Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: One explanation of the diminishing robustness over the years of the notion of generativity in Anthony Giddens’ social theory – from a radically new ontology for the social sciences in his early elaboration of structuration theory to an emphasis on reflexivity as one of the hallmarks of modernity in his analyses of late modern societies to an emphasis on “positive welfare” policies to encourage “responsible risk-taking” in his works on the politics of the Third Way -- can be found in his over-reliance on structuralist premises in his reformulation of the notion of structures as virtual sets of rules and resources. Both Cornelius Castoriadis and Roberto Mangabeira Unger – theorists who develop and sustain the notion of generativity in their work, the former in his notion of the “imaginary institution of society” and the latter in his “democratic experimentalism” – see a commitment to structuralist premises as a major barrier to the development of a genuinely generative social theory. Both Castoriadis and Unger have much to contribute to the recuperation of the generative in the structurationist project – Castoriadis’s distinction between the creative constitution (or “instituting”) of new social frameworks, on the one hand, and the instantiation of already-existent rules and resources in social routines (in legein or “representing” and in teukhein or”doing”), on the other, and Unger’s notion of the varying generativity of different social frameworks (i.e., their availability to ongoing challenge and revision).