Abstract
Gregor Fitzi’s Normative Intermittency: A Sociology of Failing Normative Structuration is an important and original contribution to critical sociology. It is an ambitious book: its main intention is to cope with the crisis of social critique by interrogating the deep societal transformations that have invested contemporary societies. To put it succinctly, as the author does in the first line of the book: ‘There is a main problem with modernity. The problem is capitalist society.’ More precisely, the author is interested in investigating what happened to capitalist societies in the last 40 years, changes that he associates, in line with an ample secondary literature, with the erosion of those ‘regulatory principles concerning labour protection and social rights’ that formed ‘the nucleus of a normative structuration of complex societies’ (p. 1). This erosion has diminished and transformed social normativity without annihilating the ‘normative structuration’ of contemporary societies, but instead, creating interruptions, breaks and fallacies within it and provoking an intermittency and dispersion, which, instead of being addressed only as a systemic failure, should be a condition that demands to be addressed and conceptualized as an inescapable factor of contemporary social life.
The author investigates this erosion by focusing on the effects that it has provoked on two interconnected levels: a political one and a conceptual one. In the first regard, it is the state of our democracies that calls for investigation. More precisely, their inability to intervene on the deficiencies imposed by neoliberal policies and reinforced by the fact that pressing political issues – first, the environmental emergency – would call for a structural intervention on the deregulatory forces of global capitalism that provoke an apparently irreparable democratic deficit. In the second regard, is the state of our critical capability to be investigated. It is in particular the state of sociological critique to be confronted – with a broad understanding of the latter, which includes Critical Theory traditions, contemporary debates and their shortcomings – by interrogating the reasons that contribute to the disempowerment of social critique. Part of this limitation, the author thinks, is connected with the lasting trust in the normative functions originated with the ‘welfare compromise’ that shaped democratic societies during the ‘glorious thirty’.
One of the ambitions of Fitzi’s book is to investigate, following this same progression, the relation between the epistemic change and failures of ‘normative structuration’, the transformations in democratic life and the weakening of our critical capabilities. In this regard, its conceptual aim consists in recovering a strong critical programme for sociological theory in order to use it as a standpoint for political and institutional analysis and to reflexively approach and, then, re-embed social criticism in the actual conditions of social life. To this end, the book engages in a broad reflection that is strongly influenced by classical sociological theory and by the legacy of German social theory, in particular, with a main emphasis on Georg Simmel and Max Weber’s sociologies. The interest of this large use of classical sociological literature should not only be considered as a tribute to the founders of sociology but also as an effort to establish a stronger analogy between the political and critical dimension of classical sociology and the actual condition of social critique. This analogy appears to be connected with an historical vision of the discipline that could be summarized in the following way. At the time of its emergence, Classical sociology aimed to reflect about the transformation of modern political and legal normativity at a moment when they were undergoing a fundamental transformation due to the crisis of liberalism and the rise of nationalism. In other words, sociology emerged as a science of crisis. German sociology in particular was concerned with a pluralization of different realms of normativity, operating within the same normative societal framework but maintaining their relative autonomy. Simmel in this regard – echoed on Marxist grounds by the first Frankfurt generation and more generally by a part of social theory debates in the Weimerian era – was the author that contributed most to shaping this vision of society. The generation of social theorists following the Second World War, from Parsons to Habermas, defended a different vision for which societal structuration primarily depended on the welfarist transformation of the modern State and by a trust in the discursive and critical take of public opinion. The critical aim of sociology has to be understood in light of the structural transformations imposed on society by welfare. The deep transformation of this social and institutional layout, imposed by neoliberal policies, has been the object of many analysis, from Thomas Piketty to Wolfgang Streeck, revealing how the economic, social and legal compromise of welfare-societies had become unable to reproduce its own conditions of possibility, fertilizing the ground for new forms of social and economic inequality. One of the main ambitions of Fitzi’s book, then, is to bring classical sociology back to this diagnosis by offering a different understanding of our contemporary crisis. Sociology still is, mutatis mutandis, a science of crisis.
In order to unfold this ambitious programme, the book is organized in three sections. The first section – titled ‘Societal symptomatic’ – is principally occupied with a reconstruction of the changing social conditions that appeared with the neoliberal shift of the last decades, which the author describes as ‘Crumbling late capitalism’ (p. 27). These conditions are described by the author as too unstable to define a discursive space that is able to articulate social conflicts in a unitary framework. In the words of the author: ‘Intermittent normative orders openly deviate from the rules of discursive legitimation and establish frames of action coordination that are not negotiated, not consciously reflected and not embedded in rational justification orders’ (p. 96). Among the different consequences of social fragmentation upon which Fitzi insists are two aspects that appear to be correlated. First, the fact that the incapability of society of mediating social conflicts and integrating differentiated social orders entails a colonization of society by an economic order that intends to cope with these transformed conditions: by abandoning a Keynesian pretence of regulation on economy; by disempowering the legislation that controls financial speculation; by terminating forms of state intervention in the industrial sectors ‘as Thatcher’s battle against the miners paradigmatically showed’ (p. 105). Second, the fact that emptying the forms of legitimation and weakening ‘administered capitalism’, as Habermas defined it, political representation made possible regressive uses of power that operated outside of the previous forms of legitimization and, thus, opened the way to emergent forms of populism and nationalism.
The second section, the boldest in the general economy of the book – titled ‘Sociological diagnosis’ – is a reconstruction of sociological approaches that aims to diagnose the condition of normativity in contemporary societies and, at the same time, offer a critique of these same approaches, which suggests the grounding reasons of the crisis of sociological critique. First, the author intends to inquire into the ‘accelerating alternation between processes of social structuration and destructuration’, which, he says, ‘introduces a condition of “social liquidity” that characterizes complex societies’ (p. 139). This condition of liquidity and acceleration blurs the lines that have traditionally sectioned different social spheres in the modern world that are organized according to different legitimation logics, such as, religion and politics. In this regard the forms of validity that are internally consistent with different social orders are jeopardized and, consequently, the forms of social legitimization are compromised or at least pushed towards the same condition of ‘intermittency’ that, the author argues, should be understood as both a condition, which transforms societal structures, and a pathology of contemporary societies, which prevents the coordination between different spheres of action.
If previous forms of social criticism have addressed modern social structuration by associating it with ‘bureaucratic rationalization’ (Weber); ‘reification’ (Critical Theory); ‘reproduction of habitus’ (Bourdieu), while, at the same time, agreeing that the hardening of social structures was functionally related to the strengthening of domination, today’s social critique should instead find a way to address the way social structuration has become able to ‘adapt to the increasing speed and shifting conditions of accumulation processes’ (p. 152). In other words, if previous social theories shared the central critical aim of fighting the excess of social structuration in order to produce a condition of democratization to emerge from collective action, today this same structuration has been radically deflated and the call for a collective subject able to contrast it, dialectical or not, seems to be condemned to end in an idealistic call for more social justice, and to not have been supported by a realistic analysis.
Again, with an evocation of a long-lasting opposition in classical sociology, the author mentions Simmel and his scepticism towards holistic ontologies and, on the opposite side, the aim of Durkheimian sociology to define the social in direct opposition to individualistic or purely interactionist account of social life – both Simmel and Tarde have notoriously been the object of Durkheim’s criticism. The epistemological preference of Fitzi goes to the German thinker, whose formal sociology seems to him to be more in line with the condition of contemporary intermittent social normativity. At the same, as stated in this second section of the book, contemporary normative intermittency pushes both action theories and structure theories to touch their own diagnostic limits and suggests the need for a renewal of sociological critique. These limits reveal the difficulty that social critique encounters in operating under conditions that are characterized by a regression from ‘legitimation process’ – organized, administered, welfarist societies – to the ‘consensus’ making defining the accelerated, normatively intermittent conditions of crumbling, late-capitalist societies. In our contemporary world – the author refers to the Gramscian concept of ‘interregnum’, which describes a state of transition from a previous social regime that has not yet ended to a new social regime that has not yet emerged – ‘regulating institutions’ are no longer able to define the transcendental conditions for legitimation and, therefore, inevitably shift towards a mechanical consensus, based on asymmetric and aleatory compromises, entailing a dramatic failing in societal structuration. These failures, the author concludes, consist in the ability to individuate a shared normative horizon and to individuate social forces that are ‘capable of exerting sufficient pressure on decision makers’ (p. 293).
The third and shortest section – titled ‘Political outcomes’ – intends to move forward from the previous two, offering a new critical take on the changes described above and presenting a new way to cope with the pathological conditions connected with the failures of social structuration. It is in this regard that Fitzi’s book appears to confront its own internal limitation and hence, indicate its possible future development. One of the first elements that emerges from this last part consists in the assumption that the quest for environmental progress and its global dimension seems to inescapably suggest the need to find new shared forms of normative regulation that are able to reunify the intermittency happening both at an intra-national and an international level. In other words, the intervention required to repair the failures of social structuration seem to be suggested, from a top–down perspective, by the global dimension imposed by the environmental crisis. The author points out how this global condition represents a clear symptom of the malaise of contemporary world. The possibility to normatively transform this malaise into an opportunity is only minimally touched by the author at the end of the book referring to the possibility of inquiry to build new forms of ‘transformative social action’ in the twenty-first century. Only some preliminary insights are offered on the topic. First, the author addresses a critique of the research of an equilibrium between economical liberal policies and the emphasis on civic and political rights that has characterized the ‘third way’ of the new labour and in general has defined the agenda of liberal left in the last decades. Second, he advocates for a ‘transformative realism’, which is able, from a bottom–up perspective, to bring back a ‘strategy of political struggles’ (p. 309) and put at the centre of its own agenda those social inequalities outside of which a leftist political strategy and a consistent organization of collective action could not let emerge.
This short but condensed reflection aimed at coping with the fundamental failures in social structuration and the organization of social action described in the book potentially has a lot to offer even if it is not in a condition to fully satisfy the questions to which it gives rise. I would like to suggest a couple of reasons for why this could be the case. The first concerns the preference mentioned above for the diagnostic capability of the Simmelian and Weberian conceptions of social normativity for understanding the condition of normative intermittency emerging in contemporary societies. One of the possible problems with investing those approaches with such a descriptive capability could be that of conflating a description of a condition of intermittency with the diagnosis of the pathological failures in social structuring. The important question to address, in other words, could be: how to distinguish between a normal transformation in the contemporary conditions of social structuration and the pathological expression of the same? The second question, then, could instead be posed in relation to the author’s concern for a Habermasian trust in the expectations of modern societies to balance social inequalities by the rational and discursive practices emerging in the liberal public space. There are different reasons, as the author shows in several passages of his book, to think that with the paradigmatic shift from ‘administered capitalist’ societies to societies characterized by ‘normative intermittency’ these expectations can no longer be satisfied. Nonetheless, the author seems to share the modern expectations to design institutions that, despite their normative fragmentation, would be able to support transformative forms of social action and embody collective aspirations for social justice. The important question this raises is: substituting a transcendentalist belief in the emancipatory potential of discursive practices, how could we understand the function of institutions as the one of still providing a mediation in the contemporary quest for social justice? In both these regards, a germinative tension runs through the author’s reflection, one that asks to find a way to justify the emergence of a demand for social justice from within the kind of ‘transformative realism’ defended in the last pages of the book. This tension would definitely be essential to better visualize the critical diagnosis of the modern fallacies in normative structuration from the description of a condition of normative intermittency itself, while, at the same time, it would be essential to provide an historical understanding of the development of modern institutions, recognizing their conflictual and processual dimension and an alternative to their justification via transcendental and discursive practices.
This could be the ground of a future work that, in line with the rich critical reflections offered in this book, should invest in a reflection on the possibility of a sociological criticism of contemporary social pathologies, a reflection that at one point, the author himself seems to understand as one of the main advantages of a socio-historical understanding of political and legal institutions suggested by the other traditions in classical sociology. To put it succinctly: in order to develop the transformative power of social action, it could be important to explore what modern institutions resist, what, at the same time, requires them to transmit collective rules, to pluralize social practices and to embody diffused aspirations for social justice. Exploring these issues could allow us, in turn, to foresee the emergence of new institutional dimensions from the ashes of the failing forms of normative structuration. This appears to be the limit and the promise of this important contribution in critical sociology.