Book contents
1 - Reflexivity's biographies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
Summary
This chapter is devoted to two macroscopic considerations about reflexivity – taken to be the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa. The first issue concerns the proposition: ‘no reflexivity; no society’. In other words, reflexivity is held to be a transcendentally necessary condition of the possibility of any society, though one that is rarely acknowledged. The second consideration takes up the bulk of this chapter and defends the proposition that some forms of social organisation foster greater reflexivity amongst their members than others. It is maintained that reflexivity has increased in scope and in range from the earliest societies to the one global society now coming into being. This latter proposition is contentious. It is denied from opposed viewpoints: by Ulrich Beck, announcing subjective freedom as a rerum novarum of ‘reflexive modernization’ (now we have it; then we didn't) and by Pierre Bourdieu, maintaining that reflexivity has always played a minor role in the guidance of social action, in the past as in the present.
No reflexivity; no society
Through those inherited dichotomies between the primitive and the modern, mechanical and organic integration, gemeinschaft superseded by gesellschaft and, most general of all, tradition versus modernity, early forms of social organisation became stereotyped as ones in which reflexivity was neither known nor required. Instead, culture, generically defined as a ‘community of shared meanings’, fully orchestrated the doings of primitive ‘cultural dopes’.
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- Making our Way through the WorldHuman Reflexivity and Social Mobility, pp. 25 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007