ABSTRACT
From his earliest work onwards, Jürgen Habermas has been a theorist of modernity and has deployed – if not always explicitly – an image of a modern world that is internally differentiated, rather than one that is coordinated by a single totalising logic, such as that of capitalism. Sociologically, Habermas contests the one-dimensional view of modern societies that sees them as deriving from a basic unifying core, feature or structure, the assumption of which produces a totalising picture that becomes the basis for a totalising critique. More recently, Habermas’s sociological discourse of modernity has also enabled him to engage with the post-1989 and post-9/11 environments that include phenomena such as terrorism, unilateralism, population movements, and new nationalisms as well as post-national politics and multiculturalism. Instead of upholding a modernisation theory that privileges economic and industrial development, and a neoliberalism that privileges markets, then, Habermas is able to critically engage in the so-called ‘new’ global environment with his political ideal and programme of deliberative democracy and cosmopolitanism, underpinned by his theory of communicative competence and learning processes (Habermas, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2009). Nonetheless, this chapter will seek to contrast Habermas’s sociological dis-
course of modernity and his underlying theory of evolutionary learning processes with an alternative theory of modernity as tension-ridden, dynamic and multiple. In what he has termed ‘the linguistification of the sacred’, Habermas has argued that there is an internal connection between the increasingly complex and differentiated evolution of our relations with nature and the organisation of society, and the equally differentiated evolution of cultural forms (1987a). In Habermas’s view, these cultural forms are embodied arguments, rather than only world views. However, the first section of the chapter will argue that, in tying argumentation and the evolution of world views together, Habermas circumscribes his own sociological discourse of modernity. In the second section, Habermas’s theory of modernity will be contrasted
with a counter-model which is more pluri-dimensional and tension-ridden, and thus contestable and open-ended. Rather than drawing on a linguistic
paradigm and evolutionary impulses, this counter-model is based on the concatenation of historically indeterminate social imaginaries, among which there are irreducible tensions, conflicts and interpenetrations. This alternative theory of modernity opens our understanding to non-Western versions of modernity that are not circumscribed by evolutionary or occidental models.1
