Modernity, Sociology and Theories



Modernity, Sociology and Theories

Introduction

Modernity is an evasive and paradoxical concept. It is about eternity and fleetingness, immutability and transience, continuity and change - “a unity of discontinuity,” as Marshall Berman (1982) put it. It is about democracy, science, legal culture, industrialization, rationalization, and education; and it is also about bureaucracy, inequality, atomization, alienation, and abjection. It is about differentiation of identities, outlooks, attitudes, lifestyles, and beliefs; but it is also about intolerance, racism, exploitation, inequality, and exclusion. Rather, there is an ongoing debate on how its various constituents manifest themselves in different Western and non-Western societies. There is one characteristic of modernity, however, that can hardly be questioned: its Western lineage and its inherent connection to Western expansion over the world, which started with the discovery of Amerindia by Columbus and continued with Anglo-German colonial enterprises. Rationalizing political life (bureaucratization) and the capitalist enterprise (administration), suppressing practical communicative reason, and validating individuality that negates the community, all these manifestations of modernity, as it is understood in the West, were necessary for the management of the huge world opened for European expansion (Dillon, 2009).

Discussion

The very concept of civilization, according to this critical outlook, acquired a worldwide status once Europe started to enlarge over the world, repressing ruthlessly all pre-existing forms of social organization. Racial ideologies, he claims, spread across the world through the works of modern European philosophers such as John Locke or Immanuel Kant. McCarthy shows how Kant's humanism goes hand in hand with his theory of racial hierarchy, which is deeply embodied in the philosophy of the Enlightenment (1977). As McCarthy and numerous other critical scholars highlight, the political values of liberal justice, which the philosophers of the Enlightenment exalted, were inseparable from justifications of inequality and subjugation made by the same philosophers, denying the state of slavery for Europeans, Kant, Hegel, and other outstanding figures of the Enlightenment supported it for “savages.” Hegel's “Philosophy of History,” which relocated populace in sequential hierarchy instead of in geographical locations, became an important philosophical justification for unfolding the Western colonizing enterprise on a global stage.

The enormous space and population of colonized societies provided Europeans not only with the Eurocentric sense of superiority but also with colossal economic and geopolitical resources that European powers grabbed from their colonies. Together with colonial communication infrastructure laid out to manage provinces, this material advantage helped the Anglo-American world to strengthen its global dominance in post-colonial times.

Role of Colonization

Through colonization, Europeans also gained invaluable knowledge on how to manage the global world. From 1850 to 1914, most scholarship had originated in, and was about, five countries: France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States. The rest of the world served as a huge field for Western anthropological or Oriental studies, through which Western power constructed the peripheral world as a passive spectator, “barbarian” and “premodern”. By ascribing the barbarian status to non-Western world, Western scientists and intellectuals also constructed the necessity of barbarians' ...