Modernity as Experience and Interpretation

Peter Wagner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

We are all modern today. But modernity today is not what it used to be. Over the past few decades, modernity has been radically changed by globalization, individualization, new inequalities, and fundamentalism. A novel way of analysing contemporary societies is needed. This book proposes such an analysis.

Every society seeks answers to certain basic questions: how to order life in common; how to satisfy human needs; how to establish knowledge. Sociology long assumed that the answers had been found once and for all: a liberal-democratic state, a market economy, and free scientific institutions. This trinity used to be called 'modern society'.

By contrast, this book is based on the idea that, under conditions of modernity, there are no stable and certain answers to these questions. There is a plurality of possible answers, every proposed answer can be criticized and contested, and every society needs to find its answer on its own.

This new sociology of modernity proposes two key instruments through which to understand the answers given to those questions: the experiences human beings have of their own modernity and the interpretations they give to those experiences. It reviews the history of 'Western' modernity in this light and then focuses on the specific answers that were and are being developed in Europe.

1

Ways of Understanding Modernity

CLOV: Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished […]

HAMM: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?

CLOV: What in God’s name could there be on the horizon? […]

HAMM: The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame [1957], 1958, pp. 6, 21 and 41

Modernity as experience and interpretation: the agenda

We are all modern today. The idea that modernity could come to an end, strongly proposed for several years from the 1970s onwards and, as one may think, anticipated by Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame of 1957, has not been found convincing. Rather, we may have witnessed a grand revival of modernity during the 1980s and 1990s, covering now the entire globe and gradually reaching towards each and every individual, as the theorems of globalization and individualization suggest.

But modernity today is not what it used to be. Modernity was associated with the open horizon of the future, with unending progress towards a better human condition brought about by a radically novel and unique institutional arrangement. This expectation arose in the decades around 1800, as revealed by the analysis of conceptual change in political language, pioneered by the late Reinhart Koselleck from the 1960s onwards and in different ways by Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner. And it found one significant expression in the evolutionist strands of the social sciences, first during the nineteenth century and then in the sociological theories of modernization during the 1950s and 1960s. But there is nothing on the horizon of the future today, and even the question of what there should be remains unanswered.

Thus, maybe we are modern in different ways today – in a different way than we used to be until the 1960s, and also in a variety of different ways at the same time. This is a theme that has been addressed in recent years in an increasingly persistent manner under headings such as ‘multiple modernities’, ‘successive modernities’ or ‘alternative modernities’. My own Sociology of Modernity (1994) tried to give an account of the transformations of West European modernity over the past two centuries and make some comparative glimpses on the different modernities of the USA and of Soviet socialism. The argument remains plausible, I would maintain. But it has made inroads in neither scholarly nor public debates. Recent sociological analysis of modernity by and large only accepts that the moderns needed to make some adjustments in the light of the problems they themselves had produced. Modernity thus became reflexive, rethinking its own achievements and failures (Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck); or flexible networks are said to have replaced, or at least complemented, the iron cages of modern life (Manuel Castells, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello). Public debate, in turn, sees modernist globalization taking its course, resisted only by marginal movements in its centres and by fundamentalists at its peripheries.

To say that we have remained modern, but are so in a different way today, is, however, not satisfactory.¹ It begs the question about that which is variable in modernity and how change in modernity occurs. The aim of this book is to provide an answer to this question. Its basic assumptions can be spelt out in a rather straightforward manner:

Modernity is a way in which human beings conceive of their lives.

As such, it needs to address the questions of how to govern life in common; how to satisfy human needs; and how to establish valid knowledge.

Modernity’s specificity is the commitment to autonomy:

to giving oneself one’s own law. Thus, the modern answers to those questions cannot be derived from any external source of authority. By implication, any answer proposed is open to critique and contestation.

There is no single uniquely modern answer to those questions:

much of the philosophy of modernity, from Immanuel Kant to Jürgen Habermas, tried to find such a unique answer. Much of the sociology of modernity, from Emile Durkheim to Talcott Parsons to recent neo-modernization theories, claimed to have identified the one institutional structure of society that is specifically modern. However, the very transformations that modernity keeps undergoing suggest that there is a variety of modern answers to those questions.

The difference between varieties of modernity is a difference in the answers given to those questions:

such difference is often certainly related to the cultural background against which modern answers are developed – the ‘cultural programmes’, as Shmuel Eisenstadt puts it. To assume, however, that contemporary, say, Japanese modernity is determined by the long-term cultural legacy of Japanese society underestimates the dynamism of modernity that has often been observed. The commitment to autonomy renders the acceptance of any prior answers difficult and contestable. Rejecting any cultural determinism of ‘multiple modernities’, however, does not suggest, in turn, that answers to the questions are under constant revision. Modernity is not a permanent revolution either. Rather, the answers that any given collectivity of human beings – for the sake of brevity, any given society – elaborates to these questions can be traced back to significant moments of their common history.

The experience of significant historical moments constitutes the background against which specific answers to those questions are elaborated:

this proposition takes up the common view that modernity emerged historically as a profound rupture with the past, as a rupture with ‘tradition’ as the common sociological parlance has it. From a modernist perspective, the significant historical moments that put modernity firmly into place were a particular sequence of great revolutions: the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the democratic revolution. After those revolutions, this view holds, the adequate answers to the three fundamental questions were found once and for all. From then on, modern society is said to have unfolded rather smoothly and progressively, and all remaining difference between societies is seen as due to either ‘backwardness’ or relatively insignificant cultural difference. The significance of these moments in the history of European modernity will not be doubted here – against objections from some forms of post-colonial studies, which tend to see Eurocentrism wherever European history is studied, and of more recent historiography, in which the idea of major social transformations dissolves into myriads of small occurrences that do not add up to anything significant.²

The interpretation given collectively to the experiences of those significant moments is that which gives shape to a specific variety of modernity:

experiences, namely, do not ‘speak’ on their own – they need to be interpreted and given meaning in human interaction. While the approach I propose here agrees with established wisdom about modernity in regarding those revolutionary transformations as highly significant moments in European – and to some extent North American – history, it takes issue with the view that such a rupture occurred once and for all, and that the evolutionary programme of modernity just unfolds from that moment onwards. In contrast, I suggest that the experience of those moments differed considerably between societies and that the interpretations given to them were contested from the beginning and continued being revised in light of further experiences with their consequences. As Hamm in Endgame has it, there is some end in the beginning. But how to go on is not endlessly determined by the beginning.

The objective of this book is to spell out the above programme. In this light, the remainder of this chapter will do the following. First, it will review the variety of existing approaches to the study of modernity in some more detail. The aim here is to demonstrate that an analysis of modernity in terms of experience and interpretation does exist already but that it has not been elaborated in any systematic way. Second, to provide the underpinnings of a more systematic elaboration, it will discuss the status of the three questions raised above for a historico-sociological analysis of social configurations. For these purposes, the questions are rephrased as problématiques to which any society needs to give an answer. The question about the rules for life in common constitutes the political problématique (to be analysed in Part I of this volume); the one about the satisfaction of needs, the economic problématique (Part II); and the one about valid knowledge, the epistemic problématique (Part III). The book will proceed by demonstrating how different answers were given ‘within modernity’ to these problématiques.

The meaning of ‘within modernity’ requires a clarification to avoid misunderstandings. It here refers to the predominant presence of the idea of autonomy in the social configurations that are analysed. Wherever human beings hold an understanding of themselves as autonomous beings, there is ‘modernity’ – the ancient Greek democracies, for example, were highly modern in many respects. The analysis of modernity as the experience with, and interpretation of, human beings giving themselves their own laws entails a broadening of the concept of modernity and allows a widening of the spatio-temporal perspective for the socio-historical investigation of modern practices. At the same time, though, the term ‘modernity’ cannot escape reference to the all-too-widely accepted idea that modern societies are those that have evolved in Western Europe and North America during the past two centuries. Working by means of conceptual retrieval and aiming at a review of historical experiences, much of my own analysis draws on such existing scholarship and will often refer to Western Europe and North America for examples and illustrations. However, my analysis in terms of problématiques takes distance from any conceptualization that presupposes a tight link between the concept of modernity and recent Western history. This double orientation may appear as ridden with contradictions, most clearly of a strong tension between a very broad and general concept, on the one hand, and the need to be specific, on the other, as experiences and their interpretations are, first of all, local and particular. While I acknowledge this tension, I rather see it as both inescapable and capable of fruitfully widening the scope of the analysis.

To underline the specificity of experiences and their interpretations, the general analysis of the three problématiques in terms of modernity will be followed (in Part IV) by reflections on the specificity of European modernity – as an example of modern experiences and their interpretations, not as the origin of modernity or its model. The choice of Europe as a ‘case’ is doubly motivated. First, the author of this book is European, and the book is, therefore, also a reflection on his own experience with the recent transformations of European modernity. Second, European modernity – as any other – is today more than ever set in the context of a global socio-political constellation. One of the tasks of Part IV is to see in what way the European interpretations of modernity can contribute to addressing the novel problems emerging in this constellation, which is more suitably described as one of dispute over ways of world-making than as one of one-dimensional and inescapable tendencies of globalization (see Karagiannis and Wagner 2007).

Modernity: beyond institutional analysis

As briefly introduced above, the social sciences of the early post-Second World War decades worked with the assumption that contemporary Western societies, called ‘modern societies’, had emerged from earlier social configurations by way of a profound rupture. This rupture, although it could stretch over long periods and occur in different societies at different points in time, regularly brought about a new set of institutions, most importantly a market-based industrial economy, a democratic polity, based on an idea of national belonging plus rational administration, and autonomous knowledge-producing institutions developing empirical-analytical sciences. Modernity, thus, was located in space, that is, in ‘the West’, meaning Western Europe and North America, but it tended to get diffused from there and gain global significance. Once such ‘modern society’ was established, namely, in this view, a superior form of social organization was reached that contained all it needed to adapt successfully to changing circumstances. There would, thus, be no further major social transformation. Once it had emerged, modernity stepped out of cultural context and historical time, so to say.

During the 1980s, it was exactly this key conviction of the modern social sciences that was challenged by the idea of ‘post-modernity’, often understood as the assertion that Western societies had transformed into an entirely new form of social configuration, based on novel forms of social bond. As such, the assertion was most prominently made in Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘report on knowledge’ of 1979, titled The Postmodern Condition, but as a hypothesis of an ongoing major social transformation it has guided much sociological research since. At roughly the same time, the spatial connotation of the term was also challenged. The rise of Japan, and other East Asian economies somewhat later, to compete with Western economies in global markets suggested that non-Western forms of modernity could exist. The Iranian Revolution, in turn, inaugurated the idea that modernity could be successfully challenged in societies that had appeared to have safely embarked on the long process of ‘modernization’.

This is the context in which the term ‘modernity’ came into use in sociology. The idea that modernity was neither established in its final form once and for all nor immune to radical reinterpretations outside of its space of origins was now more readily accepted. Nevertheless, conceptual change in much of sociology remained rather limited. The term ‘modernity’ tended to replace the earlier concept of ‘modern society’, but it often simply continued to refer to the history of Western societies since the industrial and market revolutions, and since the democratic revolutions and the building of ‘modern’, rational-bureaucratic nation-states. In the work of Anthony Giddens, to cite one major example, modernity kept being addressed from the angle of ‘institutional analysis’, and these institutions are those that arose in the West over the past two centuries. All that happens today is that they undergo an internal transformation towards what Giddens calls ‘institutional reflexivity’ (Giddens 1990, 1994). This is not a major step beyond Max Weber’s assertion ‘that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which […] lie in a line of development having universal significance and value’ (Weber 1976 [1904–5/20], p. 13). The reader may note that I omitted Weber’s insert ‘as we like to think’; I will come back to this.

With ‘modernity’, thus, sociology proposes a key concept for understanding socio-historical development but oddly makes this concept refer to only a single and unique experience. ‘Modernity’ is one large-scale occurrence, the origins of which can be traced in space and time but which tends to transcend historical time and cover all socio-cultural space. This view has been radically challenged by work in philosophy, anthropology and post-colonial studies over the past three decades. From the angle of philosophy, with support from the historiography of concepts, the question of concept-formation in the social sciences came under scrutiny. Questioning the facile presupposition that phenomena in the world can always be constructed as empirical ‘cases’ that are to be subsumed under ‘concepts’, attention was redirected to the actual ‘work’ of the concepts, to that which concepts are employed to perform, in social-scientific inquiry. Concepts are proposed not least with the purpose of relating experiences to each other that are otherwise simply separate and different. Particular emphasis was given to the suppression of time in such conceptual labour by virtue of postulating the timeless validity of concepts. From the angle of anthropology and post-colonial studies, related issues were raised with specific regard to the, so to say, conceptual relation between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies, between colonizers and colonized. While maintaining the suppression of historical temporality, so the critical argument goes, time was here re-instituted into concepts in the mode of a ‘denial of coevalness’ (Johannes Fabian). And even where a greater sensitivity existed, the degree to which a mere application of concepts that were generated in and for a specific context, most often a European one, to other socio-historical situations could be problematic was often underestimated (Derrida 1978; Lyotard 1979; Koselleck 1979; Fabian 1983; Asad 1995).

Until now, however, it is quite open how such critiques of the conventional social and historical sciences relate to the task of analysing entire social configurations over large stretches of time. Much of the critical work operated in the mode of denunciation and thus tended to discard rather than aim to rethink key concepts of the social sciences. Many of those established concepts, however, do address actual problématiques of human social life, even if they may do so in an overspecific or unreflective way. Thus, work at conceptual criticism would also always need to be work at conceptual retrieval, i.e., an attempt to understand both the limits and the potential of those concepts. This book should be seen as a contribution towards a rethinking of the concept ‘modernity’ in the light of such conceptual retrieval.

As we have seen, the sociology of modernity operates mostly by means of a distinction between historical eras, by some assumption of a rupture, a major social transformation. Such distinction demands specification as to how these eras differ, i.e., a conceptualization of what is modern. In other words, the term ‘modernity’ inevitably carries a double connotation; it is always both philosophical and empirical, or both substantive and temporal, or both conceptual and historical (Yack 1997; Wagner 2001a). The conceptual imagery of a ‘modern society’ as developed in mainstream sociology, characterized by a market-based economy and a nation-based democratic polity, aims to reconcile the historical view of modernity, as the history of Europe, and later the West, with a conceptual view of modernity, namely a social configuration composed of sets of functionally differentiated institutions. It provides what I will present here as the first of a variety of possible ways of conceptualizing moder...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1 Ways of Understanding Modernity
• Part I: Interpretations of Political Modernity: Liberty and its Discontents
• Part II: Interpretations of Economic Modernity: The Endgame and After
• Part III: Interpretations of Epistemic Modernity: Distance and Involvement
• Part IV: The European Experience and Interpretation of Modernity
• Part V: The Analysis of Modernity and the Need for a New Sociology
• References
• Index