http://tcs.sagepub.comTheory, Culture & Society DOI: 10.1177/0263276403020002005 2003; 20; 79 Theory Culture SocietyBoris Holzer and Mads P. Sørensen Rethinking Subpolitics: Beyond the `Iron Cage' of Modern Politics?http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/2/79 The online version of this article can be found at: Published by:http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University can be found at:Theory, Culture & Society Additional services and information for http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/20/2/79SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms): (this article cites 15 articles hosted on the Citations © 2003 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on December 21, 2007 http://tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded fromRethinking SubpoliticsBeyond the ‘Iron Cage’ of Modern Politics? Boris Holzer and Mads P. SørensenMODERN POLITICS is bound up with the idea of democracy. Yet, assuch, it not only entails empowerment but also a subtle kind ofexpropriation. If we follow Weber, modern politics has achieved aseparation of political subjects from their ‘means of production’ quite similarto that characteristic of a capitalist economy (Weber, 1921a: 401f.). Whilepre-modern, particularly feudal societies allowed a wide range of actors totake control of the various sources and instruments of politics, modernsociety has monopolized them under the control of the state. The concomi-tant ‘political expropriation’ has been a prerequisite for the predictabilityand complexity of democratic mass politics. It provides the basis for theestablishment of a bureaucracy that can be rationalized according tointernal political criteria – rather than according to the interests of princesand feudal landlords. Just as in the economic realm, expropriation inpolitics thus results in alienation. Bureaucratic politics is part of the ‘ironcage’1of modernity: it is primarily built upon the formal rationality of expertknowledge and involves a ‘slow boring of hard boards’ to which only rela-tively few people can devote much attention. Being a vocation for the fewand an avocation for the many, politics shares the fate of other specializedfields of knowledge and activity.Thus, politics appears to become a victim of its own success. Whileeven dictatorial regimes nowadays cast themselves as mere facilitators ofdemocracy, voter participation in elections is on the decline in manyWestern democracies. At the same time, however, the iron cage of bureau-cratic politics seems to be under siege. More and more people take uppolitical issues, either individually or in associations, movements andprotest groups – but seek to tackle them from outside formal politics. Thus,the fact that interest in formal politics seems to be declining does not needto be taken as evidence of a general lack of political action in late modernTheory, Culture & Society 2003 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 20(2): 79–102[0263-2764(200304)20:2;79–102;032621]05 Holzer (jr/t) 3/12/03 8:47 AM Page 79 © 2003 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on December 21, 2007 http://tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded fromsociety. Rather, Beck draws our attention to the possibility that we mightsimply be looking for politics in the wrong places and using the wrongconcepts (1993: 157). In so doing, we underestimate the significance of whatBeck calls ‘subpolitics’: the re-politicization of areas outside the iron cageof bureaucratic politics in the face of new challenges brought about by theprocess of reflexive modernization.In this article, we argue that the concept of subpolitics indeed drawsour attention to the relationship between the system of formal politics andsources of power and influence beyond the bars of its iron cage. In contrastto Beck, however, we believe that it is important to conceive of those sourcesof societal influence as largely independent and distinct from the politicalsystem. In our view, it is exactly their non-political character that gives‘subpolitical’ phenomena their significance for reflexive modernization. Inwhat follows, we first review the role of subpolitics in the context of thetheory of reflexive modernization. Then we provide examples of subpoliti-cal phenomena from three areas: the subpolitics of science and theprofessions; green, ethical and political consumers; and corporations asagents of subpolitics. These three cases describe what we perceive to be a‘continuum’ of subpolitics that runs from the unintended production ofsubpolitical effects in science to the deliberate subpolitical strategies ofsocial movement organizations. The political significance of corporations,then, appears to be located between these two extremes. In the final section,we draw out the implications of our analysis against the backdrop of a socio-logical theory of power. The idea of subpolitics stresses the significance ofsources of power outside the political system in a differentiated modernsociety. We can observe that these non-political sources of societal influ-ence impact on the way politics is done in modern society. In particular,they point to the limits of politics concerning collective action underconditions of individualization and decision-making under conditions ofuncertainty.Subpolitics and the Theory of Reflexive ModernizationGenerally speaking, the concept of subpolitics refers to small-scale, oftenindividual decisions that either have a direct political frame of reference orachieve political significance by way of their aggregation. Narrowly defined,subpolitics thus bears connotations of being placed beneath the nation-state.More generally, however, it can be conceptualized as a form of politics‘outside and beyond the representative institutions of the political systemof nation-states’ (Beck, 1996: 18). The concept has been developed in thecontext of the theory of reflexive modernization, which contends thatWestern industrial societies have entered a second, reflexive phase ofmodernity (for the general argument see Beck et al., 1994,