Abstract
Nico Stehr is very well known for his publications on the heritage of Karl Mannheim. Now he has decided to repeat Mannheim’s efforts in a comprehensive diagnosis of our times. Stehr’s recent work on the heritage of Georg Simmel has certainly influenced the decision to focus the diagnosis on the concept of money. Another source of motivation lies in the widely debated trend of the value of the global financial transfers outpacing the growth in exchange of goods and services. The experience from the global financial and economic crisis 2008–2011 has impressively confirmed the suspicion that the disconnection of the financial processes from the ‘real economy’ has severe implications for economic, political, and social stability. Stehr and Voss identify the source of this instability in the fact that money becomes more and more an autarkic power in the global context, and underline the changing status of money as the major component of the rise of the new non-material economy (Chapter 1).
The complexity and controversies of money and its circulation are related many times in the book to other complex and contested issues. They concern prices and incomes, technological innovations and unemployment, use and abuse of nature and knowledge, human capital and social inequality, social change and development, etc. All these phenomena are interrelated in their permanent fluctuations and change. This is the background of the tremendous challenges to the social theory. Challenges of this type contain the potential of intellectual breakthroughs. However, it is exactly the high complexity of the processes which may easily turn the ambitious program of the study by Stehr and Voss into a program for mission impossible. Facing these challenges, they show a strong dedication to the aims and means of their research and consequently try to clarify the content of a series of problem situations and, likewise, options for resolution. Their research strategy is guided by the intention to decompose structures and actions in the global social community. The deep problem of such decomposition activities is that it is never certain if the conceptual reconstruction of the phenomena, events and structures might be achieved indeed. Ideas of Marcel Mauss could provide some orientation. But we live and do research in a reality which is rather different from the reality which our intellectual forefathers could ever have imagined. Therefore, the authors made ambitious efforts to identify transformative potentials of the ongoing processes. The task could not be resolved by applying already known theoretical and methodological tools. The task required new conceptual and methodological tools. For this purpose, the utilitarian conceptual scheme of land, capital and labor as factors of production has been reconsidered with a view to the present-day technologies, work organization and development of the human capital (Chapters 2, 3 and 4). In addition, knowledge has been introduced as a newly recognized major factor of productivity, arguably the most important in rising knowledge-based societies (Chapter 5).
Thus Stehr and Voss provide the tools for developing a social diagnosis of our times. The strategy for dealing with the task is also available. The authors consider the common interpretation of social conflicts as a destructive and negative force as a misunderstanding. In line with Georg Simmel and Randall Collins, they assume that the identification and use of the innovative and constructive potentials of conflicts should become the priority in their analysis, interpretation and application for the purposes of the management of social processes. Another issue concerns the relationships between the information rich but generalization low studies focused on particular cases and the information low but generalizations high comparative studies. The relationships between the rationality of the market prices and the value systems is still another focus for discussions even in societies with best functioning market mechanisms. The issue of financial speculations is particularly sensitive in this context. Guided by predatory instincts, speculators are chasing profit at the expense of the human and social capital as well as at the expense of nature. The reason for this self-destructive activity is the extreme commercialization of modern and post-modern societies. The speculative commercialization of actions and the ruthless exploitation of nature and labor provoke the most destructive effect of the rise of social inequality. The digitization of production and services and the development of the non-material economy strengthen the inequality.
The identification of achievements and failures in the study and management of present-day commercialized conduct very much rely on the quality of knowledge acquisition, processing and use. Knowledge has become a valuable asset for every kind of action in the knowledge-based societies. However, contrary to the optimistic satisfaction with the achieved breakthroughs in the knowledge accumulation one may be very much dissatisfied with the understanding of knowledge as a practically relevant factor in contemporary advanced societies. Under the dominant relations and habits knowledge is not a common good as it was envisaged in the European Enlightenment. Large portions of knowledge are privatized in patents, registered useful models or in companies’ protected know-how. Given the transition to a non-material economy, the protection of intellectual property is becoming a key element in the struggle for improvement in the strategies for money acquisition and use of money for making money. Since the options for success in this type of activities are always limited, the use and abuse of knowledge in the new arrangements of knowledge acquisition and use is one of the major sources of uncertainties and socio-economic divisions in the present-day socio-economic, political and cultural inequalities. The central issue in the context concerns the tricky need for efficient governance of the not-commercialized knowledge. Therefore, the issues related to the variety of democratic forms of governance become a particularly relevant topic for social sciences and for the organization of modern and post-modern societies
The briefly summarized extraordinary rich content of the monograph under review would attract a broader audience and improve its readability if more real life cases were introduced and interpreted. Some additional statistical information might also enrich the analysis and complement the argumentation.