The future of post-socialism Michael Rustin This article discusses three contributions to new thinking in positive theories of social development), and Weber on the Left. * Two of these, Anthony Giddens' s Beyond on the other. Weber's voluntarist action-based Left and Right: The Future ofRadical Politics and David methodology then become one foundation of Giddens's Miliband's collection Reinventing the Left (to which own approach. The separation of fact and value became Giddens contributes the first chapter), set out to provide the grounding of an 'ethical' view of politics, and its the new thinking which the post-Clause 4 Labour Party rejection of determinism and economism was the basis certainly needs. Socialismfor a Sceptical Age, by Ralph for Giddens' s critique of historical materialism. There is Miliband (Miliband pere), defends traditional socialist an affinity between the theoretical preference for ethical positions against facile revisionism, as its author did over materialist approaches shown by Giddens and the throughout his working life. ethical view of socialism now proclaimed by the Labour The most theoretically ambitious of these works is leader. that of Anthony Giddens. It is a prolegomenon to a In The Class Structure of Industrial Societies (1973, political programme, somewhere between a theoretical revised edn 1981) Giddens demonstrated the distinctive framework and the specific policies it might generate. 'A insulation between political and economic spheres which Future for Post-Socialism', one might say.' This book he held, following Weber, to be the defining ?ttribute of was originally announced in 1981 2 under the title capitalism, later of capitalist democracy. This argument 'Between Capitalism and Socialism'. It was going then supported Giddens' s view that capitalism should be to combine the project of realizing still-valid socialist understood as a distinctive system with its own laws of ideals with confronting the 'absences' in Marxism and in development, not as a mere stage in an evolutionary actually-existing socialism: the role of violence, military schema to which universal explanatory laws (e.g. of power, ethnic and sexual exploitation. But Giddens's historical materialism) applied. The distinction between thinking has moved on. Now he says socialism is political and economic spheres became a basis for virtually moribund and looks to a post-socialist and Giddens's institutional pluralism, since it denied the post-capitalist perspective, as if the enemies confronted causal priority of anyone (e.g. material) sphere. This led by these old ideologies have vanished into thin air, or, Giddens on, in The Nation State and Violence (1985), to more precisely, into cyberspace. 3 the exploration of the means of violence and surveillance as modern forms of social domination and threat. Critical Giddens's sociology of modernity attention to the role of the state has, of course, had a It is useful to see Beyond Left and Right in the context of central place in 'revisionist' social theory of the left (in Giddens's two decades and more of theoretical work, the the work of Mann, Parkin, Skocpol and the later E.P. underlying coherence of which is now made clearer by Thompson, for example). It made possible a full its political application. To begin at the beginning, in confrontation with the oppressiveness of state socialism. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971) Giddens Giddens has continued to see the state as an ambiguous drew a contrast between the work of Durkheim and Marx force, sometimes oppressive, sometimes emancipatory. on the one hand (historicist, systemic, and naturalistic in In parallel with this work on the institutional their ethics in grounding immanent or emergent values dimensions of society, Giddens also devoted much * Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge, Polity, 1994; David Miliband, ed., Reinventing the Left, Cambridge, Polity, 1994; Ra1ph Miliband, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, Cambridge, Polity, 1994. Radical Philosophy 74 (NovlOec 1995) 17 attention to the subjective and intersubjective dimension produce useful accounts of the social world, social of 'action'. What is meant by 'action' in the sociological scientists need to be able to understand actors' own lexicon are the dimensions of understanding, rule­ definitions of the situation. (This is another continuity following and decision-making which constitute with Weber.) But in a 'double hermeneutic', as Giddens individuals' relationships to society. Here, in his notably called it, sociologists' understandings were liable to be syncretic way, Giddens has drawn on the work of reincorporated into social life, thus modifying the phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists like Schutz thinking and behaviour of actors, and incidentally and Garfinkel, and post-structuralists - especially maintaining the quality of social life as an open, Foucault - to explore the different ways in which cultural underdetermined system. This (at least theoretically) systems can be constraining of individuals, and yet, in interactive relationship between sociological thinking other conditions, the objects of individual reflection, and actual social life is one reason why Giddens should choice and decision. His concept of 'structuration' still be seen as a 'critical theorist' . He believes that social enabled him to theorize the idea that individuals are both theory is emancipatory in so far as it thus enables actors made by and the makers of social forms~ necessarily so, to redefine their situations and see new possibilities for since the means by which societies reproduce themselves choice. require that individuals and groups have to internalize This reformulation of the grammar of sociological the rules by which their own lives are lived. But the explanations might not have amounted to much in processes whereby individuals learned these cultural practice, except that Giddens linked this redefinition of scripts always allowed some scope to redefine and the relation between social actors and social structures to reinterpret them as they did so. a substantive theory of historical change. This asserts that This more methodological turn took place in a series the scope for 'reflexive' understanding has undergone a of works beginning with New Rules of Sociological secular increase with the development of 'modernity'. Method (1976), and continuing with Central Problems Actors' relationships to social structures have been of Sociological Theory (1979) and the very substantial theoretically recast as 'recursive' (structures are always The Constitution of Society (1984). These works and only reproduced through actors' understandings and attempted a new synthesis of sociological theory, the aim practices). But what does change over time is how much of which was to transcend - through the concept of must be taken as given, and how much can be reflected 'structuration' - the antitheses of 'structure' and on by actors. Evolutionist models, rejected in their 'agency', 'system' and 'action', 'micro' and 'macro' deterministic, positivist, and materialist forms, thus make sociology with which sociological theory had been left an indispensable though covert return in Giddens' s at the end of the long debate between functionalists and theory of 'disembedding' and globalization.5 According interactionists. Both structuralism and phenomenology, to Giddens, these processes have the effect of enhancing though antithetical to each other with respect to reflexivity.6 What was historically a mainly 'dualist' individual agency, enabled Giddens to clarify that, in relation of individuals to unchangeable facts and drawing on implicit social rules in routine social action, traditions now becomes more of a 'duality' as it becomes individuals were reproducing and instantiating a social possible for citizens to reflect on alternative definitions order which had often been wrongly misconceived in of the real and the normative. A mainly coercive positivist sociology as 'external' to them. Giddens sought relationship between actor and structure thus evolves into to replace the concept of 'dualism' (the supposed a more voluntaristic one. 'Modernity' is defined by this antithesis between action and system, individual and change in the relations between actors and structures. In structure) with the idea of 'duality of structure', the effect we might say that duality of structure becomes argument that individuals were both independent of and defined as the modern condition, dualism as pre-modern. yet also utilized the normative resources of the social Giddens arrives at this conclusion both through his groups to which they belonged.4 Structuralism abstract arguments about 'the constitution of society per contributed to this understanding through its cognitively se, and through discussion of contemporary institutional and linguistically elaborated version of the social system~ forms and social processes, in A Contemporary Critique phenomenology and ethnomethodology through their of Historical Materialism, Volume 1 (1981) and The view of social action as an intersubjective construction Nation State and Violence (1985). (Beyond Left and of meanings which both drew upon and enacted implicit Right was originally conceived as the third volume of social norms. this trilogy.) In these books he argued for the centrality Giddens argued that the understandings of social to social theory of the concept of power and began the scientists were intrinsically