Modernity as Experience and Interpretation E-Book

Peter Wagner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 597

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

1 Ways of Understanding Modernity

Modernity as experience and interpretation: the agenda

Modernity: beyond institutional analysis

Multiple modernities: multiples of what?

Overview

Part I: Interpretations of Political Modernity: Liberty and its Discontents

Overture: Multiple Interpretations of Political Modernity

2 Modernity and the Question of Freedom

The priority of individual liberty

The continental deviance and the insufficiency of ‘negative liberty’

Alternative liberal views

Two concepts of liberalism

3 The Political Forms of Modernity

Four familiar narratives: liberty, statehood, democracy, revolution

Re-narrating European political modernity

4 Modernity as a Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics

Emancipation from what? The philosophical answer

Emancipation from what? The sociological answer

Emancipation of whom?

Emancipation for what?

Part II: Interpretations of Economic Modernity: The Endgame and After

Overture: Capitalism and Modernity as Social Formations and as Imaginary Significations

5 The Critique of Capitalism and its Impasse

Individual, rationality, capitalism: rise and fall of the autonomous subject

Democracy under conditions of capitalism: Adorno as a political scientist

Theorizing the present: the task of social theory

Critical theory, political philosophy and the theorizing of modernity

Critical theory and the place of the political: the purposes and the common

The historical horizon of contemporary capitalism: the plausibility of modernity’s self-cancellation

6 Towards a Historical-Comparative Sociology of Capitalism

Capitalism/modernity as changing interpretations of problématiques

Capitalism/modernity as historical experience

The problématiques of modernity and the direction of history

Crisis and criticism

7 The Exit from Organized Economic Modernity

What is to be flexible?

The semantics of ‘flexibility’

The social construction of ‘inflexibility’: towards a historical perspective

Beyond ‘flexibility’ (1): work at reinterpretation

Beyond ‘flexibility’ (2): work at re-institutionalization

Part III: Interpretations of Epistemic Modernity: Distance and Involvement

Overture: The Quest for Knowledge beyond Experience and Interpretation

8 The Critique of Science and its Prospects

Science and the question of representation

Science and its critics: a recurring debate

Science and its applications: science-inspired transformations of the world

Varieties of epistemic certainty

Epistemology and critique: knowledge as regulation and knowledge as emancipation

9 Varieties of Socio-political Interpretations of Modernity

National identities and sociological problématiques

National traditions in the social sciences: analytical possibilities

The case against national traditions in sociology

Sociology as an international discourse?

Persistent variation in the interpretation of modernity

Forms of social knowledge and the contemporary condition of modernity

Part IV: The European Experience and Interpretation of Modernity

Overture: European Integration as an Interpretation of Modernity

10 Logics of European History

European unity – the standard view

European unity – two dissident views

European divisions – a brief history of European diversity

Processes of problem-creation

Reversal of a developmental trajectory

European unity – again

11 Regionalizing European Modernity

Plural interpretations of modernity and the meaning of empire

Freedom and the common: rethinking modernity beyond imperial modernism

Situating political modernity: Europe in context

Part V: The Analysis of Modernity and the Need for a New Sociology

Overture: When the Light of the Cultural Problems has Moved On

12 The Social Theory and Political Philosophy of Modernity

The emergence of the social from within the political

The moment of the revolution

The problem of post-revolutionary liberty

The rise of social theory

13 The Conceptual History and Historical Sociology of Modernity

Democracy and capitalism in comparative perspective: the legacy of historical sociology

Language and history

Discourse formations, speech acts, conceptual history: the revolution in intellectual history

Modernity and its problématiques: four episodes in rethinking the history of European societies

Language and interpretation between historical sociology and political philosophy

References

Index

To Ariadne Lou

Copyright © Peter Wagner 2008

The right of Peter Wagner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

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Preface

In the afternoon of 25 August 2007 the skies darkened over Arcadia. Fires were destroying vast areas of the Peloponnese and had created smoke clouds that turned the sunlight orange and gave the apocalyptic impression of a very early dusk. More than sixty people died in the fires. A state of emergency and a day of national mourning were declared in the country.

The summer of 2007 had been characterized by extraordinarily high temperatures in the south of Europe, going often far beyond forty degrees centigrade. This phenomenon was generally attributed to global warming, the persistent rise of temperature due to irresponsible human activity on the earth. But it was also clear that fire was unlikely to break out accidentally in so many places at the same time. It was widely assumed, and could sometimes be documented, that the fires were deliberately started, most likely for reasons of individual profit-seeking, to turn protected reserves into buildable land, but other more politically targeted strategies are not ruled out.

The darkening of the skies over Arcadia offers a sign of our contemporary modernity swinging out of its always precarious balance. The inability to halt the process of global warming that will make ever larger parts of the earth uninhabitable shows that the notion of a common world, which needs common measures to be preserved, has been radically weakened or has even withered away. If the pursuit of individual gain was the driving force of the arsonists, as the most probable explanation suggests, then so little sense for the common exists that a small individual advantage is seen to justify destruction of a highly valuable, almost irreplaceable common good. If fires were set for strategic political advantage – a rather less likely reason – then ‘the public thing’ itself barely figures on the mind of those who committed these deeds, be they Greek or international actors.

All of those accounts capture aspects of our modernity, and none of them is specific to this example and to this region of the world. To be modern means to see oneself as autonomous; it means to reject any source external to oneself as a guide to one’s action. Whoever sets incendiary devices, be it by igniting them in a forest of the Peloponnese or be it by refusing a signature to the Kyoto agreement, is likely to justify their action only by reference to their own will, by no source outside of themselves. Such a modern self-understanding found its first strong expression in the ancient Greek city republics, most importantly Athens, not far from Arcadia, and also burning these days. These republics were strongly committed to collective self-determination, to a radical concept of autonomy, in which there was no brake to the will of the collectivity – and sometimes this meant the ruin of the city.

In ancient Greece, two elements existed that are rather absent today and that mark a significant difference between this early manifestation of modernity and our own. Even though the ancient Greeks did not accept any ruler over them, first, they knew about the precarious nature of their modernity and they had a term for its most important peril: hubris. When human strivings hubristically overreached the capacity to master the consequences of one’s action, then life in common was at risk. And even though, second, the ancient Greeks recognized the dangers created by over-ambitious individuals and had a means to counteract those, namely ostracism, expulsion from the polity, they did not see these dangers as the most significant ones because ruthless and instrumental individualism, which is so frequent in our world, was absent in theirs. Greek modernity knew and cherished the expression of personal freedom but it was based on the idea of collective autonomy, and individual ambition was unlikely to upset this way of ruling the common life.

Our current modernity is clearly different. Individual liberty and instrumental action are not only driving forces that are recognizable in all walks of life, the fires in Arcadia being only one dramatic example among many others. They are even hailed as the epitome of modernity in sophisticated accounts of social and political theory. The aims of this book, which I was about to finish on 25 August 2007 in an Arcadian village, are, first, to understand this aspect of our contemporary modernity and, second, to suggest that modernity, even today, can be otherwise.

Maybe one is always rewriting the same book, but the situation changes and thus the words. My first writing about interpretations of modernity, without using exactly those terms, was a comparative political sociology of the European social sciences (published as Sozialwissenschaften und Staat in 1990). This was during the second half of the 1980s and there was a sense that modernity was undergoing radical changes, but the existing words for them were highly inappropriate. My second attempt (A Sociology of Modernity, 1994) tried to approach the question of our contemporary modern condition through a historical sociology of transformations of European modernity over the past two centuries, an analysis of ‘successive modernities’ as Johann Arnason would later call it. This was after 1989 and the fall of existing socialism; and it was also after I had first left the European continent and had gained direct experience of North American modernity. The words given to this analysis mostly stemmed from some kind of thick historical description and stayed close to the experiences of continental Western Europe. To fully spell out their meanings, my third attempt tried to take some distance from this ‘case’ and widen the conceptual horizon (Theorizing Modernity, 2001). This move suggested to me even more strongly that modernity could be, indeed had to be, analysed in terms of plurality and of possibility. As necessary as this step may have been in times of supposed pensée unique, of neo-liberal hegemony, as I still think, it may have conveyed too little a sense of the limits to possibility in history and invited too general and too abstract an idea of the contingency of modernity. The current work tries to remedy this imbalance by reintroducing the specificity of the experiences of modernity and to relate existing interpretations of modernity to those experiences.

As it happened, much of the research for this book was pursued at the European University Institute in Fiesole. EUI is in many respects a most privileged place for a researcher in the social sciences. If there is any place where the ‘new sociology’ I am proposing, a truly interdisciplinary endeavour in terms of current disciplines, should flourish, then this should be there where the transcending of national intellectual horizons is more easily possible than elsewhere. In particular, in my opinion, EUI should be the place where constructive work at a reassessment of European modernity with a view to the contemporary global context could take place. However close or not EUI may have come to live up to its promise, I am glad to have had the opportunity to work there for eight years and to develop much of what follows in this book. In particular, I had the good luck to work with the historian Bo Stråth for much of the time on an interdisciplinary research programme analysing European modernity. I am very grateful to him for his intellectual and institutional companionship. The outcomes of our common work, we hope, will also be available in book form very soon. Most importantly, I take this opportunity to thank the doctoral researchers of EUI with whom many of the following ideas were shared and developed in numerous seminars, workshops and conferences.

From 2003 to 2006, my research also benefited from generous support by the Volkswagen Foundation programme, ‘Key themes in the humanities’, for the working group on ‘Modernity and contingency’, which I co-directed. This group possibly did not realize all of its immense potential, but it enabled me to reflect anew on my ideas about significant experiences and their interpretation in European history in the framework of workshops on the period around 1800, the First World War and ‘1968’. Traces of these discussions will be found throughout this volume.

This book is being finished just after I have started teaching and researching at the University of Trento. I would like to thank my colleagues there for granting me an extended summer period to conclude the writing. I look forward to discussing the outcome with them.

Nathalie Karagiannis’s presence in the following text is stronger than any word in this preface can express.

Melana, August 2007

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: