Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity

by Hartmut Rosa, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (Translator)

Overview

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time.



According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231148351
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/09/2015
Series:	New Directions in Critical Theory , #32
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	209,940
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hartmut Rosa is professor of sociology and political science at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. He is the author of Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality and coeditor, with William E. Scheuerman, High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity.

Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (1979–2014) was assistant professor of philosophy at Boston College.

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction
In Place of a Preface
Introduction
Part 1. The Categorial Framework of a Systematic Theory of Social Acceleration
1. From the Love of Movement to the Law of Acceleration: Observations of Modernity
2. What Is Social Acceleration?
Part 2. Mechanisms and Manifestations: A Phenomenology of Social Acceleration
3. Technical Acceleration and the Revolutionizing of the Space-Time Regime
4. Slipping Slopes: The Acceleration of Social Change and the Increase of Contingency
5. The Acceleration of the "Pace of Life" and Paradoxes in the Experience of Time
Part 3. Causes
6. The Speeding Up of Society as a Self-Propelling Process: The Circle of Acceleration
7. Acceleration and Growth: External Drivers of Social Acceleration
8. Power
Part 4. Consequences
9. Acceleration
10. Situational Identity: Of Drifters and Players
11. Situational Politics: Paradoxical Time Horizons Between Desynchronization and Disintegration
12. Acceleration and Rigidity: Attempt at a Redefinition of Modernity
Conclusion: Frenetic Standstill? The End of History
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Ulrich Beck

Hartmut Rosa, a rising star in the field of German sociology, proposes a new critical theory that explains and explores the narrative of 'run-away-modernity' conceptually, empirically, and normatively. In the second half of the twentieth century, most giants of social thought focused on the reproduction of the social and political order in late capitalism, class society, social systems, and structures of power, but Rosa does the opposite: he reassembles the focus of his theory on the transformation of order.

William E. Scheuerman

Ours is a high-speed society: we need a proper conceptual and theoretical framework for making sense of it. As Hartmut Rosa shows in this ambitious and wide-ranging work, the concept of social acceleration offers a rich starting point for doing so.

Jerald Wallulis

Hartmut Rosa has put forward the most developed and most important social theoretical analysis of the acceleration of time from the perspective of critical theory. His theory of social acceleration is of great importance, since it explains how our social lives are speeding up, and extends critical theory into a new and fruitful avenue of inquiry—and maybe even into a new generation of social theorizing and critique.

Editorial Reviews

When I first picked up this book, I was looking forward to a leisurely reading on obscurantist Heideggerian bullshit. I was wrong. But once I got over my deep disappointment that the book was, in fact, intelligible and not littered with ramblings about Dasein, I began to appreciate the book for what it was.

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