Lecture 4: Weber (cont) Diagnosis and the Task of the Modern Individual

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8. Weber thoughts on the prospects and the fate of modernity can be summarized into a double formulae "loss of meaning", "loss of freedom". (A) The "loss of meaning" refers to the idea of "disenchantment" just elaborated. The traditional Christian cosmology that provided a fixed, hierarchical and harmonized view of the world and gave the individual security by locating his/her place in the world by providing limits and certainty has now collapsed inducing a "crisis" of experience. The pre-modern individual knew their place in the world, knew the bounds of that world and what could be expected of themselves and others. Such an order made life meaningful. The modern individual must make sense of life and determine conduct without the security of traditionally endorsed values and life conduct, without the weight of a collectively affirmed set of rules and practices and amidst a welter of competing and clashing values and standpoints.  Rationalisation has forever destroyed the harmony of the old cosmologies that subordinated all values to one overriding value (typically religious like salvation). Before I mentioned intellectualisation as a facet of rationalisation: the way in which various aspects of culture become autonomous. Motored by their own highest value and its institutions, the logic and possibilities of this sphere are explored. The pursuit of science or art as a value has its own necessity that further estranges these cultural activities from each other and problematises the possibility of their ultimate reconcilability.  Weber believes that in modernity we have re-entered the age of polytheism (of multiple and warring Gods), of conflict between depersonalised value standpoints that cannot be reconciled in any rational way.

The grandiose rationalism of an ethical and methodical conduct of life which flows from every religious prophesy has dethroned this polytheism in favour of “ the one thing that is needful”. Faced with the realities of inner and outer life, Christianity has deemed it necessary to make those compromises and relative judgements, which we all know from its history. Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old Gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again resume their eternal struggle with one another (S asV, p149)

At the dawn of the modern age Machiavelli had argued that politics had to obey its own laws and grasp its own ethical schema. He drew our attention to the fact that ordinary ethics and the necessities of political life are incompatible. Kant first grasped this increasing differentiation of value spheres philosophically; he separates the theoretical-scientific, practical-moral and aesthetic- spheres. Weber gives a cultural reading of this insight in terms of the increasing autonomy and inter-conflict of value-spheres of life. One of his favourite examples is the birth of modern science out of religious wonder in the harmonious and lawful character of the natural cosmos. For many of the early modern scientists like Newton, their work was a demonstration of a theological design in nature. However, the ongoing evolution of science allows it to completely dispense with theological presuppositions about design. Moreover, in many cases science is compelled by is own logic and method to contest a religious view of the world. As he says, it becomes an irreligious power. Since the late 18th century it has been impossible to reconcile truth, morality and beauty. Kant argued that these are theoretically irreducible human faculties but practically reconcilable. But even this practical postulate of ultimate reconciliation is in doubt. The difficulty is expressed even more strongly in Nietzsche with his idea of the incompatibility and tension between art, science and morality. Weber maintains that intellectual honesty now forces us to choose between competing conflicting values-spheres. The dissolution of an objective cosmic order is now compounded by the fragmentation of the unity of subjective experience itself in the sense of coherent meaningfulness. The challenge is now the existential one of how the individual can establish a personal unity and meaningfulness out of these fragmentary and conflicting perspectives.        

     9. The idea of a "loss of freedom" refers to both the increasingly irresistible power of the modern industrial economic order and its more frequent incursions into, and annihilation of, individual space and the possibility of autonomy. Weber argued that in modern western society the material fate of vast populations depended upon the increasingly bureaucratised mechanisms of private capitalism. Here Weber does not mention the state. This is because he did not live to see the modern welfare state nor the Soviet style command economies of Eastern Europe. However, his comments on the Bolshevik Revolution and his analysis of socialist doctrine, demonstrate a remarkable prescience: he recognized both the increasing necessity of massive bureaucracies both in private capitalism and the state apparatus but also their dangers. For Weber, all hopes that these vast modern bureaucratic mechanisms could be eliminated were completely utopian. The necessity of large-scale economic organization requires, and even demands, the further refinement of specialisation, an increasing individual discipline and predictability and growth of bureaucracy. The imperatives of specialisation and discipline conscript individuals into a universal vocational culture. Here vocations are stripped of their former religious meaning and now typically entrap their bearers in an endless advance of "progress”, "career”, specialisation, fragmentation and "tension”. The increasingly all-encompassing universality of these system-demands foreshadows the rapidly encroaching "rational" discipline shaping all private and public relations. The emphasis is on behaviour that is calculable and predictable. These organizational imperatives enhance the role of the professional expert and further restrict the scope for individual charisma and idiosyncratic behaviour. This tendency towards organisational regimentation is prescribed by the principles of rationalisation, by the rational economy of doing things efficiently and predictably in a complex, mass society. The expert and the bureaucrat are servants of totally impersonal orders. One serves science and the other higher authority. Each is required to subordinate personality to impersonal, objective rules and functions. Increasingly all moderns find themselves imprisoned in or effected by similar "chains of command", mere cogs in the wheels of a vast machine over which they have little control. This physiognomy of modern society-- vast political and economic systems, regimentation, discipline, specialisation and uniformity--means that these systems threaten to become more and more autonomous, operating only according to their own purely functional and systemic requirements. They either subordinate or completely negate the needs/personalities of contemporary individuals. In general, Weber is wary of historical predictions. He refuses to allocate a definite outcome or meaning to his diagnosis of modernity. The threatening aspect of the diagnosis is more a negative utopia. On the positive side, Weber offers a guarded emancipatory potential. 

         10. For Weber, the modern individual is set before a task.  Recognising that the loss of immediate unified experience of the past has problematised the very idea of a modern self, the challenge becomes to recreate meaning and centreness out of the passion and critical scepticism of modern subjectivity. For Weber, this task requires the abandonment of all illusions, a sober acknowledgement of all the facts --bad as well as good--and sense of responsibility to history.

We know of no scientifically demonstrable ideals. To be sure, our labours are now rendered more difficult, since we must create our ideals from within our own chests in the very age of subjectivist culture. But we must not and cannot promise a fool's paradise and an easy street, neither in the here and now nor in the beyond, neither in thought nor in action, and it is the stigma of our human dignity that the peace of our souls cannot be as great as the peace of one who dreams of such a paradise (Debate at the

Association for Sozialpolitik in Vienna 1909)(GASS, S420)

 

The liberating aspect of this task is the prospect of emancipation from the age-old straitjacket of tradition and "received" self-definition and world order. Its attraction lies in the possible realisation of a new ethical dignity forged in radical autonomy. The exemplary modern individual's life is a self-chosen one. The individual creates their own lives meaning by choosing a particular value sphere and living in its terms to the full, making their life harmonious and integral in terms of the chosen value. Paradoxically, for Weber the real personality is not the individual who seeks meaning in merely subjective experience but the one who can passionately commit themselves to the impersonal demands required by service to these higher values whether they be art, politics or science. This requires a stoic acceptance of limits imposed by the modern objective order, the determination to struggle for the realisation of chosen values against resistance and in full consciousness. Weber wages on the individual and his/her ethical autonomy and passionate commitment as the principal bulwark against both the increasing power and dominance of objective rationalised processes and institutions and the correlated subjective retreat into "mere experience". Weber recognises that this view of a calling and existential ethics radicalises the element of choice in social action. But he particularly also emphasizes the weight of these choices by driving home the need for individual responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of self-chosen actions. This understanding of self-creation is not without risks. Weber realises that a proposal for the radical subjectivisation of meaning and value is not for all. Not everyone can live without the security of a sense of absolute standards and bear the internal tensions of conflicting norms.

To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are open widely and compassionately to him. Afterall, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice—that is inevitable. If he can do it, we shall not rebuke him. For such an intellectual sacrifice in favour of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity…(S as V, p155)

Those who have the intellectual courage to dispense with fixed signposts and beautiful illusions face heightened dangers. Such an individual commitment can become a "demonic possession".  Commitment to one value can involve conflict with other cherished values and even their annihilation i.e. ethics and politics. As recent events have only too well demonstrated, the passion to “become what you are” does not allow for the discrimination between saint and assassin.  In Weber's view such conflicts are irresolvable: there is no rational way of resolving questions of value. Science can only demonstrate the appropriate means to given ends and the consequences of adopting alternative means: it cannot hierarchise the ends themselves. This must be left to individual choice. In a famous passage Weber maintains:

The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that it cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; It must recognise that general views of life and the universe can never be products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.

Weber recognises the limits of science. This allows him to even question the value of rigorous intellectual activity itself while himself remaining committed to it. The quest for truth itself is a value choice that must be left to the individual. "Truth" is a value only for those who seek the truth. Unable, as it had in the past, to show men how to act rightly and how to be good citizens, rational analysis must remain silent before the ultimate questions of human meaning and direction. All that science can do is allow the individual to attain self-consciousness about the meaning of their action in terms of consequences. Beyond that Weber demands only that the modern individual be passionately devoted to their demon. For Weber, this ideal of individual self-creation through vocational calling and responsibility represents the realisation of true ethical autonomy in a world devoid of universal principles and traditionally sanctified hierarchies of value. The individual who takes up the challenge liberates their own life from being merely a natural event, they make it free and, in so doing, become a personality, an exemplary model that serves as a paradigm for others.

Lecture 3: Max Weber (1864-1920) Rationalisation

1. With the thought of Max Weber we enter 20th century reflection on the problem of modernity. Despite his own thoughts about the rapid obsolescence of scientific work, his diagnosis of modernity has endured. His vision is compelling: it marks both a heightened awareness of the difficulties and tensions of modern complexity and, nevertheless, a determination to further advance this project and confront its challenges. Weber takes over insights from Nietzsche and Marx while, simultaneously, radically repudiating their diagnoses. He felt that Marx's revolutionary scenario failed to come terms with the problems of politics and administration in complex mass societies, while Nietzsche's hopes for the restoration of aristocratic culture and the Ubermensch was a pipe dream of radical subjectivism. Weber was born into a political family; his father was a well-known National Liberal politician. Despite his own strictures on the modern necessity for vocational specialisation, Weber was himself always torn between science and politics. He had career options in law and politics, but decided on academia and as a relatively young man gained the chair of political economy at Freiburg. However, right from in inaugural lecture his theoretical interventions had national political significance and his occasional writings were to constantly complain of a vacuum of political leadership in pre-war Germany. Towards the end of the First World War he even reconsidered a political career but circumstances and personality worked against it. In the mid-nineties he married his second cousin Marianne and in 1896 was called to a full professorship at Heidelberg but soon after suffered a severe psychological collapse. He retired from academic life in 1903 and travelled to America. From this time he began to recover but did not return to lecturing until after the war. However, he remained the “ghost of Heidelberg”: his home was the centre of one of the most dazzling intellectual milieus especially during the War. He was an advisor to the Germans at the time of the Armistice and his political thinking played a key role in framing Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. He died soon after the First World War. Weber is best known as a founding father of academic sociology. His work has remained a classical paradigm contemporaneous right up to the present. Although in philosophy he explicitly remained within the dominant Neo-Kantian paradigm of the time, his social theory was to preoccupy successive generations of scholars who followed. Horkheimer& Adorno, Foucault and Habermas all recognized his significance and found it necessary to respond to his diagnosis.

2. Weber saw at close range the rapid industrialization and modernization of Germany, the political unification of the Reich and the consolidation of a prosperous bourgeois society and finally the growing political crisis that led to the First World War and the German collapse. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he was not content with bourgeois prosperity. While facing the inevitability of modernizing processes and recognizing its emancipatory dimensions, he was aware of the ambiguity of this "progress", conscious of its increasing constraints, tensions and limitations. This was why he took Nietzsche's critique of modern democratic, secular, rational civilization so seriously. Unread at the time of his first writings in the 1870s, he only became popular after his mental collapse and death around the turn of the century. But unlike Nietzsche, Weber’s scepticism in regard to the claims of bourgeois academic and  political values did not become a frontal assault on them. He is aware of ambiguity, costs, the inevitability of value clashes in modern culture but he always remained committed to the value of science. While he agreed that science could not solve the fundamental problems of life, he upheld its significance as a passionate calling for its devotees and an indispensable means of clarification of the meaning of action. He joins Nietzsche in formulating doubts about the organisational mechanisms of mass society. However, he remains proudly bourgeois and liberal: he can see no prospects of a radically alternative future. The processes that brought modernity into existence were not inevitable but they are now practically irreversible. Weber’s authenticity and contempt for beautiful illusions combined with a voracious intellectual curiosity produce, I think, a very attractive, if tortured, personality. His diagnosis of modernity is couched in ascetic terms: it is our practical (moral) and intellectual duty to meet the "demands of the day". This requires courage: to face the modern predicament with rigorous intellectual honesty and to accept real emancipatory possibilities with all their constraints and limitations.

3. The central theme of the Weberian diagnosis of modernity was the problem of "rationalisation". Much of Weber's work represents an attempt to understand and explain the sort of rationalism unique to modern western civilization. For Weber, the principle underlying all the processes of rationalisation is: that it is possible to master all things by calculation and comprehensively understand all aspects of life. Given the time and inclination, everything in our world is amenable to rational understanding. However, unlike the Hegelian “spirit”, "rationalisation" is not a single historical process. The term denotes a number of historically distinct and contingent processes that have only become inextricably interlocked in Western civilization. This rationality has become universally significant but it is not necessary in any logical or evolutionary sense. Weber rejects all teleological accounts of history which one way or another perceive history as the bearer of an immanent meaning. Again siding with Nietzsche, Weber views history as a terrain of existential chaos and, at least in modernity, of value conflict. In all likelihood the course of historical development will not clarify the meaning of culture and it would be naive to believe that human happiness will emerge from the expansion of the world's limitless possibilities. As we will see, he believes the opposite more likely.

4. The various manifestations of rationalisation share common features. These are:

1/ Human control over both natural and social processes is extended.
2/ Depersonalisation of social relations (contracts replace personal ties and obligations.
3/ Life chances determined by function, achievement and examination rather than birth.
4/ Discipline (the increasing importance of predictability and control in human action. Emphasis on legality and discipline and restriction placed on spontaneous, charismatic actions).
5/ Refinement of the techniques of calculation (book-keeping, bureaucratic files and records, science).
6/ Specialization (extended division of labour and the increasingly vocational character of modern life).
7/ The intellectualisation of all realms of culture. Elaboration and analysis of the meaning and consequences of all realms of culture. Art rejects nature as a model and takes on a much more conceptual and autonomous self-understanding in which its meaning is no longer immediate but intellectualised, science liberates itself from the demands of religion and an anthropocentric view of the world).

5. The manifestations of rationalization appear in all spheres of life (economy, religious life, science, politics), they have different historical sources (Monotheism, Greek enlightenment, Renaissance) and distinctive rates of development.

6. The ongoing historical extension of the principle of rationalization to all aspects of western culture results in what Weber called Entzaüberung "disenchantment". The world cannot retain its magical and religious significance. In traditional pre-modern societies, magic and religion are meaningful and prescriptive: the individual inhabited not an the objectified, scientific world of quantities but a mysterious, communicative one peopled with Gods that stipulated the sanctified rules and ends of all action. These early forms of world interpretation rendered meaningful such inexplicable problems as death, suffering and unfairness. These events are meaningful within a fixed cosmology and a narrative of divine order. Magic even allowed the individual to intervene and influence this order and sequence of events through ritual practices and ceremonies.  But rationalization strips the world of this ultimate religious or magical meaning, of a fixed moral order. Tradition is unable to endure rational dissection and criticism. For modern natural science, the world of nature just exists, natural events just "happen" but no longer signify anything. Science constructs a de-anthropomorphic view of the world with humanity is displaced from a central position. Science offers explanations but no meaningful order, or cosmological truths that might orientate individual action. Rationalization eliminates the meaningfulness and the harmonious order of experience in the universal ultimate sense furnished by the great world religions. The thirst for such orientation remains but science is unable to quench it. The de-magification of the world implies a degree of historical disorientation and a cultural demand for a new human answer to this problem.

7. Weber's attitude to the ongoing consequences of "rationalization" and "disenchantment" is ambiguous. For those sufficiently resolute to take up the challenge, he offers the heroic prospect of being able to create the meaning of his/her own life within the limits circumscribed by the modern objective order:

'The fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is distasteful to the complacent but which is, nonetheless, inescapable, consists in the insight that every single important activity and ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be permitted to run on as an event in nature but is instead to be consciously guided, is a series of ultimate decisions through which the soul chooses its own fate, i.e., the meaning of its activity and existence'. (Essays on the Methodology of the Social Sciences P18)

Weber formulation of this theme of emancipation is tinged with limitation. Individual choice is always heavily constrained. The other side of increased individual autonomy and choice is the increasing domination of objective social processes and institutions (economy, bureaucracy, technology). These objective processes are rational and efficient but they also constitute a soulless and impersonal world that imposes its own severe disciplines. In a famous passage from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (P181), Weber continues:

'The Puritan wanted to work in a calling: we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of the monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of a "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed the cloak should become an iron cage'.

 In Weber’s famous reading, the Puritan is the archetypical modern individual. Their psychology of inner-worldly asceticism is decisive for the creation of the modern world. The spirit of capitalism emerges not from economic activity itself but from reformation Protestantism. The deep religiousity of the Protestant sects like the Lutherans, who believed in predestination, paradoxically gave rise to a disciplined and regimented inner-worldly activity that was especially conducive to modern economic life. The paradox is that a religious doctrine of predestination that might have disempowered the worldly aims of the individual, in the context of the religious sects of the Reformation, generated an unprecedented active participation in the world and empowerment of individual agency. This was a result of the fact that in this case a religious end now was assessed in terms of inner-wordly success. Here intense religiousity fostered deeper enmeshment in the world. This was why Weber could say that Luther had turned the whole world into a monastery. The Puritan found meaning in their calling and the discipline they imposed upon their lives. This meaning founded in absolute beliefs and convictions was ultimately transformed into an economic ethos. Thus we have the modern economic universe with its own ethos and logic. The religion foundations have disappeared, eroded by the ongoing scientific critique of religion. We, who have inherited the world the Puritans created, find ourselves compelled by emphatic economic and technological imperatives to asceticism and discipline without divine sanction or subjective conviction of its ultimate meaningfulness.

Lecture 2: Historical & Conceptual Introduction (cont)

• 7. Modernity is a concept with a notoriously vague temporal range. In some cultural contexts it begins with the Renaissance while in others its relevance commences only in the late 19^th century of early 20^th century. I choose to start at the beginning of the 19th century, suggesting that at this time a complex of economic, political and socio-cultural changes intensify and coalesce to produce a fundamental historical transformation and shape a new institutional structure and life-world. Without wanting to be exhaustive, I try to register this qualitative change by abstracting out of this complex historical transformation a number of interrelated features that exemplify the change and still engender problems for which we have not found solutions. These are:
• a) Capitalism: organization of production primarily by markets and on the basis of free labour and profitability. This leads to great economic dynamism and efficiency. From the outset, this raised the question of whether, and to what degree, these quasi-autonomous markets should be controlled? The recent GFC has only underlined the contemporaneity of this question.
• b) Industrialisation. Imposing mechanization and science as the major productive force between man and nature. This lead to massively increased material wealth and productivity, to urbanization as a result of the need for a new mass work forces and eventually raised issues of limits: those of ecological environments, resources and populations. Only a few years ago it was estimated that now 50% of the world’s total population is now urbanized. This is a completely unprecedented aspect of contemporary social existence.
• c) Nation-State and Bureaucracy. The development of “imagined communities” and the tensions within them: between identification with race, ethnic or religious affiliations or with the legal categories of citizenship and rights. This raises issues like appropriate policy for immigrates and refugees as well as the viability of the nation-state in the era of globalisation. The debate in Australian politics over refugee policy is the most obvious index of the ongoing relevance of this dimension. But this also refers to and implies the centralisation of politics and growth of efficient administrative machinery within modern government. This leads to concerns about democracy, expert elites, paternalism, quietist citizens, government infringement of rights, and invasion of individual privacy by distant but powerful central agencies.
• d) Democracy: Universal franchise. What should universal political participation mean? Should it be merely formal in the sense of government deriving a mandate of legitimacy or more substantive in the sense of individuals and communities having a more active political role? Does it mean citizens having the role of constantly reviewing the complex decisions made in their name or more actively determining the conditions of their own lifeworld. Would a more substantive move in the latter direction be possible, a fetter on innovation, efficiency and excellence? If democracy in modern conditions implies merely formal participation, how can community interests be protected from power and elites of knowledge. The so-called Arab spring in Egypt and North African states demonstrate that these continue to be live and vital issues in much of the contemporary world outside the liberal democratic world while the general disaffection with contemporary politics within these societies speaks for a substantial degree of alienation from how these arrangements are currently performing.
• e) Cultural rationalisation. The various spheres of culture like science and art become autonomous developing their own supporting institutional structures and being orientated by their own leading values. How autonomous should the spheres become (ethical limitations of science, incomprehensibility of modern art)? How rational is rationality? Is there more than one form of rationality? Is rationality just a tool of calculation or is it also relevant to ends? Is it a force for human emancipation or oppression?
• f) Individualism. The bonds that embedded the individual in a community and given social roles are loosened by historical change. The individual is allowed the social space to become whoever s/he is. This is increasingly conceived as a task and subjective experience is consequentially both deepened and, as a result, problematised. The individual has to find, discover or construct his/her self. Is this task and its inevitable choices a good or bad thing, personal emancipation or just another burden?
• 8. I have drawn attention to the fundamentally changed cultural mood at the beginning of the 20th century compared to the early part of 19th century. This change is already registered in Nietzsche, his cultural pessimism and critique of what he regarded as the illusions of the Enlightenment. The secure belief in modernity as a speeding train racing towards the known destination becomes increasingly problematised in the course of the 20^th century. The optimism evident in Hegel and Marx's respective declarations of bourgeois modernity as the realization of reason and freedom and socialism as the opening of the "realm of freedom" is replaced by a recognition of the mounting problems associated with this new constellation and an increased awareness of constraints and risks. The 19th century creates an unprecedented material prosperity and mastery of nature but at the same time also creates the novel problems of surplus, concentrated political power, risk and sustainability, on a vast scale. Initially, this was the historically novel problem of surplus goods that had to find markets in order to sustain the capitalist economy and problem of unemployable, surplus people. Although this had historical precedents, it had never before existed like anything like this scale. It was almost as if the very success of the west in the 19th century was the harbinger of decline and the mounting problems generated by its very success.
• 9. Weber will still holds out the emancipatory challenge of a self-made meaningful life especially for the few, but his image of modernity as the "iron cage" has a representative cultural resonance for the coming generations and expresses the emerging discontent over the dominance of organization and bureaucracy, of the increasing tendency to functional differentiation in a modern mass society and mounting sense of the constraints of modern civilization. Of course, all of this is expressed and compounded by the apparent implosion of the First World War and the intervening period of crisis, reconstruction, hyperinflation, depression and Fascism that followed the opening decades of the new century. In just a few years all the Victorian hopes for modernity as a new realm of freedom, rationality and prosperity collapses into a frenzy of unimaginable inhumanity. Within twenty years, the slaughter of the trenches was followed by the Depression, the rise of fascism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Gulags and the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. The latter is a profound symbol of the Janus face of modern “progress”. For the most part, what is missing from the mood of these earlier 20th century thinkers in comparison to those of the 19^th   century, is the sense of optimism, unambiguous belief in historical progress and utopian expectation. The ideals and or illusions of the 19th seemed much more problematic and paradoxical than initially thought. The economic and political catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century seem to express the contradictory potentials and enigmatic character of modernity. Eric Hobsbawn has called his book on the twentieth century the “age of extremes” to indicate the polarization that characterizes it in terms of poverty/prosperity, ideologically between right and left, rationality/barbarism and so on. The 20th century has also been called the short century because historians tend to see the First World War as the beginning of a decisive change of mood and set of socio-political expectations and mark its end with the collapse of Communism in 1989. The overriding mood of the thinkers we are considering reflects precisely this paradoxical spirit, its foreboding, skepticism and anti-utopianism. As you will see, only Heller escapes this attitude. She reached maturity after the Second World War and, although as a Hungarian Jew who experienced the Holocaust first hand and suffered under the Soviet controlled Eastern Block totalitarian regime, she emigrated to the liberal democratic in the West, experienced the cultural impact of the post-WW11 economic prosperity and lived to see the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Nevertheless, all the thinkers in this course have with good reasons a clear understanding of the  “darker” potentials of modernity. Their perspective puts into relief those of my generation in the west who came to maturity in the golden age of the post-war social democratic compromise that delivered a greater role for egalitarian policies of state regulation and intervention, and with it, a world of improving life chances, generous medical and educational services and a ubiquitous sense of security and optimistic prospects of upward social mobility that still underpins much of the thinking of this generation despite the fact that the conditions for it have been gradually diminishing since the 1970’s.
• 10.  If only to emphasis the dynamism of modernity and its shifting temporal and special dimensions, the 20^th century also sees the shift of the centre of modernity west to the United States. If Paris was the cultural capital of the 19^th century for most sophisticated Europeans and London its economic center, New York shifts from the absolute periphery of the world in the early 17^th century, to become its cultural and economic center of modernity from the end of the WWII. In the course of the 19^th century, the population of New York increased fifty times and by the middle of the 1920’s it was becoming the manufacturing, financial and cultural centre of the world: its skyscraper urbanization and consumer mass culture epitomizes the modernity in the new century. Of course, all the great 19^th century theorists of modernity wrote about America but this was usually only in terms of the future. Only Tocqueville actually travelled to America and made it the centre of his vision of modernity. Yet even he was still thinking of France and its future. Not surprisingly all the thinkers considered in this course either visited or spent significant periods of their life in the United States, and, in all cases, their experience of the American version of modernity profoundly impacted upon their general vision of modernity and its potentials. 
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• 11. The six aspects of the historical transformation that brought about modernity will be recurrent themes throughout the course. But this does not mean that they exhaust modernity.  Other theorists have emphasized alternative features of modernity. These themes are abstracted from a living and vital historical process. Their relative significance, contours and prominence will ebb and flow with this dynamism and the emphasis supplied by differing theorists: in the course of these ongoing, dynamic processes, new issues and questions concerning each of these aspects emerge with new problems and possibilities of praise or blame. Example1. A decade ago the notion of "globalisation" came into vogue. This brings together various revolutionary developments in the economy, communications and politics to posit a world unified into a single social network by the expansion of trade, shrinking of distances and the rapidity of communication. Phenomena like the increasing importance world financial markets, international credit and multi-national companies, the new role of international diplomatic organization like the UN and its Security Council in regional conflicts and the trans-national character of environmental risks has made us more aware of our interdependence and shared fate. The concept of globalisation is clearly relevant to a contemporary account of modernity. However, it takes up and theorizes many of the themes and issues discussed above not from the standpoint of the particular concrete society but from that of systemic interconnections of an increasingly unified global village. Example 2. Today we are still evaluating the full impact of the events of Sept 11 and what they might mean for modernity. Irrespective of how ideologically driven one assesses the so called “war on terrorism” to have been, the issue of terrorism has in a very short time been transformed from a marginal political phenomenon and issue to a central one for citizens even in stable liberal democratic societies. Changes in the nature of struggles and the emergence of new problems under these aspects represent the dynamic aspect of modernity. However, as mentioned, the concept of modernity is a theoretical construct that can be filled by a spectrum of dynamic and subjective experiences. Global Warming is only the most recent and most potentially catastrophic. This means modernity gives rise to an irreducible pluralism: modernity can and has been theorized from a variety of different perspectives. The range of alternative possibilities underscores the fact that my choice of themes is not exhaustive but based, at least partially, on what I consider to be important.
  
• 12. Let me stress that this “inexhaustibility” is no failing of social philosophy. On the contrary, it is an expression of the fact that modern life is not a problem for which we will ever find the definitive solution. Furthermore, my aim is not to come down for or against modernity: that would be non-sensical. We must deal with the cards we have been dealt. Heidegger speaks of the modern individual as being “thrown” into a specific society and time that is contingent and beyond the individual’s choosing. However, while we are contingent, we always have choices and make them. We therefore cannot avoid the responsibility for those choices. Finally some of you may find the concept of modernity itself too abstract and homogenizing. While I sometimes harbor empiricist doubts along these lines myself, I also find it quite challenging to try and encapsulate a common experience of the modern that incorporates something like the full richness of all its permutations. The concept of modernity has always been a value concept that evaluates societies of the basis of certain, primarily Western indices. Of course, the evaluative or normative dimension of the concept is inevitable because it is in part future –orientated, looking at the present from the standpoint of the future present.  However, if the concept of modernity is to be really useful, it needs to be stripped of all naïve prejudices associated with constructing a crude version of modernity in terms of GNP and other like measures. What is required is a more encompassing understanding of modernity that, while holding on to certain historical, value achievements, also concedes a variety of ways of life as modern, that does not itself oppress but allows for cultural richness as a crucial and legitimate element of contemporary modernity. In this way, the concept would be no mere abstraction but reflect new realities and perspectives that have emerged as a result of the complex dynamics of modernity itself. Our task is to use the theoretical means at our disposal to read them, to give theoretical expression to these insights: their opportunities and threats. In this way we stand some chance of beginning to grasp our own possibilities, see our own dark potentials, present possibilities and responsibilities.

Lecture 1: Introductory Historical Background

1. This course is a continuation of the course that covered 19^th and 20 century theories of modernity. The one dealing with the 19^th century I  titled  ‘Theorising Modernity’. This course shall be dealing with a number of influential 20th century attempts to characterize and diagnose the specificity of modern society. I shall follow themes and perspectives from that earlier course as well as the new issues, perspectives and challenges that emerge in the course of the new century. Despite this, this course to be is relatively self-contained. Those of you who have not done the earlier course are not at any substantial disadvantage and I will leave my lectures for that course on my blog for your edification. In that course I did take the first two lectures to outline my understanding of modernity and indicate my approach. At the risk of boring some of you, I shall briefly recapitulate the main elements of this before saying a few words about the spirit and dynamics of modernity through the 20th century.

2.One way to think about this course is as an introduction to some of the classics of 20th century social philosophy. Why social philosophy? Hannah Arendt proposed a diagnosis of modernity that put the “rise of the social” at the very center of what modernity is. Put simply, this refers to the emergence of the economy as an independent system of relations from the domestic sphere focused on work, consumption and the status relations connected to it. Social philosophy in large part emerges in the 19th century in response to the massive social changes that accompanied the early development of this new sphere. The philosophers who championed this conceptual innovation recognised that the new economic and social relations signify a qualitative change and a dynamism that neither the old disciplines of political philosophy nor the new ones of political economy or economics were fully equipped to cope with. It is this recognition of a real crisis in the sense of the need for a more comprehensive or totalising approach that animates the original project of social philosophy. And it is this will to be comprehensive that connects social philosophy to the concept of modernity. As I indicated last semester and, as I will briefly reprise in a minute, the “modernity” that I’m interested in emerges from the confluence of a number of historical and social dynamics—political, economic, social, technological and cultural—that converge in the early decades of the 19th century but have continued to interact and develop in ever changing forms right up to our own time. Our main interest is the characterization of this novel societal constellation, the dynamics that animate it and the transformations it underwent from that time until the end of the 20^th century. And obviously there have been not only very dramatic changes in the substance of these dynamics, also the attitude of contemporaries to these dynamics and their consequences have also changes dramatically. As an example of such changes I would offer the idea of the new locomotive as an image and metaphor for the emerging modernity of the 19^th century. The locomotive is the product of the new technology and industrialization, it expresses the newly emerging mobility of the modern world; it travels on a track in a single direction and its course and its destination appears fixed and certain. If we try and think about a metaphor or representation of contemporary modernity, the locomotive not only seems technologically old hat. It seems too rigid, lacking in flexibility; the optimism and confidence expressed by this former technological marvel has now been replaced by ambivalence and anxiety about incipient unknown and unpredictable outcomes of technology. Contemporary popular culture has fine antennae for discerning and expressing these concerns. Think about the computer “Hal” that is smarter than us. A couple of years ago there was a Hollywood disaster movie titled Unstoppable that you might have seen. It concerned an enormous locomotive and accompanying train that somehow, unfortunately, I did not see the movie, was racing along a track without drivers and threatening to wreak havoc on anything standing in its way. I think this movie and many others that you might name clearly express a widespread anxiety about science, technology and its unforeseen consequences and dangers for human populations. In recent years there have been many such movies and this theme reaches a pinnacle in a move like The Road a couple of years ago, taken from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title which you also might have seen, that depicts the journey of a father and young son as they try to escape from an unnamed apocalyptic disaster which has completely destroyed the world as they know it. Again here, the popular social imagination is preoccupied with the fate of a modern civilization that has got to the point of contemplating its own demise as a result of a range of unspecified scientific, military or environmental excesses. If I try to think of a metaphor to express the anxieties of our contemporary modernity, then perhaps the airports of Europe at the end of 2010 seem an appropriate corollary to the 19^th century locomotive: thousands of people stuck in transport lounges, trying to sleep, not knowing when, or if, their plane was departing and how long they would be in transit waiting to get home. These images are cultural expressions of the dark side of modernity, of dangers, possibilities and of risks, of which we have increasingly become aware. You might also think that this concentration on the dark side of modernity and its potentials is a little morose. After all, what about all the good stuff! In this respect, I can only call on the support of another contemporary Italian social philosopher Giorgio Agamben who, in a recent essay entitled ‘What is Contemporary?’ argues that the individual who is too closely tied to their epoch are not contemporaries because they lack the distance to be able to see their epoch clearly. His point is that all times are obscure for those who live through them. Part of this obscurity is being blinded by the light of the present, whose brilliant familiarity makes it difficult for us to establish the required distance to see things distinctly in all their contours. Agamben maintains that the real contemporary is the individual who manages not to be blinded by the light of their own century but is able to glimpse the shadows and darkness. It is this historical asymmetry that Nietzsche called being “untimely”. This capacity to resist the light of the present is rare by definition and demands a sort of unconventionality, a courageous thinking. However, it is from this source that most of our keen insights into the dynamics of the contemporary world and the future has come, the ones that today we think of as paradigmatic.   

     
3. However, it would be wrong to think that such a cultural awareness of crisis and attempts to give it cultural expression are only a recent phenomenon. This has also been a constant theme of modern social philosophy, which by its very concern to comprehend modernity as a whole, has inevitably also maintained a key diagnostic dimension.  This stemmed from the recognition that modernity was a dynamic society that generated constant change and therefore also always provided new challenges. The thinkers that we will be concerned with in this course very much fit into this mould. It is hard to avoid the names Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault when doing social philosophy or other related disciplines. Most of you would have heard of these names even if you don’t know anything about them. If for no other reason, it is worthwhile to know at least something about them.  These thinkers are paradigmatic in the sense of offering categories, questions and frameworks that have had an enduring influence. Their theories cannot provide us with all the ingredients needed for a contemporary view but they do articulate some of the fundamental tensions in modern societies and ways of thinking them through from our perspective. You could say they serve as theoretical trampolines to assist our own thinking about modernity: they allows as to rise a little higher and see things more clearly, more distinctly that we otherwise might do.  

4. But one can think of a deeper and more existential rationale for such a course. The geo-political world order, economic conditions, political and cultural vocabularies have all changed rapidly in recent times. Technological change, information revolutions, the multiple effects of globalisation and global warming now transforms every aspect of our everyday life. World history happens not just out there somewhere. Not only do we see it dramatically on the TV, it also seems to impact directly on all of us in every aspect of our everyday life. Heightened public concern about security or refugees, whether manipulated or not for political purposes, is a measure of this. The idea that rapid change adds to insecurity is a register of the fact that we are no longer as certain as former generations about the world that surrounds, its stability and where changes to it might be leading us. Modernity also has an enigmatic look. If you look at it from the disadvantaged perspective of the Third World it has become the bearer of universal aspirations to material abundance and autonomy, while our own doubts and misgivings about it and the risks that come with it have also grown. Most of what I will discuss in this course will not bear directly on contemporary issues, but the theoretical developments I recount should indicate how some of the key constituents of this contemporary enigma came into place. Knowing something about the determinants and shape of this modern world even at the abstract level of philosophical theory aids our practical orientation to it. It provides perspective, a set of categories, some ways of thinking and acting upon your experience.

5. One problem that immediately arises is the question of the status of knowledge about modern society. Here we are dealing not just with an independent and discreet natural object of knowledge but with a dynamic social reality that is always shifting and a collective modern experience that seems, ultimately, irreducibly idiosyncratic. As a consequence, the concept of modernity is inevitably a conceptual construct: there cannot be a single, definitive account of modernity. Because our experience of modernity is dynamic and perspectival, modernity is an inexhaustible theoretical object; no single version can ever claim the last word. Yet experience is not just idiosyncratic but also collective and shared. Many dimensions of our modern experience are common and inescapable. Some theories become significant because they strike a cord with many contemporaries. In this course we will be looking at four theories that are widely regarded as classical because they have struck a cord; they have been very influential in helping others to think their own experience of modernity. As I have said, these theories act as trampolines that assist others to think their own experience of modernity. These theorists fall into a category of philosophy that today we might call “orientative”. As mentioned there can be no positive knowledge of modernity in the sense of the “hard sciences”. This alternative approach attempts to diagnose the present, to suggest the human significance of some of the main dynamics of the past and the present (according to some usually implicit image). We could say that this orientative approach is interested in a crucial aspect of the philosophical task that I will call “vision”. What I mean by “vision” is nicely captured in an image I’ll take from Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who travelled widely in the US in the early 1830’s and wrote the famous book Democracy in America. At one point, in his travels he talks about leaving a town and walking down a road that climbed a nearby hill. At a certain point he turns around to view the town and sees it in a way he has never seen it before; he has an entirely new perspective and sees it in its totality and interconnections like never before. This is a metaphor for the philosophical vision being spoken about; it may be a vision that distorts much of the fine detail but it nevertheless, provides a perspective that is indispensable to orientation. I want to provide you with some key visions of modernity in the 20^th century.

6. Let me offer a word of caution. This assistance gained from this “orientative’ approach is in most cases obtained under duress. My concern with these theories is with their explicit or even more often implicit account of modernity. Therefore we need to stress that this is our question and not necessarily always theirs. Weber was primarily concerned with the question of the uniqueness of the West; Foucault carried out a number of primarily historical studies of the relation between discourses, power and subjectivity. However, I would argue that all the thinkers in this course are explicitly ambitious and presuppose a vision of modern society that can be excavated from their other concerns. To wring from these theorists a theory of modernity does involve some interpretative violence. However, let me say in my own defense that philosophers are always perpetrating such violence on their predecessors and contemporaries. The first hermeneutic task of philosophical interpretation is to understand the philosopher the way they understood themselves. Even if this is only an ideal that cannot be achieved perfectly, it remains an important regulative idea and after all we do have their texts so we can’t just attribute any view to them. However, at the same time, it must be acknowledged that philosophy is always written from a contemporary perspective and interest; and this also conditions what we find interesting in these classical texts. We inevitably approach these texts with our questions.