Abstract
How did cultural dynamics help bring about the societies we now recognize as modern? This article constructs seven distinct models for how structures of signification and social meaning participated in the transitions to modernity in the West and, in some of the models, across the globe. Our models address: (1) the spread, via imitation, of modern institutions around the world (memetic replication); (2) the construal, by socio-cultural forces and by state organizations, of the modern citizen-subject (social subjectification); (3) the continual search for new meanings to replace traditional religious meaning-systems (compensatory reenchantment); (4) repeated attempts, in modern revolutions, to remake society completely, according to a utopian vision (ideological totalization); (5) the cultural origins and social consequences of scientific and humanistic worldviews (epistemic rift); (6) the gendered politics of state formation (patriarchal supercession); (7) the invention and production of race in the colonial encounter (racial recognition). We explicate the models in reverse chronological order, because in our synthesis, we argue that the original modern break results from a dynamic combination of racial recognition, patriarchal supercession, and epistemic rift; these changes set the stage for the four other processes we theorize. In addition to our synthesis, we also consider, from a more neutral perspective, the kinds of causal arguments upon which these models tend to rely, and thus explicate the analytical undergirding for the application of any of these models to empirical research on transitions to modernity. Throughout the article, we consider how these models might, and might not, mesh with other families of explanation, such as the politico-economic.
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Notes
Another important connection could be drawn to the recent debates about, attacks on, and revisions of secularization theory in the sociology of religion. The complex processes by which religious authority is redistributed, relegated to certain spheres of influence, or retains a certain amount of force in public life could be studied as part of the question of moral reenchantment. See, in particular, Smith (2003), and Lichterman and Potts (2008).
One might add to this that Furet himself was prone to participate in this ritualized imagination, in so far as he attempted to interpret the revolution as the source of both egalitarian and authoritarian strands of modern Europe, thus apotheosizing it—despite his neo-Tocquevillian intentions—as both God and Devil of modernity.
Once again, we see the iterative nature of the totalizing ideal.
Pincus counters both the “Whig” and the “revisionist” accounts of the English revolution. In the Whig story, it was James’ “un-English” policies and Catholic faith which made the reasonable, Protestant Englishmen resist his rule and install a more “moderate” regime. The revisionists have countered this by arguing that it was, in fact, bigoted Tory resistance to James’ toleration policies that provoked revolution.
In We Have Never Been Modern, for example, Bruno Latour (1993) argues that “modernity arises first from the conjoined creation of [the human, the natural, and the divine], and then from the masking of the conjoined birth and the separate treatment of the three communities while, underneath, hybrids continue to multiply as an effect of this separate treatment.”
Here we use patriarchy to refer to a specific political format of father rule and the inheritance of sovereignty, rather than in the broader sense of a society structured to serve men’s interests. See Adams (2005) for further discussion. For a version of this model articulated in the normative language of political theory, see Carol Pateman’s classic, The Sexual Contract (1988).
It is interesting to note, in the context of current debates about multiple modernities, that the concept of the “captive mind” has migrated from an Eastern European account of the totalitarian state (Milosz 1990) to an account of the continuation of not only economic, but also cultural domination, of the East by the West in the post-colonial era (Alatas 2006).
Here, we might mention that the historical sociology of modernity meets up with the normative debates about modernity and post-modernity that occupied social and political theory in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the normative question raised and answered in the affirmative by Jürgen Habermas—namely “can the rational kernel of modernity be salvaged from the highly exclusive social context in which it emerged?”—might be approached in a new way, on the basis of a quite different account of the cultural forces involved in the origins of modernity. See Habermas (1989) and Calhoun (1992).
The intellectual formation of modernization theory itself could be seen as part of this memetic apparatus.
In this we are inspired by Stinchcombe’s (1968) parsing of three modalities of causal imagery in social research. There may also be some similarities between our analysis of cultural causality and Hayden White’s “tropological” analysis of historical narratives (1973) and cultural-theoretical arguments (1978). However, we consider what follows to be an explication of arguments that historical sociologists interested in culture make about the world, and indeed, often make correctly about the world. Thus while we share White’s passion for understanding the structures through which investigators grasp the past, we reject some of the more relativist readings of his work. For a review of the implications of White’s work for “postmodern” historiography, see Ankersmit (1986, 1998).
Here we use a post-Lacanian reading of Freud, wherein the unconscious is constituted by both drives and representations. See Lacan (1997).
For a discussion of structuralism, post-structuralism, and “neo” structuralism, and the relationship of all of these to sociological analysis, see (Heiskala 2003).
Another way of putting this would be to draw John R. Hall’s distinction between ‘cultural structures,’ which repeat themselves across time and spaces, and ‘cultural meanings,’ which have specific histories. See Hall (2000).
There is of course the possibility that she would have not only to execute a causal analysis but also of prepare for practical intervention, or, “diagnosis and cure.” Here we move very quickly out of the realm of sociological analysis and onto the terrain of revolutionary politics (see Fanon 1968; 1969) Use, then, of depth-psychological imagery can thus in some cases raise the stakes of investigation tremendously.
For an explication of this figure-ground metaphor as a conceptual methodology for historical research, see (Clemens 2005).
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Acknowledgments
Drafts of this article benefitted from comments received at the Comparative Research Workshop and the June 2009 Transitions to Modernity mini-conference, both at Yale University; the "Comparing Past and Present" miniconference of the ASA Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology, held in August 2009 at the University of California-Berkeley, and an invited session of the Section on the Sociology of Culture at the 2007 American Sociological Association meetings. The authors are especially grateful to the Theory & Society Editors and reviewers, Jennifer Bair, Rick Biernacki, Stephanie Mollborn, Amy Wilkins, and Nick Wilson for their constructive criticism.
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Reed, I.A., Adams, J. Culture in the transitions to modernity: seven pillars of a new research agenda. Theor Soc 40, 247–272 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9140-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9140-x