张汉的社会学博客

BOOK REVIEW

ANTHONY GIDDENS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF MODERNITY[1]

这是我上香港大学社会学系研究生必修课Modern Theory and Sociological Analysis的课程作业，该课程由黄伟邦(Dr. Thomas Wong)副教授主讲。黄老师的主要研究方向是社会阶层与社会发展，香港社会与当代中国社会。

我学社会学，自始至终没有对理论特别感兴趣。因为我自小学开始，真正感兴趣的是历史和地理，初中开始又梦想当作家，到了大学虽然选择了社会学这个自己不太讨厌、很多人也觉得合适的专业，但自始至终是个不务正业的社会学学生。本科4年，前2年还是在看文学，大三开始对城市产生兴趣，但最初的学科视角仍然是城市历史学和城市地理学，甚至是建筑学，而社会学对城市本身也没有特别专一的研究，我看芝加哥学派的东西也是到大四才看到的，印象也并不深刻。直到考研结束之后才逼着自己看了几本社会学经典理论的书，像《社会学的想象力》，无奈现在一点印象也没有了。硕士3年更是挂着羊头卖狗肉，身在社会学系，可上课最多、听讲座最多的地方是城市与资源学系。社会学的书除了上课、写作业必需之外基本不看，城市规划、城市地理的书倒是看了一大堆，而且因为准备考博，看的还颇为系统。

跨专业考博的愿望破产之后，自己居然幸运的得以在香港大学继续自己的学业。一个学年下来，收获最大的，是由于导师的耐心指导（以前读研的时候可完全没这种环境），我对人类学的民族志研究方法有了很多认识，目前在宁波做的调查也是积极的使用这种方法，虽然并不一定算是真正的民族志研究。但在社会学理论上，我依然提不起兴趣。在上这个课程的时候，有时觉得一些理论实在过于虚幻，完全是建立在思辨基础上。不过同时有些理论则建基于分支社会学研究，比如福柯的医学社会学研究。心想这种研究是如何可以成为社会学理论，而城市研究则从来不入社会学理论的殿堂呢？

黄老师发给我们的tutorial阅读书目以欧洲社会学为绝对主导，或许与他留学牛津的背景有关。而我自本科以来接受的社会学理论课程的教育，现代部分都是以美国为主的。作业分为tutorial陈述和讨论，以及最后的读书报告或论文。我选了一个据说比较易懂的、而且老师也比较看重的吉登斯的《现代性的后果》。不过tutorial的时候这本书我还只读了一半多一些，后面的只好急慌忙促的浏览一下，自然更没有时间回顾，所以tutorial的陈述相当粗略，而且大量的是我就一些印象比较深刻的理论分析进行延伸，举一些城市研究方面的实证资料进行陈述。不过最终的作业终究是要认真对待的，而且时间还充分。我于是认认真真把全书又看了一遍，边看边在旁边做笔记，用中文写下本页的大概意思以及自己的些许想法。读书过程实在是相当痛苦，尤其是吉登斯不厌其烦的反复讨论信任(trust)和亲密关系(intimacy)的讨论，我是一点兴趣都提不起来，而我所感兴趣的时空延伸(time-space distanciation)以及空间转型的问题，我感觉吉登斯讨论的并不充分。

不过收获肯定是有。首先这是我完整仔细的阅读的第一本英文原著学术书籍，恐怕也是我迄今为止读的最认真的社会学的书籍。其次，吉登斯的时空延伸(time-space distanciation)理论和空间分析，对我的城市研究是有一定帮助的，虽然他本身的讨论还不充分。但是我依然要说，读这种很"社会学"的书，我从中获得的收益与我所花费的时间是完全不成比例的，因为里面大段大段讨论的都是对我的研究基本没有帮助的东西，而这可能恰恰是该书的作者所着重讨论的。吉登斯的这本书也有很多问题，我的一个突出的感觉是对历史、地理等人类社会发展维度的忽视，吉登斯完全沉浸于自己创建的radicalized modernity的四维度模型中。

我并非忽视理论。每当我看到一些从建筑学、城市规划、城市地理的角度所做的城市研究，本来选题非常好，但是由于理论水平的有限，以及调查工作的缺乏，却没能做更深入的分析，实在可惜，尤其是很少能够从理论建构的角度作出自己的贡献。现在我对新马克思主义城市理论已经建立起高度的认同感，因为我在自己的城市理论阅读过程中发现，新马克思主义城市理论是真正能够一针见血发现城市本质的理论体系。所以我的阅读方式是直接阅读城市的理论，而不是阅读宽泛的理论。而阅读的范围更主要的是在现代城市理论，也就是二战之后的理论，特别是1970年代末西方经济大危机之后的城市理论。因为西方资本主义的发展阶段性十分明显，所以城市理论的同样应该跟上步伐，推陈出新。芝加哥学派的很多理论早已经陈腐不堪，甚至简·雅各布斯的理论，也都需要注意以同样批判性的态度去阅读了。

This book is based on Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures delivered by Giddens at Stanford University in 1988. As Giddens said, therefore, the book "takes the form of extended essay" rather than formally divided chapters. And the book is more like a social commentary in terms of writing style and overall structure.

There are six sections in this book. In the following parts of this book review, I will firstly detailedly go through each section to report the points of Giddens' writing, and then give some general comments.

Section Ⅰis a general discussion on modernity as a whole, in which several important concepts and perspectives are presented, such as distanciation, disembedding, and reflexivity. Those terms are actually pillars for Giddens to build up the framework for his "institutional analysis" of modernity.

First of all, he gave an approximation of "modernity" as "modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in the influence" (p. 1). This is a starting point given by him for further discussion, because the nature of modernity is far from wholly identified, instead, just as he said, "stowed away in a black box" (p. 1).

Then he moved on to a widely-discussed transition from modernity to a new era, for which a variety of new terms have been put forward. Two types of terms are identified: one refers to a positive emergence of new social system ("information society" / "consumer society"), and the other, which is the majority, refers to an ending social system ("post-modernity" / "post-modernism" / "post-industrial society" / "post-capitalism"). Among the debates on this transition, epistemology is the focus. As Lyotard presents it, post-modernity implies the dissolutions of "grand narrative" (p. 2) and linear history. "A plurality of heterogeneous claims to knowledge" replaces generalized and systematic knowledge.

Giddens argues that we cannot make further discussion regarding the aforementioned debates until we realize that all those result from a lack of full grasp of modern society. So it is not a good approach only to invent new terms. Instead, our task is to probe into "the nature of modernity itself" (p. 3). He claimed that we are moving toward an era in which "the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized" (p. 3). The contours of post-modern society can be detected, but it is quite different from "post-modernity" discussed so far by many social scientists. Giddens also associated his frequently emphasized "institutional analysis" of modernity with a broader concern with shortcomings in established sociology. Through the whole book, we can clearly see his endeavor to make this critique.

Giddens saw a discussion on the discontinuities of modernity as a precondition for further analysis of the nature and consequences of modernity. This is the first subtopic in this section. Modernity is a very clear watershed which makes modern society so different from all traditional orders. The transformations brought about by modernity are so profound and dramatic that all knowledge of transformations in pre-modern era becomes pale. Modernity alters both the globe and our day-to-day life. The extensionality and intentionality of those transformations culminate in human history so far. He proposed to get rid of social evolutionism and keep in mind that history is not a unity with the totalized form. Then several features of the discontinuities are given: the pace of change, the scope of change, and the intrinsic nature of modern institutions. He used the city as an example to illustrate "specious continuity" apart from obvious discontinuity. It is a very illuminating perspective to help understand the radical transformation of Beijing in PRC history, since the post-1949 Beijing is functioning according to totally different principles from those of the ancient Beijing despite the same locale.

Then Giddens moved to the second subtopic to make a comparative analysis of security and danger, trust and risk. This topic occupies "a substantial portion of" (p. 7) the whole book, and will be discussed in much more details in Section Ⅲ and Ⅳ. He firstly revealed modernity is double-edged. The positive side of modernity was more or less highlighted by the three founding fathers of sociology. But none of them fully anticipated the darker side of modernity. Large-scale destructive force in relation to the material world, totalitarianism, "industrialization of war" (p. 9), especially the invention of nuclear weaponry, all those negative effects of modernity makes the world we live today "fraught and dangerous" (p. 10). And it is just what justifies Giddens' later discussion in detail regarding security and trust.

The next is the relation between sociology and modernity, in which Giddens also show this critique on several widely held sociological conceptions dating back to classical social theory.

The first conception is a "single overriding dynamism" of modernity. Marx proposed capitalism, in which investment-profit-investment circle and declining rate of profit force the system to expand. This approach is the most familiar one to common Chinese people who have been exposed to regular communist ideological and political education. Durkheim's explanation is industrialism, in which increasingly complex division of labor underlies the "industrial exploitation of nature" (p. 12). Weber put forward his "rational capitalism", in which rationalization and bureaucratization are the impulses. After those brief retrospections, Giddens proposed that modernity is "multidimensional on the level of institutions" (p. 12), and the aforementioned factors are not exclusive.

The second conception is "society" as the focus of sociology. Giddens see "society" as a "distinct system of social relations" with its certain boundary and inner unity. Since "society" is associated with modernity, society is always nation-state. Before looking into "problems of order", which is regarded as the prime task for sociologists, we should be more clear about the boundedness of social system. Meanwhile, time-space distanciation crosscuts different bounded nation-states. Therefore, a bigger question is to understand "how modern institutions become ‘situated' in time and space" (p. 14).

The third conception is the connection between knowledge and modernity. The output of sociology is believed to be utilized for prediction and control. "Reflexivity" and "double hermeneutic" (p. 15) are precisely used to refer to this circular relationship between social scientific knowledge and its subject-matters in human societies. Therefore, this kind of immense practical impact of social sciences is an integral part of modernity.

On the basis of foregoing discussions, finally, Giddens generalized three sources of "extreme dynamism and globalizing scope" (p. 16) modernity: separation and recombination of time and space, "the disembedding of social systems" (p. 17), and "the reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations". They constitute the discussions in the rest of Section Ⅰ.

He began with a discussion on the ordering of time and space. In modern society, time becomes emptied due to the invention of uniform time by mechanical clock and functional division of time catering to the need of industrial production and social control. Therefore, different from the conditions in pre-modern world, under the conditions of modernity, time is not necessarily related to specific place, which makes the "emptying of space" (p. 18) possible. Since activities happening in one place might have no relation with this specific place, but formulated and manipulated by distant forces, the space no longer belongs to this place. Therefore, specific places lose their privileged positions to represent space; instead, they are highly substitutable in this respect. Meanwhile, time and space are reorganized, for example, by timetable. Giddens argues that time-space distanciation is of vital importance for modernity, because (a) it is the precondition of disembedding, and generates "manifold possibilities of change by breaking free from the restrains of local habits and practices" (p. 20); (b) it paves the way for rationalized bureaucracy to connect the local and global in an unprecedented way; (c) through such assistances as the Gregorian calendar and world map, almost every historical happening can be precisely positioned in a "genuinely world-historical framework of action and experience" (p. 21), upon which "historicity" is established.

Giddens then moved to a detailed discussion on disembedding. He defined "disembedding" as "the ‘lifting out' of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space" (p. 21). Firstly he held that the concepts of "differentiation" or "functional specialization" are not adequate enough to interpret the dynamism of modernity. Then he distinguished two types of diembedding mechanisms: symbolic tokens and expert systems. The former means universal media of interchange without any reference to specific participants of the interchange, while the latter means "systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise" (p. 27) that organize our physical and social world. Giddens used money to give a detailed illustration on symbolic tokens along with a brief review of writings on money by Marx, Simmel, Parsons, Luhmann, and Keynes. Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value is also the most familiar approach to common Chinese people. Parsons hold that money, as well as power and language, is among several types of "circulation media" (p. 23) in modern society. Keynes distinguished between "money of account" and "money proper". Giddens defined money in modern societies in terms of "credit and debt" (p. 24). Money makes deferral and self-mobility of wealth possible. Only so, the economic dynamism of modernity can expand, like what we have witnessed, to a global scope. Giddens precisely put the functions of money in his time-space distanciation framework in this way: "a means of bracketing time-space by coupling instantaneity and deferral, presence and absence" (p. 25). In order to achieve a reasonable understanding of expert system, Giddens argued that the continuous impact of expertise upon laypersons is much more significant than those obvious phenomena like consultations with lawyers or doctors. Expert systems provide guarantees across distanciated time-space. In this way, social relations are removed from their respective local contexts.

Since both the two disembedding systems entail trust as an integral part of the whole systems, Giddens could not help talking about trust in this subtopic, rather than reserving it in the following special part on trust. The modern nation-state is the guarantor of the value of money issued, therefore, the trust involved in money is "public confidence in the issuing government" (p. 26). In the case of money, through a review of Simmel's writings, Giddens argued that trust is "a form of ‘faith'" based on "vague and partial understanding" (p. 27). It is also true for expert system: we assume that the knowledge generated by expert systems can tackle potential risks. But actually we do not have a full understanding of the occurrences and consequences of those risks, not to mention the corresponding countermeasures. Giddens agreed with Luhmann's distinction between confidence and trust. According to them, trust is specifically related to risk, coming from unintended results of human activities. So trust itself entails an awareness of potential risk. On the contrary, confidence is more like a "taken-for-granted attitude" (p. 31), neglecting the potential risk, both because of the low occurrence, and because there is no way to eliminate or stop the risk. In terms of alternatives, this distinction is also clear. Alternatives are consciously kept as part of trust, but it is not the case for confidence. Meanwhile, the emergence of modernity is the precondition for a clear distinction between risk and danger, because we better know that contingencies are more likely to be human creations.

However, Giddens is not fully content with Luhmann's framework. To be exact, Giddens regarded trust as "a particular type of confidence" (p. 32) rather than a distinct phenomenon. He developed a complex analytical framework for trust and related issues in ten points. I try to condense these points as follows. Trust is related to a lack of full grasp of information, bound up with contingency. Trust is "the link between faith and confidence" (p. 33). Trust necessarily entails neither a mastery of operation of the system, nor the faith in the morality of people who operate the system. Instead, trust is a faith in "the correctness of abstract principles" (p. 34). So trust is limited in scope and applicability, only concerning "a given set of outcomes or events" (p. 34). The concepts of chance and risk emerge simultaneously in the conditions of modernity. Danger always goes along with risk, and risk does not necessarily entail a completely clear awareness of the precise level of danger involved. Trust is a means to reduce dangers, because "patterns of risk are institutionalized" (p. 35), and corresponding technology and change can considerably reduce risk. So risk becomes quite calculable. Security only means some certain dangers have been kept at a considerably low level, "a balance of trust and acceptable risk" (p. 36). The scope of risk and security can be from individual to global.

After this detailed but far from completed discussion on trust, Giddens moved on to reflexivity of modernity. "Reflexivity" is not a brand new term invented by Giddens. However, Giddens is among the pioneers who made this conception "both an issue and a solution in modern approaches to the problem of structure and agency" (Wikipedia). He regarded reflexivity as the "defining characteristic of all human action" (p. 36), because human action always includes an awareness of behavior and corresponding contexts. Then he traced some features of traditional societies in this respect. At that time, tradition was an integrating mechanism between the past, the present and the future. Specific human action can be located in this time-space system formulated by tradition; meanwhile, human action can also reshape the whole system. Writing enhanced time-space distanciation and made human action can spread across larger historical-geographical scopes. However, rapidly accumulating knowledge in modern society replaces tradition to be the major force for shaping people's day-to-day life. Tradition can be maintained due to inertia, but this ostensible continuity of tradition is justified by the reflexivity of modernity rather than tradition itself. Human action is continuously checked and reshaped by new knowledge in modern society, and the scope of this process expands to an unprecedented degree, even including reflexivity of reflexivity itself. People believe reason, rather than tradition, should be the reasonable means to obtain knowledge. However, since knowledge is subject to constant restructuring due to reflexivity of modernity, knowledge also fails to give people a sense of determination and authenticity. The knowledge generated by social sciences never stop to re-enter into the contexts where it came from, and further constantly restructures human life. Part of this circular process has even become the basis of certain activities: doing business in the market, governmental data collection and analysis, and even marriage. This process also makes modern people universally reflexive, and scientists are only "one step ahead of" laypersons. Therefore, the universe of social events can never be completely controlled and manipulated, as this interaction between social life and knowledge will never stop. Giddens further generalized the major factors impacting the application of knowledge in human society: differential power, role of values, and unintended consequences (p. 44). Power relations can directly impact the application of knowledge. Values are always ready to change, since there are no universal values that can transcend certain historical periods. So the changing relations between values and knowledge will inevitably impact the application of knowledge. The human society keeps changing. Furthermore, the reflexivity of modernity intensifies this mutability.

The last subtopic prior to summary in this section is a clarification of the term "post-modernity". He distinguished post-modernism from post-modernity as follows. Post-modernism is an aesthetic means to represent modernity, whereas post-modernity means to transcend modernity. Post-modernism only implies an awareness of the possibility of this transition from modernity to post-modernity, but not necessarily means its actuality. Post-modernity often refers to the dissolutions of certainty and progress, as well as the increasing ecological concerns and social movements. However, Giddens denied that we could no longer obtain systematic knowledge of human society. Giddens did not think the transition from modernity to post-modernity is happening, one of the reasons for which is that we are not able to draw a coherent historical map and pinpoint our current position on it in order to determine whether we are within the transition. Giddens saw breaking away from foundationalism as "modernity coming to understand itself" (p. 48). He even associated modernity with Christian culture in the West. In his point of view, divine providence never died out, instead, it has transformed from divine law to science. And the western dominance over the world coincided with this transformation to be the backing force. Giddens then touched on nihilism once more, and stressed that sense data is questionable evidence for knowledge, especially in conditions of modernity, when sensory observation is wholly penetrated by diverse theory, and much farther from empiricism. He regarded those developments as a deeper understanding of reflexivity, in which both the circularity of reason and circular justification of reason are enigmatic, especially when tradition and dogma become increasingly weaker. Giddens argued that modernity entails the "end of history" (p. 50) and stressed the distinction between history and historicity. Historicity is recorded history, not myth or legend. This conception allows discussion regarding how the form of history is interpreted (Wikipedia). Therefore, historicity is "one version of modernity's reflexivity" (p. 50), reshaping or reinterpreting the past in the light of the principles of modernity. This future-oriented conception brings about "futurology"- envisaging available futures. Finally Giddens raised his core argument in the whole section. He regarded the current transition as the radicalization of modernity rather than post-modernity replacing modernity. Globalization is a key element of this radicalization, in which the west gradually loses its hegemony due to the wider spread of modernity and the increasing power of NIEs elsewhere. Therefore, modernity should not be regarded as a regional civilization. Giddens stressed again that post-modernity means "immanent transitions away from" or "beyond" (p. 52) modernity, which has not been the reality nowadays. Rather, it is surfacing, of which some aspects can be detected.

Section Ⅱis an analysis of institutional dimensions of modernity. Giddens negated reductionism holding that there is a single dominant institution for modernity. He argued that modernity is not simply equal to capitalism or industrialism.

Giddens developed a set of four dimensions of modernity. First of all, he distinguished industrialism and capitalism, both of which are among the four dimensions. The defining characteristics of capitalism developed by Giddens are not much different from the Marxist ones: commodity production, wage labor, competitive market and price signal; whereas those of industrialism are inanimate energy, machine production and "regularized social organization of production" (p. 56). Giddens regarded capitalist society as a subtype of modern societies, and he gave four institutional features of this subtype: (a) the economic order mentioned earlier; (b) the insulation of economy and other social institutions; (c) the separation of polity and economy; (d) the state's reliance upon capital accumulation. Capitalism is international in scope from the beginning due to its expansionist character. However, capitalism is territorially confined by nation-state system and subject to corresponding coordinated administration. Administration depends upon surveillance, which is the third dimension. Surveillance can take such obvious forms like prisons, but more probably make use of the control of information. The fourth dimension is the control of the means of violence, which implies nation-states monopolize the means of violence. And military affairs become industrialized: weaponry, technology, organization and knowledge are systematically produced.

The four dimensions have complex interconnections. Among others, some points should be given more attention. The first is the relations between surveillance + military power and capitalism + industrialism. The latter party cannot survive or develop into the current state without the former party as supporting forces. For instance, modern machine production cannot function well without a set of complex surveillance systems composed of taskmasters, electronic monitors, attendance recording and the whole factory bureaucracy. And the nation-state monopolizing violence is always there ready to deal with tougher problems regarding the sustaining of production, such as strike negotiation or repression. The second is industrialism as the "the main axis of the interaction of human beings with nature" (p. 60). Industrialism so profoundly transforms our living environments that "pure nature" is almost nowhere. In created environment under human manipulation, human society and its relation with the nature should be interpreted in quite different way because the context is not the same with that in pre-modern societies. This transformation justifies more ecological concerns in modern societies. The third is the relation between capitalism and industrialism. Capitalism is the earlier one to emerge. Since then, due to the expansionist character of capitalism, the modern society has become much more productive in terms of economic capacity, but also more restless, because the static equilibrium in the economic system cannot be achieved and maintained. Industrialism is an extremely powerful impetus for capitalism to upgrade its means of production. However, we may now say that in the contemporary society, some signs of the transition from industrial capitalism to a new phase of capitalism can be detected, to which some new terms like "information society" can be used to refer. The fourth is the "abstract labor power" (p. 61) involved in capitalist labor contract. In pre-modern society, class system can be maintained by violence in a way, for example, in the instance of pre-modern Tibetan serfdom. However, capitalism has transformed class system to be primarily an economic system, in which nominally free wage labor is incorporated into capitalist production. In this context, no obvious use of violence is involved, and wage labor is not controlled by capitalists as the "whole person" (p. 62) or slave. So labor contract is the "focal point" (p. 62) of capitalist class system. The last one is the nation-state as one of the greatest promoters of modernity. The concentrated administration of nation-state enables it to mobilize diverse resources for spreading modernity.

Then Giddens moved on to a discussion of globalization and modernity. He held that "modernity is inherently globalizing" (p. 63). He held that "modernity is inherently globalizing" (P. 63). For sociology, undue reliance upon the notion of "society" should be replaced by time-space distanciation. Only so can we better understand the relations between local transformation and globalization, the latter part of which means the global spread of modernity and the networking dynamism. Globalization may either diminish or intensify local nationalism in different contexts. The stretching process of globalization across time and space often stimulate more concerns on local autonomy and identity.

Then two approaches dealing with globalization were distinguished: international relations and world-system theory. According to the studies in international relations, nation-states are the star of international relations, which are originally independent entities enjoying complete sovereignty within their respective political borders, but become more integrated with others along with the formation of world system. Giddens criticized this approach because it only takes into consideration one dimension of modernity, and it cannot account for those widely spread social relations crosscutting nation-states' borders. Actually, the sovereignty of nation-states and the formation of world system are interdependent. The worlds system is subject to continuous changes which give rise to uneven development, for example, the waxing and waning economic capacities between western countries and NIEs.

Giddens regard the "embracing conception of globalization relationship" (p. 68) and an awareness of the particularity of modernity as two of the contributions made by Wallerstein in his world-system theory. As Giddens interpreted, Wallerstain held that the pre-modern world economic relations were base on the administrative capacities of several great empires, whereas the world capitalist economy is integrated by international economic relations rather than a political centre. But I think this understanding is questionable because (a) Ancient China in Han Dynasty had maintained "Silk Road" trade with Roman Empire for a long time, in which large parts of the trading road (in central and south Asia) was not directly administrated by Han Empire or Roman Empire, and Parthian brokers were the people who benefited the most in this trade, (b) the early expansion of capitalism from Europe to Asia cannot be sustained were it not backed by the overwhelming military power of British Empire, which made those Ancient Asian Empires like Mogul Empire and Qing Empire who rejected this expansion like glass jaws under the British modern weaponry made through machine production, (c) in the face of communist spread starting from the Soviet Union after World War Ⅱ, the U. S. replaced the U. K. to be the political centre of world capitalism and strived to restore capitalism on the ruins in Western Europe and Japan, as well as other peripheral places both the two blocs scramble for, like Korea and Vietnam, and capitalism cannot be like what has shown in the latter part of the 20^th century if the U. S., who is often called "Roman Empire Ⅲ" or "New Roman Empire" did not play such a role as the political center of capitalism.

According to Giddens' interpretation of Wallerstein, the global expansion of capitalism always disregards national boundaries, and it is primarily an economic order. So he regarded the fact that colonialism in its classical sense disappeared but world capitalism still sustains as the proof of this nonpolitical characteristic. However, I do not agree with this kind of simplistic interpretation of "colonialism" because it equates political order to "colonialism" which has a strong connotation of use of violence. If we take a look at the new imperialism which is much more common than violent colonialism after World War Ⅱ, we can find that use of violence has been replaced by new means of intervention, conquest and control, for example, peaceful evolution and color revolution targeting former socialist bloc and nowadays Community of Independent States, the contest between the U. S. and Japan regarding U. S. dollar-Japanese Yen exchange rate, many Asian and African countries colonized and self-colonized by English language imperialism, or even China's new imperialism represented in China's participation in scramble for the control of commodity markets and strategic investment projects and resources in Africa. Those phenomena are by no means of no political significance. Wallerstein was right in that he noticed the possible mismatch of one country's economic power and its political or military power. In other words, an economically weak country can be politically and militarily quite strong and vice verse. The two possible mismatches are respectively true for Maoist China and post-war Japan.

The last subtopic of this section is an institutional analysis of globalization, which is quite similar with that of modernity done earlier. Giddens listed four dimensions of globalization: world capitalist economy, nation-state system, world military order and international division of labor. Transnational corporations cannot rival nation-state in terms of territoriality and control of means of violence despite the startling economic capacities of some empire-like transnational corporations like Microsoft and Toyota. Although the power of any nation-state is strongly conditioned by its wealth, the nation-state is not a pure economic machine, and other concerns like fostering national culture and geopolitical involvements have never been erased from its agenda. The coordination and concerted actions among some member states in those multinational organizations like NATO will probably compromise the sovereignty of the states involved, but may also enhance their abilities in achieving some international goals, especially when they are targeting some outsiders. Giddens regarded the socialist bloc as an enclave in the world capitalist system. Of course he has not witness the collapse of socialist bloc and spectacular fruits of China's state capitalism when he finished this book. During the cold war era, due to the nuclear deterrence, worldwide war was suspended, but partial wars in peripheral countries and regions never completely disappeared, in which superpowers were backstage directors and other troops like guerillas were the actors. This was more or less applicable to Chinese civil war, Korean War and Vietnamese War. For global division of labor, giddens here mentioned another aspect: regional specialization as the global division of labor between different economies. NIEs emerged along with the deindustrialization of developed countries and regions. Given this increasing interdependence in world economy, Keynesian economic policies are less applicable in this context. For the all-encompassing characteristic of modernity, Giddens here added the impact of mechanized technologies of communication upon people's self-identity, interaction pattern and the spread of knowledge along with reflexivity.

Section Ⅲ is a discussion on trust and risk in conditions of modernity. First of all, Giddens introduced the notion "reembedding", which means "the reappropriation or recasting of desembedded social relations" (p. 79), the purpose of which is to pinpoint the disembedded in the local space-time structure. Then he distinguished two types of reembedding: facework commitments and faceless commitments. The former exists in "circumstances of copresence" (p. 80), while the latter concerns abstract systems, including symbolic tokens and expert systems.

The following discussions were made by Giddens with frequent references to some relevant theorists like Simmel, Goffman and Garfinkel, which made large part of the discussions quite microscopic and psychological. Starting from Simmel, Giddens distinguished the meanings of "strangers" in pre-modern and modern societies. In conditions of modernity, a stranger is no longer understood as a "whole person" (p. 80) representing heterogeneous cultures, instead, as a representative or operator of the concerned system or agent, who is expected to fulfill certain type of duty. Giddens then borrowed the notions "civil inattention" (p. 81) and "unfocused interaction" (p. 82) developed by Goffman to elaborate the interaction skills with strangers in modern societies, which are regarded as the basic type of facework commitment. Those seemingly simple and taken-for-granted skills actually includes very subtle and sophisticated management of facial expressions, eye contacts, bodily gestures and positioning, the function of which is to convey the nonexistence of hostility. In the interactions with strangers and acquaintances, "tact and rituals of politeness" (p. 82) are used as mutually "protective devices" (p. 82) for the two sides, but usually only on the level of "practical consciousness" (p. 83).

Then Giddens moved on to an analysis of trust in abstract system, in which "trustworthiness" (p. 83) is the focal conception. Trustworthiness exists in two types of relations: intimates and acquaintances that have kept contacts for a long time and affirmed the other party's reliability. The trust in abstract systems does not necessarily include direct contact with the operators or representatives of the system; nonetheless, usually lay persons do have encounters with those people, for example, a medical consultation with a doctor, or meetings with a lawyer regarding a legal case. Those encounters are termed "access points of abstract system" (p. 83) by Giddens, which are the "meeting ground of facework and faceless commitments" (p. 83). On the part of representatives of expert system, managements of demeanor at access points of vital importance for sustaining the trustworthiness of the whole system, especially when the risk involved in the system are open to view by lay persons. Giddens termed this as an attitude of "business-as-usual", or "unflappability" (p. 85), of which the solemnness of the judge can be an example. The demand for this management is derived from the difference between the trust in the system and the trust in the flesh-and-flood people who are operating the system, or in other words, between expertise and the expert. Giddens used Goffman's conceptions "frontstage" and "backstage" to facilitate his arguments, in which the threshold between the two can be regarded as the access point. The level of trust is strongly influenced by experiences at access points.

Due to the reflexivity of modernity, the future is highly open to changes. In this circumstance, the trust sanctioned by lay persons upon expert system is more like "a calculation of benefit and risk" (p. 84), a belief that the concerned expert system will help condition or even create the universe of events. Because many of such encounters are periodic or transitory rather than regularized, the trust sanctioned by lay persons should be quite cautious. Besides, within the abstract system, there is also a question about how to sustain trustworthiness, or in other words, how to establish trust and integrity among the operators of the system. In this context, collegial trustworthiness can be established and updated through professional ethics and facework commitments providing encounters and rituals. Therefore, the popularity of seminars and conferences in academic circles can be easily understood from this perspective.

The next subtopic is the relations between trust and expertise. Modernity produces new social practices and ideas, which generate a strong pressure for common people to be more reflexive in order to obtain better adaptation, and also a demand for lay persons to develop trust in those new things in order to promote their application in our day-to-day life. However, lay persons' attitudes toward expertise that they do not have a complete grasps are quite ambivalent. Just because of this, they need trust to release the tensions between expected respectfulness and inevitable skepticism toward expertise within their minds. "A bargain with modernity" is a commonly adopted pragmatic approach dealing with this problem. Trust does not necessarily entail a conscious commitment; rather, it is a tacit acceptance of the fact that other alternatives are foreclosed.

Updating of knowledge provided for lay persons and professionals through media and other sources continuously brings changes to trust in abstract system. Upon seeing the failure of abstract system, there will be two approached to deal with: cynicism and disengagement. But it is very difficult to completely disengage from abstract system due to the pervasiveness of modernity.

The next subtopic may be the most micro one: trust in persons and ontological security. Ontological security implies the continuity of people's self-identity and social and material environments in which people's actions are conducted. Ontological security is more an emotional than cognitive phenomenon. However, ontological security does not bring deep anxiety to common people's life. Some rare cases of such deep anxiety may usually be understood as mental illnesses or supersenstivity. For example, fear of nuclear war day and night.

Giddens then made a detailed analysis of trust building in infant-mother relation. In early childhood, infants may potentially encounter such ontological puzzles as "who am I" and "where do I come from". However, infants will gradually become immune to such problems thanks to mother's or other caretaker's rearing. This is the process of building "basic trust" (p. 94), which entails both the reliance upon the consistency and continuity of the living environments and the trustworthiness of oneself. Through this process, a stable self-identity can be built up subsequently. Trust is a mutual experience, which means not only the reliance upon the consistency of others and the environments, but also the establishment of the reliability and trustworthiness of oneself. In this perspective, therefore, bizarre behavior and deviance can be easily understood as a mirror of the unreliability of the living environments where those behaviors come from. A feeling of the reliability of others and the environment is "central to a sense of continuity of self-identity" (p. 97). And the trust on nonhuman objects is based upon trust in persons.

Giddens also borrowed the term "potential space" (p. 96) to refer to trust sustaining when caretakers leave and let the infant alone for a short period of time, which definitely entails the infant's capability to accept the caretaker's departure and how to behave properly on his/her own. The base upon which this capability is developed is largely the belief that the caretaker will come back, and the short-time departure does not mean a withdrawal of love.

Giddens regarded trust as a persistent and recurrent human need with regard to the familiarity and reliability of others and the social and material environments. Ontological security and routine and closely connected due to the pervasiveness of habit. Although routine is relaxing for our day-to-day life, it also demands "constant vigilance" (p. 98) on a level of practical consciousness so as to maintain itself and avoid misunderstanding, puzzlement and other bad feelings, which may emerge when routine is violated or neglected. In short, careful maintained and continuously sustained routine is the basis for the daily updating of trust.

In the last part of this subtopic, Giddens posed the question about "what is the opposite of trust" (p. 99). He did not regard "mistrust" as the antithesis of basic trust, because this term is too weak to convey the correct meaning of that opposition, given the fundamental importance of trust for our self-identity and the identity of the environment. He held that "persistent existential anxiety" (p. 100) would be the outcome of a lack of basic trust.

The last subtopic of this section is a comprehensive comparison of trust and risk in pre-modern and modern societies. The total differences between the two societies largely derive from the discontinuity made by modernity.

In pre-modern societies, ontological security is connected with contexts of trust and forms of risk, and can be precisely positioned in localized time-space framework. There are four major contexts of trust: kinship, local community, religion and tradition. Role expectations and obligations designated by kinship systems make kin people involved to help other members and show trust; those conducts are not necessarily based on personal feelings toward specific member. So kinship plays a prominent role in providing a stable network upon which people can rely most of the time. The similar can be said of the local community. This kind of social relation is organized in the light of local or place, and has not been transformed by time-space distanciation. The limited spatial scope of local community enables the community to be stable in time. The large majority of people in pre-modern societies stick to their lands, rather than often migrating from one place to another. Meanwhile, different places are isolated from one another, which make it difficult for people in different places to know other potentially shocking or disturbing lifestyles and ideologies. This is one of the important conditions for their ontological security. Religion is also an important environment in which the reliability of people's day-to-day life is established, and we obtain a set of formalized interpretation and reaction mechanism with regard to most daily happenings. And more or less, the trust and trustworthiness on a personal level is connected with those within social groups and religions. Giddens regarded tradition as the organization manner of beliefs and practices across time. He stressed the notion of "reversible time" (p. 104) developed by Levi-Strauss to refer to the tradition's central role in organizing the future through repeating the past. Therefore, tradition is deeply embedded in the present practices through this continuous representation. This is based upon the past-orientation or "backward-looking" (p. 105) of tradition. In sum, as Giddens said, tradition sustains trust by maintaining the continuity of past, present and future, and represents such continuity through routines. Finally Giddens paid some special attentions to religions. Religion should not be understood as entirely a refuge from real tribulations because religious doctrines also include the records and interpretations of human sufferings.

But Giddens did not romanticize tradition societies as pastoral odes because risks did exist, some of which are even more pervasive or uncontrollable than those in modern societies. The first is the hazard of material environment, which can be indicated by rate of infant mortality, death rate of parturient, spread of infectious illnesses and endemics, not to mention those natural disasters like floods, typhoons, hurricanes, storms and droughts. The second is the wide spread human violence of which there is no effective and persistent control. All agrarian civilizations are based on their military force; however, those states could not monopolize the means of violence, which brings about the real existence of threats from invading enemies, bandits, pirates and so on. So it is different from modern societies where forces against violence monopolized by the nation-states are far stronger.

Due to the dynamics of modernity, trust is disembedded from the local contexts. The local is no longer the primary element for shaping itself, and cannot resist those global forces that are quite distant from it. Somehow, the local can be regarded as the representation of the global. Therefore, the stability of the local not only depends on its local characteristics, but also depends on the stability of disembedding mechanisms of modernity. Giddens held that tradition is more supplanted by the reflexivity of modernity than religion, because tradition is more directly opposite to reflexivity, the implications of which include positivism, logic, material technology and so on. Along with the development of industrialism, the relations between human and material environment has been changed, therefore, the environment of risk has also been changed. Ecological threats are more outcomes of human activities than naturally made. In the field of military violence, despite the wide spread of weapons of mass destruction across the world, many nation-states achieved internal peace thanks to the monopoly of means of violence by nation-states within their respective territories. Risk and danger have also been secularized and can be assessed in the light of inductive knowledge, which repels the dominance of religion. The concept of "risk" is more understood with regard to the indelible possibilities of things going wrong, rather than something determined by Deity. However, that concept of "fate" won't disappear entirely, in particular, in environments of high risks.

Section Ⅳ has overlaps with the previous section, such as trust and security. But Giddens wanted to more investigate the impact of modernity upon personal relations, or "intimacy", and touch on different approaches coping with modernity or "juggernaut" which makes the world a "runaway" world.

Giddens once again used air travels as the example to illustrate how trust is vested under the pervasive impact of abstract systems. The point is that we vest our trust upon those abstract systems without a full grasp of the operating principles under the backdrop of time-space distanciation. Trust on abstract system has been something taken-for-granted, and certainly it has been testified more or less by frequent practices in our day-to-day life. Then Giddens put forward his theorems that globalizing modernity is directly connected with the "transformation of intimacy" (p. 114), and construing oneself becomes a reflexive action.

After repeating his preceding arguments regarding the construction of ontological security and emphasizing that abstract systems do not provide mutuality or intimacy as personal trust relations, Giddens distinguished three ways in which the distinctions between modern and pre-modern societies in terms of intimacy and social orders. are elaborated. The first one is conservatism, which depicts the rupture of community and attendant destructive forces towards personal relations. Due to the dominance of modern democracy and mass society, personal relations have been "deinstitutionalized" and therefore, people pay more attention to the inner subjectivity in order to find the meaning and stability of life. The second is sort of Marxist, arguing that life-world is taken over by modern institutions, and its inner meaning has been deprived, only reduced to be a hobby or leisure. The third is a more optimistic one, which argued that modern institutions create new means for communal life; therefore, community will not decline, but on the contrary, still survive or revive. Giddens regarded those debates as problematic because the overall backgrounds for this discussion should be put in the first place, namely, the very nature of "community" has changed along with the development of modernity. Given the fact that "place" is separated from space and loses its autonomy, it can be said that, as the synonym of place, community was destroyed. And similar can be said about kinship.

Then Giddens began his discussions on intimacy, especially friendship and sexual intimacy. He held that the nature of friendship in pre-modern society should be understood together with community and kinship. In this context, "insider" and "outsider" is clearly distinguished, and the prime function of friendship is to build up alliance targeting potentially hostile groups. In this way, therefore, friendship becomes institutionalized. Friendship definitely entails sincerity and loyalty, but also supporting and participating in some dangerous endeavors like take revenge on enemies. In modern society, on the contrary, friendship becomes a reembedding mechanism, but has no direct connection with abstract systems. The antonym of friendship is no longer "enemy" or even "stranger", but "acquaintance" and some other words conveying a lack of well-knowing of the particularity of others. Basic trust in pre-modern society can be anchored into personalized trust relations based on community, kinship or other local ties. Emotional intimacy is institutionalized framework in which trust is operating by different codes of sincerity, loyalty and so on. Trust on a personal level is a means of establishing social relations beyond the scope of local ties.

However, in modern society, trust upon impersonalized principles and anonymous individuals is contradictory to basic trust. The tissue and form of life-world is reorganized by distant forces, for example, routines are reorganized by abstract systems. In this process, personal relation becomes part of the institutions of modernity and time-space distanciation. Personal life has been closely connected with distant abstract systems. Personal trust no longer concentrates on personalized ties based on community and kinship, and it becomes a project to be "worked at" (p. 121) rather than pre-given, the operating codes of which include warmth and openness. He then took love and erotic involvement as an example to elaborate the mutual self-disclosure which is needed to establish personal trust. Giddens regarded erotic involvement as a progressive pattern of mutual disclosure, which also entails self-enquiry and self-discovery. The searching for self-identity is part of the collapse of pre-modern communal order, which gives rise to narcissism hedonism due to the feeling of powerlessness in the arenas of political decision-making. Giddens argued that those activities searching for health like fitness, dieting and psychiatry are not personal discoveries, and do not necessarily imply the lost of interest in the outside world, but rather, the reappropriation of expert knowledge by lay persons. It just represents the pervasiveness of the outside world which has been largely reshaped by modernity. In the last part of this subtopic on trust and personal identity, Giddens generalized five points of transformation of intimacy (p. 123-124), which I won't repeat here.

The next subtopic for discussion is risk and trust in modern society. He depicted the risk profile of modernity composed of seven points. The first four points are with regard to the objective distribution of risk, whereas the remaining three points are about the experience and understanding of risk.

The first point is the globalizing intensity of risk. Along with the spread of world-wide risk, there is no "others" who can be stay out of the global risk profile, for example, in the face of the threat of nuclear war. Meanwhile, it cannot be denied that some certain groups are more susceptible to some inferential risks in terms of social status, income, regional distribution and so on. The second point is the global extension of risk, which makes the global risk beyond the control of any specific individual or group. Since resources and services are no longer completely controlled by the local, local contingencies cannot be tackled efficiently all the time. And above all, the failure of disembedding mechanisms is the biggest risk. These two points together concern the scope of risk. The third point is regarding the changed relations between human beings and physical environment, namely, the "socialized nature" (p. 127), which itself is the source of a variety of new risks. And the fourth point is the institutionalized risk environments such as stock market. These two together concern the changed type of risk environments.

The fifth point is the good awareness and recognition of risk by both experts and lay persons, which even gives rise to psychological numbing. No risk can be assessed in a totally strict sense. Risk derives from the imperfections of disembedding mechanisms, and more importantly, become a close and institutionalized universe of action. Giddens borrowed game theory to depict this universe of action, in which competing actors attempt to outguess the strategy of others and hereby make their own decision, and in the meantime, they all know that their competitors are doing the same things. In traditional society, high risk can be concealed by religion or magic, thereby, a sense of security can be created. In modern society, however, those techniques will not word at all due to a strong and universal awareness of risk. The limitations of experts are also well recognized, which raises kind of "public relations" problems to experts: how to sustain the trust on abstract systems and experts themselves. The worst thing is not that some experts attempt to conceal the risks, but rather, that experts themselves have not really realized the risks.

Then Giddens once again discussed ontological security. Given the profound impacts of risks in modern society and the end of "others" of the global risk profile, not specific individual or group, but rather the overall modern institutions should be responsible for creating risks and negatively impacting our ontological security. Modern risks cannot be controlled or predicted in a strict sense, therefore, few people always consciously keep them in mind, and they are assured by abstract systems and themselves that the occurrences of those risks are considerably low despite their serious consequences once they happen. This sense of "fate" can help people be released from long-time apprehensions, having nothing to do with rationality. The cost of this relieving method is on an unconscious level, since the dread involved has never been dissolved but repressed. Giddens argued that "low-probability high-consequence risks" will persist in modern society, given the fact that the knowledge system that is particular to modern society cannot be eradicated. Technological advancement will only lead to endless technological race, which further intensifies the consequences of modernity. Modern risks are always there as real beings, but nobody has adequate experiences of their real occurrences, except for several rare cases like Chernobyl Incident. Meanwhile, the perceived "unreality" of modern risks by common people has narcotizing effects.

Subsequently Giddens discussed the fourfold adaptive reaction to the risk profile in modern society. The first is "pragmatic acceptance" (p. 135), which focuses on short-term benefits, because the overall trajectory of modernity cannot be controlled. The cost of this approach is psychological anxiety, and the attendant may either pessimism or emergence of new hope. The second is "sustained optimism" (p. 136), sort of continuation of the Enlightenment, which obtain its optimism from the faith in providential reasons, technological advancements and some religious ideals. The third is "cynical pessimism" (p. 136), which directly concerns the anxiety deriving from risks. This approach serves as a means of blunting anxiety, objecting to the future-orientation of modernity and more or less advocating "delights of the here-and-now" (p. 136). Pessimism cannot become a formula for action because there is no concrete content within it. Combined with cynicism, however, it becomes a guide for practices. The last approach is "radical engagement" (p. 137), which implies "practical contestation towards perceived sources of danger" (p. 137), in order to minimize or even transcend their impact. The major means is social movement.

The next subtopic is a phenomenology of modernity. Firstly, Giddens identifies two types of perceived contours of modernity that dominated in sociology. The first is given by Weber, the elements of which include the strengthening of rationality, iron cage of bureaucracy, and the importance of professionalism. The second is given by Marx, which regarded modernity as a monster, an irreversible and unfinished project, whereas it can also be tamed. Capitalism is an irrational way for the operation of modernity. Then Giddens gives his alternative contour: juggernaut. Giddens held that human beings can ride this juggernaut to some extent, but also have to remember another possibility that the juggernaut may get out of control and becomes ruptured. It is not an integrated machine, but instead, one that is influenced by different forces. Thus, it is difficult to form a sustainable ontological security. The overall background of all those phenomena is the time-space distanciation of modernity.

Giddens present his phenomenology of modernity as four types of experience that are dialectically connected with one another.

The first is "displacement and reembedding" (p. 140). Displacement of place by modernity is a double-layered process and the experience of space itself has been changed. The familiarity we obtain in our day-to-day life is also influenced by time-space distanciation, no longer a pure presentation of the particularities of the local. In the global cultural and information environment, familiarity does not necessarily conform to local ties. Those activities that have few intersections in pre-modern society can juxtapose in modern global community. People might be very familiar with very distant happenings thanks to electronic media. Thus, familiarity no longer only depends on spatial distance. Reembedding is the counterpart of displacement, which provides new opportunities for time-space reorganization by creating new communication spaces or patterns, or promoting small-size and informal social relations. The previous time-space limitations set up by local community or kinship in traditional society is therefore transcended.

The second is "intimacy and impersonality" (p. 140). Since trust environment has been dramatically changed by modern institutions, intimacy and abstract systems interact with each other closely. Apart from traditional types of intimacy based on local community and kinship, due to the insertions of abstract systems, new types of intimacy crossing space emerges, such as pen friends who keep contact with each other via email across perhaps continents, and there are more opportunities for establishing new personal relations. In relations of intimacy, trust is always ambivalent, and is likely to be dissolved or transformed into impersonal contact. Self-disclosure not only creates as sense of security, but also incurs anxiety, because trust-building demands mutual self-understanding, self-expression and emotional support, whereas any imbalance in this process will incur distress and frustration.

The third is "expertise and reappropriation" (p. 140). Giddens argued that the fact that expertise has been part of intimacy in modern society should not be understood as a colonizing process of life-world by abstract system. One reason is that the changes in life-world also influence reembedding systems, so the two parties have a dialectical interplay. Another reason is that nobody can be versatile in all sectors given the high complexity of abstract systems; meanwhile everybody needs to learn some rudiments so as to interact with abstract systems in the simplest way; therefore, everyone might be both an expert and a lay person, and thus, expertise is subject to this kind of continuous reappropriation by lay persons. Neither experts nor lay persons as individuals have full grasps of modern institutions. Modern life often implies dealing with something almost every day but never knowing their fundamental operating principles, for instance, using Windows XP PC operating system without any knowledge about how does Microsoft develop it. This process has nothing to do with local knowledge based on the particularities of local community, which is just the case in pre-modern society. Modern life is a complicated rather than one-way process, in which expertise is reappropriated by lay persons and applied to different spheres. Furthermore, those practices might become routines in the long run.

No matter how profoundly those practices facilitate their life, for common people, a greater sense of security has never been guaranteed, because the concerning scope of self-fulfillment and security has been largely expanded, the needs of which become much more difficult to meet. Modernity has made human activity to reach an unprecedented level in terms of scope and capacity. For example, nuclear deterrence exists only because the real threat of nuclear war is aware of by us. Nobody can be sure about whether it will function all the time. What we know it that until now, it works and nuclear war still did not happen. But the inherent uncertainty of the whole thing can be detected. Risk is not something distant from us. Instead, risk has been part of the core of our day-to-day life. Meanwhile, risk often coincides with opportunity, which makes it difficult to decide to want extent should we vest our trust, or should we suspend or withdraw our trust.

The last type of experience in Giddens's phenomenology of modernity is privatism and engagement, towards which Giddens held a somewhat optimistic attitude. He held that most of us will show a positively participatory stance due to the pervasiveness of modernity and the fact that nobody can be totally "others" survive without the spectrum of modernity. Thus, modernity might more arouse positive activism in the framework provided by nation-states and other collective organizations.

The last part of this section is Giddens's criticism of the conception of post-modernity and his alternative account of the current era: "radicalized modernity" (p. 149), which is a series of generalized arguments elaborated in the preceding parts of this book.

Section Ⅴ and Section Ⅵ are concluding remarks, proposing Giddens's approaches regarding how to transcend modernity, especially the dark sides, and his expected contours of post-modern social order.

Giddens used the term "Juggernaut" to describe modernity largely because of its uncontrollable feature, which makes itself different from the Enlightenment envisions. There are four major factors severing as the explanation for the defects of modernity. The first is "design fault". Modernity is intrinsically connected with abstract system, the design faults of which make modernity deviate from its originally designated path, given the fact that any social organization is expected to achieve certain goals, which can serves as the criteria for assessing the efficiency of modern institutions. The second is operator failure. Operators of modern institutions cannot completely avoid mistakes. Wherever people are involved, operator failures will persist. Besides, no calculation can effectively incorporate operator failure, because this kind of failure is actually unpredictable. The more important reasons are the remaining two: unintended consequence and the reflexivity. The complexity of human activity and other systems that are interacting with the system in question brings about the unpredictability of modern institutions. Reflexivity has been well discussed by Giddens, which continuously alters the form, nature and development direction of the living environment.

Thus, the social life cannot be completely controlled by human beings. Besides, reason does not refer to value differences and other differential factors like the use of power. Those factors can bring about significant variations in the operations of modern institutions, for which empirical research.

Then Giddens put forward the conception of "utopian realism" and his systematic framework for envisaging the possible post-modern social order. The overriding objective of minimizing high-consequence risks transcend all divisions of values and power, therefore, there is no privileged social group in this context. Giddens emphasized that utopian realism never reject the use of power, because beneficial changes often take place by virtue of the privileged group, and many such changes actually are realized undesignedly. Social transformation needs to be connected with institutional possibilities. This should be the criterion for distinguishing realism from utopia; however, the characteristics of modernity blur this distinction. The very nature of "utopian realism" exactly refers to the balance between utopia and realism.

Giddens appealed to establish a sociologically sensitive critical theory, which is sensitive to institutional transformations driven by modernity, and "geopolitically tactical" (p. 156). In the context of high risks, moral commitments may be dangerous in themselves in terms of the consequences they cause. "Models of good society" (p. 156) should transcend the boundaries of nation-states and single dimension of modernity with regard to both emancipatory politics and life politics. Individual benefits and broader social and global organizations should be well coordinated, through which some broader connections can be the means or conditions for self-actualization. In summary, Giddens depicted four dimensions of utopian realism: life politics, emancipatory politics, politicization of the local and politicization of the global. Due to modernity's impinging upon other countering trends, Giddens believed that this scenario is also applicable to those less developed countries.

Giddens then discussed the role of social movements in his framework of utopian realism. The importance of labor movement has dramatically declined because the laborer has become one of the various interest groups. The diversification of interest groups and social movements reflected the multi-dimensional character of modernity. Labor movements derive from capitalism, or the economic order of modernity, aiming to control the workplace and the state apparatus. Labor movements were the major carriers of fighting for freedom of speech and democratic rights; however, because those struggles do not derive capitalism in their natures, but rather, the surveillance system, the labor movement is not the only means. Peace movements concern the means of violence, the root reason of which is the industrialization of war, especially the high-risk war like nuclear war. Ecological movements concern the created environments. Since capitalism was not well distinguished from industrialism, plus the collective destruction towards traditional lifestyles, ecologically movements often combine with labor movements in their early phases.

Giddens regarded social movements as the provider of the possible future scenario, as well as the means to realize it. But he held that social movements are not the necessary preconditions and sole base for improving the society. Utopian realism recognizes the importance of the powerful, and does not regard them as always the naturally harmful. The division of interests among different social groups may impact social movements, but the power is not necessarily the tool for some groups to oppress or exploit other groups. In general, the power is the means to achieve certain goals, but also needs to be used concertedly in order to maximize opportunity and minimize risks.   

Although Giddens reject the misuse of the conception "post-modernity", he positively depicted his contours of a post-modern order, the implications of which are the transcendences of four dimensions of modernity. To Giddens, four dimensions of post-modern order are multilayered democratic participation, post-scarcity system, demilitarization and humanization of technology (p. 164). The transcendences in different dimensions are not necessarily synchronous, and need participations of various agents. With regard to economic order, Giddens held that socialism in its Marxist interpretation will by no means be the dominant order in post-modern society, because it is clear that complex economic order cannot be managed in the light of "cybernetic control" (p. 164), but rather, the signals given by specific economic organizations in the bottom of the whole system. The transcendence of capitalism implies the transcendence of class divisions, and declining importance of economic criteria in defining people's life circumstances. Giddens put forward the term "post-scarcity system" to generalize this post-modern economic order. In this kind of economic order, market is not the means of exploitation but only a signaling device, thus, the dilemma of whether or not to make the market to be subject to governmental control is dissolved. Since the accumulation of capital cannot be endless due to the unsustainable resources, it is urgent to stop this accumulation and avoid the self-destruction. The concept of "scarcity" is a relative one based on specifically defined social needs and lifestyles. Thus, a post-scarcity system needs a change of modes of social life: stop the undue expectations towards endless economic growth, redistribute the global wealth, and make the growth to improve the quality of life of the majority of people. The global economic organization is more a provider of information for economic policy-making than a regulatory agent. Giddens generalized the four dimensions of post-scarcity system as follows: socialized economic organization, coordinated global order, transcendence of war and system of planetary care (p. 166).

The intensification of surveillance gives rise to more demands for democratic participation. The government becomes more aware of the importance of people's participations in governmental procedures and the timely and response to people's preferences. Modes of democratic participation will go beyond the limited scope of nation-states and perhaps emerge more on the local and global levels, such as workplaces and mass media. Global cooperation is more stressed in coping with key issues of global impacts. The increasing production of weaponry persists, and employs more technology. But war can be prevented, given the stabilizing of nation-states system, increasing international interdependence and common interests. Constant technological innovations partially derive from capital accumulation and military consideration, but also have its own dynamics. In other words, technological innovation becomes a routine with strong inertia. It continuously generates "solutions", but it is still a big problem whether we really have those questions by which those solutions are justified. The serious ecological consequences caused by this phenomenon make it necessary to incorporate moral considerations into the created environment. The relations between human beings and the nature should not be totally instrumental. Giddens introduced the "Gaia hypothesis" to illustrate the planetary basis of more ecological concerns. In this point of view, the globe is a single organic unit, sustained by decentralized ecological circulations.

Modernity is full of risks, which has been fully discussed in preceding parts of the book. Four dimensions of risks in modernity can be generalized as follows: collapse of economic growth mechanisms, growth of totalitarian power, nuclear conflict or large-scale warfare and ecological decay or disaster (p. 171). In transition to a new order beyond modernity, diverse direction can be identified, all of which are full of risks. Despite constant technological innovations and the self-adjustment mechanisms of the market, capital accumulation cannot transcend resource limitations and resolve the problem of externality. Besides, due to the intensification of surveillance, totalitarianism is likely to emerge, with which modernity has an inherent connection. And technology escalates modern wars in terms of destructive power and affecting scope. We can see, therefore, another scenario of post-modern order, namely, the complete destruction of human life.

The last topic discussed by Giddens is whether modernity is equal to westernity, or in other words, is modernity particular to the West. The roots of two most significant organizational complexes in the four-dimension contour of modernity are all in Europe: nation-state and systematic capitalistic production. The astonishing power generated by the combination of the two complexes enables Europeans to expand globally and devastate almost all other countertrends. Modernity is inherently globalizing. But Giddens did not regarded globalization as the oppression made by western institutions towards other cultures. Instead, globalization creates new forms of international interdependence and global awareness. Globalization is still in its process of intensification; therefore, there will be diverse reactions based on the diversity of world cultures, and the inequality of wealth and power still persist to influence this process. The reflexivity of modernity distinguishes modernity from all previous eras and cultures. This discontinuity is realized by cultural commitments rather than reason and rationality. But power cannot resolve the problems caused by reflexivity. This is well displayed by discursive argumentation disregarding culture and value differences. To this kind argumentation, there cannot be anything particular to the west. Giddens opposed this arbitrary reasoning, and through the preceding affirmative but also blunt answers to the question posed by Giddens himself, we can find that Giddens cautiously confirmed the western features of modernity, at least in its origin; meanwhile, he also confirmed the wider-spread of modernity and attendant declining western dominance of modernity.

In concluding remarks, Giddens tried to generalize his major arguments in the shortest words. High modernity dissolves the sense of security provided by tradition and the dominance enjoyed by the west. Since the collapse of certainty established by "peestablished dogmas" (p. 176), doubts involved in modernity has been institutionalized. There are two-fold circulations of knowledge in social sciences: one implies that the knowledge is subject to constant corrections, the other refers to practical circulations of knowledge in and out of social life. The inherent reflexivity of modernity and the circulation of knowledge give rise to new risks. Modernity combines large-scale organizations with individuals dielectrically on both local and global levels. Subjectivity transforms simultaneously with the transformation of global social organizations. The future-orientation of modernity provides the basis for utopian realism, namely, the prediction and orientation of the future. Utopian realism combines the prediction of the future with the institutional analysis of the current trends.

Through the voices of utopian realism, finally, Giddens advocate the post-modern order in his mind which opposes reflexivity and temporality of modernity and sets a baseline to the currently endless expansion of modernity. This transition may give rise to the resurgence of tradition more or less, and intense reorganization of time and space locally and globally.  

General comments

Giddens showed his excellent grasp of classical sociological theories in this book, a large part of which can be regarded as dialogues with three founding fathers of sociology, as well as other social theorists who are relevant to his arguments. However, I do not think these dialogues are enough for this general discussion of "radicalized modernity", since the modern societies have dramatically changed, making the contexts for this discussion very different from those when Weber, Marx and Durkheim were doing their work. When talking something particular to "radicalized modernity", it is easier to be critical of those classical theorists, part of whose arguments have been proved to be obsolete. The most obvious example is Marx's undue expectation on socialism as transcendence of the dark sides of modernity and the labor's role in realizing this ideal. Giddens did not touch on enough modern social theorists who have contributed to studies of modern societies and late capitalism, such as Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell, Robert K. Merton, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, etc. This kind of inadequacy makes this book sometimes is like soliloquizing. It is understandable, however, because this book is not a systematic study but a collection of his lectures. So he did not have enough time to consult those relevant theorists one by one and make dialogues, comments and critiques.

Time-space distanciation is a novel perspective for analyzing modernity, transcending traditional sociological analysis in terms of the control of resource and domination of some social groups over others. This conception greatly contributed to the study of space, which has increasingly become a hotly-debated issue in social sciences. Not until around recent 4 decades do social scientists began to realize the importance the conception of space in analyzing modern societies and the necessary transcendence of single perspective in terms of time arrangement of modernity. Time-space diatanciation is particularly useful for urban and regional studies in a global era, given the fact that globalizing and localizing are interplaying in transforming the time-space arrangements across the world, generating novel patterns of social organization and lifestyle. Those new terms like "glocolization" remind us of the importance of adjusting to those novel time-space organizations of radicalized modernity.

Giddens attempted to work out a universal framework for analyzing modernity regardless of the particularities of specific places, peoples, land features and countries. To him, those features deriving from certain historical contexts and geographical locations have either been transcended or lost their importance in radicalized modernity. In other word, along with the wider spread of modernity across the world, those particularities no longer matter so much. Some kind of Eurocentricism can be detected in this book, although Giddens always tried to avoid this accusation through his statements with regard to the role of the diversity of cultures in reacting to modernity. It is not exaggerating to say that his arguments on modernity are largely based on the experiences of the West, particularly the UK. Other societies that are quite different from the societies in which he is doing his work are not interesting enough for him to account for. In his point of view, those particularities are going to be transcended or minimized at last when radicalized modernity engulfs the whole world.

I do not think it is reasonable to take Giddens's scenario of radicalized modernity for granted, because the importance of history and geography in understanding the past, shaping the present and predicting and orientating the future have been largely denied. I do not use the two terms of "history" and "geography" in the sense of modern scientific disciplines. Instead, they are two sets of total knowledge of human beings in terms of time-space arrangements. In other words, history and geography should be understood as the two fundamental dimensions in determining human beings. If we are blind to the two sets of total knowledge, we can never completely understand anything in which human beings are involved.

For example, the impact of Mongolia invasion of East Europe should be taken into consideration in understand the emergence of the capitalism in Europe, and even the details of the war between Mongolia troops and South Song Dynasty are relevant to understanding why Europe finally survived from the disastrous Mongolian invasion rather than being conquered and become part of the universal Mongolian Empire. Only since then did Europe recovered from the darkness of the medieval era and launched early development of capitalism. This part of history can therefore make Giddens confidently say the origin of modernity is in Europe. Let's assume, if Ogodai Khan of Mongolian troops did not die in the eve of the general attack on Europe, and Mongolian troops at the gate of Vienna did not withdraw because of the scramble for the position of Mongolian Khan among several Mongolian princes, the natural fate of Europe will be similar to that of Abbasids and South Song. There is no reason to doubt the possibility of Europe's collapse under Mongolian general invasion, given the history of what Huns and Goths have done to the Roman Empire. The inevitability of the European origin of modernity, therefore, is subject to be doubt in this historical perspective.

On the part of geography, a convenient example is the contrast of the unbelievable success of Great Britain and Japan in establishing modern nation-states and launching industrial revolution, and the long-time turmoil after the French Revolution in France and extreme difficulty of modernizing of China in modern history. The advantages of being island nations of Great Britain and Japan should not be neglected, which can help avoid frequent foreign intervention, for instance. Let's recall how many times France suffered from intervention by coalition of Austria Empire, Prussia, Great Britain, tsarist Russia, Spain, Ottoman Empire, and how many times of foreign invasions obstructing China's endeavors of modernizing, such as the shelling Nanjing (1927) by British, Japanese, American and French warships, and the Jinan Massacre (1928) by Japanese troops during the Northern Expedition. Likewise, the astonishingly rapid growth of the USA is partially thanks to its geography: isolated continent, only two neighboring countries with mild character, and rich resources which have never been fully exploited by American Indians.

For understanding China, on the one hand, Chinese exceptionalism should be avoided, but on the other hand, western theories on modernity should not be taken for granted, especially those with Eurocentric features. China is the only country with uninterrupted recorded history in the world. In this context, history matters more in terms of shaping Chinese society and Chinese peoples' identity. This has been well illustrated by endeavors of recoding, making, changing, fabricating and spreading some parts of history for a variety of purposes. In this specific case of Giddens's Consequences of Modernity, bearing in mind of the importance of history and geography, can help us go beyond his shortcomings in the institutional analysis of modernity, and better understand the diversity of modernity in different parts of the world.

[1] Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. All quotations in this review are drawn from this edition with pages specified except those with further notes.