Andreas Reckwitz

Agora

Andreas Reckwitz

b. 1970

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Today being unique and special is valued over being normal, and this new ideal divides society into winners and losers.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · Western Europe · Society & History, Aesthetics, Politics & Law

Diagnoses late modernity as a “society of singularities”: no longer the standard but the unique is what counts – a shift that divides winners and losers and new and old middle classes.

Key ideas

Society of singularities
The creativity imperative
Culturalisation of the social
Loss as a problem of modernity

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Influence

Influenced by 5

Georg Simmel

influenced by
Reckwitz took up Simmel’s ‘qualitative individualism’, the valuing of the individual as unique, and made singularity the guiding logic of late-modern society (Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, 2017). A. Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (2017); reply to critics, Analyse & Kritik (2022); G. Simmel, “Die beiden Formen des Individualismus” (1901)
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Simmel › 1858–1918
Max Weber

influenced by
Reckwitz described industrial modernity’s logic of generality in terms of Weber’s formal rationalisation, set against late modernity’s logic of the singular (Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, 2017). A. Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (2017); SEP “Max Weber”
Evidence: AI draft
Max Weber › 1864–1920
Michel Foucault

influenced by
Reckwitz drew on Foucault’s genealogy of subjectivation to trace bourgeois, organised-modern and postmodern subject cultures from the eighteenth century to the present (Das hybride Subjekt, 2006). A. Reckwitz, Das hybride Subjekt. Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (2006); SEP “Michel Foucault”
Evidence: AI draft
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Pierre Bourdieu

influenced by
Reckwitz built his theory of social practices on Bourdieu’s habitus and practical sense, treating society as routinised practices guided by implicit knowledge (‘Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken’, 2003). A. Reckwitz, “Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken”, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32 (2003); Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Pierre Bourdieu › 1930–2002
Anthony Giddens

influenced by
Reckwitz studied social theory at Cambridge (MPhil 1994), where Giddens then taught; in “Toward a Theory of Social Practices” (2002) he counts Giddens’s theory of structuration among the versions of practice theory he builds on. A. Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices”, European Journal of Social Theory 5:2 (2002), 243–263; A. Reckwitz, Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Anthony Giddens › b. 1938

Works

2017The Society of Singularities
Late modernity rewards the unique rather than the general: a culture of singularisation carried by the new, university-educated middle class – and resented by those it devalues.

Position

Reckwitz’s sociology starts from practice theory: society consists of routinised practices of bodies and things, and cultures are the orders of knowledge that guide them. On this basis he wrote a history of modern forms of subjectivity and, in Die Erfindung der Kreativität (2012), traced how creativity, once the privilege of artists, became a general social imperative. Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (2017) describes the shift from industrial modernity, governed by a logic of generality – standardisation, mass production, the norm of the average – to a late modernity governed by a logic of singularity, in which goods, places, experiences and persons gain value by being unique. Digital culture and the creative economy drive this singularisation. Its social carrier is the highly educated new middle class, whose lifestyle of self-realisation becomes the cultural standard, while the old middle class and a precarious service class lose status. Reckwitz links this polarisation to the rise of populism and the crisis of liberalism, the theme of Das Ende der Illusionen (2019). In Verlust (2024) he argues that modernity, oriented towards progress, has systematically neglected experiences of loss, which now return politically – from climate anxiety to nostalgia.

Life & context

Andreas Reckwitz was born in 1970 in Witten in the Ruhr. He studied sociology, political science and philosophy in Bonn, Hamburg and Cambridge, where he took a master’s degree under Anthony Giddens in 1994. He gained his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1999 with a study of the transformation of cultural theories, and his habilitation there in 2005. He was professor at the University of Konstanz (2005–10) and at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) (2010–20), and since 2020 has held a chair of sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (2017) won the Bavarian Book Prize, and in 2019 he received the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation.