Social Theory and the Environment

David Goldblatt

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book establishes whether contemporary social theory can help us understand the structural origins of environmental degradation and environmental politics.

1
Capitalism, Industrialism and the Transformation of Nature: Anthony Giddens

Two of the key concepts social theory has developed to define and describe modern societies lie at the heart of contemporary environmental debate: is capitalism or industrialism responsible for the devastating environmental record of the modern world? The resonance of that debate is not simply of historical interest, for the policies we propose in order to forestall the current ecological crisis will depend on how we diagnose its origins. The green parties of Western Europe have tended to argue that industrialism is the key to explaining environmental degradation under both capitalist economies and the state socialism of the former Soviet Union and postwar Eastern Europe. They have, therefore, called for programmes of voluntary deindustrialization. Marxists, by contrast, have sought the structural roots of environmental degradation in the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, for which the usual recipe of socialist economics has been offered as the solution – although they have invariably failed to account adequately for the capacity of state socialism to achieve equal levels of environmental damage at lower levels of overall production. Environmental economists of both a social democratic and liberal orientation have argued that an unregulated or incorrectly regulated capitalism is the problem rather than anything intrinsic to the operation of markets and the private ownership of capital. Giddens’s work provides our starting point for examining these controversies.

Giddens’s Social Theory: an Outline

The difficult task of assessing Giddens’s prolific output has already been performed with a greater sweep than I can attempt here.¹ A summary will therefore serve my purposes. Three overlapping chronological phases can be identified in Giddens’s writings. In the early 1970s his work was characterized by a settling of accounts with the key figures of nineteenth-century social theory, primarily in Capitalism and Modern Social Theory with a comparative analysis of Marx, Weber and Durkheim.² Here, Giddens acknowledged capitalism as the central object of study for social theory, but never sought a simple reinvigoration of historical materialism. On the contrary, Giddens argued that much of that legacy, as well as those of Durkheim and functionalism, would have to be shed if the historical development of Western capitalism was to be grasped and its immense internal variation illuminated.³ Just such an intention informed The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. Assessing the validity of both Marxist and Weberian models of class, Giddens powerfully reinterpreted the different forms of class structure, consciousness and struggle in different capitalist and state-socialist societies.⁴ For my purposes, however, the most important argument of the book concerns historical changes in class structures. All social formations prior to capitalism had been either tribal societies, in which class analysis was inappropriate, or class-divided societies; only capitalism could be accorded the status of class society proper, and it was that status that marked out its unique dynamics and organization.⁵

The second phase of work began with the 1976 publication of New Rules of Sociological Method, in which Giddens focused on a series of recurrent problems in social theory: epistemology, methodology and the relationship between structure and agency.⁶ He critically examined the various traditions of interpretive sociology, as well as the functionalist legacy in social theory.⁷ Both positivistic and naive interpretive epistemological projects in the social sciences were rejected and the Parsonian resolution to the problem of order was readdressed. Despite the demands of Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, this has been the keystone in Giddens’s developing research project: an attempt to redress the balance between the individual and society or between agency and structure in the analysis of social action. He sought to transcend deterministic formulations, which effectively write the conscious human agent out of social theory. Yet he has also sought to recapture the bounded and determined nature of social action.⁸ The outcome of this inquiry has been Giddens’s theory of structuration.⁹ Having laid the ontological and epistemological foundations of a substantive social theory, in the 1980s Giddens returned to the concrete ground of actual historical societies. Here he deployed the newly honed theory of structuration in a continuing critical encounter with historical materialism. Central to the third phase of his work has been the displacement of a historically unique capitalism as the prime subject of contemporary social theory; the focus has become modernity, its institutional orders and the transformation of both social structures and everyday life under the impact of heightened risk and reflexivity.

Giddens’s critique of Marx is primarily contained in his two-volume Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism.¹⁰ Here he has not only challenged the most basic tenets of historical materialism, but developed an alternative and comprehensive social theory on the same ground. It would be misleading to limit the scope of these rich works to a few substantive themes, but three stand out. First, Giddens rejected all evolutionary models of societal development or historical explanation. This position is underwritten by his discontinuity thesis and the demonstration of the many different trajectories of social development.¹¹ Second, he has rejected any purely endogenous theory of social development; rather, Giddens emphasizes the importance of the relationship between different social formations along time-space edges.¹² Third, his earlier work on concrete social formations has been enriched by a consideration of space and time in the constitution of social structures; the nature of cities; the importance of the absolutist state and nation-state in the formation of Western capitalism and the modern global state system; the associated industrialization and centralization by nation-states of the means of violence and information gathering and use.¹³

The upshot of such a complex and differentiated analysis is a firm rejection of both economic and technological determinism in explaining either the origins and structure of capitalism or – in a striking shift of theoretical focus – of modernity. The latter, for Giddens, is characterized by the distinctive combination of four institutional orders. The exact classification of the orders has shifted in his work, but in the most recent formulation they are capitalism, industrialism, surveillance and military power. These institutional orders emerged together in the West and have become effectively globalized. In The Consequences of Modernity this analysis has been developed in confrontation with theories of postmodernity, arguing that its themes of epistemological, personal and aesthetic fragmentation and uncertainty are best accounted for in terms of the radicalization of modernity’s core institutions. The psychological, political and phenomenological dimensions have been explored in, first, Modernity and Self-Identity and more explicitly in connection with issues of gender, sexuality and family life in The Transformation of Intimacy. Most recently Giddens has sought to reconnect this new model of modernity with an explicitly political agenda in which the limits to both contemporary socialism and neoliberalism are tested against a modernity they can no longer comprehend.¹⁴

How has this theoretical trajectory brought Giddens to consider the historical and structural origins of environmental degradation in modern societies? Externally, the rise in environmental concern of the 1980s has had its effects on Giddens’s work and the political and existential implications of global environmental change have formed an important component of his emerging political agenda. But the developing theoretical logic of his work has allowed him to make two significant and interconnected arguments. First, he has argued that the conjunction of capitalism and industrialism is responsible for modern environmental degradation. He has, in shifting his focus from capitalism to modernity, subsequently reassessed the causal origins of environmental degradation. Second, recalling the discontinuity thesis, he has argued that whatever the precise causal origins of environmental degradation, the modern world heralds a more wholesale transformation of nature than human societies have ever been capable of before.¹⁵

Giddens on Capitalism, Industrialism and Modernity

Giddens’s most extended discussion of capitalism and industrialism is initially analytical, delineating the unique features of these forms of social organization.¹⁶ The uniqueness is the whole point of the argument. They are separate and irreducible, empirical historical phenomena; there have been capitalist societies that have not been industrial and industrialized societies that are not capitalist. Giddens also considers the historical relationship between capitalism and industrialism by reflecting on the two dominant approaches to this problem in social theory. The first approach argues that industrialism can be understood as the outcome of a developing capitalist society that both temporally predates it and is a condition of its emergence. For Giddens this is the essence of the Marxist theory of capitalist development.¹⁷ The second approach, exemplified by the work of Durkheim and Raymond Aron, argues that capitalism is a temporary phase in the longer development of industrial societies or a specific variant of a causally prior industrialism.¹⁸ The resolution to this debate is necessarily twofold. As Giddens writes: ‘I do not wish to pretend that these matters can be settled on the level of conceptual cogency alone. They depend also upon a definite empirical assessment of the trends of development of modern societies …’¹⁹

Analytically Giddens’s tactic is to review Weber’s account of capitalism, using it as an antidote to the shortcomings of Marx’s analysis, and as a prelude to developing his own analytical and historical positions. Giddens places particular importance on Weber’s organizational account of capitalism. However, given the thrust of his own discontinuity thesis, he finds Weber’s distinction between capitalism as a form of historically unspecific economic action and capitalism as the structural organization of a mode of production unsatisfactory. Giddens thus sides with Marx in establishing the distinct and generic qualities of modern capitalist societies and turns to his theory of commodification, particularly that of labour power.²⁰

Giddens acknowledges the existence of commodities and commodification in other social formations, but argues that their nature in capitalist societies is radically discontinuous with that of their predecessors.²¹ First, the commodity form, as the principal system of exchange, extends at a greater level of intensity, over a greater geographical range, and covers more goods and services. Second, and this is really the crux of the matter, labour itself is commodified as labour power on a massive scale. The implications of this are enormous and provide the point of departure for Giddens’s fivefold classification of capitalist society. First, he classifies it as an economic order serving as ’the primary basis of the production of goods and services upon which the population of that society as a whole depends.’²² When this feature of capitalism is conjoined with the structural economic imperatives of the investment-profit-investment cycle, economic decisions and actors clearly achieve an importance in capitalist societies that cannot be accorded to them in precapitalist societies. Second, underlying that importance, the cycle is conjoined with commodified labour and product markets to form an economic sphere distinct from the vertically hierarchical and horizontally parcelized economy and polity of feudal Europe. Third, that separation or insulation is predicated on the existence of private property in the means of production; it is therefore part of the wider process of commodification which creates both private property and the propertyless, who are required to sell their labour as labour power. This fundamental transformation provides the primary axis of modern class differentiation and results in the creation of endemic class struggle. Giddens is careful to clarify that not all social divisions and struggles can be reduced to or explained in terms of class structure, despite the centrality of class conflict.²³ Fourth, the separation of polity and economy at the level of institutional orders is marked in capitalist societies by complex institutional alignments between the activities of the state and those of private property.²⁴ Fifth, the ‘capitalist state’ can be used synonymously with ‘capitalist society’, because the nation-state and its boundary-defining mechanisms are intrinsic, rather than incidental, to the nature of capitalism.²⁵

How then does Giddens conceptualize industrialism? He has, since his earliest writings, been a stringent critic of the concept of industrial society.²⁶ None the less, he does not wish to reduce industrialism to a historical epiphenomenon of capitalism, and nor does he wish to accept the standard analytical formulation of industrialism as factory production plus technology.²⁷ He rejects the latter on the grounds that the impact of new technologies cannot be focused on the system of mechanized production alone, and points to the impact of transport and communications technologies on a range of social activities.²⁸ Similarly the location of industrialism in the factory is considered too narrow to capture the specific organizational changes that occur with the advent of industrialism. Giddens thus identifies four defining characteristics of industrialism. The first two are essentially technological features. Industrialism entails the mobilization of inanimate sources of power in the production and circulation of commodities and the mechanization of those processes.²⁹ The conjunction of these two developments in the routinized flow of goods and production come to constitute an industrial economy. All three features must be located (with some significant exceptions) in centralized workplaces, wholly devoted to productive activity and quite separate from the domestic locale, to form a ‘homogeneous productive order’.³⁰

The analytical separation complete, Giddens then turns to the substantive historical questions. He does so by considering the historical validity and explanatory power of the terms ‘capitalist society’ and ‘industrial Capitalism, Industrialism and Nature society’. Giddens finds the latter to be wanting on two counts. First, it cannot explain the dynamic quality of modernity, its inherent and incessant transformatory powers and the acceleration of the scale and speed of social change. None of the usual accounts of industrial society, nor Giddens’s own account of industrialism, can provide an explanation of this.³¹ Second, the notion of an industrial society would suggest that industrialism as a productive order has a substantial effect on the constitution and organization of other social structures. Again Giddens argues that the term simply cannot carry the explanatory weight placed on it.³² However, his own definition of capitalism, given the investment profit cycle and the chronic impetus it imparts to technological development and economic expansion, does account for the transformatory qualities of modernity. Similarly, given the inherent relationship between polity (capitalist nation-state) and insulated economy, the term capitalist society is preferable to that of industrial society. The rejection of the Durkheimian tradition does not entail a whole-hearted acceptance of the classical Marxist position on the relationship of capitalism to industrialism. In contrast Giddens argues that capitalism, industrialism and the emergence of the nation-state should be seen as ‘three distinct “organizational clusters”, associated in a direct way with one another in their original European context, but which should be kept analytically distinct and which can have separate substantive consequences when instituted in other societal orders’.³³

Even if the effects of industrialism require that it be viewed separately from capitalism, Giddens argues that their original historical relationship is somewhat closer. There are ‘elective affinities’ between the two which allow him to talk of a generic capitalist-industrialism.³⁴ These affinities are threefold: first, that the inherent dynamism of capitalism is associated with a propensity towards technical innovation in the manufacture of commodities; second, the commodification of labour power, generic to capitalist societies, is a basic condition of the suitability of the work-force for regularized, mechanized production processes, characteristic of industrialism; third, the expropriation of peasants to create wage-labourers is a precondition of the mobility of the work-force required for the centralized working practices of the industrialized economy. It would therefore appear that Giddens is suggesting that capitalism, although not the only economic order capable of combining with industrialism, is historically unique in its ability to create the preconditions for the emergence of industrialism.

However, in the argument of The Nation-State and Violence, a degree of confusion exists. On the one hand Giddens wishes to retain a relative autonomy for the impact and consequences of industrialism. Although there are elective affinities between capitalism and indu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Social Theory, Environmental Degradation and Environmental Politics
• 1 Capitalism, Industrialism and the Transformation of Nature: Anthony Giddens
• 2 Urbanism, Globalization and Environmental Politics: Anthony Giddens
• 3 The Political Ecology of Capitalism: André Gorz
• 4 Social and Cultural Origins of Environmental Movements: Jürgen Habermas
• 5 The Sociology of Risk: Ulrich Beck
• Conclusion: Social Theory, Socialism and the Environment
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index