Abstract
Andreas Reckwitz’s The End of Illusions: Politics, Economy, and Culture in Late Modernity—aiming at nothing less than the interpretation of the spirit of contemporary society, of its Zeitgeist—is a recent example of an established sociological genre. It is a bold attempt, in a single stroke and with a parsimonious choice of concepts, to explain the past, give a meaning to the present, and divine the future. As typical of this genre, the analysis also has a normative bent. Readers are sternly invited to abandon outmoded, and ultimately untenable, theoretical traditions to face the new realities.
The End of Illusions stands in a line of sociological reflections that include such great works as Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Bell’s The End of Ideology (1960), Parsons’s The System of Modern Societies (1971), or Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne (1979)—a genre that has produced, in recent years, the extraordinary success of Zygmunt Bauman’s analyses of many liquid things. To locate the book within its genre is crucial for evaluating it. The End of Illusions has the same weaknesses and strengths (and intriguing appeal) of the other great works in the literary tradition to which it belongs. It is ambitious and well written, dealing skillfully with important issues such as the significance of (collective) cultural identities or the complexities of any ideal of self-actualization. It always leaves the reader with the feeling that there is a method to the madness. Consequently, those who appreciate the genre will love the book. On the contrary, inevitably, those who hate the genre will start frowning as soon as they open it.
The Zeitgeist genre must comply with a well-known set of parameters. First, the past must be compacted into a simplified vignette. Second, a claim must be advanced that something, in recent decades, has fundamentally altered the very same structure of society, thus requiring the introduction of a wholly new set of categories and problems. Third, the book has to be presented as a challenge to all dominant (and yet inadequate) available interpretations. Eventually, such a challenge has to be codified as a crucial task for sociology, as a mission to be accomplished.
All these necessary operations are performed in the very first pages of The End of Illusions and carefully developed in the subsequent chapters. Reckwitz presents as obvious that, until a few decades ago (tentatively the 1970s), modern society was the realm of the “general” and the “collective.” Its societal structures were oriented to stability and conformity. They valued structured, uniform experiences. Starting in the 1970s and reaching full bloom in the early 1990s, a set of macro processes—post-industrialization, the expansion of education, and a shift in values—has brought about a brand-new form of globalized social life, at the core of which is a markedly new principle: the valuation of whatever (actor, object, site, situation) is unique, strongly individualized, non-reproducible, and unexchangeable. Building on the analyses already developed in his Societies of Singularities (Polity, 2020), Reckwitz insists that recognizing “singularity” as the core structure of late modern societies allows the understanding of the underlying theme behind a large variety of cultural, political, economic, and existential phenomena.
Having established the radical nature of this new societal form, the author can then chastise colleagues and intellectuals for not being able to appreciate its relevance. The End of Illusions portrays the current intellectual climate as polarized between two equally unsatisfactory narratives. One is the complacent, post-1989, progressive narrative, sanctifying liberalism and globalization. The other is the nostalgic longing for the previous form of societies, constantly interpreting the present in terms of social decay. Contrary to both, a sociology able to interpret adequately a society of singularities would be able to perform a “sober analysis of the present” (p. 6), able to highlight the intrinsic ambivalence and tensions of contemporary life and sensitizing the reader to the fragile nature of everyday life. It would bring—in a way akin to psychoanalysis—the structural tensions and contradictions to consciousness, allowing actors to manage them as well as to accept that they will never be able to dissolve them.
Ambitious claims always come at a cost. As for the past, to present a view of “modern society” nearly entirely built on a (rather simplified) picture of the affluent Northern European countries during the trente glorieuses years of postwar economic development does a certain violence to the historical record. Moreover, were those societies really marked only by rationalization, industrialization, and planning? With no room for romantic longings for authenticities, no conspicuous consumption of rare or unique goods, no star systems celebrating exotic, extraordinary, and unattainable lifestyles?
Reckwitz’s portrayal of the present is equally one-sided. The claim that contemporary society has at its core the processes through which “particularity and uniqueness, incomparability and superlatives are expected, fabricated, positively evaluated, and experienced” (p. 8) is clearly intriguing, although it is difficult to accept that such processes were insignificant in previous social forms. He is right in stressing that these processes exist and that they are important and undertheorized. To make them the “core” of contemporary society, however, requires some serious overstretching of both term and concept. As for the term, it is never completely clear if Reckwitz refers to singularity as a matter of uniqueness or as something exceptionally good or great. Nor is it clear why Reckwitz sees sometime non-exchangeability as an attribute of singularity—albeit most of his examples relate to goods and services that are, indeed, exchanged all the time. Conceptually, it is never too clear if singularity refers to some intrinsic property of certain social objects or only to the way they are perceived. It should not be forgotten, in the age of Tinder, that presenting something as unique is perfectly compatible with its being a functional equivalent with thousands of others. Although Reckwitz mentions that the orientation to singularity is, in fact, made possible only by the operations of standardized structures and practices, the functioning of this paradox is never explored adequately.
Finally, the book, initially presented as a radical challenge to both whiggish and nostalgic interpretations of the post-cold-war world, turns out to be, in the end, a restrained and moderate call for embedding liberalism into a stronger understanding of society and culture. It is able to foster universalistic cultural practices and a culture of reciprocity, a recipe the author labels with the oxymoron “regulatory liberalism.” The discussion of such a possibility, in Chapter Five, presents a Durkheimian flavor that is likely to be of interest for many, perhaps most, sociologists. To his regulatory liberalism, however, one can apply what is known of all other current attempts carried out by sociologists to find a way out of the maze. While being able to argue in detail the strength of such a solution, Reckwitz is conspicuously silent on the steps necessary to reach it.