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.