1. This course is a continuation of the course I offered in first Semester. That course covered the 19th century. 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 but this is still relatively self-contained. Those of you who did not sit the first semester course are not at any substantial disadvantage although you might benefit from reading through the lecture notes available on (http://www.geocities.com/dr_grumley/index.html). 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 as we enter the 20th century.
2. One way of looking at this course is as an introduction to some of the classics of 20th century social philosophy. Why social philosophy? Those of you who did first semester will remember Hannah Arendt’s view of the “rise of the social”. Put simply, this refers to the emergence of the economy as an independent system of relations focused on 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. It recognises 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 are fully equipped to cope with. It is this recognition of a real crisis and of the need for a more comprehensive approach that animates the project of social philosophy. And it is this will to be comprehensive that connects social philosophy to the concept of modernity. As I tried to indicate 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 culture—that converge in the early decades of the 19th century. 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 our own.
3. Now, a few words about our subjects. It is hard to avoid the names Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault and Habermas 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. 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, 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 as to where this change is leading us. Modernity has an enigmatic look. At the same time as it has become a universal idea and aspiration, our doubts about it and the risks that come with it have also grown. Most of what I say will not bear directly on contemporary issues, but the theoretical develop I recount should indicate how some of the key constitutants 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.
4. 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 a construct: there cannot be definitive account of modernity. Because our experience of modernity is dynamic and perspectival, modernity is an inexhaustible theoretical object; no single version can claim the last word. Yet experience is not just idiosyncratic but also common. Some theories become significant because they strike a cord with others. In this course we will be looking at four such theories that are classical because they have been influential in helping others to think their own experience of modernity. 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 vision as a crucial aspect of the philosophical task. What I mean by vision is nicely captured in an image I’ll take from Tocqueville. 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 vision, it may be a vision that distorts much of the fine detail but it nevertheless, provides a perspective that is indispensable to orientation.
5. 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 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 and 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 it cannot be achieved, it remains an important regulative idea. However, philosophy is always written from a contemporary perspective and interest.
6. Last semester I mentioned that modernity was a concept with a notoriously vague temporal range. In some uses it begins with the Renaissance. I chose to start at the beginning of the 19th century suggesting that at this time a complex of economic, political and socio-cultural changes coalesce to intensify the pace of historical transformation and shape a new institutional structure and lifeworld. Without wanting to be exhaustive I tried 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 were:
a) Capitalism. Organization of production primarily by markets 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?
b) Industrialisation. Imposing mechanization and science as the major productive force between man and nature. This lead to urbanization and eventually raised issues of limits: those of ecological environments, resources and populations.
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. This also implies centralisation of politics and growth of efficient administrative machinery within modern government. This leads to concerns about democracy, expert elites, paternalism, quietist citizens, infringement of rights and invasion of privacy.
d) Democracy: Universal franchise. What should the meaning of political participation? 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 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 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 knowledge elites.
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 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. Individual is allowed the social space to become who s/he are. These is increasingly conceived as a task and subjective experience is consequentially both deepened and problematised as a result. Is this task and its inevitable choices personal emancipation or just another burden?
7. Not surprisingly, one notices a 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 and his critique of what he regarded as the illusions of the Enlightenment. The firm belief in modernity as a speeding train racing towards the known destination of progress has either disappeared or become problematised. 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 prosperity and mastery of nature but at the same time also creates the novel problems of surplus on a vast scale. This is the historically novel problem of surplus goods that must find markets in order to sustain the capitalist economy and problem of surplus people. Although this has 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.
8. Weber will still hold 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 its discontent over the dominance if organization and bureaucracy 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. In just a few decades 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 20th century thinkers to be discussed in comparison to those of the 19th is the sense of optimism, unambiguous belief in historical progress and utopian expectation. The ideals and or illusions of the 19th seem 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, who span this period, reflects precisely this paradoxical spirit, its foreboding, skepticism and anti-utopianism. As you will see, only Habermas escapes this attitude. However, after the worst disasters of the first part of the century, Habermas is a German, who participated in the reconstruction of liberal democratic institutions in his own society.
9. These 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. We could have thought of others. Furthermore, other theorists will emphasize other 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 the process new issues and questions concerning each of these aspects emerge with new problems and possibilities of praise or blame. A few years 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 shrinkage 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. Today, we are now becoming aware of 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 be, 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. This means it 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.
