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Essay
Morality in an Age of Contingency
Hans Joas
University of Erfurt, Germany and University of Chicago, USA
Let me begin this essay with a note of caution or perhaps an all clear sign: it will not be a
jeremiad. I will not lament a process of ongoing fragmentation, of the loss of all values in our
time, of the disappearance of community or trust or commitment or the social significance of
character formation. Such jeremiads are so common in current debates about values and
morality that they constitute a rhetorical genre of their own both in the social sciences and
in cultural criticism. They can be found in conservative as well as in progressive versions. The
mere fact of their being a genre of their own can already sensitize us to the schematizations
and narrative restrictions imposed by this genre.
When the American historian Thomas Bender searched American historiography to locate
the exact date of the triumph of individualism and materialism over the ideals of Puritan
community life, he discovered that such a claim has been made for practically all points in time
since 1650. Desperately he asked: How many times can community collapse in America? (1978:
46). Similarly, we should ask ourselves when the time before the alleged contemporary frag-
mentation of society is said to have been and whether we really do justice to contemporary
changes if we constantly force them into the framework of loss and decline. In the first part of
this essay I exemplify the problem I have with these pessimistic diagnoses by analysing one of
the most influential sociological contributions to this genre in the past few years. In the second
part, I sketch an alternative to this type of interpretation before developing a few thoughts in
the concluding section about the problem areas for successful value-transmission today.
The influential diagnosis I have in mind is Richard Sennetts book The Corrosion of
Character, published in 1998. Its title is a clear sign that it belongs to the genre of diagnoses
of decline. The author intends to describe a process of corrosion, namely of decay, decom-
position, disintegration. What is it that according to Sennett is undergoing such a
decomposition today? It is the human character of human beings a phenomenon he defines
in terms of the permanent structure of a personality in its emotional and other dimensions.
Human character, he writes, is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through
the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratifications for the sake of a
future end (1998: 10).
The formation of characters is said to be fundamentally threatened today by an epochal
change in capitalism, for which Sennett uses the term flexibilization (1998: 10):
. . . How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short-term? How can mutual
loyalties and commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or
continually being redesigned?. . . How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society
which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment?
While early sociology and also classical Marxism described the destructive consequences of
industrial capitalism with regard to pre-industrial communities, Sennett responds to the disso-
lution of social, economic and political structures that came into being after the New Deal of
the 1930s at the earliest, but mostly, both in the U.S. and in Europe, since the end of the Second
World War. The foil against which contemporary developments are described is therefore an
epoch of continuing prosperity, bureaucratized industrial relations, an expansive welfare state,
the golden age of the nuclear family and institutionally supported biographical stability. It is
ironic to observe how this regime, during its existence the object of trenchant criticism from
the left and continually compared to an idealized version of socialism, is now becoming
romanticized almost as much as the pre-industrial world in the writings of early sociologists.
Sennett hastens to counter the tendency he shows, almost despite himself, to romanticization,
and to distance himself from the well-grounded suspicion that he is defending the preser-
vation of or a return to a deadening politics of seniority and time entitlements (1998: 117).
But despite these declarations by the author, the tone of decline proves to gain the upper
hand in his text. Job security is said to have disappeared, like all possibilities of relying perma-
nently on acquired skills and qualifications, of finding clear and recognizable rules for
orientation in ones work, of planning a career for oneself and ones children. Collegial attach-
ment and loyalty to the firm allegedly cannot arise under these conditions. According to
Sennett, age and experience are systematically negated today, because flexibility is exclusively
associated with youth and age with rigidity or paralysis, and because seniority no longer
justifies any claims. In new structures such as flexible time-regulation, increased individual
responsibility, teamwork and dehierarchization, Sennett sees nothing but a humiliating super-
ficiality of social relations and a subtle disguising of the real conditions of power. Whereas the
highly routinized character of bureaucratic work and the repetitive character of assembly line
production had traditionally been used to illustrate the alienation of man under capitalist
conditions, they are suddenly viewed in a milder light; the new flexibility is not interpreted
as a step toward more creative self-realization, but as the elimination of even those small
degrees of freedom that were offered by a work regime based on completely routinizable
activities.
The simplest question regarding these strong claims is how comprehensive these changes
have really been. Sennett frequently takes the self-presentation of an enterprise as its social
reality and totalizes current tendencies as if they were taking place without any counter-
developments. But more important still than this question, not to mention that of how new
and how flexible this new and flexible capitalism really is, are the tacit presuppositions Sennett
makes when he speculates on the long-term consequences of certain observable changes. Here
he makes many presuppositions that clearly cannot be taken as a matter of course. For
example, he assumes that strong attachments to other people can only be the result of long-
lasting coexistence. He supposes that a lack of stable career patterns leads to a dissolution of
temporal experience. He claims that in the American suburbs friendship and local community
can only be casual. He imagines the ability to keep ones distance to be a permanent attitude
of reserve and detachment. And he believes that only very few people, mostly the tiny elite
of participants in the World Economic Forum whom he facetiously terms homo davosiensis,
are among the winners produced by flexibilization. But all these claims and assumptions are
empirically highly questionable and, what is more, logically problematic. Empirically they are
contradicted by a wealth of findings demonstrating the adaptability of persons and social
structures in the face of the demands of flexible social processes.
For me, however, it is much more important to expose the logic of this diagnosis and this
task gains additional importance because the same logic can be identified in the writings of
other influential contemporary sociologists. Ulrich Becks descriptions of the dissolution
of traditional sociomoral milieux in Germany are clearly similar, though Beck is more
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In this seemingly watertight six-step causal chain from markets to violence, none of the links
seems to me plausible. They are not even supported by the authors own findings. But his
own modifications do not lead him to abandon the crucial assumption that capitalism leads
to social disintegration and social disintegration to violence. And the new, less bureaucratic
and more flexible capitalism is said to have the same repercussions to an even greater extent.
Well, what is the logical problem with this rather popular theoretical construct? An easy
reaction would be to say that most of the changes are not simply dangers, but also present
opportunities. This is a point of which the authors I have in mind are well aware. It would
already be a step beyond thoughtless cultural pessimism if the two-fold framework of order
versus disintegration were replaced by the three-fold framework of order, disintegration and
reintegration a framework allowing us to imagine creative actions and creative adaptation
to new conditions. But this critique of cultural pessimism is not my main point. My main point
is to make a strict conceptual distinction between problems of social integration and problems
of increasing contingency. Fragmentation, social disintegration or corrosion of character are
not the appropriate catchwords for understanding changing conditions for the development
of value commitments and social relations today, but increased contingency.
Presumably it is appropriate to offer at first a definition of this concept. I follow Niklas
Luhmanns definition, itself taken over from William James: A fact is contingent if it is neither
necessary nor impossible something that is but does not have to be. I think this definition is
useful because it makes clear at the outset that the best way to understand the meaning of
contingency is to see it as a counter-notion to another idea, namely necessity. Thus the precise
meaning of the term contingency depends on the precise meaning of the term necessity that
it presupposes. If necessity referred, as in pre-modern philosophy, to the idea of a well-
ordered cosmos, contingency referred to the incompleteness and imperfection of the merely
sensual and material world on the one hand, and to the liberty and creativity of Gods
unrestrained will on the other. In a brilliant essay published in 1910, Ernst Troeltsch recounted
the early history of the concept (1922: 76978). But a dramatic semantic change took place
when the modern scientific revolution replaced the image of the well-ordered cosmos with the
image of a causally determined universe, ruled by the laws of nature in the sense of a
clockwork-like mechanism. This reconceptualization destroyed the idea of finding meta-
physical certainty in the contemplation of a well-ordered cosmos or in the faithful contem-
plation of an order of nature designed by the unfathomable will of the divine Creator.
Retaining its double meaning, the term contingency became associated now with chance on
the one hand and free will on the other. The longing for complete certainty moved from the
ontological to the epistemological level the clearest expression of this move is the Cartesian
belief in the possibility of a methodical procedure in human cognition as warranting complete
certainty. Since around 1800, the period named by Reinhard Koselleck Sattelzeit, i.e. since the
radical temporalization of human self-understanding, there have been several waves of insight
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into the contingency of human existence, but also new constructions of frameworks suppress-
ing this insight again, also on the basis of temporalization. Here I am referring to the teleo-
logical and the evolutionist philosophies of history which dominated nineteenth-century
thought. Whereas Darwins biological research opened up space for insight into the irreducible
contingency of organic evolution, Darwinism gave rise to a determinist evolutionism among
what Paul Croce called science watchers. But this is not the place to develop the ways in
which thinkers like Nietzsche, Bergson and the American pragmatists tried to develop an
anti-necessitarian type of thinking about history (Peirce); the topic of this essay is whether
this notion is fruitful for the purposes of a diagnosis of our time.
The concept of contingency sensitizes us to the increase in the number of options for our
choice and our action and to the number of paradoxical consequences the collective
expansion of individual options can have. Sociologists are familiar with this thought, less
from the pragmatists than from Georg Simmels analysis of life in the modern metropolis.
He had his sight set on Berlin, the city in which he spent almost all his life, and emphasized
the rich variety of contacts and impressions on the streets of the city, the speed of their
changes, the impossibility of digesting the multiplicity of such impressions, the opacity and
abstractness of means-end-chains mediated more and more by money, as the result of an
alleged on-going economization. Though he had very profound things to say about death
and the question of immortality in his last book (still not translated into English), and on the
question how the genesis of values is interrelated with the experience of finiteness, in
Simmels work we can also find not only an emphasis on the contingency of human existence
in general but also a stress on historical change in the experience of contingency. Contin-
gency thus develops from an anti-necessitarian metaphysical category into a sociological
concept, allowing different degrees and becoming appropriate for an empirically founded
diagnosis of our time.
To put this in a less abstract way, we can refer to the category of small ads in todays city
magazines in which the writer longs for a meeting with an unknown person he or she has
briefly met or seen: Caf Lutz, November 4, Sunday, 1 pm, Goltzstrae. Looking for you,
female, black smooth hair, sitting with another girl at my table, cant get you out of my head
(the last sentence in English in the original Berlin magazine). Such texts had been, so to speak,
ennobled a century earlier in Charles Baudelaires famous poem A une passante:
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, dune main fastueuse
Soulevant, balanant le feston et lourlet;
(. . .)
Un clair . . . puis la nuit ! Fugitive beaut
Dont le regard ma fait soudainement renatre,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans lternit ?
Ailleurs, bien loin dici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-tre !
Car jignore o tu fuis, tu ne sais o je vais,
O toi que jeusse aime, toi qui le savais !
In both texts, the small ad and Baudelaires poem, an experience is articulated that resembles
what Simmel described in his famous sociological essay: the great number of surprising
encounters and the sudden closeness to unknown others in urban life. City-dwellers are used
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to this type of experience; they are no longer fully aware of it and have developed a reper-
toire of behaviour that allows them to deal with situations of anonymous closeness. But these
encounters are different in principle from other surprising encounters, such as those with wild
animals or robbers in the forests of pre-industrial life. Nowadays we constantly encounter
others for whom we are just as much a source of surprise as they are for us. It is only because
we can choose with whom we wish to connect and because we assume others to enjoy the
same freedom of choice that a brief eye contact in a Berlin caf or on a Paris boulevard can
trigger the fantasy, or maybe the realization, of authentic love. A real increase in the number
of individual options, in this case for choosing a partner, is the backdrop to the experience of
contingency in urban life.
In Baudelaires poem this experience is articulated in a tragic sense. As lovers tend to
interpret their meeting, even if it was purely coincidental, as the result of some sort of predes-
tination, Baudelaires poetic ego is certain that the passer-by would have been his true love,
but that he will never meet her again, so that true love becomes visible in a moment of
epiphany but disappears immediately afterwards. It was the First World War that made the
awareness of contingency, at least in some European countries, a mass phenomenon, but it
was an awareness tinged with tragedy. Greater numbers of options can be experienced as
release and redemption, but also as a compulsion to be free; a wealth of encounters with the
freedom of others can be experienced as heightening lifes intensity or as a threat.
Let me return from these briefly sketched reflections on our time as an age of contingency
to the narrower question of what all this means for contemporary possibilities of developing
a commitment to values and persons. In my book The Genesis of Values (Joas, 2000), I claimed
that our value commitments are not the result of rational-argumentative justifications, but of
experiences of self-formation and self-transcendence, hence of experiences in which we
transcend the boundaries of ourselves and in which something appears to us as good (or evil)
in a subjectively evident and affectually intense way. If this claim is true, we can conclude that
the mere knowledge of or acquaintance with values or persons never produces commitment.
And this means also that mere knowledge of alternatives does not shake or unsettle our
existing commitments. To put it bluntly: to know that there are billions of other female human
beings on the earth does not as such weaken my commitment to my wife. Mere confrontation
with the fact that besides the Christian religion there are other religions or secular worldviews
does not shake my Christian convictions. Increasing contingency as such does not endanger
the emergence of commitments. It influences, however, the type of commitments that can
survive under these conditions. That is why we must investigate those types of commitment
(to persons and values) that are adequate under the condition of high contingency.
Though there are important parallels between our commitment to other human beings and
our commitment to values, and though these parallels are important for the distinction
between value commitments and cognitive validity-claims, I shall restrict myself here to the
topic of value-commitments. I would just like to point to the fact that we are all familiar with
forms of commitment to partners and children that are adequate under conditions of high
contingency. The dissolution of fixed gender and generational roles and of a seemingly natural
division of labour in the household has not, as the diagnosis of decline would suggest,
produced nothing but fear and complete behavioural uncertainty. Interaction between
marriage partners and between them and their children has changed in ways for which the
Chicago sociologists of the inter-war period had found a good short-hand term: from insti-
tution to companionship. Coordination and communication become more important, success-
ful interaction is based on sensitivity to ones partners current needs and the specificities of
a situation and these abilities and acts of communication compensate for a disappearing
static stability and produce a potentially much higher dynamic stability.
In the field of morality we should expect a similar development. Value commitments change
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social activities as an indicator for successful value generalization; its lack may also indicate
stagnation. Since these results refer exclusively to the German situation, I will not present them
here. Let me just summarize them in two brief statements: (1) the weakening and almost
complete dissolution of both labour-related and church-related sociocultural milieux in
Germany has enormously reduced the opportunities of those without higher levels of
education to participate in voluntary organizations; and (2) the level of voluntary activities in
East Germany remains considerably below the level in West Germany. This is clearly due to
the suffocation of voluntary activities under totalitarian control and to the abrupt collapse of
all types of community in the rapid transformation following the fall of the communist regime.
But in neither case can social disintegration simply be attributed to market forces and their
antagonism to community. Such an interpretation would neglect the long-term negative
consequences of totalitarianism, the positive consequences of overcoming the pillorization of
a society, and the enormous potential for human freedom that lies in the rise of contingency.
Note
This text is a revised version of Hans Joass, Wertevermittlung in der fragmentierten Gesellschaft, in
Nelson Killius et al. (eds) Die Zukunft der Bildung (Frankfurt/Main 2002, pp. 5877). When I changed the
title of this article for the English-language version as it was presented at the European Sociological
Association meetings in Murcia (Spain) in September 2003, I was not aware that Zygmunt Bauman had
used an almost identical title before; see his Morality in the Age of Contingency, in Paul Heelas et al.
(eds) Detraditionalization (Oxford 1996, pp. 4958). I leave it to the reader to discern the differences
between these two analyses. I express my gratitude to Ricca Edmondson (Galway, Ireland) for helping
me to improve the English style of this text.
References
Bender, Thomas (1978) Community and Social Change in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Heitmeyer, Wilhelm (1994) Das Desintegrationstheorem: ein Erklungsansatz zu fremdenfeindlich motivierter
rechtsextremistischer Gewalt und zur Lhmung gesellschaftlicher Institutionen, in Heimeyer (ed.), Das
Gewalt-Dilemma, pp. 2972. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Joas, Hans (2000) The Genesis of Values. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lepsius, Rainer (2002) Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur. Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen
Gesellschaft, 1966; reprinted in his Demokratie in Deutschland, pp. 2550. Gtingen: Vandenhoeck und
Rupprecht 1993.
Parsons, Talcott (1977) Comparative Studies and Evolutionary Change, in Social Systems and the
Evolution of Action Theory. New York: Free Press.
Sennett, Richard (1998) The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism.
New York, London: Norton.
Troeltsch, Ernst (1922) Die Bedeutung des Begriffs Kontingenz (1910), Gesammelte Schriften. Tbingen:
Mohr.
Biographical Note: Hans Joas, born 1948 in Munich (Germany), is Director of the Max Weber Center for
Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt (Germany) and Professor of Sociology and Social
Thought at the University of Chicago. Among his recent publications are: The Genesis of Values, War
and Modernity, Braucht der Mensch Religion? and Sozialtheorie (with Wolfgang Knoebl).
Address: Max Weber Center, Am Huegel 1, D-99084 Erfurt, Germany. [email: hans.joas@uni-erfurt.de]
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