A Sociology of Modernity

Liberty and Discipline

Peter Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134891900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2004. Confusion reigns in sociological accounts of the curent condition of modernity. The story-lines from the 'end of the subject' to 'a new individualism', from the 'dissolution of society' to the re-emergence of 'civil society', from the 'end of modernity' to an 'other modernoity' to 'neo-modernization'. This book offers a sociology of modernity in terms of a historical account of social transformations over the past two centuries, focusing on Western Europe but also looking at the USA and at Soviet socialism as distinct variants of modernity. A fundamental ambivalence of modernity is captured by the double notion of liberty and discipline in its three major dimensions: the relations between individual liberty and political community , betwen agency and structure, and between locally situated human lives and widely extended social institutions. Two major historical transformations of modernity are distinguished, the first one beginning in the late nineteenth century and leading to a social formation that can be called organized modernity, and the second being the one that dissolves organized modernity. It is this current transformation which revives some key concerns of the 'modern project', ideas of liberty, plurality and individual autonomy. But it imperils others, especially the creation of social identities as ties between human beings that allow meaningful and socially viable development of individual autonomy, and the possibility of politics as communicative interaction and collaborative deliberation about what human beings have in common.

Part I
Principles of modernity

Chapter 1
Modes of narrating modernity

THE MODERN RUPTURE

For several decades, the term ‘modern society’ has rather unquestioningly been applied to the social formations of the Northwestern quarter of the world during the past few centuries. It relies on a basic distinction between these social formations and ‘traditional’ societies.¹ However, it has been immensely difficult to both exactly define the characteristics of modern societies and to show when they actually broke with traditional social formations.

Often, processes of urbanization, industrialization, democratization, the emergence of an empirical-analytical approach to knowledge are referred to.² All of these processes, however, extend over long periods of time, they do not always occur simultaneously, and some of them can be traced to regions and times quite distant from the so-called modern world and era. More specifically then, the so-called industrial and democratic revolutions are sometimes seen as the social phenomena constituting modernity.³

Even these revolutions are fairly extended and uneven phenomena in time and space. But if one starts with the political changes in seventeenth-century England and the economic transformations in the late eighteenth century, some demarcation is achieved. Furthermore, it can be argued that these developments had impacts, even if only gradually, on the rest of the world by changing the general conditions for phrasing political ideas and organizing economic practices. The close coincidence of the American and French Revolutions then seemed to provide a sufficiently short period that could be seen as the beginning of political modernity.⁴ During the nineteenth century, periods of industrial take-off in a number of European countries and in the US have come to be seen as marking a similar economic rupture.⁵

To many observers, these transformations lay so far apart and were so little connected that serious doubts could be raised on whether they constituted a major social transition. Social historical and anthropological research, in particular, could show that very little had changed in the orientations and practices of most human beings during and after these supposedly revolutionary events. If modernity was to mark a ‘condition’ or an ‘experience’,⁶ then the qualifications required to show its existence were largely absent in the allegedly modern societies during the nineteenth century, and for a still fairly large number of people during the first half of the twentieth century.⁷

Some recent research, though, has re-emphasized the idea of the modern rupture, and a critical look at this research may help to clarify the issue. Michel Foucault sees the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a period in which new discursive formations emerged in the humanities, namely the tripartite set of discourses of biology, political economy and linguistics. From a perspective of the history of concepts, Reinhart Koselleck speaks of a major turn in the development of key philosophical and political ideas. Partly following Koselleck, Jürgen Habermas identifies the emergence of a self-reflective philosophy of modernity and the opening of the time horizon. The beginning of a social time of history marks the possibility of a view of history as a project. Inversely, Wolf Lepenies identifies the end of natural history. These analyses would indeed locate the beginning of modernity at the turn to the nineteenth century.⁸

I generally concur with this perspective, but one of its features needs to be emphasized. Broadly understood, all of these works are contributions to a history of concepts and of philosophy. Hardly any similarly clear ruptures occurred in terms of economic, social and political practices throughout society.⁹ In such terms, the prevailing view seems to be that the revolutions were much less revolutionary, that is, pronounced ruptures during a short time-span, than the discourses about the revolutions. In as much as the studies by Foucault, Koselleck and others are about practices, they are about those of the very small minorities in a given society who were directly involved in the production of these discourses, namely about (proto-) intellectuals and (proto-) professionals.¹⁰

If these findings are reliable, one can understand the difficult relation between the judgement and the analysis of modernity, which haunts our thinking, in sociohistorical terms. It is the relation of affinity, but non-identity between ideas and institutions of modernity that is at the root of most of the problems in analysing the history of modernity.¹¹ The normative issue, that is, the project of modernity, may then possibly be more or less neatly identified historically and theoretically, even with all its internal tensions. However, this project has never translated into similarly neat and pure institutions.

To pursue an analysis of modernity, then, requires a distinction between the discourse on the modern project (itself ambiguous and amenable to a sociology of knowledge as well as subject to historical transformations), and the practices and institutions of modern society. Far from trying to erect some idealistic—normative and suprahistorical—notion of modernity, this merely acknowledges, sociologically and historically, that some break in the discourses on human beings and society occurred more than two centuries ago. This discursive rupture brought about the establishment of the modern ideas as new imaginary significations for both individuals and society and, as such, it instituted new kinds of social and political issues and conflicts.¹²

TWO PORTRAITS OF MODERNITY

The discourse of modernity is based most firmly on the idea of freedom and autonomy. Historically, it was used to interpret and reinterpret observable social practices in the light of this imaginary signification. By way of an introduction, I shall briefly sketch the main cognitive opposition that emerged in this process, the opposition between the realization of liberty and the undermining of liberty. Thus, two very common, but incompatible, portraits of modernity will appear. These are two opposed narratives, one of which may be called the discourse of liberation, the other the discourse of disciplinization. This sketch does not aspire to intellectual historiography, rather it is meant to generate the issues that a sociology of modernity will have to pay attention to.

The discourse of liberation stood at the very origins of modern times.¹³ It goes back to the quest for autonomy for scientific pursuits during the so-called scientific revolution, to the demand for self-determination in the political revolutions—the model cases of which were the American and French ones— and to the liberation of economic activities from the supervision and regulation of an absolutist state.

In each of these cases freedom was seen as a basic—‘unalienable’, ‘self-evident’— human right. But it was also argued for with the collective outcome of liberations in mind, namely the enhancement of the striving for truth, the building of a polity to whose rules everybody had contributed and in which, thus, violence was no longer a legitimate means of action, and the increase of ‘the wealth of nations’. In both ways—the establishment of individual rights and the collective justification for the use of these rights—the discourse of liberation was and is of major importance as a means of self-interpretation of and for ‘modern’ societies.

Throughout the past two centuries, however, the adequacy of this discourse has not remained unquestioned. It had not only an intellectual genealogy, but also a particular social location. It was pursued only by some groups, and it was socially conditioned. An early critique focused on the contrast between the discourse and the practices of the social groups that were supporting it.

A particularly strong version of such a ‘critique of ideology’ was launched by Karl Marx. He held that the allegedly universalist and scientific theories of political economy merely masked the interests of the emerging bourgeoisie. Rather than discarding them completely, however, he tried to separate their real insights into the workings of the economy from their ideological elements. Thus, he indeed subscribed to a notion of the need for liberating the productive forces; it was rather the social context in which such a project was to be carried out that had to be revolutionized so that all humankind could benefit from this liberation.

Quite regardless of whether one concurs with Marx’s particular analysis, nineteenth-century European societies displayed, to almost any observer, striking contradictions between a universalist rhetoric and the strong boundaries between social groups as to the availability of liberties. The opportunities of entrepreneurship, of expressing one’s views and interests within political institutions, of participating in the academic search for truth, were limited to a very small part of the population and the barriers erected were often formal (like the restriction of the suffrage), or at least formidable. In fact, the idea of containing the liberal utopia within certain limits, of creating boundaries against the consequences of its own claims is crucial to any understanding of modernity, as shall be shown throughout this book.

Still, from a twentieth-century perspective, it may appear as if the power of the idea of liberty ultimately overcame these boundaries. Not only were formal rules of exclusion lifted, but social mobility also increased. Related to such social transformations, the discourse of liberation itself changed its form. The functionality of social arrangements in ‘modern’ society was itself regarded as liberating human beings. The higher performance of economy, politics and science would set the individual free from many of the concerns of ‘traditional’ societies. It was recognized that the new arrangements also put new strains on the individuals who would have to comply with multiple role expectations according to their status in different spheres of society. But in many of the analyses put forward during the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, the gains in terms of liberty were seen as far superior to the losses.

The most sophisticated, and far from uncritical, version of such a discourse is put forward by Jürgen Habermas. While praising the performance of modern institutions and accepting their historical inevitability, he fully recognizes their liberty-constraining effects. He reconciles this ambiguous finding with the attempt to safeguard the ‘project of modernity’ by counterposing those institutions against a ‘life-world’ in which authentic, unmediated communication is possible and from which renewals of an emphatic understanding of modernity may always reemerge.¹⁴

During the past two decades, such views of a functionally ordered society, be they generally affirmative or critical, have lost their persuasive power. From within this intellectual tradition some observers saw a gradual dissolution of the order; moreover, empirical findings on pluralization and disintegration of both institutional arrangements and social life-styles were reported, which were difficult to accommodate in mere terms of functionality. In this current phase, the emphasis on order is relaxed, and the discourse of liberation takes the form of a praise of individualization.

Ultimately, then, modernity is about the increase of individualism and individuality. In an early phase, few may have benefited at the expense of many. In a second era, differentiation may have occurred group- and role-wise, but not really on the level of the individual. Nowadays, however, modernity’s achievements allow the development of a great plurality and variety of individual life-styles and life-projects, available to the great majority of the population of Western societies.

If such a discourse of liberation, all modifications notwithstanding, shows a continuity through more than two centuries of modernity, it is plausible to assume that it reflects important features of these societies. However, it has never been without a critical counterpart, the discourse of disciplinization.

A starting-point for the latter was the observation that liberation actually never occurred the way it was conceived in the liberal ideas. European revolutionary societies between 1750 and 1850 were marked by continuities, and the most important continuity was the centrality of the state apparatus. If we look at the Enlightenment writings, we shall see that the state, while feudal and absolutist in historical origins, was often regarded as the means to make Enlightenment social practices possible. One major argument focused on the necessity of the state for social order, another saw in the state a social incarnation of Reason, raised as a universal entity above the particularistic society.¹⁵ In both cases, its nature as an effective and legitimate boundary to the potential infinity of possible autonomous social practices becomes evident. The state form as the container—safeguard and limit—of modernity is another major issue throughout this book.

The idea of the state as container of modernity, as an instrument to restrict practices and to discipline individuals, drew on an existing social institution. A second, and historically later, variant of the theory of disciplinization postulated the unintended self-limitation of modernity as the outcome of modern practices. Far from fulfilling the bourgeois-humanist promise of human self-realization through autonomy, so the argument goes, modern practices, once started, would transform human beings in both idea and reality so that the very notion of realizing a self becomes untenable.

Elements of such a discourse can be found in Marx’s writings about alienation and fetishization as a result of the exposure of human beings to the market. Analogously, Weber argues that the achievements of the workings of bureaucratic and market rationalities transform the ‘life destiny’ of human beings and rob human life of some of its important qualities. Modern scientific practices, even if they were begun in its name, would turn out to be unable to maintain the quest for truth. And according to Nietzsche, the moral-religious project of a Christianity that was focused on the individual undermined its own foundations and cancelled any possibility of morality from social life. The argumentative figure of the self-cancellation of modernity in and through its own practices is a further theme that needs to be explored in this socio-historical account of modernity.

Such portraits were drawn from the experience of a modernity that had begun to unfold its full powers, powers that were seen as residing in the multitude of morally, economically, politically and intellectually freed individuals. While the societal effects of the interactions of these individuals were the problem at the heart of these analyses, the dynamic itself was seen as being unleashed by the freeing of the individuals.

The experience of twentieth-century modernity tended to alter the portrait of disciplinization again, with Weber already marking a different tone. However, a full new narrative of modernity, focusing on the subjection and disciplinization of individuals, only came into being with fascism, the Second World War and the massive material transformations of the modern society scape between the 1930s and the 1960s. Theodor W.Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse as well as Michel Foucault identified a disciplining alliance of instrumental reason and will to power in the organized, administered societies of that time. Under the almighty coalition of knowledge and power, the question of resistance or compliance hardly seemed to pose itself any longer.

With plurality and difference apparently reemerging during the past two decades, images of instrumentality and one-dimensionality have lost their appeal. Still, the discourse of disciplinization has not given way to a new and unquestioned hegemony of the discourse of liberation. At least one strand of the postmodernist debate interprets pluralization not as a condition of the self-realization of the individual but as the expression of a fragmentation of selfhood, and sees the subject finally completely vanishing, disappearing even from the utopian point from which claims for societal alternatives could be made. Such kinds of arguments point to the possibility of a historical transformation of the self and to the conditions for, and understanding of, self-realization.

These two portraits of modernity were always in co-existence and, as I have tried to indicate, they even underwent analogous transformations over time. They were not always as completely separate as I described them. The most sensitive observers of modernity, such as Marx and Weber, contributed to both images. However, the gallery of modernity is full of pictures that emphasize either one or the other side. What we may conclude from this is, first, that t...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PROLOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I PRINCIPLES OF MODERNITY
• PART II THE FIRST CRISIS OF MODERNITY
• PART III THE CLOSURE OF MODERNITY
• PART IV THE SECOND CRISIS OF MODERNITY
• PART V TOWARDS EXTENDED LIBERAL MODERNITY?
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY