Reflexive modernization

Ulrich Beck suggests that the contemporary world is less post-modern than radicalized modernity, a modernity that has become self-conscious and self-reflexive. He writes:

“Just as modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernization today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being . . . Todaty, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, in the developed western world, modernization has consumed and lost its other and now undermines its own premises as an industrial society along with its functional prnciples. Modernization within the horizon of experience of pre-modernity is being displaced by reflexive modernization . . . Modernization within the paths of industrial society is being replaced by a modernization of the principles of industrial society . . . It is this antagonism opening up between industrial society and modernity that distorts our attempts at a ‘social mapping,’ since we are so thoroughly accustomed to conceiving of modernity within the categories of industrial society . . . We are witnessing not the end but the beginning of modernity – that is, of a modernity beyond its classic industrial design . . . Reflexive modernization means not less but more modernity, a modernity radicalized against the paths and categories of the classical industrial society.”