Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies

Kristina Stoeckl, Massimo Rosati

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317093244
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Engaging with the idea that the world reveals not one, but many routes to modernity, this volume explores the role of religion in the emergence of multiple forms of modernity, which evolve according to specific cultural conditions and interpretations of the 'modern project'. It draws upon case study material from Africa, The Middle East, Russia and South America to examine the question of whether modernity, democracy and secularism are universalistic concepts or are, on the contrary, unique to Western civilization, whilst considering the relationship of postsecularism to the varied paths of modern development. Drawing together work from leading social theorists, this critical theoretical contribution to current debates will appeal to sociologists, social theorists and political scientists, with interests in religion, secularization and postsecularization theory and transitions to modernity in the contemporary globalized world.

Chapter 1
From Multiple Modernities to Multiple Democracies

Alessandro Ferrara

Along with the idea of ‘secularization’, the theory of ‘modernization’ has been recently questioned as yet another by-product of the Enlightenment linear view of history. Drawing on Max and Alfred Weber’s comparative work and on Jaspers’ notion of an axial age which encompasses a plurality of ancient civilizations, Eisenstadt, Arnason, Assmann, Wittrock and a number of other leading social theorists have put forward a new framework for making sense of global history, known under the heading of ‘multiple modernities’.

In this chapter, I will highlight some of the questions that the ‘multiple modernities’ approach can generate in the specific field of political philosophy. Assuming that we can distinguish formal democracy as a set of procedures that can merely ritually be paid lip service to from ‘democracy with a democratic spirit’, can we disentangle the ‘spirit of democracy’ from its original roots in the culture of radical Protestantism and envisage a plurality of ‘cultures of democracy’ anchored to various civilizational bedrocks? Are ‘multiple democracies’ genuinely viable versions of the same model of political order, or are they way-stations towards the Western modern form of liberal democracy?

From the ‘Rise of Modern Rationalism’ to ‘Multiple Modernities’ and the Rediscovery of the Axial Age

Eisenstadt is usually credited for the notion of multiple modernities and its polemical emphasis against the linear theory of modernization. His life-work encompasses the transition from a comparative version of the paradigm of modernization to the paradigm of multiple modernities. Drawing on Weber’s thesis about the distinctive contribution of Calvinism to the development of a modern capitalist society, Eisenstadt began a comparative investigation of different paths to modernization. In the late 1960s, he brought together an influential volume (Eisenstadt 1968) on the ‘functional equivalents’ of Puritanism in a plurality of non-Western contexts – Tokugawa religion in Meiji Japan, certain sub-traditions of Islam in North Africa, Gandhi’s version of Hinduism, the santris of East Java and countless others. The emphasis was still on explaining why some countries have gone further along the path of a modern ‘economy and society’ nexus, and the explanation was sought in terms of the transformative potential inherent in the ‘economic ethic’ (Wirtschaftsethik) conveyed by various strands of religiosity. Back in the 1960s, it was still a matter of ‘faster’ and ‘slower’ modernization, ‘first-wave’ modernization and subsequent adaptations. Quite revealing of the underlying spirit of the comparative research program is Eisenstadt’s comparison of Catholic and Protestant societal contexts in Europe. The seeds of what Polany would call ‘the great transformation’ existed ‘in most countries’ of Europe; yet, Eisenstadt argues, ‘in the Catholic countries – in Spain, France, and even earlier in the Italian states of the Renaissance in which modern statecraft first developed – these potentially diversifying tendencies were stifled’ (1968: 12). Innovative features such as the newly emerging role of the capitalist entrepreneur, the new type of wage-labor, the banking system, even though sporadically present, could not in Catholic countries ‘be freed from their dependence, in terms both of goal orientation and legitimation, on the political center’ (Eisenstadt 1968: 13). From this comparative perspective, Eisenstadt examined religious cultures in terms of their potential for producing results similar to those attributed to the influence of Puritanism – i.e., in terms of their potential for leading to a rationalization of culture, of social life and of the actor’s life-conduct.¹

Forty years later, in the decade 2000–2010, this research-program in ‘comparative modernization’ underwent a radical change. Attention is being paid now not so much to the convergence of institutional, economic, social and cultural patterns towards a modern form of life originating in and epitomized by the West, but to the specific and alternative paths followed by societies rooted in different cultural-civilizational-religious contexts, when they negotiate their own distinctive version of the patterns of structural differentiation, urbanization, autonomization of the market, the replacement of status with contract and of ascription with achievement, and patterns of cultural and institutional reflexivity which characterize a modernity no longer prejudicially equated with its Western version. The insight underlying the paradigm of multiple modernities is the idea that becoming modern and becoming Westernized are two different things which need not coincide.²

As Sachsenmaier, Riedel and Eisenstadt (2002: 3–4) point out, earlier approaches to modernity and modernization embedded the strong assumption that the structural transformations distinctive of a modern society (again, urbanization, the rise of a market economy based on wage-labor and separated from the state, reflexivity) would spontaneously result in giving rise to a ‘secular and rational world-view’ and to a widespread atomistic individualism. As in Walzer’s reconstruction of the ‘covering-law’ universalism rooted in Isaiah’s prophetic voice (1990), according to modernization theorists Western modern societies have the privilege of living under patterns which others will at best come to imitate at later points in history. Current approaches couched in the paradigm of multiple modernities instead renounce this perspective, deconstruct the ‘ideologically premised’ unity of the Western form of modernity, by pointing to the variability of modern patterns across the Atlantic Ocean and between Northern and Southern Europe, and above all emphasize that, pace Fukuyama, ‘although modernity has spread to most of the world, it has not given rise to a single institutional pattern or a single modern civilization’ (Sachsenmaier, Riedel and Eisenstadt 2002: 4, emphasis added).³ Rather, modernity has ‘influenced the development of several modern civilizations, or at least civilizational patterns, i.e. of societies that share some characteristics, but have developed different ideological and institutional dynamics’ (Sachsenmaier, Riedel and Eisenstadt 2002: 4).

This reorientation can be understood as a function both of a cultural dynamics associated with the decentering of reason, typical of Western high-culture after the Linguistic Turn of the early twentieth century and of globalization. What has come under attack in the decade 2000–10 is the very idea that when conceiving and institutionalizing modern patterns of sociation and political life, the West can legitimately ‘draw from its internal resources while the others must be inspired solely from outside’ (Sachsenmeier, Riedel and Eisenstadt 2002: 58).

The attempt to de-Westernize the notion of modernity has led to a resurgence of interest in the notion of an axial age. The term refers to a quantum leap, relatively concentrated in time when compared with the tempo of the evolution of the species and simultaneously occurring in several distinct civilizational contexts, in the reflexivity of social organization – an increase in reflexivity consisting of: a) an ‘opening up of potentially universal perspectives, in contrast to the particularism of more archaic modes of thought’; b) an ‘ontological distinction between higher and lower levels of reality’; and c) ‘a normative subordination of the lower level to the higher’ (Arnason 2005: 2). Such increased reflexivity in turn generates new dimension of agency, a perception of historicity and responsibility of human actions and institutions (Wittrock 2005: 67).

Weber was the first to notice, in his essays on Hinduism and Buddhism within his investigation on the sociology of religion, that in India a philosophical reflection on nature and religion developed in the seventh century BC, to be accompanied within the span of a few centuries by the rise of Confucianism, Greek philosophy and Judaic prophecy. Although causally unconnected, these breakthroughs in cultural evolution set the scene for the overcoming of magical, animistic and mythological world-views, and generated diverse but convergent paths to a differentiated and more reflexive social life.

Then Jaspers in his Origin and Goal of History formulated the idea of an axial age as a ‘total spiritual phenomenon’.⁴ In an attempt to decentre the Western vision of universal history, which from Augustine to Hegel had centered ‘on a Christian or post-Christian axis of progress’, Jaspers conceived of the ‘spiritual process’ of the axial age as the rise of a ‘common frame of historical self-comprehension for all peoples’ (quoted in Arnason 2005: 27). The substance of this ‘common frame’ is a shared awareness on the part of the human subject ‘of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations’, as well as an experience of absoluteness ‘in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence’ (Jaspers 1953: 8). At the same time, the multifocal narrative of the axial age is one of diversity. Like in the reiterative type of universalism which Walzer understands as originating from Amos’s prophecy, each and every axial breakthrough generates a historical path of its own: hence the axial age constitutes the paradigm for thinking of a multiplicity of modernities, supposedly one for each of the major civilizations where an axial breakthrough occurred.

With Eisenstadt – and also with Voegelin’s work⁵ – the axial age is brought into systematic relation with modernity. Axiality, as Arnason points out, introduces an unprecedented dynamism into the balancing of ‘order-maintaining’ and ‘order-transforming’ symbolic forces within each of the axial civilizations, leading to a long-term prevalence of transformation, though with different historical pace in different contexts.

Democracy and the Spirit of Democracy

This perspective on axiality can be fruitful when applied to the prospects for democracy in the world we inhabit. Democracy qua self-government originated at the time of the first axial age, in the Western version of it which unfolded in Greece, then flourished to unprecedented levels when, during the second axial age, it was combined with the liberal idea of individual rights, with the notion of a constitution and constitutionalism, and with the modern nation state (itself a combination of a state apparatus, the rule of law, a nation with a common history and memory, and a territorially delimited market economy); now in the global world it has become a general horizon and the legitimate form of government par excellence. Evidence for this claim is the fact that no one, when considering the kind of polity existing in Spain, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands or Belgium, thinks that these polities cannot be considered democracies because technically they are monarchies – as everyone would have thought during the previous 24 centuries.

In fact, from Plato’s time up to a hundred years ago, democracy had basically remained the rule of the many, as opposed to the rule of the few or the one. It is only after democracy’s merging with the modern nation-state, with liberalism and constitutionalism, that all the major democratic advances have occurred: the separation of powers, universal suffrage, social rights, the protection of privacy, the ideal of publicity and transparency in administration, gender equality, cultural rights and multiculturalism, and the rights of future generations. This process, in combination with the communicative possibilities opened up by the process of globalization and the competitive economic pressures equally emanating from it, has led to a series of big waves of democratization in the last third of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first: initially some countries in Southern Europe in the 1970s (Spain, Portugal, Greece), then the momentous wave of the democratization of Central and Eastern European countries after 1989, then the democratization of the countries of Latin America in the 1990s, and now the Arab Spring of 2011.

However, this tremendous success carries its problems. First and foremost, democracy risks becoming a vague accolade of praise that every regime in the world tries to obtain, due to the obvious advantages it procures: easier credit lines with the main global financial institutions, removal from the blacklist of the NGOs that defend human rights, easier diplomatic avenues for pressing one’s interests in the global arena. Second, the major global players also have an interest in presenting to their internal publics the image of carrying out foreign policy in partnership not with dictators and authoritarian regimes, but with countries that strive to realize democracy ‘within the limits of their context’. These two powerful forces converge in an attempt to establish a view of democracy as merely a set of procedures, exportable anywhere and universally preferable to outright conflict or explicit oppression – a view of democracy as a mere going through certain democratic motions (campaigning on the part of a plurality of parties, perhaps debating on TV, voting, tallying the vote in a fair way, forming majorities, governing). Such view is misguided from a normative point of view: democracy so conceived can easily lead to the self-destruction of the democratic regime, as the example of Hitler and the countless other authoritarian or totalitarian regimes brought into being by popular vote can attest. It is also descriptively inaccurate: Egypt and Tunisia were countries where elections were held – in fact Mubarak was re-elected for a fourth time with an overwhelming majority – and it would be an utter mystery why people would want to risk their lives in order to obtain what they already have, if democracy were equated with voting.⁶

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 From Multiple Modernities to Multiple Democracies
• 2 Multifaceted or Fragmented Public Spheres in Turkey and Iran
• 3 The Turkish Laboratory: Local Modernity and the Postsecular in Turkey
• 4 Russia’s ‘Cursed Issues’, Post-Soviet Religion, and the Endurance of Secular Modernity
• 5 European Integration and Russian Orthodoxy: Two Multiple Modernities Perspectives
• 6 A State Goddess in the New Secular Nepal: Reflections on the Kumari Case at the Supreme Court
• 7 Big Man of the Big God: Nigeria as a Laboratory for Multiple Modernities
• 8 The Modernity of New Societies: South Africa, Brazil and the Prospect of a World-Sociology
• Index