Martin Albrow

Martin Albrow ( * 1937 ) is a British sociologist.

About the person

Albrow is a professor emeritus of social sciences at the " Roehampton Institute" in London. 1985-1987 he was President and Honorary Vice President of the British Sociological Association. He worked as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. For his book "The Global Age. State and Society beyond Modernity " he won the 1997 European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences of the University of Rome.

Global age

For Albrow we live today in the Global Age. The global era went a transitional phase - globalization - expected that began with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and is completed with the general knowledge of global warming. The project of modernity, with the discovery of America by Columbus and the first circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan took for Albrow approximately at the turn of the 16th century its beginning, found by globalization to an end. It was characterized by the guiding principles of rationality, expansion, capitalism, nationhood and innovation. In particular, the nation-state as a social -forming principle, the supreme authority of the control and organization of the social, the expansion and extension of national vested in territorial and economic terms and as an extension of influence on him belonging to individuals and groups, and the rationality, less than rationality, but as a distinctive pattern between rational and irrational are for Albrow as models of modernity. The main function of the state, the institution of the modern project, was to secure the unity of state and society through the institutionalization of the social. The Global Age, represents the essential feature of the terms of globality, including visible in the relativity of identity and place, the decoupling of citizenship and nationality, the focus on consumers rather than the producers and the loss of importance of the state monopoly on violence. In the autopoietic, creative and diversifikatorischen force of the social, which have long organized transnationally, Albrow sees the opportunity of citizens in the global era, active role in shaping the state and with everyday practices, which increasingly involve the whole world, a socially just, environmentally friendly and produce more sustainable form of society.

Writings (selection )

• Bureaucracy, List, Munich 1972
• Max Weber 's construction of social theory, St. Martin's Press, New York 1990
• The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996 (German, Advanced): The global age, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main ² 2007