High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0271034173
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Everywhere, life seems to be speeding up: we talk of “fast food” and “speed dating.” But what does the phenomenon of social acceleration really entail, and how new is it? While much has been written about our high-speed society in the popular media, serious academic analysis has lagged behind, and what literature there is comes more from Europe than from America. This collection of essays is a first step toward exposing readers on this side of the Atlantic to the importance of this phenomenon and toward developing some preliminary conceptual categories for better understanding it.
Among the major questions the volume addresses are these: Is acceleration occurring across all sectors of society and all dimensions of life, or is it affecting some more than others? Where is life not speeding up, and what results from this disparity? What are the fundamental causes of acceleration, as well as its consequences for everyday experience? How does it affect our political and legal institutions? How much speed can we tolerate?
The volume tackles these questions in three sections. Part 1 offers a selection of astute early analyses of acceleration as experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 samples recent attempts at analyzing social acceleration, including translations of the work of leading European thinkers. Part 3 explores acceleration’s political implications.
Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law
Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia
Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism
Marinetti, however, Dewey formulates the temporal dilemmas at hand as a series of constructive questions that he thought democrats must tackle successfully if they were to revitalize existing liberal society’s unrealized radical democratic potential: “How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay 00 Front.qxd 10/27/2008 2:31 PM Page 23 introduction 23 in place?” To the extent that democratic citizenship minimally requires the possibility of e¤ective action in.
Debased money, because debtors are generally active economic producers, whereas 01 Chapters 1-5.qxd 44 10/27/2008 1:49 PM Page 44 classical perspectives creditors are mostly passive consumers who contribute much less positively to economic transactions. The Wduciary note-issue was not yet legal currency at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Connecticut and at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, yet every creditor was obliged to accept it in payment of debts. The.
Debased money, because debtors are generally active economic producers, whereas 01 Chapters 1-5.qxd 44 10/27/2008 1:49 PM Page 44 classical perspectives creditors are mostly passive consumers who contribute much less positively to economic transactions. The Wduciary note-issue was not yet legal currency at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Connecticut and at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, yet every creditor was obliged to accept it in payment of debts. The.
02 Chapter 6.qxd 78 10/27/2008 1:54 PM Page 78 theoretical foundations empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speedup of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life. In terms of its structural and cultural impact on modern society, this change in the temporal structures and patterns of modernity appears to be just as pervasive as comparable processes.
Of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Armin Nassehi, Die Zeit der Gesellschaft: Auf dem Weg zu einer soziologischen Theorie der Zeit (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1993). 02 Chapter 6.qxd 10/27/2008 1:54 PM Page 93 social acceleration 93 (A) The economic motor: Time = Money 1. Technological acceleration The acceleration cycle 3. Acceleration of the pace of life 2. Acceleration of social change (C) The cultural motor: The promise.