Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
The theoretical legacy
Giddens engages with classical social theorists, most notably Karl Marx, Emile
Durkheim and Max Weber. His aim, like that of the great trio, is to understand
the cluster of changes which we call the emergence of ‘modernity’ from
around the time of the mid-seventeenth century. Sociology’s origin and purpose
were to account for this break with ‘traditional’ societies which was marked
by the development of factory production, bureaucratisation, urbanisation, the
growth of a scientific ethos, new ways of seeing nature – the set of institutional
and attitudinal changes which we call ‘modernity’.
Unlike the founding fathers, however, Giddens finds Marx’s explanation for
modernity (the dynamics of ‘capitalism’) and the Durkheimian and Weberian
master keys (‘industrialism’ and ‘rationalisation’) inadequate. It is not that these
are inapplicable so much as that they oversimplify. What we need to acknowledge
are other factors in the making of the modern world which the great
tradition either understated or overlooked. Giddens emphasises two associated
features of modernity underplayed by the classical thinkers, namely heightened
surveillance and violence, war and the nation state.
Giddens does not, of course, develop his critique without drawing on
antecedent theorists. Thus his concern with the growth of surveillance owes a
good deal to the work of Michel Foucault, as well as, in a less direct manner, to
themes discernible in the writing of Max Weber (O’Neill, 1986). Again, Giddens’s
(1985) conviction that ‘the impact of war . . . upon the generalised patterns of
change has been so profound that it is little short of absurd to seek to interpret
such patterns without systematic reference to it’ (p. 244) recalls the interest in
‘militaristic societies’ of nineteenth-century sociologist Herbert Spencer as well
as themes of neo-Machiavellians such as Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca,
who paid attention to power, coercion and force.
Nevertheless, Giddens’s observation that the two major competing explanations
of the emergence of the modern world – ‘capitalism’ or ‘industrialism’ –
have eclipsed other contributions is valid, and much of the originality of his
critique lies in bringing concerns of Foucault and Spencer into debate with the
major classical inheritance. This endeavour to illuminate other factors allows him
to present an especially interesting perspective on the origins, significance and
development of information.
Organisation, observation and control
At the outset we need to establish a point which is preliminary to what follows.
This is simply – though it is not simple at all! – that the world in which we live
is much more organised than before. That is, our lives now are planned and
arranged in unprecedented ways.
No one should jump to the conclusion that there is implied here some
decline in personal freedoms. There can be no doubt that in the past circumstances
massively restricted humankind: hunger, the uncertainties of nature, the
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