Abstract

Anthony Giddens has recently located modernity's fault lines in the loss of the binding normative character of traditions. This loss is countered by attempts to reestablish or create “new” traditions. Such attempts do not represent a nostalgic bid for something irretrievably lost, but rather “an incipient move beyond a world dominated by internally referential systems.” Giddens recommends “life-political issues” as the vehicles for “the return of the institutionally repressed” tradition.

Tradition is not buried in the past but something latent in everyday life which may still be reactivated. Gidden's approach, however, is to use traditions as psychological props. He robs them of their moral force by reducing them to security blankets which “we moderns” have never quite managed to do without.