Hartmut Rosa presents a working paper on 'Airports Built on Shifting Grounds? Social Acceleration and the Temporal Dimension of Law'

Modern societies are characterized by a progressive transformation in their temporal fabric which can be understood as a consistent trend towards dynamization and social acceleration (Rosa 2013). This trend implies that there is not just an ongoing technological acceleration in the speed of transport, communication and the production of goods and services, but also a progressive decrease in the stability of social arrangements and practices; that is, a change in the rates of change themselves. In other words, the social, technological and economic world transforms itself at an ever increasing pace. If one accepts this as a defining feature of modernity and hence as an adequate description of modern society, the interesting question for the role of law in this process arises almost as an enigma. On the one hand, law is supposed to ensure stability and calculability in a dynamic world. So this would mean that the rule of law is a prerequisite and even a safeguard for the dynamism of the socioeconomic world, but is not itself accelerated in the process. On the other hand, of course, laws need to be adapted to changing needs, values and environments, so lawmaking itself has becoming a perennial task in the modern world. And furthermore, of course, law itself can be the source of considerable social dynamics, as every historian can tell from the introduction of welfare, educational or gender legislation. In this contribution, I will try to sort out the role and function of law in the process of social acceleration in a systematic fashion. In the first step, I will briefly sketch out the logics and workings of social acceleration as a consequence of modernity’s core principle: dynamic stabilization, and I will point out how this leads to escalatory processes of speed-up, increase and innovation. In the second step, I will scrutinize the argument that law can be understood as a functional and indispensable ‘stabilizer’, even a decelerator, in the acceleration-game. However, not all aspects or spheres of social life can be dynamized to the same extent and at the same speed. This systematically raises the danger of desynchronization, for example, between the speed of market developments and the pace of democratic decision-making. Therefore, as I will try to point out in the third step, law serves a vital function in ‘re-synchronizing’ the pace of social life. This explains why law-making and applying, in some cases, actually is a tool to accelerate or dynamize certain social spheres or populations. Nevertheless, there is something like a natural speed-limit for law to be capable to fulfill this function. Beyond it, the rule of law itself is in danger of becoming anachronistic, of being too slow for the pace of social dynamics and hence of being eroded by the escalatory tides of acceleration. It might well be that late-modern societies are approaching this state of affairs quickly. It might mean, however, that the system of dynamic stabilization and social acceleration is finally undermining itself. This will be the topic of my concluding remarks in the fourth part of this paper.