Global Modernity

A Conceptual Sketch

V. Schmidt

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137435811
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

This book introduces the concept of global modernity as a paradigm for the analysis of the contemporary era. Building on Parson's distinction between social, cultural, personal and organismic systems, it presents a four-dimensional scheme that aims to identify modernity's key structural components.

1

Introduction

Abstract: This chapter introduces the concept of modernity as it is used in this book. It pleads for a dynamic understanding of modernity, one that leaves ample scope for modernity’s constant self-transformation. It also argues that modernity is a world-encompassing phenomenon, hence the notion of global modernity. However, it is only during the past few decades that modernity has broken through on a genuinely global scale. This breakthrough, the chapter claims, is an event of seismic proportions whose significance the world is only just beginning to come to terms with. The aim of the book is to help lay some conceptual foundations for its adequate understanding.

Schmidt, Volker H. Global Modernity. A Conceptual Sketch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137435811.0004.

The concept of modernity is used with a great variety of meanings. This book is concerned with a sociological understanding of modernity, although it goes somewhat beyond what sociology has typically treated as its subject matter. Moreover, it does not claim to represent ‘the’ sociological view, because sociologists have in fact taken very different stances in matters of modernity and will likely continue to do so as sociology is a multi-paradigmatic discipline, with different paradigms asking different questions, shedding light on different aspects of the same reality, and hence also yielding different answers and conclusions about it. As will become clear later in the book, the perspective adopted here is rooted in a broadly differentiation theoretical tradition, which shares with classical sociology an understanding of modernity as an ‘evolutionary jump’ (Hall 2001: 491), as the second great transformation of human affairs that propelled the species to a higher (and if not higher, then certainly very different) stage of development.

This understanding is by no means unique to sociology. Indeed, when the word ‘modern’ came into usage in the European Middle Ages, it already signaled a strong discontinuity with the past, a sense of departure from the known world toward an uncertain future that, while still too fuzzy to be spelled out in its own terms, clearly differed from the present (Gumbrecht 1992). The modern signified the new in the present (Lemert et al. 2010: 61), and in everyday language it still does so today – regardless of whether the new is celebrated as a harbinger of progress or viewed with apprehension. In fact, change, the ceaseless production of novelty, seems to be one of the few constants of the modern condition, which continuously renders obsolete not only the residues of earlier, premodern times but also the manifestations of its own workings. The pace at which the present ‘ages’ has accelerated since the early days of modernity; the logic of a dynamic that constantly outmodes it is the same.

This observation suggests a conceptualization of modernity that is both relatively general and abstract. Modernity, on this reading, is not a state of affairs that can be reached once and for all, but always ‘work in progress’, a ‘moving target’ that opens up the present for a future anticipated to be different and in need of active shaping, molding, preparation.¹ Reaching a given target does not end the process but only raises the bar for the next round, creates the springboard for new, often more demanding tasks that need to be accomplished in subsequent attempts at modernization, and so on ad infinitum. This conceptualization rules out a teleological understanding of modernity. It does not, however, preclude the possibility that processes of modernization follow discernible trajectories, making some future states more likely than others. Nor does it imply the same level of penetration in all locations that have been touched by aspects of the modern.² What it does imply is a division of the social world into forerunners and followers. For any innovation that gives some actors or systems³ a competitive edge over others alters the latter’s environment (Bendix 1977) and pressures them to adapt – ‘on pain of extinction’, as Marx and Engels (1967) put it with only slight exaggeration. The division itself is a permanent feature of modernity, a particular system’s placement in one or the other category is not. Current laggards can catch up with, even leapfrog, present leaders and then become leaders themselves. At the same time, past success is no guarantee of future performance; history is replete with examples of rises and falls of players who suddenly emerge on the scene and later fall behind others that unexpectedly surpass them.

The adjective global modernity suggests that modernity is a world-encompassing phenomenon. It also suggests that modernity’s reach has not always been global, for if it had, its globality would be self-evident and hence in no need of mentioning. To mention this globality is thus to point to its novelty. In line with other scholars writing on the subject (see Dirlik 2003),⁴ the present book argues that modernity has indeed just recently broken through on a global scale, and that this breakthrough is an event of seismic proportions whose significance the world has barely begun to understand. The concept of global modernity aims to shed light on the new world-historical constellation that this breakthrough brings about, as well as on some of the challenges it presents.

In what follows, the focus will be on challenges that are specific to the social sciences. The book starts out with a periodization of phases of modernity (Chapter 2). Periodizations are ex post facto constructs whose rationale is a function of the research question under which a subject matter is analyzed. Their primary purpose is not to give a complete account of the ‘facts’ in question but to highlight certain aspects of historical processes that seem particularly noteworthy from the perspective under which these processes are examined. Alternative periodizations are possible and legitimate from other perspectives.⁵ The periodization proposed here was chosen with a view to the above world-historical changes and their attendant intellectual challenges. Two such challenges will be looked at: (1) epistemological and/or methodological challenges and (2) social theoretical challenges. While the former are discussed only briefly (Chapter 3), the latter are given more attention, occupying the bulk of space available in the book. The core problem dealt with is laying out the contours of a conceptualization of modernity that is up to the task of arresting its contemporary structure (Chapter 4). This is followed by reflections on the status of the proposed conceptualization and a few contextualizing notes (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 explores two consequences of the breakthrough of global modernity that revolve around emergent new forms of centrality or centricity. The conclusion summarizes what the book hopes to have accomplished and addresses a few objections that might be raised against some of the conceptual tools and categories it uses (Chapter 7).

Notes

  1   Amongst European intellectuals, ‘the expected otherness of the future’ becomes normalized by around 1800 (Koselleck 1985: 251). Gradually, this disposition diffuses to other social milieus, eventually manifesting itself in what Habermas (1996) has called the unfinished (and arguably never to be finished) ‘project’ of modernity, with the notion of a project suggesting modernity is something to be strived for. Today, a sheer endless number of individual and collective actors is engaged in practices doing precisely that.

  2   Differential degrees of modernity exhibited by different social systems can be thought of as points on a continuum of change that has a beginning but (as yet) no known endpoint. To say modernity is a continuum is to treat it as an ongoing reality. This goes against concepts like post or late modernity which, when taken literally, suggest modernity either has come to an end already or will soon be over – and that we actually know what its ‘endpoint’ looks like. Lacking such ‘clairvoyance’ (Carleheden 2007, citing Bauman), the author of the present book has to resort to greater modesty.

  3   Such actors or systems can include states but should, contrary to a long-standing convention in the social sciences, not be reduced to political entities. Instead, modernizing agents – agents who find themselves compelled to modernize or who actively seek to modernize because they identify with what is considered modern at a particular point in time – are found in all spheres of life and (especially organized) behavior.

  4   Given his understanding of globalization as the universalization of modernity, Roland Robertson (1992) might also be mentioned here, even though he does not use the phrase global modernity.

  5   Two well-known and widely debated examples are the periodizations of modernity proposed by Peter Wagner (1994) and Ulrich Beck (Beck and Lau 2005), respectively. But whereas Wagner is concerned almost exclusively with developments in Europe, Beck focuses on certain aspects of modern development which, while doubtless important, do not capture what constitutes modernity in its entirety. In both respects, the periodization suggested here aims to be more comprehensive.

2

Phases of Modernity

Abstract: This chapter distinguishes three phases of modernity: the phases of eurocentric, westcentric, and polycentric modernity. Periodizations are ex post facto constructs whose rationale is a function of the research question under which a subject matter is analyzed. The periodization proposed here follows the assessment that the breakthrough of global modernity entails far-reaching changes of both key characteristics of modernity itself and the geopolitical positioning of world regions. The chapter briefly addresses the second of these aspects.

Schmidt, Volker H. Global Modernity. A Conceptual Sketch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137435811.0005.

Three phases of modernity are distinguished here: eurocentric, westcentric, and polycentric modernity.

Eurocentric modernity marks the first phase (or sub stage) of modernity. Despite recent attempts to tone down the achievements and the uniqueness of European modernity through various forms of socio-historical contextualization and relativization (see Goody 2006), the pertinent literature leaves little room for doubt that the breakthrough to modernity occurred in certain parts of mostly northwestern Europe, from where it gradually spread to other locations. No agreement exists as to the exact timing of modernity’s beginnings. One position traces them back to the late 15th/early 16th century, with the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the so-called exploration voyages of the Portuguese and Spaniards representing important turning points in the transition toward the modern epoch. The next three centuries, often said to comprise the early modern period, lay the foundations for several revolutions (the scientific revolution, the economic revolution, the political revolution, the educational revolution) that, according to the second position, usher in ‘true’ modernity which transforms all aspects of human life in a short space of time.

Regardless of which of the two – different but not incompatible – positions is preferred, what their proponents regard as specifically modern arrangements are predominantly European phenomena, phenomena that either originate from Europe or are given their peculiarly modern shape in Europe, the impact of various non-European sources and influences on their evolution notwithstanding.¹ Through processes of trade and commerce, subjugation, colonization and settlement, other continents come in contact with aspects of (what now counts as) the modern too, but for the next 100 years, Europe is the unchallenged center of modernity (Tiryakian 1985): is the agent of modernization processes that for a long time remain largely confined to its own territory, is the force that generates the semantics of modernity’s self-description, is the place that pioneers many of its first institutional and organizational forms – in short, is basically modernity itself (Mignolo 2000: 207), because whatever may be associated with the modern exists at best in embryonic form outside the European hemisphere,² or because alternatives to European modernity that may spring up elsewhere have no chance of survival against the onslaught of power projected by globally operating European forces who insist on their superiority and ‘mission civilisatrice.’ At the end of this era, roughly around 1900, Europe dominates the entire globe. Britain has established the biggest empire of all times, and the rest of the world has been transformed into one global periphery: politically, militarily, economically, culturally (Darwin 2007). The first phase of modernity, and so also the first genuinely global order that it brings about, is thus essentially a ‘eurocentered’ phase (Quijano 2000).

In the second phase, the phase of westcentric modernity, Europe loses its monopoly on modernity, and European modernity is absorbed into a larger Western modernity, whose center, however, shifts across the Atlantic to North America. By the end of the 19th century, the economy of the United States has surpassed that of Britain, and around the turn to the 20th century, the country has the largest population of European descent except for Russia. Living standards are higher than in Europe, and for the first time in history the ‘masses’ begin to experience a modicum of prosperity, epitomized by Fordism and the emergence of consumer culture. Parallel to the rapid growth of its industrial economy, the United States begins to assert its status as a global political player, with the entry into World War I marking a critical turn and the outcome of World War II sealing its rise to the preeminent power of the West. The institutions of the world order established in the aftermath of that war are largely of its making, and even though this remains overshadowed by the Cold War and the competition for globa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Phases of Modernity
• 3  Epistemological and Methodological Challenges
• 4  A Four-dimensional Scheme of Modernization
• 5  Global Modernization in Context
• 6  Two Aspects of Polycentric Modernity
• 7  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index