Modernity at the Beginning of the 21st Century [1 ed.] 9781443802253, 9781847183026

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Modernity at the beginning of the 21st Century

Modernity at the beginning of the 21st Century

Edited by

Volker H. Schmidt

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Modernity at the beginning of the 21st Century, edited by Volker H. Schmidt This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Volker H. Schmidt and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-302-6; ISBN 13: 9781847183026

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Into The Second Millennium: Modernity at the Beginning of the 21st Century Volker H. Schmidt Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 10 Interpreting, Coding and Narrating our Historical Condition: Relevance and Limits of the Notion of Modernity in the 21st Century Yves Bonny Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37 The Universal Underneath the Multiple: Social Acceleration as a Key to Understanding Modernity Hartmut Rosa Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 62 The Transformation of our Conduct of Life: One Aspect of the Three Epochs of Western Modernity Mikael Carleheden Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 89 The Meshing of Civilisations: Soft Power and the Renewal of the Civilisation of Modernity Edward A. Tiryakian Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 114 Modernity and Culture: Origins, Varieties and Trajectories Mike Featherstone Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 163 Modernity as ‘World Consciousness’ Oliver Kozlarek

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Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 188 Global Modernisation and Multiple Modernities Alberto Martinelli Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 205 One World, One Modernity Volker H. Schmidt Contributors............................................................................................. 229

CHAPTER ONE INTO THE SECOND MILLENNIUM: MODERNITY ST AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21 CENTURY VOLKER H. SCHMIDT

Modernity is back on sociology’s agenda. From the beginnings of sociology as an academic discipline, questions surrounding the meaning and consequences of modernity have fascinated generations of sociologists. The initial interest in the concept was inspired by a sense of a deep rupture (and crisis) afflicting European society, a sense that society had irrevocably departed ‘from a path it had followed for millennia’ (Nisbet 1965: 20) and was approaching something fundamentally different from the past, an entirely new form of societal organisation that bore little resemblance to anything known before. Where exactly this transformation was headed was by no means clear, but around the 18th century a growing number of European intellectuals and scholars realised that the changes that had been in the making since the late 15th century were irreversible and could not be contained in any particular region or confined to particular sectors of society, but would ultimately transform all spheres of life. Like other thinkers, sociologists observed this transformation with awe, and their attitude towards it was from the outset ambivalent. On the one hand, the growing liberties that accompanied the decline of the estate order of Mediaeval feudalism were welcomed as harbingers of an age of freedom in which human creativity could flourish like never before; on the other, an increasingly idealised past served as the reference point for diagnoses of a loss of community and virtue, a decay of civilisation, etc., informed by a deep conservatism that has remained a constant in sociological thought to the present day. Perhaps the first eminent sociological theorist who unambiguously embraced modernity was Talcott Parsons, and this, arguably more than anything else, explains his marginal position in contemporary sociology.

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Sociologists are always in search of a crisis, and Parsons’ work has little to offer for a ‘Krisenwissenschaft’, a science of crises, as sociology has long understood itself. An optimistic or ‘affirmative’ stance towards the modern world, as fashioned by much of mainstream economics, is unacceptable to many sociologists. The implications of the ‘sense of crisis’ that many sociologists share (often quite independently of their political leanings) are far-reaching and they tend to influence the choice of conceptual tools as well. ‘Capitalism’, which was the master concept of sociology throughout much of the 20th century, serves the sentiments of a ‘critical sociology’ better than ‘modernity’ because, while it is easy to reject the excessive inequalities that a socially ‘dis-embedded’ (Polanyi 1957) capitalism produces, a whole-hearted dismissal of modernity is more difficult, given that modernity, despite its many downsides, is also associated with a number of developments that many sociologists embrace – not the least of which is a growing emphasis on social equality, which is of course in tension with capitalism. One of the effects of the collapse of socialism in the Soviet empire was that it silenced the critique of capitalism for a while, because it left the critics with no alternative model of societal (or rather, economic) organisation. This and several other developments, ironically including the ‘postmodern’ intellectual movement from the late 1970s onwards, created space for renewed interest in ‘modernity’. ‘Postmodernism’ may have been instrumental for this renewal because it brought, albeit through negation, the language of modernity back onto the social scientific agenda. The movement itself now seems to have exhausted its energies. One still finds references to it here and there, but by and large the excitement it aroused among intellectuals is over. Instead, there is now a growing sense that many of the phenomena referred to as signals of a new epoch in the making, whilst real and in some ways fundamentally altering the everyday realities and living conditions facing (primarily) the populations of (Western) Europe and North America, are not the hallmarks of an altogether new type of societal formation, but just the latest manifestations of a social order to which continuously accelerating change is endemic. Thus, the rise of the tertiary sector and the concomitant (relative) decline of manufacturing, of mass production organised in a ‘Fordist’ production regime, in the most advanced economies of the world in no way alter the logic of capitalism; they only shift the focus of economic attention and activity. Nor has mass production itself come to an end, it only moved to new locations where the (relatively low-skilled) labour it utilises is cheaper, thus expanding the

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geographic scope and reach of capitalism by integrating newly industrialising countries. Likewise, growing individualisation, value pluralism and organisational fragmentation do not point beyond modernity. Instead, they are better understood as manifestations of the spread of (increasingly higher levels of) education and wealth to large fractions of the population whose result is a multiplication of options, lifestyles and dispositions that had previously been the privilege of the avant-garde elite. When the majority of the people are barely literate and poor, there tends to be greater homogeneity in living levels, modes of thought, biographical patterns and lifestyles than when 30 per cent or more (in some countries nowadays up to 50) percent of the people undergo tertiary education. Such education not only enhances workers’ income chances, but also gives rise to a more reflexive attitude towards established societal norms (and hence increases the likelihood of reaching a ‘post-conventional’ stage of ethical reasoning) as well as to a different attitude towards one’s own lives, which only then can become a ‘project’, something to be planned and executed by the individual him- or herself. When the epistemological and geographical horizons of millions of people expand within a matter of a few decades, then the ‘menu’ of values to pick from is obviously larger than at a time when only tiny minorities had access to the world’s knowledge and cultural heritage. In hindsight, it is therefore not surprising that the phenomena associated with what some now call the ‘organised’ stage of modernity should have given way to more individualistic (and more consumption-driven) life styles, a greater emphasis on choice, selfexpression, etc. In the past half-century, modernity has not only penetrated its Western birthplace much more deeply; it has also spread to other world regions at a historically unprecedented pace. As a result, modernity is now a genuinely global phenomenon. Moreover, with East Asia, there is now an entire nonWestern region that has reached levels of development comparable to the West. If China’s rise continues unabated, then this region will soon be the largest fully modernised part of the world. It may thus become a serious competitor in the creation of ‘world culture’ and, more specifically, of ‘world [developmental] models’, whose designation has thus far by and large been the prerogative of the West. This, in turn could set the stage for an entirely new phase of modernity in which what it means to be modern might differ substantially from its present understanding, which is still dominated by specifically Western experiences and values. But what is modernity, anyway? One of the problems facing any effort to come to terms with modernity is its conceptual meaning. The present

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volume focuses on the way the concept is (or ought to be) understood sociologically. Like much of the classical sociological tradition, Yves Bonny proposes to reserve the notion of modernity for a specific type of society and civilisation, a set of internally coherent structural characteristics, as well as a complementary set of social imaginaries and normative-ideological orientations, whose origins are to be found in Europe, but which has now spread to all parts of the globe. Bonny warns, however, against treating all presently existing societies as equally modern. Moreover, given the global spread of modernity, we should guard against equating modernity with ‘Western civilisation’, which is but one of modernity’s possible manifestations. These considerations lead him to suggest three distinctions: that between the modern and the ‘contemporary’, that between modern and ‘post-traditional’ societies, and that between modernity in general and its peculiarly Western variety, which long served as the key reference point in discussions of the concept. Since modernity changes its outlook over time and takes on a different shape in different contexts and regions, we further need to distinguish phases of modernity in the temporal dimension and varieties of modernity in the spatial dimension. Armed with these analytical tools and distinctions, Bonny detects in what he calls the post-traditional universe – a term he prefers to that of modernity – four common trends of social change, namely tendencies towards (1) generalised denaturalisation, (2) the weakening of traditional communitarian structuring, (3) the weakening of patterns of verticality, and (4) the differentiation of social worlds and social spheres. In contemporary societies, these trends are driven by the gradual disenchantment of the world, by the diffusion of liberal democracy as a model for legitimising political actions and orders, and by various forces that subvert the former, thus giving rise to continuous contradictions whose – always provisional – solutions can differ substantially from society to society. Hartmut Rosa starts off with a similarly demanding programme for detecting the main features characterising modernity. His conceptualisation seeks to account for both modernity’s (historical as well as cultural) diversity and for its unity. According to Rosa, this is best achieved by focusing on modernity’s processual nature, i.e. on the ongoing modernisation of society, which, rather than simply reflecting the dynamics of developments resulting in peculiarly modern life forms, constitutes modernity’s very core, that which distinguishes modernity from other, non-modern types of societal organisation. And since the modernisation process, once set in motion, has been constantly accelerating, what is required to understand modernity is a theory of social

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acceleration. Such a theory is what Rosa aims to develop. The theory of acceleration he proposes is three-dimensional, distinguishing technological acceleration within society from accelerations of society itself and from the acceleration of the pace of life, respectively. Being a process theory of modernity, it will come as no surprise that this theory, like most of its competitors, also distinguishes different phases of modernity, with each phase marked by its own pace of change. Thus, ‘early’ modernity is the phase during which a substantial change in society’s basic structures required several generations. During ‘classical’ or ‘high’ modernity, this pace was reduced to one generation, and in the current phase of ‘late’ modernity, far-reaching change can occur in a matter of just a few decades, i.e. at intra-generational pace. Mikael Carleheden likewise favours a phased approach, viewing modernity as plural both in the socio-cultural dimension of space and in the temporal dimension, in which distinct forms or rather epochs of modernity succeed one another. Whereas Rosa’s focus is primarily on the social structural aspects of modernity and modernisation, Carleheden places greater emphasis on the cultural and motivational sources inspiring agents of change. Following Peter Wagner, and restricting himself to Western modernity rather than claiming global validity for his propositions, Carleheden suggests three such epochs can be distinguished, namely ‘restricted liberal modernity’, ‘organised modernity’, and ‘extended liberal modernity’, the epoch the West is presently approaching. Enriching Wagner’s approach with the concept of a ‘conduct of life’, borrowed from Carl-Göran Heidegren and referring to people’s efforts of mastering and shaping their lives, Carleheden derives a threefold typology of ‘ages’ that Western modernity has gone through: the age of asceticism, the age of organisation, and the (present) age of authenticity, with each age reflecting a distinct ethic of conduct of life, or ‘Lebensführung’ in Weber’s original formulation. Each stage combines the two conflicting principles driving the modernisation process, namely discipline and freedom, in a unique fashion. During the transition from one stage to the next, (modern) society undergoes a deep crisis in which the specific character of the above combination, the relative weighting of the elements of discipline and freedom, is negotiated, until some longer-lasting equilibrium is reached. The next three chapters likewise focus on the cultural aspects of modernity and modernisation. Edward Tiryakian takes issue with Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisation’ thesis, which he believes is not only substantively flawed but also politically problematic. According to Tiryakian, in some cases Huntington over-dramatises what upon close

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inspection turn out to be relatively minor differences between civilisations. An example would be the values espoused by Confucianism and Western modernity, which in Tiryakian’s reading overlap to a significant extent. Given the movement of increasing numbers of people across continents, he also charges Huntington with holding an antiquated view of civilisations being located in specified geographical areas. One point that Tiryakian finds agreeable is Huntington’s claim that the world of Islam finds itself in tension with the rest of the world, if not with modernity itself. He also praises Huntington’s re-opening, in a later work, of the debate of Weber’s thesis concerning the impact of culture and religion on development/modernisation; a debate whose renewal would seem timely against the backdrop of East Asia’s rise, which raises the possibility that modernity’s centre might soon move eastwards, as hypothesised by Tiryakian himself (1985) two decades ago. But Tiryakian pleads that the West should not respond to its own relative decline with a confrontational approach. Instead, it should try to engage the East in genuine dialogue. If we try to build bridges between the East and the West, he concludes, then there is hope for a programme that could renew modernity, carrying it into the 21st century and sharing its benefits more evenly across world regions. Like Tiryakian, Mike Featherstone reflects upon some of the consequences of East Asia’s rise. Taking recent debates about the concept of modernity as his point of departure, Featherstone suggests the confusion surrounding notions such as that of ‘postmodernity’ that were fashionable in the 1980s might reflect a growing, yet insufficiently grasped sense among Western intellectuals that the world was on the edge of a shift to new times. But rather than moving beyond modernity, the rapid modernisation of non-Western regions, especially of East Asia, means a shifting of the balance of global power – economically, politically, and probably also culturally. In other words, something significant was indeed happening, but what has only recently begun to dawn upon us is that this something is not the end of the modern age but rather, through the spread of modernity, the end of the age of Western hegemony that shaped world affairs during the past 500 years. Focusing on the cultural dimension of this process, Featherstone suggests the rise of Asia could soon begin to affect the flow of academic knowledge as well, and consequently lead to a redefinition of modernity. Featherstone then discusses some of the key cultural aspects of Chinese and Japanese modernity, which exhibit some commonality with those of the West, but also differ from it (as well as from each other) in important ways. The

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concluding parts of his chapter are devoted to conceptual reflections about the implications for theorisations of modernity. Oliver Kozlarek proposes to understand modernity as a form of awareness that he calls ‘world consciousness’. In his view, past conceptualisations of modernity, especially those of modernisation theory, suffer from an overemphasis of the temporal dimension at the cost of territoriality, which, despite its centrality for an adequate theory of modernity, has been largely ignored in the pertinent literature. Among the greatest flaws to which this negligence has given rise is an overly Euro- or Western-centric view of modernity, which downplays other, alternative ‘logics of modernity’ working themselves out elsewhere in the world and tending to be misrepresented in critiques that consider them through Western lenses. To do justice to non-Western societies is to create conceptual space for acknowledging the diversity of forms that modernity can take and to accept this diversity. Rather than treating some societies as less and others as more modern, modernity ought to be seen as a global reality with regional and local variations. Kozlarek suggests that important building blocks for developing the requisite analytical tools can be found in the works of several European thinkers, particularly in that of Alexander von Humboldt, who originated a science reflecting world consciousness and aiming to produce (unprejudiced) world knowledge. Today, one of the most promising candidates meeting Kozlarek’s expectations is the multiple modernities approach of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and his followers. This approach also lays important foundations for ‘a multi-optical critique of modernity’, the desirability of which Kozlarek briefly sketches in his concluding remarks. The multiple modernities approach, while touched upon in several contributions to this volume, also figures prominently in the last two chapters, which shed more critical light upon it. Alberto Martinelli believes this approach deserves praise for having heightened our sense of the variability of modern forms, both institutionally and in the symbolic universe of meanings. But that should not lead us to forget the European origins of modernity. The spread of modernity to other world regions is therefore bound to leave a deep imprint on these other regions’ cultural forms, social practices and institutional arrangements. Consequently, global modernity exhibits more elements of convergence than the advocates of the multiple modernities approach are willing to admit. Moreover, they have a tendency to overstate cultural aspects of modernity and to underestimate the significance of structural forces. They also downplay the revolutionary character of the (European) breakthrough to modernity that is strongly emphasised by modernisation theory, which

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should therefore not be dismissed too lightheartedly. Drawing upon several like-minded scholars, Martinelli’s own work stresses the inherent contradictions and the conflicts that have afflicted modernity from its early beginnings and that play themselves out differently in different social, spatial and temporal contexts. But while they provide ample scope for variations of site-specific adaptations, the multiplicity of forms permitted by the cultural codes of modernity is not unlimited. Rather than focusing almost exclusively on diversity, we should also not lose sight of the substantial similarities that exist among modern societies. While Martinelli thinks the multiple modernists raise some valid points, Volker H. Schmidt finds little of merit in their approach. Instead, he defends modernisation theory, which can accommodate much more diversity than its critics are willing to grant. That modernisation theory does not emphasise such diversity very much should not surprise, as it has no bearing on its subject matter, the dynamics and spread of modern society. Modernisation theory is best conceived of as a process theory of modernity, and the purpose of a theory of modernity is to analyse and capture what is unique to modernity as against other societal formations. As such, it is bound to be relatively abstract and to focus on the basic structures of modern society, not on the specific forms in which these manifest themselves on the ground. Schmidt does not dismiss these forms as irrelevant, but argues that their conceptualisation should be relegated to ‘middle range’ theories whose analytical scope is more confined than that of general (‘grand’) theories of society, of which the theory of modernity is perhaps the most prominent example. The theory of modernity preferred by Schmidt himself is the differentiation theory of Niklas Luhmann, which he believes is the most sophisticated theory of the modern age that sociology has thus far produced. Armed with the conceptual toolbox of (a much simplified version of) this theory, Schmidt also defends modernisation theory’s distinction between degrees of modernity and modernisation achieved by different societies and in different world regions; he argues, in fact, that the differences marking the dividing line between modernity and pre- or semi-modernity are far more significant than those highlighted by the multiple modernists. He then discusses various empirical trends that suggest modernity, far from rapidly approaching its endpoint, might in a certain sense still be in its early stages, as genuinely modern social structures and living conditions have only recently begun to touch the majority of the world’s population. Like any volume dealing with a subject matter as complex and controversial as the present one, its chapters offer no conclusive answers to the questions they raise and address. The debate about modernity, to

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which they hope to make a useful contribution, must and will continue – hopefully with greater sobriety and in an atmosphere that is less politically charged than the social science culture of the past few decades. And while the authors disagree on many points, they all agree on one key point: modernity is not over yet. It has been gradually developing over the course of the past 500 years, taking on different shapes at different times and in different places, and it will in all likelihood continue to evolve during the 21st century, modernity’s second millennium. 500 years is a lot of time from the viewpoint of an individual human being, far surpassing any person’s horizon and capacity of imagination, but it is a relatively short span in the history of humanity. It might well be that we have not seen very much yet and that modernity is only just beginning to work itself out globally.

References Boli, John, and George M. Thomas (eds.) 1999: Constructing World Culture. International Non-Governmental Organizations Since 1875. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez 1997: “World Society and the Nation State”, American Journal of Sociology 103: 144-182. Nisbet, Robert A., 1965: Emile Durkheim. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Polanyi, Karl, 1957: The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Tiryakian, Edward A., 1985: “The Changing Centers of Modernity”, pp. 131-147 in: Erik Cohen, Moshe Lissak and Uri Almagor (eds.) Comparative Social Dynamics. Essays in Honor of S.N. Eisenstadt. Boulder: Westview Press.

CHAPTER TWO INTERPRETING, CODING AND NARRATING OUR HISTORICAL CONDITION: RELEVANCE AND LIMITS OF THE NOTION OF MODERNITY ST IN THE 21 CENTURY YVES BONNY

Among the different categories mobilised to interpret social and cultural transformations in a macro-social perspective, the notion of modernity is one of the most frequently used, whether in ordinary discourses or in social-scientific analyses. Our era and our society are continuously described as being ‘modern’: at the peak of ‘modernity’. We also regularly hear talk of the necessary ‘modernisation’ of firms or administrations. These different terms are used in all sorts of contexts, without much precision, and they condense a number of important factors, which are not always very clear, but generally imply a valorisation of change, of novelty. Being modern, in the ordinary meaning of the term, is being in phase with the present, not being oriented towards the past or set rigidly in one’s habits, but on the contrary looking constantly to the future, and accepting endless disruptions which are the sign of progress. This repertoire of signification allows its user to mark at the same time an adhesion and a difference, which is its first vocation. Designating oneself as ‘modern’ is affirming a set of orientations and values, as well as distinguishing oneself from those who are not, and who will be labelled depending on the case - as ‘archaic’, ‘traditional’, or ‘classical’. In other words, the adjective ‘modern’ and its different derivatives are relational terms, which only assume meaning within a contextual perspective, i.e. in opposition to something else. The present is however also marked by a significant weakening of the way in which this category was until recently apprehended and theorised,

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most notably around an implicit or explicit opposition between tradition and modernity and around a largely linear, if not frankly evolutionist, conception of socio-historical transformations, associated with the history of so-called ‘Western civilisation’. The European historians’ increasing temporal distance from the ‘Modern times’ and distance from the contemporary sociological theorisation of modernity which issued from those times has lead to a plurality of theories. The development of major but often diverging or conflictual dynamics of transformation in almost all societies in the world (with the result that the geographical opposition between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies is no longer possible to hold), the increasing interdependencies between societies, the intellectual crisis of the notion of progress and the calling into question of evolutionist interpretive models, the acceleration of history and the compression of space, all these phenomena explain the emergence of new theoretical perspectives and new appellations, such as late or advanced modernity, hypermodernity, global modernity, multiple modernities, and of course postmodernity. What all these terms have in common is the idea that contemporary cultural-ideological orientations and forms of social organisation are characterised by significant transformations with regard to what is now frequently designated by contrast – at least by those who reason in terms of advanced modernity – as ‘classical modernity’. With this displacement, the relational character of these notions mobilised to express the historical consciousness of the present is still apparent. The significant relationship, however, is not between modernity and tradition anymore, but between our present time and what used to be defined as modernity. This relationship can be situated within two major interpretive orientations. One may re-evaluate the previous characteristics used to define modernity as not completely modern, or as corresponding to an historical phase of modernity that has been replaced by a new phase, as well as to the peculiar Western historical experience and trajectory, and we get late or advanced modernity or hypermodernity in temporal perspective, and varieties of modernity or multiple modernities or global modernity in spatial perspective. Alternatively, one may define modernity as a historically specific type of society, which is objectively undermined or being superseded, and we get postmodernity, whatever the evaluation one develops of this mutation.

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The historical semantics of the term ‘modern’ and its derivatives To better understand this displacement and to clarify the theoretical difficulties we are faced with when we use the notion of modernity today, it is necessary to place the present period in perspective and to examine the historical semantics of the notion. The etymology of the term (in Latin, modernus means ‘recent’, ‘current’) explains a strong tendency to associate what is ‘modern’ with the present time. But as Jauss (1982) and Koselleck (2004) have shown, the category of the modern is not simply a ‘timeless topos’ that has been regularly mobilised in theology, literature and the arts to mark a temporal distinction and designate what is new or what is of today. This category has actually always been used to thematise and problematise the relationship between the historical consciousness of the present and some normative reference, be it in the past or the future. It is thus connected with major changes in the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’ (Koselleck) of the elite groups of a society and major displacements in their historical consciousness, up to the present day. Following the hermeneutic reconstruction developed by Jauss, it appears that the term ‘modern’ can be traced back to the 5th Century. It is first mobilised as an adjective to mark the ‘frontier of the actuality’ and to express an opposition between the present moment (modernus) and the past (whether it is the ecclesial past of the patres and their antiquis regulis or the pagan past of the Romano-Hellenistic culture of antiquity). It is then used as a noun to oppose two generations or two schools of thought, through the couple antiqui/moderni, which can already be found in philosophy in the 13th Century but which is especially well-known through the famous 17th Century ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’ in literature and the arts. These schools of thought can be contrasted in the course of time by the classic/modern eras. For instance in France, where classic referred not to Antiquity but to the so-called ‘classical’ canons fixed during the seventeenth century, especially under the reign of Louis XIV. With the autonomisation of literature and the arts in the second half of the nineteenth century, the relevant relationship and opposition to the modernist movement came increasingly from within. This is compared with the avant-garde movement, where each generation or school tried to go beyond the preceding one, in terms of a renewal that could be interpreted as a deepening and purification of the aesthetic expression.

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If, from a purely formal and descriptive perspective, the modern can thus be successively opposed to the ancient, the classical, and itself,1 the historical semantics of the notion of modern is not at all linear (Habermas 1998). For the notion of the modern has been associated in the historical consciousness of European civilisation with the sense of a major rupture in universal history starting from the sixteenth century onwards, which progressively gave birth in the eighteenth century to a new historical period, distinguishing Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modern times. In this process, the category of the modern not only expressed the historical experience of radically new times,2 but also progressively conveyed a normative judgment of superiority, as may easily be seen in the notion of Enlightenment. Indeed, the adjective ‘modern’ and all its derivatives are not simply descriptive categories, but also highly normative ones. In this normative perspective, modernity has been associated with a claim to rationalisation, translated among other things into a claim to universality and a notion of progress. This normative dimension has been a central component of the relationships between social groups, societies and civilisations over the past centuries. It is inevitably part of our own relationship to history each time we use the notion. Given the history of the terms, mobilising the category of the modern cannot be simply a matter of description of social characteristics and dynamics, it also implies adopting a stance toward the history of the last centuries and the orientations of the present, be it affirmative or critical; since a critique of modernity, for instance in a Marxist vein, may remain fully committed to its normative ideals. It is as a direct participant in this historical rupture and its intellectual and ideological refraction – even though the precise dating of the rupture varies considerably from one narrative to the next – that sociology will thematise what we now call ‘modern society’ or ‘modernity’, through a central opposition between modernity and tradition (equivalent in sociology to that between modern and ancient or classical in literature and 1

Until a new pairing, modern/postmodern, broke through in the 1960s. Here, modern is no longer synonymous with actual, present, but designates an orientation that is criticized, and by extension the period during which this orientation is supposed to have been dominant and which is coming to a welcome end from a postmodernist perspective. Doubtless there will very soon be attempts to rethink the modern after the postmodern (Meschonnic and Hasumi 2002), which will consider the postmodernist moment itself as part of the modern condition and history. 2 It is interesting to note in this context that the German term corresponding to what we call ‘the Modern times’ is Neuzeit.

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the arts) that is explicitly or implicitly present in most of the general typologies proposed in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as contract and status (Maine), society and community (Tönnies), democratic principle and hierarchical principle (Tocqueville), capitalist society and feudal society (Marx), organic solidarity and mechanical solidarity (Durkheim), legal-rational domination and traditional domination (Weber), achievement and ascription (Parsons), or more recently individualism and holism (Dumont).

The increasing confusions surrounding the notion of modernity today If we put together these different elements, we easily understand why the use of the notion of modernity is so confusing today. First, given our historical legacy on the one hand and the etymology of the term on the other, the notion of modernity is marked by an intrinsic instability and a permanent oscillation and tension between the reference to a specific (although often quite vague) historical epoch and spatial localisation, that of the West European civilisation, with its normative claims, its internal dynamics and the history of its encounter with other societies and civilisations, and the reference to the present virtually anywhere on the planet, since any contemporary development different from the past may be labeled as ‘modern’. It is thus easy to understand that whether we consider modernity as starting around the 16th or 17th Century in Western Europe or as referring basically to the main cultural orientations and forms of organisation of today’s world, we will have very different characterisations of the societal type we propose under this term. This tension and oscillation is accentuated by the fact that an increasing interval of time separates us from the ‘Modern times’ of the European historian. In this process, we may have more and more difficulty to understand the very ‘modernity’ of the so-called Modern times, given our feeling of an acceleration of change and massive transformations at work today in all the major domains of social life, to the point where we may feel that up to recently we were only semi-modern (Beck 1992) or that modernity is really beginning only today. Spatially as well, we have the feeling of worldwide dynamics of transformation at work today, which are not limited anymore to mainly Western societies. Instead, we consider that more and more societies are modernising today and therefore that modernity is at large (Appadurai 1996). Yet, since they do not seem to be modernising at the same pace, and after the critique of evolutionism and colonialism, the presently dominant social imagination tends to stress

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difference and diversity rather than similarity and convergence. Some influential thinkers propose to develop the paradigm of multiple modernities (Taylor 1999; Eisenstadt 2002). A different orientation is taken by those who talk of global modernity, who insist rather on the idea that for the first time in universal history the whole of humanity is going to be unitised, through interdependencies and globalisation, and that major convergence dynamics may be observed (Inglehart 1997; Tiryakian 1991). Most of these interpretations take more and more distance from Western societies and Western history, which were once treated as the obvious historical-empirical background of any ideal type of modernity and which are now considered as only a specific variety of the type. We could consider that this is perfectly understandable, and even extremely salutary, since this allows us to go beyond the previous forms of evolutionism or Eurocentrism and to consider that all societies and all social groups are today embedded in the modern world (Gilroy, 1993). The trouble is that there is a major risk that in this process, the very notion of modernity will lose the theoretical depth it used to have. Indeed, too many analyses conflate empirical with conceptual questions (Wittrock 2002), endlessly discussing all kinds of value orientations, patterns of behaviour, institutional configurations or societal trends and comparing them in time or in space to pinpoint evolutions, convergences and divergences, without ever explaining the relationship of these empirical questions to the concept of modernity, except through vague notions like individualism, democracy, market economy, or science and technology. In order to propose a theory of modernity, we cannot simply follow and describe the factual evidence of change, difference or convergence. Instead, we have to build an ideal type around a set of relatively precise characteristics and principles of structuration forming a coherent (which does not mean contradiction-free) whole, and to provide an account of the dynamics of transformation. Another major source of confusion surrounding the use of the notion of modernity has to do with the normative connotations associated with the term ‘modern’ and its derivatives. Here again, we are confronted with the relational character of the notion, but in a different perspective. The relationship at stake is not that between our own time and the postmedieval period in Europe, nor that between the dynamics of transformation going on everywhere in today’s world and the European and then Western civilisational area, but the relationship between the analyst and his object of study, in the present case world history, as it is mediated by the semantic categories he uses to apprehend it.

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First, we should not immediately confuse and conflate questions of historical diagnosis with questions of normative judgement. The historical diagnosis has to be based on a hermeneutic of structures and experience. If the concept of modernity designates a type of society, that is a set of structural characteristics endowed with a certain coherence, the first relevant concern is to explain on what bases these characteristics are established, and to assess whether the contemporary situation marks a continuity or a rupture with regard to the proposed type. Whatever the answer given, a second and distinct moment, which is more or less salient according to the interpretations and to the contexts in which they are developed, has to do with the judgement we develop about the structural traits thus underlined, whether one proposes a positive or a critical reading of them. It is from this double perspective that modernity must be apprehended sociologically, that is a descriptiveinterpretive and a normative perspective, but without conflating the two. Of course, this distinction has a more analytical than sequential significance, since the very characterisation of a type of society frequently involves normative judgements (consider for instance the opposition between the labels ‘industrial society’ and ‘capitalist society’). However, we should always keep it in mind when we engage in a social-scientific analysis, which should be guided by a principle of detachment towards pure opinion or immediate political positions. The pure and simple confusion between these two levels is extremely frequent, because the term modernity is heavily connoted. For numerous contemporary authors, keeping the term modernity to designate the present time represents a major stake, since postmodernity is associated in their mind with the rejection of rationalism and assimilated to cynicism and nihilism. Independently from any other consideration, it is thus much less problematic to talk of a post-industrial society than to talk of a postmodern society. This may then lead one to artificially maintain continuity where it does not exist. This is a major reason why it is important that sociologists actively participate in the debate about postmodernity and propose a proper sociological interpretation of societal transformations. In order to concretise these remarks it may help us to develop a more sophisticated account of the advanced modernity/postmodernity debate. Let us build a two-dimensional table presenting the possible interpretive positions on the two perspectives I have distinguished. For each position, I have placed major authors in the current debate to illustrate the potential interest of such a classification, even though they do not always occupy a clear-cut or stable position according to books or periods in their intellectual production.

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Table 1: Diagnostic and evaluative judgement in the debate on modernity and postmodernity Interpretation of current cultural and social transformations Inflection within

Crisis of modernity

Tendential rupture

continuity with

and uncertainty as to

with modernity

regard to modernity

the current orientations

Valorisation of modernity Normative position

1) Positive theories

3) Modernist

5) Modernist critical

of advanced

theories of

theories of

modernity

modernity in crisis

postmodernity

(Giddens, Beck,

(Bell)

(Habermas)

Contradictory

Contradictory

6) Affirmative

position

position

theories of

3

Luhmann, Inglehart) Valorisation of postmodernity as contemporary

postmodernity

reality

Valorisation of an ideal to come

(Bauman, Maffesoli) 2) Critical theories

4) Critical theories

7) Critical theories of

of advanced

of modernity in

postmodernity and of

modernity

crisis

modernity

(Jameson, Harvey)

(Touraine, Wagner)

(Freitag)

I will now propose elements of a renewed theorisation, aiming to go beyond the above confusions.

Elements of a renewed theorisation The need for new macro-historical typologies Given all the sources of confusion attached to the notion of modernity, is it relevant to continue using it at all within sociological discourse? We could certainly conclude that it is not; that we should try to dispense with it altogether. As we have seen, it is more and more difficult while using the terminology of the modern to make a clear distinction between what relates to the specific societal form that originated in Western Europe after 3

This refers in particular to Habermas’ famous theme of the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld by the system’ (Habermas 1984). Of course, Habermas could also be associated with position 1, if other orientations of his work were privileged.

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the Renaissance and what relates to the societal forms characterising the contemporary world. Moreover, given the normative connotations associated with the term, continuing to use it today in the sociological discourse to interpret the present cannot be an innocent enterprise; except in routine usage where it only means ‘present’ or ‘current’. For all these reasons, we should probably not use the label ‘modernity’ anymore within the social sciences to designate types of society. I see two possible ways to do this. The first one would be to arbitrarily name for instance ‘civilisation R’ the type of society and civilisation that emerged in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards, so that it can neither be confused anymore with ‘anything contemporary’ nor with something ‘anywhere on the planet’. This would also sever any immediate link with the connotations of normative superiority implied by the term of ‘modernity’. Another advantage of replacing ‘modernity’ by ‘civilisation R’ is that it allows us to reintroduce the debate around postmodernity in a very different way, which is again much less passionate, in terms for instance of the hypothesis of a ‘civilisation S’ developing in the more recent period. A second and certainly more fruitful, although more difficult, enterprise consists in developing a completely renewed typology of post-traditional societies. This typology must be multidimensional, based on a synthetic interpretation of societal forms and not on a list of features such as technology, formal market economy and representative democracy, and the like. It must be abstract enough to allow for change and to cover a number of variable patterns, but at the same time distinct and precise enough to allow for discrimination between types. It must be free from evolutionism and Eurocentrism, while being able to present a coherent account of worldhistorical transformations and to integrate the ideological orientations which have been an integral part of the European historical consciousness and of its relations with the other societies and civilisations up to the present day. The elaboration of this renewed typology constitutes in my view a very promising research agenda for historical and comparative sociology.

Three basic distinctions Until we build such a renewed typology, however, we can hardly dispense with the notion of modernity. We can, however, be much more careful than before with the way we use it with a sociological intent. To begin with, three basic distinctions must be made. First, we have to distinguish ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’, the product of the present day. If we want to give modernity conceptual content, we should not accept as self-evident that we all live in modernity today, because there is a

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worldwide diffusion of what we routinely call ‘modern’ technology, ‘modern’ economy, ‘modern’ ways of life, ‘modern’ consumer items, and so on. In all these usages, modern simply means contemporary, and in this sense, a sociology of modernity ends up being nothing other than an analysis of social change. In the same sense, we have to distinguish ‘modern’ from ‘not traditional anymore’. To say that all cultural and institutional patterns are modern because all societies are modernising amounts to a massive tautology, through a reversal of the logical reasoning; instead of defining modernisation as the process of implementation of modernity, one defines modernity as any end-product of continuous change, routinely labeled as modernisation. Modernity has to be defined as a type of society and civilisation, and if it does have any theoretical meaning, this type cannot be defined in such abstract or vague terms that any non-traditional society or any present-day feature fits into it. Third, we have to distinguish modernity and so-called ‘Western civilisation’, considered either as a specific, deep-seated cultural code alien to other parts of the world or as a political and ideological marker of hegemony. If what we understand by modernity is a type of society and civilisation originating in Western Europe, it is neither reducible to a culture among others nor to a history of domination. Its cultural and institutional premises and orientations can potentially be developed and appropriated by any society and it should not be equated with Westernisation in a cultural or hegemonic sense.

Integrating the normative connotations of modernity in the analysis In connection with these distinctions, the normative dimension associated with the notion of modernity should be integrated into our approach to modernity, in two respects. First, this dimension is intrinsic to our object of study, and we have to include it in our interpretation. Modernity refers to a history, which cannot be undone, and for this reason the notion cannot be defined arbitrarily. If we want to give this notion a sociological meaning, we have to elaborate it through a hermeneutic and historical approach where the normative orientations underlying the institutions of society have to be accounted for. Modernity cannot be reduced to a list of characteristics, such as a market economy, a democratic political system and scientifically-based technology. It has to include the social imagination and cultural-ideological orientations which ground these characteristics in deep conceptual changes and integrate them into a type of society (Wittrock 2002). Secondly, this normative

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dimension is also part of our relationship to our object of study and should make us aware of the impossibility to separate radically in any sociological interpretation of history and the present time an explanatory model, a coding and a narrative (Alexander, 1995). Any macrosociological interpretation belongs at the same time to the social-scientific sphere and to the larger intellectual sphere, since it cannot simply pretend to explain in a distant and neutral way the social world and its history, but constitutes a reading grid of reality which gives coherence and orientation, through analytic units, conceptual schema and theoretical elaboration, which are always disputed. Social theory must not be considered simply as an explanatory discourse, but also as a general intellectual discourse aiming at interpreting the world, at giving it meaning, at situating the epoch and the society we live in by contrast with and opposition to others. This dimension of the discourse cannot be eliminated and separated from its ‘properly scientific’ one, because it cannot be reduced to ideology. Thus, any interpretation functions as a ‘meaning structure’ which codes and narrates the socio-historical world. The sociologist, and especially the macro-sociologist, cannot be a neutral observer. He is at the same time an observer and a participant, willingly or not, consciously or not involved in the normative dimension of his object of study, for there is no such thing as a pure description or a neutral position of observation. We have to include reflexively in our theoretical elaborations: the fundamental idea that the notion of modernity (or postmodernity for that matter) is not a label that transparently designates the real, but a self-referential semantic construction through which we at once explain societal characteristics and dynamic links, narrate social and cultural transformations in a certain way, and code them positively or negatively.4 We have to accept the fact that the categories we use are at the same time categories that structure our apprehension of reality, that the story we tell is part of the history we build, and that in this process explanation and evaluation are inevitably intertwined. What should be explained is the way we propose to do it.

Scales, phases, varieties Another important question for any renewed theorisation of modernity has to do with the scale of reference of our macro-sociological interpretations. We have to include reflexively in our theorisation the multiplicity of possible scales – either historical or geographical – and therefore the multiplicity of possible accounts of modernity (or 4

Luhmann (1998) has rightly insisted on this inevitably self-referential character of any interpretation of modernity.

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postmodernity). Here again, we have to elaborate and discuss historical periodisations and geographical scales in a reasoned way, through a hermeneutic perspective, while being aware of the fact that the scales and coordinates of reference are always redefined in the course of history. Within our scales of reference, we may perfectly well distinguish phases of modernity in the temporal dimension or varieties of modernity in the spatial dimension. This question of scales, phases and varieties has been revived recently by the growing audience of a recent theoretical paradigm, usually labeled ‘multiple modernities’, which aims to redefine modernity with the clear intent to relativise the Western trajectory and to acknowledge the multiplicity of so-called modernisation processes marking the contemporary world, characterised by heterogeneity and divergence as much as by similarity and convergence. To talk of multiple modernities is however not the same thing as to talk of varieties of modernity (Schmidt 2006) and confuses the idea of variety within a type with the idea of different types. This theoretical confusion can itself be explained, in my view, by confusion between ‘post-traditional’ and ‘modern’. In order to clarify this matter, I propose to distinguish four different analytical levels within a macro-sociological perspective.

Four analytical levels Whether we adhere to it or not, the hypothesis of postmodernity forces us to stop reasoning within a dualist frame opposing modernity to tradition and considering as obvious that ‘moving out’ of tradition means ‘entering’ modernity, if we are ready to admit that postmodernity, however one defines it, is itself a post-traditional manifestation. A way out of this mode of reasoning consists in establishing a clear distinction between what concerns types of society and what relates to a deeper anthropological level of structuring of social relations and individual subjectivity, a level which I propose to name ‘symbolic universe’. One can then propose to distinguish within universal history two major types of symbolic universe, traditional and post-traditional. What Weber analysed under the notion of the disenchantment of the world corresponds to what is here meant by post-traditional universe, that is a fundamental ontological and anthropological mutation which unsettled first the European civilisation, then progressively the whole world, with regard to the cognitive, affective and normative frameworks that structure our relation to ourselves, others and the world. The central hypothesis is that we are moving out of a symbolic universe structured in its entirety by tradition and religion,

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whatever the more or less important role tradition and religion play in the actual structuring of social relations and in individual beliefs and practices (Gauchet 1999). A post-traditional symbolic universe is not necessarily a world without tradition and religion, but a world in which they change their status, at both the individual and collective level, and are subject to interrogation (Giddens 1994).5 In this sense, traditionalism and fundamentalism are clearly post-traditional phenomena, as well as new forms of communalism based on various references, such as ethno-racial ones. Therefore, instead of opposing traditional and modern societies, I propose to oppose traditional and post-traditional symbolic universes, each symbolic universe allowing for multiple forms of societies and tendencies. We should therefore, in my view, not speak of multiple modernities, but of multiple post-traditional societies, exactly like when we distinguish for instance kingdoms, empires, city-states, feudal systems and caste systems as different types of traditional forms of social and political organisation. Whereas the distinction between traditional and post-traditional symbolic universes is situated on a ‘deep’ anthropological level, the opposition between advanced modernity and postmodernity falls into the classical sociological enterprise of distinguishing types of society and civilisation through a set of cultural and structural characteristics. Modernity or postmodernity is defined as a type of society and civilisation, which may include historical phases, as well as variable paths of realisation, but within certain limits, lest it looses all conceptual relevance. Again, the hypothesis of postmodernity is stimulating, because in the same way that it forbids continuing reasoning within the dualist frame of the opposition between tradition and modernity, it forbids immediately confusing modern and actual or contemporary; and thus requires a much more rigorous use of the notion of modernity on the part of those who intend to contest this hypothesis and to claim that we are still, if not ever more than before, within modernity. The notion of modernity can assume conceptual relevance only if it designates something other than the current empirical endpoint of social change anywhere on the planet.6 5

My significant divergence with Giddens lies in the fact that he identifies ‘posttraditional’ and ‘modern’, whereas I propose to situate them on two different analytical levels. 6 This implies ceasing to reason upside down, as do numerous interpreters who, instead of defining the notion of ‘modernisation’ as the process of implementation of modernity (understood as a set of principles, cultural orientations and institutions characterising a type of organisation of social relations), designate as modern any product of social change, routinely named modernisation. In this respect, the introduction of the term ‘postmodernisation’ to name a process of

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Two other planes of analysis concern the historical and spatial frames, respectively, in which a given type of symbolic universe or a given type of society takes place. Until very recently, these frames have been defined from the history of Western Europe and then so-called Western societies, with only secondary divergences over the precise starting point of modernity, varying according to the readings from the 16th (Renaissance, Reformation, birth of the nation-state) to the 19th century (industrial capitalism). In all the cases, the geographical frame of the post-traditional symbolic universe and of modernity was given both by the politicoterritorial model of the nation-state and by an opposition between the West and its other, which was associated in terms of disciplines with a partition between sociology (modern societies) and ethnology (traditional societies), and on a geopolitical level with the development of colonialism and imperialism. The current debates around advanced modernity and postmodernity must here again lead us to distinguish as clearly as possible the different planes of analysis. We can thus talk of the contemporary period to designate from a historical viewpoint the present time and the idea of inflection or of mutation accompanying it according to the readings, ceasing to associate a priori the contemporary period with modernity to make of this articulation an open question. On a geographical level, we may develop the hypothesis of a worldwide diffusion of the posttraditional symbolic universe, with varying degrees of intensity, while keeping the question of types of society much more open. Neither the enlargement to all the societies on the planet of intensified dynamics of transformation nor globalisation necessarily signify by themselves the correlative diffusion of modernity as a type of society, although they do not signify any more, as such, a postmodern mutation. Within the tradition of macro-historical comparative sociology, modernity designates a type of society born in Europe around the 16th or 17th century, and it is only on the basis of a theory starting from this historic first occurrence of a new type of society that any interpretation of contemporary transformation can get its credibility. This must lead us to adopt with a lot of caution some notions in the air such as modernity at large, global modernity or multiple modernities. This must also lead us to clearly distinguish the topic of modernity from that of globalisation, as Robertson (1996) rightly stresses. The following table summarises the proposed distinctions. These different considerations and distinctions should help, in my view, to transformation alien to the logic of modernity is useful to get out of this confusion and to clarify the issue.

Chapter Two

24

develop a renewed theorisation of modernity until we are able to propose a completely renewed typology of post-traditional societies. In this perspective, I will first discuss the hypothesis of a post-traditional universe, then the opposition between the interpretations in terms of advanced modernity and postmodernity, aiming to show that we have to go beyond this formal opposition if we want to discuss substantial questions about the characteristics and dynamics of today’s world. Table 2: Four different analytical levels of a macro-sociological approach Historical7 Periodisation

Pre-modern times

Type of symbolic universe

Type of society

Traditional symbolic universe

Traditional Societies

Fidelity to the past, narrow articulation between tradition and religion, major and massive impact on ways of thought, practices and social relations.

Can be declined in various subtypes, on a diachronic or comparative basis.

Post-traditional symbolic universe Modern times

7

Deep mutation in the symbolic economy of societies and modes of construction of subjectivity, disenchantment of the

Modernity

From the perspective of European historiography.

Spatial configuration and geopolitical relations

Variable extent, most of the time limited, except in the case of traditional empires (but weak capacities of control and transformation). Importance of proximal social relations (parenthood, local community). Frame of the nationstate, first in Western Europe, then in socalled Western countries. Opposition between « the West » and « the rest ». Colonial expansion and imperialism.

Interpreting, Coding and Narrating our Historical Condition: Relevance and Limits of the Notion of Modernity in the 21st Century

Present time, contemporary epoch

world, which can go hand in hand with the mobilisation mobilisation of tradition and religion in a cultural (ethnicity) or ideological way (traditionalism, ethnonationalism, fundamentalism, etc.).

Advanced modernity or postmodernity?

25

Worldwide diffusion of the model of the nationstate. Intensified and generalised dynamics of transformation at the world scale, associated with increasing interdependencies and capacities to act at a distance. Notion of globalisation. Contraction of the planet (finished world).

The hypothesis of a post-traditional symbolic universe I would like to develop the hypothesis that the inscription of collectivities and individuals in a post-traditional symbolic universe refers to long-term dynamics, borne by varied actors, institutions and vectors, which is associated with a major set of transformations in the general economy which relates to oneself, the others and the world as well as in the anchoring of the most profound regulations of social life. Four basic tendencies may help accounting for these transformations. 1) A tendency to generalised denaturalisation. One may associate the notion of a post-traditional universe with the idea that all the forms (past or present) of naturalisation of cultural models, social roles or political institutions are undermined, since they cannot anymore rely on the support of an extra-social guarantor, be it cosmological or religious. Cultural models and inherited social roles are more and more likely to appear as contingent or as arbitrary (gender relations are today a major field of contest of the domination that naturalisation frequently uncovers). In the same sense, political institutions are perceived as a human construction and thus as transformable. The dynamics of denaturalisation may reach our conception of nature itself, which is more and more thought of as modifiable through technology. This is one of the reasons of the increasing reference to the theme of ‘risk’ (Beck 1992). 2) A tendency to the weakening of traditional communitarian structuring (such as religious, ethno-cultural, familial, local, professional community), which may be understood through the link that exists between the traditional symbolic universe and a holistic value-system

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in the sense of Louis Dumont (1992). This is intensified in Western countries by a weakening of the figures of the social whole and of collective identifications which have historically marked modernity until today (the nation-state, class and gender in particular). This weakening may lead to an individualisation of the actors, associated with a socio-historical process of loosening and recomposition of the links between individuals and the collective wholes in which they were inscribed a priori before; a process which is eminently variable as to its degree of extension and its intensity, according to social and historical configurations and to categories of actors. However, it may also lead to different phenomena of ideological hardening, closure and attempts to re-naturalise the categories of belonging and identification. 3) A tendency to the weakening of the figures of verticality, whether they have a religious (traditional churches) or secular nature (ideologies, institutions). As Dumont (1992) has shown, a traditional and holistic symbolic universe goes hand in hand with the inscription of social relations in hierarchical collective wholes, sustained by extra-social guarantors. In contrast to this, the notion of a post-traditional symbolic universe implies the coming into crisis of organic conceptions of social life and a priori hierarchies. The figures of verticality will then reconstitute on ideological bases, around the multiple political projects of re-foundation of the social order which have marked historical modernity. We may assume that we assist today, at least in Western civilisation, the coming into crisis of the secular ideologies that have functioned as substitutes of religion (revolution, progress, triumphant rationalism, modernism in art, etc.; Gauchet 1998) and the decline of the ‘institutional programme’ aiming at socialising social actors in an authoritarian way, around values, norms and cultural models presented as transcendent (Dubet 2002). 4) A tendency to the differentiation of social worlds and spheres of activity. The notion of a post-traditional symbolic universe means that the regulation of social relations and the reproduction of society are less and less provided on the basis of a commonly shared and strongly integrated culture. This potentially opens up a plurality of social worlds and domains of practice, each structuring itself around specific references and modes of regulation, instead of an overall culture or political power governing all the facets of social life (struggling

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against such a tendency within a post-traditional setting is a characteristic of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes). This differentiation goes hand in hand with a complex social life, given the plurality of modes of practice and experience, and accounts for a growing cultural and social heterogeneity. One major historical postulate behind this analysis is that these different tendencies touch today with varying degrees, temporalities and rhythms all human societies, unsettling the previous universes of thought and organisation with greater or lesser virulence, and giving rise to the most diverse answers. This hypothesis joins different interpretations of historical dynamics proposed through such concepts as detraditionalisation (Heelas, Lash, Morris 1996) or de-institutionalisation (Touraine 2000). This being said, there exists no mechanical link between the tendencies presented above and the structuring of social relations. Thus, the dynamics associated with the inscription in a post-traditional symbolic universe cannot be analysed simply in terms of secularisation, individualisation, rationalisation or reflexivity, as in the classical narratives of modernity. They may well go hand in hand in certain contexts with different phenomena of re-composition and of invention or reinvention of ‘imagined communities’ referring to tradition, ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, religion. However, the mobilisation of a routinely cultural mode of tradition and religion within the forms of life of some social groups, or their ideological mobilisation by a social movement or a political current, do not contradict the fact that they do not occupy in the overall symbolic economy of social relations the same place as before. The concept of a post-traditional symbolic universe allows us to question these contemporary forms of mobilisation without automatically seeing in them either archaic or traditional residues in a process of disappearance or intrinsic manifestations of modernity.8

8

Acknowledging the inscription in a post-traditional society of numerous societies whose cultural-ideological references and modes of social organisation diverge strongly from those of Western countries, different authors have engaged in a research program on ‘multiple modernities’ (Taylor 1999; Eisenstadt 2002). Since they fail to distinguish, as I propose to do, types of symbolic universe and types of society, they continue to reason on the basis of the tradition/modernity opposition, with the risk of being driven into elaborating a more and more abstract and empty notion of modernity to be able to inscribe in it all the contemporary dynamics, as may be seen in the writings of Eisenstadt (2002; 2003).

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It is also important to stress that individualisation does not necessarily mean reflexivity and autonomy, inasmuch as all sorts of mechanisms of blockage of questioning may operate, such as routines, phenomena of addiction, superstition, narcissism, ethnocentrism, adhesion to discourses of truth and to figures of authority.9 We must also integrate in the analysis the question of the material and social supports of reflexivity: material difficulties may engender strongly constrained conditions of existence, which are neither a matter of tradition nor of routine, which submerge the subject and forbid any significant distancing from oneself and the modes of social organisation. On the other hand, reflexivity, where it does exist, does not necessarily follow the path of critical questioning, as may be promoted by philosophical examination or by partially autonomised social universes such as science or art. It may also be inscribed within an instrumental and strategic configuration.

Going beyond the formal opposition between advanced modernity and postmodernity If we move from types of symbolic universes to types of society, we are frequently confronted today by what is presented as a major interpretive opposition, i.e., that between ‘advanced modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’. Whereas the first reading reasons in terms of ‘inflection within continuity’, the second interpretation considers that the contemporary cultural-ideological and structural configuration is marked in tendency by a mutation with regard to the societal logic and dynamics of modernity over the last centuries. The controversy between these two interpretations has been particularly important during the last twenty years, not always for reasons related to normal social-scientific debate, but frequently for ideological divergences having to do with the normative connotations that the modernism-postmodernism controversy has generated. What has been largely overlooked in this controversy is, first, the necessity to distinguish clearly (which does not mean to radically separate) the philosophical or aesthetical debate over modernism and postmodernism from the sociological perspective, and, second, between 9

One of the authors who insisted on the relation between a post-traditional universe and reflexivity is Giddens (1994). He does not limit himself to this consideration, however, insisting notably on compulsive tendencies and addiction as post-traditional forms of psychic trouble, joining thus the analyses of Ehrenberg (2000) on addiction and depression as the reverse side of the current normative ideal of the autonomous individual.

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types of society. We have to realise that even without the emergence of postmodernism as a set of intellectual currents and movements at the end of the 20th century, a discussion about the present-day cultural and social transformations would have emerged, and that given a number of previous theorisations in sociology in terms of ‘modern society’, this discussion would have given birth to the hypothesis of postmodernity or to a renewed reading of modernity.10 This corresponds to an epistemic condition which is today well accepted by historians, that is, the fact that we cannot but interpret history from the perspective of our own historical positioning, so that the periods and characteristics of socio-historical phenomena are always open to reinterpretation. The evidence we can advance for this idea is that a number of interpretations in terms of postmodernity that have been proposed in the historical and sociological literature have indeed nothing to do with postmodernism, either because they preceded this movement or because they were hardly influenced by it. Probably more important, what is also massively overlooked in the sociological discussions about advanced modernity and postmodernity is the fact that this distinction is at a certain level purely formal. What is important here is the qualification ‘at a certain level’. Clearly, when we consider world history, and even though we know well in the postpositivist age that the interpretive model we develop cannot pretend to be a simple mirror of reality, we have to assume that the notions of continuity and rupture or mutation are not simply intellectual fantasies but ‘correspond’ to something real worth debating. Otherwise, the whole enterprise of engaging in a historical and comparative interpretation of societies and civilisations would be meaningless. In the same perspective, when we examine the interpretation developed by a single author or within a collective paradigm, the distinction between advanced modernity and postmodernity is usually associated with a number of characteristics forming an ideal type that we can discuss on a substantive level. However, if we group together all the interpretations that reason in terms of 10

It is essential not to confuse postmodernity and postmodernism. Whereas postmodernism designates a set of aesthetic and intellectual currents and movements critical of the orientations they label as ‘modernist’, the notion of postmodernity refers to the hypothesis of a socio-historical set of transformations marking an objective rupture with those that have characterised Western history since the 16th or 17th century onwards. If numerous theories in terms of postmodernity are marked by a postmodernist sensibility, associating modernity as a type of society with forms of ideology and hegemony that need to be abandoned, this is not automatically or logically implied, and others are extremely critical of postmodernism and/or may code postmodernity negatively, like Freitag (2002).

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inflection within continuity as opposed to mutation, we must realise that the criterion for this operation is purely formal. It would be a major mistake to assume that each group thus formed corresponds to a homogeneous interpretive position. Thus, once we engage in an examination of the whole space of interpretations, we realise that the opposition to advanced modernity/ postmodernity does not distinguish the interpretations proposed by different authors and currents. What is common for instance, between reasoning in terms of advanced democracy and in terms of advanced capitalism? If the form of the interpretation is the same, the definition of the central characteristics of modernity diverges radically from one current to the next, as well as the narrative and coding of historical dynamics. In the same way, what is common between the Luhmannian reading of advanced modernity in terms of systems differentiation (1998) and that of Habermas (1984) in terms of rationalisation through communicative action? If we move from the formal to the substantive level, we can easily account for these massive divergences within each ‘group’. Indeed, the reference to ‘modernity’ understood as effective history refers today in representations to deeply heterogeneous contents, sometimes radically opposed: the affirmation of reason as a source of individual and collective emancipation, human rights and cultural and political liberalism, democracy, scientific and technical progress as well as economic and social development and their consequences on the well-being of people, artistic experimentation and creativity; but also capitalist relations of exploitation, the colonial and imperialist domination of Western countries, the Holocaust, the penetration of instrumental rationality in all aspects of social relations, the loss of meaning associated with the ‘disenchantment of the world’. It is no surprise then that each interpretation can privilege certain processes and significations to the detriment of others in order to elaborate its explanatory model of historical transformations, whether it is to reason in terms of advanced modernity or postmodernity. The implications of this observation are extremely important. In a different work (Bonny 2004), I have tried to show that contrary to what is routinely assumed, notably through the confusion between postmodernism and postmodernity, there exist today two opposite readings of postmodernity, one of which is positive, while the other is critical and entertains no specific link with postmodernism. Moreover, the positive interpretation may itself take on two very different meanings, whether it designates trends already characterising our epoch or a form of realistic utopia to be established, present in some practices and institutions, but in a minor role. For in this case, this positive reading is redoubled by a critical

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theory of the dominant forms of social organisation, the escape from modernity being in large measure to be accomplished and not simply to be recorded. The same holds true for the interpretations in terms of advanced modernity: once we go beyond the formal regrouping, we have to develop major distinctions within this formal set on the grounds of the proposed characterisation of modern society as well as the interpretation of its dynamic of transformation. In the book mentioned above, I thus distinguished three major interpretive paradigms (placing the emphasis on democracy, capitalism and industrialism/post-industrialism, respectively), two more abstract perspectives centred on differentiation versus rationalisation, and two opposite readings of worldwide transformation (in terms of convergence or multiplicity of trajectories). The evidence of massive substantial divergences within each ‘group’ should not lead us to conclude that everything is only a matter of opinion. For the different interpretations may be seen as partial illuminations of reality, which must have an empirical basis of validation, are not necessarily always incompatible, and must take into account the other interpretations in order to get any credibility, implying adjustments, nuances, argumentation aiming at refuting the other readings. Thus, we may engage in an examination of the space of interpretations to increase our reflexivity, the objective being less to oppose right and wrong interpretations than to catch in a comparative perspective the internal logic of each type of reasoning; to underscore its partial relevance as well as its limits. There is no reason to assume that we must necessarily take a decision and a stance among the different interpretations. One may instead start from the idea that readings in terms of continuity or mutation could well be in part simultaneously relevant, simply because they do not put the emphasis on the same types of phenomena and historical developments. This perspective can notably help us to understand why some very divergent interpretations can all appear to us as relevant to understand the present time. For it is not made of a single piece of cloth, and cannot be characterised through a single process, a single overarching logic, but rather, refers to plural dynamics, marked by different temporalities. If we can understand that an author tries to explain a set of phenomena through a single principle, the confrontation of interpretations engage us rather toward a narrative mixing different threads, which allows us to simultaneously better understand the complexity of the real and the frequent ambivalence of our appreciation of the present time. Thus, if we do not stick to the surface of the appellations and to a formal opposition between advanced modernity and postmodernity, it seems possible to bring out significant main themes from the space of interpretations this

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opposition covers. Of course, the limit of such a perspective is naïve eclecticism.

Conclusion: Towards a complex interpretive model It is not certain that it is still possible or relevant to elaborate a general theory of society, if this means the unfolding of a unique explanatory logic of all social phenomena. Such an enterprise leads indeed too often, in order to remain faithful to the privileged interpretive frame, to the production of reductive analyses of numerous phenomena. The complexity of the contemporary social world has probably definitively invalidated this kind of orientation. The conclusion to be drawn from this observation is not that we must therefore renounce to propose a theory of society and engage only in the description and analysis of strictly circumscribed and localised realities. One may instead aim at complexifying the analytical models in order to get in phase with the plurality of logics that structure social relations and orientate actions and interactions, while developing the hypothesis that they are not infinite in number and that if they confront each other, without any possible reduction to one or the other, they form at the same time according to places and epochs configurations whose dominant characteristics and most significant tones it is possible to locate. The idea, in other words, is to find a major route between general theories reasoning in terms of ‘global packages’ and theories centred on circumscribed systems, processes and interactions. Whatever the difficulties of the enterprise, it is crucial to elaborate analyses of the dominant societal logics at large spatial and historical scales, if at least sociology aims at distancing itself from unceasing social change, lightening the major stakes of the century to come and contributing to define reflexive collective orientations. In this perspective, I suggest to distinguish three structuring logics whose effects intersect today, which may help explain contradictory tendencies at work within contemporary societies, as well as divergences of evaluation or our own ambivalence towards them. The first logic, in terms of post-traditional conditions, relates to the most fundamental symbolic and anthropological frames of experience and refers to a longterm process of disenchantment of the world. In this process, the contingency of institutions, of biographies, of norms and values is progressively put in evidence, and all the forms of naturalised transcendence one refers to in order to stabilise social life are ever more rapidly undermined. Within the Western sphere, this dynamic first reached tradition and religion, then the laicised transcendences put in place by

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‘classical’ modernity. It is in such a perspective that we may reinterpret in part postmodernism, as a form of historical consciousness characteristic of the end of the twentieth century accompanying the crisis of the modernist modes of thought which had engendered these laicised figures of transcendence. This first historical logic is largely indeterminate in terms of social forms of organisation. It is thus not possible anymore today to confuse the post-traditional symbolic universe with the way out of tradition followed by Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. All the societies on the planet are now inscribed with varying degrees within a post-traditional symbolic universe, including traditionalist or fundamentalist movements when they try to impose in a constraining mode to whole populations the respect of tradition or religion as they interpret them. The second logic corresponds to the deepening and diffusion of the legitimising of references and institutional frames of liberal-democratic modernity as they were first elaborated in Europe. One may situate here the political integration of society through the institutions of the nationstate, the promulgation of fundamental rights of the human being, the differentiation between private and public spheres, the autonomisation of multiple spheres of activity each regulated by specific finalities and principles, the internal dynamic which leads to the enlargement of the sphere of citizenship, to the deepening of democratic institutions, to the political control of capitalist logics, to the shift from the liberal state to the developing state and the social state, and from often univocal and rigid cultural models to a cultural pluralism and the relaxing of mores. At the planetary level, this logic has notably found a realisation with the diffusion of the nation-state model and the constitution of the international relations system. It has also given birth to supranational institutions, which repeat in a large measure, at larger scales, the liberal-republican principles and the universalistic orientations first developed in Western countries. If the dynamics associated with this logic imply a certain convergence of the legitimising references and institutional frames of different societies, they also inscribe themselves within specific symbolic, social, geographical and historical configurations, which endlessly maintain and renew the differences. The third structuring logic refers to the development of modes of regulation and reproduction of social relations in rupture with the principles and institutions of liberal democracy. They are built on other bases, where powers, organisations, technical systems, relations of force and influence play the main role. Whether we examine the proliferation of systems and organisations, of technocratic decisional processes or of the

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autonomised innovations of techno-science, the planetary grip of transnational and globalised capitalism, the geopolitics of power, terrorism, fundamentalism, ethno-nationalism, communitarian withdrawals, in all these cases one does not situate oneself anymore within the universe of reference of post-medieval European thought and the modern philosophy of right and the state which issued from it. Whatever the way we name these historical manifestations and their underlying logic, whether we speak of postmodernity or not in reference to them, it is essential to apprehend them in their profoundly post-traditional character as well as in their divergence with regard to a certain model of civilisation which is attached to European history, beyond the dark face this history also contains and beyond the limits of this model. It seems to me that this kind of complex and nuanced interpretive model can be a good basis for the elaboration of a renewed typology and a sensitive historical and comparative approach to societies and civilisations. Its advantage is that it does not force us to choose between advanced modernity and postmodernity, and does not conflate posttraditional and modern. It also integrates normative considerations, takes seriously the intellectual dimension of the sociological discourse, and its possible role in the self-reflexivity and self-orientation of society.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C., 1995: Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun, 1996: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, Jean, 2001: Selected Writings. Edited and introduced by Mark Poster. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt, 1992: Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Beck, Ulrich, 1992: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Beck, Ulrich, Giddens, Anthony and Lash, Scott, 1994: Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity. Bell, Daniel, 1976: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Bonny, Yves, 2004: Sociologie du temps présent: Modernité avancée ou postmodernité ?. Paris: Armand Colin. Dubet, François, 2002: Le déclin de l’institution. Paris: Seuil.

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Dumont, Louis, 1992: Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ehrenberg, Alain, 2000: La Fatigue d’être soi: Dépression et Société. Paris: Odile Jacob. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 2002: “Multiple Modernities”, pp. 1-29 in: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.) Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. —. 2003: Comparative Civilizations & Multiple Modernities: A Collection of Essays by S.N. Eisenstadt (two volumes). Leiden: Brill. Freitag, Michel, in collaboration with Yves Bonny, 2002: L’oubli de la société: Pour une théorie critique de la postmodernité. Rennes: PUR. —. 2002: “The Dissolution of Society within the ‘Social’”, European Journal of Social Theory 5: 175-198. Gauchet, Marcel, 1999: The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. La religion dans la démocratie: parcours de la laïcité, Paris, Gallimard, 1998. Giddens, Anthony, 1990: The Consequences of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 1994: “Living in a Post-Traditional Society”, pp. 56-109 in: Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity. Gilroy, Paul, 1993: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Habermas, Jürgen, 1998: “Modernity – An Incomplete Project”, pp. 1-15 in: Hal Foster (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New Press. —. 1984: The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon. Harvey, David, 1990: The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell. Heelas, Paul, Scott Lash and Paul Morris, (eds.) 1996: Detraditionalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Inglehart, Ronald, 1997: Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Fredric, 1991: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Jauss, Hans Robert, 1982: Toward an Aesthetics of Reception. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

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Koselleck Reinhart, 2004: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Luhmann Niklas, 1998: Observations on Modernity. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press. —. 2002: Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Edited, with an introduction, by William Rasch. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press. Maffesoli, Michel, 1995: The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Societies. London: Sage. Meschonnic, Henri and Hasumi Shiguehiko, (eds.) 2002: La modernité après le post-moderne. Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose. Robertson, Roland, 1996: Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Schmidt, Volker H., 2006: “Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity?”, Current Sociology 54: 77-97. Taylor, Charles, 1999: “Two Theories of Modernity”, Public Culture 11: 153-174. Tiryakian, Edward A., 1991: “Modernisation: Exhumetur in Pace (Rethinking Macrosociology in the 1990s)”, International Sociology 6: 165-180. Touraine, Alain, 2000: Can We Live Together: Equality and Difference. Cambridge: Polity. Wagner, Peter, 1994: A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge. —. 2001: “Modernity: One or Many?”, in Judith R. Blau (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, pp. 30-42. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittrock, Björn, 2002: “Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition”, pp. 31-60 in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.) Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

CHAPTER THREE THE UNIVERSAL UNDERNEATH THE MULTIPLE: SOCIAL ACCELERATION AS A KEY TO UNDERSTANDING MODERNITY HARTMUT ROSA

I. Modernisation and Acceleration Theories of modernity as we find them, first in the classical approaches of Weber, Durkheim, Marx, and Simmel, and then in the wake of Talcott Parsons, usually conceptualise modernisation as an ongoing process of (structural) differentiation, (cultural) rationalisation and/or (personal) individualisation, and sometimes as a process of commodification or instrumental control (van der Loo/van Reijen 1997). However, these theories have come under attack from two directions. First, it appears that theories of modernisation conceive of modernity as a unidirectional, straight and continuous development. Therefore, they are incapable of accounting for the various ruptures, reversals and variances even within Western modernity. Secondly, it is claimed that they are utterly ethno- or euro-centric, taking cultural particulars of Western civilisation to be universal goals of social development, whereas in fact, modernisation might lead to very different structural and cultural outcomes in Africa, Southeast Asia or Latin America. In both cases then, it is objected that these theories deny the possibility of a historical as well as geographical or cultural plurality of modernities. However, the prevailing postmodern or postcolonial approaches to an alternative conception of plural or multiple modernities, which focus on the many differences, heterogeneities and contradictions between distinct historical phases or geographical regions of the modern age, have thus far

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failed to give an account of the unifying ‘modern’ within the plurality of social formations. The dissolution of the concept of modernity into the mere idea of a conflicting plurality of modernities eventually nullifies our conception of the modern: The talk of ‘multiple modernities’ then implies no more than the observation of a plurality of (potentially conflicting) lifeforms and cultures out there. If sociological theory were to travel this road, it would renounce any hope of identifying the characteristic specificity of the modern form of life and of the experience of modernisation that underlies its variances and contradictions. Therefore, in my view, the fundamental challenge for sociology today is the attempt to re-define modernity, or, if we accept its processual nature, modernisation, in such a way that we can simultaneously account for its historical and cultural diversity as well as for its conceptual unity. The argument I want to develop in this chapter is that the reinterpretation of modernity as a ‘three-dimensional’, ongoing process of social acceleration actually meets this challenge. It does not only allow for vast and persistent cultural and institutional diversity as well as historical breaks and ruptures, but it even helps to causally explain the latter and to precisely define the critical moments of rupture within the process of modernisation. Hence, I want to claim that the definition of modernisation as social acceleration is capable of accepting the valid arguments made in favour of the multiplicity of modernity, while at the same time accounting for its unity. To take the principle of acceleration – which allows for very different forms of differentiation, rationalisation or individualisation and is compatible even with their partial reversal – as the core of modernisation provides sociology with a key to understanding the connection between the abstract-structural homogeneity and the substantial heterogeneity of modernity. Consequently, my argument rests on the claim that the experience of modernisation in all its historical phases and cultural regions is tightly connected to the experience of a strange dynamisation and acceleration of history, culture, society or even life or time itself.1 Unfortunately, this very experience, which dominates the culture of modernity from Shakespeare and Rousseau to Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Heidegger, and from Mann and Proust to Douglas Coupland and Speed Metal (Rosa 2005a: 71-89), and of which the ‘founding fathers’ of

1

This is why the cultural historian Peter Conrad (1999:9) boldly claims that ‘[m]odernity is about the acceleration of time’, whereas the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio (1986) calls for the study of speed (dromology) as the key to understanding politics and society.

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sociology were vividly aware,2 is almost completely neglected in contemporary theories of modernisation as well as in philosophical interpretations of modernity. This fateful neglect results in all too many plain and plainly false assertions, even within otherwise highly distinguished sociological literature, that with modernity, ‘simply everything’ is speeding up. What is needed first, therefore, is a clear-cut categorical definition of social acceleration, i.e. an identification of the various types of dynamisation that can be empirically observed, and of their inter-connections. The forces of social acceleration then need to be carefully balanced against the powers and phenomena of social deceleration or inertia – for clearly, some spheres of social life do not speed up at all. The claim that modernisation is acceleration will be sustainable only if it can be demonstrated that the former forces systematically or categorically outweigh the latter. In the present chapter, I would like to establish precisely this claim. In order to do so, I will first distinguish three dimensions of social acceleration, which will then be balanced against five forms of deceleration. In the third section, I will briefly discuss the causes and the auto-dynamic, or self-propelling, character of the acceleration process. Both these sections will be rather short and apodictic, since I have developed and discussed the arguments at length elsewhere (Rosa 2003, 2005a and b). In the fourth section, I will go on to identify two critical thresholds or turning points within the history of (Western) social acceleration, which significantly changed the whole fabric of society and resulted in a shift in the forms of its historical self-interpretation as well as in its patterns of politics and identity. If I succeed in making these points, the claim that acceleration not only allows for, but explains or implies ruptures, breaks and reversals in the process of modernisation, will appear much more plausible. Even though I lack the empirical data to substantiate the further claim that modernisation is predominantly experienced as social acceleration outside the Western world (i.e. in India as in Brazil or with the Zulus3), I will close with a brief consideration of the universality of the acceleration-hypothesis.

2

Just think of Simmel’s (1971) account of metropolitan life, Marx and Engel’s notion of all solid melting into air, or of Weber’s emphasis on the temporal discipline of the Protestant ethics, for which wasting time was ‘the deadliest of all sins’ (cf. Rosa 2005a: 89-111). 3 Hylton White recently pointed out to me that the social experience of the Zulus could be very much interpreted along these lines (White 2006).

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II. Modernisation as Acceleration: The categorical framework4 A) Three dimensions of social acceleration In order to understand the process of social acceleration, we need to analytically distinguish three different dimensions or types of phenomena, since the experience of acceleration can be related to the speed of goaldirected processes (a), to the rate of social change (b), and to the sense of a growing scarcity of time (c). a) Technological Acceleration The first, most obvious, and most easily measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of intentional, goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production that can be defined as technological acceleration. Although it is not always easy to measure the average speed of these processes, acceleration in this realm is undeniable. In fact, the industrial revolution and the recent ‘digital revolution’ can be interpreted as straightforward ‘dromocratic revolutions’ in this sense. Thus, the speed of communication is said to have increased by 107, the speed of personal transport by 102, and the speed of data processing by 106 (Geissler 1999: 89). The effects of technological acceleration on social reality are certainly tremendous. For example, as Harvey (1990) and many others have pointed out repeatedly, our perception of space and time has been significantly transformed as space virtually appears to ‘contract’ and gradually lose its significance for orientation in the modern world. b) Acceleration of Social Change Whereas phenomena of the first category can be described as acceleration processes within society, the phenomena of this second category can be classified as accelerations of society itself. When novelists, scientists, and journalists since the eighteenth century observed the dynamisation of Western culture, society, or history, they were not so much concerned with the spectacular technological advancements as with the (often simultaneously) accelerated processes of social change that rendered social constellations and structures as well as patterns of action and orientation unstable and ephemeral. Hence, within modernity, the rates of change themselves are changing. Thus, attitudes and values, fashions and lifestyles, social relations and obligations as well as groups, classes, or 4 In this section, I draw heavily on an article published by Constellations in 2003 (Rosa 2003).

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milieus, social languages and forms of practice and habits tend to change at ever increasing rates. However, empirically measuring (rates of) social change remains an unresolved challenge. There is little agreement in sociology as to what the relevant indicators of change are and when alterations or variations actually constitute a genuine or ‘basic’ social change.5 Therefore, I want to suggest that sociology avails itself of approaches developed in social philosophy as well as in systems-theory and define the acceleration of social change as an ongoing contraction of the present (Lübbe 1998). Such a contraction is the consequence of the accelerating rates of cultural and social innovation. The measure is as simple as it is instructive: If we define the past as that which no longer holds/is no longer valid, while the future denotes that which does not yet hold/is not yet valid, then the present is the time-span for which (to use an idea developed by Reinhart Koselleck) the horizons of experience and expectation coincide. Only within these time-spans of relative stability can we draw on past experiences to orient our actions, and only within such periods is there some certainty of orientation, evaluation, and expectation. In other words, social acceleration can be defined by an increase in the decay-rates of the reliability of experiences and expectations and by the contraction of the time-spans definable as the ‘present.’ Conceptually then, we can apply this measure of stability and change to social and cultural institutions and practices of all kinds: the present contracts in the political as well as the occupational, the technological as well as the aesthetic, the normative as well as the scientific or cognitive dimensions, i.e., in cultural as well as in structural respects. Yet, how could we verify this empirically? There seems to be fairly general agreement in the social sciences that the basic structures of society are those that organise the processes of production and reproduction, which, in western societies, are organised by the family and the occupational system. Therefore, we gain some measure of change if we pay attention to indicators suggesting that change in these two realms – family and work – has accelerated from an inter-generational pace in early modern society to a generational pace in ‘classical modernity’ to an intragenerational pace in late modernity. Thus, the ideal-type family structure in agrarian society tended to remain stable for centuries, with generational turnover leaving the basic structure intact. In ‘classical’ or ‘high’ 5

Cf. Sztompka 1993 or Müller/Schmid 1995. Peter Laslett (1988) distinguishes between 19 different rates of internal social change (economic, political, cultural, etc.).

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modernity, by contrast, this structure was built to last for just a generation: it was organised around a couple and tended to disperse with their death. In late modernity, there is a growing tendency for family-cycles to last for less than an individual life span: increasing rates of divorce and remarriage are the most obvious evidence for this. Similarly, in the world of work, in pre-modern societies, the son inherits the father’s occupation – again, potentially over many generations. In ‘high’ modernity, occupational structures tended to change with generations: sons (and later daughters, too) were free to choose their own profession, but they generally chose only once, i.e., for a lifetime. In late modernity, occupations are no longer meant to extend over the whole of a work-life; jobs change at a higher rate than generations.6 Hence, to formulate the argument more generally, the stability of social institutions and practices can serve as a yardstick for the acceleration (or deceleration) of social change. In the work of authors like Peter Wagner (1994) and Beck, Giddens, and Lash (1994), further theoretical as well as empirical support can be found for the thesis that institutional stability is generally on the decline in late modern societies. c) Acceleration of the Pace of Life Interestingly, there is a third type of acceleration in modern societies that is neither logically nor causally entailed by the first two, but rather seems paradoxical with respect to technological acceleration. This third process is the ‘acceleration of the pace of life,’ which has been postulated again and again in the unfolding of modernity (e.g. Simmel 1971 or Levine 1998). It is the focus of much of the discussion about cultural acceleration and the alleged need for deceleration. The widespread sense that we are running out of time, that time is getting increasingly scarce and that we have to speed up our actions in order to keep pace with the demands made upon us, along with increased feelings of stress, has been well documented for virtually all modern societies (cf. Robinson/Godbey 1999). While it is hard to see why, on the subjective side, we feel temporal stress in spite of the abundance of time-resources gained via technological acceleration, the speeding up of the pace of life can be objectively defined as an increase in the number of episodes of action or experience that we live through in a given unit of time, i.e., in an hour, a week, a year or a life-time. This increase is obtained by either speeding up individual actions themselves (like in fast-food, speed-dating or power-naps), or by reducing breaks and 6

For a justification of these two (obviously very contestable) claims, see Rosa 2005a: 176-194.

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waiting-time between episodes of action, or finally via ‘multitasking’, i.e. completing several actions simultaneously (for empirical evidence, see Rosa 2003 and 2005a). B) Five forms of social deceleration Given then that we find convincing evidence for acceleration in all three spheres defined above, what we need in order to determine the sense in which we can speak of the acceleration of societies is an understanding of the status, function, and structure of those phenomena that escape dynamisation or even represent forms of slow-down and deceleration. Analytically, we can distinguish five different forms of deceleration and inertia, which cut across the spheres of acceleration identified so far. 1) First, there are natural and anthropological speed limits. Some things cannot be accelerated in principle. Among these are most physical processes, like the speed of perception and processing in our brains and bodies, or the time it takes for most natural resources to reproduce. 2) Furthermore, there are territorial as well as social and cultural ‘niches’ that have not yet been touched by the dynamics of modernisation and acceleration. They have simply been (totally or partially) exempted from acceleration processes, although they are accessible to them in principle. In such contexts, time seems to be ‘standing still,’ as the saying goes, e.g., forgotten islands in the sea, socially excluded groups or religious sects such as the Amish, or traditional forms of social practice (like producing whiskey in the famous Jack Daniels commercial). Arguably, these ‘oases of deceleration’ come under increasing pressure in late modernity unless they are deliberately protected against acceleration and thus fall under category (4). 3) There are also phenomena of slow-down as an unintended consequence of acceleration and dynamisation. This frequently entails dysfunctional and pathological forms of deceleration; the best known version of the former is the traffic jam, whereas psychological depression might well serve as a most relevant example of the latter (Ehrenberg 1999). Economic recessions – called economic slow-downs – could also be interpreted along these lines. 4) Contrary to these unintended forms of slow-down, there are intentional forms of (social) deceleration, which include ideological movements against modern acceleration and its effects. Such movements have

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accompanied more or less every new step in the history of modern acceleration, and in particular of technological acceleration. Thus, the steam engine, the railway, the telephone, the computer, and the cell-phone were all greeted with suspicion and even hostility; but in all cases, the oppositional movements eventually failed (e.g. Levine 1998). However, intentional deceleration is not always anti-modern or ideological, but rather, frequently, a functional requirement for keeping up the process of social acceleration. On the individual level, we find such accelerating (or functional) forms of deceleration where people take ‘time out’ in monasteries or take part in yoga courses that promise ‘a rest from the race’  for the purpose of allowing a more successful participation in acceleratory social systems afterwards. On the social and political level, ‘moratoria’ are sometimes introduced to solve technological, political, legal, environmental, or social obstacles that stand in the way of modernisation. Similarly, some spheres of modern society, such as the institutionally stable realms of law, political will-formation, or, for some time, the welfare state, have been deliberately exempted from dynamic change in order to create conditions of stability and calculability, which allowed for long-term economic and intellectual investment. 5) Finally, for a systematic theory of social acceleration, it is vital to account for phenomena of cultural as well as structural inertia, which represent the fifth and final form of social deceleration. Paradoxically, they are experienced in close connection with processes of radical acceleration, and have given rise to theories about the end of history (Fukuyama), about polar inertia (Virilio) or a hyper-accelerated standstill (Baudrillard, Jameson). They share the perception that despite widespread acceleration and flexibility (which create the appearance of total contingency, hyper-optionality, and unlimited openness), ‘real’ change is in fact no longer possible: the system of modern society is closing in and hence the enormous speed of events and alterations is a superficial phenomenon barely covering up deep-rooted cultural and structural inertia. In the fourth section, I will argue that these processes of paralysis and inertia are not just contingent upon, but systematically and structurally connected to the very concept of social acceleration and hence to the heart of modernity. C) Why there is acceleration rather than deceleration The fundamental question that arises at this point is the relationship between processes of social acceleration and deceleration in modern society. Two possibilities are conceivable: First, the processes of

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acceleration and deceleration are by and large in balance such that we find both types of change in the temporal patterns of society without a clear and sustained dominance of one or the other. Second, the balance in fact shifts towards the powers of acceleration such that the categories of deceleration have to be interpreted either as residual or as reactions to acceleration. I want to suggest that the second is in fact the case. (Otherwise, of course, the claim that modernisation is in its essence acceleration would appear to be refuted). My claim rests on the supposition that none of these forms of deceleration amounts to a genuine and structurally equal counter-trend to modern acceleration. The phenomena listed under categories (1) and (2) merely denote the (retreating) limits of social acceleration; they are not counter-powers at all. The decelerations of category (3) are effects of acceleration and as such derivative of, and secondary to, it. Category (4) identifies phenomena which, on closer examination, turn out to be either elements or enabling conditions of acceleration processes, or (ultimately unsuccessful) ideological reactions to them. Thus, the only form of deceleration that seems not to be derivative or residual is category (5). This dimension seems to be an inherent, complementary or even constitutive feature of modern acceleration itself and as such amounts to an ‘epiphenomenon’ of social acceleration that waxes and wanes with the powers of acceleration. It certainly does not constitute a counter-force.

III. Auto-Dynamisation: The Driving forces of Acceleration What, then, is driving the wheels of social acceleration? If we are to defend the claim that acceleration is the core principle of modernisation tout court, then, of course, it must turn out to be a self-propelling force that is not reducible to other fundamental processes of Modernisation such as rationalisation or differentiation. And in fact, we can trace the existence of an ‘auto-dynamic feedback-cycle’ between the three dimensions of social acceleration identified above: Technological acceleration, conceptually as well as empirically, can be seen as a social answer to the problem of scarce time, i.e., to the acceleration of the ‘pace of life.’ However, technological acceleration, which is frequently connected to the introduction of new technologies (like the steam engine, the automobile, the computer), almost inevitably brings about a whole range of changes in social practices, communication structures, and corresponding forms of life. For example, the Internet has not only increased the speed of communicative exchange and the ‘virtualisation’ of economic and

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productive processes; it also establishes new occupational, economic, and communicative structures, opening up new patterns of social interaction and even new forms of social identity. Hence, it is easy to see how and why technological acceleration is prone to go hand in hand with the acceleration of social change. Furthermore, if the acceleration of social change entails a ‘contraction of the present’ in the sense discussed above, this naturally leads to an acceleration of ‘the pace of life.’ The explanation for this is to be found in a phenomenon that is well known from the realm of capitalist production and might be called the ‘slipping slope phenomenon’ (Rosa 2005a: 190ff). Just as, with Marx or Weber, the capitalist producer can never pause or rest, since standing still is equivalent to falling behind, in a society with accelerated rates of social change in all spheres of life, individuals always feel that they stand on ‘slipping slopes’: taking a prolonged break means becoming old-fashioned, out-dated, anachronistic in one’s experience and knowledge, in one’s equipment and clothing as well as in one’s orientations and even in one’s language.7 Thus, people feel pressed to keep up with the speed of change in order to avoid the loss of potentially valuable options and connections.8 Hence, accelerated social change will in turn lead to an acceleration of the ‘pace of life.’ And finally, as we saw at the outset, new forms of technological acceleration will be called for to speed up the processes of productive and everyday life. Thus, the ‘acceleration cycle’ becomes a closed, self-propelling process that, in the course of modernisation, turns out to be increasingly hard to break or interrupt (Figure 1). Nevertheless, it must at least be mentioned (since I cannot develop this point at length here) that in addition to this auto-dynamic character of acceleration, there are three powerful ‘external’ motors which historically converged to set up the identified cycle and which continue to lend it additional momentum: The process of acceleration is driven by the economic logic of capitalism, for which time is money and money is necessarily scarce; by the institutional and structural logic of functional differentiation; and finally by the dominant cultural program of modernity according to which acceleration is an answer to the problem of human finitude and death: If we live fast enough, we can have (the experiences of) a hundred lives within a single life span. Speed thus tends to replace 7

Thus, elderly people in Western society are frequently unable to understand the techno-jargon the young use when talking about their gameboys, emails, iPods, DVDs, etc. 8 This problem is aggravated by the fact that in a world of incessant change, it gets increasingly difficult to tell which options will eventually turn out to be valuable.

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religious notions of an eternal life (see figure 1, cf. Rosa 2005a, Chs. VIII and IX). Instead of further dwelling on the causal connections behind the acceleratory system of modernity, I now want to turn to an analysis of the ways in which the identified logic of acceleration inevitably leads to qualitative breaks and ruptures in the cultural and institutional make-up of modern societies and hence already implies the emergence of a plurality of modernities. Figure 1: Dimensions/Motors of Acceleration

A) The Economic Motor: Time = Money

1. Technological Acceleration Dimensions of Acceleration

3. Acceleration of the ‘Pace of Life’

C) The Cultural Motor: Promise of Acceleration

2. Acceleration of Social Change

B) The Structural Motor: Functional Differentiation

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IV. Cultural Discontinuity as a Consequence of Progressive Acceleration As soon as we accept the idea that with the advent of modernity, the speed of social change is continuously increasing – even though, of course, empirically, social acceleration comes in waves and meets resistance and partial reversals such that the idea of linear acceleration is an over-simplification in the sense of a Weberian ideal-type, we are pressed towards the conclusion that this process of dynamisation meets critical thresholds beyond which there appear qualitative shifts in the social space-time-regime as well as in the experience of history and society, and hence in the predominant forms of politics, self-perception and identity. Most importantly, as authors like Jan Assmann (1992) or Reinhart Koselleck (1985) have shown, communicative social memory and the collectively shared awareness of past and present are limited to a period of about 80-100 years, since this denotes the time-span which the three (or maximally four) generations living together at any one point in history actually can oversee and communicate from their own experience. This implies that the divergence of the horizons of experience and expectation, so characteristic in Koselleck’s account of modernity, and hence the actual experience of a contraction of the present, can only become a cultural reality and gain social relevance when significant processes of endogenous social change occur within the life-time of these three (or four) generations living together, i.e., when the speed of social change crosses the threshold from an inter-generational to a generational pace. In other words, only when grandfathers, drawing on their own experience of the past, expect the future of their children and grandchildren to be significantly different from their own, the perception of a progressing history, and of a society in change, can actually take hold. On the other hand, when processes of fundamental social change occur so rapidly that the basic conditions appear to be unstable even within the life-time of a single generation (when social change, in other words, reaches the threshold of an intragenerational pace), the relationship between generations is obviously fundamentally altered once again (cf. Mannheim 1964), and the erosion of the stabilities and certainties of the life-world takes on a new character, once more transforming the experience of history, the patterns of identity and the possibilities of politics. Beyond an even higher threshold, finally, social change will no longer be experienced as a change in structures and institutions, but as a process of (potentially chaotic) incessant indeterminacy. Hence, the prominence of postmodernist ideas in our time

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might well signify the crossing of such a threshold, beyond which the transmitted forms of narrative, linear and cumulative experiences of the world can no longer be sustained. As I have indicated in section II, the idea of a progressive acceleration of social change in the process of modernisation supposes precisely such an increase in the speed of social change (in Western societies) from an inter-generational pace in pre- and early modernity to, roughly, a generational pace in high- or ‘classical modernity’ and on to an intragenerational pace in our late-modern age of globalisation. I have pointed out how such a claim could be empirically validated by referring to the decreasing stability and durability of ideal-type family- and occupational structures. Therefore, I restrict myself here to noting that on the level of normative ideals, this shift can also be observed in pre-modern societies, where individuals were expected to perpetuate the familial and occupational (as well as the religious and political) structures of their forbears; whereas it is a core-idea of ‘classical modernity’ that every individual should found his or her own family, find his (and only later on: her) defining job, a political and religious stance towards the world and so on. Thus, renewal, and not perpetuation, was a generational challenge, but – in its core as well as its peripheral dimensions such as hobbies and consumer-habits – this task of self-invention and choice was taken to be a once-and-for all challenge of adolescence. The possibility of conversions not withstanding, the normative ideal of classical or ‘high’ modernity involved the stable adherence to a once defined and then gradually developed individual life-plan. In late-modernity, by contrast, such an ideal is considered to be utterly out of touch with the requirements of a highly dynamic society. To strictly adhere to life-choices once made, or to a life-plan, appears to be not only utterly boring (who would want to stay with the same job, or woman, once and for all, or to stick to a life-long political conviction?), but also dangerously inflexible and immobile in the age of dynamic turbo capitalism (Sennett 1998, Bauman 2000). It is a core-assumption of this chapter that the progressive dynamisation of social conditions leads to a two-fold reversal in the cultural experience of time and history, which is closely connected to the generational and the intra-generational thresholds of social change identified above. Considering all we know about pre- and early modern societies, it is not implausible to assume that for them, historical time (even despite the Christian expectation of an apocalyptic end of all times) appeared to be very much static in character. The horizons of experience (what is known from the past) and of expectation (what is to be expected from the future) extensively overlapped, the vast and often uncontrollable

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contingencies and the cyclic character of every-day life notwithstanding. Hence, historical time appeared to be like a ‘container’ for manifold histories, which oftentimes repeated themselves, such that history could be the teacher of life (historia magistra vitae, as Koselleck pointed out incessantly): One could learn from the past how to act in the future. Quite to the contrary, in the rather short period between 1750 and 1830, termed ‘saddle time’ by Koselleck and the editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, a wholly new form of experiencing time and history emerges. For observers and commentators of culture, politics and society alike, the past and the future became notably different, expectations started to diverge from experience, and hence, history started to move as if it were, Koselleck notes, a ‘singular subject.’ History as such, became almost as an independent force, with an identifiable direction, and as the great ‘judge’ to human actions. I do not want to cite all the historical testimonies Koselleck and his colleagues adduce for proving this shift. Rather, I want to repeat my point that such a break in the cultural experience of time, history and society is an almost ‘natural’, expectable consequence of the acceleration of social change from the intergenerational – basic conditions appear to be endogenously invariant over at least 80 to 100 years – to the generational level, i.e., for the speed of endogenous social change crossing the first critical threshold of cultural perception. Beyond that threshold, actors are convinced that the future will be structurally different from the past, and that change is driven endogenously, i.e., not by contingent exogenous events like war or a drought. Thus, Koselleck’s main point is the identification of a historical ‘temporalisation’ of history and politics.9 He leaves us in no doubt that this temporal shift was essentially connected to the perception of an acceleration of history and society themselves. Acceleration, he assures us, was the core-element of the new conception of society and history, and the

9

However, Koselleck remains ambivalent as to the causes of this shift. He finds empirical evidence for social acceleration only in the period after the industrial revolution, i.e., considerably later. Thus, he attributes the cultural transformation to the political crisis and the emerging political expectations of the time, leading to a rapid series of disruptive events. However, this explanation remains wholly unsatisfactory since the political ruptures themselves are explained precisely by the shift in the social conception of time and history, thus leaving the argument in an explanatory circle. The reason for this conundrum, in my view, lies in the fact that Koselleck only examines technological acceleration as an empirical dimension of change, whereas he neglects evidence from the other two dimensions identified in section two above.

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idea of progress was a necessary and complementary element of this new cultural conception: it signaled the direction of social change. However, what Koselleck, being a historian, could not and did not foresee is the emergence of a second significant break in the modern perception of (historical) time towards the end of the 20th century. Even though this second break – just as monumental and essential as the first one – was heralded by various writers from the beginning of the 20th century, it only became the dominant mode of cultural experience, I would argue, after 1989, after the end of the Cold War and the digital revolution culminating in the internet. From then on, history is no longer perceived to be moving: even though, of course, there will be more wars, more failed and re-built states, new coalitions, movements and so on, i.e., even though there is frantic change, there appears to be no more history in the singular, a history with a direction, a moving history. History stopped to be an evolving process. This is what all the heralds of the end of history, of posthistoire tell us, from Gehlen to Fukuyama, Baudrillard or Virilio. It is also what innumerable testimonies from high as well as dominant pop-culture tell us, from Coupland to Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters or to Imre Kertesz.10 In late-modern perception of time, history is frantic as well as static in its pace. It is once again opening up to give space to a myriad of hi-stories which do not amount to a progressing history, thus resembling the premodern state except for the fact that change and contingency (producing the episodic hi-stories) are now endogenous. If Lübbe (1998: 277) reminds us that utopian political energies thrive only at a time when history is experienced as a process of directed change, then their virtual disappearance at the end of the 20th century is not a contingent fact, connected only to the crisis of the welfare-state and the society of labor (as Habermas has it)11, but a signal for the waning of the belief in political power to shape society’s fate as such. This second fundamental transformation of the modern conception of time can be understood as a de-temporalisation of history: Social, political and cultural events are no longer interpreted as being a link in a progressive chain, but rather, as contingent episodes in a highly contingent universe. A random succession of events, fragmented episodes and contradictory developments (such as secularisation and de-secularisation, democratisation and de-democratisation, nation-building and nation states falling apart, the evolution of the welfare-state and the return of 10

Cf. Douglas Coupland’s celebrated novel Generation X, Roger Waters’ SoloAlbum Amused to Death, or Imre Kertesz noble-prize winning book Fateless. 11 Habermas 1985.

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Manchester-Capitalism) have taken the place of what were thought to be historical sequences of social development (or progress). This is reflected in the fact that the political concepts Koselleck identifies as signifying the idea of (irreversible) dynamic movement in saddle time – all the -isms of the age – today just represent a ‘static’ array of reversible political alternatives: socialism, fascism, conservatism, liberalism, etc. In this sense, the politico-historical time of the globalisation-age is at once timeless and ‘temporalised’ in the sense that the sequence of events is not pre-determined by any meta-historical logic or principle. No social theory or philosophy of history could foretell the course of history or identify an underlying logic of progress. Even though it might appear so at first glance, this return of timeless time is not a simple return to the pre-modern conception of static-cyclical time. There is no ‘natural cycle’ of progression as in the constitutional model of Polybios, while frantic change on the level of events and associations is caused by endogenous social forces, not the least of which are technological and scientific innovations. This, in my view, helps to explain why at the turn of the millennium, the experience of frantic change and radical social contingency on the one hand and perceptions of radical (structural) inertia – to many observers, globalised society seems to represent the perpetual re-occurrence of the ‘ever-same’, the radical absence of meaningful innovation – on the other hand came to flourish simultaneously: Society is changing, but it is not going anywhere (cf. Niethammer 1989). I argue that this second change in the socio-cultural conception of time is the consequence of the pace of social change reaching the critical threshold of an intra-generational speed. After the wave of social acceleration emanating from the political and digital revolutions around 1989, individuals in advanced societies can no longer expect their basic life-worlds to provide stable background conditions for their evolving lifecourse. Rather than developing or enacting a conception of personal identity over a lifetime, the accelerated life-world structures now demand that subjects are ready to change their self-conceptions, political convictions etc. in accordance with a changing environment. Thus, history in the singular, as a subject and judge, is only conceivable within a certain ‘speed-frame’ of social change. In ‘saddletime’, it appears, its lower threshold was crossed and history began to move, whereas in late-modernity, the upper barrier is transcended and history seems to fall back into inertia, albeit a highly dynamic one this time. However, with the crossing of the identified critical thresholds, not only the perception of time changes, but with it the whole fabric and cultural substance of society is transformed, too. This is due to the fact that

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society and self in their very essence are temporal and processual rather than static and solid (Lauer 1981). This provides the basis for my claim that substantive transformations of self and society are not only compatible with, but also an inevitable effect of the continuous, abstract process of social acceleration. Let me briefly spell out this claim by way of an analysis of the shifting modern conceptions of politics and (personal) identity. I begin with the former. Even though this is rarely acknowledged, it appears to be rather selfevident that our conception of the role, function and limitations of politics in social development is highly contingent upon our social perception of history. Thus, the modern idea and ideal of political autonomy, i.e. of a self-determined shaping and controlling of our shared form of life, could only gain plausibility and credibility once history, or the social world per se, were perceived to be moving and changing. Before the ‘saddle time’, when basic change was so slow that for communicative cultural memory, the horizons of experience and expectation were basically identical, such a conception – and the idea of democracy in the modern sense – was not a real option. There was nothing that needed or suggested political shaping and planning, steering and development, albeit, of course, there were practical day-to-day decisions to be taken in order to keep the social order intact. Only when the process of social change became a cultural reality, the modern conception of society as a collective project that could be politically shaped in time, and with it the political project of modernity, could develop. Hence, the modern conception of political democracy, i.e., of a collective shaping and planning of the shared future, is a complement to the temporalisation of history. When history started to move in a ‘progressive’ manner, society became a project prone to democratic political shaping, and utopian visions were projected into the political future. After that, the Koselleck-School maintains, all politics became ‘temporalised’ around the progressive-conservative axis: Politics could either try to accelerate social change in the direction of historical progress, or it could try to preserve as much as possible from a valuable past against the grain of history. Progressive politics, then, appeared as the pacemaker of history. However, as with the conception of history, the modern conception of political democracy might turn out to be appealing and convincing only within a certain ‘speed-frame’ of social change. For democraticdeliberative processes of will-formation and decision-making are inevitably time-consuming; and they become even more so in diverse,

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pluralistic and post-conventionalist societies. The more elements of the life-world are de-traditionalised and therefore opened up for political debate, and the more background-conditions become unstable, the longer it takes for a political community to organise itself and to reach a rational or consensual decision (Rosa 2005b). Thus, there appears to be a growing problem of de-synchronisation for political decision-making in the global age: While the speed of economic transactions, technological innovations and socio-cultural currents increase incessantly, the processes of democratic decision-making are stalled or slow-down. Hence, in a world of intra-generational social change, political steering and planning can no longer claim the role of the pacemaker and controlling centre of history. Rather than directing (future) social change, governments increasingly take on the character of re-acting emergency-units, involved in the day-today business of putting out fires instead of shaping a collective future. Politics today thus appears to be de-temporalised. A new situationalism or ‘muddling through’ character has replaced the idea of a political shaping of history, and political scientists are about to postulate a ‘postdemocratic’ age of output-legitimation. The decline of Etatism (Castells 1996) since the 1970s signifies this decline in the role of politics. With it, the meaning of the terms progressive and conservative almost seems to be inverted today. Progressive Politics, if it has any meaning left at all, insists on a political control of social change and therefore seeks to curb the speed of the global flows of finance, goods, and technological innovations. Quite to the contrary, many who formerly were considered to be Conservatives are now ‘neo-liberal’ in the sense that they still distrust political steering and therefore argue against putting any brakes on the evolving market-forces of social change. Consequently, it is now the progressives who argue in favor of political deceleration and conservatives who press for an acceleration of change and development. If this development heralds the end of the modern idea of collective autonomy, something very similar can also be said about the end of the modern conception of individual autonomy. The ‘high-modern’ conception of individual identity was based on the idea that each individual could and should find out what his or her place and stance in the world is meant to be: find a profession, found a family, work out a political and a religious conviction that are ‘true to yourself’ and ‘authentic’, and then grow and develop according to your individual lifeplan based on these elements: this, in a nutshell, is the modern conception not only of identity, but of individual autonomy, of authenticity, and of the good life as well. Of course, such a conception is unimaginable within a

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social order that is intended to remain stable from one generation to the next, i.e., for which the basic productive and re-productive structures as well as the political and religious order are not meant to change dynamically from one generation to the next, but to be invariantly transmitted over many generations. Once again, it can only become a cultural ideal once social change has crossed the lower barrier of being culturally perceptible. With a generational pace of social change, individual life itself is experienced as ‘progressing’ along developmental lines (of the life-course, the family-cycle and the carrier-path, cf. Kohli 1986, Rosa 2005a: 352-362). The experiences and events of the life-course are interpreted and narrated as the cumulative elements and links of an evolving, directed life-history, as a story of growth, development and fulfillment (Sennett 1998). However, this conception becomes untenable and unappealing once the speed of social change crosses the intra-generational barrier. As I have already pointed out, just as politics turns situationalist in the late-modern age, identities, too, lose the character of ‘temporalised projects’: What we are is something that has to be decided from context to context and from one chronological stage to the next, not over the course of a complete individual life-time. The idea of living out a – professional, familial or political – life-plan seems strangely anachronistic in a world of incessant economic, occupational, cultural and political change. This transformation of late-modern identities can easily be traced even within ordinary language. Today, we either temporalise or renounce identity-markers all together: We no longer are bakers, New Yorkers, husbands, Republicans or Catholics tout court – rather, we work as bakers right now, we are New Yorkers since five years ago, we live with such and such (for now), voted Republican last time and attend Catholic services. All these building blocks of identity might change any time, due to our own decisions or to changing circumstances, even though they might just as well remain unchanged for quite a long time. In any case, they have become unstable and contingent even if they don’t change. What, where and with whom we will be next (and how long our current self-definitions will remain valid) will be decided as time evolves, not according to a life-plan. Thus, as identities (just as history and politics) are de-temporalised, time itself is temporalised in the sense that the order, duration and sequence of events are now open to the temporal process itself. Importantly, this change has not just been forced upon us – it has just as much been embraced by late-modern culture. Hence, a new conception of flexible, experimental, reversible, relational, situationalist or even multiple identities – as postmodernist authors have been advocating it for a

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long time – appears to be a ‘natural’ complement to an intra-generational pace of social change.12 Of course, there are many within the globalised world who feel at unease with this trend and, in reaction, turn towards fundamentalist solutions to the late-modern challenge of instability and insecurity. However, this reaction, too, can be read as an indicator for the increasing fragility or even implausibility of the ‘high-modern’ conception of stable individual autonomy and identity, since it signals an anachronistic return to pre-modern conceptions of inter-generational (or even ahistorical) stability. In the case of politics just as much as in the case of identity-formation, late-modern situationalism is correlated to the experience of frantic, but non-directed change, i.e. of high-speed inertia. Figure 2: Acceleratory continuity and cultural discontinuity in the course of modernity Pre- and Early ‘High’ Late Modernity Modernity Modernity Structural and Change-rates Change-rates are Speed of cultural approaching the above the speed endogenous change-rates pace of of generational social change below the generational exchange speed of exchange (generational (intragenerational exchange pace) generational (interpace) generational pace) InterFamily and Successions of Indicators: Family and generational occupational jobs and intimate occupational stability of structures partners replace structures occupational changing with a life-time and family generational commitments: structures pace: ‘serial (family in the Individualisation monogamies’ of 12 In a similar vein, Zygmunt Bauman (1993: 240f) compares the ‘modern pilgrim’, who feels that he or she is on his/her way to a destined end, to the postmodern vagabond, who is ‘a nomad without an itinerary’ or a destination, and the tourist who ‘knows that he will not stay for long where he has arrived. And as in the vagabond’s case, he has only his own biographical time to string together the places he visits; otherwise, nothing orders them in this rather than another temporal fashion.’

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sense of an economic unit)

of work and family; generations are the bearers of innovation Separation of the horizons of past, present and future; Linear time

Perception of time

Congruence of the horizons of experience and expectation; cyclical time

Conception of history

Static conception of history: Historical time as a ‘container’ for ‘hi-stories’

Temporalisation of History: History as an intelligible and directed process prone to political shaping (temporal index of politics: progressive vs. conservative)

Conception of individual life

‘situativestatic’ perception of life, centered around day-today challenges on the one hand and based on substantive, ‘transindividual’ identities on the other

Temporalisation of life: Perspective of a progressively evolving lifecourse on the basis of stable, yet selfdetermined individual identities

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both work and family

‘timeless time’ and yet ‘temporalised time’: the sequence, rhythm and duration of events is contingent on the course of time The ‘End of History’ in the high-modern sense; De-temporalised history: non-directed, erratic, yet frantic change; ‘situationalist politics’ no longer historical ‘pacemaker’ DeTemporalisation of life: Perspective of a contingent and reversible lifecourse, episodic addition replaces narrative of cumulative growth; ‘situationalist’ identities

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V. Conclusion: Universality and Plurality, Heterogeneity and Homogeneity in Modernity With this, the shift from classical or ‘high’ modernity to late modernity can be precisely identified as the moment in the history of social acceleration when the forces of dynamisation exceed the integrative capacities of individuals as well as societies to the extent that the modern conceptions of temporalised life and progressive history give way to the perception of non-cumulative, episodic (life-) history. Thus, the ‘cultural project’ of modernity centered around the idea of self-determination and autonomy, and the structural forces of modernisation in the sense of acceleration stop to be allies and turn out to be increasingly at odds with each other. This critical moment, I have argued, is essentially linked to the crossing of the speed-threshold of social change from a generational to an intra-generational pace, for the latter pace erodes the requirements of continuity and coherence connected to the ideal of time-resistant preferences and stable personal identities. Now, is this a conception of modernity that can actually overcome the ethnocentric and functionalist limitations of modernisation-theory and claim true universality? In fact, this is what I want to claim by holding that modernisation in all its manifestations, at all places and in every epoch is intrinsically defined by (or at least connected to) processes of acceleration in all three dimensions identified above. modernisation is invariably characterised by phenomena of technological acceleration, by a speed-up of endogenous social change (even where it might be connected to a stabilisation of highly conflictual or violent conditions), and by an acceleration of the pace of life.13 The auto-propelling dynamics of the acceleration-cycle, of course, can claim universal validity as well. This is not true, however, of the three ‘external motors’ of social acceleration. Of course, a capitalist mode of production and the logic of functional differentiation will cause social acceleration whenever they are applied, but there is no reason to assume that these two principles are defining elements of modernisation per se: there are socialist or ‘functionally integrated’ versions of modernity too. This is even more so for the cultural motor of social acceleration: Protestant ethics and the idea that acceleration can be an answer to the problem of human finitude clearly are culturally specific ‘Western’ phenomena. Nevertheless, the auto-dynamism of acceleration could 13 The data produced by Robert Levine and his research-group (1998) on the speed of life in 31 countries lends some empirical support at least to the latter claim.

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enforce (further) modernisation even in the absence of one, two or all three of the external motors. Besides, there could, of course, be other motors in other socio-cultural contexts. On the other hand, the identified link between the speed of social change and the social experience of time and history might well turn out to involve some invariant anthropological constants, even though there obviously will be a broad range of cultural variation in this. In any case, the definition of modernisation as an ongoing process of social acceleration provides us with a key to identify a unitary, albeit abstract logic or principle of development in the face of the cultural, historical and geographic diversity of modernities. Not only is such a definition compatible with the persistence of an almost unlimited range of cultural or institutional differences between ‘modern’ societies, it even allows for growing divergence as a consequence of acceleratory pressures under varying circumstances. At the same time, the identified connection between the perception of time and the dynamics of change serves to analytically reconstruct and causally explain the cultural and institutional breaks and ruptures within the developmental path of western modernity. Finally, the acceleratory view of modernity proposed in this paper sheds some new light on the apparently insoluble debate between those who diagnose an unstoppable convergence and homogenisation between societies and cultures in the global age and those who, on the contrary, see growing divergence and insurmountable heterogeneity. On the level of material structures, social associations and cultural convictions, there might be rapid change as well as dramatic divergence between latemodern societies, but when it comes to the depth-structural logic of global transformation, they all invariantly follow the dictates and logic of social acceleration, which might very well be at the heart of modernity’s ‘iron cage’ long identified by Max Weber.

References Assmann, Jan., 1992: Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München. Beck. Bauman, Zygmunt, 1993: Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2000: Liquid Modernity. Cambridge UK: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash 1994: Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994. Castells, Manuel, 1996: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Conrad, Peter, 1999: Modern Times and Modern Places. How Life and Art were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation and Radical Change. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ehrenberg, Alain, 1999: La fatigue d’être soi. Dépression et société. Paris: Odile Jacob. Geißler, Karlheinz, 1999: Vom Tempo der Welt. Am Ende der Uhrzeit. Freiburg: Herder. Habermas, Jürgen, 1985. “Die Krise des Wohlfahrtsstaates und die Erschöpfung utopischer Energien”, pp. 141-163 in: Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Harvey, David, 1990: The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Kohli, Martin, 1986: “Gesellschaftszeit und Lebenszeit. Der Lebenslauf im Strukturwandel der Moderne”, pp. 183-207 in: Johannes Berger (ed.) Die Moderne – Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren. Göttingen: Otto Schwartz & Co. Koselleck, Reinhart, 1985: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Laslett, Peter, 1988: “Social Structural Time: An Attempt at Classifying Types of Social Change by their Characteristic Paces”, pp. 17-36 in: Michael Young and Tom Schuller (eds.) The Rhythms of Society. London and New York: Routledge. Levine, Robert V., 1998: A Geography of Time, New York: Basic Books van der Loo, Hans, and Willem van Reijen 1997: Modernisierung. Projekt und Paradox (2nd ed.). München: dtv. Lübbe, Hermann, 1998: “Gegenwartsschrumpfung”, pp. 129-164 in: Klaus Backhaus and Holger Bonus (eds.) Die Beschleunigungsfalle oder der Triumph der Schildkröte (3rd ed.). Stuttgart: Schäffer/Pöschel. Mannheim, Karl, 1964: “Das Problem der Generationen”, pp. 509-565 in: Kurt H. Wolff (ed.) Wissenssoziologie. Berlin/Neuwied: Luchterhand. Müller, Hans-Peter, and Michael Schmid (eds.) 1995: Sozialer Wandel. Modellbildung und theoretische Ansätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Niethammer, Lutz, 1989: Posthistoire. Ist die Geschichte zu Ende? Reinbek: Rowohlt. Robinson, John, and Geoffrey Godbey 1999: Time for Life. The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (2nd ed.). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press Rosa, Hartmut, 2003: “Social acceleration. Ethical and Political Consequences of a De-Synchronized High-Speed Society”, Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 10: 3-52.

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—. 2005a: Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. —. 2005b: “The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics”, New Political Science 27: 445-459. Sennett, Richard, 1998: The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton. Sztompka, Pjotr, 1993. The Sociology of Social Change, Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Virilio, Paul, 1986: Speed and Politics. An Essay on Dromology, New York: Columbia University Press. White, Hylton, 2006: Migrancy, Youth and Affinity: The Values of City and Countryside in Post-Apartheid Zululand. Unpublished manuscript, New York. Wagner, Peter, 1994: A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge. Simmel, Georg, 1971: “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, pp. 324-339 in: Donald Levine (ed.) On Individuality and Social Form. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER FOUR THE TRANSFORMATION OF OUR CONDUCT OF LIFE: ONE ASPECT OF THE THREE EPOCHS OF WESTERN MODERNITY MIKAEL CARLEHEDEN

Introduction In the mid-1970s, ‘modernity’ began to rise to its present status as a master concept within sociology (Venn and Featherstone 2006:457–8). It replaced ‘capitalism’ at approximately the same pace as the Marxist influence declined (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005:ix–xii). This change is not simply terminological, but also conceptual. ‘Modernity’ is something more abstract and comprehensive than ‘capitalism’ and has the potential to include more social dimensions with explanatory power. Further, in recent years social scientists have been able to globalise and temporalise ‘modernity’ in a more profound and multifaceted way than ‘capitalism’ would have allowed. The current state in the ongoing development of the concept of modernity can be summarised as follows: 1. Modernity has become a multidimensional concept. It includes cultural, political, economical and technological dimensions and does not a priori give one of these dimensions more significance than the others. Each dimension has its own social logic and influences other dimensions in complicated ways. A modern society can be more or less modern in all or some of the different dimensions.1 1

Cf. Giddens’ distinction between four different ‘institutional dimensions of modernity’: capitalism, surveillance, military power and industrialism (Giddens

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2. Modernity has become conceptualised as plural in space. Thus, modernity is no longer reduced to the particular socio-cultural pattern of the West, but has the potential to overcome the conventional Westcentrism of the social sciences. It allows for multiple patterns of modernity around the globe (Eisenstadt 2002; Sachsenmaier, Eisenstadt and Riedel 2002). 3. Modernity has become conceptualised as plural in time. The distinction between tradition and modernity, which in one way or the other has been fundamental for the social sciences (Waters 1999:xi–xv), is on a concrete level too crude to help us understand the contemporary world. A theory of different epochs in modernity (Beck 1986; Carleheden 2001; Wagner 1994) or – to use another terminology for the same general idea – a theory of ‘successive patterns of modernity’ (Arnason 2005) has instead been suggested. Such an abstract and wide-ranging concept of modernity opens up a very broad field of research. Dimensions, types and epochs of modernity can be combined in different ways and give rise to an almost infinite number of research topics. The general aim of the present chapter is to show the usefulness of such a comprehensive concept of modernity applied to a specific topic. The specific topic of the chapter is what Max Weber called ‘Lebensführung’, which is here translated as ‘conduct of life’.2 The aim is to grasp the transformation of the modern conduct of life since the end of the ascetic age that dominated Weber’s own time and place. The investigation will, however, be limited to the Western type of modernity, which means that the chapter has little to add to the understanding of the multiple patterns of modernity.3 The chapter will be more original in the 1990:55–63). His intention too is to avoid ‘reductionism’, but his dimensions are too concrete and cannot, for instance, include socialist economies and societies dominated by post-industrial production. 2 Weberian scholars are debating how to translate Lebensführung into English (Swedberg and Agevall 2005:150–1). The literal translation would be ‘leading of a life’ (Kalberg 1996:56), but more common suggestions are ‘conduct of life’, ‘life conduct’, ‘lifestyle’, ‘managing one’s life’ and ‘way of life’ (for arguments supporting ‘conduct of life’ as the most adequate translation, see Abel and Cockerham 1993; Ghosh 1994). 3 However, the cultural significance of the West changes within the context of a globalised conception of modernity. The Western type of modernity is then not necessarily seen as a model for modernisation around the world, but rather as one

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choice of dimension(s) and in the conception of time. Weber’s concept primarily pertains to culture on a micro-level, but contains indications of how to understand the relations between the micro- and the macro-level. The concept is rarely used systematically in contemporary social science.4 It will be argued that ‘conduct of life’ has great conceptual potential and that it should be further developed in order to better understand the cultural dimensions of modernity. The choice of conception of time is based on a theory of structural transformation within modernity. Sociological studies, for the most part conducted in the United States and partly inspired by Weber’s concept of ‘conduct of life’, will be used as empirical points of departure. These investigations are not used as means for empirical testing, but rather provide the empirical material for the development of a theory. The ambition here is to work out a consistent theory with heuristic value for further investigations. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, the meaning of structural transformation will be briefly discussed. Secondly, this concept will be related to the concept of modernity in a cultural sense. Third, these concepts will be used in the special case of ‘Lebensführung’, which leads to a preliminary theory of the historical epochs of the modern conduct of life in the West.

Structural transformation In a trivial sense, everything changes constantly; it is impossible to step into the same river twice – ‘panta rei’. In order to make a concept of transformation theoretically interesting, a distinction must be made between ‘changes in the system’ and ‘changes of the system’ (Sztompka 1993:6). The latter can also be called structural transformation and refers to a change of the (symbolic or material) logic of societal reproduction. On that basis a further distinction can be made between longer historical periods, which are mainly characterised by structural consolidation, and shorter and more intense periods of structural transformation. In some sense, structural transformation has always been a crucial subject matter for the social sciences and history. The notion of a groundbreaking transition from tradition to modernity was fundamental particular type among others. The historical fact that modernity in an abstract sense had its genesis in the West does not change that. Further, even when the account of the transformation of modernity is limited to the West, it must be able to include the fact that Western culture itself, due to increased migration, has become more heterogeneous. 4 There is however one research group in Germany that has made ‘alltägliche Lebensführung’ its central concept (Voss 2001).

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for the rise of sociology.5 Historians and social scientists have further divided traditional society into several stages in order to grasp the whole history of mankind.6 Classical stage theories are characterised by some form of evolutionism, that is, history is ruled by a kind of natural law. A historical logic makes stages follow one another more or less necessarily. Usually evolutionism involves the idea that the historical development of human societies is a story of success. Stage theory is normative in the sense that a later stage is always understood as better than the earlier. On the basis of a more or less explicit philosophy of history, social scientists and historians from the West generally implicitly proclaimed their own culture and their own society as the high and end point of historical development, that is, as a model for the rest of the world. Any deviation from this model was seen as a sign of social immaturity. Further, it became almost as impossible to imagine new stages after modernity as it is to imagine new species after mankind in Darwin’s theory of evolution.7 This West-centric conception of social change has characterised both political thinking and social scientific research up to very recently. Let us call this conception ‘old modernisation theory’ (cf. Tiryakian 1991).

The structural transformation of modernity Old modernisation theory implies that structural transformation does not occur anymore once modernity has liberated itself from tradition. It was the postmodern intervention into social science which first shook this long-lasting and deeply rooted persuasion. However, postmodernists never 5

I will use the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ even though classical social scientists used other terms, e.g. ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ (Tönnies), ‘military’ and ‘industrial’ society (Spencer) and ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic solidarity’ (Durkheim). 6 Björn Eriksson argues that social science has its origin in the Scottish Enlightenment (Eriksson 1993). The theoretical core of that school was a stage theory that distinguished between four modes of subsistence: the age of the hunters, the age of the shepherds, the age of agriculture and the age of commerce. 7 Of course, ever since thinkers like Condorcet and Marx, there has been the possibility to understand contemporary society as the second to last stage of modernity or as an ‘unfinished project.’ However, such claims involve neither a refutation of social evolutionism nor of West-centrism. The end and high point of history has only been displaced one step into the future. Not even the cultural criticism of modernity by thinkers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud and Weber radically challenges this evolutionism. It only evaluates modernisation in a negative rather than in an optimistic way.

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managed to offer an alternative theory of social change. Mostly they remained dependent on old modernisation theory in the form of a negation. Postmodernists have generally been reluctant to take the step from deconstruction to construction of social theory. Further, at least the term post-modernity implies more than its advocates can argue for. It implies that the present period of social transition is as radical as the transformation from tradition to modernity. Today, postmodern social theory seems to have exhausted its energies. New theories of modernisation have instead come to the fore (Lee 2006). These theories have learnt from postmodern criticism, but do not entail the claim that we have left modernity behind us. Rather, we are living in ‘another kind of modernity’ (Beck 1986) or – to put the same idea in slightly different words – in a society which is ‘modern in a different way’ (Bauman 2000:27). Contemporary theories of modernity depend on two important theoretical moves: First, modernity in the singular is used in such an abstract sense that a distinction can be made between modernisation and Westernisation, on the one hand, and between modernity in general and different periods of modernity, on the other. Secondly, the idea of structural transformation is neither limited to ‘before modernity’ (old modernisation theory) nor does it involve an ‘after modernity’ (postmodern social theory); instead, it is applied ‘within modernity’ (Beck 1986:13). These theoretical moves lead not only to a theory of multiple modernities, but also – which is the subject of the present chapter – to a theory of successive modernities. Stzompka’s distinction between ‘changes in the system’ and ‘changes of the system’ is too simple in this context. It is not modernity in an abstract sense that is undergoing structural transformation, but rather the concrete realisation of abstract modernity in time and space. These theoretical moves dissolve the conception of an end point of modern history. It also becomes very difficult to judge entire epochs or types of modernity as higher or lower than others. They first and foremost only differ from one another. Furthermore, under these circumstances structural transformation cannot be understood as ruled by some kind of natural law. Rather, the historical transformation of modernity is to be explained by individual actors struggling together and against each other and against unexpected consequences of their actions and of existing institutions. The main reason to work out a theory of the structural transformation within modernity is pragmatic. Social theory should be seen as ‘a tool to understand the world’ (Castells 1997:3). Thus, a sociology of social change, which situates the last structural transformation of society hundreds of years ago and – at best – implies that historical change since

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then has only been a question of realisation, intensification, extension and radicalisation (cf. for instance Giddens 1990), is not satisfactory. Such a theoretical tool does not help us enough to understand the contemporary world; we need finer distinctions.8 This theoretical intention is not new. The talk about epochs within modernity is a terminology borrowed from Ulrich Beck (Beck 1986), who in his book Risk Society already sought an alternative to postmodern social theory. Today he claims that a transformation from first modernity to ‘second modernity’ is taking place and that we have entered a period of ‘modernisation of modern society’ or a period of ‘reflexive modernisation’ – which is another way of expressing the same thing (Beck, Bonß and Lau 2001). Zygmunt Bauman on his part has worked his way through and beyond the concept of post-modernity. His new distinction between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ modernity is a theory about the transformation of modernity (Bauman 2000). Richard Sennett focuses primarily on structural transformation in working life and economics. In general, he seems to be in agreement with Bauman when he distinguishes between ‘social capitalism’ (or ‘paternal capitalism’) and ‘flexible capitalism’ (Sennett 1998; 2006). However, most similar to my own approach is the history of modernity developed by Peter Wagner (Wagner 1994), who has worked out both a concept of modernity in the abstract sense and a theory of different epochs of modernity. Unlike Beck’s, Bauman’s and Sennett’s divisions of the history of modernity into two epochs, Wagner claims that Western modernity has gone through two epochs and is currently entering a third one. I will take his suggestion as a point of departure, but believe it needs to be further developed and also reconstructed in important aspects. So far it might seem arbitrary if we choose two or three epochs of modernity. Why not four or five? The making of historical boundaries is always to some extent dependent on theoretical (or everyday) constructions and human interests. We have to try different concepts of modernisation to see if they help us ‘cope with reality’ better (Carleheden 1999; Rorty 1991). As a sociologist, my interest in history is primarily instrumental. To understand our contemporary world, we need to understand what it is not. Distinctions are the midwives of knowledge. Too few distinctions lift us so far up in the universal sky that we lose sight of the particular conditions 8

Concepts like ‘high modernity’ and ‘late modernity’ are, at least terminologically, mystifying. They imply that modernity will soon be over. However, it is only possible to talk about the late middle ages because we already know that the middle ages came to an end. The use of the term late modernity today implies faith in some form of clairvoyance (Bauman and Yakimova 2002).

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of everyday life. Too many distinctions, on the other hand, leave us with our faces so close to the overwhelming complexity of everyday life that we do not see anything at all. Hence, the epochs of modernity should be understood as ideal types. Consequently, theories of epochs or types of modernity do not neglect the empirical fact of ‘entangled modernities’ (Therborn 2003). To claim that we live in a certain epoch or type does not exclude the influence of other kinds of modernity or of tradition. Such a claim only says that a particular kind of modernity is more or less hegemonic at a certain time and place.

Abstract modernity The pluralisation of modernity in space and time depends on a general concept of modernity in the singular. It is contradictory to speak about different kinds of modern society if they do have nothing uniquely modern in common. If they do not, the distinction to be made is not that between different kinds of modern societies, but that between different kinds of societies. There have to be some family resemblances or family differences. The common features of all types and epochs of modernity can best be elucidated in contrast to tradition. Such a general concept of modernity must be abstract to be able to cover different epochs and types. It is only on the abstract level that a contrast between modernity and tradition is possible. On the level of the ‘empirical history of modernity’ (Therborn 2003:296) – or rather the empirical histories of modernity – the influences of different traditional backgrounds are highly significant. Where exactly should we draw the line between tradition and modernity? Björn Wittrock has clearly spelled out the theoretical conditions for making such a distinction. In a first step he distinguishes between a ‘cultural’ and an ‘institutional’ constitution of modernity. The former involves profound ‘conceptual changes’, that is, ‘new assumptions about human beings, their rights and agency’ (Wittrock 2002:36). A crucial aspect of these revolutionary conceptualisations of the world is, he claims, the ‘generalised reference points’ or ‘promissory notes’ that they contain (Wittrock 2002:38). Wittrock seems to point at a central dimension of social reality here, which many social scientists unfortunately tend to overlook. Habermas calls this dimension ‘idealisation’ (Habermas 1996:1–27), Hartmann and Honneth call it ‘Geltungsüberhang’, that is, ‘normative surplus’ (Hartmann and Honneth 2006:43) and Boltanski and Chiapello are on the same track when they write about the social significance of ‘justificatory regimes’ and ‘ideological configurations’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Such

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concepts elucidate the special role convictions play in social life. They have a great impact on social life even if they never become (fully) realised and converted into facts. Thus, social science cannot reduce social life to facts without distorting it.9 Wittrock claims that only on this ‘cultural’ and ‘conceptual’ level is it possible to distinguish between tradition and modernity in a clear-cut way. Wittrock mentions ‘a democratic nation-state, a liberal market economy, or a research-oriented university’ as candidates of modernity in the institutional sense (Wittrock 2002:36). However, we moderns constantly ask ourselves whether we really live in a democratic state, in a liberal economy or work in a research-oriented university. There are certainly a lot of good arguments that imply we do not. In this way every search for a pure institutional definition tends to end up in Bruno Latour’s assertion that ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour 1993). It is, in the first instance, not institutional facts in themselves, but rather the cultural source of the criticism of modern institutions that constitutes modernity. Modernity should be understood as an ongoing effort to institutionalise modern ‘generalised reference points’ or ‘promissory notes’. Thus, modernity is a never-ending struggle about how modern idealisations should be understood and how they should be institutionalised. In that way, critique becomes an important subject of research for the social sciences (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Wittrock’s approach means that institutions are too concrete to define modernity in general. This does not imply that modernity is first and foremost something cultural, but rather that the common ground of different types and epochs of modernity is to be found on a cultural or conceptual level.10 What characterises this common ground?

9

This is what Habermas means when he talks about ‘die faktische Kraft des Kontrafaktischen,’ that is ‘the very real force of the counterfactual’ (Habermas 1985:242; 1987:206). It does not only concern the normative dimension of social life, but also the cognitive one. Conceptual categorisations profoundly influence the way we act. The role of aesthetic convictions in social life should also be mentioned in this context. 10 This claim can be supported by the following two examples: If we treated an institution like capitalism or the market as something typically modern, then socialist economies would have to be excluded from modernity. If we characterised the institutionalisation of representative democracy as something typically modern, totalitarian regimes would have be excluded. However, the socialist economies and the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were certainly not traditional. On the contrary, it has been shown that some of their traits are

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Agnes Heller recently claimed that modernity has ‘no foundation, since it emerged in and through the destruction and deconstruction of all foundations. In other words, modernity is founded on freedom’ (Heller 2005:63). This definition is a good starting point. It is a variation of what has been claimed at least since Immanuel Kant gave his famous answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Modernity is ‘Mündigkeit’, that is, autonomy (Kant 1995). Habermas expressed the same general idea when he wrote that ‘[m]odernity… has to create its normativity out of itself’ (Habermas, 1987: 7) instead of fetching it from the outside or from above. However, Heller also points to another and darker side of modernity, which has been repeatedly emphasised in social theory. Freedom is a strange form of foundation, she claims: ‘it is a foundation that does not found’ (Heller 2005:64). The other side of freedom is an abyss in which we moderns always are in danger of falling down. Modernity is a void (Bauman 1992:xi–xvii), it is ‘tranzendentale Heimatlosigkeit’ (transcendental homelessness; Georg Lukacs, quoted by Isenberg 1996), it is contingency (Rorty 1989). How then is this apparently paradoxical idea of a foundation that does not found to be understood? Durkheim once claimed that ‘the cult of the individual’ is a crucial trait of modern societies (Durkheim 1974:59), that is, modernisation means ‘the sacralisation of the person’ (Joas 2004). Thus, even in modern times a conviction is to be found, which has the quality of divinity and absolute given-ness. Not all that is solid melts into thin air. This modern cult should be understood as human self-sacralisation in contrast to the cult of Gods in past epochs. The meaning of this cult can be made more specific in connection with the Kantian conception of autonomy. What we moderns worship is the human capability to judge what is true or false, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. Autonomy is a promissory note which modernity in general seems to presuppose.11 If we violate this conviction, we leave ourselves wide-open to modern critique. However, autonomy as foundation is a very abstract form of foundation and thus different from traditional foundations.12 It is precisely this abstract form that opens the typically modern (Bauman 1989) and that they were modern in a non-capitalist and non-democratic way (Therborn 1995; Waters 1999:xviii). 11 Modernity is primarily a cult of human autonomy rather than a cult of individual autonomy. Modernity allows for different degrees of individualism. 12 At least some philosophers of Enlightenment still stood with one foot in tradition when they imagined that reason and science can substitute religion and thus that humans are able to produce absolute truths. However, human judgement in its modern sense is fundamentally fallible and we should therefore perhaps talk about reflexivity rather than about reason in this context (cf. Giddens 1990:36–45).

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door to contingency. On a concrete level, modernity constantly has to reinvent itself in different ways to avoid the abyss. Accordingly, modernity cannot be reduced to freedom. Foucault once wrote that ‘[t]he “Enlightenment” which discovered the liberties also invented the disciplines’ (Foucault 1979:222). The distinction between order or discipline, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other, is not a distinction between tradition and modernity. Rather, order and discipline are necessary consequences of the other side of freedom, that is, of the abyss. Man-made order is the modern way to handle the darker side of freedom (Bauman 1992:xi–xvii). Autonomy as promissory note means order created out of freedom. The Swedish playwright Lars Norén gave one of his earlier plays the title ‘Chaos is God’s Neighbour.’ In modern times it is true that freedom is the neighbour of man-made order. To be modern is the ability to balance on the edge of an abyss. Such a balancing act presupposes some form and degree of discipline. Thus, abstract modernity should be seen as an inescapable tension between freedom and discipline (Wagner 1994). In a modern society, discipline and order can be institutionalised (legitimately) only in the name of freedom. However, freedom – due to its abstract sense – has been interpreted in numerous ways and placed in numerous contexts in the history of modernity, e.g., it has been understood as the freedom of capital, of the citizen, of the people or of the nation.

Epochs of modernity Not even we moderns are able to reinvent our societies and ourselves constantly. That would be an insurmountable task not only for every single person or group, but also for the most powerful state. We have to discipline ourselves and stick to certain rules, at least for a while. We have to compel ourselves to obey the rules that we ourselves have made (which is the literal meaning of autonomy). We have to accept most of our habits and values as self-evidently valid to be able to lead our everyday lives. We have to build institutions, which after a while have a tendency not only to generate what they were supposed to generate more or less independently of each of us, but also – in the terminology of Luhmann – to become more or less autopoietic. Further, social change is always bound to specific times and places as points of departure. Even revolutionaries are shaped by the society they overthrow. Thus, even modern societies have their history of inertness. Marx’s well-known claim that ‘all that is solid melts

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into thin air’ is only partly right. Modernity is also discipline.13 However, had the freedom side constantly been defeated by the disciplinary side, modernity would never have taken place. Now and then, with greater or lesser force and for different reasons, the abyss-like quality of modernity becomes evident. If this ‘return of the repressed’ is powerful and broad enough, an existing manifestation of abstract modernity runs into a crisis, the future opens wide, reflexivity and contingency prevail and we suffer a loss of meaning. That is, of course, a strong incentive for the creation and realisation of new rules and values. Abstract modernity has been realised in different ways. It is on this concrete level that we can talk about epochs of modernity. According to Peter Wagner, in the history of the West two epochs of modernity have so far existed, with a third one presently on the rise. He calls these epochs ‘restricted liberal modernity’, ‘organised modernity’ and ‘extended liberal modernity’ (Wagner 1994). Between the three epochs are two crises of modernity. According to Wagner, contemporary Western societies are currently in the second crisis of modernity rather than in the third epoch. Therefore he has very little to say about the third epoch. However, there have been clear signs of an emerging third epoch for some time now, so it is possible to say much more about it than Wagner has done. Unfortunately, he also tends to fall back to the rather common view of modern social transformation as an oscillation between liberty and discipline, as his choice of names for the three epochs already indicates. In this way, Wagner tends to contradict his own general definition of modernity. A new epoch of modernity is not primarily about the realisation of more or less freedom or more or less discipline. Rather, it is about the realisation of a new combination of freedom and discipline.14

The structural transformation of the modern conduct of life in the West So far two things have been discussed: First, the theoretical conditions for an investigation of the structural history of modern societies and, 13

In modern social theory, this side of modernity has been conceptualised in two different directions. On the one hand, we have what Giddens (1990) calls ‘the separation of time and space’ and ‘the development of disembedding mechanisms,’ that is, the ‘juggernaut’ quality of modernity. On the other hand, we have the concept of power developed by Foucault and his followers. Both directions are relevant here. However, a systematic inclusion of these aspects of discipline cannot be made in this chapter. 14 Cf. my criticism of Wagner in Carleheden (2001).

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secondly, the meaning of modernity in a general and abstract sense. Below, we will see whether these theoretical tools are capable of clarifying a certain aspect of modern history. As mentioned in the introduction, this aspect is the history of the modern conduct of life in the West.15 Conduct of life is a concept that most social scientists have left at the bottom of their conceptual toolboxes. However, the Swedish sociologist Carl-Göran Heidegren recently showed its potential. From his discussions, we can draw the conclusion that conduct of life should actually play a central role in micro-sociological research. Action and interaction are both very general concepts, whereas other important micro-sociological concepts such as narrative and identity are closely tied to the reflexive self-interpretation of the person. Conduct of life, on the other hand, invites us more directly to a certain kind of investigation, which is not only based on the self-experience of persons. Conduct of life is, in contrast to narrative and identity, ‘primarily a form of praxis’ (Heidegren 2006). Of course, this is not to claim that conduct of life could replace these other micro-sociological concepts,16 but rather that the former concept catches a crucial aspect of everyday life which the latter concepts are not designed to grasp, at least not primarily. In fact, conduct of life could probably constitute the conceptual centre of micro-sociology, around which other concepts circle. However, this is not the place to spell out that argument in detail – the application of the concept to the history of modernity that follows will hopefully back up that claim. Conduct of life should be understood as a person’s ongoing effort to ‘actively master and shape his or her life’ (Heidegren 2004:55) ‘in all its aspects’ (Heidegren 2006) and in a specific way. Such a project is guided by a more or less orderly pattern of normative, cognitive and aesthetic convictions. It is a generally conscious and reflexive undertaking, but can also, to a high degree, be based on habits and convictions taken for granted, that is, on routinised outcomes of socialisation processes. Such an effort can never come to a halt because every person must almost constantly struggle with all kinds of circumstances that resist his or her efforts.17 Thus, a person’s observed conduct of life at a specific point in 15 Inglehart’s ‘cultural maps’ show that it is possible to treat ‘the West’ in a cultural sense as a delimited object of research (Inglehart and Welzel 2005:63). 16 The concept of ‘lifestyle’ might be a competing concept. However, as compared to conduct of life, the use of this concept tends to over-emphasise the significance of aesthetics. Lifestyle should be seen only as one aspect of conduct of life. 17 The conventional person has an easier task in this respect than the outsider, but conduct of life must also be understood as an ongoing project in the former case.

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time is always a pragmatic compromise between his or her project and the circumstances. Over time, project and circumstances influence one another to some extent. Individual projects are always situated in a particular cultural and social context, which means that persons have access only to a limited range of normative, cognitive and aesthetic convictions. Persons use this range of convictions in a largely creative way and apply them to their individual situation. Sometimes, but rarely, their creativeness can be revolutionary. However, just because individuals are always already situated in time and space in a fundamental sense (Heidegger 1979), it is possible to talk about a conduct of life in more general terms. There are always – except in times of cultural crisis – hegemonic convictions which constitute a certain period of time and consequently set the limits for individual persons’ conduct of life. I will take Max Weber’s writings about the Protestant ethic as a point of departure to grasp the transformation of the modern conduct of life in this epochal sense. Max Weber included the conduct of life of the person in his general theory of modernity. He did this first and foremost in the context of capitalism and work rather than in the multi-dimensional sense adequate for a theory of modernity, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.18 However, there are many reasons for choosing Weber as a point of departure, the most obvious being that he developed the concept of ‘conduct of life’. Another important reason is that several later studies more or less closely follow in the footsteps of his investigation. These studies will be used to grasp the transformations of conduct of life after Weber’s death. Finally, even if Weber’s specific subject of research was capitalism and work, he certainly did not reduce social life to economy. The reverse is true; he emphasised the importance of culture in economic life. Weber’s claim in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the Protestant ethic was crucial for the genesis of capitalism is one of the best known theses of classical sociology. At the end of the book he states, however, that ‘victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its [religion’s, MC] support no longer’ (Weber 1976:182–3). Weber describes a transition from religious asceticism via worldly asceticism to pure utilitarianism; from value rationality to instrumental rationality; from individualism to the bureaucratic iron cage. However, this is not a theory of the transformation of the modern conduct 18 Elsewhere I have made a preliminary attempt to develop a theory of the structural transformation of modernity in a political sense (Carleheden 2006).

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of life in the sense of the theoretical conditions developed above. As we have seen, a conduct of life depends on values and convictions. The social change described by Weber is rather a dissolution of ethics and thus – in our context – the dissolution of the conduct of life typical of the first epoch of modernity. In this respect, Weber’s sociology is deeply situated in the first crisis of modernity. To grasp the further transformation of the modern conduct of life, we must look for the rise of a new strong ethic able to motivate the actions of a new generation. Modern man, trapped in the first crisis of modernity, ‘needs … something that will do for him what the Protestant ethic did once’ (Whyte 2002:6). Two American Weberians actually observed such a change in the modern conduct of life in two of the most widely discussed books in the US during the 1950s: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and William Whyte’s The Organization Man (cf. Heidegren 2005). Their claims are rather similar. While Riesman talked about a change from an ‘innerdirected’ to an ‘other-directed’ ‘social character’, Whyte saw a change from a Protestant ethic to a ‘social ethic’. The latter, Whyte writes, could just as well be called ‘organisation ethic’ or ‘bureaucratic ethic’ (Whyte 2002:6). Both authors take, rather explicitly, their point of departure in Weber’s idea of a conduct of life based on a Protestant ethic, but add precisely that which Weber hardly could have seen, namely the genesis of a second modern conduct of life. Organisation men were born in the period in which Weber died (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:1). Unfortunately, like Wagner, Riesman and Whyte sometimes understand this social transformation as a shift from freedom to discipline rather than as a new combination of discipline and freedom. Thus, to some extent we have to reconstruct their interpretation of the change they themselves lived through. More than three decades later, Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker traced and interviewed the children of the organisation men Whyte had interviewed. They observed a third kind of ethic and a third kind of social character, that is, a third modern conduct of life (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:232–6). They called the new ethic ‘self ethic’ and the new social character ‘subject-directed.’ If we relate the empirical observations of these three investigations to the theoretical conclusions above, it becomes possible to develop Weber’s original investigation into a theory of the structural transformation of the modern conduct of life in the West. Such an endeavour will support Wagner’s division of the general history of Western modernity into three different epochs.19 However, his theory must 19 This claim can also be supported by Boltanski and Chiapello’s investigation (2005). Likewise, investigations made by Beck, Bauman and Sennett can be used

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be reconstructed and concretised in our specific case. The claim developed below is that three major conducts of life are to be found in the history of Western modernity. They will be named ‘the age of asceticism’, ‘the age of organisation’ (Whyte 2002:12) and ‘the age of authenticity’ (Ferrara 2002). All three ages are composed of particular combinations of discipline and freedom.

The age of asceticism In the economic context in which the above investigations were conducted, the rise of the first epoch of the modern conduct of life was closely connected to the liberation of the market and of capital from tradition, that is, from Gemeinschaft and from feudal political and social power. Central to this context is the liberation of the person as worker and as entrepreneur. The first modern man is especially well-known as an entrepreneur, not least due to Weber’s portrait of Benjamin Franklin in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This man replaced ‘tradition-direction’ with ‘inner-direction’ (Riesman, Glazer and Denney 2001) and could thus be understood as ‘a self-made man’ (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:232–4), that is, as autonomous. The tradition-directed person… hardly thinks of himself as an individual. Still less does it occur to him that he might shape his own destiny in terms of personal, lifelong goals or that the destiny of his children might be separate from that of the family group. He is not sufficiently separated psychologically from himself (or, therefore, sufficiently close to himself), his family, or group to think in these terms. In the phase of transitional growth, however, people of inner-directed character do gain a feeling of control over their lives and see their children also as individuals with careers to make (Riesman, Glazer and Denney 2001:17)

On the other hand, inner-direction is certainly not the same as freedom to do anything that comes to one’s mind. On the contrary, inner-direction involves self-discipline and hard work. The first modern man believes he can reach his long-term goals only through rigid self-control. Thus, he realises his freedom through self-discipline. In this way, the ‘delay of fulfilment becomes a way of life’ (Sennett 2006:31–2). Such delay is the ‘principle of self-discipline’ (Sennett, 2006: 78) and thus the principle of

to some extent, but only when reconstructed according to our theoretical points of departure. Concerning ‘the death of the organisation man’, Bennett (1990) also supplies empirical support.

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discipline in the age of asceticism.20 The rationality of this kind of discipline is that of instrumental reason, that is, means overshadow goals. This ascetic character was based on religious convictions and on the internalisation of a severe parental authority.

The age of organisation Even though Weber did not see the coming age of a second modern conduct of life, his theory of bureaucracy and legality can be understood as the beginning of a theory about the organisation age on a macro level.21 However, to talk about the second epoch of modernity only in terms of an ‘iron cage’ is partly misleading. Weber was wrong in claiming that the transformation of modernity does not need an ethical foundation (Weber 1976:182–3). The age of organisation, like all ages, has its own special form of ethics. Certainly, Leinberger and Tucker agree with Weber when they claim that ‘the success of the Protestant ethic had helped to destroy it’ (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:10, 234–5). The economic success of the ascetic conduct of life led to bigger corporations and thus to an increase in social complexity. Increasingly, other people are the problem, not the material environment (Riesman, Glazer and Denney 2001:18)

The growing need for organisation was solved by what Sennett calls a ‘militarisation of society’ (Sennett 2006:33), that is, a bureaucratisation of both economy and politics. The growth of formal, hierarchical and pyramid-like organisations divided into offices with fixed functions

20

Sennett occasionally indicates an epochal division of modernity into three parts. However, when he does that he reduces the first epoch to an anarchic state followed by the second epoch of ‘social capitalism’ (Sennett 2006:19). Consequently, he relates Weber’s writings about an ascetic conduct of life to the second epoch rather than to the first and postpones ‘the erosion of the Protestant ethic’ to the 1970s (Sennett 2006:31–2, 77–9). In that way he cannot distinguish between the conduct of life of an entrepreneur such as Benjamin Franklin and the conduct of life inside the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy. Thus, Sennett (like Beck and Bauman) neglects the important distinctions made by Riesman and Whyte. 21 One might even argue that the concept of ‘Legalitätsglaube’ (faith in legality), which Weber developed later in a different context (Weber 1972), could be used to understand the ethic of the second epoch. However, such a faith is hardly enough to lead a life.

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radically changed modern society.22 These organisations required, on the one hand, administrators rather than entrepreneurs and, on the other, increasing consumption and a generally high standard of living rather than thrift to find enough demand for the ever increasing supply of products.23 Asceticism could not survive as a dominating ethical principle under these new structural conditions. The bureaucratised maintenance of rules replaced self-discipline as the typical control mechanism. At the same time, work and leisure became separated in a much stricter sense than in the case of both the first and the third epoch. Bureaucratic work presupposes objectivity, impersonality, a rigid maintenance of rules and long-term planning, whereas leisure time requires the opposite.24 This bureaucratic conduct of life is particularly outmoded today, as things often are when they have recently become obsolete. Thus, it is easy to see the disciplinary side of the second modern conduct of life, but harder to disclose what kind of freedom is at stake here. The disciplinary side becomes especially apparent when we go from Whyte’s white-collar worker to the blue-collar worker. The factory is probably the most obvious example of what Foucault and Bauman understand as the panoptical character of modern society (Bauman 1988; Foucault 1979). This second epoch of modernity is the age of ‘Taylorism’ and ‘Fordism’. There is hardly any need to go deeper into this disciplinary side. Today, it has almost come to reflect the mainstream picture of modernity within sociology.25 It is more important to underline that the conception of modernity as Panopticon writ large, just as the Iron Cage metaphor, 22

Giddens’ (1990) theory of the separation of time and space (and of space and place) and of the significance of disembedding mechanisms can be used to further explicate the bureaucratisation of society. However, his lack of a theory of different epochs of modern society means that it has to be reconstructed to fit the intentions of this chapter. 23 The significance of the latter should not be forgotten. Riesman even talks about ‘a shift from an age of production to an age of consumption’ (Riesman, Glazer, and Denney 2001:6). Cf. also Daniel Bell, who claims that American culture in the 1950s had already become ‘primarily hedonistic’ (Bell 1996:70). However, hedonism is rooted in desires, and desires are too fragmentary and contingent to enable a person to conduct his or her life. A conduct of life presupposes ‘secondorder desires’ rather than ‘first-order desires’ (Frankfurt 1988) or ‘strong’ rather than ‘weak evaluations’ (cf. Carleheden 1996:217–39; Taylor 1985:15–44). 24 The organisation man was of course typically male. Parsons’ theory of the family and his distinction between an instrumentally orientated breadwinner and an expressively orientated homemaker should be situated in this second epoch. 25 For a further account of the disciplinary side of the second epoch of modernity, see Wagner (1994:89–103).

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neglects what the theory of the Organisation Man and of the other-directed social character brings to light, that is, the genesis of a new kind of modern ethic. Instead of emphasising a general diminishing of freedom in the sense of inner-direction, we should focus on the changing character of freedom. Whyte tries to grasp what characterises the organisation ethic, even though he almost seems to feel disgust for the second epoch Its major propositions are three: a belief in the group as the source of creativity; a belief in ‘belongingness’ as the ultimate need of the individual, and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness’ (Whyte 2002:7)

Belongingness forms the centre of Whyte’s definition. The organisation ethic is an ethic of belongingness. Organisation men see no conflict between the individual and society. On the contrary, they are convinced that their autonomy depends on the relationship between the two. They not only view themselves as dependent on social units, such as corporations and nation states, but also understand such social units as being dependent on their loyalty. In the extreme case, they are even willing to sacrifice their lives for the survival of the social unit. This is another typical sign of the militarisation of modern society (Sennett 2006:64). Loyalty (or solidarity) rather than duty distinguishes this new kind of modern ethic. Amanda Bennett describes ‘corporate loyalty’ as ‘the hallmark of the Organization Man’ (Bennett 1990:16). This new ethic does not involve a step back towards a Gemeinschaft, because autonomy is just as important a trait of this epoch as of the first epoch. Rather, autonomy has been realised in a new way. The individual becomes free only by belonging to a group. This ethic of belongingness and loyalty plays a crucial role for the genesis and the legitimacy of the most significant institutions of the second epoch: expanded citizenship, the mass party, representative democracy, the trade union and the welfare state. However, we should not forget that belongingness and loyalty accompanied by a hierarchical type of organisation often had elitist or paternalistic consequences.26

26

Whereas authors such as Wagner have had difficulties explicating what kind of freedom is typical of the second epoch, Hartman and Honneth (2006) almost glorify this epoch – which they call ‘the social-democratic era’ – and seem to forget its disciplinary side.

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The age of authenticity Just as the success of the Protestant ethic eventually transformed social structures in a way that turned the Weberian entrepreneur into a rare species of modernity, the success of the bureaucratic ethic and of big corporations eventually rendered the conduct of life of the organisation man obsolete.27 In light of the often harsh and insecure material conditions of the first epoch, the safe haven of the big organisation was attractive to the entrepreneur’s children (Bennett 1990: 21). The next generation, however, found this haven suffocating. While certainly the first but also the second epoch of the modern conduct of life were highly materialist in general orientation, the children of the organisation men could take a high standard of living for granted to a historically unprecedented degree. Their conduct of life became primarily guided by post-materialist values. Ronald Inglehart claims that this transformation of ethics can be understood almost as a social law: … socio-economic development tends to transform people’s basic values and beliefs – and it does so in a roughly predictable fashion… [A]s the work force shifts from the agrarian sector to the industrial sector, people’s worldviews tend to shift from an emphasis on traditional values to an emphasis on secular-rational values. Subsequently, as the work force shifts from the industrial sector to the service sector, a second major shift in values occurs, from emphasis on survival values to emphasis on selfexpression (Inglehart and Welzel 2005:5–6)

The investigations done by Inglehart and his colleagues can, to some extent, be used to explain the genesis of a third epoch of modern conduct of life, that is, of an epoch in which self-expression, rather than delay of fulfilment or belonging and loyalty, becomes a crucial guiding principle for the realisation of abstract modernity. However, in the quotation above, Inglehart seems to advocate some kind of economic determinism (see, however Inglehart 1997:216–36). Such an account must be complemented by a cultural explanation. Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2002; 2005) ‘sociology of critique’ has done that in a promising way. They distinguish between a ‘social critique’ and an ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism, both of which, albeit in different ways, have influenced the development of 27 However, at this point we should remember that structural transformation does not mean that a new epoch starts form scratch. A new epoch should always be understood in the light of the preceding one. In our context, that can mean that certain conducts tend to disappear or simply lose their exemplary status. It can also mean that conducts assume a different meaning within a new context.

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modern societies. Both forms of critique take their point of departure in the cultural source of modernity. The former is primarily directed against poverty and exploitation, which involves taking a stand for equality, redistribution of material resources and solidarity. The labour movement has played a most important role in changing societies in accordance with this kind of critique. Artistic critique, on the other hand, is directed against oppression, reification and standardisation, and primarily involves taking a stand for authenticity. There is no doubt that these forms of critique in different combinations have played important roles throughout the history of modernity, but artistic critique assumed a more significant role in the transition to the third epoch of the modern conduct of life in the West. From the standpoint of social critique alone, the presently ongoing transition only looks like a neo-liberal revolution. It has led to a crisis of both representative democracy and the welfare state and thus to a general increase in social inequality. However, if we only were to take the perspective of social critique, we would make a mistake similar to Weber’s. Thus, we would interpret and judge the coming of a new age against the ethical standards of a previous age. The second crisis of modernity does not lead to a ‘corrosion of character’ in some universal sense, which Sennett (1998; 2006) seems to imply. It leads to the corrosion of a particular social character, which is followed by the genesis of another.28 Boltanski and Chiapello’s account of this transformation shows that we cannot understand it from the perspective of social critique alone. Their general thesis is that radical versions of both forms of critique were influential during the ‘1968 crisis,’ that is, at the beginning of the second crisis of modernity. However, capitalism eventually managed to neutralise radical social critique by incorporating artistic critique into its own system. This incorporation saved capitalism, but in doing so it also changed it dramatically. Leinberger and Tucker’s investigation supports this explication of the transformation. Leinberger and Tucker (1991:15) report that ‘nearly all the organisation offspring we interviewed harbour artistic aspirations.’ Of course, very few of them actually realise these ambitions, yet they influence their conduct of life in all aspects. Marginalised conducts of life of earlier epochs – those of the dandy and the beatnik – suddenly became exemplary models. ‘[E]verybody should choose to be different in exactly the same way: by laying claim to the originality and the individuality of the artist’ (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:267). Suddenly most of us want 28 In many respects, Sennett is the Weber of our time. He transfers the logic of Weber’s line of arguments from the first crisis to the second crisis of modernity.

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our life to be ‘as literature’ (Rorty 1989:27). Our greatest horror is finding ourselves ‘to be only a copy or replica’ (Rorty, 1989: 24, quoting Harold Bloom). Such ‘self-directed’ men and women are not interested in selfcontrol, but in finding and expressing their own self. Material wealth might be a part of it, but only secondarily as a means facilitating selfexpression. They will certainly not become simple cogs in a machine-like organisation. Rather they suffer from ‘a loss of community’ (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:15). Their conduct of life has creativity rather than productivity or loyalty as its core value, and the object of this creativity is their fragile and elusive identity. This conduct of life should not be understood as some kind of hedonism. Leinberger and Tucker (1991:12) emphasise that ‘the self ethic, like the social ethic it displaced, was based on a genuine moral imperative – the duty to express the authentic self’. In an age of authenticity freedom is understood as the freedom to cultivate individual or collective identities. The romantic idea of an expressive self, which in early modernity was only known to a very small cultural elite (Taylor 1989), becomes the crucial part of a dominating form of ethics. This cultural transformation deeply influences both politics and economics. The present age is the age of identity politics rather than the age of redistribution (Fraser and Honneth 2003:16). The struggle for recognition of repressed cultural and sexual identities has become an issue on the daily political agenda.29 Contemporary economic life rewards personality and emotionality rather than objectivity and instrumentality. It rewards flexibility or ‘tolerance for fragmentation’ (Sennett 1998: 62), independence and networking rather than ‘one-company-for-life philosophy’ (Bennett, 1990: 20), rigidity, loyalty and belonging. It rewards creativity, imagination and vision making rather than order, longterm planning and rationality. It rewards flat organisations and making self-realisation a part of work, rather than hierarchical organisations and a strict division of work and leisure time (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Leinberger and Tucker 1991; Sennett 1998). In this context, Boltanski and Chiapello (2002:21) talk about an ‘irresistible societal trend – which is that people not only do not want to take orders anymore, they do not even want to give them.’ Under these new circumstances a successful leader is a person who can lead on the basis of visions rather than on the basis of commands. The manager has to be a ‘catalyst’ and a ‘coach’ rather than a boss (Boltanski and Chiapello 2002:23). In that way, the ethics of

29 Thus, in becoming an age of authenticity, Western culture also gains the potential to become multicultural.

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authenticity can be used to motivate employees to work hard (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:398–401, 408–12). So far we have mostly focused on the freedom side of this third conduct of life. However, this age also has a disciplinary side. The decreasing influence of social critique and thus increasing social inequality is a part of it. Inequality in this age should be understood primarily in terms of material resources for self-realisation. However, authenticity in itself is also a kind of discipline. It has become not only a duty, but also an ‘institutional demand’ (Honneth 2004:472). It is especially obvious in some of the most innovative parts of contemporary working life, where self-realisation has become a crucial component. Authenticity tends to become instrumentalised as a means for making profit. The conception of authenticity also plays a central role in the advertising industry and thus increasingly characterises the consumerism of contemporary Western societies.30 Axel Honneth argues that the permanent compulsion to draw the material for an authentic selfrealisation from their own inner lives … must sooner or later leave them empty. …It may well be the case that with the ideal of self-realisation’s inversion into an external compulsion we have reached the historical threshold where the awareness of this inner emptiness has become the experience of a growing proportion of the population (Honneth 2004:475)

Leinberger and Tucker’s study shows that this development is not a question of the future, but has for decades been an empirical reality. To conceptualise their finding, they return to Riesman who related different types of emotional sanctions to his conception of different social characters. Whereas sanctions of action in the case of the inner-direction might lead to feelings of guilt, it leads to feelings of anxiety in the case of outer-direction. A sanction of subject-direction, however, most typically involves ‘mourning’ (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:362–6). The age of authenticity is a ‘loss culture.’ The authentic self can only exist in the form of ‘presence in absence.’ This conceptualisation might explain why depression has suddenly become one of the most common psychological problems in the contemporary Western world (Petersen 2005). However, and not surprisingly, the closer Leinberger and Tucker’s investigation comes to their own time, the more unsystematic and contradictory it becomes. They restrict the third conduct of life to a highly 30

This third epoch is also an ‘age of consumption’, but has become postmaterialist rather than materialist in orientation. Consumption is an important part of the self-realising process.

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individualist and essentialist version (Leinberger and Tucker 1991:407), leading them to speculate about the coming of a fourth epoch at the end of the book. However, there is no need to presume an ahistorical and given core of the self, hidden deep inside the soul of the person, to give sense to a conception of authenticity and self-realisation. An authentic self might also be understood as something historical, socially dependent and fluid, that is, as a self-constructing narrative. The age of authenticity, like every age, provides space for different versions of a dominating ethic. These versions have subject-direction in common and represent forms of a selfethic. Accordingly, mourning over an elusive self is not necessarily the fate of the subject-directed man, but rather the emotional risk typical of the third modern conduct of life in the West.

Conclusion This chapter had two objectives: to develop and apply a general theory of structural transformation within modernity, and to use the concept of ‘conduct of life’ to apply the general theory and to show the significance of that concept for the understanding of a specific aspect of the history of modern societies. The tentative conclusion is that such an application of the general theory both strengthens that theory and deepens our understanding of the history of modernity. It leads to a division of the modern conduct of life in the West into three ages: an age of asceticism guided by the ethical principle of delay of fulfilment; an organisation age guided by the principle of belongingness and loyalty; and an age of authenticity guided by the principle of self-realisation. Of course, a theory of this kind requires an empirical investigation on its own terms. It cannot rely on secondary data, which are dependent, at least partly, on different theoretical points of departure. So far the theory developed in this chapter can only have heuristic value. It indicates, however, that neither a general concept of modernity nor commonly used divisions of modernity – e.g. modernity and post-modernity, early and late, first and second, solid and liquid, industrialism and post-industrialism – can do justice to the modern history of Western societies. Without a complex theory of structural transformation, social science is in danger of using what Ulrich Beck has called ‘zombie categories’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002:202–13), that is, categories suitable for past epochs to understand the contemporary age.

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—. 2005: “Social Characterology: From the Protestant Ethic, via the Social Ethic to the Hacker Ethic,” Distinktion 11: 87–95. —. 2006: Livsföringsforskning. Unpublished manuscript. Heller, Agnes, 2005: “The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern Imagination,” Thesis Eleven 81: 63–79. Honneth, Axel, 2004: “Organized Self-Realization,” European Journal of Social Theory 7: 463–78. Inglehart, Ronald, 1997: Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, Ronald, and Christian Welzel 2005: Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Isenberg, Bo, 1996: “Det moderna som kontingenskultur,” Res Publica 32/33: 153–80. Joas, Hans, 2004: The Origin of Human Rights. Unpublished manuscript. Kalberg, Stephen, 1996: “On the Neglect of Weber’s Protestant Ethic as a Theoretical Treatise,” Sociological Theory 14: 49–70. Kant, Immanuel, 1995: “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung,” pp.162–70 in: Rolf Toman (ed.) Der Streit der Facultäten. Köln: Könemann. Latour, Bruno, 1993: We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lee, Raymond L.M., 2006: “Reinventing Modernity: Reflexive Modernization vs Liquid Modernity vs Multiple Modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory 9: 355–68. Leinberger, Paul, and Bruce Tucker 1991: The New Individualists: The Generation After the Organization Man. New York: HarperCollins. Petersen, Anders, 2005: “Depression – selvets utilstrækkelighedspatologi,” pp. 61–78 in Marie Østergaard and Rasmus Willig (eds.) Sociale patologier: anoreksi, sjælesorg, præstationsangst, panikangst, voldtægt. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney 2001: The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (abridged and rev. ed.) New Haven: Yale Nota Bene. Rorty, Richard, 1989: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991: Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sachsenmaier, Dominic, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Jens Riedel 2002: Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations. Leiden: Brill. Sennett, Richard, 1998: The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton. —. 2006: The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Swedberg, Richard, and Ola Agevall 2005: The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Social Sciences. Sztompka, Piotr, 1993: The Sociology of Social Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, Charles, 1985: Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1989: Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Therborn, Göran, 1995: European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000. London: Sage. —. 2003: “Entangled Modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory 6: 293–305. Tiryakian, Edward A., 1991: “Modernisation: Exhumetur in Pace,” International Sociology 6: 165–80. Wagner, Peter, 1994: A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline London: Routledge. Waters, Malcolm (ed.), 1999: Modernity: Critical Concepts. London: Routledge. Weber, Max, 1972: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (5th rev. ed.). Tübingen: Mohr. —. 1976: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (new ed.). New York: Allen & Unwin. Venn, Couze, and Mike Featherstone 2006: “Modernity,” Theory, Culture & Society 23: 457–76. Whyte, William H., 2002: The Organization Man. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wittrock, Björn, 2002: “Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,” pp. 31–60 in: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.) Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. Voss, Günter (ed), 2001: Tagaus, tagein. Neue Beiträge zur Soziologie Alltäglicher Lebensführung, vol. 1. Mering: Hampp.

CHAPTER FIVE THE MESHING OF CIVILISATIONS: SOFT POWER AND THE RENEWAL OF THE CIVILISATION OF MODERNITY EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

Revised version of a paper presented at the First World Life-Culture Forum 2003, Gyeonggi, Republic of Korea, December 18-21, 2003. ‘If mankind does not destroy itself in the next few decades, the disintegration of sensate culture will be completed and a creative reintegration will emerge. In this way the crisis of our age will be ended, and a new creative era will open up in the life of humanity.’ —P.A. Sorokin, S.O.S. The Meaning of Our Crisis (1951:142)

Prologue The story is told of two salesmen, one Korean and one American, who work for major semi-conductor companies and who meet in the waiting lounge at Hong Kong International Airport. The Korean is heading for San Francisco, the American for Seoul. Mr. Kim asks the American, ‘Tell me, how do you prepare for your important business trip to Korea?’ With a pleased smile, Mr. Jones replies, ‘I do a thorough background internet search on the Korean semiconductor industry, go to the library of a nearby business school to see if there are special reports on the relevant chaebol, contact the US Department of Commerce and get all the statistical data and market trends they can provide, and you see what I have been studying for several months?’ Mr. Jones pulls out of his suitcase a heavy stack of publications, charts, tables, then with a pleased smile, he asks Mr. Kim, ‘and you, how have you prepared for your trip to my country?’

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‘Oh,’ says Mr. Kim, ‘I take just one reference book’, and reaching in his small attaché case, he pulls out… the Bible. ‘I am told,’ he says with a grin, ‘that this book is the key to unlocking the American mentality.’ I mention this somewhat apocryphal anecdote as a gentle illustration of cultural differences in approaching ‘the other’, and several inferences about assumptions we make from unstated cultural premises can be drawn. So, for example, Mr. Kim might well have prepared for his American trip in agreement with Max Weber’s rather surprised observation when he visited the United States 100 years ago about the religious vitality of a new industrial giant where membership in a religious community was a practical necessity for general social credit of worthiness (Weber 1946). But Weber, less than Kim, might not have been surprised that religion, however deeply rooted in American culture, including its foundation myth of John Winthrop’s ‘A City Unto the Hill’, is an acutely contested area in the public sphere, so much so that in November 2003, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was removed from office by a state disciplinary court, not for attacking religion, but for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building. Needless to say, the Ten Commandments have been seen without question as a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian morality, and moralism is a salient American cultural characteristic, at the domestic as well as the foreign policy level. If Mr. Kim, after his trip to the United States, would go on to Europe, he might well think in seeing the plethora of churches that this is an important, integral structure, however ‘Western Civilisation’ is expressed. Yet, the place of religion in the Constitution of the new Europe, of the enlarged European Union, has been equally bitterly contested to the extent that reference to ‘God’ was dropped in the revised draft Constitution, in part from opposition of countries like Spain and France which have an historical image of being ‘Catholic’. 1 What is agitating ‘secular’ or ‘secularising’ Europe even more is the growing presence of Islam and Muslim minorities in major European urban areas, urban areas where Christianity is vestigial or receding (Davie 2000). Lastly, while travelling in the United States and Europe, our visitor from East Asia would likely encounter ‘culture wars’ raging at different levels over public issues of multiculturalism, pornography, gay rights, school vouchers, political correctness, and related matters. From all this, he might conclude that, indeed, the cultural sphere is significant in the 1

The negative vote of France and the Netherlands in 2005 regarding the Constitution of Europe was not because of any religious consideration.

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‘West’ but that it is, if anything, much more divisive and less structured than in East Asia. That, of course, is just an initial approximation, and I only intend to use this as a springboard for this chapter as a contribution to the wide ranging literature on modernity. The vignette above is meant to point to the following: in the modern sphere of globalisation, enhanced by technology and its global infrastructure providing an enlarged work sphere (also compressed in time and space), individuals from very different national or geographical bases share a common work habitat (which might be subsumed in the modernisation literature stressing convergence). Yet, the psychological motivation and cultural underpinning in terms of which individuals relate to one another and experience the world is also embedded in deep cultural patterns, which may remain implicit in the interaction process and limit our understanding of ‘the other’. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of some classical figures of sociology, and in response to some contemporary stimuli that have global import, this chapter will seek to broaden the discourse of modernity

I. Introduction It is an important challenge that brings us together, the challenge of understanding the crisis of modernity of our times in cultural terms, of understanding both how culture is a precipitant of the crisis and how culture is an avenue (or perhaps a set of roads) out of the crisis. At the onset, we might note the following basic points: (1) ‘Modernity’ is an ambiguous, multivalent characterisation of the human condition, indicating structural and ideological transformations of the social setting. Although there is no consensus as to its referent, an adequate specification would have to include both inter-subjective aspects and objective ones. In terms of the commonly accepted historical process, ‘modernity’ might be used to designate the inter-subjective and objective, structural features, past, present, and anticipated future conditions which have heightened the reflexivity of actors in the past two hundred years. The course of modernity is not fixed or determined, for collective decisions of various orders of collectivity do influence the direction, towards or away from some desired states. (2) The ‘crisis’ of modernity has different meanings and different interpretations as to what conditions produce it and what changing conditions can remedy it. Modernity may, in fact, lose its heuristic significance without a notion of ‘crisis’ attached to it.

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The citation from P.A. Sorokin at the head of this chapter is indicative that the notion of ‘crisis’ is deeply rooted in Western social thought, with periodic attempts at diagnosis. Sorokin’s discussion 50 years ago is a continuation of a diagnosis of the moral crisis of modern society, which received an early and classical treatment in Emile Durkheim’s analysis of anomie, a state of normative disarray marked by multiple sets of values and rules of conduct providing no anchorage for right conduct. Sorokin in the 1930s had already brought attention to the corrosion of the sensate culture that had given modern civilisation its major institutional anchorage and thrust, but in the 20th century had degenerated into mere materialism and hedonism, which made for a propitious climate for violence, wars, and political tyranny. His 1951 ‘update’ viewed the global setting as still one of crisis, characterised by eclectic attempts in different fields of human creativity to bring together sensate, idealistic and ideational forms. These attempts, he felt, fell short of a new cultural integration; if sensate culture still has dominance, there are signs of a creative minority looking for alternatives, but a ‘creative reintegration of culture’ (1951:140) is still in the offing, not in the present. Given this line of analysis, were Sorokin to update his diagnosis yet again, he would find the contemporary scene, particularly in the West, to still be sliding down the sensate slope, for example, in the increasing and widening display of crude sexuality in public forums, television, and the internet, whose largest industry may be pornography of all sorts. (3) There are other areas where a ‘crisis of modernity’ has a significant literature. One is the political sphere, where at the level of international relations we speak of a portentous imminent conflict between major adversaries arising from disputed territory or possession of resources. The ‘Cold War’ between the United States and the Communist world a generation ago had a number of ‘crises’ (e.g., the Berlin airlift crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, etc.), where the stakes were very high given the nuclear capabilities of mutual and global destruction. In the present decade, the most imminent political crises appear to be the violent confrontations between the United States and its (at times faltering) Western allies and Islamic jihadists with practically the entire Middle East as a theatre of war. For a Western audience, the war against terrorism, led by Al Qaeda, is seen as an attempt to do away with modernity and return to barbarism. In broader terms, the war is viewed as savage resistance to bringing modernity to authoritarian regimes that have oppressed ethnic minorities and their own women. From the perspective of militant Islam, such as Al Qaeda architect Osama bin

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Laden, the war with the West and its satrap Arabic allies is a just war against Western colonialism in the Middle East seeking to exploit its natural resources. At the domestic level of the political dimension, the United States has also seen an ongoing staging of conflicting perspectives on modernity by the ‘left’ and the ‘right’, for example over the teaching of evolution in public schools, federal funding for stem-cell research, and the display of traditional Judeo-Christian symbols in public places. In the United States and in many other Western countries, the influx of large numbers of immigrants from outside the traditional cultural region of the host country has produced sharply conflicting views of modernity, with nativistic reactions seeking to limit, curb, and repel ‘the other’ who are viewed as undermining the traditional cultural values of the host society; and advocates for advancing the rights of immigrants and their children (e.g., Soysal 1994), on the other hand, who see extending the inclusion of citizenship as a feature of the modernity announced by the Enlightenment. While most of the public attention in the Western media is devoted to instances of political crises of modernity in the West, the clash between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ has several other settings; for example, today, in Turkey, between secular Kemalists and Islamic clericals who would like to see Turkey adopt the Sharia rule, or in India between the secularists in the multicultural tradition of Nehru and those who see Indian national identity as expressed in Hinduism. A second sphere is the epistemological, where standards of evaluating the adequacy of knowledge either contradict one another or are not in place to make sense of new data, reflecting the absence of an integrative scientific theory. This appeared to be the case for sociology a generation ago after the structural-functional paradigm of the post-WWII decades came under multiple attack from competitors (Eisenstadt and Curelaru 1976). A sort of epistemological truce seems to have settled in, with the objectivist, positivistic model seeking to assert that the way to the truth of social reality lies in quantitative, statistically reliable data. This has long been contested with the inter-subjective, interpretive epistemology that sees the truth of social reality as lying in the more covert aspects of social interaction and the meanings that actors attach to and produce in such interaction. Yet another epistemological orientation that has affinity with the inter-subjective critique is, broadly speaking, the critical approach to truth, which views the public depiction of truth – including mainstream social and sociological truth – as masking underlying structures and flows of power. That post-structural perspective which was brilliantly developed by Michel Foucault has an important source in Nietzsche, and has had a

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significant impact in various areas of historical and humanistic social sciences (Cohen 2006). A radical extension of the post-structural critique is that of postmodernism, which flourished in the 1980s and 1990s (Dickens and Fontana 1994). Taking ‘modernity’ to stand for the social order and its values, which carry out the rational, industrial, Western-centric premises and actualisation of Enlightenment, the post-modern paradigm took more of its inspiration from Nietzsche’s nihilism. It denies an evolutionary, teleological aspect of history and historical progress. There is no centre, no terminus ad quo, no ‘grand historical narrative’, Christian or secular. There are only multiple perspectives. A third is an environmental crisis, with different perspectives on what aspects of the environment of a society, nation-state, or civilisation is threatening the stability and survival of the entity in question. For those growing up after World War II, the capabilities of the USSR and the USA to launch a thermonuclear war that might well destroy life as we have known it has been an enduring crisis, heightened with technological advances making the destruction one that could reach anywhere, anytime. Yet another sort of environmental crisis, one that seemed to fascinate the West particularly, was the crisis of population explosion in the 1960s and 1970s – with most of the explosion coming from high birth rates and falling death rates in the Third World. This, it may be pointed out, is a variation of the crisis felt in many Western circles of being swamped by cultural aliens, such as expressed by many today in the United States regarding the Hispanic immigrant population, or in Western Europe by the crisis of Islamic immigrants. Yet another definition of the environmental crisis is that of the rapid and differential spread of AIDS, which has been a major (but not the only) factor in giving Africa negative economic growth rates in the past two decades or so. These manifestations of the environmental crisis give weight to the crisis bearing directly on the human environment. Not to be forgotten is that the environment of the human condition in its material form is the world of nature and of life related (by our common genetic materials) to our social world but also having a separate existence. Yet, through individual and collective actions, humans intrude on the biophysical environment. That, of course, has always been the case. But what has not always been the case is that advanced modernity and its economic engines of mass consumption and mass technological adaptations have rendered increasingly fragile the boundaries of the ecosystem, in the air, on earth, and in the waters. The pollution of the atmosphere, the pollution of sea life with mercury deposits and the commercial fishing which depletes species,

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and the emission of toxic wastes of carbon, which have had a perceptible ‘global warming effect’2 – all these are a manifestation of a single global ecological crisis which threatens the quality of life today and increasingly tomorrow. This has been dramatically documented and demonstrated by former American Vice-President Al Gore in his An Inconvenient Truth (2006). To borrow from the seminal discussion of Ulrich Beck (1992), we may propose that the greater the advances of modernity in technology and globalisation, the greater the risks of disasters (with Chernobyl in 1986 as a harbinger). All the above dimensions of crisis are fruitful for a critical examination of what is involved in discussing modernity concretely rather than in the abstract. I will opt to concentrate on one dimension only, the political crisis with economic and cultural underpinnings between ‘the West and the rest’. Rather than a zero-sum contest that seems like a sure recipe for unending war, I will opt for a new and hopefully more constructive alternative.

II. The Huntington Cultural Paradigm One of the most trenchant, controversial contemporary analyses of the post- Cold War era is Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis (Huntington 1996). It has sparked a great deal of attention and notoriety in its basic presupposition of there being civilisational ‘fault lines’ that modernity cannot bridge: Emerging inter-civilizational relations will normally vary from distant to violent, with most falling somewhere in between (1996:206)

Worse, the contemporary, post-1989 world is viewed as ordered by a set of civilisations competing in a zero-sum game for the resources of modernity, and the major competing actors are ‘the West’, ‘Islam’ and ‘East Asia’, with China as the core of the last-named. Global cultural contradictions are, for Huntington, intrinsic to the world order where civilisations replace nation-states as key actors, and the zero-sum aspect has a potential for global inter-civilisational war with a shift in the balance of power among civilisations and their core states. Huntington does not 2

Thus, Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya will in another hundred years have no snow left, with serious consequences for life below it depending upon it for water supply, and this is being repeated in countless places with glaciers and high mountain ranges, such as the Alps and the Himalayas (http://worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/glaciers.html).

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hide his concern: it is with the ‘emergence of China as the dominant power in East and Southeast Asia [which] would be contrary to American interests as they have been historically construed’ (1996:312).3 What is disconcerting, if one reads between the lines, is an image of East Asia across the Pacific as ‘the other’, constituting a ‘yellow peril’ for America. It is an old image, which is akin to what Delanty has taken to be at the core of European identity, the image of the ‘other’, chiefly Turkey and Islam (Delanty 1995). At the beginning of the 20th century, the ‘peril’ was a demographic one – the fear of America being overrun with swarms of Japanese and Chinese immigrants, which led after World War I to severe immigration restrictions. At the beginning of the 21st century, the peril is an economic one: of East Asia becoming the global colossus of both consumption and production. Huntington’s thesis has its own fault-lines, and there are a few in particular worth mentioning. First, I do not see a justification for viewing East Asia/China and the West/United States as having irrevocable cultural differences, structurally and historically. Confucian values emphasis on the (extended) family, on virtue, seniority and hierarchy are differences of degree and not of kind with more pronounced American values of individualism, egalitarianism, and civic participation. But they are not absent from the American scene, if one knows where to look for them, and the socio-economic success of East Asian immigrants in America – Chinese, Korea, Vietnamese – coming from a ‘Confucian’ milieu and adapting readily to the educational and economic resources of the United States testifies to the absence of cultural barriers in achieving goals shared by the wider society. I will, in a later section, argue that a fruitful, even symbiotic interaction of ‘East’ and ‘West’ is underway and more likely to be an emergent trend of an advanced civilisation of modernity than is a separation and conflict between them. The second fault-line is that Huntington, although aware of global immigration, operates in a somewhat outdated view of civilisations being located in a single geographical area. Even if we retrace the historical process, population movements always involved the transplanting of cultural elements from their point of origin to geographically more remote areas. Christian civilisation, Islamic civilisation, Buddhist civilisation, 3

Huntington in that concern anticipates what in recent months has been expressed with alarm, with global financial pressures (from the United States and others in the West) pointing a finger at China’s growing trade surplus and its very strong currency. It seems like an echo of about ten years ago when the Pacific specter was Japan, rather than China. At the same time, American investments in China, from Starbucks and Wal-Mart to sophisticated hedge funds keep on multiplying.

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Confucian civilisation, and so on were not contained long in their point of origin. In our global age, diaspora communities are changing the cultural scene of ‘global cities’ and their domestic and international networks (Sassen 2001, 2002), and this is accentuated by internet communities, the global tourist industry, and international immigration from labourextensive countries to labour-short, capital intensive countries. Yesterday’s geographical divides are less and less civilisation specific. This is a concomitant of the socio-economic aspect of globalisation. Beyond this is what Pieterse has recently discussed in terms of the ‘hybridisation perspective’ in the reorganisation of social spaces, a perspective within a globalisation view that ‘is meaningful as a counterweight to introverted notions of culture’ and which applied to metropolitan cultures provides the basis for a ‘counter-history to the narrative of imperial history’ (Pieterse 2003:82).4 Further, one can invoke a demographic imperative: the Western nationstates must remain reciprocally porous to carriers of non-Western civilisation because of marked declining birth rates, with an expected decline from the present level of 728 millions to 538 millions by century’s end. Thirty years ago, this would have been cause for rejoicing, but today the recently published OECD report sees the falling birth rates as having dismal, even ‘apocalyptic’ consequences for economic growth and even political integration (Financial Times, December 10, 2003). Europe and Japan, to maintain the service sector of the economy, which is the critical sector of an information age society, have to import labour to make up for an internal demographic deficit. 5 Yet, on the other hand, Third World regions like Africa, the Middle East and most of Latin America have a growing population surplus which lacks educational facilities and occupational outlets providing for security from basic wants. A feature of the global economy which Huntington overlooks is that the complementarity of ‘rich’ nations needing labour imports, and ‘poor’ countries needing to export labour, means that new cross-civilisational patterns get continuous promotion in established Western nation-states,

4

Even in less sweeping aspects of globalisation and hybridisation, a recent story of a popular American weekly journal featured on its cover a composite feminine face incorporating aesthetic standards from different regions of the world (‘The Global Makeover,’ Newsweek, November 10, 2003). The Western and Eastern influences, in particular, seem to blend in harmoniously in this globalisation of aesthetics. 5 Japan is resisting opening up to immigrants from adjoining areas but there may be a limit to how much labour can be done by robots, although robotics is taken to an advanced level in service and production functions.

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while the emigrant, diaspora population makes significant contributions to the economy back home. There is a last fault-line in the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis. Implicit in its argument is the homogeneity of a civilisation in terms of core values and premises, which set it apart from other civilisations and can therefore be invoked to mobilise a population into sharp conflict with the population of another civilisation. While having a certain degree of plausibility, what this neglects is that severe conflict over basic values and premises are as likely to take place within a civilisation as across civilisations. For two centuries, Christian Europe was rent in violent sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Today, the tensions between Shiites and Sunni Muslims have erupted in violent sectarian conflict in Iraq (as it did a generation ago in the prolonged Iran-Iraq war). Despite theoretical and empirical shortcomings, Huntington’s thesis received a new lease of credibility after September 11, 2001 and its continuing aftermath. It has made salient that the world of Islam finds itself in tension and sustained conflict with the non-Islamic world, at least, in the relationships of Islamic communities with non-Islamic communities in a wide spectrum of cases. These range from Jakarta’s relationship to East Timor to the Sudan’s relationship with the Christian South, from Chechnya’s continuing attempt at secession from Moscow and the conflicts of Muslim Albanian populations in Kosovo and Macedonia with the Orthodox communities, to the simmering conflict in Kashmir where India rules over a restless Muslim population. In Europe, where the Islamic communities have found satisfying work employment in large numbers, they are viewed by a significant number of the host population as alien intruders, providing voting strength for restrictive immigrant policies of centrist and right-wing parties. Even in France, which prides itself on the democratic secular tradition of laïcité, a new law prohibiting the use of religious symbols aimed at curbing Muslim schoolgirls from wearing religious headdress in public schools has generated bitter disputes and violent demonstrations. Lastly, the reactions of the American government to September 11 has been to take the war against terrorism into the far-flung corners of the world, but mainly against ethnic populations identified with (militant) Islam, for these are the prime suspects of being ‘terrorists’. The new wars of the young century are military wars with the latest technologies used by the West, at least by the United States and its erstwhile ally Great Britain. It is, in one sense, a new version of the imperialist wars of the 19th century, when Western countries used ‘incidents’ to justify their occupation and presence in non-European or

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non-Western settings. But it is also different in that the war against terrorism today knows no boundaries, East or West. It is not a war of states against states as such, at least in the ideology of the war. It is a war that may have no boundaries and no time limits, since no candid public discussion of the root causes of ‘terrorism’ is made. It is perhaps this very fact, the fact that the war has no boundaries and no time limits, that is a central feature of the global crisis in which we find ourselves. In the new, ambiguous and violent state of the world, the Huntington thesis, very crudely simplified in the minds of some as ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’ (Barber 2001), has found a niche in providing a global perspective that superficially at least makes more sense than other macro paradigms such as modernisation, world system theory and globalisation. Rather than convergence toward a shared modernity, the post 9/11 world in the context of the Huntington paradigm would suggest a radical divergence of modernities. Various responses to Huntington have been generated, mainly critical, by intellectuals and clericals of various secular and religious traditions, and even heads of states. In the last named category, mention might be made of a speech given by former German president Roman Herzog in Seoul some years ago. He first emphasised commonalities between Korea and Germany, giving attention to the important issue of reunification, East/West in the case of Germany, North/South in the case of Korea. He then proposed that cultural resources could be drawn globally from major religious traditions to be used together to solve global challenges, including challenges of economic growth. He drew several ‘maxims’ for the globalisation era, with culture as central: Our contemporary view of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Confucianism should therefore not be determined by the ideological distortions later propagated by ultra-orthodoxy. In reality, the rich variety of cultural traditions in the world can be a source of strength. I know no better proof of this than the harmonious modus vivendi to present-day Korea between Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity (Herzog 1999:61f.)

The question we should ask, to go beyond Huntington and also beyond Herzog, is whether the violent clash of civilisations, if it has a component in addition to political and economic factors, has no way out. This is where we might entertain a discussion of ‘soft power’ as an alternative paradigm to the ‘clash of civilisations’. It will be the endeavour of the second part of this chapter to indicate, in the context of an ‘East Meets West’, going beyond the ‘modus vivendi’ mentioned by Herzog,

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that a ‘soft power’ paradigm is a meaningful alternative to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. Such a paradigm, still in an early stage of formulation, would focus not on the ‘clash’ but on the ‘meshing’ of civilisations.

III. ‘Soft Power’ as an alternative Although Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ is prominent in the public eye, he has recently taken a ‘softer’ perspective regarding differing cultural systems. This shows in the later volume he co-edited, Culture Matters (Harrison and Huntington 2000). There, he and the contributors take cultural values as significant variables in the success or failure of economic development. The basic premise of the work is that human progress is tied to economic development and growth. This, it might be said, is a very old theme of Western modernity, going back to the 18th century Enlightenment and in particular to Adam Smith’s epochal Wealth of Nations (1776). The question of what cultural obstacles hinder development (or alternatively, the cultural factors that promote it, following the trail of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) became an important problematic in the 1950s and 1960s of the multidisciplinary group of Western (mainly American) scholars who worked on a comprehensive analysis of development which took on the name of ‘modernisation analysis’. One of the questions they raised was whether and how Western values might be adopted, and via what institutions (educational and political in particular) for non-Western countries seeking to modernise rapidly beyond feudalism/traditional society (or a colonial past). A few scholars (for example, Robert Bellah in his study of Tokugawa Japan, 1969) also sought to find in non-Western cultural systems values and social structures that might equally promote development and/or modernity. In a sense, the studies did much to stimulate social science research of a comparative nature. But that did not translate into successes in all regions that wanted to modernise and have high levels of sustainable economic growth following a ‘take-off’ period, in emulation of what the economist W.W. Rostow (1971) depicted as a model of economic modernisation in stages of economic growth based on the historic pattern of Western societies. In particular, Latin America (with the exception of Chile), Africa and the non-oil producing Middle East countries had poor economic results in the last quarter of the 20th century, with political turmoil, authoritarian repression, high rates of economic inflation and financial crises and civil wars being more prevalent than consistent

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economic development and political stability. In brief, development for a large portion of the ‘Third World’ remained elusive in terms of an institutional framework and cultural values conducive to progressive change. The vices rather than the virtues of modernity seemed to prevail, whether in the form of military takeovers, violent ethnic conflicts, or the scourge of AIDS. All this was undoubtedly in the back of Huntington’s mind as he began his introduction to Culture Matters by musing on the differential performance of Korea and the African country Ghana. In the early 1960s, both countries had about the same level of development and both were receiving about the same level of economic aid. 30 years later, Huntington noted, Korea had become an economic giant with the 14th largest economy of the world; Ghana’s economy, by contrast, produced only 1/15th of Korea’s per capita GNP. How come? Huntington proposes that Korea had the right set of values for growth: thrift, investment (implying a high savings rate), hard work, education, organisation, and discipline – values lacking in Ghana. In short, Huntington concluded, ‘cultures count: they do make a difference!’ Given that premise, Huntington and his associates set out to look at different settings and tackle as a central question how political and social action can make cultures more favourable to progress understood in socio-economic terms (Huntington 2000:xvi). The noted neo-Confucian scholar Tu Wei-Ming in his contribution ‘Multiple Modernities’ to the Harrison-Huntington volume makes an eloquent case that there are different (cultural) paths to modernity, a theme developed extensively by S.N. Eisenstadt in examining the different paths to modernity taken by civilisations since a common ‘Axial Age’ around 25 centuries ago (Eisenstadt 2003). What Tu Wei-Ming intends is not simply to indicate that Confucian values are of intrinsic worth in the West’s understanding of the modernisation of East Asia (consider the reciprocal of Mr. Kim approaching the United States by its underlying values in the Bible in my introductory anecdote). It is also a tacit critique of Huntington’s ‘obsolete notion of pitting the West against the rest of the world’ (Tu 2000:259). With globalisation, there is a greater need of the West’s understanding of local conditions outside the West,6 but there is also a greater need inside the West to increase human reflexivity expressed in manifestations of a sense of crisis and the social disintegration of community: 6

Even to say ‘outside the West’ is misleading, because ‘within the West’ there is important variability in the political and economic preferred paths to development, reflection not only of cultural traditions but also of socioeconomic realities.

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Chapter Five …ecological consciousness, feminist sensitivity, religious pluralism, and communitarian ethics all strongly suggest the centrality of nature and spirituality in human reflexivity (ibid: 260).

Tu Wei-Ming goes on to stress that the crisis of community may reflect the inability of today’s heirs of the Enlightenment to deal seriously with ‘ultimate concerns and harmony with nature’. What is called for is nothing short of a ‘global perspective on the human condition that is predicated on our willingness to think in terms of the human community’ (ibid). Subscribing to Tu’s perspective, we can propose that: To think in terms of the human community, what may be innovative is to think in terms opposite to the ‘clash of civilisations’ and rather in terms of the ‘meshing of civilisations’, that is, in terms of their congruence and complementarity so as to yield a more comprehensive paradigm of development. More on that later. Although the thrust of the Harrison-Huntington volume is to induce peaceful acceptance of values that stimulate economic progress, what is not addressed are some important questions. On the one hand, what are the social and environmental costs of accepting the values of economic growth as the main if not sole criteria of progress? On the other hand, how much acceptance on the part of a hegemonic power like the United States today is there for those seeking an alternative path to modernity, for example by the populist route that has become increasingly popular in several Latin American countries? The social costs can be considerable if governments embarking on development do not have the public good as a priority and instead allow the abusive exploitation of natural resources as well as exploitation of segments of their population (even taking the form of forced displacement of an indigenous population). Environmental costs are equally enormous in both Western and non-Western countries, from tanker oil spills that pollute waters leading to the deaths of marine and bird life, to pollutant emissions that can result in deforestation and deaths from asthma, to the contamination of rivers from chemical wastes. When one begins to total the devastation to the physical and the human environment that the frenetic pursuit of growth at any price has accumulated, endangering the biosphere of future generations, one can better understand why the World Life-Culture Forum held in Gyeonggi, Korea, in 2003 put the environmental crisis at the fore of its concerns. Asia, which has had spectacular growth rates in the past three decades, has equally had spectacular instances of environmental degradation, notably pollution of air and water. Hopefully, Asian countries may have started on the long, slow road to cleaning up some of their major sores, for example in China,

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Borneo and Indonesia (Business Week 2003). Safeguarding the environment in the face of political pressures for rapid economic development is certainly a major challenge of Asian modernity. A further sombre note is that while the European Union and the great majority of countries in the United Nations have signed and ratified the Kyoto Treaty to regulate carbon emissions which threaten global warming, first the United States and then Russia decided not to sign the Kyoto Protocol, a signal that their immediate economic development matters more than the ecological disasters this may entail for the rest of the world. Dropping off the Kyoto Pact, which the previous administration had endorsed but had not brought for legislative approval, is most unfortunately in the general vein of the present American administration’s laissez-faire policy of privatising environmental resources. While scholars can justify alternative models of development, acceptance of multiple modernities by a hegemon is another matter. The United States has often sought to block a path to progress and development that is not congruent with what its administration deems a proper model. So for example, Castro’s Cuba, the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua, Mossadeq’s Iran or Chavez’ Venezuela have incurred the wrath and various sanctions of the American government. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, direct actions taken in the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq show that unlike McArthur’s acceptance of continuing the basic Japanese system at war’s end, now America may seek to transform, if not subdue by force, those and perhaps others who may be defined as belonging to or aiding ‘the axis of evil’. Given the clear military superiority of the United States over any single conventional foe, the first option has been for most of the present decade a utilisation of ‘hard power’, military and gross economic power. This line of action in foreign policy, particularly manifest in the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in the attendant denunciation of ‘Old Europe’ (France and Germany in particular) as the United States prepared to go to war in the spring of 2003 despite the objections of old allies, is an unequivocal policy of unilateralism. Such unilateralism is a far cry from what American specialists in international relations like Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye have counselled: a policy of multilateralism, of engaging in action in consultation and with the accord of others. Nye, presently Dean of the prestigious Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, published a keen alternative of sources of American power. Although contradicted by actual courses of action of the present American administration, Nye asserted that in the post- cold war era, ‘the

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foundations of power have been moving away from the emphasis on military force and conquest,’ that ‘the absence of a warrior ethic in modern democracies means that the use of force requires an elaborate moral justification to ensure popular survival’ and that, especially for postindustrial societies, ‘war remains possible, but it is much less acceptable now than it was a century ago or even half a century ago’ (Nye 2002:5f). That part of his remarks certainly applies to post-war European and East Asian countries (especially to Germany and Japan, in contrast to their earlier ‘warrior ethic’ and reliance on ‘hard power). In making the case for multilateralism, Nye invokes the concept of soft power: to get others to do what you want done, because they have a preference to do it (Nye 2002:9). Nye points to the importance of having American values as a crucial component of American power in world politics. American values are reflected in film and television popular the world over and provide a backdrop for American power, though, he cautions, soft power cannot do without ‘hard power’ in certain situations, but neither for a hegemonic superpower can it do without ‘soft power’. Nye’s concept is very suggestive and I wish to develop it beyond the frame of his discussion in the area of international relations, beyond, that is, a state-centred policy of enlightened self-interest to a more comprehensive inter-civilisational if not global- centred perspective. Soft power entails the interrelation of cultural values and institutional frameworks. In the Fulbright interdisciplinary and multinational project that I directed in 2002-2003 (http://www.cies.org/NCS/NCS_II.htm), we researched on a comparative basis, violent ethnic conflicts and peace processes that follow accords which suspend the conflicts. We came to the realisation that this is a dynamic process involving ‘soft power’ variables, both in causing or increasing the violence between groups and in mitigating these conflicts and restoring the peace – variables like religion, trust, collective identity. These and other similar variables are operative in the fragmentation of community into massive violence and in the reconstruction of community and reconciliation of groups. We produced no miracle medicine with which to inoculate populations that are ethnically differentiated against the virus of severe ethnic conflict and civil war, but we advanced the worth of a paradigm of soft power in accounting for this process in a manner different from other paradigms that focus predominantly on versions of ‘hard power’, including economic enticements favoured by the World Bank. Soft power can also designate the cultural values underlying institutional frameworks and their social networks. So for example, social connections and social capital – what the Chinese term guangxi – are as

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critical for getting things done as hard power. American values expressed in education, values of American democracy, egalitarianism and pragmatism, together with a keen interest in mastering the forces of the universe by technology, have made professional training in the United States highly desired and prized outside as well as inside the United States for most of the 20th century. The global networks of medical schools, engineering schools, schools of business management, and divinity schools, among others, have added considerably to American ‘soft power’, that is, to establishing American leadership on a multilateral basis. These networks have built on previous important layers of American contributions to global education, often from a religious service orientation, which led to the establishment of colleges and universities in the Middle East and Asia, for example the American University of Beirut, the American University of Cairo, Roberts College in Turkey, and Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul. Their alumni and alumnae have provided important cadres in their country’s and regions human, social, and economic development, and made the American presence and values meaningful. This deployment of American ‘soft power’ was further put into action under President Kennedy’s prompting with the Peace Corps program, bringing American volunteers to assist bottoms-up local development projects in the Third World. That leadership of the 20th century, I am afraid, is being negated in the new century by American unilateralism in environmental and military matters. The multi-pronged environmental crisis related to unregulated global development is facing an enormous challenge, the challenge of the world’s hegemon focusing so much on terrorism that paradoxically it may lack the vision of making the world safe for humanity. It is precisely at this moment that there is an urgent need for a ‘meshing of civilisations’, a new meeting of East and West at the level of values and culture to redirect global development.

IV. Rethinking the Civilisation of Modernity: East Meets West, Again The modern world cannot help but give development a high priority. It has been a cornerstone of modernity for more than two centuries, in spite of the abuses and social ills that have been committed in the name of progress. Science and technology know no national boundary, nor is there any brake of the changes they bring about, although the reproduction of life by utilising materials from human foetuses is raising anew the question of bio-ethics. However, unless the world’s powers, especially the

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United States as the present hegemonic superpower, would miraculously collectively renounce warfare (in the spirit of the long-forgotten KelloggBriand Peace Act of 1928), it is likely that science and technology will generate equally new ways of destroying an enemy as providing new ways of enhancing life. Science and technology will also produce tools to place in economic development that will make for greater productivity; at the same time, without firm disinterested controls and new directions, these tools can aggravate the exploitation and abuses of the natural habitat of animal and floral species, including members of the human species who may stand in the way of progress. We are living in a rather unique civilisation of modernity, one certainly noted by the extent of its acceptance in both recognised and nonrecognised ways. This civilisation has sought to justify itself in the name of progress, despite abuses and social ills committed in its name.7 Max Weber gave us a fairly comprehensive diagnosis of this civilisation and its peer group of other civilisations (China, India, ancient Israel), noting that the triumph of late capitalism was muted by ‘an empty shell’, that is, the disappearance of the ‘spirit’ from the bureaucratisation of life. The quest for salvation in the West had in the not-so-distant past been turned into a mighty level of change with inner-worldly asceticism of the laity. But secularisation had taken its toll of asceticism, and Weber’s Europe was a period of transition in economic work ethics, from production-oriented capitalism to consumption-oriented capitalism. Although it might be said that he sensed it coming at the conclusion of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism essay, Weber would note with askance at the spirit of consumerism which marks the culture-ideology of late modernity (Sklair 1995). China is at an early stage of the spirit of consumerism, the United States and most of the ‘North’ (say, the OECD countries) have been there a long while; Korea, for purpose of the argument is still in an early phase, a decade or two ahead of China. The latter, it should be noted, in keeping with the new wealth of development from very high levels of economic growth, is rediscovering the treasures of its cultural past and weaving them in along with importing the high ends of Western consumerism (Armani clothing, Tiffany jewellery, Cartier watches), and making consumer goods available not only to overseas populations but also to its own population with the Chinese equivalent of a people’s car, the Chery among other new makes (Prasso 2007). 7

It was in the name of progress that imperial powers took colonies as part of their ‘mission civilisatrice’, but it is equally in the name of progress that the neo-cons of today sought/seek to bring about regime change.

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Unlike some Western Puritans, it is not my intention to castigate consumerism per se as a curse of modernity – after all, who are the nations with high standards of living to deny those in low-income and medianincome countries from seeking a better and happier way of life? To preach the virtue of poverty does have a religious ancestry in the West, but to be preachers of poverty in academic walls is far different from practicing it in the service of the poor, à la Mother Theresa. If development can lead to substantive melioration of working conditions and higher standards of living for larger number of people – and this was the enticement of the economic program of the Enlightenment – then consumerism as an objective does have some justification. East Asian development in two generations has gone through a significant transformation in the structures of its economy from low-paid agrarian labour to the manufacturing sector and on to higher-paying, service oriented, outsourcing work as well as research and development needing trained professional skills. A ‘valueadded’ aspect of the consumerism in East Asia is that it takes pride in quality manufacture of the home country; in the case of the new Chinese consumerism, for example, ‘offering products that appeal to China’s growing sense of Chinese-ness – to its nationalist pride and strength of tradition’ (Prasso 2007:96). This, it might be noted, is very much like the pride that once prevailed in the United States over manufactured items marked ‘made in America’. Consumerism or the enjoyment of the material abundance of a civilisation of modernity, along with the complementary enjoyment of the enriched benefits of citizenship, including human rights, have been major poles of the civilisation of modernity. But the economic and the political do not exhaust the demands of the age; they do not exhaust what I consider a more comprehensive global development. The dimension missing is in the cultural realm, of the spiritual, the ethical and the normative. This is what underlies the subtitle of my chapter, the renewal of the civilisation of modernity. And to attain this, I consider it essential that the major civilisational components of modernity be interactive with one another, not in a position of subordination/ super-ordination or in a position of clashing with each other, but in a dialogical encounter, such as suggested in the recent sociological volume of Camic and Joas (2004). Of the various possible civilisational dialogues, a new meeting of the East and West offers great potential, as I have suggested on previous occasions (Tiryakian 1985, 1990).8 There have been numerous occasions 8 The meeting of the East and West I have in mind is quite different from the one presented by F.S.C. Northrop over fifty years ago in stating: ‘in addition to

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in the past of their inter-civilisational encounters. Some, unfortunately, have been bitter in terms of military conquest and invasions. Yet others, at the cultural and scientific levels, have been productive and enhancing. Let us mention here in passing how much of modern art, such as impressionism, was stimulated by Japanese woodcuts in the 19th century, or to go to an earlier period, how Leibniz, one of the great mathematicianphilosopher of the West, acknowledged how his invention of the binary code had already appeared in Chinese civilisation centuries before (Krikke 2004:29). At present, one of the interesting innovations in mainstream medical training in the United States, sponsored by a unit of the National Institute of Health, is in ‘alternative medicine’ therapy, which owes much to the holistic approach of traditional East Asian medical practices. On a complementary basis, leading Western pharmaceuticals, such as Pfizer, Bayer, and Eli Lilly have been engaging in vigorous herbal prospecting in China and screening traditional Chinese medicines for new ingredients that may be used in Western drugs and cosmetic products; there is a twoway interchange, with China’s start-up medical firms (like Chi-Med) combining Western approaches with traditional Chinese ones, often using Western-trained Chinese medical researchers (Dolan 2007). The rapid rise of Asia to being a major region of economic growth with a commensurate growth in high-technology has gained it an undisputed respect as a partner in modernity. In the past, the respect of the West for Asia was mainly at the cultural level, a respect for the traditions of Buddhism and Confucian social philosophy. There has been a certain image that ‘spiritual’ values, including living in harmony with nature and living in harmony with fellow humans, were lacking from the West, while prevalent Western values were much more materialistic, emphasising dominance over nature and post-modern values of self-expression. Of course, there are gross cultural differences between the East and West – if there were none, there would be no need for a dialogical encounter. But I do think there are important bridges, and I wish here to suggest some, as being important in reconstituting a developmental program to renew the civilisation of modernity. At the economic level, an important ethical perspective to development has been stimulated by the works of the Indian economist and Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen (Anand and Sen 1997; Sen 1999). In very clear and rigorous terms, he has advanced the field of ‘sustainable human development’, which stresses human ends, for the present and future continuing conflict between diverse… ideologies in the West, there will be more direct confrontation of Occidental and Oriental cultural values.’ (Northrop 1952:6)

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generations, above ‘more commonly used criteria for progress, such as the growth of GNP per capita,’ (Anand and Sen, 1997:29). The deep, ethical frame of sustainable development as optimal development lies in a neoKantian rejection of viewing ‘human beings as merely the means of production and material prosperity, taking prosperity as the end of the causal analysis… Rejecting such an exclusive focus on people as “human capital” is central to the human development approach,’ (ibid:30). There is a Western partner to this perspective, and that is F.L Schumacher, who won an important following in the post-World War II period with his advocacy of ‘small is beautiful’ as a model of sustainable development (1973; McRobie 1981). It would be well if the complementarity of the two were recognised as an economic alternative to the present dominant model of growth promulgated by market-oriented economies and their institutional organs. At the spiritual-ethical level, where scholars feel that the West is sadly delinquent regarding (wo)man’s relation to nature (or rather, where the dominant Western orientation seems to be mastery, conquest, and exploitation of nature), there are Western voices that need recognition in a dialogue on the human condition. Let me mention two. The first is the great philosopher-theologian-musicologist Albert Schweitzer, who made the cornerstone of his philosophy the reverence for life (Schweitzer 1923). I find him a kindred soul to Buddhism in expressing the unity of mankind with all of life, expressed in the following: What does the reverence for life teach us about the relations of man and the non-human animals? Whenever I injure the life of any kind I must be quite clear as to whether this is necessary of not… Wherever any animal is forced into the service of man, the sufferings which it has to bear on that account are the concern of everyone of us… It is only as a result of reverence for life that we shall be able to form standards of that economic justice in which alone a real mutual understanding is possible. Shall we really be able to make this development an actual fact? We absolutely must do so if we are to avoid complete material and spiritual ruin (1933:264, 284)

Schweitzer, who gave the better part of his life to enhancing the human condition by establishing a hospital in Lambarané, Gabon, far away from the resources of ‘Western civilisation’, was an apostle of the ‘reverence for life’. The West had an earlier one in Francis of Assissi who early in the 13th century wrote a poem, The Canticle of Brother Sun (Leclerc 1977), really a hymn of praise celebrating the created world of material things to which humans have mystical ties on union/unity of self, things from

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‘Brother Sun’ to ‘Sister Moon and Stars’, to ‘Brothers Wind and Air’, to ‘Sister Water’ and ‘Brother Fire’. To illustrate: ‘All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire, Through whom you brighten up the night How beautiful he is, how gay! Full of power and strength…’ (Leclerc 1977:xvii).

As the editor of the hymn notes, there is no reference to Christ. Yet, of course, Francis of Assissi became the fountainhead of a very important movement of ‘soft power’ named after him (the Franciscan Movement and its missions to the poor), which with Joachim of Fiore took on a radical aspect. However, the canticle is one that expresses the reverence for life while expressing an equally deep interiority. This I think offers a bridge with East Asian spirituality, for example, expressed in the tao. I conclude with these suggestive remarks that a ‘meshing of civilisations’ is a viable alternative to a ‘clash of civilisations’, and that to develop this into an educational program linking East and West is to provide an important cultural renovation in the civilisation of modernity. It is one where emissaries of one civilisation can freely travel abroad as good will ambassadors and mutually enrich, on their own terms, their home base while enriching that of their host. This interactive process is in line with the dynamics of modernity. The conditions and institutional arrangements (perhaps a new multipath Civilisational Peace Corps) that can provide for this process without distortion into a ‘clash of civilisations’ are the heady challenges for social science in the 21st century.

References Anand, Sudhir and Amartya K. Sen, 1996: Sustainable HumanDevelopment: Concepts and Priorities. New York: Office of Development Studies, United Nations Development Programme. Barber, Benjamin R., 2001: Jihad vs McWorld. New York: Ballantine Books. Business Week 2003. “Asia’s Future: Cleaning Up,” October 27: 50-65. Bellah, Robert N., 1969 (1957): Tokugawa Religion. The Values of PreIndustrial Japan. New York: Free Press. Bhukta, Anindya, 2001: “Sen’s Sense of Development: A Humanitarian Outlook,” pp. 96-104 in: Ray Biswanath (ed.) Welfare, Choice and Development: Essays in Honour of Professor Amartya Sen. New Delhi: Kanishka Publisher.

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Camic, Charles and Hans Joas, (eds.) 2004: The Dialogical Turn. New Roles of Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cohen, Elizabeth, 2006: “Foucault, Michel,” pp. 212-214 in: Bryan S. Turner (ed.) The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davie, Grace, 2000: Religion in Modern Europe. A Memory Mutates. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delanty, Gerard, 1995: Inventing Europe. Idea, Identity, Reality. London: Macmillan. Dickens, David R. and Andrea Fontana, (eds.) 1994: Posmodernism & Social Inquiry. New York and London: The Guilford Press. Dolan, Kerry A., 2007: “Ancient Secrets,” Forbes, June 4: 80-84. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 2003: Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. with Curelaru, Miriam. 1976: The Form of Sociology: Paradigms and Crises. New York: Wiley. Gore, Al, 2006: An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warning and What We Can Do About it. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press. Habermas, Jürgen, 1975: Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Harrison, Lawrence E. and Samuel P. Huntington, (eds.) 2000: Culture Matters. How Values Shape Human Progress. New York: Basic Books. Herzog, Roman, 1999: Preventing the Clash of Civilizations. A Peace Strategy for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Henrik Schmiegelow. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Huntington, Samuel P., 1996: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Krikke, Jan, 2004. “Digital Dragons. The Analog West Meets the Binary West”, [email protected]. 50: 23-33. Leclerc, Eloi, 1977: The Canticle of Creatures Symbols of Union. An Analysis of St. Francis of Assisi. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. McRobie, George, 1981: Small is Possible. New York: Harper & Row. Northrop, Filmer S.C., 1952: The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding. New York: Macmillan. Nye, Joseph S. Jr., 2002: The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Offe, Claus, 1985: “Ungovernability: On the Renaissance of Conservative Theories of Crisis,” pp. 67-88 in: Jürgen Habermas (ed.) Observations on ‘The Spiritual Situation of the Age’. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 2004: Globalization & Culture. Global Mélange. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Prasso, Sheridan, 2007: “China’s New Cultural Revolution,” Fortune 155: 91-96. Ray, Biswanath, (ed.) 2001: Welfare, Choice and Development: Essays in Honour of Professor Amartya Sen. New Delhi: Kanishka Publishers. Rostow, Walt W., 1971: The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, Saskia, 2001: The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. 2002: Global Networks, Linked Cities. New York: Routledge. Schumacher, Ernest F., 1973: Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row. Schweitzer, Albert, 1923: Civilization and Ethics: The Philosophy of Civilization. London: A. & C. Black. —. 1969: Reverence for Life. New York: Harper & Row. Sen, Amartya K., 1999: Reason Before Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sklair, Leslie, 1995: Sociology of the Global System (2nd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Soysal, Yasemin, 1994: Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tiryakian, Edward A., 1985: “The Changing Centers of Modernity,” pp. 131-47 in: Erik Cohen, Moshe Lissak and Uri Almagor (eds.) Comparative Social Dynamics: Essays in Honor of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. —. 1990: “On the Shoulders of Weber and Durkheim: East Asia and Emergent Modernity,” pp. 3-25 in: Kim Kyong Dong and Su-Hoon Lee (eds.), Asia in the 21st Century: Challenges and Prospects. Seoul: Panmun Book Co. —. 2001: “Introduction: The Civilization of Modernity and the Modernity of Civilizations,” International Journal of Sociology, 16: 277-92. Tu, Wei-Ming, 2000: “Multiple Modernities: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Implications of East Asian Modernity,” pp. 256-66 in: Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds.) Culture Matters. How Values Shape Human Progress. New York: Basic Books.

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Weber, Max, 1946: “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” pp. 302-322 in: Hans Gerth and Charles W. Mills (eds.) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Paul, Trench, Trubner.

CHAPTER SIX MODERNITY AND CULTURE: ORIGINS, VARIETIES AND TRAJECTORIES MIKE FEATHERSTONE

Introduction We are past the time of generally applicable forms. —Novalis, Fragment 2167, cited in Luhmann 1998:21

Modernity is a concept which continues to fascinate. Yet, like its associated terms in the conceptual set deriving from the modern, the more the term is interrogated, the more it seems to evaporate into a series of contradictory definitions. The continuing interest in modernity is all the more surprising at a time when the mood in the social sciences and humanities has swung away from higher level categories of knowledge which claim universal authority towards a greater sense of diversity, difference and singularity. Apart from society, nature or humanity, it is hard to find a higher level and more general concept than modernity. On one level, this continued interest is reproductive, given that many major figures in the social sciences and humanities, such as Habermas, Lyotard, Giddens, Therborn, Hall, Appadurai, Beck, Bauman and Chakrabarty, have all written on modernity and its associated terms in the last twenty years. The ripples are still spreading out and the secondary literature and accounts of the debates continue to grow. A noted event was the Habermas paper Modernity: an Incomplete Project, given upon receiving the Adorno prize in 1980 (Habermas 1985). Habermas’ depiction of Foucault and Derrida as young conservatives raised the tempo of a debate about the value of the modern and the emergent postmodern. Despite their pleas about the inappropriateness of the term, Foucault and Derrida have

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become associated with the postmodern and have been labelled postmodernists. The Habermas confrontation of the postmodern linked into a number of high profile debates that had started in the 1970s, drawing on artistic postmodernism which had flourished in the 1960s. It was not only artistic modernism that was assumed to have become exhausted, but also the modern project itself in all its various manifestations, hence opening up a space in which the challenge was to think beyond the modern. This transference from an artistic and intellectual to epochal usage seemed to trouble few people in the social sciences when they took up the debates and began to search social life and cultural forms for evidence of the postmodern. The modern and postmodern, and the associated family of terms, were batted back and forth between Europe and the United States with a range of major figures involved and invoked, such as Bell, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Jameson, Lyotard and Vattimo (see Featherstone 1991: ch 2). In the postwar era, up until the mid-1970s in sociology, capitalism was the dominant term. The influential Introduction to the History of Sociology (Barnes 1966) had no place for modernity in the index, although it had a large number of references to capitalism. Similarly, Anthony Giddens’ (1973) influential early work Capitalism and Modern Social Theory foregrounds capitalism, also prominent in the index, which had no mention of the modern or modernity. Yet, by the early 1990s, the focus for Giddens was more directly on spelling out the contours of modernity in books such as The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Identity. In cultural studies, it may well be possible to chart a similar shift with Stuart Hall and his associates producing the influential Open University volume Formation of Modernity in 1992. When terminology shifts, it is possible to see this renaming process as a strategic move in the field of academic and intellectual cultural production (Bourdieu 1984). A new generation of scholars can confine a previous one to history and make them appear outdated if they succeed in imposing a new and allegedly superior set of concepts. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the interest in postmodernism, then, helped to stimulate an interest in revisiting and defending the modern. Nietzsche remarked that what has a history cannot be defined. There is clearly a plurality of genealogical lines, with breaks and stoppages, as we look back into the histories of the terminology around ‘the modern.’ According to Habermas (1985, who follows Hans Robert Jauss), one of the earliest usages of the term modern in the western tradition is the Latin term modernus, first used in the late fifth century in order to distinguish

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the officially Christian present, from the Roman and pagan past. Here, the emphasis is on the consciousness of a new time, a break with the past, the start of a new epoch (cf. the Renaissance, or the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns in France in the late seventeenth century). It could be argued that in the 1980s there was a similar sense that we were on the edge of a shift to new times. This had been prefaced by the socalled ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s generation, the disputes about the movement into ‘post-industrial society’ (Bell, Touraine et al), the new emergent information society, the decline of United States’ power with the Vietnam War defeat, the 1973 oil crisis and predicted limits to growth which signalled the end of the vision of permanent accumulation and abundance. There was a clear searching for new terminology to better account for these changes allegedly signalling the move towards a new social order, or even epoch: postmodernity. This led to a good deal of inventiveness in rethinking and expanding the set of terms deriving from the modern: modernity, modernisation, postmodernisation, high modernity, late modernity, reflexive modernity, trans-modernity, liquid modernity, postmodernity, modernism, postmodernism, global modernity, global modernities, multiple modernities, alternative modernities, hypermodernity and counter-modernity. The focus of this chapter is on the relationship of modernity to culture. It can be argued that the cultural dimension is important in the literature on modernity for a number of reasons. Firstly, culture is often invoked in the accounts that see modernity as having its exclusive origins in Western Europe. There is also the related sociological argument about the transition from traditional to modern societies, and ‘take off’ growth factors leading to modernisation. Secondly, there is the question of the culture of modernity in terms of whether this is a particular generic experience of modern life which leads to certain common expressions and cultural forms. Thirdly, there is the global aspect to the question in terms of whether there are multiple or alternative modernities. This is also a key dimension to the process of conceptualisation linking it to the shifting balances of global power. As Western power declines relatively, it can be argued that we will see the emergence of a range of different definitions and solutions to the modern condition: complexes of interests will emerge in the emergent powerful players on the global stage seeking to retell the origins of modernity. The shifting global balance of power, manifest in economic and cultural power shifts, could also be accompanied by changes in the production and circulation of knowledge. Finally, this relates back to the questions Max Weber raised about values and modern life: what are the constraints, parameters and dilemmas of modern

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experience? Is there any sense in which they can be regarded as having hardened into a common fate? Can we in any sense still talk about a modern or postmodern condition? 1 How do we understand the cultural possibilities of modern or contemporary life for innovation and invention in a globalising and interconnected world? In this chapter, I will seek to address a number of aspects of these questions. A central focus will be on the commonly held assumption that it was the unique cultural complex of the West that gave rise to modernity, through the way it provided the generative source, which could be transmitted into economic and socially structured forces. The case of China provides an interesting counter-example to the orthodox sociological views, which tend to depict Western societies as being dynamic and proto-modern, and China and Asia as tradition bound and reproductive. The current wave of scholarship, doubtless spurred by China’s rise since the 1990s, is restructuring the archive to discover a much more significant and central role for China in world history and pointing to many similarities in terms of economic growth with Western societies up until the early nineteenth century. If these assumptions are correct, it is to be expected that there would be evidence of the emergence of an expanding literate cultural sphere and consumer culture in parts of Asia. This is discussed through the examples of Ming Dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan. The interesting development of a cultural aesthetic sphere, or series of enclaved public spheres, is also discussed through the case of Japan, in its alleged proto-modern phase. The emphasis on aesthetic perceptions, civility and identity-switching, are contrasted to Habermas’s theory of the bourgeois public sphere’s more overt political function as a key outcome of European modernity. The relevance of these questions in terms of the building of a global public sphere today is also discussed. At the same time, the series of depictions of Tokugawa Japan by twentieth century Japanese scholars as modern, proto-modern or 1

For some the concern with modern experience and the quality of modern life (modernité), can be traced back to Baudelaire and the Paris of the 1840s (see Berman 1983). The artistic movement modernism is often located in the first decades of the 20th century (cf. Virginia Woolf’s oft-quoted remark made in 1924, that ‘in or about December 1910, human character changed.’ Certainly this period was also the focus in the work of Georg Simmel, characterised as ‘the first sociologist of modernity,’ (Frisby 1985) in his analyses of the metropolis, money and the concern with style and experience in the emergent consumer culture. As can Max Weber’s influential account of the differentiation and rationalisation of the value spheres, the dilemmas of modern existence in terms of how to live a meaningful ordered life in a post-religious world (see Featherstone 1995: ch 8).

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traditional, highlight one of the central problems in research on modernity: the modern as harbinger of the new is endlessly subject to recasting in each succeeding historical phase, as new generations address their present value concerns to reconstruct the lens through which they illuminate the past. Tradition and modern can all too easily operate as praise-words and blame-words from a present-day perspective primarily interested in constructing its own historical uniqueness, communality or difference from the past. In the final sections, the chapter returns to a discussion of the different views of culture in relation to modernity and argues against the assumption of spatially separated, integrated ‘deep structured’ cultures, to discuss the questions of cultural invention within modernity. For some this inventiveness provides the basis in the contemporary world for the generation of a range of alternative modernities.

The Modern in the Western conceptual order Sociology has long worked off a dichotomous model in which the modern, scientific, rational, industrial stage is contrasted with dogmatic, irrational traditional knowledge. This distinction between tradition and modern societies, often conceived in ideal type terms, became established as the disciplinary conventional wisdom. The dynamic for the transition between the two types was often located in the West’s unique cultural constellation. In the influential Weberian formulation, the ‘spirit of capitalism’ behind the success of Western modernity was linked to a particular world-changing ethic, ‘inner-worldly asceticism,’ with its purest form found in the Protestant sects of the European Reformation. Max Weber’s sociology of religion, involving studies of the religions of China and India, was seen as providing further evidence for the thesis, by arguing that these other world religions lacked this inner worldly ascetic ethic with its transformative potential. Max Weber’s whole intellectual endeavour started from the acceptance of the limited and perspectival nature of our knowledge (see Weber 1949). Weber was well aware that although he tackled major questions such as the origins of capitalism and ‘the fate of modernity,’ these questions could only be formulated through values. In effect, these issues were selected because they were relevant to his own values and the values of his age. Indeed, Weber emphasises that history was not only coloured anew from the point of view of each age, but that the potential for cumulative scientific knowledge was strictly limited. He was pulled towards a radical historicist position, and at the same time towards delineating the emergent historical universals which gathered force and effectively became our

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human fate, as in his theory of rationalisation and disenchantment of the world, which is central to his view of modernity. He was well aware of the limited nature of the answers we get to the questions we ask from history.2 Today, a century after Weber first formulated his Protestant Ethic thesis, other relevant questions have necessarily emerged. People are no longer speculating about a potential ‘decline of the West’ in the large civilisational brush strokes in the manner of Spengler who wrote in the wake of the First World War. Rather, we are concretely witnessing ‘the rise of the East’ and the dramatic gains in power of Asia over the last quarter of century.3 The rise of Asia could also see a shift in knowledge formation which could well redefine the way we conceive questions such as modernity and modern society. Globalisation processes not only mean the intensification of flows of goods, people, information, data, money, but also of academic knowledge (Featherstone 2006a). The predominant form of academic knowledge flow, markedly in the social sciences and humanities, has entailed the export of theory from Western centres to the peripheries, with raw data moving the other way (Sakai 2001). The conceptual order and classification system of disciplines such as sociology formed in the West is assumed to have supplied universal categories. There has been minimal interest in utilising theoretical formulations or classification systems arising outside of the West.4 For those outside the West who wish to have 2

There are, of course, many interpretations of Weber’s work, some of which emphasise the ideal type method as used in Economy and Society as a step towards the development of general universal categories of knowledge. The interpretation here emphasises the centrality of the value questions and the life orders along with a strong historical sense of the development of knowledge and the categories of the social sciences (see Featherstone 1995: chs 3 and 4). 3 Some commentators are now talking not only about the eclipse of US hegemony, but also about the coming World War Three between the West and Islam, with China and India the gainers (see Chan Akya ‘China and India in World War 111’ Asia Times July 25 2006). Asia Times contains regular articles on the decline of US power and the rise of Asia. Critiques of Weber’s thesis from an Asian point of view are more evident; see, for example, the cleverly titled ‘The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism,’ by Chow (2002). Weber was himself aware of the rise of Japan in his day and also predicted that the Chinese would adapt well to modern capitalism in his Religion of China. 4 There are clear problems with trying to use enthnophilosophy and African philosophy as a basis for alternative sociology or forms of knowledge, as Paulin Hountondji (1983, 2002) identifies, not least because they rely on models of static isolated islands of culture, which misses the long process of movements of knowledge and culture. As Eric Wolf (1982) has also shown, local knowledge is a

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their ideas taken seriously in the global field, the English-language dominated academic investment curve is steep. It is difficult to shift the existing power balances and patronage networks in the production and dissemination of global knowledge, although, clearly, postmodernism, post-structuralism and postcolonial theory have had some intellectual impact. Yet, their impact on mainstream disciplinary structures and modes of classification and methodology has been limited. It is possible to envisage some of the conditions which could produce a shift in this balance of power away from the West. There are of course many complicating factors, not least the shibboleth terms West and East, which conceal internal heterogeneity: in knowledge terms, there is a West in the East, as well as many people moving from the East for education in the West. Yet, the rise of China and East Asia could also be accompanied by not only the broadening of the type of content taught, but also by a greater questioning of some of the categories and classificatory terms used. This could lead to the investigation of alternative genealogies of global history, along with the expansion of the canon to take in Asian figures. With the predicted parity of China with the United States in economic terms by 2030, some of these shifts in knowledge formation could well be underway and become manifest within a generation. 5 It is also to be expected that such changes would be uneven: those parts of higher education which are tied more directly to the global economy such as business and management education and training could well continue to produce skilled system analysts, who work with more abstract forms of knowledge (Reich 2006). In the social sciences and the humanities, theory could well continue to be exported from the Western centres, but in the longer term we can assume there would be an expansion in the horizons of Western theorists not only to take into account the ‘abstract non-Western other,’ but to rethink the scope of their concepts and delve into concrete historical and cultural detail. This is especially so since some of the critics of Western knowledge classifications who contest the claim to universality now speak from within the West, or are in a process of constant movement between the West and other parts of the world. Here we think of books such as Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2000) and On the Postcolony (Mbembe 2001), both of which take a critical stance on the concept of modernity as used in Western intellectual thought, to show its inherent relative concept within all societies and different groups depend in different ways on horizons of limited and local knowledge. More powerful groups have always had greater access to regional and globally circulating forms of knowledge. 5 See The Economist special issue on China revival September 16-22 2006.

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deficiency when applied to Indian or African contexts. Hence, the range of postcolonial and other critical writings following on from the influential work of Said (Venn 2006), suggests the start of the process of excavation and re-ordering of the knowledge archive (see Featherstone 2000, 2006). This, of course, is not the archive Weber knew, but an expanding archive in which new questions and angles of research are leading to the rediscovery and reclassification of material driven by a new sense of value relevance (see Featherstone and Venn 2006). With the shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, we are starting to see a rejection of some of the ‘orientalist’ categories and assumptions about the ossified unchanging East contrasted to the dynamic West. This binary was easily fed into the tradition-modernity dichotomy with temporal and spatial dimensions; tradition not only seen as the past of the West, but as central to cultural reproduction in non-Western societies, which would have allegedly remained confined to tradition without Western intervention.

China Modern and the Question of Tradition As China continues to return growth figures of more than ten percent GDP in recent years and is becoming increasingly central to the global economy, it is now on a trajectory which will see it resume a position as one of the dominant world powers. It is no accident that the scholarly interest in China increases and the number of book series, texts, journals and university courses devoted to China rises. China assumes a growing position on the horizon of knowledge and not only its present geopolitical potential, but its role as the centre of the world economy up until the end of the eighteenth century (Pomeranz 2000; Gunder Frank 1998) are currently under scrutiny, casting doubts on previous depictions of China as ossified and stagnant. This suggests the reconstruction of the China archive and the re-assemblage of material which became scattered around the world in the wake of the 20th century China wars and diaspora. The reconstituted archive will doubtless form the basis for a revaluation of the role of China in world history; a process which will potentially emphasise the many occluded and obscured contributions made by Chinese people to the stock of knowledge of humanity.6 China is clearly becoming increasingly relevant for our values and for the values of our age. Yet, a century ago, when Max Weber, was developing 6

A process of rediscovery because of the positive reception Ming advances had in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe (see Leibniz, Adam Smith and others evaluations).

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his Protestant Ethic thesis, China occupied the category of the counterexample. Weber sought to link Protestantism to the greater rationalisation and systematisation of conduct in daily life, laying the ground for the development of the voracious modernising capitalist spirit. For Weber, this ethos was unique to Western Europe with its base in Christianity (although he did trace back the origins of the rational conduct back to Ancient Judaism and Biblical prophecy). For Weber, the other major civilisations and world religions, specifically the religions of China and India, did not have a similar basis for the generation of an inner worldly ethic which had world transformative potential. Rather, these were generally ‘other-worldly’ religions or ‘world accommodating’ in relation to conduct. The logic of Weber’s argument lies in his focus on the impediments for the growth of capitalism provided by Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, Hinduism and Islam. A key element of Weber’s argument is that capitalist modernity is based upon the separation of the public and the private which permits the extensive development of formal rationality, stimulating the process of rationalisation which penetrates into all the various spheres of life. This was seen as a condition which occurred uniquely in the West. It was the extension of this rationality, which helped produce capitalism, along with industrialisation, urbanisation, rational state governmental administration, secularisation, individualism, science and technology, and the various dimensions of social life which constitute modernity. In contrast, the rest of the world, especially when viewed through the prism of late 19th and early 20th century colonialism, was seen as static and subject to the reproduction of tradition. 7 The operation of the binary tradition-modernity within sociology tended always to cast Asia on the wrong side of the divide, forever subjected to constraining tradition, or more recently in the 20th century as trying to catch up, to modernise. Tradition, as Elias and others have pointed out, often operates as a blameword, suggesting the domination of habit and fixed everyday routines. Modern people, in contrast, are presented as engaging in rational calculation of courses of action and exercising individual choice. Traditional culture is presented as integrated, normative and involving inflexible social bonds and belief systems. By contrast, modern culture is seen as dynamic, innovative, inventive, and as obsessed with ‘the new’ and the excitement of transformation. We will return to these two 7

Marx’s theory of the Asiatic mode of production is also well known for its negative depiction of the East. Another influential theoretical concept was Wittfogel’s theory of ‘oriental despotism,’ which depicted Asian societies as unchanging, authoritarian and reproductive.

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depictions of culture later. It is also important to note that once we have societies depicted as traditional it is very hard to see any imminent means of change. Change has to come from the outside: traditional Asian societies are seen as having to wait for the West to liberate them from tradition and open the door to modernity. Tradition and modern are terms, then, that tend to cast societies on either side of the binary. Yet, if we look at the history of China and Japan, it is clear that the terminology is inadequate. Recent research has started to show that many of the preconceptions previously held in the West about the lack of commercial enterprise, absence of merchant groups, individualism or market freedom in Asian societies do not stand up to scrutiny. The evidence about China is compelling. The World economy prior to 1800 has been described as ‘Sinocentric’ (Hobson 2004:61). Pomeranz (2000:17) remarks that core regions in China and Japan circa 1750 seem to resemble the most advanced parts of Western Europe, combining sophisticated agriculture, commerce, and non-mechanized industry in similar, arguably even more fully realised ways

Indeed, Hobson (2004:77) further tells us that Chinese share of world manufacturing output outstripped Britain’s until 1860 and that “the Indian share was higher than the whole of Europe‘s in 1750 and was 85 percent higher than Britain’s as late as 1830.” In addition, it is argued that it is mistaken to claim that after the withdrawal of Admiral Zheng He’s ‘great ships’ in the Ming Dynasty in 1434, China remained closed to foreign trade (Pieterse, 2006: 412). Further, it has been highlighted that that China experienced not only proto-industrial development, but also industrial development (in ceramics and later cotton). As Goody (2004:104) remarks, China enjoyed …an age of astonishing creativity and transformation during the Song (960-1279) and the Yuan (1279-1368) dynasties... the period 1000-1500 CE witnessed an economic revolution such as the world had never seen. Cities grew, mainly in the southeast, agriculture was transformed, commerce flourished. Gunpowder, the magnetic compass and printing – the three inventions that Francis Bacon named in 1605 as the foundation of the modern order in Europe – had all come into common use in China in Song times

After 1492, with the opening up of trade with the Americas to Western European nations, the access to gold and silver, and the development of slave plantation agriculture, the global balance of economic power began to move away from China towards Europe. For

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economic historians such as Gunder Frank (1998) or Blaut (1993, 2000), the only way in which European nations could gain admission to the China dominated global economy and open up trade relations with China was through the forceful acquisition of silver through the conquest of the Americas.8 Silver was the only commodity China valued from the West and needed in order to replenish its treasury. Gunder Frank emphasises the inter-relatedness of the world economy, and the way in which precious metals, trade, technology and knowledge moved around through an opportunity-cost logic. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the Chinese inventions documented by Needham (1980) found their way to Europe, even if their origins were obscured, or that Arab medicine along with Greek philosophy came into Europe via the Moors in Spain (see discussion of Averroes by Venn 2007). Yet, against Frank’s assumption that it was only the American bullion that permitted Europeans to gain entry to the China-dominated world economy, Goody (2004:77) emphasises the importance of sea-power and weaponry: the means of destruction. The epic voyages of Columbus and the Portuguese navigators occurred in and after the 1490s, much later than the exploratory voyages to Africa and various parts of Asia by the Chinese navy under Zheng He in the period 1405-33 (Levathes, 1994). The Ming Court’s decision to lay up the massive treasure ship fleet, meant that the European powers were able to dominate at sea and gradually develop

8

One indication of China’s dominance was the role it enjoyed in the imagination of writers, scientists and philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Not only did Adam Smith and others admire the efficiency of Chinese bureaucracy, the free market notion in economics was also taken from China. In fact it was Quesnay, not Adam Smith who was the first European to criticise mercantilism, with his doctrine of Physiocracy (rule of nature). As J. J. Clark (1997:49) remarked, ‘Quesnay’s revolutionary ideas amounted to a liberation from the economic orthodoxy of... mercantilism… and his influence on the free market theories of Adam Smith was profound. What is often omitted in accounts of Quesnay’s place in modern thought which emphasises his role in developing economics as a scientific method, is his debt to China – unlike in his own day when he was widely known as ‘the European Confucius.’ One of his key influential ideas, which he imported from Chinese political economy, was we-wei, which was translated into French as laissez-faire (Hobson 2004:196). In addition it has also been argued by Pomeranz (2000) that China and to a lesser degree Japan in the eighteenth century, more closely resembled the neoclassical ideal of a laissez-faire market economy than Western Europe. For an insight into the major influence of China on another central figure in Western mathematical and scientific thought, Leibniz, see Perkins (2004).

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sophisticated military maritime technology.9 To cite the title of the book by Cipolla (1965), it was Guns and Sails that enabled European powers like the English, Dutch, Spanish, French and Portuguese to control sea routes and force open ports of entry around the world. Even when they were unable to conquer and colonise, most notably China and Japan, it was not for want of trying, since numerous military incursions were made.10 The memories of these wars, raids and punitive actions, plus the subsequent humiliating unequal treaties which were imposed, stoked the sense of injustice and desire to be modern. They increased the desire to counter the arrogant, violent, uninvited Westerners. For Asian countries to seek to develop equivalent economic, technological and military power should not therefore be interpreted in the same way as the reasons for the expansion of Western modernity. Indeed, it was often motivated by the desire to be able to control and shut the door that the West forced open. As Shintaro Ishihara (1991) put it, in the title of his best-selling book written at the time of the Japanese bubble economy, it meant The Japan that can Say No. The threat and reality of violence and military humiliation gives an important insight into the dynamics of modernity. As Chua Beng Huat’s (2006:469) writing about Singapore’s modernity reveals,

9

This was especially the case after China abandoned the naval expansion policy with the triumph of the land party over the seas party within the Imperial Court which led to the laying up of the Chinese junks (which dwarfed Vasco de Gama’s Portuguese caravels) in Admiral He’s fleet which some held sailed not only to East Africa, but rounded the Cape and reached Portugal. Some speculate even sailed the Pacific to Mexico (see Levathes 1994). Yet, the impact of the strengthening of the army in face of threats from the north, and the laying up of the great ships and the imperial ban on foreign commerce of 1434 in no way amounted to isolationism, as argued by Hobson (2004:62). Indeed, along with the continued importing of silver, international trade remained as vibrant as did internal trade and economic infrastructure building. 10 Just to take two examples: Firstly, the infamous Opium Wars (1834-43 and 1856-60), in which England bombarded the coast of China and made numerous raids into the interior, were caused by British affront at Chinese resistance to the extension of the British East Indian Company run opium trade into China. These events resulted in a humiliating Chinese defeat, the doubling of the number of opium addicts and the opening up of a series of treaty ports. It stamped the decline of China and the rise of Europe, and opened up the argument that the only response to Western domination was for China to modernise. In Japan, after the increased incursions from Western powers in the wake of the US Admiral Perry’s ‘black ships’ visit of 1853, a British warship bombarded the Satsuma port of Kagoshima in Kyushu. The pretext for the Satsuma-British ‘War’ of 1862-3 was the execution of a British sailor, who stole a cow, by the Japanese.

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Chapter Six Humiliation at the military prowess of the West caused a rethinking of the local culture as ‘backward’, ‘traditional’ against the ‘modernity’ of the West. The desire to be ‘modern’ was as much driven by the need to erase the humiliation as a people, as it was by the need to catch up with the West technologically; the latter being itself a means to the former. Western modernity was therefore never totally taken on board, there has always been an insistence that local, historical cultural resource can provide the necessary concepts for the organisation of a new society that will embrace Western science within Asian culture; the latter as essence of the culture, of society and of self, with Western science and technology for economic development. The genealogy of this line of reasoning stretches from the early 19th century to the attempt to develop an ‘Asian Value’ discourse in the late 20th century

Indeed it is the economic success of China and Japan and the Chinese diaspora scattered through East and South-East Asia, which can lead to the rethinking of Weber’s thesis and notions of East as tradition in contrast to the West as modernity (Cheah 2006). Certainly there does not seem to be an absence of entrepreneurial spirit, commercialism and capacity for economic accumulation in East Asia. Gunder Frank and others regard this as a return to the Asian domination of the world system, after a brief century and a half ‘Western interlude.’ It is the intertwining of military and economic power which was important in producing a Western modernity which had world changing impact. Important here was the particular condition of Western Europe, with its jumble of small nation-states drawn together in an increasingly competitive figuration, in which colonial conquest became an important resource base for inter-European political rivalries (Elias 1994). This unstable situation can be contrasted to East Asia; certainly in the role of overseas colonies, although this is not to under-emphasise the number of internal regional conflicts, peasant revolts and attempts at conquest by Japan and China around their peripheries. Yet, it is also the realisation of military force and economic power through a range of technologies which was important. This entails the capacity to improve the design of ships to increase efficiency, accuracy and speed of navigation, and also the design of weaponry and military tactics. Knowledge is if crucial importance, then, for the development of the means of destruction.11 Science and technology develop within literate cultures, which in turn are associated with urbanism and the success of merchants. 11

Knowledge, as Todorov (1992) argues, was central to the conquest of Mexico, and Cortez used a wide array of tactics, propaganda and ruses to triumph over the Aztecs and Montezuma.

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As Goody (2004:61-62) points out, Eurocentric historians are reluctant to grant that there could have been ‘bourgeois revolutions’ led by merchants and professionals in other parts of the world. He cites Goiten (1967), who wrote of a ‘bourgeois revolution’ marked by the presence of scholar-merchants in the medieval Jewish communities of the Geniza in eight and ninth century Cairo. He also refers to Zafrani’s (1996) study of the bourgeois revolution which took place in Islam, manifest in the intellectual effervesce in knowledge, poetry and artistic activities involving Jews, Muslims and Christians in tenth century Cordoba and Granada. The library of Cordoba at that time possessed some 400,000 books, whereas the library of the monastery of St Gall in Switzerland had around 400 (Goody 2004:74). This was a period followed two to three centuries later by the extraordinary activity of a school of translators, largely Jewish, who translated works of philosophy, medicine, astronomy and mathematics from Arabic into Latin and other vernacular languages. The key role of the Arabs in Spain as the ‘postmen’ redelivering the Greek knowledge, which they had long preserved and guarded, is well known (Sayyid 2006). It was this phase, involving the birth of the university in Europe, which formed the basis for the weakening of the authority of religious knowledge in Europe and the revival of secular enquiry, which culminated in the Enlightenment and the expansion of cumulative independent learning. Yet, less known is the connection and flows of knowledge from China to the Arab World and the general ‘criss-cross diffusion’ which occurred. The West clearly had no monopoly on merchant and bourgeois activities, and there are similarities in the pattern of the merchant groups and their specialist professional and artisan middle class associates, who produced an expanding urban commercial sphere with concomitant knowledge, communication, consumption, and leisure practices in both the East and the West (Goody 2004:71). Likewise, it is possible to see economic ‘individualism’ and entrepreneurial orientations, innovation, exploration and rationality, as accompanying merchants’ activities everywhere. Yet, it is hard to see commercial activity, monetisation of the economy, banking systems, use of paper money, calculation of interest rates, and even rice future markets which occurred in China and Japan at various times up to 17th and 18th centuries, as not involving rational calculation and practical rationality.12 In addition, Habib (1990:398-9) argues that Indian trade was 12

Indeed, it is also possible to see forms of individualism and rational calculation as important at particular times in Japanese history, despite all the commonly held Western stereotypes of ‘groupism,’ ‘group mind,’ emotional intuitionism and differently wired brains, which frequently resurface in popular and academic

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little different from commerce in Western Europe and that it enjoyed commercial institutions such as brokerage, deposit banking, bill money and insurance, adding that perhaps The European triumph over Indian (and Asian) merchants was not, then, one of size and techniques, of companies over peddlers, of joint stock over atomised capital, of seamen over landsmen. Might it not have been more a matter of men-of-war and gun and shot, to which arithmetic and brokerage could provide no answer, whether in the earlier ‘Age of Partnership,’ or after Plassey?13 (cited in Goody 2004:152)

Prior to the rise of the military power of European nations in the second half of the 18th and the 19th centuries, with their capacity to colonise, set up the slave trade and systems of indentured labour, and force open unequal treaty ports through firearms and gunboat diplomacy, there were multiple trade circuits within Asia as well as links between Europe and Asia through the development of merchant cultures.14 The rigidities of the social structures of China and Japan with their alleged impediments to merchants could well have been exaggerated (Goody 2004:106). Ming China after 1434 and Tokugawa Japan were by no means closed to overseas trade as is often assumed. Andre Gunder Frank (1998) estimates that overseas trade still made up over ten percent of the Japanese GNP at this time based on a network of overseas settlements of Japanese merchants in Vietnam, the Philippines and other places. In Ming China, Confucian doctrine may have been hostile to trade and consumption, but there was a good deal of ambivalence in practice. In addition, the Ming state left the economy pretty much alone to expand. In Japan, the bakuhan system which places samurai at the top of the four groups, above farmers, tradesmen, and merchants, formally placed all power in the hands accounts of Japan. On honorific individualism in Samurai culture prior to Tokugawa Japan see Ikegami (1995). 13 Ha-Joon Chang (2002) has argued that in the nineteenth century free trade was used as a means to de-industrialise colonial economies, in a similar way that WTO policies favor the intellectual property rights of transnational corporations, further exploitation today in the contemporary South (see Pieterse, 2006). 14 For example, the process of taking in silk goods from the East, then Chinese knowledge and machinery for silk production in Northern Italy over a number of centuries from the thirteenth century onwards illustrates a long term process of import substitution and then the development of an export market (see Goody 2004). The cotton and ceramics trade provides other examples. Notable is the attempt to breakdown the monopolies of production techniques and knowledge through observation and industrial espionage, not just the creative imagination of the lone inventor or entrepreneur of popular mythology.

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of the samurai. Yet, in practice, especially in the expanding cities such as Osaka and Edo, merchants enjoyed a lot of power and influence along with access to cultural participation (Ikegami 2005). Hostility to merchants under imperial and monarchical forms was the general rule, but in many different parts of the world, those in power had also to rely on merchants, as the global economy began to emerge and grow under its own impetus, certainly from the Song Dynasty (tenth century) onwards.

The Rise of Consumer Culture in China and Japan If the orthodox view of the exclusive rise of modernity in the West tends to depict culture as a set of deep-rooted stable background factors which demarcate peoples, nations, civilisations, then, this view of culture has difficulty accounting for cultural innovation and interchange. Yet, modernity is generally presented as involving cultural innovation in a wide range of areas: in literate forms of knowledge such as science and technology, but also in the development of a literate cultural sphere based on the circulation of books and innovation and discussion of the arts. In addition, there is an emergent consumer culture in which new goods circulate, in which taste hierarchies and classifications become important. The mastery of the new world of goods and fashion systems, in turn help to create new forms of experience, with a greater sense of individual authorship and reflexivity. The people who are caught up in this expanding world along with those who hover on the margins and seek to enter, require pedagogies, practical guides to help them cope with the new bodily controls and interactional forms, given their need to cultivate and ‘naturalise’ the new sensibilities. If capitalism, seen as the development of production geared to the market along with the use of money to purchase an expanding range of goods and experiences, is seen as central to modernity, the nature of the new world of goods and experiences becomes the subject of cultural accounting, both practically (the guide books and encyclopaedias designed to outline pedagogies of lifestyle and consumption), and theoretically (the novels, artistic and other forms designed to explain, interpret and speculate on the larger significance of the experience of these shifts). Indeed, one might speculate that the development of a modern culture should not just be conceived as merely a sudden break, the emergence of the modern urban man who seeks to invent himself á la Baudelaire, but as a long-term process of accumulation of sensibilities. This process of cultural accumulation did not just take place in Western Europe but in many parts of the world where there was the development of markets, trade and merchant communities. The cities

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of East Asia, especially China and Japan, can therefore be seen as having many of the characteristics, not just the infrastructure of trade and manufacturing, but also culture, which we associate exclusively with Western modernity. The development of a world economy, then, did not only mean the rise in the power potential of economic specialists (merchants, financiers et al), but in the cities which expanded through trade and manufacturing, we also see the rise of other specialists in knowledge and culture, along with various intermediaries. Merchant cultures, then, are more than the cultures of merchants, being larger urban cultures, taking in the whole urban network involving the manufacture and supply of goods for exchange, as well as the groups of lawyers, doctors, and professionals, plus the artisans and craftsmen needed to operate the system (Goody 2004:152). There are similarities between merchants in East Asia, the Near East with merchants in the West in their common organisational problems and difficulties, along with their cosmopolitan orientation and seeking of prestige and cultural influence. There was also a consumption side to this dynamic. This is particularly noticeable in China and Japan. Commercialisation can be traced back to the late Song Dynasty with its flourishing market culture and production of luxury goods in cities such as the Song capital Kaifeng. It is during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that commodification becomes widespread and an urban consumer culture began to develop. This became particularly marked in the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) with the increase in trade in luxury goods and the development of interest in connoisseurship. Books with titles such as Eight Discourses in the Art of Living and Treatise on Superfluous Things were available in the marketplace. Such books outlined principles of appreciating and collecting art and fashionable luxury goods (Clunas 1991). As Norbert Elias (1994) argued in his discussion of European ‘civilising processes,’ changes in patterns of conduct meant new forms of bodily and emotional restraint, which created a market for ‘how to do it’ handbooks and manners books. It can be argued that in Ming China there was an increase in handbooks, almanacs and “encyclopaedias for daily use” (Goody 2004:113), which were effectively guidebooks to the new forms of consumption and lifestyles. The same can be said for preTokugawa and early Tokugawa Japan, where an increase in literacy and book publishing provided a wide range of guidebooks, handbooks and practical encyclopaedias (Ikegami 2005). This would seem to have been more than an elite-based form of conspicuous consumption, or the court society system of good manners and fine distinctions, but rather, forms of consumption of goods involving a more fluid supply of goods along with

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new fashions, which could permeated the expanding middle classes in large cities. The rise of a consumer culture is a long-term process and like modernity, it is difficult to chart and fix a point of origin. There are many genealogies of consumer culture and we can note the confluence between the restricted fine-graded distinctions of court consumption (one of the clearest depictions of the European accounts of court society being Norbert Elias’s (1983) account of Louis XIV’s Versailles in the 17th century) and middle class patterns of consumption. In Elizabethan England, with the increase in wealth and influx of new goods from the Americas along with the stimulus from the Italian Renaissance, there were also changes in consumption patterns with new fashions and tastes not only in court society, but in the middle classes and through the trickle down effect via servants to other groups in large cities (McCracken 1988). Clunas (1991:148) emphasises that an examination of “the situation in China and Europe in the century or so from 1550 to 1650 reveals a strikingly similar picture, with an increasing lack of regard paid by consumers to the state’s attempts to intervene in their behaviour.” As sumptuary laws, designed to rigidly fix the access to certain goods and styles of dress to particular social groups, gave way to fashion systems in which new goods and tastes were introduced from the outside or through the innovation of cultural specialists on the inside, cultural intermediaries and brokers within particular societies were able to circulate information on how to consumer and experience the new sensations, especially for literate rising groups in the middle classes.15 Not only how to eat, consume and deport oneself through bodily regimes and controls, but also the governance of the household: the furnishing of rooms, the display of luxury items in the right setting became important not just for aristocrats and the lesser nobility, but for merchants and others. Also important in the process, in addition to connoisseurship, was the transformation of luxuries 15

On sumptuary laws, see Appadurai (1986) and also Pomeranz (2000). The latter argues that in England, Holland, China and Japan, sumptuary laws lessened in influence earlier than in Spain and Italy. Pomeranz (2000:131) remarks that in Ming China, while the early Ming state passed various sumptuary laws to regulate dress, tableware etc, they had little effect and soon became hopelessly outdated and irrelevant. At the same time, there were periodic attempts in 17th century England and the Netherlands and also Japan to reintroduce them. In Japan, sumptuary laws became enforced with the rise of the Tokugawa state in 1604 (the same time as they were ending in England), but they were difficult to impose and the burgeoning fashion system and use of fine silks flourished, especially in the cities (Ikegami, 2005:257ff).

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into everyday goods for the middle classes and eventually the poor. What Sidney Mintz (1995) called “the drug foods,” sugar, cocoa, tobacco, coffee and tea, were all luxuries in 16th century Europe, but became widespread in much of western Europe by the late 19th century (Pomeranz 2000: 115). This was also the case in China and to some extent, Japan. What is interesting here is the emergence of a fashion system, which means that people will throw outdated goods away and purchase new ones, thus increasing demand and stimulating the economy. The attempts to apply sumptuary laws were clearly attempts to fix status signifiers and restrict access to goods. Yet they frequently failed with people in the middle and lower orders seeking to acquire fashionable goods. The story of indigo, the blue dye which is familiar to because of its use in denim jeans, has a long history before it became work-wear for the inhabitants of Nîmes and the fashionable vernacular of post 1960s youth around the world. Indigo became a more valuable commodity than sugar, through being a prised fabric colour, which tells us something about the fashion priorities in early modern culture (see Taussig 2007). Fashion, then, as Simmel (1997a) pointed out, involves both imitation and distinction, with the denigration of outdated goods. It can be argued that it is a key dynamic of modern culture. A fashion system requires an increase in the variety of goods deemed socially significant, as well as an increase in the velocity of turnover. It also requires an increase in the range of the people who are allowed to possess the goods, and the degree to which they can be acquired from strangers. Additionally, it points to the need for an increase in imitative consumption, and the circulation of information – either by word of mouth (gossip) in private and public spaces or in the form of print media (handbills, broadsheets, magazines, handbooks, home encyclopaedias etc), to provide advice on not only the ‘latest’ and the ‘tasteful,’ but also advice on use. Ideally, this should occur in urban settings where there is the opportunity to see the new fashions, observe people wearing new clothing, or glimpse new interiors and artefacts. Pomeranz (2000:129) tells us that “these phenomena are best documented for various urbanised regions of western Europe: Renaissance (northern) Italy; Golden Age Spain; Holland; some parts of France; and England.” Yet the upper class households and merchant homes of Ming Dynasty China and Momoyama and Tokugawa Japan also became crammed with luxury goods, paintings, sculptures, fine furniture etc. What is notable in China and Japan of this period is the conspicuous consumption strategies of nouveau riches groups, who not only indulged in extravagance and luxury, eating and drinking to excess, but also engaged in lavish patronage of the arts (Burke 1993). This meant not only

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the need for guidebooks and manners books to help the new urban public, who lacked the traditional education in the Confucian classics, but also the demand for the educative novel. Notable here is the early seventeenth century novel Jin Pei Mei (Golden Lotus), described as the first novel of manners, and the mid-eighteenth century Hong Lou Meng, or Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone). The Pin Mei tells the story of a rich merchant from Shandong, who is a connoisseur of objets d’art and a great drinker and womaniser to boot, and is ‘a novel absolutely stuffed with descriptions of expensive furnishings’ (Burke 1993:152). The Hong Lou Meng, is referred to by Burke as “a kind of eighteenth-century Buddenbrooks, a nostalgic chronicle of the decline of a great merchant family, the Jias, who are doomed because, as an outsider puts it, ‘Both masters and servants… lead a life of luxury and magnificence… they can’t bring themselves to economise.’” Burke goes on to tell us that “The contents of different rooms in the family mansions are described with living care, so that the novel sometimes reads like an inventory of objets d’art, often antiques: paintings, calligraphic scrolls, mirrors, low tables of coloured lacquer, brocade curtains, yellow cedarwood armchairs...” (ibid). It is interesting to note that in French literature, like Chinese literature, the novel of manners also appeared in the seventeenth century, with Antoine Furetière’s Roman bourgeois (1666), a story about the attempts of the professional bourgeoisie to pass as nobility. There are interesting comments on interiors (antiques, furniture and curiosities) and the concern for clothes and language. A similar trend towards display and conspicuous consumption is apparent in the Momoyama period in sixteenth century Japan. The trend continued under the Tokugawa Shogunate, with a cycle of ruinous lavish court consumption, not only as the shogun forced daimyo and nobility with their retinue to attend court in the new rapidly growing capital Edo, but also through the construction of great houses with fine decorations, furnishing and ceremonial spaces. This was a gilded cage court society existence under the watchful eye of the shogun and his spies, similar to that described by Norbert Elias (1983) in Louis XIV’s Versailles occurring at approximately the same time in seventeenth century France. Although nominally at the bottom of the four-scale social ladder in Japan, merchants prospered in the cities, and the chonin turned to the arts and urban entertainment. In practice, in the cities, there was a good deal of mixing in the new urban leisure spaces and the pleasure quarters. As Burke (1993:154) remarks, A new society was producing a new culture. There was a trend towards the commercialisation of leisure, at much the same time as in the great cities

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Chapter Six of the west, Paris, Rome and Madrid as well as London. In Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, it took the form of teahouses rather than coffeehouses, sumo wrestling rather than boxing or bullfights, but the role of courtesans, the theatre and cheap print was remarkably similar in east and west. In practice, as one might have guessed, the separation between social groups and cultural genres was very much less clear cut than it was in principle. The boundaries were transgressed on both sides. The daimyo could not keep away from the pleasure quarters. Lower-status groups also appropriated or imitated high culture. Wood-block prints or kimono patterns associated with noble ladies allowed townswomen to imitate them

A number of points can be made. Firstly, neither in Japan nor China did the luxury culture go uncriticised or unopposed. Although Ming merchants were not impeded institutionally, culturally or politically to the extent often assumed in the West, conspicuous consumption did not sit easily with Confucianism. The emphasis on connoisseurship and gentility, or gentlemanly conduct, was also accompanied by a valuation of the amateur as against the professional, and the scholar against the dilettante. Clunas (1991) emphasises that the distinction between professional and amateur painters was still of great importance in the Ming Dynasty. In Japan the development of the za arts, the multiplicity of cultural circles of haiku and waka poetry, painting, the tea ceremony, cookery, kimono making and performing arts, formed a networked aesthetic public sphere which drew in merchants, samurai, tradesmen and other groups from the Momoyama period onwards. These enclaved public spheres, were hobby groups and voluntary associations which had a high level of active participation. They could swing between phases of luxury connoisseurship, austerity and purity, as well as commercialisation (the handbooks, advice manuals etc fed off and stimulated an active book print industry). One famous example of the pull to purity and simplicity is the case of Sen no Rikyu, the inventor of the tea ceremony and his various struggles and implicit critiques of the luxurious excesses of the Shogun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Sen no Rikyu (1521-1591) developed the tea ceremony into a highly refined aesthetic ritual, the wabi-cha, or ‘poverty’ tea ceremony with its zen-inspired emphasis on minimalism and simple bamboo and pottery utensils, contrasted with the vulgar display of Hideyoshi, who in 1587 had a gold tea room built (Ikegami 2005:120ff). Sen no Rikyu’s spirited artistic intransigence, along with his fame, eventually cost him his life as he was ordered to commit suicide by Hideyoshi. The Rikyu case offers an interesting illustration of the dynamics between high and low, vulgar and refined taste, stoical selfcontrol and excess, individuality and obligation to authority, the struggles between nobles, merchants and artists, between cultural capital and

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economic capital. This suggests that these dynamics, which are assumed to be more marked in the development of the European cultural sphere and autonomous art, are by no means unique to the West. Secondly, according to Pomeranz, there is good reason to think that ‘luxury’ demand was as dispersed among the various classes of Chinese and Japanese as it was among Europeans. In terms of the role of ‘free labour’ and markets in the economy, Europe was not ahead of China and Japan; indeed, Pomeranz (2000:165) tells us it may have lagged behind China and concludes that “[a]t the very least, all three of these societies resembled each other in these matters far more than any of them resembled India, the Ottoman Empire, or southeast Asia.” If a modern culture took a good deal of impetus from the market to generate the flows of new goods and experiences, the beginnings of the fashion and information systems associated with the beginnings of consumer culture, it also required forms of accounting and administration which depended on widening literacy, which in turn helped to stimulate print culture, handbooks, novels, broadsheets (in Japan, Kawaraban) which advised the middle class initiates on the appropriate desires, dreams and conduct. It has been argued that the focus in Western theories of modernity on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and the depiction of Asian societies as oriental despotisms, obscures the way that both were variants of a ‘tributary’ system (Wolf 1982; Goody 2004:132). In any case, the concentration on feudalism would seem to have not only obscured the common origins, but played down the role of towns in the West. Unlike Western European towns which suffered a decline in continuity in the Middle Ages (‘Dark Ages’), after the fall of the Roman Empire, the towns in Eurasia, such as Damascus and Baghdad as well as the cities of China and India, continued to develop trade and knowledge networks. Changes in patterns of consumption took place incrementally over a long period of time and were necessarily linked to changes in production. These were changes which increased the power potential of merchants and traders and the literate bourgeoisie, the cultural and knowledge specialists in the middle classes. The similarities in levels of production and consumption between China, Japan and England we have mentioned, suggests that the alleged antipathy towards trade and economic matters in Asia, was far from the whole picture. Goody (2004:136) sees the alleged difference between European and Asian cities, especially the assumption that Western towns which emerged in the Middle Ages developed a fundamentally different form, as highly questionable. It relied on an alleged historical difference constructed to show that only the Western towns were capable of producing the necessary entrepreneurs: ‘the .

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freedom–loving bourgeoisie that could form the basis of a capitalist system.’ Here again, the assumptions of European exceptionalism, in this instance that of the democratic commune, following the thesis of Pirenne and others which guaranteed the legal system and structures for commercial enterprise, is not the whole story. The analysis of Hankow by Rowe (1984) and Hunan by Perdue (1987) make the case that such features, emphasised by Max Weber in his study of the city, were also to be found in the Asiatic city.16 This could also suggest that although the public sphere, generally assumed to be exclusive to Europe, might not be totally absent from the Asian context. The linking of the public sphere to deliberative democracy, discourses on human rights and political change, as described by Habermas (1989) and others, would seem indisputable in the European context. 17 Yet, there could well have been other public sphere variants in Asia, which instead of having an overt political dimension, had a cultural one. This is the argument of Ikegami (2005), who in her analysis of Tokugawa Japan seeks to interrogate and broaden the notions of public and civil society.

Proto-Modern Civility in Tokugawa Japan Ikegami (2005) argues that in the Tokugawa era (1603-1867), Japan experienced ‘civility without civil society,’ not a form of civility linked to the emergence of a new type of public supported by associations of citizens seeking political rights, as was the case in Europe, but certainly a form of civility associated with good manners and polite modes of conduct. Rather than a single integrated public sphere as that which emerged in Europe, through freedom of the press and public discussion in the piazza or coffeehouse (long the source of contestation, struggles and remonopolisation processes), in Japan, there emerged a range of enclaved public spheres formed around voluntary associations in the arts – 16 In Japan, not only should the independence and fluidity of the enclave publics in Edo be mentioned, but the rise of independent towns, such as the city of Sakai, the home of Sen no Rikyu, should also be considered. The city was one of the few places in Japan to achieve a degree of autonomy, and was protected by gates and moats resembling the European free cities. It was governed by a board of merchant councillors and the arts flourished. However, it was conquered by Oda Nobunaga in 1568 (Ikegami 2005:122). 17 Current interest revolves around the global or transnational public sphere and the potential to extend the notion of public beyond the nation-state and the potential new types of public will formation (see Fraser 2007).

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associations which were not perceived as a political threat to the powerful Tokugawa state rule. These enclaved publics and even counter-publics in the form of the pleasure quarters, the ukyo (floating world), provided relatively free discursive spheres for aesthetic sociability, which made possible forms of experimentation and creativity, cultural diversity and identity play. People enjoyed participating in various cultural circles and learning the skills of poetry, flower arranging, the tea ceremony, painting and the various za arts, in enclaved interactional spaces within which there occurred a good deal of public mixing.18 It is also important to consider the degree of urbanisation which took place in Tokugawa Japan, with Edo (Tokyo) rapidly rising from a fishing village in the early 1600s to the largest city in the world in the 18th century (McClain et al 1994). The urban economy not only meant the rise of the fortunes of merchants, the development of luxury goods, entertainment and pastimes as mentioned above, but also the development of a strong print industry with relatively cheap availability of novels (via bookshops and book peddlers), such as Iharu Saikaku’s depictions of the rise and fall of people in the urban life of consumption (Burke 1997:154), poetry books, handbooks, manners books, guide books, encyclopedic dictionaries (setsuyoshu) and home encyclopaedias (many of which catalogued material and summarised knowledge without express editorial principles) and the kawaraban (broadsheets with advertisements, and lurid accounts and pictures of disasters, murders etc). It also meant a literate public in the process of development, a public in which some women also read kana novels, and reading aloud to groups of people was not uncommon. Tokugawa Japan contained many of the sensibilities and forms of cultural life we associate with modernity. It did not just contain the means of production, but also the means of consumption and of information, which encouraged the development of discriminating publics interested in fine distinctions and experiencing creative aesthetic sensibilities and sensations. This involved the training of not just the eye, but of the body: the development of a sense of iki, or sense of style and aesthetics in body movement, presentation of self and demeanour. This was coupled with a fashion system featuring changing styles and concern for high quality cotton, silk and linen fabrics with subtle patterns and dyeing techniques (Ikegami 2005:245ff). The capacity for stylised aestheticised interactions on the part of city-dwellers, especially in the enclaved aesthetic publics 18

The term public has a complex set of genealogies in Japan, with a range of terms such as kogi, ko and oyake used (Ikegami 2005:366). For a discussion of the relevance of mu’en spaces in the context of the development of equivalent public spheres in Japan, see Hanada (2006) and Hayashi (2006).

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necessitated a capacity to manage a more fluid and situational (context dependent) sense of identity. People developed the capacity to temporarily decouple themselves from the baku-han chains of interdependencies, responsibilities and power balances as they explored different modes of sociability and playful (although seriously framed) imaginative work while engaging in voluntary associational activities. Ikegami (2005:368) remarks that Although it is difficult to define the distinctive quality of modern social life in any precise way, the possibility of multiple affiliational identities made on the basis of individual choice seems to be an important index of modernity. Any society that does not allow individuals associational ties other than those they are born with – whether territorial or religious affiliations or kin ties – cannot be called modern. Although Tokugawa Japan was deliberately organised as a segmented society in which individuals were destined to live within structurally separate components, its aesthetic networks nevertheless facilitated individual choices regarding associational ties. Yet, having developed a domain of voluntary association ties on the plane of private aesthetic socialising, this society truly deserves the name of proto-modern as far as its civic culture is concerned

Ikegami (2005:374), goes on to remark that this new model of civility and enclaved pubic spheres revolving around poetry and the performing arts, should make us conclude that ‘Japan was moving towards its own versions of ‘proto-modernity,’ or ‘modernity before modernisation,’ in the dimension of cultures of sociability. Ikegami adds that the guidebook image of Japan as a land dedicated to beauty emerged from this cultural communicative sphere and the aesthetic socialisation connected people with the common culture of Japan. This experience of a commonality formed through shared aesthetic experiences laid the ground for the construction of the modern nation-state. This was not a deliberate attempt on the part of the Tokugawa state but rather the result of people’s networking and the market forces which created new channels of communication. However, after the Meiji restoration of 1868, these preexisting images of Japan as an aesthetic nation, the sense that people already had a clear cognitive map of their own culture through the aesthetic sensibility and the articulation through commercial publications, were rapidly exploited to shape Japanese cultural identities as a modern nation ready to compete in the global power struggle. Although Ikegami (2005:290) only makes one passing reference to Benedict Anderson’s (1991) study of the role of print capitalism in the creation of imagined communities, it can be argued that this construction

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of nation provides the sense of being networked together, through newspapers and other media, which is the other side of the coin of culture. On the one side, we have the Habermasian public sphere and its various transformations, the aesthetic enclaved public spheres Ikegami speaks of, but on the other side and certainly occupying the same time-space framework or chronotope, we have the attempted construction of nation as Gemeinschaft as an ‘organic community’ (Cheah 2006). The latter depends on some sense of ethnie, common language, myths, sentiments, and is not just an invention (see Smith 1998) on the part of rulers, who seek to exploit the dynamics of in-group/out-group, insider/outsider conflicts. Tokugawa Japan could be drafted in to provide images of aesthetic Japan, particularly relevant at certain points in its history, such as in the wake of the 1945 defeat by the United States, when Japan sought to step aside from politics and war, to promote an image of its peaceful past, of Japan as a cultured nation, the land of beauty and politeness, of skilled craftsman and refined sensibilities. In contrast, in the Second World War, powerful symbols of the cultural tradition of beauty, such as the cherry blossom, had been used to mobilise people’s patriotic sacrifice for the Japanese homeland. Top-down nation-building, the project to be modern to establish Japan’s place in the world (the ‘strong army, rich nation’ doctrine), to become civilised on Western terms, had meant the eclipse of culture in the German sense of kultur, the za arts and the aesthetic tradition, and a particular definition of Japaneseness. Culture (Japanese) gave way to civilisation (western), to meet the demands of the day. More succinctly, culture (the resilient different Japanese, with their own distinctive range of aesthetic sensibilities which had beautified Japan), became pushed into the back room, to be used as a repository of difference, with items to be wheeled out when necessary, as the frenzied activity of building the façade and substance of a competitive modern state which could escape the clutches of subordinate neo-colonialism, continued up front. Ikegami discovered a particular Japan relevant to her values and the values of the current age. The searchlight of her value question, the revaluation of the arts and aesthetic publics, has helped illuminate a particular image of Japan, the benefits of ‘civility without civil society,’ the ’strength of weak ties,’ linked together in ‘the proto-modern network revolution,’ with its ‘cultural innovation and vitality,’ an image which could be useful in contemporary global politics as a counter to other more dialogical (clashing of reason) constructions of the public sphere. Indeed, there is much to be said for this particular genealogy at this point in time both for Japan and the nascent global public sphere in the current wave of

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market-led, finance-capital and trans-national corporate dominated globalisation with its range of powerful global institutions such as the WTO, World Bank, WEF, etc. Yet, it also raises questions about the designation of Tokugawa Japan as proto-modern and the invention of genealogies.

Reading Edo as Tradition and Modernity To know you are modern, to know this moment is new and to impose this image on the future also involves knowing it is substantially different, (not just a difference of degree as one moves through a regular series of known moments), from the past (Koselleck, 1993). In effect, the past has to be constructed as tradition, as repetitive, ossified and static, dominated by ritual cycles. As Carol Gluck (1998:262) remarks, Modernity, by definition saw the future by setting itself off from the past. Newness was all, but it could only be grasped by juxtaposition to what was old. In France the ancien régime came to represent the whole of the old order; the very antithesis of the new revolutionary age... In Japan the Edo period became just this sort of historical imaginary. “Edo” (meaning the Tokugawa era, not the city later named Tokyo) was the invented other in relation to which modernity positioned itself. From early Meiji times, Japan’s before-the-modern was imagined largely in terms of an Edo identified as Japanese “tradition”

The Meiji reformers preoccupied with constructing their own image of Japanese newness, Meiji as civilisation (bunmei), as national and progressing, depicted Edo as oldness, as feudal, and as a hindrance (Gluck, 1998:265). Yet, once this Euro-American inspired modernity had become a reality in the early 1920s (Japan’s GNP surpassed those of England, France and Germany, after is ‘de-shackling’ from the Meiji unequal treaties and economic boom from being on the right side in World War One), the attitude to Edo shifted. For when the new Western-inspired modernity disappointed, the disappointment became attached to the West. As Gluck (1998:272) tellingly puts it, A syllogism had formed: Modernity is Westernisation. Japan is now modern. Therefore, Japan is Westernised: Japan is no longer Japan

This was the background for Japan to begin the adventure of developing an alternative modernity, a Japan purified of its Westernised materialism and to find a more spiritualised and militarised Japanese modernity. This became the basis of Japanese fascism, leading to war in

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the 1930s. Its intellectual side became explored by members of the Kyoto School in the 1930s and ‘40s (Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani et al) who sought to think through the basis for an alternative globalisation with a different basis than Western colonialism (see Heisig 1996; Sakai 1993). This was the Japan, which, according to the telling title of Harootunian’s (2000) book, was Overcome by Modernity in the Second World War. After the war, a period of disenchantment with ‘feudal’ Edo as the closed country, which should have been opened to give the Japanese chance to develop a ‘scientific spirit’ followed, as Japan sought to tie itself to a reformed and revamped modernity drawing its inspiration from the Meiji reformers. 19 Edo again became pre-modernity and tradition, impediments to the modern. In the 1980s, with the expansion and success of the Japanese economy which produced scare stories in the United States captured in the media in titles such as Japan in the Passing Lane (Kamata 1983) and movies such as Rising Sun (Raz and Raz 1996), in Japan itself there was an Edo boom with the image of ‘happy feudalism.’ This was accompanied by the discovery of the superior balanced ‘ecological’ Edo, with its floating world, simulations and sign play etc., which had allegedly reached the postmodern before the modern: in effect, “Japan’s pre-modern was in fact already post-” (Gluck 1998: 275). After the fall of the postmodern fashion in the 1990s and with it the fading of postmodern Edo, there briefly emerged an interest in Edo as somehow ‘transmodern,’ as the term modern itself became fluid and lost its referents. This was followed in the early 1990s by a more positive, proto-modern view of Edo, with Bito Masahide (1992; Gluck 1998:175) asking “What is Edo?” and answering “Japanese modernity.” Everything before Edo for him became ancient, everything after Edo became modern. Other civilisation theorists in the 1990s found in Edo “a kind of socialist paradise based upon polities of economic equality,” as having experienced an industrial revolution and peace, a lesson for the world in a time of diminishing resources. Edo became a modernity not just for Japan, but for the world (Gluck 1998:276). Enter Ikegami. Once we have engaged in this sociology of knowledge exercise and started to sift through the genealogies of the modern, the world becomes a 19

It should also be added that the image of modern society in the postwar era, was influenced a good deal by the American social science ‘oversocialised’ view of culture as integrative and orderly, with works such as Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) being highly influential. This assumption that Japan enjoyed a persistent cultural identity beneath the flux of modernisation became not only a truism of area studies, but was also fed back into Japanese social science (Siberman, 2002).

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different place. It is no longer possible to start to narrate the world in forward mode, innocently jumping from one event to another. A central feature of our modernity is our expectation of change and a different future: that modernity amounts to this constant colonisation of the past by the future. Each new time can mean a new time in academic fashions, not just driven by institutional and disciplinary processes of knowledge monopolisation, or insider and outsider struggles with their avant-garde dynamics, but through the attempt to respond to the complexities of a changing socio-cultural world, with its shifting political struggles which propels upward or downward particular nations, social groups and strata, predisposing them to develop an affinity for particular progressive or fateful narratives. One aspect of the culture of modernity, then, could well be this ‘condition’ in cultural and knowledge production. It is not only driven by a market dynamic (economic capital driving cultural production), but also by various cultural dynamics which are manifest in popular culture, consumer culture and artistic, intellectual and academic cultural production (fashion dynamics, avant-gardism, invention and preservation of classics and canons, hybridisation and fusions, etc.) within the field of cultural production.20 If we seek to understand the relationship between modernity and culture, then, we cannot avoid being conscious of the changing meanings attributed to particular ages, variously designated as the seedbed of modernity or the enduring source of tradition. The conditions of possibility of these designations, as Gluck argues, lie in the present, in the responses to contemporary issues, and shifting value complexes in response to larger socio-economic and political events. Yet, this is not just a question of writing history, in re-coding Edo through an expanding range of tropes. It is also a question of the cultural archive that makes it possible. This entails an archive of cultural material, especially texts, and in the case of Edo, also visual images (ukiyo and other paintings and drawings), which drew from popular culture and the market. As mentioned above, in the discussion of Ming novels and handbooks, this needed a literate public, which in turn depended on the institutions and markets of cultural 20 I am conscious that a similar analysis of the construction of China Modern could be made the way Carol Gluck performs on Japan. Important here are the ways in which in the 1990s, postmodernism has been varyingly embraced and challenged within Chinese academic and intellectual circles seeking to define itself in relation to the Maoist communist past and a present in which an emergent consumer culture gained major significance. See the discussions by Chen Xiaoming on postmodernism (2006) also Dirlik (2000).

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production and consumption. The za arts and enclaved publics, along with the market for novels, handbooks and home encyclopaedias, discussed by Ikegami, provided this basis in Tokugawa Japan. Hence, the literate popular culture provided an Edo repository, an archive which could be explored and reformatted to provide significant material to meet the needs of a particular age. In 1920s Japan, Edo again became fashionable with the explosion of mass culture at a time when the Japanese economy was strong and the Meiji westernisation which had previously confined Edo to backward feudal tradition, was rejected. Now the Edo ‘cultural storehouse’ could be re-opened to show Edo in a more positive light, as the source not just of proto-modern tendencies, but a uniquely Japanese past which had produced its own form of ecological stable efficiency, the potential source of a Japanese modern. Edo provided material for popular entertainment not only in cheap books, novels, magazines, newspapers, but also in the new radio broadcasts and movies. What is of particular interest here is this embracing of the Edo past, the reconstitution of Edo as a positive source of popular Japanese tradition, occurred at the same time as ‘the modern’ was being celebrated in the nascent consumer culture. In 1920s Tokyo, the modern girl, or moga, emerged in the Ginza and the downtown city streets, the department stores, the sakariba entertainment areas of dance halls, cinemas and cafés. The modern girl, with her flapper style, expressed a vitality, freedom of movement and independent spirit, in marked contrast to the Meiji reinvented tradition of the modest ‘good wife and wise mother’ (See Tamari 2006). The moga, was assumed to be the epitome of the modern embrace of the new, a largely media-invented new woman, whose impact was all the more heightened in Japan. The modern girl can be contrasted to the jokyû, the café waitress, who manifested a fusion of modern styles with elements drawn from the long history of female sex work (Silverberg 1998). As Chakrabarty (1998:292) remarks the term jokyû, was only intelligible as part of the new culture of the interwar period with its importation of foreign words and media images, which only proved intelligible when combined with, and differentiated from, other Japanese words referring to women in public such as meshimori onna, yûgjo, inbaita, etc. The modernity of the jokyû, then, only took its meaning from a sign chain and field of differences in which old and new lay alongside each other without strict hierarchy. Chakrabarty, concludes that The erection of polarities such as tradition and modernity has to ignore these carry-overs between categories. The modern like any other historically evolved structure, is hybrid. It contains polysemy…

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Various founding taxonomies such as tradition/modernity, feudalism/capitalism, are binaries which become transformed into hierarchies. They are based on progressive, developmentalist metanarratives of history which are kept in place by the various discourses and practices of institutional power. However, in saying this, it does not mean that it is possible to go back to the field of differences, beneath these founding classificatory acts, in which the answer to the question ‘what was Japanese tradition’ can clearly emerge. Rather, there is the play of ambiguities and polysemy in the constitution of the categories of Japanese modernity and tradition, which points to the contingent space in which the two interdependent categories were invented and continue to be reinvented anew: contingent, because, as Gluck shows, there is a continual process of reworking the Japanese historical cultural archive, in terms of the present contingent events which propel the trajectory of the nationstate forwards through history. These events mean that it is inevitable that historians and the public will continually be drawn to re-evaluate, reinscribe and re-inflect the past as tradition and modern, to fit in with the ‘demands of the day.’ This involves a continual process of declassification and re-classification.

Multiple and Alternative Modernities The relationship of culture to modernity is complex. As mentioned, culture often is perceived as bifurcating: an unchanging set of values, beliefs and assumptions that ensures the coherent reproduction of social life as tradition. At the same time, some cultures are seen as carrying within them the seeds of world transformation. Thus, while often regarded as something fundamental, fixed and persistent, particular cultures or subcultures, such as the Protestantism addressed by Weber, embody a powerful generative force: the Protestant ethic not only was conducive for the spirit of capitalism, but the process of rationalisation and valuation of transformative inner worldly conduct which produced modernity and the modern life. Weber’s argument, although couched in ideal type terms, has the merit of not just working a cultural logic through a reading of texts (cultural logic not being an unproblematic notion – see Featherstone 1991: ch.4), but of seeking to link the discussion to conduct and life transformative experience. As mentioned earlier in relation to the discussion of modernity, the key question as Jack Goody (2004:29) states it is “If culture changes, as surely it must, how then is it an explanatory variable?” The problem is that culture becomes a meaningless variable as it is generally used in an all-

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inclusive way, which does not permit the focus on particular features. Culture is presented as outside and resistant to economics, as designating ‘inner values and attitudes,’ as a long-enduring set of background variables. If it is everything outside economics, i.e., that which hinders or helps the economy take off into modernity, then culture also includes the social. There is a further problem in terms of identifying the unit of cultural specificity. In discussions of modernity, especially those which argue for multiple modernities, there is the tendency to reify cultures as wellbounded integrated entities which have inner coherence that persists over time. Effectively, cultures are presented as islands, with the units of culture generally seen as civilisations or nation-states. Yet, the definition of civilisations and the construction of the culture of the nation-state as an ‘imagined community,’ or ‘invented tradition,’ as we have discussed in the case of Japan, is itself a product of modernity. Only in modernity do we have cultural specialists and intermediaries directed by politicians, state functionaries and powerful economic interests, given the latitude to reorder the cultural archive in coherent and affectively-binding ways to produce all the paraphernalia - the folklore, stories, heroes, myths, rituals, ceremonies, memorials - which function to pull together the nation. This re-ordering process has an important exterior dimension in international politics, taking place within the figuration of competing nation-states, as nations sought to mobilise their populations as economic and military resources designed to maximise ‘biopower,’ and construct the nation as a ‘sacred community’ through cultural education processes. The concept of multiple modernities suggests that what modernity supposedly left behind, stubbornly persists, blurring the boundaries between the modern and the pre-modern (Dirlik 2003:287). It suggests a readily demarcatable global multiculturalism with coherent, manageable units of culture, ready for comparison and plays down internal conflicts and diversity. In addition, it neglects the continual process of inter-cultural exchange, the movement of knowledge and culture around the world by merchants and religious movements which points to a high level of internal cultural complexity. As Sakai (1998) points out, the project of the construction of the national society as a homolingual community, which forms the basis for assumptions of a common culture, depends upon a process of imposed language standardisation. This entails the suppression of the hetero-lingual non-aggregate linguistic community of foreigners, in which people engaged in polyglot discourse, with the assumption that their addresses formed a mixed audience and that translation would always be incomplete and imperfect, but workable.

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Multiple modernities, then, suggests cultural differences that are themselves structured around ‘spatialities,’ such as civilisations, nationstates, cultures and ethnicities, which are themselves the product of modernity, or the modernisation process. The focus on culture as the main or decisive source of difference relegates to the background social and political differences which cut across the background of these various spatial boundaries (Dirlik, 2003:285). This focus on spatial separation, not only misses intercommunication between the various structured units (societies), it also tends to lead to the playing down of the differences over time. In the case of Japan, the construction of Nihonjinron, Japanese uniqueness, as a national ideology, plays down the societal family resemblance between modern, or modernising societies. As Schmidt (2006:81) puts it, “Is Japan significantly more different from Spain than Denmark or Britain or Greece are? And does contemporary Japan have more in common with pre-modern Japan than with, say, contemporary Canada or Germany?” The multiple modernities perspective is based upon the assumption that there must be greater differences across civilisational lines and cultures than across time. Multiple modernities and the related concept of ‘alternative modernities,’ are of course discovered after the event, and it is legitimate to ask what is at stake in such designations in the way Carol Gluck dissected the shifting Japanese historical presentation of Edo as tradition or modernity. Alternative modernities can legitimately be applied to the various projects to construct a different cultural programme and alternative institutional framework for modern societies. Here we think of the projects of soviet socialist and communist party dominated societies, such as the USSR or China, or fascist and national socialist societies such as Germany and Italy (see Arnason 2000, 2001; Arnason et al 2004; Herf 1986), or Japan in the Asia and Pacific Wars, 1930-45. In all these cases, alternative modernity was an active project conceived by a party structure with its own ideological apparatus and institutional structures designed for the total mobilisation of the population to serve the state/national aims. What is clear after various military and economic defeats in 1945, 1989, 1991 is that all these projects have failed, with the ambiguous case of China remaining to be played out. If the notion of alternative modernity in the sense of a cultural project for wholesale social transformation, given these, defeats no longer makes sense today, there are those who emphasise a more restricted project of producing differences within the cultural spheres of modern society. Gaonkar (1999), for example, argues that once modernity has expanded from its origins in the West to become established globally, non-Western

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people are able to critically engage to produce their own hybrid modernities. Alternative modernity, then, in this sense is used to argue that with the decline of Western master-narratives of modernity, there is no longer a governing centre and hence, “modernity today is global and multiple” (Gaonkar 1999:13). What has travelled to the rest from the West is not only modernity in the sense of institutional arrangements, social practices and cultural forms, but also modernity in the sense of a critical discourse which interrogates the present. Different sites around the world do not mimic the Western institutional order of modernity, nor generate an adversarial modern culture with its preoccupation with self-realisation and self-expression, as discussed by Daniel Bell (1976) and others. Rather, they engage in a unique, contingent and culturally-specific reading of the two strands of modernity (societal modernisation and cultural modernity) to pluralise the experience of modernity; following Charles Taylor (1999), it is argued we need both to “recognize and problematise the unavoidable dialectic of convergence and divergence.” Convergence is usually thought of in terms of institutional frameworks (market economy, state administration, etc.). Divergence is primarily thought of in terms of lived experience and cultural expressions filtered through the habitus and social imaginary of a particular set of people. The alternative modernity perspective focuses on site-specific variations, the ‘creative adaptations’ to societal modernisation. The site-based analyses, according to Gaonkar (1999:17), enable us to see ‘creative adaptation’ as an interminable process of questioning the present, which is the attitude of modernity. It is precisely in this sense that ‘modernity is an incomplete project and necessarily so.’ The connection of the cultural dimension of modernity to experience echoes the concerns of Koselleck (1993), who endeavours to answer the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? He focuses on the categories of experience and expectation, arguing that the distance between them expands in Neuezeit, with expectations distancing themselves more from previous experience. A new horizon of expectations is opened up, with history conceived as a longterm process of growing fulfilment, subject to active human intervention, later to be conceived as progress. Koselleck (1993:267) goes on to tell us that Kant may well have been the originator of the term Fortschritt (progress), in his strenuous opposition to the thesis that things would always remain the same and belief that new experiences, such as the French revolution, could be accumulated to sustain an ‘advance to the better.’ History became formulated and experienced as unique and open to human intervention, with the need to bridge the increase in the gap

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between experience and expectation. In his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Foucault (1984:39) remarks that modernity should not be seen as an epoch, but rather, following Kant, as an attitude, a distinctive way of acting and behaving, as ‘an ethos.’ Kant’s work is important because it involves a reflection on the moment he is writing, on history, and on the conditions of possibility of knowledge. This modern attitude is ‘one that simultaneously problematises man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject (Foucault 1984:42). This is the basis of the European Enlightenment spirit of critique, and something which also holds the potential to open up a new horizon of expectations for political practice, which Kant hoped would lead to a new republican Bund (league of associations), of ‘self organising peoples,’ to produce a cosmopolitan new international politics. Yet, if modernity, as conceived by Kant, involved an attitude of critique, of problematising the present, emphasised a new attitude or ethos, involving a voluntary way of thinking and feeling, of acting and behaving, then this new form of consciousness could occur in art as well. For Baudelaire, this new modern attitude involves an ironic heroicisation of the present, but not that of the flâneur who drifts through the city as a spectator, more that of the dandy who seeks to extract from fashion, the quality of the new or modernity, to grasp, imagine and transform the highly valued present. To be modern for Baudelaire, Foucault (1984:41) comments, involves a dandyisme which not only involves a surrender to the flux of the present moment, but a deliberate asceticism, through seeking to make one’s body, conduct, feelings and passions a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is a man who tries to invent himself, who forces himself to face the constant task of producing himself anew. As Maffesoli (1991) has argued, this involves an ‘ethic of aesthetic,’ not just an aesthetic attitude to life, the aestheticisation of everyday life, but the concern to aestheticise one’s persona, conduct and life, to create an ordered life (Featherstone 1995: chs 3,4; 1991: ch 4). This attitude of questioning the present, of invention of the self, involves an attitude of taking the emergent, the flux of material thrown up by the present moment along with the reworking of the experience in the fashions of art and consumer culture seriously. Baudelaire’s perceptions developed in mid-nineteenth century Paris, and it is this experience of city which gave rise to the new aesthetic sensibility which is seen as the founding moment of modernism by Benjamin (1999) and others (Berman 1983). It is possible to write the history of modernism as the counterculture of modernity, involving a constant critical artistic dialogue

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attempting to grapple with the transformations of modern life, the technological, industrial and business changes which restructured and remodelled the fabric of urban life into the experience of metropolis which Simmel (1997b) spoke about in his famous essay. Notable here is the affective response to modern life, the dizzying visual, aural and proprioceptic bodily sensations of shock, speed, movement, intensity, produced not only by the crowd, but by the trams, motor cars, buses and trains, with their attendant dangers producing new stresses, anxieties and fears, to be theorised and clinically diagnosed as neurasthenia, psychasthenia and other ‘new’ illnesses. Not only did this different present produce new historical memories, which were recorded, recreated and narrated by new twentieth century media such as the gramophone, radio and movies which sought to capture the pace of modern life, they also produced the longing for the opposite: the reassuring images of harmonious rural life and the ‘timeless folk.’ As Chakrabarty (1998:294) reminds us in his discussion of invented tradition in Japanese modernity “[i]n effect, ‘anxiety,’ ‘shock,’ and ‘fear’ circulated... as the most uninterrogated categories, while serving, most usefully, to remind us that no ‘invention of tradition’ is effective without a simultaneous invocation of affect, of sentiments, emotions and other embodied practices.” What is interesting here is the dual response to this modern condition: both modernism driven by the avant-garde dynamic quest for ‘the new,’ and the retreat to the imagined reassuring images of tradition, both place a high premium on invention.21 This dynamic of invention, according to Gaonkar (1999:13) was played out around the world in different sites, as various peoples encountered the experience of modernity, as the institutional parameters, social practices, cultural forms and intellectual discourses of Western modernity became circulated. Alternative modernities, then, for Gaonkar, unlike Eisenstadt’s notion of multiple modernities, is not written in a strong sense to indicate persistent civilisational or cultural forces which endure to shape long durée differences. In addition, it is not a societally mobilised project, but rather a smaller scale mediated cultural responses to the spread of Western modernity, in the wake of the dominance of western techno-economic modernisation. These responses were not premised on robust persistent cultural differences which marked different ways into 21 1920s Japan, especially with the rebuilding of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake and the expanding consumer culture, as Harootunian (1998, 2000) points out, played this out; not only exhibiting the intellectual and artistic fascination with modern life, the modan, but the retreat from it into the invented tradition with its talk of harmony, beauty and spirit, the alleged categories of the ‘timeless folk.’

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modernity, nor do they retain the promise of different routes out of modernity, as for example the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the 1930s and 1940s German or Japanese modernity sought. Rather, alternative modernities points to the view that modernity today offers people around the world the opportunity to engage critically with their own hybrid modernities. It is not the end of a single master narrative for modernity, the end of modernity or coming of postmodernity, but instead, the absence of a governing centre, which produces latitude for multiple variation and ‘creative adaptation’ in a range of sites. This reading of the culture of modernity as invention is premised upon the cultural resources, the availability of means of cultural production, circulation and consumption. Yet, as we have shown in the example of Ming China and Tokugawa Japan, the evidence of these resources themselves gives rise to the search for similarities with Western modernity and endless discussions about proto-modern potentials. What it does is broadens the range of phenomena, which can be considered as relevant for modernity and take us away from models which stress the replication of the allegedly key Western cultural ingredient. In relation to the cultural dimension of modernity, the expansion of the cultural sphere is clearly a crucial process, whereby people discover that they are modern through various literary and artistic cultural forms and institutions (Featherstone 1995: ch 2). If the experience of the modern points to the expectation of a different present, then, the expansion of the market for cultural goods produced by cultural specialists, certainly helped to cater for it. If a change in the rhythm of movement in lived time and space creates the potential for new experiences, reflections and expectations, then travel itself could be considered as ushering in something which presaged the experience of modernity (Featherstone, 1995:152). There are, then, complex genealogies of the modern, which are in the process of being uncovered. In addition, ambivalent attitudes towards the modern are manifest in the characteristic ways of dealing with the new sense of temporality seen as accompanying, or defining the emergence of the modern. The move towards modern consumption should not be seen as a move from Puritanism to hedonism as Bell (1976), Campbell (1987) and others have argued, but as more of a ‘calculating hedonism,’ as people sought to experience and cope with, but not necessarily resolve, the dilemmas of both. As Simon Sharma (1987) indicates, in his discussion of the emergence of modern consumption in seventeenth century Amsterdam, the seemingly contradictory impulses of calculative rationality and abstraction and hedonism existed alongside each other. Attending to both church and tavern in everyday life, may have involved people in a moral

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ambivalence, but according to Sharma (1987:371; cited in Miller 1994:79) in many “departments of Dutch culture, opposite impulses were harmoniously reconciled in practice... Nor did it take any lofty wisdom to see that the world was not torn asunder between abstinence and indulgence. Any fool could see that the same people embodied, at different times, in different places, the values appropriate to their impermanent role.” The demands of a radical sense of the present, along with the demands of the day and eternity, helped to produce the experience of modernity as a dilemma. As Miller (1994:79) puts it, The core dilemmas of modernity lies in the consequences of the new temporality: that is a distinct sense of present, future and past, which leads to an increasing concern with the knowledge of self-construction of the criteria by which we live

This ambivalence has departed from the conventional sociological accounts of modernity, which can be too quick to set out from the neat ideal type dichotomies of tradition and modern societies. Certainly, secularisation does not fit neatly into the process, although it was clearly central to the eighteenth century European philosophical discourse of modernity as progress and enlightened escape from religious dogma and deception.22 Chakrabarty (2000: 14-16,101-4), for example, in discussing India mentions two logics of power in modernity; one secular based upon European institutional rule, and the other continuing to bring gods and spirits into the domain of the political, suggesting a pluralisation of power within global modernity. Chakrabarty goes on to contest the authority of secular, historicising, western forms of knowledge which seek to define modernity in a singular way which draws from European experience.

Conclusion: Culture, Civility and the Global Public As mentioned earlier, a further dimension of modernity often seen as definitive of modern societies is the question of the right to speak and participate in the public arena: democratisation. Habermas (1989) focused on the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth century Europe, the rise of what he was later to call ‘communicative rationality,’ modes of critical debate and argumentation which had political potential for democratisation. Ikegami (2005:25), on the other hand, argues that 22

The secular nature of the public sphere is often overestimated. A strong impetus for reform continued within the public sphere in the West from Unitarian Church and other nonconformist religious groups (Venn and Featherstone 2006).

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Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like Europe, produced hierarchical civility (good manners with a stress on politeness and the ‘mask of courtesy’). However, whereas the European civility opened up into a civil society to help produce spaces in which a public sphere and the Enlightenment could develop, Japan, in contrast, produced a form of ‘civility without civil society,’ due to the Tokugawa system of social segregation and restricted formal public world with its hierarchical civility. Yet, according to Ikegami (2005:39), ‘wide enclaves of free discursive spheres emerged outside the boundaries of the formal public world.’ These ‘enclaved publics,’ the za arts, the arts and literature associations, were not seen as challenging to the Tokugawa Shogunate, and allowed for the formation of a network of communicative spheres in which people could experience sociability, identity switching and cultural mobility. The Tokugawa aesthetic publics contrasted with the critical-rational European publics in the way in which the former valued more implicit tacit modes of communication and the latter assumed more explicit articulation of differences through argumentation. Yet, Ikegami (2005:383) is reluctant to let go of the potential of the aesthetic cultural sphere and argues for its relevance in the modern world in which ‘we participate in multiple publics in society and are constantly switching connections from one to the other.’ The Japanese za arts and use of the ritual logic of the mu’en (no relation) spaces, encouraged horizontal fellowship and the acceptance of differences. Ikegami (2005:384) adds that The current world situation with its communicative demands and challenges is in many ways structurally similar to the situation in the Tokugawa era. The normative implications of the Japanese aesthetic publics this resides, paradoxically, in underscoring the human ability to create connectivity by means of decoupling into a ‘no relation’ mode within relational networks

Ikegami sees this as a potential step forward from the difficulties associated with the paralysis of democracy in multi-ethnic and multireligious societies, and in a world in which we increasingly have to interact with others, whose communicative styles often differ radically from our own, either directly or through mediate systems such as e-mail. Ikegami (2005:384) adds that the modern world could need “a new form of global civility for effective communication,” and that the pluralism of communicative styles and switching of identities and capacity to handle

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diversity needed, could well learn from the Japanese example.23 If, as Norbert Elias (1994) argues, there is a link between civility and violence control, this relationship is being severely tested today in a time of increasing belligerency and warfare, based on the United States’ ‘state of exception' views of its sovereignty (Malik 2006; Dirlik 2003; Ugarteche 2007).24 If a global public sphere is to emerge, then it could well need to explore more flexible modes of communication, as Ikegami suggests. Max Weber’s vision of modernity emphasises a sort of Darwinist struggle between nation-states bent on winning in an elimination contest. The nation-state with its sense of singular purpose and national destiny, was one, albeit problematic, outcome of modernity. Certainly a glance at international politics today, with the growing instabilities of the so-called Pax Americana and end of ‘the American Century,’ offers the prospect of a new cycle of global political and economic struggles with the potential for military conflicts, as power balances shift with the rise of Asian powers (notably China, India, Pakistan and Iran) with their own agendas. Yet, modernity is also associated with the development of a range of counter-institutions and public spaces. If modernity in its various manifestations has bequeathed us a public and cultural sphere, which has the potential to reach from transnational to even global scope, then this space has to be relational and expansive enough to work through a plurality of communicative styles and modalities.

******* Modernity is generally associated with a heightened intellectual impulse for reflexivity, for rethinking the grounds of knowledge in a shifting context of rapid social change. In Europe, the assumption was that universal knowledge was not only possible, but also that the scope of the 23 There is not the space here to address the question of the intimate or affective public sphere (Berlant and Warner 1998) and neo-vitalist attempts by Lazaratto and others to rethink public life as a site of expression and invention (see Terranova 2007; Featherstone and Venn, 2006). There are also interesting parallels between Ikegami’s view of Edo and Sennett’s (1976) discussion of the functionality of ‘masking’ and playfulness in eighteenth century French public life, prior to the fall of public man through our over-concern with revelatory intimacy in public and ‘destructive Gemeinschaft.’ 24 There are considerable debates amongst Elias scholars about the relationship between civilising and de-civilising processes and the switching between modes of civility and violence control in the metropolitan centers and violent excesses in the colonial peripheries (see Mennell 1989).

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rational scientific method could be extended from the analysis of nature to the human domain. Yet, the quest for universality in the human and social sciences have been fraught with difficulties in terms of the historical and praxiological dimensions of human existence, on the one hand, and the active discovery and construction of cultural differences alongside the development of the nation-state in which culture became synonymous with national cultures, on the other. The dangers of the emphasis on culture are that it promotes and essentialises national differences. At the same time, while this invention of national cultures is to be seen as part of modern culture, the culture of modernity clearly means more: pointing to the invention of an active cultural sphere based both upon print and commodity production along with a range of interstitial quasi-public spaces. As I have argued, the roots of this cultural sphere go back a long way and cannot be regarded as the exclusive province of a particular place, such as Europe. A consumer culture and a print culture have the potential to alter the nature or public life. Yet, increasingly, we are becoming aware that the public sphere as described by Habermas in terms of European development and associated with rational argumentation and democratisation, may not necessarily be the only outcome. Habermas was, of course, aware of the deformation of the public sphere related to the mass media monopolisation processes. Also significant were the active policies of authoritarian states analysed by Horkheimer and other critical theorists. A globalised public sphere in the positive sense is still only a potential. In this context, Ikegami’s investigation of an alternative genealogy of public life and civility provides an interesting counter example. There is a lesson here in terms of the increasingly globalising archive which stands behind all scholarship. We can no longer assume this to be located within the West, nor can we clearly presume that Western developments were somehow benign, or superior prototypes for the development of the world as a whole. Global knowledge is an impossible ambition, yet it is an ambition written into the authority claims of many forms of knowledge, especially those which sought scientific and rational legitimation as they emerged within modern societies. If our intention has increasingly become one in which we subject these claims to critique, and uncover alternative genealogies, then the classification of knowledge also becomes subjected to critique, certainly in terms of scope and level of generality. Postmodernism and postcolonial theory point to the difficulties of existing authority claims along with things which have been misplaced, forgotten and occluded from authoritative accounts. In many ways, there

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has always been a crisis in modern thought, in adjusting to a world in which new knowledge and social experimentation became more prevalent and officially sanctioned, throwing doubts on the grounds and legitimacy of knowledge. Today, we face a further crisis in this process, one in which Western-based claims to global knowledge have become problematised.25 To construct adequate knowledge and to think through the ways in which it could work in relation to a nascent global public sphere, along with the modes of sociability and civility that ground that sphere, is one of our pressing tasks.

References Anderson, Benedict, 1991: Imagined Communities. Revised edition, London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun, 1986: “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” pp. 3-63 in: Arjun Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnason, Johann, 2000: “Communism and Modernity,” Daedalus 129: 6190. —. 2001: “The Multiplication of Modernity,” pp. 131-156 in Eliezer BenRafael and Yitzhak Sternberg (eds.) Identity, Culture and Globalization. Leiden: Brill. Arnason, Johann, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wittrock Björn (eds.), 2004: Axial Civilizations and World History. Leiden: Brill. Barnes, Harry E. (ed.), 1966: Introduction to the History of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bell, Daniel, 1976: Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. London: Heinemann. Benedict, Ruth, 1946: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Benjamin, Walter, 1999: The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner, 1998: “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 25: 547-566.

25 The investigation of this process and the attempts to re-think knowledge in the light of the processes of globalisation and digitalisation is one of the aims of the Theory, Culture & Society New Encyclopaedia Project – see the Theory, Culture & Society ‘Problematizing Global Knowledge,’ special issue – especially introduction by Featherstone and Venn (2006).

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Berman, Marshall, 1983: All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Bertens, Hans, 1995: The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge. Blaut, James M., 1993: The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford Press. —. 2000: Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1984: Distinction. London: Routledge. Burke, Peter, 1993: “Res e Verba: Conspicuous Consumption in the Early Modern World,” pp. 148-161 in: John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.) Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge. Campbell, Colin, 1987: The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 1998: “Afterward,” pp. 285-296 in: Stephen Vlastos (ed.) Mirror of Modernity: Invention of Tradition in Modern Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 2000: Provincializing Europe. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chang, Ha-Joon, 2002: Kicking Away the Ladder. London: Anthem Press. Cheah, Pheng, 2006. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Chow, Rey, 2002. The Protestant Ethnic & The Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Clark, John J., 1997: Oriental Enlightenment: the Encounter between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge. Clunas, Craig, 1990. Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Oxford: Polity Press. Dirlik, Arif, and Zhang Xudong (eds.), 2000: Postmodernism and China. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Dirlik, Arif, 2003: “Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism,” European Journal of Social Theory 6: 275-292. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 2000: “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129: 1-29. Elias, Norbert, 1994: The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 1983: The Court Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Featherstone, Mike, 1991: Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. —. 1995: Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity. London: Sage. —. 2000. “Archiving Cultures,” British Journal of Sociology 51: 161-184.

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Goonatilake, Susantha, 1998: Towards a Global Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gunaratne, Shelton A., 2005: The Dao of the Press: A Humanocentric Theory. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Gunder Frank, Andre, 1998. Re-ORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen, 1985: “Modernity: an Incomplete Project,” pp. 3-15 in Hal Foster (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto. —. 1983: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 1989: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habib, Irfan, 1990: “Merchant Communities in Precolonial India,” pp. 377-399 in: James D. Tracy (ed.) The Rise of Merchant Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Stuart, 1992: “The Question of Cultural Identity,” pp. 273-325 in: Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (eds.) Modernity and its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hanada, Tatsuro, 2006: “The Japanese ‘Public Sphere’: the Kugai,” in special issue on Problematizing Global Knowledge (edited by Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Ryan Bishop and John Phillips), Theory, Culture & Society 23: 612-614. Harootunian, Harry, 1998: “Poetry,” pp. 144-162 in: Stephen Vlastos (ed.) Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 2000: Overcome by Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hayashi, Kaori, 2006: “The Public in Japan,” in special issue on Problematizing Global Knowledge (edited by Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Ryan Bishop and John Phillips), Theory, Culture & Society 23: 615-616. Heisig, James W., 1996: Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press. Herf, Jeffrey, 1986: Reactionary Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, John M., 2004: The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2006. “East and West in Global History,” in special issue on Problematizing Global Knowledge (edited by Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Ryan Bishop and John Phillips), Theory, Culture & Society 23: 408-410.

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Hountondji, Paulin J., 1983: African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2002: The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ikegami, Eiko, 1995: The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. —. 2005: Bonds of Civility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ishihara, Shintaro, 1991: The Japan that Can Say No. New York: Simon and Schuster. Jameson, Fredric, 1991: Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Kamata, Satoshi, 1983: Japan in the Passing Lane. New York: Pantheon Books. Koselleck, Reinhart, 1993: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Latour, Bruno, 1993: We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lieberman, Victor (ed.), 1999: Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830. Michigan University Press. Luhmann, Niklas, 1998: Observations on Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 1984: The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Maffesoli, Michel, 1991: “The Ethic of Aesthetics”, Theory Culture & Society 8: 7-20. Malik, Suhail, 2006: “Global Sovereignty,” in special issue on Problematizing Global Knowledge (edited by Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Ryan Bishop and John Phillips), Theory, Culture & Society 23: 512-517. Mbembe, Achille, 2001: On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McClain, James L., John M. Merriman and Kaoru Ugawa (eds.), 1994: Edo and Paris. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McCracken, Gran, 1988: Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mennell, Stephen, 1989: Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human SelfImage. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, Daniel, 1994: Modernity: an Ethnographic Approach. Providence, RI: Berg.

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CHAPTER SEVEN MODERNITY AS ‘WORLD CONSCIOUSNESS’ OLIVER KOZLAREK

Die gefährlichste Weltanschauung ist die Weltanschauung der Leute, die die Welt nie angeschaut haben. —Alexander von Humboldt

1. Introduction In this chapter, I would like to sustain the argument that modernity is about territoriality. It is about places and our relation to them. This interpretation seems to be at odds with what we usually think about modernity. It is not difficult to observe a certain disregard of places, territoriality and geography in modern theory and the social sciences (Escobar 2001: 142; Wallerstein et al. 1996). Simultaneously, the very concept of modernity contains a clear temporal meaning. It refers to temporal processes rather than geography or territoriality. Although this might be true, the still ‘unfinished project’ of modernity, as I see it, is to come to terms with the practical and theoretical meaning of territoriality and places. Despite the fact that these ideas might provoke the suspicion of ‘postmodernism’, that is, of some kind of reflex to leave modernity behind, I will try to make clear that modernity remains a valid name for an imaginary that continues to be valid, as well as for a narrative challenge that remains necessary. However, I also think that the epistemological pillars upon which ‘modernity’ rests have to be reconstructed. The construction of imaginaries and narratives that respond to contemporary theoretical and political needs can only be made possible by a deep

The most dangerous worldview is that held by people who have never seen the world. [all translations from German and Spanish by me, OK].

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epistemological turn, which allows for the production of knowledge that does not neglect places and territoriality. This epistemological turn is already underway in the social and cultural sciences. Although it does not take the form of a systematically outlined theory, the literatures in both philosophy and the social sciences display a wide array of ideas which point towards an epistemological shift from time to places and territoriality, from history to geography and topography. These ideas can be clustered under the following headings: a critique of the ‘temporal logic’ of the discourse of modernity, a critique of the a-topical or meta-topical character of modern thought, and more recently, the search for a multi-topical understanding of our world. Under the title critique of the ‘temporal logic’ of modern thought, I refer to all the voices denouncing ‘progressivism’, ‘evolutionism’, ‘teleology’ and ‘philosophy of history’ that have erupted during the last century. Although these voices reached a crescendo in the 1960s, there are earlier contributions to this ‘tradition’ which have to be taken into consideration. Particularly interesting in this respect are the works of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Both authors were very conscious of the need to resist the ‘temporal logic’ of modern thought (see Vázquez 2006). Yet, a thorough revision of the ‘discourse of modernity’ must go beyond the mere rejection of ‘progressivism’, ‘evolutionism’, ‘teleology’ and ‘philosophy of history’. It also has to denounce the a-topical or metatopical character of modern thought. As Charles Taylor explained, the belief in some kind of ‘meta-topical agency’ can be understood as modernity’s continuation of monotheism. More importantly for my argument, Taylor sees a dependency between the belief in the ‘metatopical’ and an epistemological foundation in time. ‘People’, he writes, ‘cannot conceive a meta-topical agency having authority that is not somehow grounded in higher time, be it through the action of God or the Great Chain or some founding in illo tempore’ (Taylor 2004: 187; my emphasis).1 1

I use this reference to Taylor in a purely descriptive sense. I do not agree with his overall evaluation of modernity, which he derives from modernity’s relationship to religion. He says ‘[m]odernity is secular, not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all social action takes place in profane time’ (Taylor 2004: 194). Taylor obviously aims at recovering the idea that modernity stands out for its efforts to secularise the political and social order, reaffirming the conviction that modernity has already fulfilled the promise of emancipation. Against this complacent understanding of

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The understanding of the intrinsic relationship between the belief in the meta-topical and the belief in ‘higher time’ allows for two kinds of critiques. The first critique, the one of the ‘temporal logic’, will be addressed below. The second is a critique of the a-topical or meta-topical. This latter critique would require the development of a sharper awareness of places and territoriality. Such a critique does not have to be invented since it can build upon an established tradition. As will be highlighted in section 4, many early modern thinkers were convinced that geography and an awareness of places and territoriality are essential for the understanding of the human condition. The 20th century provided phenomenology with a strong sense of territoriality and with a corresponding epistemology.2 In this chapter, however, I will not delve too deeply into philosophical debates, referring to them only where necessary. Despite Peter Wagner’s (2001) recent and correct observation that sociology has always tried to stay away from epistemological debates, I argue that the epistemological turn I am concerned with here reflects, more or less explicitly, some of the most important contemporary debates in sociology and other social sciences. There is something of an unheralded epistemological shift, which has already taken place within sociology, most significantly in ongoing contributions to the debate about modernity and globalisation. I think the debate moves, quite evidently, towards a multi-topical understanding of the contemporary world. It is thus the overlapping of these three clusters of ideas – the critique of the ‘temporal logic’, the critique of the a-topical discourse of modernity and the need for a multi-topical assessment of our contemporary world, which helps us construct a new ‘world consciousness’. Yet, in order to produce this new consciousness, there is no need to go beyond modernity. On the contrary, I think it can still be harboured in the conceptual shell of ‘modernity’. However, in order to be a useful concept, ‘modernity’ has to be purified from the sediments that the last 250 years of the ‘discourse of modernity’ have deposited in it.

modernity, a view from different parts of the world – especially the postcolonial parts – shows that the promise of emancipation is not yet fulfilled, nor is it limited to secularisation. As will become clearer in the sections that follow, the emancipation that still has to come implies an epistemological shift. 2 The work of the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels demonstrates the receptiveness of phenomenological approaches to a language grounded in a geographic imaginary. His ‘topography of the strange’ also shows how sensible this kind of thought is when it comes to addressing issues of multi- and intercultural exchange, as well as the question of the ‘Other’ (see Waldenfels 1997).

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For the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, this involves the need to come to terms with ‘modernisation theory’, which represents much more than an accidental crystallisation of ideas on the surface of the theoretical landscape. ‘Modernisation theory’ condenses the paradigmatic kernel of the temporal fixation and the a-topical character so typical of post World War II modern thought. One might object that ‘modernisation theory’ has been criticised for decades and that it has long lost its place in the social theoretical mainstream precisely because of this constant critique. However, I think that earlier critiques of the modernisation paradigm often focus on a wrong target, such that the challenge to assess the epistemological consequences more thoroughly remains. After discussing the theoretical and epistemological problems of ‘modernisation theory’ in sections 3 and 4, and sketching some alternatives to the theory in section 6, I will conceptualise the possibilities for a ‘multi-topical critique of modernity’ in section 5. I begin with an attempt to explain what the consequences of the epistemological turn from a temporal logic to an epistemology of places might be.

2. An epistemological turn The epistemological shift from a primarily ‘temporal logic’ to a knowledge that takes into account territoriality and places has two important consequences. 1) The sought-for knowledge must be attuned to the demands of the recognition of differences, and to the need of thinking the coexistence of differences. As explained by Ernst Cassirer, in the ‘form of time’, the individual elements of knowledge are arranged as sequences, ‘one after the other’ (see Cassirer 2001:25-26) so that any given moment, present, past or coming, can be conceptualised as the culmination of time, the ‘end of history’; which also effectively implies the elimination (Aufhebung) of all differences. By contrast, in the ‘form of space’, the individual elements of knowledge are arranged in constellations and ‘juxtapositions’. Knowledge produced in the form of time is cumulative: any past moment dissolves into the present. Knowledge oriented primarily by spatial coordinates is contingent: every place maintains its singularity in relation to all other places. That does not mean, however, that knowledge produced in and oriented by space is hopelessly relativistic. Cassirer (2001:33) defines the ‘world of space’ rather as ‘a world of perceptions which are systematically intertwined and which relate to each other.’

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2) Another consequence of this epistemological shift concerns the produced units of knowledge. If knowledge is produced in the realm of time, the results are concepts, that is, highly abstract units of knowledge, charged with a maximum of universalistic validity claims. On the other hand, knowledge produced within the realm of space, that is, knowledge informed by places and territoriality, produces imaginaries. Gilbert Durand (2004: 421) explains that space seems to be the a priori form in which all the imaginary appears

There seems to exist an intrinsic relationship between the form of the space and imaginations (Durand 2004:416). That does not mean that imaginative knowledge displaces conceptual knowledge. Rather, it complements it. Durand (ibid.) pointed this out as well, suggesting that imagination ‘illuminates with its light all excitations of the senses as well as the concepts.’ To put it differently, concepts depend on imagination. It is only when we deprive concepts of the light of imagination that they appear as blind and shallow, as has happened so often in the history of modern thought. This distinction between a production of knowledge oriented in time and a production of knowledge informed by places and territoriality only seeks to establish ‘ideal types’. It is not my intention to suggest that human knowledge is produced exclusively in time or exclusively in space, nor that it should. Rather, human knowledge always seems to be ‘framed’ in space and time. However, knowledge produced within the realm of the social sciences tended to favour time over territoriality and geography. As Immanuel Wallerstein et al. (1996: 26) put it: treatment of space and place was relatively neglected in social sciences. The focus on progress and the politics of organising social change made the temporal dimension of social existence crucial, but left the spatial dimension in limbo

‘Modernisation theory’ is a clear example of this, and I would consider it a paradigmatic expression of the way in which the ‘temporal logic’ was installed in political and social thought after World War II.

3. The still necessary critique of modernisation theory What has been mentioned so far does not mean that modernisation theory was in fact an expression of some kind of a-topical or meta-topical truth. Far from it, there are some important geographical references one has to take into consideration. The first of such references is fairly evident

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and has often been discussed, although it has to be complemented, as we will see. Modernisation theories originated in a particular place, at a very crucial moment in the history of this place, namely at a moment at which its relationship to all other places in the world was undergoing a drastic change. The place I am alluding to is, of course, the United States and the time is the end of World War II. It is at this particular moment that the United States clearly emerged as one of the indisputable super-powers of the world, facing a new geopolitical constellation which was in need of discursive innovations. It thus became necessary for the US to produce a discourse which allowed for legitimate interventions in other parts of the world. Modernisation theory provided precisely this discourse of legitimation. The political agenda of modernisation theories is also the starting point for the German sociologist Wolfgang Knöbl, who devoted his insightful book to this strand of social thought (Knöbl 2001). Knöbl also argues that a critique of ideology, that is, a critique of the political instrumentalisation of modernisation theory, does not suffice. To understand its theoretical and conceptual deficiencies, one has to look to this line of thought from a different methodological angle. As an alternative angle, Knöbl proposes a ‘science-historical’ approach (Knöbl 2001:33-34). This approach enables him to focus on the social theoretical ambitions and achievements of modernisation theories, thereby deriving a general definition wherein modernisation theories come to represent a ‘global theory of social change’ that claims validity in ‘other’ countries which were many times poorer than the United States and ‘underdeveloped’ (ibid). It is certainly this claim to say something meaningful about ‘other countries’ which is responsible for the political usage associated with modernisation theory. Yet, it also points to a second geographical reference. If modernisation theory claims to say something about nonWestern societies, the question that follows is, How efficiently does it produce knowledge about these different places? Knöbl’s study seeks to answer this question. His ‘science-historical’ approach leads him to scrutinise the antecedents of modernisation theory. Since he considers modernisation theory a peculiarly US-American contribution to social theory, he consequently analyses it in the context of American sociology, showing that from 1915 to the 1940s, sociology in the US was not particularly interested in other countries. However, this changed in the 1950s and 1960s, the period during which modernisation theories experienced their ’short blossoming.’ Retrospectively, says Knöbl (2001: 155),

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one can criticise the theoretical tools utilised in this research; additionally one has to ask if the data it gathered would still meet our contemporary expectations. But one of the most important achievements of the theories and the research about modernisation is that it opened up new worlds for each of the disciplines involved – economics, political sciences, sociology, psychology. The almost exclusive preoccupation with national structures and problems reached an end

According to Knöbl, the critique of modernisation theory as an ‘ideology’ of US-American interests on a geopolitical level would be misleading in two ways. Firstly, it would blind us to its theoretical and conceptual deficiencies. Secondly, the assumption that ‘national’ interests are the most important motivation obscures that modernisation theory introduced – not just in the United States – a certain ‘world consciousness’ in sociology which was hitherto unknown to it. It seems obvious that what Knöbl’s argumentative structure creates and in fact achieves is a kind of separation between the geopolitical instrumentalisation of modernisation theory, on the one hand, and the theoretical and conceptual problems, on the other. For analytical purposes, such a distinction is crucial since it helps focus any critique of modernisation theory on its theoretical and conceptual problems, without reducing it to the geopolitical interests of the United States after World War II. Rather than a theory produced to serve particular political needs, as is often suspected, modernisation theory contains theoretical and conceptual aspects that lend discursive support to the geopolitical legitimation the US needed after World War II. Yet, the theory is beset with conceptual problems. Therefore, a valid critique has to start with a critique of the theory as such, and not with its political purpose. There are three theoretical-conceptual problems that Knöbl outlines: the problematic concept of ‘tradition’, that of ‘society’ and, clearly inspired by the debate on multiple modernities, he mentions the inability of modernisation theory to conceive of ‘different logics of modernity’ (217-218). However, once these theoretical deficiencies are grasped, it would be important to reconnect them to a ‘political’ context in order to understand that the theoretical flaws are not as politically innocent as they seem to be. Instead of focusing on the US-American conditions for modernisation theories, as Knöbl suggests, my critique is derived from a postcolonial perspective. The advantage of this perspective is that it helps to broaden the context that modernisation theory belongs into. The postcolonial

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perspective3 views the modern world as a result of a condition that began some 500 years ago with the ‘discovery’ and consequently, conquest of the ‘New World,’ and the establishment of a global system of colonial, imperial, neo-colonial and postcolonial structures. According to the postcolonial perspective, the global ‘system’ produced a world-view which divides the world into unequal parts: the ‘East’ and the ‘West,’ ‘North’ and ‘South,’ ‘Third World’ and ‘First World,’ and also, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies. These dichotomies refer to ‘imaginative geographies’ (Said) which are produced and reproduced by a series of discourses that follow a hegemonic epistemology, and whose purpose is the justification of the concentration of political, economic and cultural power in the ‘West’, the ‘North’, the ‘First World’ or the ‘modern societies.’ The postcolonial perspective has two main merits. Firstly, it permits the construction of a frame of reference that goes beyond the limits of the nation-state. This serves to demonstrate that there are certain discourses, theories and so forth, which are bound by a common epistemology that identifies them as products of a certain ‘civilisation’ rather than a single society defined within the analytical or methodological framework of the nation-state. The epistemological and political subject that ‘speaks’ in and through modernisation theories is ‘post-national,’ or better, pre-national. US-American modernisation theories have to be seen as a part of this broader ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ scheme.4 From a ‘postcolonial perspective,’ modernisation theory has to be located within this context. The same is probably true of sociology in general. Peter Wagner (2006) recently argued that rather than a discourse of this or that nation, sociology has always had an international character. It has always been the auto-reflexive discourse of modern societies, and in this sense, transcended national boundaries. However, the definition of the unity of modern society goes hand in hand, at least implicitly, with the establishment of criteria of ‘the other of modernity.’ Modernisation theory has made this distinction between the modern and the ‘other of modernity.’ i.e., tradition, more explicit than other sociological theories. Two of the conceptual problems Knöbl identifies in modernisation theory 3

For a discussion of postcolonial theory and sociology, see McLennan (2000; 2003). 4 That does not mean all US-American discourses have to be read as contributions to the tradition of ‘colonialism’. Against this accusation, as articulated in Mexico by the sociologist José Luis Orozco (1995), I would consider US-American pragmatism as a response to genuinely postcolonial motivations, since it also attempts to break free from the dominance of European thought.

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– ‘tradition’ and the exclusionary character of modernity’s definition, i.e., the incapacity to conceive of modernities other than those of the Western type – can thus be explained from this postcolonial perspective. Another advantage of the postcolonial perspective is its emphasis on the epistemological construction of the ‘imagined geographies’ which determine the very idea of modernity. It is precisely in this context that a ‘temporal logic’ plays a decisive role, as I will show in the following section.

4. The ‘temporal logic’ of modernisation theory Before I show that the ‘temporal logic’ dominated the epistemology of modernisation theories, it is worth remembering that the decision to opt for this logic was neither uncontested nor without alternatives. A different reading of the ‘discourse of modernity,’ like that proposed by Stephen Toulmin (1990), reveals that modern thought was not always dominated by the ‘temporal logic’. As early as the 16th Century, Montaigne (15331592) resisted scholastic philosophies. Against their ambitions to generate meta-topical truths, he emphasised the need to familiarise oneself with the real world. It was quite evident that Montaigne’s enthusiasm for the world was caused by the news which reached Europe about the ‘discoveries’ in the ‘New World’. He wrote that all we know by experience from those [strange] peoples does not only exceed all paintings… but also all the speculative concepts of philosophy and even their wishes (Montaigne 2001:88)

This thirst for experience, and the lust to know the world, the recognition of differences and even alternatives to the familiar forms of life, cultures or civilisations, were still quite common in the 18th Century. As a matter of fact, the social sciences as we know them today, especially their sense for empirical knowledge, i.e., knowledge derived from experience as against abstract speculation, owe much of their self-understanding to those scholars and thinkers who knew that in order to understand what is human, it is necessary to study the enormous richness of human expressions and forms of life distributed over the planet. The German philosopher Stephan Günzel shows that the “comprehension of geographical conditions” was much more important than the definition of teleological or evolutionary processes or the definition of some kind of ideal society. Günzel elucidates that a geographical (and not a temporal) orientation was decisive for the

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production of knowledge in thinkers like Montesquieu,5 Herder and even Kant. Philosophy was, to a significant extent, ‘geophilosophy’ (Günzel), which means geography was definitely more important for the construction of knowledge than studies of history. For Herder (17441803), it was quite clear that “[h]istory without geography [is] truly an airy construction (Luftgebäude)” (Günzel 2004: 74). Herder was convinced that what was needed was ‘experience’ in the sense of the German word ‘Er-fahrung’6: ‘Erfahrung of the earth’. Kant (1724-1804) was not only Herder’s geography teacher; he himself put geography above history. Even though Kant seems to put time above space in his Critique of Pure Reason, it must be noted that this is only so because time refers to the ‘inner sense’ and is therefore the preferred dimension only for the construction of ‘transcendental knowledge’ (see Günzel 2005: 25). However, Kant’s interests were not limited to transcendental questions. The question he was really interested in was that about the human condition. Therefore, he considered geography and anthropology to be the more essential disciplines. Historical studies were subordinated to these two disciplines: geography represented the ‘ground’ (Boden) for historical knowledge (25). Finally, one has to mention Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) in this context. According to Ottmar Ette, von Humboldt’s work displays a new kind of science which is oriented by ‘world-consciousness’ and which aims towards the construction of ‘world-knowledge’ (see Ette 2002). ‘World-consciousness’ refers to three semantically different dimensions, evoked by the word ‘world’: the world as the universe or cosmos, the world in the sense of the ‘earth’ and the world in the philosophical sense. These dimensions reveal that the construction of ‘world-knowledge’ must be a ‘trans-disciplinary’ and an ‘inter-cultural’ enterprise. For Humboldt, a very important ingredient of the world in all its dimensions was the human being: the world in all its different forms contains the human being, and it is only in this sense that the three semantic dimensions of ‘world’ are integrated. In all the examples mentioned, the recognition of plurality and of unity goes hand in hand. However, that does not mean that geographical consciousness was immune to the construction of a hierarchic world-view. The ways in which the plurality of human life forms and even of ‘nature’ were described, explained and interpreted were often highly biased. At 5

Raymond Aron called Montesquieu the ‘last classical philosopher and the first sociologist’ (see Zabludovsky 2007: 38). 6 ‘Erfahrung’ is best translated as experience. However, the second part of the word ‘-fahrung’ refers to ‘fahren’ which can be translated as ‘traveling’.

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least in the cases of Montesquieu, Herder and Kant, the mechanism by which a hierarchy of cultures and ‘natures’ was established was climatetheoretical presuppositions (see Günzel)7. However, it is precisely Alexander von Humboldt, who clearly marks the capacity of a geographically oriented science to construct a less stereotyped worldview: his own judgement about non-European cultures reflects typically European prejudices. Yet, as Ette (2004: 22) convincingly argued, [t]he coming world-political and world-economic development has to be multi-polar and not centred in Europe.

What this means is that Humboldt’s ‘world-consciousness’ clearly points in the direction of a multi-topical understanding of the world, based on a global network of exchange of ideas and information. According to Ette (2004), the essence of ‘Humboldtian Science’ is its networking quality which understands differences as differences without losing sight of a normative orientation which is firmly rooted in humanistic values and virtues. Humboldt’s ideas allow us to catch a glimpse of what geographical and territorial thinking could have been like long ago. Unfortunately, they did not prevail in their time. Rather, they marked the end of a geographically oriented way of thinking of the world, and were rapidly overshadowed by theories which provided a world-view guided basically by progressivism, evolutionism and teleology. Instead of an attitude of opening up to the world, of trying to learn about and from all the different ways in which (not only human) life settled in the world, a different modernity prevailed under the spell of the ‘temporal logic.’ It was a simultaneously normative and exclusionary project: a telos of the ideal society was projected as the ‘end of history’ on the horizon, and whatever did not resemble the image of this ideal was relegated to the fringes of the ‘process of civilisation.’ This project was based not on a grammar of integration, tolerance and recognition but rather on the master-slave-dichotomy, famously postulated in Hegel’s philosophy. Consequently, the aim was not to know the ‘Other,’ but to control and to dominate it. I am not saying Hegel’s philosophy of history and the like were invented with the interest of creating discursive tools for the subordination of other peoples. However, it would also be naïve to oversee that the thought of exclusion and segregation which was based on the ‘temporal logic’ coincided in one way or the other with politics which 7

Antonello Gerbi (1982) offers a thorough presentation of climate theoretical considerations, especially about the so-called ‘New World’ during the 18th and 19th Century.

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were characterised by violent processes of nation-building and imperialism that clearly dominated the history of the 19th century as well as the first part of the 20th. The epistemological decision in favour of a ‘temporal logic’ reached an important breakthrough in what Reinhart Koselleck called Sattelzeit (saddle period), which designates the crucial period of transition from an early to a later modernity and which lasted roughly from 1750 to 1850. According to Koselleck, a significant re-evaluation of space and time occurred during this period. Most significantly, a certain ‘denaturalisation’ of the chronological experience of time (Koselleck 2000: 303), which facilitated a ‘theoretical’ penetration of the future, occurred during this saddle period. The influence of this change was particularly tangible in the political and social rhetorics. As Koselleck (1977:293) explains, [f]rom this moment on there was almost no central concept of political theory and social pragmatic which did not contain a temporal coefficient of change, without which nothing could be recognised, thought or argued… Time became the omnipresent means of legitimation

This holds especially true for the geopolitical realm. Compared to the geographical knowledge and climate-theoretical means of discursive construction of stereotypes of the ‘Other’, the ‘temporal logic’ was much more efficient. It is one thing to recognise the existence of geographically distributed differences while at once recognising, at least in principle, that all these differences participate in the greater scheme of ‘humanity’; it is quite another to insist that certain cultures, peoples, civilisations and so forth do not participate in the creation of world-history. However, the problems of the temporal foundation of epistemology were not limited to the political realm. The heuristic qualities of modern thought were also considerably affected. The translation of the ‘dispersal in space’ into ‘sequences in time’ (Fabian 2002: 12) undermines the production of empirical knowledge about the world and the multiple expressions thereof. Differences were annihilated or reduced and simplified by processing all information through the categories of ‘before’ and ‘after,’ ‘old’ and ‘new,’ ‘tradition’ and ‘modern,’ and so forth. As Herder and many others feared, knowledge was becoming extremely abstract, speculative and guided by prejudice. This problem became especially evident in modernisation theory. The German sociologist Rainer Lepsius (1977: 11) wrote in the 1970s that

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[m]odernisation [is a] neutral concept for processes which lack more concrete definitions, [and] it distinguishes itself from tradition, that is to say, the empirical starting point for developing processes

Once again: Knöbl is right, modernisation theory is not a bold mirror of US-American geopolitical interests. But it is more than a naïve reproduction of the temporal logic that had already inspired the discourse of modernity for some time. As I see it, the temporal logic and its disregard for space and territoriality expresses a deeply rooted colonial logic. I will try to show what I mean by this through a discussion of one of the classical founding texts of modernisation theory, Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society. Modernizing the Middle East (Lerner 1958). As the book title indicates, Lerner uses the dichotomy ‘tradition/modernity’. Interestingly, David Riesman, who wrote the introduction to Lerner's book, casts doubt on the analytic soundness of precisely such dualisms: Most typologies in sociology, says Riesman, are dualistic or dichotomous: folk-urban; Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft; status-to-contract; cosmopolitanlocal; sacred-secular; and so forth. Mr. Lerner’s cast of characters puts the Moderns on the one side – they are cosmopolitan, urban, literate, usually well-off, and seldom devout – and the Traditionals on the other side – they are just opposite. But in between he puts several categories of Transitional: people who share some of the empathy and psychic mobility of the Moderns while lacking essential components of the Modern style, notably literacy (Riesman in Lerner 1958: 13)

For Riesman, the merit of Lerner’s study vis-à-vis earlier conceptual dualisms in sociology is that it is more ‘dynamic’. But this dynamisation also results in an increasingly schematic juxtaposition of ‘the’ modern and ‘the’ traditional. This becomes particularly evident when comparing Lerner’s book to Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft from 1887, which paints a more ‘static’ or ‘ontological’ picture of the two types of society contrasted. The resulting picture is nevertheless very complex and differentiated. Compared to this, Lerner’s definition of the ‘modern’ and of the ‘traditional’ is extremely bold and empty. Now, to understand why Lerner is not more specific, it is necessary to remember that modernisation theory operated with a more or less hidden and undisputed presupposition, namely that the paradigm for a modern society was, indeed, the US-American society. But instead of admitting this, Lerner explains why this presupposition should rather not be made:

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Chapter Seven Middle Easterners more than ever want the modern package, but reject the label “made in the U.S.A.” (or for that matter, “made in the USSR”). We speak, nowadays, of modernization (ibid.: 45)

This more or less opaque reference to the US-American society opens a huge space for speculation. But there is definitely one aspect of modernity that Lerner must have derived quite clearly from his experience and understanding of the ‘American way of life’, namely the principle of ‘mobility’: People in the Western culture have become habituated to the sense of change and attuned to its various rhythms. Many generations ago, in the West, ordinary men found themselves unbound from their native soil and relatively free to move. Once they actually moved in large numbers, from farms to flats and from fields to factories, they became intimate with the idea of change by direct experience. This bore little resemblance to the migrant or crusading hordes of yore, driven by war or famine. This was movement by individuals, each having made a personal choice to seek elsewhere his own version of a better life (ibid.: 47-48)

A few pages later, Lerner explains that this particular cultivation of mobility is rooted in colonial history. Or to be more specific: in the history of the colonisers: Historians conventionally date the modern era from the Age of Exploration. Every Western schoolboy knows the names of Cabot, Columbus, Cortez and is dimly aware that they opened new worlds… Geographical mobility became, in this phase, the usual vehicle of social mobility (ibid.: 52)

To put it bluntly: it is the colonial subject, the coloniser who leaves his own land, who is depicted as the prototype of the modern subject. Although the forms and techniques of displacement and mobility have changed, contemporary modernity is still a cultivation of experiences that date back to colonialism, as it were. The problems with this view are evident. It is quite clear that the ‘mobility principle’ only works if the individual who leaves his or her ‘own soil’ has some place else to go. Colonialism was basically the expansion of space – at least from the perspective of the European subject. But from the perspective of the colonised, the experience is the exact opposite. The expansion of the coloniser’s space translates into the reduction of space for the colonised. Displacement and mobility in the case of the former are voluntary; in the case of the latter, they are the result of inflicted violence.

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The history of mobility, highlighted by Lerner as one of the principles of modernity, is identical with the history of colonisation. The only difference is who tells the story. But it is in any case easy to explain why the disregard of territoriality, the disposition to leave one’s own place, is celebrated by a culture that interpreted and legitimised taking away the land of others and destroying nature as epitomising ‘the’ process of human civilisation. I hope these brief reflections suffice to explain why it is important to bring space, territoriality and geography back into the equation of modernity, and that the common accounts of modernity, especially those presented in the theories of modernisation, ought to be revised for this purpose. In the following section, I will briefly discuss two major debates in sociology that express similar epistemological intuitions.

5. Contemporary alternatives: Towards a geographical consciousness No one’s work could serve as a better starting point of this section on alternatives, derived from an explicit or implicit critique of modernisation theory, than that of a geographer. Peter J. Taylor is a particularly noteworthy example. At the end of the 1990s, he (1999:95) wrote: The development theory, which underlay the study of modernization in the 1950s and 1960s was based upon a geo-historical trick. The ruse consisted in substituting history for geography. Thus the contemporary differences between countries in terms of economic production were interpreted as different historical stages of a common historical trajectory… This social theory is about as simple as it can get: one multiple-repeated history, no geography

Taylor points out the heuristic problems of such an arrangement: it seems to make it impossible to develop a sense for really existing differences when everything is constantly pressed through the same reductive conceptual filters. Resisting this homogenising view, Taylor exhorts a social theory open for the contingencies of the realities it deals with. In order to achieve this different view on social and cultural realities, he proposes a ‘geohistorical’ attitude. What Taylor means by this is that what is needed above all is the recognition that historical processes always occur at concrete places. The metaphor Taylor uses in this context, which helps him to establish a position that clearly opposes some of the most important contributions to the debate about globalisation, is ‘embeddedness’:

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Chapter Seven A geo-historical approach respects this embeddedness, never neglecting the contexts in which modern behaviour and thinking take place. Quite simply, embedding occurs in real time and space locations which are constitutive of the modernity under study. Hence a geo-historical interpretation of modernity is concerned to understand the specific periods and places where ideas and practices of being modern are created, challenged and changed (ibid: 4)

‘Multiple modernities’ Not only ‘human’ geography, or geography with social theoretical ambitions, has adopted a geographical orientation. A similar shift can be observed in some of the most important contributions to contemporary sociological theory. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the work of a man who was once closely related to modernisation theory, but soon realised some of its major shortcomings, namely Shmuel N. Eisenstadt., the incarnation of a successful self-critique of modernisation theory. Eisenstadt understood very early that one of the most problematic aspects of modernisation theory consists in its conceptual decisions, especially in the dichotomy ‘tradition/modernity,’ which represents the categorical framework for the ‘temporal logic’ to unfold. As early as in the 1970s he wrote: Although the different societies or civilizations react in specific ways to the development of “modernity” – at least in so far as these differ from former historical situations concerning the problems which they try to resolve – the reaction to modernity also contains many similarities with processes of social change during earlier historical periods. Therefore, a change of perspectives leads to the recognition that many similarities and continuities between the contemporary and the traditional ways of social change might be possible. This insight is decisive for the understanding of the different post-traditional modern civilizations which are about to be constituted in the contemporary world (Eisenstadt 1973: 32)

Back in the early 1970s, Eisenstadt already experimented with the idea of understanding modernity in terms of a civilisation, an idea which gained some popularity in recent years.8 But two other points are perhaps even more important for my argument: (1) Eisenstadt’s assessment was based on empirical evidence, provided by societies which were trying to 8

A comprehensive overview of the different positions in the current debate on civilisational theories, including a contribution by Eisenstadt, can be found in a special issue of International Sociology (2001, vol. 16, no. 3).

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implement practical strategies of modernisation which were derived from modernisation- and development theories for almost two decades, and which showed clearly that the processes of social change did not bring the desired results. To put it differently, Eisenstadt reached a critical attitude of modernisation theory by contrasting its abstract normative recipes to what happened once these recipes were translated into political strategies. This made him realise that processes of social change are much more complex and contingent than theories of modernisation were able to foresee. (2) Eisenstadt did not interpret deviations from the ideal of modernity, which processes of modernisation in many societies – especially in those of the so called Third World – manifested, as evidence for some kind of lack of maturity or rationality. He recognised that processes of social change always follow a specific cultural programme. And since the cultural programmes differ from one society to another, not even the patterns of modernisation processes can be expected to be the same in different societies. Eisenstadt also wrote in the 1970s that It… would be wrong to assume that the forces [of modernization] – once they make themselves felt in a society – push this society in the direction of a predetermined end. Rather, they provoke different reactions in different societies which depend on the internal conditions but also on the international system and the international relations in which these societies are involved (ibid: 371)

If this was true, then a completely different way of theorising and consequently understanding modernity was required. Instead of following the much too simple ‘temporal logic’ according to which any society has to pass from tradition to modernity in the same way, a theory was needed which had the capacity to account for differences where they existed. Eisenstadt certainly continued to be interested in processes of social change and consequently also in temporal sequences, but these were no longer understood as targeting a universal telos of societal processes or even ‘the’ process of human civilisation as such. Modernity was no longer seen as something which had been achieved by a few societies as against all others, which might at best aspire to becoming modern, Instead, modernity was understood as a more or less global reality that exhibited regional and local differences. The normative orientation of modernisation theory was replaced by an analytical orientation; the exclusion provoked by the temporal logic – the negation of ‘coevalness’ (see Fabian 2002) –

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was replaced by an integral view of a global but not homogenous modernity. The idea of ‘synchronicity’ (Jung), that is, the fact that different modernities9 coexist at the same time, became much clearer in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, opening the way for what today is viewed as one of the most important contributions Eisenstadt has made to social theory: the recognition of the plurality of modernities and the need for a comparative assessment of differences and affinities. This program is known under the name of ‘multiple modernities.’ The notion of “multiple modernities” denotes a certain view of the contemporary world—indeed of the history and characteristics of the modern era—that goes against the views long prevalent in scholarly and general discourse. It goes against the view of the “classic” theories of modernisation and of the convergence of industrial societies prevalent in the 1950s, and indeed against the classical sociological analyses of Marx, Durkheim, and (to a large extent) even of Weber, at least in one reading of his work. They all assumed, even if only implicitly, that the cultural program of modernity as it developed in modern Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately take over in all modernizing and modern societies; with the expansion of modernity they would prevail throughout the world (Eisenstadt, 2000:1)

The globalisation debate Björn Wittrock wrote that …assumptions close to those of earlier forms of theorizing about convergence and modernization are still being cultivated in the more recent debate about globalisation which started to dominate in the social sciences in the 1990s, and that therefore many of the contributions to this debate are “in conceptual terms strangely reminiscent of modernization theory” (Wittrock 2001:31)

I concur with Wittrock. Many authors view ‘globalisation’ as an epochal rupture. Just as modernisation theory understands modernity as the result of a rupture with tradition, globalisation theories understand the latest generation of communication and information technologies as the foundations of a new era that radically changes social relations and processes on a world-wide scale (see Castells 1999). Many authors do not 9

An important question in this context was recently raised by Volker Schmidt (2006). Should we talk about one modernity with regional differences or about different modernities?

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hesitate to assign the attribute ‘postmodern’ to this global era (Negri/Hardt), emphasising their conviction that the current wave of globalisation represents a new situation which requires new theories and even new normative orientations. As to the latter, especially Ulrich Beck has argued that the ‘methodological nationalism’, which also limited the normative horizon of the period of ‘first modernity’, needs to be substituted by a ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ in our ‘second modernity’ (Beck 2002). What these theories share is the idea of an epochal rupture, that is to say, a reestablishment of a mode of thought that understands social change first and foremost as sequential processes directed towards a certain telos. Something else is reminiscent of modernisation theories: the notorious disregard for places and territoriality. There are two important metaphors indicating this: one is that of ‘disembedding’. Anthony Giddens wrote By disembedding I mean the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space (Giddens 1990:21)

In our context, this means that social processes and social relations do not depend on places anymore. This idea is very popular today. More and more authors are expressing the trend of de-territorialisation in the second metaphor I would like to highlight, that of ‘non-places’. George Ritzer, for instance, views globalisation as a great process of producing ‘nothing’, that is, ‘social forms which are […] devoid of distinctive substantive content’ (Ritzer 2004: 3). One of the results of this production of nothing are ‘non-places’, that is, the undermining of local differences by homogenising processes that can be pressed into one grand theory. Another prominent example for a non-place-theory is Toni Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s book Empire. The only place to which this book pays tribute is the largest place that human beings can (or better: should) really be concerned about: the earth. This is not wrong. We know today that we cannot ignore what is going on in other parts of the earth, and we certainly have to know that our actions have consequences in other parts of the world. But what is problematic in Negri and Hardt is that they see the earth as a big container in which all specific geographical differences seem to disappear. The striated space of modernity constructed places that were continually engaged in and founded on a dialectical play with their outsides. The space of imperial sovereignty, in contrast, is smooth. It might appear to be free of binary divisions or striation of modern boundaries, but really it is crisscrossed by so many fault lines that only appears as continuous,

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Chapter Seven uniform space. In this sense, the clearly defined crisis of modernity gives way to an omni-crisis in the imperial world. In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power—it is both, everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-place (Negri/Hardt 2000: 190)

All of this obviously raises the suspicion, expressed by many, that the talk about globalisation does not contain anything new. From a conceptual and epistemological perspective, it seems to continue what modernisation theory has provided, as we have just seen. But many argue that even the diagnosis of our time is not really new, since globalisation processes were always concomitants of modernity and modernisation. Finally, from a ‘political’ point of view, many suspect the discourse of globalisation to be the ideological device of neo-liberalism (Saxe-Fernández 1999; Wallerstein 199910). However, to think that a discursive event like that of the globalisation debate would not be worth taking seriously is probably arrogant. That there is little ‘contrast’ (Konturenschärfe) between ‘modernisation’ and ‘globalisation’ is something the sociologist Armin Nassehi too has observed. But this does not mean the concept should not be taken seriously. Perhaps the chiffre globalisation stands only for a cognitive relocation. Maybe it only refers to a new view of things, which themselves possibly have not changed so much (Nassehi 2003: 191-192)

This ‘cognitive relocation’ (kognitive Verschiebung) obviously points to an epistemological shift which provokes a different understanding of modernity. To put it differently: Globalisation discourses and theories have failed wherever they claimed globalisation marks a totally different era. We still live in a modern world! What has changed is the way we understand modernity. Modernity is not the privilege of a few societies anymore; instead it has become a global phenomenon. It is not a condition located in a near or far future, it is here and now. The word ‘globalisation’ already expresses this shift: it evokes a geographical image, that of the globe, that is, of a place which is recognised by more and more people as a place which all human beings share but which is also, at the same time, 10

It is interesting to see that Wallerstein, who has been depicted as one of the ‘classics’ of globalisation theory (see Lechner 2005: 332), has expressed himself very clearly against it: ‘The [globalisation] discourse is in fact a gigantic misreading of current reality – a deception imposed upon us by powerful groups, and even worse, one that we have imposed upon ourselves, often despairingly’ (Wallerstein 1999: 1).

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extremely heterogeneous with a very complex topography. It is a place made out of places, as it were. It is probably this imagination of places, topographies, territories and so forth that motivated Arjun Appadurai to the following statement The image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imaginary as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. […]The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order (Appadurai 1996: 31)

It is the imagination of the global which forces us to imagine our place in it as social and cultural actors. It is in this way that the imagination of ‘globalisation’ allows to think of both, the whole and the part, the ‘universal’ and the particular, unity and plurality, in a non-exclusionary way.

6. Towards a multi-topical critique of modernity As we have seen, Alexander von Humboldt stands for a research programme which could have been turned into a multi-topical learning process. This process could probably best be understood as a process of exchange of experiences made with our contemporary modernity in which representatives from all the different ‘places’ are encouraged to participate. Not the determination of general principles of social action and institutions as such would be the main objective of such an endeavour, but the learning from and through each others experiences in coping with general problems human beings, no matter where they are living, are confronted with. But the legacy of von Humboldt’s world-science does not end here; his science does not limit itself to encouraging learning from other human beings, but also includes the possibility of learning from the ‘absolutely other’, from nature. Now, if we consider that the main challenges we are facing today concern human relations across different cultures and places, as well as the relationship between humanity and the natural resources of our planet,

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then all of this appears quite plausible. But if these challenges are so clear, then why is it still so difficult to reorient our thinking and to act accordingly? Why is it so difficult to reach out to the knowledge which human civilisations have produced at different places over thousands of years? And why is it so difficult to find a way of interacting with nature that would be more ‘sustainable’ – to use a word which probably fits quite well in this context? There cannot be a single answer to this question. But the search for an answer would probably have to inspect the ways in which we are still producing knowledge. Once we do that, it should be easy to see that there are institutionalised reasons that explain why transdisciplinary and international (let alone intercultural)11 cooperation are still so difficult to achieve (see Smelser 2003). The first step on the road to an alternative, to a multi-topical understanding of the world, would be a multi-topical critique of the homogenising and experience suppressing (see Santos 2000) discourse of modernity. But even if the limiting aspects of our conventional knowledge production are evident, it is still difficult to proceed to the next step. Perhaps what is needed is a new generation of researchers, a generation with the ability to look at the world from different places, and a research programme under the title of ‘world consciousness’.

References Appadurai, Arjun, 1996: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Beck, Ulrich, 2002: Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter: Neue weltpolitische Ökonomie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Cassirer, Ernst, 2001: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen I. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Castells, Manuel, 1999: La era de la información, vol. 1. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Durand, Gilbert, 2004: Las estructuras antropológicas del imaginario, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 1973: Tradition, Wandel und Modernität, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 11 There might be international research, but in it researchers from different countries which still share the same scientific culture interact. This cannot be considered intercultural learning or knowledge production, in which different knowledge producing cultures, such as modern science and local forms of knowledge, interact.

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—. 2000: “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus, 129: 1-29. Escobar, Arturo, 2001: “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” Political Geography 20: 139-174. Ette, Ottmar, 2002: Weltbewußtsein, Weilerswist: Velbrück. —. 2004: ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie, Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag. Fabian, Johannes, 2002: Time and the Other, New York: Columbia University Press. Gerbi, Antonello, 1982: La disputa del Nuevo Mundo: Historia de una polémica, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Giddens, Anthony, 1990: The Consequences of Modernity, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Günzel, Stephan, 2004: “Geographie der Aufklärung. Klimapolitik von Montesquieu zu Kant,” part 1, Aufklärung und Kritik, 2/2004: 66-91. —. 2005: “Geographie der Aufklärung. Klimapolitik von Montesquieu zu Kant,” part 2, Aufklärung und Kritik, 1/2005: 25-36. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri 2001: Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Knöbl, Wolfgang, 2001: Spielräume der Modernisierung: Das Ende der Eindeutigkeit, Weilerswist: Velbrück. Koselleck, Reinhart (ed.), 1977: Studien zum Beginn der modernen Welt, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. —. 2000: “Über die Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft,” pp. 298-316 in: Reinhart Koselleck Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lechner, Frank J., 2005: “Globalization,” pp. 330-333 in: George Ritzer (ed.) Encyclopedia of Social Theory. London: Sage. Lepsius, Rainer, 1977: “Soziologische Theoreme über die Sozialstruktur der Moderne und der Modernisierung,” pp. 10-29 in Reinhart Koselleck (ed.) Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lerner, Daniel, 1958: The Passing of Traditional Society. Modernizing the Middle East. Glencoe: Free Press. McLennan, Gregor 2000, “Sociology’s, Eurocentrism and the Rise of the West Revisited,” European Journal of Social Theory, 3: 275-291. —. 2003: “Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory,” European Journal of Social Theory, 6: 69-86. Montaigne, Michel de, 2001: “Von den Menschenfressern,” in Michel de Montaigne (2001) Essais (ed. Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow) Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag.

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Nassehi, Armin, 2003: Geschlossenheit und Offenheit. Studien zur Theorie der modernen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Orozco, José Luis, 1995: Filosofía norteamericana del poder. Ciudad Juárez: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. Ritzer, George, 2004: The Globalization of Nothing, London: Sage. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 2000: A Crítica da Razão Indolente: Contra o Desperdício da Experiência para um Novo Senso Comum, São Paulo: Cortez Editora. Saxe-Fernández, John, 1999: Globalización: crítica a un paradigma, Mexico: Plaza y Janés. Schmidt, Volker H., 2006: “Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity?”, Current Sociology 54: 77-97. Smelser, Neil J., 2002: “On Comparative Analysis, Interdisciplinarity and Internationalization in Sociology”, International Sociology 18: 643657. Taylor, Charles, 2004: Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, Peter J., 1999: Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Toulmin, Stephen, 1990: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Vázquez, Rolando, 2006: The Survival of the Past in Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, unpublished manuscript. Wagner, Peter, 2001: Theorizing Modernity, London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage. —. 2006: “Variedades de interpretaciones de la modernidad: sobre las tradiciones nacionales en sociología y otras ciencias sociales,” in Christophe Charle, Jürgen Schriewer and Peter Wagner (eds.), Formas de conocimiento académico y búsqueda de identidades culturales, Barcelona/Mexico: Ediciones Pomares. Waldenfels, Bernhard, 1997: Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 1, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Wallerstein, Immanuel et al., 1996: Open the Social Sciences, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.. Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1999: Globalization or the Age of Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World-System, http://fbc.binghampton.edu/iwtrajws.htm Wittrock, Björn, 2001: “Social Theory and Global History: The Three Cultural Crystallizations,” Thesis Eleven 65: 27-50. Zabludovsky, Gina, 2007: “Concepciones en torno a la diversidad y unidad del mundo en los orígenes de la sociología,” pp. 37-57 in

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CHAPTER EIGHT GLOBAL MODERNISATION AND MULTIPLE MODERNITIES ALBERTO MARTINELLI

Introduction Which are the basic dimensions of modernity? Has modernity become a global social condition? Are there different paths towards and through modernity? Are there different ways to be modern? The prevailing approach in contemporary studies of modernisation, as exemplified by authors like Eisenstadt, Gaonkar, Taylor and Wittrock, argues for the existence of multiple modernities, affirming that the paths towards and through modernity are different and even alternative. However, such approaches face the criticism of those who, like Schmidt, prefer to speak in terms of varieties of the same basic model. In this chapter, I will discuss the contemporary literature on multiple modernities. I will argue that modernity has gone global, and at the same time takes different forms, following some ideas which I have developed in my book Global Modernities (2005). First of all, the proponents of the multiple modernities approach take a clear stand on the question of the convergence, arguing that the paths of modern and modernising societies are rather divergent from each other, and rejecting the identification of modernisation and Westernisation. They also argue that modernity is first and foremost a cultural programme rather than a structural condition or an institutional reality and that “the history of modernity is a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs.’ At the root of this multiplicity lies the fact that the civilisation of modernity as it first developed in the West ‘was from its beginnings beset by internal antinomies and contradictions, giving

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rise to continual critical discourse and political contestation.’ (Eisenstadt 2000:7) The first radical transformation of the premises of cultural and political order took place with the expansion of modernity in the Americas and now the crystallisation of distinct patterns of modernity has spread to the whole world, since modernity has become a ‘common global condition.’ In contemporary discussions, both academic and non-academic, about the uniformity or diversity of modern societies, two positions occupy a prominent place, as Wittrock recalls. The first position is what he calls ‘liberal historicism.’ …in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy and market economy, in the particular form that these institutional practices have come to exhibit in recent decades in parts of North America and Western Europe, are seen to provide the sole legitimate models of social organisation. These forms will then come to be embraced, if with time lags, across the world (Wittrock 2000:53)

The proponents of the first position are not so naive as to assume that this type of global diffusion will entail a development towards cultural, or even linguistic, homogeneity, but rather, think that there is no reason to expect any fundamental institutional innovation would transcend these types of liberal institutional arrangements. To conclude, this position ‘simply elevates the experiences of a single country to the status of a world historical yardstick.’ (ibid.:54) The alternative position, which stresses the multiplicity of modernities, ‘focuses attention on the current array of cultural life forms and assigns each of them to a larger civilisation entity.’ It recognises the Western European origins of a set of modern technological, economic and political institutions that have become diffused across the globe, although it seems to think that they spread more in the form of a set of ideals than as working realities. It affirms that ‘these processes of diffusion and adaptation, however, do not at all mean that the deep-seated cultural and cosmological differences between say Western Europe, China and Japan are about to disappear,’ since ‘in their core identities, these societies remain characterised by the form they acquired during much earlier periods of cultural crystallisation.’ (ibid.:55) Wittrock argues that the latter position, although a valid critique of different convergence theories, is not a valid critique of his conception of modernity as a global condition, since modernity …is not so much a new unified civilization, global in its extensiveness, unparalleled in its intrusiveness and destructiveness; rather, modernity is a

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In order to sustain this position, Wittrock reminds us that ‘modernity from the very inception of its basic ideas in Europe has been characterised by a high degree of variability in institutional forms and conceptual constructions,’ and argues that …the existence of a common global condition does not mean that members of any singular cultural community are about to relinquish their ontological and cosmological assumptions, much less their traditional institutions; it means however that the continuous interpretation, reinterpretation and transformation of those commitments and institutional structures cannot but take account of the commonality of the global condition of modernity (ibid.:56)

I agree with the gist of these critiques, i.e., the rejection of any kind of unilateral evolutionary model of modernisation. I share both Wittrock’s critique of what he calls ‘liberal historicism,’ which can be seen as an updated version of the unilateral evolutionary model of modernisation; and his main thesis that the global condition of modernity surely entails different paths towards and through modernity. However, some critical qualifications are in order, which imply a reappraisal of some aspects of the multiple modernities literature.

The European origins of modernity My first critical remark has to do with the European/Western origins of modernity. It should be made clear that arguing for the existence of multiple modernities cannot mean underplaying the fact that the contemporary global condition originated in the modernity of Europe and has been shaped by this historical experience. The most sophisticated versions of the multiple modernity approach fully take history into account, but others tend to neglect it since they are unable to distinguish two different phenomena. On the one hand, the existence of multiple modernities is a matter of empirical evidence: we should look at modernisation from a trans-national and trans-cultural perspective, and reject the view that modernisation, once activated, moves inescapably towards establishing a certain type of mental outlook (scientific rationalism, pragmatic instrumentalism, secularism) and that certain types of institutional order (popular government, bureaucratic administration,

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market-driven industrial economy) are indifferent to the culture and politics of a given place. On the other hand, it is also a matter of empirical evidence that modernity was born as a distinct European (Western) phenomenon, which shaped European identity as a cultural attitude of endless search and quest for knowledge, as going beyond the limit (expressed in such literary figures as Dante’s Ulysses and Goethe’s Faust), of individual freedom and religious tolerance, which crystallised into a set of specific institutions (market-led industrial capitalism, sovereign nationstate, research university). As Gaonkar (2001:14-15) argues, To think in terms of alternative modernities does not mean one blithely abandons the Western discourse on modernity. This is virtually impossible. Modernity has travelled from the West to the rest of the world not only in terms of cultural forms, social practices and institutional arrangements, but also as a form of discourse that interrogates the present. The questioning of the present, which is taking place at every national and cultural site to-day, cannot escape the legacy of Western discourse on modernity: Marx, Weber, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Habermas, Foucault. One can provincialize Western modernity only by thinking through and against its self-understandings, which are frequently cast in universalistic idioms

One should add at least the other major sociological interpretations of modernity, Weber and Durkheim, that the advocates of the concept of multiple modernities too hastily dismiss. In fact, they proudly affirm that their approach does not only go against the view of the theories of modernisation and of the convergence of industrial societies prevalent in the 1950s, but also against the classical sociological analyses of Marx, Durkheim and even Weber since they ‘all assumed that the cultural program of modernity as it developed in modern Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately… prevail throughout the world.’ However, ‘the actual developments in modernising societies have refuted the homogenising and hegemonic assumptions of this Western project of modernity’ (Eisenstadt 2000:1). This statement is based on a one-sided reading of the works of the great sociological classics, which were well aware of the cultural diversity of different societies.

The convergence of different paths towards and through modernity The second critical qualification stems from the fact that I see greater elements of convergence in contemporary global modernity than some

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advocates of the multiple modernities approach would admit. More specifically, in most developing countries, I see greater similarities with already modern countries and with other modernising ones than with their own past. The reason is two-fold: on the one hand, there is the continuous selection, reinterpretation, and reformulation of the imported ideas and institutional patterns of the original Western modern civilisation by leaders, elite and collective movements producing innovations and showing an ambivalent attitude towards modernity in general and the West in particular. On the other hand, there are the different responses given to, and the different strategies worked out, to cope with the structural problems of modernisation, such as industrialisation, the opening of markets, social differentiation, urbanisation and mass migrations. There are different national routes to modernisation, which are shaped by the structural location of a given country in the world system of economic and political relations (or, in other words, in the global division of labour and distribution of power), by its specific genetic code, and by the strategies of those individual and collective actors, endowed with cultural and organisational resources, which are the key agents of modernisation. In this sense, different countries work out what we may call cultural and institutional equivalents of coping with common problems. The advocates of the multiple modernities approach tend to neglect the global dimension and overemphasise local and national specificities, tend to stress actors’ cultural codes and underestimate the structural context. Most accounts of multiple modernities do not answer satisfactorily such relevant questions as: What kinds of diversity exist between different modern societies? How profound are the existing differences, and what are their future prospects? Are they more likely to persist, to withstand further social change in a globalising world, perhaps even to deepen as a result of, and a form of resistance to, globalisation, or do we have reason to expect that they will diminish in the long run? Moreover, if we all experience the modern global condition, does this imply that all societies are equally modern now? Or is modernity a matter of degree? What exactly does it mean to be modern anyway? (Schmidt 2006:80)

Schmidt (ibid.) argues that since questions such as these have not been satisfactorily answered in the affirmative, they cannot justify the language of multiple modernities. Rather, it would be more appropriate to speak of ‘varieties of modernity.’ According to him (ibid.:80-81), the problem is

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whether Japan – or the West or India or whichever region or country one may consider – is so unique as to justify, perhaps even warrant, the conceptualization of its institutional and cultural outlook in its own, and, what is more, even in civilizational terms – so different that something very important would be missed if Japan were treated as one of several members of a common family of modern societies. Is that really the case?

The question to be answered, however, is not as Schmidt (ibid.:81) frames it: ‘Does contemporary Japan have more in common with pre-modern Japan than with, say, contemporary Canada or contemporary Germany?’, because even if the answer is negative, it does not rule out the fact that Japanese modernity is strikingly different from, say, French modernity. Eisenstadt (1987:55) neatly addresses this question, arguing that …while a general trend toward structural differentiation developed across a wide range of institutions in most of these societies-in family, economic and political structures, urbanization, modern education, mass communication, and individualistic orientations – the ways in which these arenas were defined and organised varied greatly, in different periods of their development, giving rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns. Significantly, these patterns did not constitute simple continuations in the modern era of the traditions of their respective societies. Such patterns were distinctively modern, though greatly influenced by specific cultural premises, traditions and historical experiences. All developed distinctly modern dynamics and modes of interpretation, for which the original Western project constituted the crucial (and usually ambivalent) reference point. Many of the movements that developed in non-Western societies articulated strong anti-Western or even anti-modern themes, yet all were distinctively modern. There are multiple modernities also because there are different programs of modernity and different social actors who interpret them

The two basic premises of my argument, first that the breakthrough to modernity is a genuinely revolutionary process, radically transforming all aspects of life, and that today modernity is becoming global, and, second, that multiple paths towards and through modernity are taking place in the contemporary world, are not contradictory. Schmidt (2006: 81) is, however, right in pointing out that much literature on multiple modernities does not sufficiently clarify ‘what is being compared across two or more social entities (which need not be states)’, and does not analyse in depth the basic questions about which are the existing differences between different (modern) societies, and how profound they are and how they are likely to evolve in the future (with the answers depending on what precisely one looks at). Some advocates of the multiple modernities

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approach do not even permit the posing of such questions as the very premises on which these rest ‘imply that there must be greater variance across civilization lines than across epochs in world history’. Yet, ‘given that almost everyone agrees that modern society, be it in the singular or in the plural, differs from pre-modern society’, be it in the singular or in the plural too, ‘the assumed differences between the newly discovered multiple modernities must be very profound indeed. For if they were not, then there would be no sound basis for speaking of modernities in the plural’. Defenders of the notion of multiple modernities might reply that I read too much into their accounts and that their aim is only to highlight a number of cultural differences between different parts of the world that are easily missed when approaching the whole world as one, which modernization theory seems to do. However, while it may well be the case that modernization theorists have a tendency to underestimate existing differences, we should also guard against overstating them. In particular, we should be more specific about the exact nature of the differences that we claim exist and about the reasons for their ascribed magnitude (ibid.: 81)

The arbitrary separation between the cultural and the other dimensions of modernisation The third critical qualification which I make to most advocates of the multiple modernities approach is their tendency to focus mostly on cultural factors at the expenses of structural and institutional factors in the analysis of modernisation, which in turn induces them to overrate existing differences among countries and regions living the same experience of global modernity. An instance of this line of reasoning is Taylor’s distinction between acultural and cultural theories of modernity, where an acultural theory describes the transition to modernity in terms of a set of culture-neutral operations, which are viewed as ‘input’ that can transform any traditional society, whereas a cultural theory conceives modernity as a set of transformations defined by their position in a specific constellation of understandings of personhood, nature, social relations, goods and bads, virtues and vices, which are translated into specific languages and practices which are often mutually untranslatable (Taylor 2001:172-173). A convincing target of Taylor’s critique are those accounts of modernisation which see Western modernity itself as a culture with a distinctive moral and philosophical outlook and impose a false uniformity on the diverse encounters of non-Western cultures with the allegedly

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culture-neutral forms and processes on the basis of the belief that ‘any culture could suffer the impact of growing scientific consciousness, any religion could undergo secularisation, any set of ultimate ends could be challenged by the growth of instrumental thinking, any metaphysic could be dislocated by the split between fact and value.’ (Taylor 2001:173) Yet, Taylor’s thesis of the ‘two theories of modernity’ overshoots its target, in so far as it does not adequately problematise the unavoidable dialectic of convergence and divergence. Structural aspects of modernisation, like industrialisation, urbanisation, social and geographical mobility, and modern institutions like the democratic nation-state, the liberal market economy, or the research-oriented university are closely linked to profound cultural changes in Western culture, and when they take place or are adopted in non-Western cultures, they cannot be fully separated from their cultural premises. Taylor stresses the unity of cultural and institutional aspects of modernity within each specific culture, but arbitrarily separates them whenever modern institutions spread to parts of the world other than those where they started. In this sense, Taylor’s thesis of the ‘two theories of modernity’ is a step back with regard to his previous formulation in ‘Nationalism and Modernity’ (McKim and McMahon 1997), because some major instances of the so-called acultural theory of modernity such as Weber’s process of rationalisation are not acultural at all. Taylor is ambiguous in this respect since at first he states that ‘in Max Weber’s interpretation, rationalisation was a steady process, occurring within all cultures over time’ (Taylor 2001:174), while later on he acknowledges that Weber ‘gave a reading of the Protestant ethic as a particular set of religious-moral concerns that in turn helped to bring about modern capitalism’ (ibid:175). This is not the view of all scholars identifiable with the multiple modernities approach. Wittrock’s position is more balanced: …modernity may be understood as culturally constituted and institutionally entrenched… the institutional projects of modernity – be they a democratic nation-state, a liberal market economy, or a researchoriented university – cannot be understood unless their grounding in profound cultural changes is recognized. Ultimately, these institutional projects were premised on new assumptions about human beings, their rights and agency. These conceptual changes entailed promissory notes that came to constitute new affiliations, identities, and, ultimately, institutional realities (Wittrock 2000:36-38)

European modernity was not simply a package of technological and organisational developments; it was intimately linked to a political

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revolution, to an equally important transformation of the nature of scholarly and scientific practices and institutions. Modernity can be defined in terms of a conjunction, with global implications, of a set of cultural, institutional and structural shifts that originated in a specific part of the world and then spread all over. As Collins argues (1999), a multidimensional model of modernisation should take into account four variously related basic dimensions: bureaucratisation, capitalist industrialisation, secularisation, and democratisation. Modernity had unavoidable, irresistible consequences, which Taylor himself admits: ‘modernity is like a wave, flowing over and engulfing one traditional culture after another’ (Taylor 2001:279). Recognising this obvious fact does not amount to denying the existence of multiple modernities, since ‘a successful transition involves a people finding resources in their traditional culture to take on the new practices. In this sense modernity is not a single wave’. However, precisely because the structural processes of modernity and the economic and political institutions of modernity are strictly connected to a specific modern culture that is different both from its predecessors’ cultures and nonWestern cultures, the extent to which they can take place or be adopted through a process of creative adaptation by non-Western cultures has definite limits. It may be true that science and technology are neutral means that are applicable to different goals (D’Andrea 2001), but if Western modernity corresponds to the absence of ethical limits to the technical dominion of nature, to what extent does the diffusion of modern science and technology imply deep changes in the value orientations of non-Western cultures? It may also be true that free market capitalism can be adapted to and coexist with alternative political regimes and styles of life. Yet, if this is the case we will witness different varieties of capitalism rather than alternative multiple modernities, since differences in production regimes and in consumption patterns will have a limited range of variation. Moreover, if modernity corresponded historically with the beginning of the semantics of rights, with the formation of the concept of a core of individual freedoms (Bobbio 1979), we can expect that the encounter with cultures based on community-based social cement will be very controversial and conflict- ridden. Thomas McCarthy (2001) poses the crucial question of whether modern law, with its conceptions of basic human rights, belongs in Taylor’s view, and the answer is Rawls’ notion of overlapping consensus (Rawls 1993). It is a sensible but very abstract solution if only one considers the potential for conflict in husband/wife

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relations in mixed-ethnic communities and in such decisions as raising children by couples with different religious faiths. Even the most controversial relation of all, that between modernity and democracy, requires a greater appreciation of the dialectics between convergence and divergence in non-Western, modernising countries. If as Dahrendorf, reinterpreting Tocqueville, maintains modernity involves two primary elements: the generalisation of citizenship rights (or more modestly, the basic equality of status of all members of society) and the mobilisation of people and their needs, demands and wishes, which is a precondition of economic growth, we should expect political struggles and regime changes in authoritarian states with open market economies (Dahrendorf 1992:16).

The hurried dismissal of previous theories of modernisation The fourth critical qualification has to do with the way most multiple modernities advocates reject in toto the ideas of modernisation theorists, and misunderstand their views. In this chapter, I have tried to show that some of these ideas are still fruitful, if properly reformulated and updated in the light of globalisation. Actually, as Schmidt remarks (2006:78), the literature on multiple modernities ‘largely relies on an implicit notion of modernity which, when closely scrutinised, actually appears surprisingly close to that underlying much of the work of modernisation theorists, only thinner,’ since to the extent that a theory of modernity is outlined at all, it is a self-proclaimed cultural theory, as in Taylor’s account. Whereas ‘modernisation theory aims to capture the whole structure of modern society and all aspects of the dramatic change processes that give rise to its emergence, the literature on multiple modernities focuses almost exclusively on cultural factors and the ways these are believed to frame politics and the political order (as though modernity was identical with its polity or with the modern state)’. The relation between modernity and religion is actually an instance of misunderstanding. One of the main targets of the critique of classical modernisation theory by multiple modernities advocates is the idea that modernisation leads to secularisation, a critique based on the empirical evidence concerning the continuing importance of religious beliefs and practices in global modernity. However, for modernisation theorists, ‘secularisation does not necessarily imply the complete vanishing or disappearance of religion. It only implies its gradual separation’ from many spheres of society ‘in which its viewpoints cannot claim paramount

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importance anymore because the spheres (i.e., the economy, politics, the law, sciences, etc.) become structurally autonomous from religion and increasingly follow their own norms – an issue already raised by Max Weber in his notion of distinct ‘value spheres’’ (ibid.: 90). It implies that man and nature are less and less perceived as phenomena directly regulated by God’s will or by some transcendent metaphysical principles as in the great religions, and more and more as autonomous entities which can be understood by human reason. The fact that most Americans believe in God does not mean the United States are not a modern society; it means that religion seems to interfere much less than in pre-modern contexts like Medieval Europe with American science, economics and politics. In general, the contributions of modernisation theorists are usually dismissed as theoretically obsolete and ideologically biased, without any effort to distinguish ‘what is dead and what is alive’ in those theories. There are, however, a few significant exceptions by authors who honestly acknowledge their debts, like Eisenstadt (2000:4) who recognises the insights of Lerner (1958) and Inkeles and Smith (1974) about two basic components of the modern project, i.e., the awareness of a great variety of roles existing beyond narrow, local, and familial ones and the possibility of belonging to wider translocal, changing communities, and Therborn’s (1995) reference to Black’s (1966) four different points of entry into modernity. Yet, references are usually made even when recent writings are just new wine in old bottles. Doubtless, the classical theories of modernisation of Marx, Weber and Durkheim (and modernisation theorists of the post-second world war) implicitly or explicitly exaggerate the degree of simultaneity of the different dimensions of modernisation, assuming that although analytically distinct, they take place together; but the multiple modernities advocates exaggerate the degree of disjunction of such processes. Thus, I agree with those scholars who stress the coexistence of structural processes and cultural attitudes, like Gellner who argues that specialisation, atomisation, instrumental rationality, independence of fact and value, growth and provisional nature of knowledge are all linked with each other (1983). The relevant point to make is that coexistence does not mean coherence. From its beginning in the West, the civilisation of modernity was beset by internal contradictions, giving rise to intellectual criticism and socio-political conflict. Various scholars have in different ways stressed the inherent contradictions and conflicts of modernity: Berman’s account of the tension between the modern promises of adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world and, at the same time, the modern threat of destroying everything we have, everything we

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know, everything we are’ (1983); the conflict between instrumental rationality and communicative rationality as central in Habermas’ theory of modernity (1985), the revolt of the subject against reason in Touraine’s account (1992), as well as the contradictory mix of liberty and discipline in Wagner’s interpretation of modernity (1994). We can add here a few other formulations of the inherent tensions and conflicts of modernity. Castoriadis (1987) argues that modernity entails a central conflict between the ‘radical imagination,’ which presents the image of a self-creating society of autonomous individuals, and the ‘institutional imaginary’ of capitalism with its penchant for rational and instrumental mastery of human beings and objects. Delanty (1999) discusses the basic tension in modernity between autonomy of the subject and social fragmentation. On the one hand, modernity as a cultural project refers to the autonomy of the individual, the self-assertion of the self and the progressive expansion of the discourses of creativity, reflexivity and discursiveness in all spheres of life. On the other hand, modernity entails the experience of fragmentation, the sense that modernity as a social project destroys its own cultural foundations. For Eisenstadt (2000), perhaps the most critical rift in both ideological and political terms was that which separated universal and pluralistic visions, between a view that accepted the existence of different values and rationalities and a view that conflated different values and, above all, rationalities, in a totalistic way. The inherently contradictory character of the civilisation of modernity fosters the perspective of multiple modernities in the sense that nonWestern cultures can, at least to some extent, creatively select some aspects rather than others and develop original responses. Eisenstadt (2000:3) argues that …the idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world – indeed to explain the history of modernity – is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs

However, I stress once again that the multiplicity of cultural programs is limited, and must be contextualised in the light of world economic and political relations which constrain the range of the specific institutional responses which are given to the relatively similar structural changes that all modernising countries have to face. In this respect, I consider the concept of cultural hegemony (in Gramsci’s sense) as relevant for the discussion of multiple modernities. In the contemporary world (even more than in the past), those countries or peoples which hold economic, political and military might exert a cultural hegemony as well and spread around a

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model to be imitated. The so-called ‘soft power,’ favoured by the control of major global media, is often more important than the ‘hard power’ of military force. However, even this cultural hegemony is far from complete, not only because it is challenged by alternative cultural values and visions but also because it is criticised from within. The contradictory character of Western modernity, its very nature of critical self-awareness and of democratic public discourse, runs contrary to the ideological indoctrination by the most powerful. Globalisation favours global control, but at the same time it fosters global opposition (no-global and new-global movements, anti-Western political actors, etc.), as well as self-criticism and protest movements within the Western countries themselves. A final critical qualification concerns only a few proponents of the multiple modernities approach: there is no need to link the notion of multiple modernities to that of postmodernity. Long ago, Amartya Sen (1996) criticised the Hindu peculiar mix of post-modern enthusiasts, who ride the Western wave with a scrupulously anti-Western programme, and who often join forces with pre-modern supporters of Hindu fundamentalism. Both are convinced that India must be protected against the aggression of the so-called modern culture, because they are the victims of a serious prejudice, that of considering India as a culturally fragile country running the risk of losing its fundamental values under the impact of Western culture. They misread Indian history and forget that the country has been able to absorb influences of many kinds without giving up its own identity. More recently (2001), Gaonkar persuasively argued that to announce the general end of modernity even as an epoch, much less than an attitude or an ethos, seems premature, if not patently ethnocentric at a time when non-Western people everywhere begin to engage critically their own hybrid modernities.

The dialectic of convergence and divergence To think productively along the lines suggested by the idea of alternative modernities, we have to recognise and problematise the unavoidable dialectic of convergence and divergence. It is customary to think of convergence in terms of institutional arrangements and of divergence primarily in terms of lived experiences and cultural expressions of modernity. The idea of alternative modernities focuses on that narrow but critical band of variations consisting of site-specific creative adaptations on the axis of convergence… Creative adaptation is not simply a matter of adjusting the form or re-coding the practice to soften the impact of modernity; rather it points to the manifold ways in

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which a people question the present. It is a site where people ‘make’ themselves modern, as opposed to being ‘made’ modern by alien and impersonal forces, and where they give themselves an identity and a destiny (Gaonkar 2001:17-18)

Although empirical research along these lines is not extensive, some interesting contributions exist, such as Hanchard’s and Chakrabarty’s essays (2001). The former, ‘Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics and the African Diaspora’ studies the case of the African peoples’ diaspora. Often violently captured and removed from home and deprived of their languages, traditions and territory, forced to adopt the languages, religions and political ideas of their oppressors, they succeeded in articulating a distinctive culture which often includes a vision of pan-African modernity. The latter, ‘Adda, Calcutta: dwelling and modernity’, shows how creative adaptation, even when it succeeds as for the addas in Calcutta, succeeds only in exposing the tensions inherent to the process of learning to live with modernity. Drawing on Lee’s study of Shanghai in the 1930s and Chakrabarty’s study of Calcutta in the 1940s, Gaonkar remarks that modernity is more often perceived as a lure than as a threat, and people (not just the elite) everywhere, at every national or cultural site, rise to meet it, negotiate it, and appropriate it in their own fashion. Everything in sight is named modern: ‘modern coffeehouse,’ ‘Modern Age,’ the magazine for the ‘modern woman,’ ‘modern education,’ and so on. The Shanghai modernist elite, especially writers, artists and political activists (including communists), eagerly consumed Western offerings, but they did so not in the mode of a ‘colonial minority’ but in a cosmopolitan mode of dialogue and engagement, dazzled by and hungry for Western ideas, experiences and cultural forms. They remained certain of their identity as ‘Chinese’. In spite of enormous differences with the contemporary modernisation which involves a whole country and not limited minorities within a politically independent state, today the Chinese are also lured and dazzled by modernity while maintaining their Chinese identity. Other empirical evidence comes from research on the Africanisation of Westernisation which has taken place in various forms and degrees in post-colonial Africa (Bernardi 1998). Although cultural modernity is conventionally seen as both the machinery and the optic for the limitless production of differences, such difference always functions within a penumbra of similarities, and such similarities may be seen in the style of the flâneur, the mystique of fashion, the magic of the city, the ethos of irony, or the anxiety of mimicry, all ineffable yet recognisable across the noise of difference.

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What is common to these strings of similarities is a mood of distance, a habit of questioning, and an intimation of what Baudelaire calls the ‘marvellous’ in the midst of the ruins of our tradition, the tradition of the new. Whether these common identities, which regularly find expression in popular media, especially film and music, will one day pave the way for an ethic of the global modern, remains to be seen. Gaonkar (2001:23) tentatively concludes that [j]ust as societal modernization (the prime source of convergence theories) produces difference through creative adaptation or unintended consequences, so also cultural modernity (the prime source of divergence theories) produces similarities on its own borders…: everywhere, at every national/cultural site, modernity is not one but many; modernity is not new but old and familiar; modernity is incomplete and necessarily so

The existence of multiple modernities and varieties of modernity is explained by the different structural arrangements and cultural codes of modernising countries and by the impact of the world economy and of the international division of power. Yet, multiple modernities are also possible because, in spite of the erosion of nation-states’ sovereignty due to globalisation, governments continue to be proactive agents of development and modernisation. The nation-states which have sufficient economic, social and cultural resources continue to be key actors in world politics, capable of at least some form and degree of creative adaptation to global common trends. In spite of its weaknesses, the multiple modernities perspective makes an important contribution by stressing the fact that there are as many roads to modernity as there are cultures. However, in the light of the critical qualifications I have developed, I am inclined to share a mild view of this approach which is close to the varieties of capitalism perspective and which recognises both the strength of the flowing wave of modernity and the possibility of creative adaptation to global trends.

References Berman, Marshall, 1983: All that is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity. London Verso. Bernardi, Bernardo, 1998: Africa. Tradizione e modernità. Roma: Carocci. Black, Cyril E., 1966: The Dynamics of Modernization, New York: Harper. Bobbio, Norberto, 1985: Stato, governo, società, Torino: Einaudi.

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Castoriadis, Cornelious, 1987: The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2001: “Adda, Calcutta: dwelling in modernity,” pp. 123-164 in: Dilip P. Gaonkar (ed.) Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Collins, Randall, 1999: Macrohistory. Essays in Sociology of the Long Run. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dahrendorf, Ralf, 1992: “Democracy and Modernity: Notes on the European Experience,” pp. 15-19 in: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.) Democracy and Modernity. Leiden: Brill. D’Andrea, Dimitri, 2001: “Europe and the West. The Identity Beyond the Origin”, pp. 133-154 in: Furio Cerutti and Enno Rudolph (eds.) A Soul for Europe, vol. 2, Peters Leuven-Sterling, Virginia. Delanty, Gerard, 1999: Social Theory in a Changing World. Conceptions of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 1987: European Civilization in Comparative Perspective. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. —. 2000: “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129: 1-29. Gaonkar, Dilip P., (ed.) 2001: Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Gellner, Ernest, 1983: Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Giddens, Anthony, 1990: The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen, 1985: Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. Hanchard, Michael, 2001: “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics and the African Diaspora” pp. 272-298 in: Dilip P. Gaonkar (ed.) Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Inkeles, Alex, and David H. Smith 1974: Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. International Sociology 2001. Rethinking Civilizations Analysis. Vol. 16, no. 3. Lee, Leo O., 2001: “Shanghai Modern: Reflections on Urban Culture in China in the 1930s”, pp. 86-122 in: Dilip P. Gaonkar (ed.) Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Lerner, Daniel, 1958: The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Glencoe: The Free Press. Martinelli, Alberto, 2005: Global Modernities. London: Sage.

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McCarthy, Thomas, 2001: “On Reconciling Cosmopolitan Unity and National Diversity”, pp. 197-236 in: Dilip P. Gaonkar (ed.) Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. McKim, Robert, and Jeff McMahon (eds.) 1997: The Morality of Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John, 1993: Political Liberalism. New York, Columbia University Press. Schmidt Volker H., 2006: “Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity?”, Current Sociology 54: 77-97. Sen, Amartya, 1996: “Our Culture, Their Culture: Satuajit Ray and the Art of Universalism,” The New Republic: 155: 27-34. Taylor Charles, 2001: “Two Theories of Modernity,” pp. 172-196 in: Dilip P. Gaonkar (ed.) Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Therborn, Göran, 1995: European Modernity and Beyond. The Trajectory of European Societies 1945-2000. London: Sage. Touraine, Alain, 1992: Critique de la modernité. Paris: Fayard. Wagner, Peter, 1994: A Sociology of Modernity. Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge. Wittrock, Björn, 2000: “Modernity: One, None or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,” Daedalus 129 31-60.

CHAPTER NINE ONE WORLD, ONE MODERNITY VOLKER H. SCHMIDT

I Modernity is a very important concept in sociology; it might, in fact, be seen as the discipline’s most important concept as it stands for the very societal formation to whose emergence academic sociology itself is often said to owe its existence. Yet, despite its centrality, no consensus exists among sociologists as to what exactly the concept signifies, how it should be properly understood, defined and applied to social reality. We have assembled massive bodies of knowledge about specific aspects or particular areas of modern society, such as its complexity or its economic and political orders, but as valuable as such knowledge is, it does not provide a comprehensive view of the structure of modern society at large. For example, to conceptualise modern society as a capitalist society or as a liberal-democratic society doubtless illuminates important structural features of this society, but the picture it presents is nonetheless incomplete as it reduces, at least implicitly, the whole of society to one or two of its subsystems while diminishing the significance of other institutional sectors. Likewise, to characterise contemporary society as an industrial, post-industrial, knowledge, information or risk society is to highlight certain properties of socio-economically advanced societies while neglecting others. As long as students of modernity are aware of the limitations that such notions entail, this is not a problem. However, many scholars exhibit little such awareness. Then modern society, rather than having particular features, is equated with these features, and that is a

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problem because it gives rise to an overly simplistic understanding of this society. A second problem facing any effort to come to terms with modernity is that the concept is not only used differently within sociology, but also between sociology and other academic disciplines. But while this is a problem that sociologists can do very little about, it should be in their interest to reach some agreement as to what they mean by modernity – as to how the term is (or ought to be) understood sociologically. That is the question I will be addressing in the pages ahead. In so doing, I will be drawing primarily on the differentiation theoretical school. To my knowledge, this school is the only tradition of social scientific thought that aims to offer a comprehensive theory of modern society. It has laid foundations that I believe no theorist interested in the ‘big picture’, in what is peculiar to modern society as against other societal formations, can sensibly ignore. The concept of modernity developed in this work is a very abstract one, thus permitting a great deal of variation on the ground. At the same time, it is sufficiently clear to turn it into a workable instrument of social analysis, allowing us to identify key characteristics of modern society. Given the absence of any serious competitor on the theoretical plane, sociologists interested in conducting meaningful analyses of modernity must either work with (some variant of) this theory or propose an alternative that matches the former’s level of sophistication. Since such an alternative is presently not in sight, we have to make do with the conceptual tools that are available to us now. Based on this premise, section II offers a very basic sketch of Luhmann’s theory of modernity, which, for the purpose of this chapter, will be treated as an elaboration and extension of Parsons’ work, as well as that of other classics in the differentiation theoretical tradition (from Spencer via Marx to Durkheim and Weber). Following some remarks concerning the theory’s operationalisation for concrete social analyses, I will go on to discuss, and reject as misleading, one presently popular alternative, the conception of multiple modernities, in the light of this theory (section III). Utilising secondary data, section IV presents a number of empirical findings that lend support to differentiation and modernisation theoretical views about the consequences of development. Finally, I offer a brief conclusion as to what can be learned from the controversy about whether we should be talking about modernity in the singular or in the plural (section V). As the chapter’s title suggests, I prefer the former option.

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II Any attempt to make sense of the contemporary world must delimit its subject matter along the dimensions of space and time. In terms of space, we can either restrict ourselves to studying particular world regions or strive to cover the whole world, and temporally we may opt to analyse either very long trends of societal evolution or focus on shorter time spans. Most empirical work in sociology concerns itself with developments observed within, or affecting the populations of, single nation states, typically the ones the authors themselves reside in. Sometimes, the scope of analysis is extended beyond national boundaries to involve other countries as well. The countries selected for crossnational comparisons are usually from the same geographical or socioculturally/politically defined region, although there are also (rare) examples of studies that aim to cover larger regions, sometimes the entire globe. The time horizon of this body of work mostly spans a few decades, from some point in the relatively recent past to the present. Substantively, it tends to be driven by a concern to capture and explain country-specific peculiarities and/or cross-national differences. The authors want to know what is unique to a given (mostly, their) country, or explore alternative (political) solutions to given social problems, and both requires comparison. Much of the knowledge yielded by this research is informative and useful. It rarely has an immediate bearing on social theory though, especially on the theory of modernity. To be relevant for such a theory, one needs a different kind of knowledge, knowledge that spans longer time horizons and whose geographic scope is limited only by the boundaries of the globe itself. Such knowledge is what much of the classical body of sociological thought strives to produce. Luhmann’s theory of society, which like any grand sociological theory ultimately focuses on modern society, is no exception. It purports (or aims) to cover all of humanity’s history and all forms of social life our species has thus far developed. Consequently, it adopts a time horizon that spans millennia and a geographical horizon that spans the globe. Viewed from such a perspective, modernity appears as the outcome of probably no more than just two major transformations that human social organisation has thus far undergone (Kumar 1999). Any student of societal evolution is familiar with the threefold typology distinguishing tribal or archaic societies of hunters and gatherers from traditional societies that emerged after the Neolithic Revolution and culminated in the so-called high civilisations. Following this account, it took several thousand years for these

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predominantly agrarian civilisations to work themselves out. The earliest signs of yet another epochal shift in the making appear around the late 15th century in Europe, where early forms of modern capitalism and the selfrule of an increasingly confident bourgeoisie in some of the continent’s economically leading cities begin to challenge the feudal order of the Middle Ages (without necessarily being aware of the ultimate consequences). Simultaneously, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment that set in and gain momentum during the next two centuries erode the (Catholic) church’s monopoly of world interpretation (which is further subverted by the Protestant Reformation). As a result of these developments, politics, the economy and science, to a certain extent also the law, become more independent, gradually separate and emancipate themselves, from religion, and begin to form their own institutional (or, as Weber calls them, ‘life’) orders and ‘value spheres’ (Weber 1978), with religion itself being reduced to one such sphere among others, rather then reigning over all of them. It is only with the 18th century revolutions – the industrial-capitalist revolution in England, the political revolutions in America and France, and the educational revolution introducing mass education in parts of Europe and North America (Parsons 1971) – that the point of no return to the old order is reached. Thereafter, the new order quickly unfolds, although its final consolidation is still a matter of centuries, arguably accomplished only in the 20th century. At the same time, it slowly extends beyond the narrow boundaries of its northwest European birthplace; first through colonisation, later in subtler, but no less penetrating ways, and eventually reaching out to the whole world, reflecting modernity’s inherent globalism. If modernity ever was a ‘project’ then this was from the outset a globalising project, as none of its core constituents are ‘naturally’ confined to any particular world region. On the contrary, as Marx was perhaps the first to point out for the case of the capitalist economy, its internal logic drives it beyond all socially constructed (hence economically arbitrary) boundaries in the quest to draw the entire globe into one world market. Today, we can discern similar tendencies in the sciences, in medicine, in the media, in religion, and arguably also in the fields of politics and law, although the latter two spheres have thus far remained more nationally (or, in the case of the European Union, regionally) circumscribed than the former. Luhmann’s theory (see Luhmann 1997, ch. 4) posits a similar sequence in the evolution of society, but rather than considering earlier forms of societal organisation primarily in negative terms, in terms of modernity’s discontinuities with the past, it characterises each stage

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positively, namely by the mode of differentiation that dominates the social order at the respective stage. Thus, a differentiation of society into equal and relatively independent segments marks the first stage of societal evolution; an idea well known since the publication of Durkheim’s Division of Labour (Durkheim 1949). This stage is superseded when vertical stratification becomes the dominant mode of societal differentiation. Under this regime, society is differentiated into unequal, but interdependent strata, with ascribed and inherited status determining everyone’s place, function and (recognised and symbolically validated) worth in society. Finally, under modern conditions, stratificatory differentiation gives way to functional differentiation as the primary mode of societal differentiation. Functional differentiation means that a multitude of subsystems in charge of separate functions – such as making collectively binding decisions, the peaceful and rule-bound resolution of conflicts, the production of true knowledge, and so forth – emerge, all of which are necessary for society’s reproduction, but not easily prioritised in terms of their relative importance. At the level of their operational rules the various systems are structurally autonomous from one another, meaning that each follows its own peculiar sub-rationality or function logic and that each employs its own criteria for determining successful conduct within its domain. At the same time, all – or at least most – of these systems are mutually dependent on each other: No rational law, no modern capitalism, as Max Weber (1984) put it in the Protestant Ethic, and Luhmann adds several further dimensions of subsystem interdependence. Key examples of the kinds of systems that Luhmann’s theory alludes to are the political system, the economic system, the legal system, the educational system, the medical system, science, etc. An important difference to Parson’s systems theory is that Luhmann does not limit the number of systems to just four (because he believes one cannot derive them deductively). A second, and related, difference is that in Luhmann’s conception, society’s systems are not primarily analytical but real entities – which means it is not up to the theorist to determine how many of them exist (and what exactly they do), but to societal evolution itself. Inclusion into any of modern society’s systems is premised to be an option for all individuals and to be based not on descent but on technical skills and qualifications or on (other) personal attributes that make a difference in the sphere in question; in short, on functional considerations. Luhmann does not believe that stratification disappears under the regime of functional differentiation. He does suggest, however, that it loses in relative significance, that (just like segmentation, which also does not

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disappear) it is reduced to a secondary mode of societal differentiation, rather than reflecting the very order of society itself as it does under premodern conditions. One of the key indicators evidencing this shift in Luhmann’s view is the decreasing legitimacy that purely status-based claims to privileged treatment, which are taken for granted across spheres in pre-modern societies, are accorded within the new order (see Luhmann 2000). This de-emphasising of stratification sets his theory apart from Marxist and Neo-Marxist scholarship that focuses on the reproduction of seemingly unchanging class relations – but whose critique of persisting class structures arguably rests on the same normative and theoretical premise, namely that modern society has no legitimate place for ossified, unchanging patterns of hierarchy and inequality. It is obvious that functional differentiation cannot be measured directly. Therefore, to operationalise the theory for empirical analyses, one has to target lower levels of abstraction and to translate the language of societal subsystems into a language of differentiated institutions. This is not straightforward because, from the viewpoint of the theory, the modernisation of society (and hence also institutional development) is an ongoing, open-ended process. Therefore, we cannot simply equate present institutions, even the seemingly most advanced ones, with modernity. Rather, we must leave open the possibility that ‘the modern condition’ is compatible with a variety of institutional forms (Therborn 2003) because functional equivalents may exist or emerge at later points in time that perform the same functions by different means and possibly equally well or even better. Moreover, since modern society puts a premium on continuous change, modernity, understood in institutional terms, is like a moving target, never fully accomplished anywhere, and always transforming, reinventing itself, hence unstable to the point of ‘liquidity’ (Bauman 2000). At the same time, once a structural innovation that enhances society’s productive (and adaptive) capacity has occurred somewhere, this fact alone alters the environment of all other societies, pressuring them to react (Bendix 1977) and to follow suit, lest they be left behind and severely disadvantaged in their positioning in the ‘world system’ (Wallerstein 1974) of global power relations. This, in turn, gives rise to further change. And so on ad infinitum. However, even though our knowledge of past social, technological, and institutional change (and their continuous acceleration during the past two centuries) makes it easy to predict that the future will in all likelihood differ significantly from the present, any empirical analysis is bound by the limitations to which the past and the present subject our ‘sociological imagination’ (C. Wright Mills). Being shaped by the past, we are inclined

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to extrapolate contemporary trends and thus to conceive the near future as an extension of the present. In other words, for us modernity cannot but have some definite forms, because we cannot transcend the horizon they delimit. Only the evolution of society itself can. Acknowledging our intellectual parochialism, and recognising that our analyses are inevitably based on temporally, spatially and perhaps also culturally specific notions of modernity, the following institutions can be suggested to best epitomise our current (ideal typical) understanding of the structure of modern society: a rationalised (preferably democratic and representative) polity with accountable governments; a market (or capitalist) economy; the rule of law and a legal system guaranteeing a core set of human rights; bureaucratic administration based on ‘meritocratic’ (skill-oriented) recruitment and insulated from ‘special’ interests; a public (collectively run or regulated) welfare system covering the whole population and securing its basic needs; a system of formal mass schooling and education; research and development in large science organisations, etc. These are the kinds of institutions that nowadays come to mind when we speak of modernity. Most of them can take on fairly different forms: As is well known, various types of democracy (and forms of ‘good governance’ more generally) co-exist in the contemporary world; capitalism comes in more than one variety; the conception of right is inquisitorial in some countries and accusatory in others; diverse social policy regimes create unique patterns of welfare provision, etc. Yet, despite the multiplicity of forms in which they manifest themselves, these are the kinds of institutions that one (presently) expects to find in modern societies. We do, of course, know that we will not find them everywhere, and that enormous differences exist in their performance where variants of them are at least formally in place, but underperformance or total absence of (more than one of) the above institutions are widely viewed as signs of deficient and underdeveloped, not just as ‘different’ forms of modernity. Such agreement did not always exist. The apparent early successes of the socialist world seemed to suggest an alternative modernity was possible and perhaps desirable. The collapse of socialism has shattered these perceptions and hopes; not completely, of course, because some continue to maintain them (see, e.g., Lin 2006), but by and large it is probably fair to say that for the time being it seems the market economy and the other aforementioned institutions have ‘won out’. Not surprisingly, therefore, they have increasingly assumed the character of ‘world models’ (Meyer et al. 1997), of reference points giving direction to developmental policies around the world and serving as measuring rods

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for assessing such policies’ success or failure. No alternative pointing systematically beyond them is presently in sight.

III It is against this background that I will now discuss the fruitfulness of a conception of modernity that seemingly contradicts the above view, namely the multiple modernities approach of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and his followers. In contrast to the differentiation theoretical school, it posits that there is not one modernity, but a multitude of them. The different modernities whose existence is postulated for the contemporary world are rooted in different civilisations (such as European – or Western or JudeoChristian – civilisation, Sinic – or Confucian – civilisation, Indian – or Hindu – civilisation, Arabic – or Islamic – civilisation, and so forth), and they crystallise in nation states, each of which ultimately constitutes a modernity of its own. The state is treated as the centre of any particular modernity, and given that each society, due to different historical trajectories, socio-cultural legacies and other contextual parameters defining its identity, translates the ‘cultural core’ or ‘spirit’ of modernity, its ‘programme’, differently into reality, no two societies/countries are exactly alike. Hence the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000, Wittrock 2000). That all countries are somehow unique is obviously true. Less evident is what social theoretic significance we should accord this fact. To determine its significance for a theory of modernity, one needs to know how the concept of modernity itself is understood within that theory. Regrettably though, a clear definition of this concept is conspicuously absent from the literature on multiple modernities, as even sympathetic observers have had occasion to note (see for example, Allardt 2005). In particular, the social structural and institutional peculiarities of modern societies are largely ignored. The cultural foundations of modernity, on which the multiple modernity approach primarily focuses, are traced back as far as the Axial Age some 2,500 years ago when, to quote Björn Wittrock (2005: 103), ‘deep-seated intellectual and cosmological shifts that occurred in different forms with striking (…) simultaneity across the Eurasian hemisphere’ for the first time in human history gave rise to a sense of the ‘malleability of human existence’ and to reflexivity, understood as ‘the ability to use reason to transcend the immediately given’ (ibid: 106). The common core of this change in the societal perception of human existence – comprising the three aspects of reflexivity, historicity, and agentiality – is said to be deeply culturally

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impregnated and hence exhibits great variations across world regions. These variations, says Wittrock, importantly shape the modernities that he claims have emerged during the past few centuries following yet another major shift in human thought, that triggered by the European Enlightenment. Since then, a worldwide movement has been set in motion which promotes the ideas of free and equal citizenship lying at the heart of modernity’s ‘promissory notes’, as Wittrock calls them. Modernity, as conceived of by the proponents of the multiple modernities school, is therefore first and foremost a cultural formation. The institutions of modernity are treated as products of the above ‘promises’ and of other cultural elements, manifestations of never ending efforts to put the ideas driving modernising agents to practice. Given the context-specificity of such efforts, their ‘fruits’ should be expected to assume different forms in different places too, so that even nations belonging to the same civilisation or culture can differ tremendously from each other. All societies/nation states are therefore historical individuals and should be treated and analysed accordingly. So fundamental are the differences between existing modernities, says Wittrock, that no social analyst can credibly argue any longer ‘that different cultural, religious and historical traditions will become increasingly irrelevant and eventually fade away in favour of one all-encompassing form of modernity and modernisation’ (ibid: 99). The target of the latter claim is the modernisation theory of the 1950s and 1960s. Modernisation theory, which is conceptually anchored in the work of Talcott Parsons and best understood as a process theory of modernity, argues that modernisation is a homogenising process, ‘a process of social change whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics common to more developed societies’, as Daniel Lerner (1968: 386) put it. Societies undergoing modernisation should therefore become more similar over time. Like numerous other critics before them, the multiple modernists reject this view – on the grounds of both its alleged empirical falsity and normative dubiousness, given its reliance on ‘the’ Western (or, worse even, American) model as a yardstick for measuring developmental achievements around the world. The normative criticism of modernisation theory is but a variation of an older claim that the theory serves to legitimise Western imperialism and hence is largely ideological. As such, it reflects the spirit of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism that left a deep imprint on the generation of social scientists which was educated from the mid- 1960s to 1980s and which defined the agenda of social thought for decades to come. And while it doubtless has its merits as a self-critique of Western triumphalism,

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this alone would not suffice to undermine modernisation theory’s empirical validity. Does successful modernisation result in similar societal outlooks, in ‘convergence’, then, or does it not? The question may seem more straightforward than it is, for to answer it, one first needs to know what exactly convergence or difference ‘mean’. In particular, one needs to know what kinds of differences render modernisation theoretical convergence claims invalid from the viewpoint of multiple modernists (or other critics). That question, however, has thus far been largely left unanswered. As in the case of ‘modernity’, the meaning of ‘difference’ is shrouded in darkness in the multiple modernities literature, and the social theoretic significance of whichever differences its authors might have in mind is simply taken for granted. Yet, while the existence of (some form of) difference is undeniable, not all observable differences carry the same conceptual weight, especially for a theory of modernity. So we need criteria by which we can distinguish more from less important differences. Eisenstadt (2005), in a rare instance of concreteness, recently gave one example of the kinds of differences he considers important enough to justify the language of multiple modernities, of modernity in the plural rather than in the singular. Thus, while the nation state has become a worldwide model of socio-political organisation, the conceptions of citizenship and collective identity that go hand in hand with its diffusion vary, with some countries opting for more ‘totalistic’ versions and others contending themselves with more ‘multifaceted’ ones that tolerate greater ethnic, religious and cultural heterogeneity of the citizenry. Such differences are indeed important, so important, as Eisenstadt reminds us, that they can become matters of life and death, for at least the ‘totalistic’ versions of nationhood and national identity have repeatedly served as seedbeds for war, genocide and other atrocities committed around the world. However, that a difference is important in some respects does not automatically render it (equally) important for (all) other concerns. Differences become social theoretically significant only if it can be shown that they occupy a strategic place in the respective theory, which in the present case is a theory of modernity. Since the multiple modernities approach does not really specify what it means by modernity, it would be difficult to determine unequivocally whether the differences in question qualify for such a role even within its own conception. But be this as it may, what can be safely said is that the language of multiple modernities itself is justified only if the differences alluded to affect the foundations of modernity as a societal formation. Are the differences mentioned by

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Eisenstadt of this theoretic magnitude? And would it be impossible for alternative social theoretic conceptions, such as that of differentiation theory and modernisation theory, to accommodate them? I doubt it. To illustrate my scepticism with the example given by Eisenstadt himself, I think it would make more sense to treat the two versions of national identity and citizenship as instances of different degrees, rather than different types, of modernity/modernisation, with the totalistic variety, because of its strong reliance on primordial notions of communal membership, less in line with the empirical realities and normative expectations of modernity than the ‘multifaceted’ one. This argument presupposes that meaningful differences can be made between pre-modern and modern conditions, as well as between degrees of modernity or modernisation realised and achieved by different societies. Surprisingly though, the multiple modernities school, while very keen to expose other differences, denies, or at least is unwilling to consider the possibility, that such differences might persist in the present age. For from the perspective of this school, the whole world is equally modern now. All are modern, only differently modern. A differentiation theoretical perspective raises doubts as to the soundness of this view. Take the example of India. India has been a political democracy since its independence in 1947, and thus, politically speaking, certainly more modern than, say, China, despite many shortcomings of its democracy. At the same time, the caste system, and hence a social structure that is incompatible with (full) modernity, persists in India despite its legal abolishment many years ago, and continues to exclude millions of citizens from even minimal education, basic health care, genuine social mobility, (real) political influence, legal protection etc.; indeed, in some of the least developed northern states, arguably from any kind of ‘agentiality’ (Wittrock) that deserves its name. Such a social structure is incompatible with modernity because it is based on categorical inequalities that subvert the principle of functional differentiation by erecting virtually insurmountable barriers between the underprivileged and the privileged. It also subverts the proper functioning of many formally modern institutions, which it effectively turns into instruments for advancing elite interests – through the allocation of both public positions (that are often filled on the basis of status rather than qualification) and funds (whose distribution tends to be highly regressive). In other words, for large segments, if not the majority of India’s population, stratification continues to be the primary mode of differentiation because they are locked into their low position of the status hierarchy. To the extent that this is the case, India is not a modern, but a

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pre-modern country, or more plausibly, a semi-modern country that blends modern elements with non-modern ones. In China, on the other hand, we also find enormous social inequalities, especially income disparities, which have in fact exploded since the country’s transition to capitalism from 1978 onwards. But while these inequalities are certainly deplorable, they are first and foremost gradual inequalities, permitting much greater social mobility than in India. One indicator of this mobility is that many of the millions of new small and medium-sized businesses that have sprung up throughout the country since the late 1970s were founded by former peasants who thus improved their livelihood enormously (Fishman 2004). Another is the emergence of a sizable middle class whose members often come from very poor families and whose ranks are constantly swelling. Socio-economically, China would therefore seem to be more modern than India, while India would be ahead of China’s modernity in terms of the political and legal systems, as well as possibly in other dimensions. Regardless of whether one agrees with this assessment, treating all countries and world regions on a par with regard to their modernness does not seem very plausible. However, if one grants the possibility of differential degrees of modernisation, then one needs criteria by which to judge particular cases. Differentiation theory proposes one such criterion, the extent to which functional differentiation has been realised, and modernisation theory adds others, e.g., the level of socio-economic development and the spread of modern institutions, as outlined in section two. Further criteria could be added. And while any proposal is debatable, the latter two schools at least venture to make ones. The multiple modernities school, by contrast, appears unwilling to concern itself with truly fundamental differences, while making far too much of relatively minor differences in the expressive cultures of contemporary nation states and in the dispositions of intellectual elites; of, as John Meyer (2000: 245) put in bluntly, ‘things that in the modern system do not matter’. Contrary to a wide-spread perception, modernisation theory and differentiation theory can easily accommodate differences in the institutional designs and collective identities (or semantics, in Luhmann’s parlance) of nation states, because their concept of modernity is sufficiently abstract to permit a great deal of diversity at this level of societal aggregation (see Parsons 1964; Smelser 1968), where reality is far more variable than at the level of the macro-structure determined by society’s (predominant) mode of differentiation. Neither school of thought emphasises such variation very much, but since it does not affect modern society’s fundamental building blocks, that which distinguishes modernity

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from other societal formations, they rightly ignore it, because (unless and until proven otherwise) it has no bearing on their subject matter. Only differences that make a difference for this reference problem ought to be taken into account by a theory of modernity. Sociology is not bereft of conceptual tools permitting us to consider other (e.g. cross-country) differences within a suitable research framework, but confusing the study of modernity with the comparative analysis of developmental policy paths pursued, of institutional regime types enacted, of collective identities (temporarily) adopted, and of allegedly unchanging cultural traditions upheld, by (the elites of) particular modern countries simply conflates levels of analysis and hence does not further our understanding of either. To conceptualise varieties of this sort, one had better resort to various ‘middle range’ theories, as famously proposed (but unduly privileged over ‘grand theory’) by Robert Merton.

IV I will now very briefly look at several post-World War II developments that I believe lend support to some of modernisation theory’s main propositions regarding the consequences of development (see Huntington 1971 for a concise summary). My point of departure is the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s (1994: 288; emphasis in original) observation that the period from the 1950s onwards saw ‘the greatest and most dramatic, rapid and universal transformation in human history (…). For 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages suddenly ended in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s’. That is a bold claim, not only in terms of its substantive content, but also in terms of its conceptual meaning. For what Hobsbawm says can be read as suggesting that modernity, far from being superseded by an entirely different type of society (as the literature on ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity implies), is, in a sense, only just beginning. Do we have evidence supporting such a sweeping claim? I think we do. Hobsbawm himself reports several major changes, ‘the most dramatic and far-reaching’ of which he considers to be ‘the death of the peasantry’ (ibid: 289). This is indeed a dramatic change because it means nothing less than the global end of the Neolithic era during which the overwhelming majority of humankind had been securing its livelihood through (mostly subsistence) agricultural economic pursuits. And before agrarian society disappears, modernity cannot really unfold. It all began with the Industrial Revolution, whose impact initially remained small even in Britain though, where it affected only a relatively confined sector of the

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economy until far into the 19th century. As late as the 1930s and 1940s, the agricultural population still comprised up to 40 per cent in the world’s socio-economically most advanced countries, down from 60 to 90 per cent in the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution (Crone 1989). By the 1980s, it had been reduced to levels as low as three to five per cent. Thus, in a matter of roughly two hundred years, what had determined the living conditions of humanity’s overwhelming majority for millennia, had virtually vanished from this part of the planet. In other regions, where it set in much later, the decline of the peasantry was even more rapid. As late as the early 1980s, only three world regions/countries remained dominated by agriculture: sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and China. In China, this is now also a matter of the past, with over 50 per cent of the workforce employed in manufacturing and services since the early years of the new millennium (Schmidt 2007). Given these regions’ population share, it took until 1990 before the peasantry became a global minority (Firebaugh 2003). Today, it is estimated to comprise roughly 43 per cent of the world’s workforce (ILO 2006). A change that typically accompanies the decline of the peasantry is the rise of the city. Modern life, it is widely agreed, is urban life. It was in the city that humans were first liberated from the tyranny of the soil and ‘rescued’, as Marx and Engels (1997: 42) put it in the Communist Manifesto, ‘from the idiocy of rural life’; that they could develop more specialised skills, learn from others, study, nurture their creative potentials, etc. But until recently, most of the world’s population lived in rural areas. That is changing now. Since 2007, half the world’s population has been urban for the first time. The trend is expected to continue with the rapid economic transformation of newly industrialising countries, especially of China, where by 2020 roughly 60 per cent of the population is expected to live in cities. Two hundred years earlier, just 2.5 percent of the world’s population lived in cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants (Kumar 1999). By 1900, that figure had risen to 13 per cent (Economist, 3 May 2007) – a fivefold increase in just eighty years, but in terms of its effects on humanity at large still a far cry from the latest leap. And whatever else may be said about this change (e.g., whether one believes it is a more positive or rather negative development), life in the city undoubtedly differs radically from that in the countryside. Another important change concerns levels of education and literacy. Between the late 18th and 19th centuries, several northwest European countries and North America began to institute compulsory education in state-run or state-controlled schools. By 1870, 30 countries reported enrolment figures of over 10 per cent for the 5-14 year age group (Meyer

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et al. 1992). Looking at some of the effects, Britain had reduced the illiteracy level of its population to three per cent as early as 1900 (Landes 1998); other leading countries, while mostly lagging behind, were quickly catching up. Elsewhere however, mass education took off only after 1945, but as soon as 1985, it was compulsory in 80 per cent of the world’s countries. As a result, between 1970 and 1990, global literacy levels rose from 48 to 75 per cent; today that figure is 82 per cent (UNDP 2006). In other words, it was only during the past quarter century that educational modernity broke through globally. That much, however, has now been accomplished. One of the effects of industrialisation has been historically unprecedented levels of wealth. Income per capita for the world as a whole increased eightfold between 1820 and 1990. However, as much as half of this increase occurred during the last 40 of these altogether 170 years (Firebaugh 2003). Initially, the growing wealth was very unevenly spread. ‘Popular affluence’ did not become general even in much of Western Europe until the 1960s. Given that the era of ‘modern economic growth’ (Kuznets 1973), whose onset Angus Maddison (1995) dates back to roughly 1820, reached the rest of the world other than Japan only after 1950, this wealth was also initially highly concentrated in the West. Thereafter, it began to spread to other parts of the globe. In the so-called golden age from 1950 to 1973, per capita incomes rose significantly in all world regions, thereafter continuing to rise only in the West and in Asia, primarily East Asia. However, since 1973, Asia grew more than double the rate of the West. One result is a massive poverty reduction both in the region itself and (due to its population share) globally; a trend that has continued since 1990 and is expected to do so in the decades ahead (Economist Intelligence Unit 2006). Using the one dollar per day consumption standard of the World Bank, poverty was the ‘norm’ for humankind for millennia. Globally speaking, three quarters of our ancestors fell below that poverty line two centuries ago, and with an estimated per capita income of $ 651 annually, ‘the’ average world ‘citizen’ was in fact quite close to it in 1820 (Firebaugh 2003: 13). 130 years later, the share of the (thus defined) poor had been reduced to one half of the world’s people, today it is down to one sixth (UNDP 2006) – even though rapid population growth means the absolute number of poor people is now probably higher than ever before. Mirroring the reduction of poverty since 1820, a middle-income group slowly emerged. Presently, with annual incomes of over $7,000 of purchasing power parity, roughly one fourth of the world’s population has reached levels of prosperity that qualify it for membership in the so-called

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‘consumer class’ (Worldwatch Institute 2004); a class that comprised a negligible minority just half a century earlier. In the view of economists, the living levels enjoyed by this presently 1.7 billion people strong group, and in fact by several hundred million people more that have escaped the most extreme forms of poverty, reflect ‘the greatest advance in the condition of the world’s population ever achieved in such a brief span of time’ (Easterlin 2000: 7). Industrialisation, urbanisation, mass education and rising incomes virtually everywhere result in higher life expectancy and declining fertility. As for the latter trend, fertility levels have been falling globally during the past four to five decades, but most dramatically in socioeconomically advanced regions, where they are now universally below the replacement level. For women in particular, this development ‘represents nothing less than a revolutionary enlargement of freedom’ (Titmuss 1966: 91) as it liberates them from the wheel of childbearing and childrearing that had dominated their lives for thousands of years. The reduction in Asian fertility levels alone, which accounts for four-fifths of the global fertility decline, has been labeled a ‘revolutionary’ change (Caldwell 1993), ‘one of the most significant events of modern times’ (McNicoll 1991: 1). A ‘revolution in the status of women’ (Nazir 2005) has also occurred in other respects during the past couple of decades, namely through their formal recognition as persons and citizens, their constantly rising levels of education, labour market participation, etc. This development set in roughly a century ago in Europe and North America, but even there it gained momentum only after World War II, arguably even as late as the 1960s, following the rise of a powerful feminist movement. Since then, it has become a global trend (Berkovitch 1999), leaving no world region unaffected, although the degrees of penetration obviously differ enormously (see Unicef 2006). The list of changes does not end here. It could be extended by several important developments in the fields of technology (e.g., the rapid expansion of high-speed mass transportation systems and of mass communication systems that have extended the geographic mobility and world awareness of billions of people enormously within a few decades), in the global economy (i.e., the reversal of a situation in which only a minority of the world’s population lived under capitalist institutions to the present situation, where this is true of the large majority, in just two decades), in the political sphere (since 1992, for the first time more than half of all states have been governed democratically), in the areas of science and medicine, etc.

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Considered individually, each of these developments marks a dramatic change in the domain(s) of life and sphere(s) of society they affect. Taken together, they mean little less than a social revolution (as Hobsbawm rightly deems them in his seminal work), resulting in a fundamental transformation of the entire society, which, once it has undergone this transformation, bears little resemblance to anything known, or at least experienced on a mass basis, before. They also suggest that modernity has finally broken through globally. For the first time since its early manifestations in Renaissance Europe, it has begun to touch and shape the lives of large parts, if not the majority, of the world’s population. But note that most of the turning points signaling the ultimate transition to modernity were reached even later than in Hobsbawm’s account: two to three decades before, or a few years into, the new millennium, rather than during the 1950s when the development really just took off. The millennium thus ushers in global modernity; a watershed in the history of humanity, because, unlike much other change, the change that this transition, the transition to genuinely modern living conditions and institutions, involves is ‘comparable in magnitude only to the transformation of nomadic peoples into settled agriculturalists some 10,000 years earlier’, as Reinhard Bendix (1977: 362), echoing much likeminded scholarship before him, aptly states. However, even at the beginning of the 21st century, this transition, despite affecting all world regions, has not been equally far-reaching everywhere, for in most parts of the world deep-rooted remnants of the old order uneasily co-exist with modern institutions and life forms, keeping modernity in check, as it were. ‘Full modernity’, as we understand it today, has so far probably arrived only in two world regions, namely the West and East Asia (Tu 2000), the latter being represented by Japan and the four ‘tigers’ South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as (growing) parts of their neighbourhood. Given the world’s uneven levels of socio-economic, cultural, institutional and social structural development, these two regions should therefore prove the best testing grounds for claims concerning the consequences of modernisation, including those pertaining to the problem of ‘convergence’ and/or ‘diversity’. Needless to say, neither claim can be validated or invalidated by purely empirical means, as much depends on how the terms are used in the pertinent literature. Empirical observations nevertheless provide some tentative hints. A first element that East Asian and Western modernity share, and that arguably differentiates both of them more from other world regions than from each other, is the ‘systemic’ quality of the modernisation processes they underwent and continue to undergo, meaning that ‘changes in one

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factor are related to and affect changes in other factors’ (Huntington 1971: 288). Modernisation in these two regions, rather than being confined to particular sectors of society and to certain segments of the population, has been and continues to be an all-inclusive phenomenon, transforming every aspect of societal organisation and the lives of all members of society in a very short time span. A second, and related, aspect that the respective modernisation processes share is the direction of change. With minor variations, comparable political, administrative, juridical, economic, scientific, educational, welfare etc. systems are in place that pursue largely similar goals, run similar institutional programmes, and are more or less equally effective. All countries in question are rich, some a little more than others. They all face similar problems, and they all respond to them in roughly similar fashion. All observe each other in the quest for models or ‘best practices’ to be emulated, or pitfalls to be avoided, at home. Major policy reforms pioneered and successfully implemented by one country are sooner or later copied, with some local variation and adaptation, by the others, and the laggards of the past may well be the leaders of the present or the future. The populations share many characteristics: levels of education, employment structures, hopes and aspirations, life styles, consumption patterns, and, as global surveys show, increasingly even value systems (with ‘self-expression’ values becoming more prevalent over time and ‘traditional’ values slowly subsiding, though nowhere fully disappearing; see Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Of course, differences are also to be found between and within the two regions. In terms of their impact on the performance of public institutions and private organisations, these differences are relatively insignificant though, and they pale, once again, in comparison to the differences that distinguish the group as a whole from the rest of the world that has not yet reached similar levels of modernisation/degrees of modernity. There are certainly differences in the political systems, and in terms of the political, legal and social conditions facing (different groups of) citizens, these differences can matter a great deal. At the same time, the respective polities all excel in ‘good governance’, serving the people better than their (often highly corrupt, if not outright ‘predatory’) equivalents elsewhere in the world. Different varieties of capitalism may be practiced in (parts of) North America, Europe and East Asia, and the respective business cultures also vary somewhat, but together, the economies of ‘full modernity’ top any list of global competitiveness, productivity, efficiency, innovativeness, leaving other regions far behind. The welfare systems established by the group’s ‘members’ differ markedly, but in contrast to much of the rest of the world, where such systems barely exist, they all

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have functioning mechanisms for protecting the most vulnerable, for aiding the poor, and for enabling even the socially least advantaged to develop their capacities, in place. They also dominate the world’s research and development, and while the West was much ahead until recently, East Asia has rapidly caught up and now is the only region outside the West that has a sizeable (and rapidly increasing) number of world-class universities/research institutes. Not surprisingly, the science produced there addresses the same global community, uses the same methodologies and follows the same standards of excellence. Taken together, the two regions also boast the best educational and medical systems in the world, and while both systems vary slightly from country to country, they share key premises, technologies and organisational characteristics, not the least of which is a common knowledge base. One could easily go on like this. We also find some differences in the ordinary lives led by the various populations: in the rites they perform, in the deities (if any) they worship, in the (religious and secular) festivals they celebrate, in the diets they prefer, etc. Yet, the lived experience of a typical ethnic Chinese physician/business woman/office clerk/industrial worker in Singapore probably resembles that of her Anglo-Saxon (or French or Swedish, etc.) counterpart living anywhere in the world more than that of a typical Chinese peasant living in one of China’s poorest western provinces or that of her own ancestors who migrated to Singapore three generations earlier. If the multiple modernists were right, then common cultural roots should separate the ethnic Chinese more from their Western counterparts than from each other; if modernisation theory were correct, then we would expect greater homogeneity within socio-economically similar groups than among people of similar ethnic and civilisational origin, but subject to vastly different levels of development. The available evidence, of which I have discussed only a small fraction in this section, clearly favours the second proposition.

V The conclusion of the foregoing must therefore be that, empirically speaking, the reasons for retaining a singular concept of modernity seem weightier than those offered for discarding it. From a social theoretic viewpoint, the concept of multiple modernities never made sense anyway, because it rests on a too simplistic, as well as underspecified, theory of modernity, making much of relatively small differences in the political systems and expressive cultures of some of the world’s nation states, while downplaying, if not altogether ignoring, social structural and

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institutional differences that cut far deeper and that arguably divide the world into a growing modern part and a ‘rest’ that has not yet fully accomplished modernity (as it is understood and understands itself today). Where modernity has progressed furthest, it takes on a remarkably similar shape in practically all institutional sectors of society – in the political system, in the economy, in the juridical system, in the educational system, in the science sector, in the medical system, etc. – as well as in the living conditions and life styles of the people. Thus, if we avoid equating convergence with identity, then modernisation theory got it right. Hence the title of this chapter: one world, one modernity. Proponents of a singular concept of modernity need not deny (or belittle) cross-country/regional variations. Nor does such a concept preclude the possibility that some variations may be quite profound – or at least appear so when comparing modern countries/regions synchronically, rather than studying the evolution of societal formations in a diachronic fashion, as befits a theory of society/modernity. In other words, the emphasis placed on differences or similarities is not simply a matter of facts, but should (also) vary with the reference problems pursued and with the research perspectives adopted. As trivial as this may seem to be, it is overlooked in much of the pertinent social science literature. Assuming a careful study of the institutional and social structural realities in different modern countries (or other societal entities) yields sufficient diversity to warrant conceptual attention, then a better alternative to the fuzzy notion of multiple modernities might be a yet-tobe-developed concept of ‘varieties of modernity’ (Schmidt 2006) that, while permitting us to retain a unitary concept of modernity, would provide ample scope for capturing intra-modern differences. But even the proposal of such a concept would require a strong justification; just a few differences here and there would not be good enough. What one would have to find to justify it are coherent patterns of institutional co-variation that systematically separate not only the economies or polities or educational systems etc. of one group of countries from those of others, but the whole institutional make-up of society across the board and according to a common, overarching logic that visibly shapes all (important) subsystems. For instance, if it was claimed that a peculiarly ‘Confucian’ or ‘East Asian’ or ‘Korean’ variety of modernity exists that differs substantially from, say, ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ or ‘West European’ or ‘North American’ or ‘Canadian’ or ‘Danish’ or whichever modernity, then what would be needed to support this claim is evidence showing that the respective signifier decisively marks the outlook of all societal subsystems in the variety in question, such that something very

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important would be missed if this was ignored in conceptualisations of modernity and instead discussed within the framework of other concepts, pitched at lower levels of abstraction. As long as we cannot demonstrate the existence of such cross-system homologies, we had better content ourselves with the tools we already have for analysing area- and policyspecific variations (such as American-style vs. Japanese-style industrial relations; French vs. Taiwanese education policies; etc.) or sector-specific variations (e.g., types of capitalism, types of governance/democracy, types of welfare provision, etc.,) prevailing in certain countries or regions. For when we talk about modernity, be it in the singular or in the plural, then we have to focus on society in its entirety, not just in this or that dimension.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Yves Bonny is Professor of Sociology at the University of Rennes, France. He received a Ph.D. in Communications from McGill University, Canada. Before coming to Rennes, he held a teaching position at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a member of the Inter-university Research Group on Postmodernity and one of the editors of Société (both in Montreal). His research focuses on epistemology and general sociological theory; critical theory; historical and political sociology; theories of modernity and postmodernity. His most recent publications include Yves Bonny (ed.) Norbert Elias et la théorie de la civilisation: Lecture et critiques, PUR, 2002; Sociologie du temps présent: Modernité avancée ou postmodernité?, Armand Colin, 2004; and "Postmodernisme et postmodernité: Deux lectures opposées de la fin de la nation", Controverses, 2006. E-mail-address: [email protected] Mikael Carleheden is Associate professor in the Department of Social and Political Science, Örebro University, Sweden. He serves as Vice president of the Swedish Sociological Association and is one of the editors of Distinktion - Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. He received his PhD in sociology from Lund University, Sweden. He has been visiting scholar in Frankfurt, New York and Chicago and held assistant professorships in Copenhagen and Aalborg, Denmark, respectively. His latest two publications are “Towards Democratic Foundations: a Habermasian Perspective on the Politics of Education” in Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2006; and “Bauman on Politics: Stillborn Democracy” in M.H. Jacobsen and P. Poder, eds., The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman - Undercurrents and Summits, Ashgate 2007 (in press). E-mail-address: [email protected] Mike Featherstone is Director of the Theory, Culture & Society Centre and research professor of sociology and communications at Nottingham Trent University. He is founding editor of the journal Theory, Culture & Society and the Theory, Culture & Society Book Series. He is co-editor of the journal Body & Society. Author of Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (2nd edition 2007) and Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (1995). Co-author of Surviving Middle Age

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(1982). Editor of over a dozen books and author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on social and cultural theory, consumer and global culture, ageing and the body. His books and articles have been translated into sixteen languages. He has spent time as a visiting professor in Barcelona, Geneva, Kyoto, Recife, São Paulo, Tokyo and Vancouver. E-mail-address: [email protected] Oliver Kozlarek is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, Mexico. He was born and raised in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. He received a Ph.D. in social science from the Free University Berlin (1997), and a Ph.D. in humanities from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico (2001). He has been visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, New York, the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen, Germany, as well as visiting professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany. His research focuses on the internationalisation of political and social thought; theories of modernity; critical theory; and Latin American political and social thought. Recent publications include Oliver Kozlarek (ed.) Entre cosmopolitismo y conciencia del mundo. Hacia una crítica del pensamiento atópico, Mexico: Siglo XXI (in press); “Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz: Two Visions of the Same Modernity”, Culture, Theory and Critique, 2006; Crítica, acción y modernidad. Hacia una conciencia del mundo, Mexiko: Dríada, 2004. E-mail-address: [email protected] Alberto Martinelli is Professor of Political Science and Sociology (since 1969) and former Dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan (1987-1999). During 1998-2002 he was President of the International Sociological Association. He is the author of numerous works in economic sociology, complex organisations, modernity and development, comparative social and political systems, and global governance. During 1996-1998 he was advisor for social policies to the Italian Prime Minister. He has been member of Italy's National Council of Science and Technology since its inception. His works in English include The New International Economy, Sage, 1982; Overviews in Economic Sociology (with N. J. Smelser), Sage, 1990; International Markets and Global Firms, Sage, 1991; Recent Social Trends in Italy, McGill-Queens University Press, 1999; Modernity and Modernization, 2005, Sage. He was Section Editor for Organisation and Management

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Studies of the International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, Elsevier, 2001. E-mail-address: [email protected] Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at FriedrichSchiller-University in Jena, Germany. He also is an Affiliated Professor at the Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York. In 1997, he received his PhD in Political Science from HumboldtUniversity in Berlin. After that, he held teaching positions at the universities of Mannheim, Jena, Augsburg and Essen and served as VicePresident and General Secretary for Research Committee 35 (COCTA) of ISA and as one of the directors of the Annual International Conference on Philosophy and the Social Sciences in Prague. His publications focus on Social Acceleration and the Temporal Structures of Modernity as well as the Political Theory of Communitarianism. E-mail-address: [email protected] Volker H. Schmidt is Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Before joining NUS in 2000, he held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Mannheim and Bremen, respectively, and in 1997/98 he was a J.F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. He is the author or co-author of five books, editor or co-editor of another four volumes, and he has published numerous journal articles and book chapters. His main areas of specialisation are the sociology of justice, medical sociology, health and social policy, social theory, and East Asian modernization. Recent papers include “Convergence With a Twist: East Asian Welfare Capitalism in Comparative Perspective”, in Lian Kwen Fee and Tong Chee Kiong, eds., Social Policy in Postindustrial Singapore, Brill (in press); and “Limits to Growth? China’s Rise and its Implications for Europe”, in: K.S. Rehberg, ed., Die Natur der Gesellschaft, Campus (in press). E-mail-address: [email protected] Edward Tiryakian is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Duke University, where he has served as Director of International Studies. He is past president of the International Association of French-Speaking Sociologists (AISLF) and the author of numerous works in the areas of theory, national identity and ethnic conflict, modernisation analysis, and modernity. His recent publications include: S. Arjomand and E. A. Tiryakian, eds., Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, Sage Publications, 2004; Editor, Ethnicity, Ethnic Conflicts, Peace Processes. Comparative Perspectives, DeSitter Publications, 2005; “Coping with Collective

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Stigma: the Case of Germany,” pp. 359-98 in D. Rothbart and K. Krostelina, eds., Identity, Morality, and Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict, Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2007; “When is the Nation no Longer?,” pp. 55-74 in A. Sturm, M. Young and E. Zuelow, eds., Nationalism in a Global Era: The Persistence of Nations, Routledge, 2007; “Sociological Theory, Constructal Theory and Globalization,” in A. Bejan, ed., Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics, Springer, 2007 (in press). E-mail-address: [email protected]