends to be so. Despite the high levels of security which globalised mechanisms can provide, the other side of the coin is that novel risks come into being: resources or services are no longer under local control and therefore cannot be locally refocused to meet unexpected contingencies, and there is a risk that the mechanism as a whole can falter, thus affecting everyone who characteristically makes use of it.

Within the various spheres of modern institutions, risks do not just exist as hazards resulting from the imperfect operation of disembedding mechanisms, but also as “closed,” institutionalised arenas of action. In such spheres, as was mentioned previously, risks are actually created by normatively sanctioned forms of activity—as in the case of gambling or sports. Investment markets represent easily the most prominent example in modern social life.

QUESTION: The point that gambling and sports are normatively sanctioned risk-producing arenas invites exploration of how formal rules legitimize risk creation.

Widespread lay knowledge of modern risk environments leads to awareness of the limits of expertise and forms one of the “public relations” problems that has to be faced by those who seek to sustain lay trust in expert systems. The faith that supports trust in expert systems involves a blocking off of the ignorance of the lay person when faced with the claims of expertise; but realisation of the areas of ignorance which confront the experts themselves, as individual practitioners and in terms of overall fields of knowledge, may weaken or undermine that faith on the part of lay individuals. Experts often take risks “on behalf” of lay clients while concealing, or fudging over, the true nature of those risks or even the fact that there are risks at all. More damaging than the lay discovery of this kind of concealment is the circumstance where the full extent of a particular set of dangers and the risks associated with them is not realised by the experts. For in this case what is in question is not only the limits of, or the gaps in, expert knowledge, but an inadequacy which compromises the very idea of expertise.

XREF: Connects to Giddens' broader work on modernity, trust, and expert systems, as well as discussions of epistemic reliance on professional knowledge.

The large majority of people do not spend much of their time, on a conscious level at least, worrying about nuclear war or about the other major hazards for which it may or may not be a metaphor. The need to get on with the more local practicalities of day-to-day life is no doubt one reason, but much more is involved psychologically. In a secular environment, low-probability high-consequence risks tend to conjure up anew a sense of fortuna closer to the pre-modern outlook than that cultivated by minor superstitions. A sense of “fate,” whether positively or negatively tinged—a vague and generalised sense of trust in distant events over which one has no control—relieves the individual of the burden of engagement with an existential situation which might otherwise be chronically disturbing. Fate, a feeling that things will take their own course anyway, thus reappears at the core of a world which is supposedly taking rational control of its own affairs. Moreover, this surely exacts a price on the level of the unconscious, since it essentially presumes the repression of anxiety. The sense of dread which is the antithesis of basic trust is likely to infuse unconscious sentiments about the uncertainties faced by humanity as a whole.

The heavily counterfactual character of the most consequential risks is closely bound up with the numbness that a listing of them tends to promote. In mediaeval times, the invention of hell and damnation as the fate of the unbeliever in the afterlife was “real.” Yet things are different with the most catastrophic dangers which face us today. The greater the danger, measured not in terms of probability of occurrence but in terms of its generalised threat to human life, the more thoroughly counterfactual it is. The risks involved are necessarily “unreal,” because we could only have clear demonstration of them if events occurred that are too terrible to contemplate. Relatively small-scale events, such as the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the accidents at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, give us some sense of what could happen. But these do not in any way bear upon the necessarily counterfactual character of other, more cataclysmic happenings—the main basis of their “unreality” and the narcotising effects produced by the repeated listing of risks. As Susan Sontag remarks, “A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms —and it doesn’t occur. And still it looms… . Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’, but ‘Apocalypse from now on’ “.

XREF: Echoes Ulrich Beck's 'risk society' and the idea that apocalyptic threats are low-probability but high-consequence, which numbs rather than mobilizes.

For these images I suggest we should substitute that of the juggernaut*—a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder. The juggernaut crushes those who resist it, and while it sometimes seems to have a steady path, there are times when it veers away erratically in directions we cannot foresee. The ride is by no means wholly unpleasant or unrewarding; it can often be exhilarating and charged with hopeful anticipation. But, so long as the institutions of modernity endure, we shall never be able to control completely either the path or the pace of the journey. In turn, we shall never be able to feel entirely secure, because the terrain across which it runs is fraught with risks of high consequence. Feelings of ontological security and existential anxiety will coexist in ambivalence.

XREF: This is Giddens's famous juggernaut metaphor for modernity, likely drawn from The Consequences of Modernity. Connects to themes of risk society and ontological security.

A feature of displacement is our insertion into globalised cultural and information settings, which means that familiarity and place are much less consistently connected than hitherto. This is less a phenomenon of estrangement from the local than one of integration within globalised "communities" of shared experience. The boundaries of concealment and disclosure become altered, since many erstwhile quite distinct activities are juxtaposed in unitary public domains.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on globalisation and identity (Appadurai, Castells) and to discourse on digital publics reshaping privacy boundaries.

The counterpart of displacement is reembedding. The disembedding mechanisms lift social relations and the exchange of information out of specific time-space contexts, but at the same time provide new opportunities for their reinsertion. This is another reason why it is a mistake to see the modern world as one in which large, impersonal systems increasingly swallow up most of personal life. The self-same processes that lead to the destruction of older city neighbourhoods and their replacement by towering office-blocks and skyscrapers often permit the gentrification of other areas and a recreation of locality.

XREF: Giddens' disembedding concept connects to discussions of globalization's dialectic — homogenization vs. renewed localism, relevant to urban geography and gentrification literature.

It is simply not true that in conditions of modernity we live increasingly in a "world of strangers." We are not required more and more to exchange intimacy for impersonality in the contacts with others we routinely make in the course of our day-to-day lives. Something much more complex and subtle is involved. Day-to-day contacts with others in pre-modern settings were normally based upon a familiarity stemming in part from the nature of place. Yet contacts with familiar others probably rarely facilitated the level of intimacy we associate with personal and sexual relations today. The "transformation of intimacy" of which I have spoken is contingent upon the very distancing which the disembedding mechanisms bring about, combined with the altered environments of trust which they presuppose.

In relations of intimacy of the modern type, trust is always ambivalent, and the possibility of severance is more or less ever present. Personal ties can be ruptured, and ties of intimacy returned to the sphere of impersonal contacts—in the broken love affair, the intimate suddenly becomes again a stranger. The demand of "opening oneself up" to the other which personal trust relations now presume, the injunction to hide nothing from the other, mix reassurance and deep anxiety. Personal trust demands a level of self-understanding and self-expression which must itself be a source of psychological tension. For mutual self-revelation is combined with the need for reciprocity and support; yet the two are frequently incompatible.

Does this mean that, as Habermas puts it, abstract systems "colonise" a pre-existing "life-world," subordinating personal decisions to technical expertise? It does not. The reasons are twofold. One is that modern institutions do not just implant themselves into a "life-world," the residues of which remain much the same as they always were. Changes in the nature of day-to-day life also affect the dis-embedding mechanisms, in a dialectical interplay. The second reason is that technical expertise is continuously reappropriated by lay agents as part of their routine dealings with abstract systems.

XREF: Challenges Habermas's life-world colonization thesis; connects to Giddens's structuration theory about the dialectic between structure and agency.

Sociologists often suppose that, in contrast to the pre-modern era, where many things were mysteries, today we live in a world from which mystery has retreated and where the way "the world works" can (in principle) be exhaustively known. But this is not true for either the lay person or the expert, if we consider their experience as individuals. To all of us living in the modern world things are specifically opaque, in a way that was not the case previously. In pre-modern environments the "local knowledge," to adapt a phrase from Clifford Geertz, which individuals possessed was rich, varied, and adapted to the requirements of living in the local milieu. But how many of us today when we switch on the light know much about where the electricity supply comes from or even, in a technical sense, what electricity actually is?

XREF: Connects to James C. Scott's work on local knowledge and tacit vs. codified expertise, as well as the Geertz reference the highlight itself adapts.

On the level of the unconscious—even, and perhaps especially, among those whose attitude is one of pragmatic acceptance towards high-consequence risks—the relation to survival probably exists as existential dread. For basic trust in the continuity of the world must be anchored in the simple conviction that it will continue, and this is something of which we cannot be entirely sure. Saul Bellow remarks in the novel Herzog, "The revolution of nuclear terror returns the metaphysical dimension to us. All practical activity has reached this culmination: everything may go now, civilisation, history, nature. Now to recall Mr. Kierkegaard's question …" "Mr. Kierkegaard's question" is, how do we avoid the dread of nonexistence, considered not just as individual death but as an existential void? The possibility of global calamity, whether by nuclear war or other means, prevents us from reassuring ourselves with the assumption that the life of the species inevitably surpasses that of the individual.

How remote that possibility is, literally no one knows. So long as there is deterrence, there must be the chance of war, because the notion of deterrence only makes sense if the parties involved are in principle prepared to use the weaponry they hold. Once again, no one, no matter how "expert" about the logistics of weapons and military organisation or about world politics, can say whether deterrence "works," because the most that can be said is that so far there has been no war. Awareness of these inherent uncertainties does not escape the lay population, however vague that awareness might be.

XREF: Connects to nuclear deterrence theory debates and game theory discussions of mutually assured destruction.

Balanced against the deep anxieties which such circumstances must produce in virtually everyone is the psychological prop of the feeling that "there's nothing that I as an individual can do," and that at any rate the risk must be very slight. Business-as-usual, as I have pointed out, is a prime element in the stabilising of trust and ontological security, and this no doubt applies in respect of high-consequence risks just as it does in other areas of trust relations.

The mix of risk and opportunity is so complex in many of the circumstances involved that it is extremely difficult for individuals to know how far to vest trust in particular prescriptions or systems, and how far to suspend it. How can one manage to eat "healthily," for example, when all kinds of food are said to have toxic qualities of one sort or another and when what is held to be "good for you" by nutritional experts varies with the shifting state of scientific knowledge?

QUESTION: How does one decide which expert prescriptions to trust when scientific consensus itself shifts over time? This raises the question of whether any stable grounds for epistemic trust exist.

Pragmatic acceptance can be sustained towards most of the abstract systems that impinge on individuals' lives, but by its very nature such an attitude cannot be carried on all the while and in respect of all areas of activity. For incoming expert information is often fragmentary or inconsistent,* as is the recycled knowledge which colleagues, friends, and intimates pass on to one another. On a personal level, decisions must be taken and policies forged. Privatism, the avoidance of contestatory engagement—which can be supported by attitudes of basic optimism, pessimism, or pragmatic acceptance—can serve the purposes of day-to-day "survival" in many respects. But it is likely to be interspersed with phases of active engagement, even on the part of those most prone to attitudes of indifference or cynicism. For, to repeat, in respect of the balance of security and danger which modernity introduces into our lives, there are no longer "others"—no one can be completely outside. Conditions of modernity, in many circumstances, provoke activism rather than privatism, because of modernity's inherent reflexivity and because there are many opportunities for collective organisation within the polyarchic systems of modern nation-states.

A second factor is what we might call operator failure. Any abstract system, no matter how well designed it is, can fail to work as it is supposed to do because those who operate it make mistakes. This also applies both to social and natural systems. Unlike design faults, operator failure appears to be ineradicable. Good design can make the possibility of operator failure very low, and so can rigorous training and discipline; but so long as human beings are involved, the risk must be there. In the case of the Chernobyl incident, the root cause of the disaster was a mistake made in the operating of the emergency shutdown systems.

XREF: Connects to normal accident theory and the idea that human error is irreducible in complex systems.

The reason for this is the circularity of social knowledge, which affects in the first instance the social rather than the natural world. In conditions of modernity, the social world can never form a stable environment in terms of the input of new knowledge about its character and functioning. New knowledge (concepts, theories, findings) does not simply render the social world more transparent, but alters its nature, spinning it off in novel directions. The impact of this phenomenon is fundamental to the juggernaut-like quality of modernity and affects socialised nature as well as social institutions themselves.

XREF: Connects to the broader reflexive modernization literature and to themes of self-fulfilling/self-negating predictions in social science.

Yet none of this means that we should, or that we can, give up in our attempts to steer the juggernaut. The minimising of high-consequence risks transcends all values and all exclusionary divisions of power. "History" is not on our side, has no teleology, and supplies us with no guarantees. But the heavily counterfactual nature of future-oriented thought, an essential element of the reflexivity of modernity, has positive as well as negative implications. For we can envisage alternative futures whose very propagation might help them be realised. What is needed is the creation of models of Utopian realism.

SEED: The idea of 'Utopian realism' — that propagating imagined futures makes them more likely to be realized — is a compelling angle for an essay on agency, hope, and social change in the face of existential risk.

By emancipatory politics, I mean radical engagements concerned with the liberation from inequality or servitude. If we see once and for all that history does not obey a master-slave dialectic, or that it only does so in some contexts and circumstances, we can recognise that emancipatory politics cannot be the only side of the story. Life politics refers to radical engagements which seek to further the possibilities of a fulfilling and satisfying life for all, and in respect of which there are no "others." This is a version of the old distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to," but "freedom to" has to be developed in the light of a framework of Utopian realism.

XREF: Distinguishes emancipatory politics from life politics as a complementary pairing, echoing the classical negative/positive liberty distinction from Berlin's two concepts of liberty.

Yet he is wrong to say that “both person and planet are threatened by the same enemy—the bigness of things.” What is at issue is the interlacing of distance and proximity, of the personal and the large-scale mechanisms of globalisation. “Bigness” is not in itself either an enemy of the person or a phenomenon to be overcome in life politics. Instead, it is the coordination of individual benefit and planetary organisation that has to be the focus of concern. Global connections of many kinds are the very condition of forms of individual self-actualisation, including those that act to minimise high-consequence risks.

As modes of radical engagement having a pervasive importance in modern social life, social movements provide significant guidelines to potential future transformations. For those who have associated modernity above all with either capitalism or industrialism, the labour movement is the social movement par excellence. Authors who have followed Marx see the labour movement as standing in “the vanguard of history”; their critics have concentrated their attention upon showing that the labour movement only has transformative impact in the early phases of the development of an industrial order, subsequently becoming one interest group among others. To be sure, capitalism remains a class system, and the struggles of labour movements are still relevant to what might lie “beyond” it. But a single-minded preoccupation with labour movements, though at one time largely justified by their strategic importance early in the development of modern institutions and capitalistic expansion, reflects the onesided emphasis upon either capitalism or industrialism as the sole significant dynamic forces involved in modernity. Other social movements are also important and can be connected to the multidimensional character of modernity outlined earlier.

XREF: Connects to Giddens' multidimensional theory of modernity, contrasted with Marx's economic determinism.

Labour and free speech/democratic movements are “old”: that is, they were well-established in certain forms prior to the current century. The other types of social movements are newer, in the sense that they have come to increasing prominence in relatively recent years. Their newness, however, can be exaggerated. Peace movements have as their site of struggle the arena of control of the means of violence, including both military and police power. “Peace” here has to be seen, like “democracy,” as a contested concept central to the dialogues which such movements enter into in the fields of action they share with organisations such as the military or the state. Pacifist movements of some kinds, normally influenced by religious values, date back to the early origins of industrialised war. If they have assumed a particular significance today, this is undoubtedly in large part an outcome of the growth in high-consequence risks associated with the outbreak of war, with nuclear weaponry forming the core component in contemporary times.

XREF: Connects to social movement theory and Giddens' framework distinguishing old vs. new social movements.

Subjecting markets to the centralised control of an all-encompassing agency is not economically efficient and leads to political authoritarianism. Leaving markets free to operate more or less without any restriction, on the other hand, produces major disparities between the life chances of different groups and regions. A post-scarcity system, however, takes us beyond this dilemma. For when the major goods of life are no longer scarce, market criteria can function solely as signaling devices, rather than being also the means of sustaining widespread deprivation.

The pursuit of capitalist accumulation could not be carried out indefinitely, since it is not self-sustaining in terms of resources. While some resources are intrinsically scarce, most are not, in the sense that, except for the basic requirements of bodily existence, "scarcity" is relative to socially defined needs and to the demands of specific lifestyles.

Clausewitz's dictum becomes substantially obsolete with the spread of industrialised weaponry; and where the borders between nations have mostly been fixed and nation-states cover virtually the whole of earth's surface, territorial aggrandisement loses the meaning it once had. Finally, growing interdependence on a global level increases the range of situations in which similar interests are shared by all states. To envisage a world without war is clearly Utopian, but is by no means wholly lacking in realism.

The constant revolutionising of technology gains some of its impetus from the imperatives of capitalist accumulation and from military considerations, but once under way has a dynamism of its own. The drive to expand scientific knowledge and to demonstrate the effectiveness of such advances in technological change is one influential factor. As Jacques Ellul points out, technological innovation, once routinely established, has a strong inertial quality:

Technology never advances towards anything because it is pushed from behind. The technician does not know why he is working, and generally he does not much care… . There is no call towards a goal; there is constraint by an engine placed in the back and not tolerating any halt for the machine… . The interdependence of technological elements makes possible a very large number of “solutions” for which there are no problems.

DEFINE: Contrasts teleological views of technology with a mechanistic, momentum-based account. XREF: Resonates with ideas of technological determinism and unintended innovation overflow.

Why should we assume that world events will move in the direction outlined by these various Utopian considerations? Clearly we can make no such assumption—although all discussions which propose such possible futures, including this one, can by their very nature make some impact. Immanent trends of development are no more than that, and the interim period, should things even proceed in these various ways at all, is large and filled with high-consequence risks. Moreover, what happens along one institutional dimension can adversely affect others. Each could have life-threatening consequences for many millions of human beings.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about speculative futurism and the ethics of utopian planning across disciplines.

In respect of administrative resources, tendencies towards increasing democratic involvement have as their dark side possibilities for the creation of totalitarian power. The intensifying of surveillance operations provides many avenues of democratic involvement, but also makes possible the sectional control of political power, bolstered by monopolistic access to the means of violence, as an instrument of terror. Totalitarianism and modernity are not just contingently, but inherently, connected, as Zygmunt Bauman in particular has made clear.

XREF: Connects to Bauman's thesis on modernity and the Holocaust, plus later surveillance-state discussions (e.g., digital mass surveillance).

Modernity is universalising not only in terms of its global impact, but in terms of the reflexive knowledge fundamental to its dynamic character. Is modernity distinctively Western in this respect? This question has to be answered affirmatively, although with certain definite qualifications. The radical turn from tradition intrinsic to modernity's reflexivity makes a break, not only with preceding eras, but with other cultures. Since reason proves unable to provide an ultimate justification of itself, there is no point pretending that this break does not rest on cultural commitment (and power).

Although its originators looked for certainties to replace preestablished dogmas, modernity effectively involves the institutionalisation of doubt. All knowledge claims, in conditions of modernity, are inherently circular, although "circularity" has a different connotation in the natural as compared to the social sciences. In the former, it concerns the fact that science is pure method, such that all substantive forms of "accepted knowledge" are in principle open to being discarded. The social sciences presume a circularity in a twofold sense, which is constitutively fundamental to modern institutions. The knowledge claims they produce are all in principle revisable, but also become "revised" in a practical sense as they circulate in and out of the environment they describe.

Modernity is inherently globalising, and the unsettling consequences of this phenomenon combine with the circularity of its reflexive character to form a universe of events in which risk and hazard take on a novel character. The globalising tendencies of modernity are simultaneously extensional and intensional—they connect individuals to large-scale systems as part of complex dialectics of change at both local and global poles.

DEFINE: Distinguishes extensional vs. intensional dimensions of globalising tendencies, where risk acquires a new character.