ABSTRACT
The notion of modernization has become problematic. It is dismissed as an instance of macro-sociology’s tendency to overgeneralize, or even universalize, a model of historical development that has appeared in the context of the European colonization of those regions which were then referred to as the non-West. At the same time, though, the notion displays a remarkable resistance against its dismissal precisely because it has been part and parcel of the processes that it pretended merely to describe. It is as if, in the current shift from modernization to modernity characterizing the discourse of contemporary macro-sociology, the term “modernization” still haunts its proclaimed alternative, that of modernity. Thus, Thomas Lamarre writes,
A number of questions arise, however, about the relation between modernity and modernization. There have been efforts to separate modernity (as cultural modernity) from modernization (as societal modernization). Arguments for the complete autonomy of modernity from modernization remain unconvincing because some degree of complicity is always in evidence. Nevertheless, modernity and modernization are not the same thing. The question is, how does modernity – first and foremost a temporal marker – relate to modernization, that is, to totalizing forces or processes? (2004: 3)
It is now a truism that sociological depictions of modernization have been instrumental in bringing about some of the totalizing processes to which Lamarre alludes. Still, it is of interest to see how the discipline has reacted to these critiques. The most outspoken approach in current macro-sociology, in regard to the incorporation of those critiques into its research agenda, is the so-called Multiple Modernities paradigm (hereafter MM; cf. Eisenstadt et al. 2002; Eisenstadt 2002; Sachsenmaier 2002; and Kocka 2002). This paradigm – and also affiliated approaches which differ in detail – abandons the notion of modernization and instead speaks of modernity in the plural. Its basic argument is that historically and culturally specific ways, which are
called “traditions,” “cultural programs,” or “culture,” of entering modernity, understood as a set of globally diffused structural and procedural moments which originated in the historical West, have been constitutive for the formation of specific modernities. Thereby processes of transmission and imposition from the European metropolises to other world regions are appropriated and transmogrified in culturally and historically particular ways. The MM paradigm differs from the classical stage of modernization theory
in three important ways. First, as the summary term already indicates, it conceives of modernity as a plural phenomenon, which means that in the modern world there are a number of different modes of being modern. There are different opinions as to how this plural constellation still allows speaking of modernity as such; still, the core characteristic that, according to most contributors to the debate, characterizes modernity and therefore underlies all modernities is a high degree of societal differentiation, that is, the crystallization of institutional arrangements around a number of key processes in society (Eisenstadt 2002: 28). In view of the fact that differentiation is a descriptive, not an explanatory category, this theoretical common denominator in the MM approach permits maintaining a notion of modernity while at the same time appreciating the causal complexity and plurality of the historical processes that led to specific modernities. Second, the MM approach takes into account that culture, and especially
religious traditions, matter in trajectories that led to different modernities. In fact, culture and religious tradition serve as explanatory categories that are held to give an understanding of why there are different modernities, and what the factors that impacted upon their crystallization were (Knöbl 2007: 81-86). Third, the MM approach departs from the methodological nationalism of
earlier modernization theory in that it identifies not (national) societies, but “civilizations” as the conceptual frame for explaining the emergence of different modernities. The most fully elaborated conception of this frame is found in the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt, who introduced Karl Jaspers’s term “axial age” into modernization theory. This introduction signals a turn toward the historical-cultural foundations of what Eisenstadt came to call “civilizations.” According to Eisenstadt, axial age(s) refer to periods, “from 500 B.C. to the first century of the Christian era, or even to the rise of Islam” (Eisenstadt 1996: 13), of the formation of sustaining cultural symbols and belief-systems and their crystallization in societal institutions crosscutting the structural differentiation in society and transcending its spatio-social boundaries. To sum up, the MM paradigm, which can be seen as the most important
trend in current macro-sociology, highlights the fundamental plurality of the modern condition and ascribes it to cultural and religious traditions that exceed the methodological frame of the nation-state by virtue of their historical depth and their geographical extension. Given this focus on modernity as a contemporary and plural phenomenon, what, then, has become of
“modernization”? In stressing the enduring, if transformed, role of traditions in different modernities, the MM paradigm returns modernization processes to history and historiography. What distinguishes the different modernities from each other is, according to this strategy, a phenomenon that seemingly resists modernization-theoretical explanations. Having modernity proclaimed as a common, if plural, condition, the trajectories that led to it – the different “traditions” – can only be approached in a historiographical fashion. Hence the inclination of the MM paradigm toward historical investigations about other parts of the world; hence its interest in “comparative historical sociology,” “world history,” and related historicizing approaches (cf. Knöbl 2007, Spohn forthcoming). On the one hand, a historicization of processes which were once grandly
termed rationalization, differentiation, individualization, or domestication (cf. Loo and Reijen 1992) can be appreciated as a self-critical answer to the critiques issued against modernization theory. In this endeavor, the MM approach stays true to the idiom of modernization in that it moves a core category of this idiom into its center: that of tradition. On the other hand, though, it seems that this notion of tradition is itself used in a fairly traditional way in that it denotes cultural patterns of orientation which are handed down from the past to the present, albeit maybe in a transformed shape. In this use, “tradition” serves as an historically explicatory category and at the same time as an alibi permitting macro-sociology to withdraw from the unavoidable question of the, in Lamarre’s words, “totalizing forces and processes” (Lamarre 2004: 3) of modernization which are the flip side of modernity in the plural. Björn Wittrock (2000) characterizes modernity as a cultural order that
issues “promissory notes” to its members. The latter term makes reference to the cultural dimension of modernity insofar as modernity hosts a variety of promises and projects (like gains in personal autonomy, a decent life, justice, etc.) which can never be completely obtained but survive as regulative idea(l)s. Modernity constantly renews itself by virtue of the gap that opens up between visions of a good life that characterize modernity and the impossibility to completely bring them into existence (cf. also Wagner 2001). Those visions therefore serve as a legitimation of modernity as long as it is viewed as an incomplete, as opposed to failed, project. It seems now that modernization theory, and so the MM paradigm, also signed such promissory notes in that they have promised to make sense of the very “totalizing processes” that made their appearance as a theoretical discourse possible. In fact, this has been sociology’s self-legitimization since Auguste Comte: explaining the macro-societal processes that made this science possible. However, much of the work being done within the MM paradigm denies its signature on the promissory note of theorizing how modernities have been brought about through “totalizing processes and forces.” Concomitantly it is especially the notion of “tradition” that allows for such denial, as it substitutes the (now discredited) promise of earlier modernization theory to explain social change
in general terms with close descriptions of why those changes were never that general as was once assumed. Sociological theory, as it were, passes on its promissory notes to cultural history, and it does so using the term “tradition” in a traditional way. This escape to historiography is problematic for a more fundamental
reason, as it fashions the underlying assumption that there are contemporaneous multiple modernities or, to put it differently, that it is now that modernity is plural. Evidently the MM paradigm is aimed at inter-civilizational comparisons, for instance, when it comes to the question of why “capitalism” or “the state” have fanned out into varying institutional crystallizations. But what underlies such adherence to plurality and historical contingence is the assumption that the current varieties of modernity are contemporaneous. And what in turn is effaced by this tacit assumption is that the concept of contemporaneity is itself a product not of modernity, but of a very narrow understanding of it. In an expression that Benedict Anderson (1985: 31; cf. also Anderson 1998: 34) borrowed from Walter Benjamin, this is an understanding of “homogeneous, empty time” which, according to Anderson, spread throughout the world with the West’s implementation of the nation-state as the ultimate macro-political form and print capitalism as the cultural vehicle of such implementation. Harry Harootunian (2004) has argued that it is capitalism, and its fetishization of the commodity form, that has forced highly variegated temporalities into a single time horizon, namely, that of labor time. Whatever stake one takes in the debate, whether it be print capitalism or the commodity form as such that forcibly synchronized divergent temporalities, the consequences for the MM paradigm are evident: the approach of multiple contemporaneous modernities implicitly rests upon violently universalizing macro-processes that it cannot account for because it has abandoned the very idea of such processes. In other words, the concept of contemporaneity is an instance for the totalizing force of modernization from which the MM paradigm tries to escape in arguing that there is no modernization but only modernity in the plural, effected by different “traditions.” What will be attempted in the present chapter is a revisiting of the notion
of “tradition” in a way distinct from its use in the MM paradigm. This attempt is guided by a notion of tradition that vouches for the validity of a processual understanding of rationalization as the central feature of modernization, with rationalization reinstalled as the “totalizing,” though by no means homogenizing, “force” characterizing modernization. In other words, I will attempt to rescue an understanding of modernization by revisiting the notion of tradition, and thus face the impossibility, and yet inescapability, of theorizing modernization.
