Peter Wagner
Modernity and critique: elements of a world-sociology
Abstract
This chapter proposes to consider the current relation between global modernity and social contestation as a particular instance of the general relation between modernity and critique. From this starting-point, it proposes some elements each of a re-conceptualization and of a re-historicization of modernity.
In the former sense, the earlier history of modernity has been marked by the opposition between, on the one hand, affirmative approaches, for which critique can only be ameliorative of an already existing project, and critical ones, on the other hand, which claim the very possibility of critique as specific to their own insights. Currently, in turn, it is more and more widely being recognized that it is the modern commitment to autonomy itself, the rejection of any external sources of justification, which renders every institutionalization of modernity open to critique, based on interpretations of modernity's commitments that differ from the hegemonic, instituted ones.
In this light, secondly, historical transformations of modernity can be seen as driven by critiques of existing interpretations of modernity. Moving from conceptual to historical reasoning, this chapter furthermore suggests a widening of the spatio-temporal horizon for the analysis of modernity. In very schematic terms, four eras of modernity preceding the current one are distinguished: "ancient modernity", for which the Greek democratic city-state is exemplary; early global modernity from the late fourteenth century onwards; restricted liberal modernity from the later eighteenth century onwards; and organized modernity from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. In each of these eras, the key problématiques of modernity are addressed in very specific terms, supporting the instituting of certain rules but also creating a transformative dynamics driven by critique.
The current period, finally, is analyzed as having emerged from plural forms of social contestation since the 1960s, effectively dismantling the institutions of the preceding organized modernity. Rather than opening the space for the full realization of a liberal-democratic as well as functionally efficient form of socio-political organization, as is too often suggested, this transformation has as yet not led to an even moderately coherent novel, truly global interpretation of modernity.
