ABSTRACT
For Marx, the modern world is revolutionary. Its revolutionary nature is derived from the sense of itself as a tempest, a constantly moving force or series of forces that destroyed everything in its path allowing modernity to be built, rebuilt and moulded anew until the final great revolution occurred which would make world history post-revolutionary. In modernity, as Marx famously remarks, everything that was once solid melted into air, everything that was holy was profaned (Marx, 1972: 83).1 For Marx, in his more paradigmatic moments and writings, the revolutionary nature of the modern period originated from and is synonymous with the capitalisation of social forces. And yet, even for Marx, capitalism was an umbrella concept that encapsulated a diverse constellation of forces that, for him at least, seemingly buttressed and reinforced one another – industrialisation, the monetarisation or commodification of social exchanges and the accumulation of these exchanges, the migration of people from the countryside to the city, the development of mass means of communication, and communicative infrastructure across spatial networks, simultaneously viewed as the prerogative of newly formed or forming nation states, and the world as awhole because capitalisation required the infrastructural communicability of the entire world, beginning with the maritime revolution and including the more recent revolutions in telecommunications. Today we call this latter development globalisation. Nonetheless, for Marx, out of all of these sites of ceaseless human activity the city remains the hub, the centre of the maelstrom of activity. It is both the originator and magnet for such activity. In this sense the city is both an empirical social place, as well as a metaphor for the formation and circulation of modern forces, and it is referred to in both ways throughout this chapter. For, Marx, for example, ‘the city’ is the whirlpool of capitalist modernity. Nonetheless, while Marx is preoccupied with conceptualising and portraying
the logic of this new, revolutionary form of capitalist accumulation, modernity is also symptomatic and representative of at least three other modern and revolutionary figurations that include aesthetic self-formation, democratisation and the nation state in its own quest for nation building. It is, however, with
the nature of democracy that this study is predominantly concerned, especially its republican current, which addresses the question of rulership by the many, rather than its liberal one, which addresses the formation of rights and negative freedoms in the context of struggles between state and civil society (Pocock, 1985: 37-50; Bohman, 2007:1-18). Like Marx, Hannah Arendt also stresses the sense of tempestuous, ceaseless
activity as the hallmark of modernity in her study of its revolutionary impetus. For her, the image and notion of revolution belongs to a cluster of terms that identify it with novelty and beginnings. For her, though, these terms and the restless activity that they invoke do not belong to modernity’s capitalistically constituted economic dimension. Rather they are distinctly and irreducibly political. As such, these clusters of revolutionary terms are, according to her, conspicuously absent from their sixteenth-century Copernican origins, as well as their seventeenth-century association with royal restoration, in England at least. Both referred in some way to the circulation or restoration of order, whether viewed as either a natural or historical necessity (Arendt, 1973: 42-43). Rather, in her view, a shift of meaning occurred in the eighteenth century:
the fact that necessity as an inherent characteristic of history should survive the modern break in the cycle of eternal recurrences and make its reappearance in a movement that was essentially rectilinear … this fact owes its existence not to theoretical speculation but to political experience and the course of real events.
