ABSTRACT
Symptomatic of the onset of reflexivity were the “notions of a post-industrial society and a post-modern culture,” which “as misleading as they are catchy,” have at least served “to highlight the shortcomings of a restrictive image of modernity and the need for a more flexible model that would incorporate current trends.” The problem here is not that structural Marxists have conceived of modernity as made up of different “semi-autonomous” processes, but that they characterize these separate processes as economic, political, and ideological respectively. The state that developed in colonial Indonesia toward the end of the nineteenth century embodied, a number of the central features of modern absolutism. A central problem for the theorists of a “redefined modernity” concerns the apparently contradictory tendencies of the stateetatism on the one hand, democratization on the other. Modernization theory, based on Weber and Parsons, tends to equate cultural modernization with the gradual but inevitable development of a unifying instrumental rationality.
