Introduction: Moral Maps, Time Structures and World-Relations
Frédéric Vandenberghe

With four successive generations of scholars, the Frankfurt School is now almost a centennial school of thought.1 From within the fold of critical theory a new star has risen in the intellectual firmament: Hartmut Rosa. He does not write only for his peers, but reaches out to a general and rather variegated public in a lively style with appealing metaphors and striking images.2 He's at his best in Q&A sessions, where he listens intensely to every question and responds by illustrating abstract concepts with surprising references to politics, pop culture and everyday life. Rosa has a knack for choosing large transversal topics that allow him to interweave broad theoretical discussions in philosophy, sociology and political science with more existential issues. How individual conceptions of the 'good life' harmonize with systemic imperatives, or, rather, how systemic imperatives undermine the possibility of self-realization at the individual and collective level in modern societies, seems to be his central question. If his readers are interested in and moved by his work it is because he is able to connect the topics he puts on the agenda for critical reflection - personal identity, acceleration, alienation and resonance - to their personal lives. Both Social Acceleration (2005) and Resonance (2016), his major theoretical works so far, are composed like elaborate orchestral symphonies, usually with four movements and some counterpoints, that articulate moral and political philosophy with social and political theory into a critical diagnosis of the present age.3 While his transitional books are often schematic and overly programmatic,4 his classic books are more complex, composed and harmonious. They open up large vistas on conceptual landscapes in critical social theory that blend a radical critique of large-scale social systems that are out of control with a more romantic yearning for social integration, cultural significance and personal connection. With his theory of world-relations, Rosa has brought a different sensibility into critical theory.5

Systematic romanticism

In this introduction I will give an overview of Rosa's intellectual trajectory. The presentation is divided into four sections that span four phases in his intellectual career. Each of these phases is represented by one or two major theoretical texts. In the first, formative phase (1994-2001), around the time of his PhD, Rosa engaged with Charles Taylor's philosophical anthropology, moral philosophy and communitarian politics and laid the foundations for a critical hermeneutics of the self and a communitarian critique of modernity. In the second phase (2001-9), focusing on the temporal structures, processes and practices of early, classic and late modernity, he transformed the metaphor of acceleration into a wide-ranging, all-encompassing prophetic analysis and critical diagnosis of the times. In the third phase (2009-11), hitting middle age, the German theorist returned to his early interest in moral philosophy and complemented his sociological diagnosis of acceleration with a normative critique of alienation. Like his predecessors in the first Frankfurt School generation, he radicalized his critique of industrial capitalism, denounced alienation as an anthropological catastrophe, and put the 'question of an alternative to modernity' on the agenda.6 Frightened, as it were, by the radicalism of his own negative conclusions, in a fourth and last phase (2011-present), Rosa has developed resonance theory as a hermeneutically sensitive, phenomenologically inspired moral sociology of fulfilling relations to the world that complements the critical theory of alienation and reification with an affirmative philosophical anthropology. In various texts, Germany's most famous sociologist retraces his path from acceleration to alienation and resonance or, in short, from time-relations to world-relations.7 The book on social energy he's currently working on will probably open up another phase. Drawing on the 'new materialisms', it will give an 'ontological turn' to resonance and construct a conceptual arc that connects psychic energy (libido), social energy (effervescence) and physical energy (combustion) to explain what moves people and things and what makes them move.8 Throughout these phases, Rosa has been centrally concerned with a single theme: 'What does it mean to be human?' (Taylor); or, 'What type of humanity' (Weber) is being produced in the various phases of modernity? Or, in his own words: 'Why do we live the way we live?' (Chapter 1). His answer to this classical question interweaves a moral philosophical reflection on the anthropological and cultural conditions of successful identity formation with a critical sociological analysis of the social structures that lead to alienation and a political theoretical exploration of the possibilities of a more resonant society. In this way, the analysis, diagnosis and therapy of modern forms of conduct come together in a communitarian sociology of the good life in late modernity.9

Born in Lörrach in 1965, Hartmut Rosa is a child of his time. He used to play the keyboards in a rock band, called Purple Haze, and still occasionally plays the organ in his local church in the Black Forest or at the annual party of the Max Weber Kolleg, which he runs at the University of Erfurt. During the pandemic, he wrote a small book on heavy metal.10 Alternating between structural pessimism (the Frankfurt School), cultural criticism (hermeneutics) and personal optimism (with a tinge of mysticism), his sociology is not exactly of one piece. One senses that the author waivers between the 'deep structures of classicism and romanticism'11 that have pervaded the social sciences since their emergence in the eighteenth century. Both strive for expression in his work at the same time, balancing each other out, but without ever finding complete unity. Like his romantic forebears at the University of Jena (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), where he teaches, he is 'searching for a way to be modern without having to reject religion' and 'pursuing "development" without endorsing "progress"'.12 In his worldview, the romantic principle of self-realization should have the upper hand over the Enlightenment project of self-determination. In the spirit of Louis Dumont's logic of 'hierarchical complementarity',13 the principles of equality and freedom should be hierarchically subordinated to the principles of authenticity and difference to complement the dominance of the former, so that the tensions between cultural holism and normative individualism can be tempered in an unstable equilibrium.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the reactivation of romantic motifs of the nineteenth century and their continuation in the modernisms of the twentieth century could thus be read and interpreted as a counter-hegemonic move within critical theory. From the vantage point of a critical theory that deploys mimetic powers against the domination of instrumental reason, romanticism, aestheticism and atheistic mysticism appear as counter-currents not against, but within the fold of, modernity. The fusion of Enlightenment and Romanticism in a communitarian critical theory of society might thus indicate a progressive and emancipatory strand within the romantic critique of modernity that renews the indictment of alienation and reification without equating the latter with modernity.

Rosa's 'positioning' within critical theory cannot be understood without constant reference to Charles Taylor. Rosa wrote his doctoral thesis on Taylor's social philosophy and his influence can be felt throughout Rosa's whole oeuvre.14 The Canadian philosopher is quoted in almost every article that he has ever written. Taylor is for Rosa what Hegel is for Taylor. Many of Rosa's intellectual motifs and themes, including resonance, come directly from Taylor. I am therefore tempted to answer the question 'What holds the work of Hartmut Rosa as a whole together?' by referring to the inspirational work of his philosophical mentor, guide and friend. While Taylor is a professional philosopher in the analytic tradition with profound knowledge of the continental tradition, Rosa is a classical social theorist who places himself in the tradition of critical theory. Both are public intellectuals on the left with ecological sympathies, romantic leanings and religious sensibilities. Both are also interested in the cultural preconditions of the formation of individual and collective identities and both are worried about the depletion of cultural resources in advanced modern societies.

In Taylor's work, which can be considered an analytic rendering of Hegel's social philosophy via the detour of intellectual history, one finds two interconnected but heterogeneous and contradictory strands of social self-interpretation that are constitutive of modern identity. The two strands were already summarily mapped in his great book on Hegel;15 they will be developed, refined and expanded in Sources of the Self, The Secular Age and Cosmic Connections.16 The first strand is naturalist, instrumental and utilitarian. It values objectivity, autonomy and control....