Lecture 2: Historical and Conceptual Background (cont)

c. Political Centralisation: the Nation-State and Bureaucratisation. At the same time as the economy becomes an independent social subsystem political administration follows a similar logic. Under the influence of newspapers, and the increasing political and economic power of the state, allegiances shift from the local area to the political center. These changes bring about profound changes in personal identity and the character of citizenship. Individuals increasingly identify with their nation and citizenship loses its former participatory meaning and assumes its modern representative implications. The new association of citizenship with nationality engenders powerful new forces both for national unity and for national self-assertion as well as for discrimination, exclusion and racism. The new complexity and expansion of the tasks of central administration engenders the need for a new class of specialist officials (bureaucrats). Their expertise is the efficient administration and functioning of public business and state affairs. Administration becomes increasingly concentrated and centralised with the state controlling borders, customs and economic instruments like taxes, weights, measures and coinage.  Whatever the gains in administrative efficiency, the centralised, bureaucratic nation-state emerges as a new external power serving both public and its own interests. It possesses an unprecedented intrusive reach and power. These developments feed both pride and anxiety. It makes possible a greater capacity for collective political action and a new imagined sense of community. Simultaneously, it generates anxiety about the paternalistic colonization of the life-world. The question of bureaucratic power, its limits and control increasingly becomes be a hotter issue into our own time in the name of the critique of the state and the welfare state. The all-powerful state can juridify all formerly “natural relations” and transform citizens into clients. While these questions remain alive, they have also been augmented by others emerging with globalisation. Are we also witnesses to the death of the nation-state? Does the state have enough power to prosecute its own policies and protect its own citizens against the vagaries of international markets and global corporations whose bottom line is not the interests of state but the return to shareholders?

 d. Democracy. While state power was being centralised and concentrated, paradoxically, the bourgeois revolutions open the door to political equality and at least formally to the possibility of mass political participation. These revolutions institute equality before the law and a constitutionally acknowledged pluralism in terms of increasing access to political rights and publicity. Bourgeois institutions and ideology both responded to, and further opened the door to socio-political struggles extending access to these institutions and even internally transforming them. Today democracy is one of the universal value ideas of modernity. It is almost everywhere acclaimed even while in practice it is often flouted. It is always under the pressure of elites of power, knowledge and money and the growing organisational complexity of modernity. In this light, a pertinent question is the appropriate meaning of democracy in contemporary modernity. Is democracy an unambiguous good? To what extent is mass participation in dynamic, complex societies possible and or desirable? If not mass participation in politics, what can democracy mean today? Would radical democratisation become a fetter to modernity's capacity for innovation and cultural achievement?

e. Cultural Rationalisation In the place of tradition and religious belief, reason becomes the ultimate ground of cultural judgement. All beliefs, institutions and practices are submitted to this immanent "worldly" tribunal which judges only on the basis of whether the thing in question conforms to the standards of rationality. This involves two main issues:  a) the parcelization of meaning. The critique of tradition causes the collapse of the hegemonic value of religion. Today talk of ‘high culture’ would typically exclude religion and this is a historically unprecedented situation. This liberation allowed the various spheres of culture (theoretical, practical and aesthetic) to assert their own autonomous validity claims to truth, goodness and beauty. Modern cultural evolution has allowed us to become increasingly aware of the tensions between these values. Can the pursuit of truth or beauty have undesirable social consequences? How far can the autonomy of the cultural spheres be taken before negative societal impacts emerge? (b) The hegemony of reason. Today not even reason is without its critics. Is rationality a principle of emancipation or oppression? Does the hegemony of reason suppress the other vital human capacities and aspirations like creativity and emotion? Is it the unsullied universal or merely the expression of a particular cultural tradition that normalises and oppresses? Whether it can or should be modified, re-conceptualized or abandoned? These are all contemporary questions.

 f. Individualism and Subjectivity. These general secularising trends both liberate and deepen the modern notion of subjectivity. The pre-modern individual lacked all subjective depth. They are too closely embedded in the family, community and prescribed social roles to feel the sense of personal contingency that presses so much on the modern individual. The notion of modern subjectivity has a number of dimensions or connotations. (1) Individualism. The modern individual is increasingly liberated from naturalistic ties to the community. This produces a sense of contingency and the quest of the individual to create their own identity, to make good or to realise their unique singularity. (2) Critique. As mentioned the tribunal of individual rationality becomes the ultimate judge. Anything purporting to recognition has to submit itself to this tribunal and the test of the subjective right to criticize. (3) The autonomy of individual action and hence our responsibility for our actions. Modern morality emphasizes the subjective freedom of the individual to recognise what they are supposed to do. Is this increasing depth of subjectivity and its freedom of choice to be celebrated or deplored? Does it lead to real emancipation and responsibility or does it simply empty the individual of all real content and leave them bereft of moral codes, hostage to their own fickle and transient moods and impressions? 

 11. In nominating these six abstract features of the transformation we today call modernity, I only want signal some of the major themes and issues which will come up as issues and problems in the work of our four paradigmatic thinkers and subsequent discussion of these issues. It is possible to think of other dimensions of modernity and to re-conceptualize the ones I have noted in radically different ways. The aim of this course will not be to come down for or against modernity: that would be nonsensical. We cannot do anything else than deal with the cards we are dealt and the society that we find ourselves in. Nor is the concept modernity itself is beyond criticism. Some philosophers might say that the concept of modernity is too abstract to be of much use. The variables of modern societies are too great and the prospects of any single theorist being able to master the required knowledge of all these factors to required extent being out of question. While I agree that philosophical abstraction carries real dangers, I would also maintain it is a crucial ingredient of the cultural relevance of philosophy. To my mind, general visions or diagnosis is one of the essential elements of culture as a vehicle of meaning creation. Philosophy in particular has a special role to play because it combined general vision with both historical knowledge and conceptual analysis. But, to my mind, a philosophy that concentrates on these latter elements only to the exclusion of the former is poorer for it. In any case, however variable is the empirical diversity of modern societies, as mentioned, development and globalization seems to be imposing some common challenges on all of us.  Another danger of this concept is that it may create the impression that modern societies form perfectly coherent and integrated wholes. Of course, facing an uncertain world without clear orientation, it is a natural heuristic method that we should try to draw all the distinguishing features of modern life together in the attempt to make it meaningful and navigable and gain some sense of its immanent tendencies. However, this can only be done with great caution and skepticism. We do not want to replace opaque and unruly reality that pulls us in many inconsistent directions at the same time with an integral, but overly homogenised and simplified theoretical picture, that impairs our own sense of alternative possibilities of practical action and our room to move. Even if you finally disagree with all the views examined in the course, hopefully the course will not be in vain. You will at least have surveyed some of the most influential diagnoses of modernity, familiarized yourself with some key concepts and ways of thinking about it and clarified your own understanding or confusions about contemporary society, its tensions, emancipatory possibilities and dangers.