Reckwitz, Andreas

German sociologist

Hyperculture and cultural essentialism: two modes of culturalization in late modernity ● A. Reckwitz

Andrea Cirla · Sep 14, 2025 · partial coverage

• Andreas Reckwitz
• hyperculture
• cultural essentialism
• culturalization
• late modernity
• Huntington
• valorization
• identity politics
• populism
• sociology of culture

Coverage note: subset (about twenty-three minutes; automatic English YouTube captions of a scripted talk, with some misheard names and terms; the transcript ends mid-argument, so the third and fourth of the four relations between the two regimes are only partly reported)

Core ideas

Opening and closing in late modernity. Reckwitz starts from the tension between opening up (a new global middle class, pluralization of lifestyles, gender norms and identities) and closing (a post-industrial working class, identity communities, neo-nationalism, religious fundamentalism, rigid moralization). He rejects Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations (and Fukuyama's end of history) as too simplistic: what clash is not cultures but two "regimes of culturalization", two contrary conceptions of what culture means. Culturalization is distinguished from rationalization (Weber): rationalization optimizes things for a purpose, reduces effects and profanes; culturalization valorizes, sacralizes, makes things singular and irreplaceable. He prefers "value" to "sacred", drawing on Dewey's valuation theory, valuation studies and Michael Thompson's rubbish theory.

Hyperculture (culturalization one). Driven by global cultural capitalism, media technologies, city competition and the new educated middle class, it is an expansive aestheticization and ethicization of lifestyles, work, food, travel and the body, guided by the ideal of the good life. Culture works as a market of attention and valorization, modeled on the field of arts, where cultural goods compete and are judged through "judgment devices". Its subject is the self-realizing individual (Simmel's qualitative individualism, romanticism) who combines cultural resources; diversity and cosmopolitanism become positive keywords because goods are in principle equal. It opens contingency.

Cultural essentialism (culturalization two). It aims at collectives imagined as communities sharing an identity and morals, with a strict inside/outside dualism that is also a dualism of valuable versus worthless: nationalism, fundamentalism, populism ("the people against the cosmopolitan elite"). It follows the tradition and the old rather than innovation, and restricts individual options. These movements are modern, reactions to the cultural vacuum of industrial rationalism and to hyperculture. Reckwitz concludes that Western liberalism is not one culture among others but a different regime, and that Marine Le Pen's followers, Putin's nationalists, evangelicals and Islamists follow the same pattern; the West is a symbolic, not geographical, term. He distinguishes two modes of relation between regimes: approximation (multiculturalism integrates identitarian communities as options of self-realization; Chinese governments treat human rights as one community's "Western value") and adversarial rejection (open society versus totalitarian essentialism), yielding four constellations; the recording stops while describing the rejection from hyperculture's side.

Excerpts