Emancipatory politics is totally based on the General Reason. It appeals to the philosophical language of "macro-narrative" , "meta-narrative" , such as rationality, subjectivity, meanings , progress, and so on. "Macro-narrative" , "meta-narrative" emphasize on the aspects of generality, uniform, absoluteness, certainty, authority and centering, and get rid of the elements of difference, variety, casualness and margin. In Giddens view, emancipatory politics must ignore the diversity and variety of social life and abandon all non-rational aspects, such as mentality, sensibility, meanings, morality and belief, etc. Moreover, emancipatory politics focuses on only such great problems as country, class, political party and congress; it cares only about how to liberate people from being oppressed and treated unfairly on exterior and system level. Therefore it is a "macro-politics". What is more, emancipatory politics has been dominated by the thinking of the mechanical rationality and the perspective of utilitarianism. All of these resulted in the isolating of the politics fundamentally from the problem of existence of human being and social morality.Based on the realization mentioned above, Giddens points out that the modern emancipatory mechanism, is actually limiting and even enslaving human being in a more hidden manner. Therefore it makes human being suffering over again. We are deeply under the obsession of ontological insecurity and existential anxiety, which are becoming a serious and prominent problem of modern society.According to Giddens, we have been already in the Post-traditional society which means a highly reflective, non-natural, non-traditional globalization society. It is also a society of high risk and uncertainty. The speed and degree of changing is greater than ever. It induced not only the transformation of social structure and system, but also urged the total changes of the values, identifications, family sensation, individual psychology, choice of life style and self-realization.Whereas, all the transformations and changes intensify the ontological insecurity and existential anxiety.However, Giddens believes that, it is impossible for the mancipatory politics alone to solve all the problems introduced by the mixing of the new and the old phases. In his point of view, politics must include the non-orthodox programs. It should deal with the trivial things in the daily life and even the private life. The reason is that the true liberty is not only the external and systematic "macro liberty", but also the individual, internal, psychic "micro liberty". Giddens above all appeals that politics must be confronted with existence and morality problems.So Giddens offers the solution of the life politics. In his opinion, life politics combine unity and diversity, internality and externality, macroscopic and microscopic, it emphasizes more on the non-orthodox political problems and microcosmic problems. Its central issue is the problems of self, body, ecology, globalization, and so on. A government whose aim is the happiness of the people should concern not only the problems of the liberty and equality, but also those of the states of mind and the meanings of existence. So body, self, security, self-esteem, choice of the life-style, ecology must become the concerns of the politics. By eliminating from the sequestration of traditional experience and establishing the active trust, positive welfare, dialogic democracy, emotional democracy, intimate relationship, other' s ethics and so on, life politics tries to solve all the problems fundamentally.Generally speaking, life politics starts from the problem of 'how we live' , its tool is the choice of the life- style, its aim is to reconstruct our morality and solve the problem of existence .As a theorist of realism, Giddens aims to find the outlet for the Occident political reality. The basis of his political thoughts is the political reality. As a result, he doesn' t abandon the macroscopic force of the emancipatory politics and concern the microscopic force as the only political force like many post-modern political thinkers. On the contrast, he believes that macroscopic force is still playing the leading role in the political field. In our opinion, life politics isdifferent from, to a certain extent transcends both macroscopic politics and microscopic politics. However, as a new theory, it still has some Utopian elements. So we think that life-politics is a political scheme of Utopian realism.This article expounded how Giddens analyses the strong and weak points of the emancipatory politics, this article proves the necessity and the importance of the life-politics. Then it interprets its content, its central problems and solutions, its political aims. In the end, we compare the life politics with the post-modern politics and the emancipatory politics, and conclude that life politics has transcended both.
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