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Alienation and acceleration – towards

a critical theory of late-modern
temporality
a
Christian Spatscheck
a
Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Social Work, Hochschule
Bremen, Germany
Published online: 26 May 2015.

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To cite this article: Christian Spatscheck (2015): Alienation and acceleration – towards
a critical theory of late-modern temporality, Nordic Social Work Research, DOI:
10.1080/2156857X.2015.1047596

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 Nordic Social Work Research, 2015

BOOK REVIEW

Alienation and acceleration – towards a critical theory of late-modern temporality,

by Hartmut Rosa, Malmö/Aarhus, NSU Press (NSU Summertalks # 3), 2010, 111pp.,
£36 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-8787564144/ISBN-10: 8787564149

With this book, Hartmut Rosa follows the ambitious project to lay foundations for a
critical theory of social acceleration and the human ‘being-in-the-world’. As a sociolo-
gist and social theorist he is working on the formulation of a theoretical analysis of the
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dynamics and transformative forces of our accelerating societies. In his works, he fol-
lows a relational and non-essentialist approach. This present book derives originally
from a double keynote he gave at one of the annual Nordic Summer Universities at the
Castle of Wik in Uppsala. Meanwhile, this book and some of his others have been
translated into different languages and find more and more repercussion in the debates
of critical theory.
The book consists of three parts. In the first part, Rosa describes the general outli-
nes of his theory of social acceleration. The phenomena of social acceleration can be
identified in three areas, technical acceleration, acceleration of social change and
acceleration of the pace of life. But what are the driving-wheels behind these develop-
ments? Rosa identifies two external drives, the ‘social motor of competition’ and the
‘cultural motor of the promise of eternity’, and one internal drive, the ‘self-accelerating
forces of late-modernity’ that no longer need external driving-wheels. Rather, they work
as ‘feedback-systems’ of permanent individual optimisation that often have lost sense
and values. Certainly, there are also phenomena of deceleration. Rosa identifies five of
them, the natural limits of speed, oases of deceleration, deceleration as dysfunctional
by-products of acceleration, intentional deceleration and structural and cultural consol-
idation. But according to his assessment, the forces of acceleration are usually stronger
than the forces of deceleration, and individuals therefore cannot resist or escape them.
The relevance of these developments is quite obvious; they determine our ‘being-in-
the-world’ and our relations to the objective, social and subjective world. On this back-
ground, it seems necessary to identify the pathologies and forms of alienation in the
current way of life.
The second part identifies the outlines of a critical theory that is able to reflect and
criticise current world relations. Here, Rosa tries to follow methodological intuitions of
the ‘founding fathers’ of critical theory, like Marx and the protagonists of the Frankfurt
School of Critical Thought, especially Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin,
Fromm as well as Habermas and Honneth, without staying tied to much on their
methodological and theoretical considerations. He identifies ‘social pathologies’
(Honneth) as a main focus of critical theory and social philosophy. But critical
approaches often implied normative considerations that, in Rosa’s understanding, can
no longer be derived from non-historic and pan-social perspectives. Instead, he pledges
to identify the ‘real human suffering’ as the main reference for critical theory. In this
sense, a contemporary critical theory would aim to assess social practices on the
 2 Book review

background of the individual’s conceptions of the ‘good life’. Here, Rosa explicitly
follows Charles Taylor’s conviction that human subjects and their actions and decisions
are guided by their conscious or implicit conceptions of the ‘good life’. This enables
Rosa to formulate a critical theory without conceptions of the human nature and
essence. Instead, he focusses on individual experiences and comparisons with social
practices and institutions. Here, the right to lead a life that matches individual abilities,
needs and hopes, and the need to create a democratic political community that supports
these aims, can serve as alternative references for critical theory. In two sub-chapters
he reflects why the approaches of Habermas’ critique of the conditions of communica-
tion and Honneth’s critique of the relations of recognition fall short to be a critique of
accelerated societies. The thorough analysis of relations of communication and the
reflection of norms, good arguments and sense often are too slow to criticise the
accelerated processes of political deliberation. And the growing societal demand for
permanent performance and optimisation makes it difficult to establish relations of
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recognition in environments of competition. Therefore, our accelerated social relations

need even to be regarded as a new form of totalitarianism. Struggling not to fall back
against competitors, we lose the ability to recognise these conditions as socially con-
structed. Rather, they seem as naturalistic and become part of an untouchable ideology.
Clearly, it seems necessary to find a critique of these conditions.
In the third part, Rosa formulates his four critiques of social acceleration. His first
one, the functionalist critique, identifies the ‘pathologies of de-synchronisation’. Some
social processes cannot be accelerated. This leads to tensions between systems, social
institutions, processes and practices that follow a different level of speed. Everyday
examples are the ecological impacts of the overgrowing human consumption of
resources, the still ongoing economic crisis with crashing global financial markets, the
increase in individual psychological problems or the lack of relaxation and creativity in
our accelerated lifestyles. On a political level, social acceleration also threatens pro-
cesses of political deliberation that need time for debate and consideration. Rosa’s
normative critique reflects the paradoxical situation that we are living in apparently free
and liberal societies, but still feel obliged to follow a growing number of social
demands and pressures. The imperative of our unfulfilled social duties seems to become
successively stronger; therefore, it is hardly possible to escape from them. Individuals
feel more and more guilty to meet the needs of optimisation, but still it is hard to lead
a debate about the seemingly anonymous forces behind these feelings. As the current
time norms undermine the modern promise of reflexivity and autonomy they need to
be challenged and enlightened by normative critique. Rosa’s next and first ethical cri-
tique refers to the ‘broken promises of modernity’. Originally, the project of modernity
was promising autonomy and self-determination for subjects. In accelerated societies,
this promise has lost its credibility. Acceleration is no longer liberating subjects. Rather
it hinders them to find autonomy. Over time, subjects are threatened to lose their ‘origi-
nal wills’ and to become ‘alienated’ from their actual wishes, interests and needs. This
leads to Rosa’s second ethical critique, the connection between acceleration and alien-
ation (Following the tradition of German social sciences, Rosa here uses the German
term ‘Entfremdung’). Through acceleration individuals become alienated from space,
things, their actions, time, themselves and their social relations. In this longer chapter,
Rosa comes closest to meet his claim from the introductory chapter: ‘In this book, I
will come back to the question that is the most important for us humans: The question
of the good life – and the question why we actually do not have a good life’.
 Nordic Social Work Research 3

But what can be done against these developments? Despite his strong focus on the
analysis of problems, Rosa at least describes some solutions in his final outlook. He
identifies the need to find and establish social relationships of ‘resonance’ as a positive
perspective. This could enable individuals to overcome current time regimes. Histori-
cally, we have been mainly building on two systems of resonance, religion and the arts.
Today it might be necessary to find new forms and settings for resonance in everyday
social relations and relations to things, nature and work. This again would be influenc-
ing our ‘being-in-the world’. For creating experiences of resonance, Rosa argues that
critical theory could at least provide more support than rational choice theories and
their concept of the instrumental homo economicus.
With this book, the term of alienation is rediscovered in a very clarifying argu-
mentation. Rosa does not build on essentialist arguments about the true nature of the
human being, but formulates a new approach for the debate about the good life. Why
is this relevant for social work? Firstly, practitioners and researchers can better under-
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stand time regimes of acceleration that affect the life worlds of social work’s target
groups as well as social workers as professionals. Secondly, it provides revitalising
arguments for a reformulation of a critical position without the need to refer to the
often doubted essentialist idea of knowing what the essence of a good life would need
to be. And thirdly, the four critiques of Rosa can help social workers in practice and
theory to find detailed and concrete arguments for a critique of the condition of our
current society and their alienating powers. This enables a well-grounded and innova-
tive perspective for the discovery of the good life as a conceptual subject matter for
social work’s research, theory development and practice.

Christian Spatscheck
Professor of Social Work
Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Social Work, Hochschule Bremen, Germany
christian.spatscheck@hs-bremen.de
© 2015, Christian Spatscheck
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2015.1047596