of the whole, especially economic interests, over particularist interests or ‘soft factors’. The carrying out of the project, however, fell mostly into the stormy period of the second half of the 1960s and the oil crises of the 1970s, which were characterized, at least in western Europe and some liberal democratic countries elsewhere, by the crisis of organized modernity, the growing criticism of the original modernist consensus, and the gradual breakdown of that consensus. Non-economic factors, including the natural environment and preservation of cultural heritage, and the lack of consideration for the particularist interests of various social groups, including individual generations, sexual minorities, and people of different skin colour from that of the majority. In the 1980s, the distinguished German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015) proposed the term ‘reflexive modernity’ for a qualitatively different form of modernity, one which had undergone the criticism and crises of the 1960s and 1970s and had also been affected by the transformation of the labour market which led to a loss of certainty.135 Beck’s analysis importantly contributes to charting the changes in politics, society, and thinking in the last third of the twentieth century. It is also a fundamental starting point for this book. The question of the extent to which the ‘second crisis of modernity’136 and its new, ‘reflexive’ character were manifested in the nature of late socialism and what influence this global transformation had on its ultimate legitimacy crisis, certainly merits greater attention than historians have so far paid it. It is worth noting at this point that the changes in the discourse about the destruction of the old Most and the building of the new one in the 1970s and 1980s underscore the usefulness of Beck’s and Giddens’s analyses also when applied to the 135 Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. The term ‘reflexive modernity’ or ‘reflexive modernization’ is also used by Giddens, in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. 136 Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity, pp. 123–71.
98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS258267