An outline of a revisionist theory of modernity

Archives Europeennes de Sociologie

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 497-526

  Kaviraj, Sudipta ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEVELOPING WORLD; MODERNITY; MODERNIZATION; SOCIAL THEORY;

EID: 33748643025     PISSN: 00039756     EISSN: 14740583     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0003975605000196     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Avery terse version of this argument was presented in my papers: Sudipta Kaviraj, "Modernity and politics in India", Daedalus (Winter 2000), and "Dilemmas of democratic development" in Adrian Leftwich, ed., Democracy and Development (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994).
2. S. N. Eisenstadt, Introduction, "Multiple Modernities", Daedalus (Winter, 2000).
3. For two early, pioneering versions of this line of reasoning, see Dileep Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Duke University Press, 2001)
4. and S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., "Multiple Modernities", Daedalus (Winter 2000).
5. For a searching analysis of the common features of theories of modernity and the peculiarities of the modern in the Indian context: Rajeev Bhargava, "Are there alternative modernities?" in N.N.Vohra, ed., Culture, Democracy and Development in South Asia (India International Centre/Shipra, Delhi, 2001, pp. 9-26).
6. On of the most unusual and perceptive treatments of this unprecedentedness is Tocqueville's analysis, especially the chapter on the three races of America. Democracy in America, Volume I, chapter XVIII (1835-1840)
7. The literature on modernization theory is vast, but one of the most interesting early examples of this theory can be found in Edward Shils, Political Development in the New States (Paris, Mouton, 1968).
8. This is an important question, but one that is insufficiently analysed: the difference between historians' history and social scientists' history; it is in its second form that European history came to assume a position of dominance over both cognition and imagination over theworld.
9. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, p. 19).
10. My reason for selecting the Marxist tradition of thinking in India is that it was for nearly fifty years one of the richest strands of social reflection, and that Marxists explored questions of historical method with much greater assiduity than other strands, since they claimed that what set them apart from others was precisely the scrupulous historicity of their intellectual methods. Although Indian Marxists saw this as the problem of the rise of the "social formation" of capitalism rather than the current obsession with "modernity", their questions and concerns were very similar. Indian Marxist discussions came to very similar puzzlements and points of theoretical decision, though on each occasion they seem to have taken the wrong turn.
11. S. A. Dange, India: From Primitive Communism to Slavery (PPH, Bombay, 1951).
12. It must be noted however that it instantly drew severe strictures from one of the leading historians, D.D. Kosambi, "Marxism and ancient Indian culture", in D.D. Kosambi on History and Society (ed. A.J. Syed), University of Bombay, Bombay, 1965, 73-78.
13. I offer a more detailed analysis of some these difficulties in Sudipta Kaviraj, "On the status of Marx's writings on India", Social Scientist, N. 124 (1983).
14. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (OUP, Delhi, 1983).
15. R. S. Sharma, Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India (Macmillan, Delhi, 1985).
16. Irfan Habib's major work was Agrarian System of Mughal India (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1985);
17. but his historical research was wide-ranging and often touched on methodological questions. See Irfan Harib, ed., Medieval India (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1992).
18. See R.S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism;
19. for a critical discussion, see also Harbans Mukhia, "Was there feudalism in India?", Journal of Peasant Studies (Vol 8 [3], 1981].
20. Only a small segment of Marxist historians found Marx's sketchy speculations about an Asiatic mode of production methodologically fruitful. For an argument in favour of the concept see Dipendra Banerjee, "Marx and the 'original' form of India's village community", in Diptendra Banerjee, ed., Marxian Theory and the Third World (Sage, New Delhi, 1985, pp. 133-172).
21. Irfan Habib provided a magisterial survey of these conditions in a famous essay, "Potentialities of capitalistic development in the economy of Mughal India", Enquiry (Winter 1971, Volume 3, No. 3, pp. 1-56).
22. I return to the two meanings of the notion of "initial conditions" in section V below.
23. Bernard Cohn's remarkable essay "Representing authority in Victorian India" in Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983) offers a fascinating account of this early strategy of symbolic emulation.
24. To take a telling but random example, the recent study by Vivek Chibber concludes that development policies in India foundered precisely because the actual behaviour of the Indian state was quite different from the model found in Weberian theory. Anthropologists have accumulated the most compelling evidence about the functioning of the Indian state - particularly at its lower bureaucratic levels. See for instance, the work of Barbara Harriss White, India Working (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002)
25. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2000)
26. Chris Fuller and Veronique Beneï, eds, The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (C. Hurst, London, 2001).
27. I think this is a deeply problematic line of thought, though it has some superficial plausibility. To take a simple but important example, it is impossible to capture the complexities of India's democratic evolution through indigenous concepts, simply because traditionally India did not have any political ideal or institutional practice seriously comparable to modern democracy. There were some attempts by Indian nationalist writers to prove the existence of a genealogy of democracy in India, but their results were, not surprisingly, wholly unconvincing. For two examples, see the 19th century arguments by the Bengali thinker, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay in Samajika Prabandha, and Radhakumud Mukherjee. Ironically, their own evidence proves beyond doubt that the political arrangements they were celebrating had a distant allegorical or rhetorical relation to modern democratic principles.
28. A very brief version of this argument can be found in my earlier paper, "Modernity and Politics in India", Daedalus (Winter 2000). But the first part of the argument is too terse; its main theses are illustrated through an historical discussion about modern Indian political life.
29. Of course, in earlier thought, these civilizations all centred on their main religions, which were perceived by European Christian thinkers as based on erroneous principles. Since Islam existed in close and hostile proximity, it was selected for special denunciation. But these were seen as different, if competing civilisations, all the same.
30. See for instance, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary in which Brahmins and Mandarins at times dispute the central principles of life with a representative of the West.
31. See, for the new usage, discussions about other societies in the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Ferguson. The emergence of a "stage" theory of history, which connects the rise of a commercial society with general pacification and a cultivation of manners, as opposed to the violent volatility of military societies, helps this transformation of a picture, which placed societies horizontally in terms of difference, to a new picture, which placed them vertically in terms of "progress".
32. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002).
33. In de Tocqueville's case, the question of difference and similarity with Europe is raised clearly in the comparison with America. In case of Weber too there are his interesting reflections on the possibility of representative politics in Russia, see Max Weber, Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994).
34. In the Marxist tradition, some of these ideas were seen and developed by subsequent thinkers, simply because, as Marxism spread to other parts of Europe, its practitioners faced problems in principle similar to ours. Marxist writers after Marx sought to develop a theoretical understanding of this question by suggesting a theory of "combined and uneven development". These ideas were taken up not merely by Marxists who sought to explain historical events in Germany and Russia, but also in the cases of China and India. In the cases of Russia and China, the more familiar extensions are found in the works of Trotsky. In the Indian case, the first Marxist writer of note, M. N. Roy that was used a cast of argument, remarkably similar in his early work, India in Transition (1922), in Selected Works of M. N. Roy, Volume I, 1917-1922 (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000).
35. In speaking about his political writings, I have primarily his French trilogy in mind: Class Struggles in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and Civil War in France; but this can be supplemented by his early journalistic writings for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and Engels' Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany. In fact, it appears that Marx's political commentaries hug the level of everyday change more closely, avoiding large generalisations, while Engels is more prone to higher-level sociological analyses.
36. Historicist in the strict sense used by German thinkers like Dilthey, not in the very different sense used by Popper in his Cold War study: Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1945). In the first sense, historicism means staying away from law-like generalizations specific to natural sciences, and treating each historical situation as unique. Popper's idiosyncratic use means almost the opposite - a belief in inexorable historical teleology. Unfortunately, in much contemporary writing, the second sense has overshadowed the first.
37. In "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1851-52)", in Karl Marx and Friedich Eengels, Selected Works, Vol. I (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969).
38. Also in the case of Marx, as with others, interpretative accounts often pursue a false ideal of excessive consistency. Readers of Marx would detect that there were rather different strands of thinking. However, instead of looking at and pursuing the implications of them all, they would think that their interpreters' responsibility was to reduce the thought of a major writer to a consistent whole, and thus excise the elements they consider less important or promising. This is an instance of a much more general tendency in reading social theory that Quentin Skinner observed and criticised a long time ago: Q. Skinner, "Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas", History and Theory, 8 (1969) and in Regarding Method (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002).
39. In the early writings, like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx does not enter into extended historical analyses; but his view of capitalist development till the writing of the Grundrisse appears to support the idea of a single structural pattern.
40. More than in Marx, the theory of this kind of thinking can be found in texts like Lukacs's essay on "Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat", History and Class Consciousness (Merlin, London, 1971)
41. and it is not surprising, as Habermas demonstrates, that Lukacs's theorizing is deeply influenced by the Weberian conception of a rationalization process. See Habermas, A Theory of Communicative Action, Volume I, Chapter IV, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986).
42. The Communist Manifesto, for instance, does not hesitate to advance an abstract argument of this kind which suggests the production of historical uniformities. Clearly, this is also the unavoidable implication of the famous remark in the Grundrisse that the shape of a more advanced society shows to the more backward the image of its future: Karl Marx, Grundrisse, transl. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973).
43. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p. 334)
44. and generally, Chapter XX, "Historical facts about merchant's capital". This argument is linked to the historical analyses in Capital I, chapters 26-32. This insight later produced a large literature that discussed questions of "combined and uneven development". That literature was primarily interested in the political implications of this "second way" development, and its effect on the prospects of democracy. Here I am more concerned with a methodological question about patterns of reading history.
45. Arguments of this kind can be found in the political writings which compare the paths of Germany and France: Marx and Engels, Articles from the Neue Rhenische Zeitung, 1848-49 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972)
46. and Engels's Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, Vol I (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1942).
47. Some later Marxists, including Trotsky and Lenin, saw this as a crucial insight and tried to develop a systematic view of combined and uneven development. This put together an interesting complex picture of how a capitalist form evolves, subject simultaneously to a process towards differentiation and a contrary process of combination. Unfortunately, when Marxists sought to think about non-European societies, they made only perfunctory uses of this insight, and did not try to develop the full implications of this line of reasoning. Liberal ideas about politics were, on the whole, far less interested in comparative sociology, and usually proceeded from exclusively normative rather than historical models.
48. Although there were enormously significant differences between the guiding political imaginaries in the French republican and the Anglo-American traditions of political action. See, Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, Durham, 2004).
49. In the last sections of his Modern Social Imaginaries ("Provincializing Europe") Charles Taylor raises this point with great persuasiveness (Taylor 2004).
50. It is quite interesting that practically every single separate process in this complex has been given its "proper" theory - Smith and Marx on industrialisation, Guizot and Foucault on what is now called governmentality, Weber on rationalisation of bureaucracy and secularisation, Tocqueville on democracy, Toennies on individuation, supplemented by various theories of the city, of modern art and the novel, gleaned from the works of Baudelaire, Benjamin, Bakhtin and many others. Curiously, the only process which is indubitably central to modernity yet without a central "high theory" is its cognitive constitution: How modernity requires a new order of knowledge from high science to everyday life.
51. It must be noted that there can be two subsidiary models of the emergence of modern institutions according to this theory. The first possibility is that all modern processes emerge simultaneously, and mature together in a temporary parallel development of capitalism, democracy, individuation, secularisation etc. But there is a second possibility in which some of the more significant processes emerge first and in isolation, but subsequently create conditions for the others. It can be argued, following a particular brand of Marxism, that for technology to be disseminated through the economic realm, capitalist relations of production are necessary; these, in turn, slowly undermine family based forms of labour, and create a modern labour market of atomistic individual proletarians. When placed in this kind of economic context, these labourers are functionally encouraged to view their selves in an atomistic manner, and would appreciate seeing this artistically reflected in the literary form of the bildungsroman. This concatenation can be extended and made more detailed. Lukacs's famous reading of the expanding logic of "reification" offers a powerful picture of this kind - at least by implication. What is crucial in this view is the pressure of necessitation flowing out of one field of social activity to another: "Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat" in Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Merlin, London, 1971).
52. Equally, however, some strands in Marxist thought - like Althusser's well-known essay on "The outline of a theory of historical time" have argued forcefully against such a presumption of simultaneity: Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital (NLB, London, 1974).
53. There is possibly a tension between two aspects of Weber's account of capitalism. His structural picture of a capitalist modernity certainly tends towards this functional view; yet, in those writings where Weber deals with the narrower question of "historical origins" of capitalism, he is keen to bring in some element of chance, which makes possible the use of the famous "elective affinity" metaphor.
54. Lukacs, "Reification and the consiousness of the proletariat" in History and Class Consciousness (Merlin, London, 1971).
55. For the criticisms see Althusser, "The materialist dialectic", For Marx (Allen Lane, Penguin, London, 1969).
56. This vision of modernity dominated not merely the thinking of European intellectuals. Intellectuals in the colonies accepted this model in its entirety. Evidently, Indian intellectuals in the 1950s subscribed to a strong version of this model, shared in appropriately different languages, by liberals, Nehruvians, and Marxists alike. In fact, the entire design of the Indian constitutional structure is based on this crucial reading of how Europe became modern.
57. For an excellent discussion of the intellectual origins of modernity, which acknowledges fissures in the intellectual traditions, but which tends overall to this picture, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992).
58. Many examples could be culled from the literature dealing with modernization of the non-Western world: One of the most succinct and in its time influential was Edward Shils, Political Development in the New States (Mouton, Paris, 1968).
59. Marxist historians have asserted this point for a long time, including E.P. Thompson's hugely influential The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1974). But this position, again, is not incompatible with the further claim that with time, the bourgeoisie and the political elites realised the stabilising effects of workers' enfranchisement, and its salutary effects for the longevity of the capitalist economic form.
60. What is more important for our purpose is that it raises the unfounded expectation that rising capitalist classes acquire a constitutional hunger for democracy, and always seek democratic rather than authoritarian political solutions - an expectation the new bourgeoisie in the Third World have signally failed to meet.
61. Interestingly, Marx's own analyses of the Chartist movement registers these contradictions: Marx and Enges, Articles on Britain (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971).
62. This links up with the question of whether democracy can flourish under conditions of widespread poverty. In the initial discussions about the prospects of Indian democracy, many observers expressed great scepticism precisely because poverty was considered inimical to the durability of democratic institutions.
63. Recent analyses of the relation between democracy and agriculture in India have drawn attention to the latent contradiction of the subsidy regime. A. Varshney's study points out that unlike in contemporary Europe, in India, a much smaller industrial sector of the economy, about 25%, is expected to subsidise a much larger agrarian sector. But because the votes of the agrarian sector are much greater, under democratic electoral politics, the pressure for subsidies is irresistible: A. Varshney, Democracy, Development and the Countryside (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995).
64. In India there is a serious debate about the relation between secular state and secular society since the publication of critical arguments against Nehruvian secularism by Ashis Nandy and T. N. Madan. Cf. Ashis Nandy, "Politics of secularism and the recovery of religious tolerance" and T. N.Madan, "Secularism in its place", in Sudipta Kaviraj, ed., Politics in India (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998).
65. For critical responses see, Rajeev Bhargava, Secularism and its Critics (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2001)
66. and Sudipta Kaviraj, ed., Politics in India (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998, pp. 293-298).
67. Friedrich E, introduction to K. Marx, Class Struggles in France [1895],
68. in K. Marx and F. Engels, SelectedWorks, Volume I (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, pp. 186-204)
69. What I mean by secondary is that a characterisation as pre-modern does not refer to intrinsic characteristics of these societies, but to the discursively imposed characteristic of their being commonly different from the modern; but this is not actual commonness of characteristics of these societies. If I have six different coloured coats, and want to fetch the blue one, other coats become the coats that are not blue. But non-blue is not a colour attribute intrinsic to the objects; it is a secondary attribute of the objects imposed on them by the necessity of distinguishing them from the blue. Non-blue is not a colour attribute.My point is that pre-modern is a secondary characterisation of this kind, and does not point to any real similarity of these societies.
70. This is such a general theoretical problem that I am sure it arises in many other contexts. My example is taken from Gadamer's discussion on the indelibility of historical interpretations, and the way each layer of interpretation of a text forms an indelible condition for subsequent layers. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Sheed andWard, London, 1981).
71. Gadamer, Ibid. p. 305ff.
72. This is a preliminary formulation; it must be noted that while Gadamer's primary concern is with the history of consciousness, our is with institutional history. The argument might need some inflection in order to be transposed on to this different field.
73. For a fascinating discussion of the birth of newness in history, see the essay on "Historical Ontology" in Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2004). Many new practices of scientific enquiry or experiment are new in this sense.
74. In that sense, to call the functioning of the Indian state, or at least some of its segments, non-Weberian is a case of a secondary description, not a theoretical concept.
75. This does not mean that Hindu philosophical systems were not based on rational reasoning and intellectual creativity; but rather that before the entry of modernity, Brahminical pedagogical systems had ossified into a largely uninventive pattern of instruction.
76. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, 8 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
77. There is little explicit presentation of Western history of modernity in Indian writings of the 20th century, because, whatever the evaluative stance of different writers, all took the symmetrical view to be self-evidently correct; but this picture forms the basis of the arguments offered by liberals, socialists and communists.
78. It was taken for granted, for instance, that if caste or religious identity were used widely in electoral politics, this would lead to a collapse or degeneration of democratic institutions. This has been one of the central inter pretative issues in Indian politics since the 1960s.
79. Business leaders often pointed out that legislation favourable to labour slowed down their ability to develop capitalist industry and economic growth. They did not bother about questions of reading European history, but that was the implication of their claim.
80. Recently, this debate has been re-opened in the Indian case by Vivek Chibber's interesting study, Locked in Place (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004), which directly compares the role of the state in the economic development in South Korea and India.Two earlier collections on this theme are Amiya Kumar Bagchi, ed., Democracy and Development (St. Martins Press, New York, 1994)
81. Adrian Lleftwich, Democracy and Development (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995).
82. Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, Development and the Countryside (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1995) explicitly makes this point - which is, in my sense, a typical sequence argument.
83. This is the claim advanced by the Bharatiya Janata Party but such instances can be found in the political history of other Third World states aswell.
84. I believe that the religious traditions of tolerance in India are often incorrectly counterpoised to the modern norms of secular politics. While they are certainly grounded in fundamentally different views of the world, their practical precepts and their historical tendency are "miscible". For a discussion of the Indian debate on secularism and its grounding principles, see Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998).
85. K. C. Wheare, Federal Governments (Oxford University Press, London, 1963).
86. An obvious example from Indian history would be the conduct of the adherents of the Brahmo sect, who clearly owned rationalistic principles, and used them as criteria to reject crucial aspects of conventional Hindu religion like doctrinal pantheism and social practices of caste.
87. It is impossible to expand on this theme within this paper. But one of the major strands of modern Indian historical reflection is precisely this line of thinking, displayed with immense power and clarity in the works of Gandhi and Tagore.
88. The imaginative dominance of the West appears to have declined, compared to the mid-20th century. Although the communist alternative to Western liberal society has collapsed, other imaginaries have appeared which deny the dominance of Western forms of life. Some of the volatility of world politics in the present phase can be traced to the peculiar imbalance between the continued military and economic dominance of the West and the decline of its imaginative hegemony.
89. In recent debates in Indian social science, several authors have suggested a comparable programme. See for instance, Partha Chatterjee's attempt to theorize a distinction between civil and political society, in a way that is entirely different from European precedents: Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (Columbia University Press, New York, 2004)
90. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, chapter I, where he explains what he means by "provincializing" (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002)
91. Rajeev Bhargava's work on secularism points to significant changes in the theory of secularism in Indian nationalist discourse: Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (2001).
92. I make a similar point in "In search of civil society", in Sudipta Kavuraj and Sunil Khilnani, eds, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, chapter 15).