The argument presented over the last nine chapters has been an attempt to specify how ‘the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency’. It was acknowledged that the word ‘through’ was unacceptably vague and that its specification as a process of conditioning was unduly unilateral. It accentuated the social shaping of our circumstances to the neglect of how agents received them. Instead, the full mediatory mechanism has been held to depend upon human reflexivity; namely, our power to deliberate internally upon what to do in situations that were not of our making.

This sounds dry and technical and so it is, until one sets out to explore the personal capacity to reflect upon ourselves and our concerns in relation to our social circumstances. The internal conversation, through which such inner deliberations take place, is relatively unknown territory. As exploration proceeded, the awareness of being a stranger in strange lands intensified. Internal conversations proved to be radically heterogeneous, despite the intuitive conviction of subjects that all others conducted their reflexive deliberations in the same way as they did themselves. On the contrary, internal conversations were found to be so different as to warrant distinguishing three different modes of reflexivity – ‘communicative reflexivity’, ‘autonomous reflexivity’ and ‘meta-reflexivity’.

The co-existence of these three modes of reflexivity within late modernity (not precluding the future discovery of others) has much wider implications.