Comparing Modernities: Pluralism Versus Homogenity. Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (International Comparative Social Studies 10)

Comparing Modernities International Comparative Social Studies Editorial Board Duane Alwin, Ann Arbor, USA Wil Arts, T...

Author: Eliezer Ben-Rafael | Yitzak Sternberg

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Comparing Modernities

International Comparative Social Studies Editorial Board Duane Alwin, Ann Arbor, USA Wil Arts, Tilburg, The Netherlands Mattei Dogan, Paris, France S.N. Eisenstadt, Jerusalem, Israel Johan Galtung, Versonnex, France Linda Hantrais, Lougborough, UK Jim Kluegel, Urbana-Champaign, USA Chan Kwok Bun, Hongkong, China Frank Lechner, Atlanta, USA Ron Lesthaeghe, Brussels, Belgium Ola Listhaug, Trondheim, Norway Rubin Patterson, Toledo, USA Eugene Roosens, Leuven, Belgium Masamichi Sasaki, Tokyo, Japan Saskia Sassen, New York, USA John Rundell, Melbourne, Australia Livy Visano, Toronto, Canada Bernd Wegener, Berlin, Germany Jock Young, London, UK

VOLUME 10

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chapter two

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

Comparing Modernities Pluralism versus Homogenity Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

Edited by

Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Comparing modernities : pluralism versus homogenity / edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg p. cm.—(International comparative social studies, ISSN 1568-4474) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90–04–14407–2 (alk. paper) 1. Pluralism (Social sciences)—Congresses. 2. Comparative civilization—Congresses. I. Ben Rafael, Eliezer. II. Sternberg. Yitzak. III. Series. HM1271.C652 2005 306'.09—dc22

2005041989

ISSN 1568–4474 ISBN 90 04 14407 2 © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Preface ........................................................................................

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In homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt ................................................ Menachem Magidor, Hayim Tadmor, Piotr Stzompka, Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Shalini Randeria

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Introduction: Civilization, pluralism and uniformity ............................ Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg

1

I. THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF MODERNITY 1. Modernity in socio-historical perspective ........................................ Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

31

2. The Axial Conundrum: Between historical sociology and the philosophy of history .................................................................. Johann P. Arnason

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3. Cultural crystallization and civilization change: Axiality and modernity ............................................................................ Björn Wittrock

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4. The exception that proves the rule? Rome in the Axial Age .......... 125 W.G. Runciman 5. Civil Society: Some remarks on the career of a concept .................. 141 Jürgen Kocka 6. Challenges of modernity in an age of globalization ........................ 149 T.K. Oommen 7. The dark side of modernity: Tension relief, splitting, and Grace .... 171 Jeffrey C. Alexander

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contents II. MODERNITY AND PLURALISM

8. Pluralities and pluralisms ........................................................ Zvi Werblowsky

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9. Multiculturalism revisited ........................................................ Han Entzinger

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10. Ethnic revival and religious revival in “Providential democracies” ...... Dominique Schnapper

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11. Doubts about pluralism .......................................................... Ralf Dahrendorf

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12. The end of the “social” .......................................................... Alain Touraine

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13. Collective identity and the representation of liminality ................ Bernhard Giesen

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III. RELIGION, NATIONALISM AND PLURALISM 14. Weber’s sociology of religion and Ancient Judaism .................... Wolfgang Schluchter 15. Comparative analysis of the civilization of modernity: 1203 and 2003 .................................................................... Edward A. Tiryakian 16. Political culture in the Islamicate civilization ............................ Saïd Arjomand

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287 309

17. Multiple religious modernities: A new approach to contemporary religiosity ................................................................................ Danièle Hervieu-Léger

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18. Religion and power in the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church .................................................................... Michael Confino

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19. From religion to nationalism: The transformation of the Jewish identity ........................................................................ Eliezer Ben-Rafael

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contents

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IV. MODERNITY AS WORLD REALITY 20. Who invented modernity in South India, and is it modern? ........ David Shulman

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21. Is Israel Western? .................................................................. Sammy Smooha

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22. Cultural translations and European modernity .......................... Gerard Delanty

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23. Center-periphery, creolization and cosmopolitanism ...................... Ulf Hannerz

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24. Europe’s multiple modernity .................................................... Erik Allardt

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25. Civilizational resources for dialogic engagement? ........................ Donald N. Levine

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V. CHALLENGES OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES 26. French and German Judaism facing modernity .......................... Rolland Goetschell

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27. From East Europeans to Europeans ........................................ Piotr Sztompka

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28. Is Hindu-Muslim cleavage the paradigmatic case for conflicts in South Asia? ............................................................................ Stanley J. Tambiah

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29. Democracy in Latin America: The ‘only game in town’? .......... Luis Roniger

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30. The European identity ............................................................ Alberto Martinelli

581

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contents VI. EPILOGUE: MODERNITY AS PROGRAM

31. Basic mechanisms of moral evolution: in Durkheim’s and Weber’s footsteps .................................................................... Raymond Boudon

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32. Collective identity and the constructive and destructive forces of modernity .......................................................................... Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

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Appendix The trail of a scholar .................................................................... A scholarly portrait ........................................................................ Donald N. Levine

657 662

Bibliography .............................................................................. Index of Persons ........................................................................ Index of Subjects ......................................................................

671 707 713

PREFACE

This book is in homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt as he reached the age of eighty, at the peak of a rich and outstanding series of intellectual and scientific achievements in the Social Sciences, in general, and in Sociology, in particular. The book is dedicated to an area of study and research whose contemporary development can be credited largely to him: the comparative study of civilizations. Scholars have debated the comparison of civilizations for more than a century, and since the last decades of the 20th century, these discussions have related to the heart of the contemporary human experience and culture. One major discussion focuses on the problem whether contemporary developments lead to one model representing the “end of history”, or, on the contrary, engender different types of modern society (multiple modernities). Among the scholars who sustain the view of different modernities, another discussion concerns whether or not civilizations are doomed to clash. This book considers these debates by emphasizing one central area, namely, pluralistic—or openness—versus totalistic—or closure—tendencies that develop within civilizations. It is in this perspective, that different approaches to the comparison of civilizations are elaborated and special attention focuses both on the roots of present-day pluralism, and on predispositions to totalitarianism and fundamentalism. The convergence and divergence of contemporary societies are highlighted within this framework. These questions are debated in the context of the often acknowledged weakening of the nation-state, globalization processes and the emergence of new transnational diasporas and social movements. The theoretical debates are rooted in the concrete analyses of specific aspects of these issues. Renowned scholars from several countries participate in this book which stems from a conference that was organized with the support of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the International Institution of Sociology, and was also made possible thanks to the cooperation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Truman Institute for Peace, the TelAviv University and the Embassy of France in Israel. This book received the support of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities

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preface

and Brill Academic Publishers. As an introduction to the topics discussed in the all-following, it is our privilege to introduce first the contribution of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. The Editors

IN HOMAGE TO SHMUEL N. EISENSTADT

On behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem This book pays tribute to a great intellectual leader, scholar and teacher: Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt. Professor Eisenstadt is a rare combines dealing scholar whose working with detail and being rooted in fact but, at the same time, generating sweeping conceptualizations and bringing to the fore grand unifying themes. In addition, he exemplifies how local-oriented research can be incorporated into a global scheme. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israeli academic community are fortunate that a thinker such as Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt has played such an important and formative role. In the name of his large intellectual offspring, in the name of his alma mater and his academic home, and in the name of the Israeli scholarly community, it is an honor and pleasure to be able to pay this tribute. Menachem Magidor President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

On behalf of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities On the occasion of the publication of this book at his homage, I have the honour of conveying the Academy’s blessing to Professor Eisenstadt, coupled with our wish for many more years of undiminished, fruitful creativity. Professor Eisenstadt was among the first members to be elected to the Academy, and he is today the most senior colleague in the Section of Humanities. Over the years, he has made contributions of singular significance to the Academy with the gift of his wise counsel, in times of plenty as well as in harder days. I am not a sociologist, and my interests as a historian are rather remote from the scholarly discourse of the social sciences and the numerous fields of research to which Professor Eisenstadt has turned his critical attention. I have, however, approached one aspect of Eisenstadt’s scholarly concerns, that of axiality. He strongly urged me to come to the first conference on the subject at Bad Homburg

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in homage to shmuel n. eisenstadt

and to the second one in Florence. This professional encounter with him was a momentous one for me; I was dazzled by his intellectual ability, the breadth of the knowledge at his disposal, his organizational ability, and the astuteness of his comments, as well as by the geniality and tact that he displayed in every interaction. I wish to convey the Academy’s greetings to the honoured contributors to this book who have gathered from all over the world, from the Far East to the furthermost west. The chapters presented in this book bring some of the finest minds in the field today to bear upon Eisenstadt’s manifold interests, all of which are at the forefront of sociological concern in the twenty-first century. Hayim Tadmor Vice-President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities

On behalf of the International Sociological Association It is a great honor and pleasure for me to pay homage to Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, on the occasion of his 80th birthday and almost 60 years of academic work. As President of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the biggest professional representation of sociologists in the world, I guess I can speak on behalf of the world sociological community. This community is indebted to Eisenstadt in many senses. He certainly belong to those great scholars who left a strong imprint on the sociology of our time. His innovative and deep theoretical work, particularly in the macrosociological and historical scrutiny of great civilizations and multiple modernities, has opened new vistas in the interpretation of the heritage and prospects of humankind. With no exaggeration Eisenstadt is one of the XXth century sociological classics. At the same time he has been probably the most international of the great sociologists. His readiness for the active participation and always creative contribution to innumerable conferences, seminars, symposia, and research projects all over the world has become famous. Within the association that I represent, the ISA, he has not only been one of the founding fathers but then took part in almost all world congresses of sociology, where his presentations were always true intellectual events. Sociologists of the world are deeply grateful to him for the wisdom he has shared with all of us, for his commitment to the disci-


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pline and his openness to the world and its challenges. We wish him many more years of intellectual creativeness, health, prosperity and deserved satisfaction with a work so important for others. Piotr Sztompka President of the International Sociological Association

On behalf of the International Institute of Sociology I want to congratulate Shmuel Eisenstadt, first as his former student in Jerusalem, second as a member of the Israeli sociological community, and third as the president of the International Institute of Sociology. I was a student, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I remember Shmuel Eisenstadt’s seminars as a genuine intellectual experience. My comrades and I have all been deeply marked by his intellectual and scientific mind, as well as, of course, by his good nature and openness to discussion. I don’t remember that he ever raised his voice, got anxious or intolerant. Year after year, we liked to gather in his classroom and ponder, in good spirit, on a new subject, a new model, a new approach, according to his changing interests. We have learned from him about sociological theories, of course, but also about age groups, revolutions, socialism, Latin America, the Moslem world, Africa, the Welfare State, stratification and, last but not least, the Israeli society. Later, from the distance or from the close, we also followed his investigations of fundamentalism, Japan, axial-age civilizations, and his comprehensive grasping of multiple modernities. Shmuel Eisenstadt has always been for us a living reference, and a source of knowledge, understanding and perspectives. It was an invaluable privilege to have such a great professor. The most difficult problem for his students was that, as a rule, he always finished writing a new book, before we finished reading the former one. I am also proud to congratulate Shmuel Eisenstadt on his eightieth anniversary, as a member of the Israeli sociological community. Shmuel Eisenstadt was the worthy student of Martin Buber in Jerusalem many years ago, and he also served as the editor for his work. Ever since, Shmuel Eisenstadt has laid down the ground for the development of an Israeli sociology; he set up a whole generation of students who, in turn, raised students of their own. For years,

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Shmuel Eisenstadt served as the head of the Department of Sociology at the Hebrew University from where came those who brought sociology to Israel’s new universities that were created in the 60s and 70s. Up to now, Shmuel Eisenstadt is the leading figure of Israeli sociology and the greatest contributor to its presence on the world scholarly scene. A desired guest in the prestigious universities of the world and a member of major academies of social sciences, he has been the founder of schools of thought and the tireless forerunner of new perspectives. It is also as the President of the International Institute of Sociology that I want to pay homage to Shmuel Eisenstadt. This Institute, the oldest world association of sociology that was created in Paris in 1893, holds world congresses every two years and numbers a following of sociologists on all continents. For many years, Shmuel Eisenstadt is a prominent key has been speaker to IIS congresses; he has contributed enormously to its development and renown. His strongest contribution, if I may speak out my personal feeling, has been his participation in the preparation and realization of the 34th world congress that was held in Tel-Aviv in 1999. I had the privilege to closely cooperate with him on the academic program. He endowed the whole enterprise its genuine importance and impact. Again, two years later, in 2001, Shmuel Eisenstadt was again a major contributor to the 35th world congress in Krakow. The Bureau of the IIS, the members of the association as well as the many friends of the IIS join me to wish Shmuel Eisenstadt to continue to amaze his colleagues and admirers, with his fruitful endeavor, for the decades to come. Eliezer Ben-Rafael President of the Intenational Institute of Sociology

On behalf of the Central European University at Budapest1 Prof. Shmuel Eisenstadt is today one of the most powerful intellectual figures of our time. He has done more than any other scholar to combine sociological theory with historical and empirical research 1

On the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate to S.N. Eisenstadt by the Central European University, Budapest, 4th December 2003.


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besides promoting our knowledge of the uniqueness and affinities, as also the interrelationships, of ancient and modern societies in Asia, Europe, Middle East, North and Latin America. No one has done more to raise the appreciation of the possibilities of sociology amongst related disciplines and especially in the fields of history and the humanities. If today modern and medieval historians, classical scholars and students of religion, scholars of ancient India and modern Japan, look at sociology as a source of deeper understanding of their own subjects, it is in no small measure due to the reception of his wide-ranging writings all over the world. Prof. Eisenstadt has consistently framed all his enquiries in a comparative framework often spanning several continents and centuries. He has provided bold innovative answers to the big questions in sociological theory. But more importantly, his scholarship has changed the nature of the very questions that we now ask. The hallmark of his scholarship, at the intersection of sociology and history, is its synthesis of a vast and varied body of specialist literature into a unitary and universal analytical framework for the comparative study of civilisations. His contribution to an analysis of social change in axial civilisations as well as in the modern world is unique thanks to his profound knowledge and understanding of times and of places outside the modern western world. I can hardly think of a central problem in sociological theory on which Prof. Eisenstadt has not written during the course of his long and distinguished academic career. The range of issues he has dealt with is as impressive as the originality of his approach to them. He has had an abiding interest in issues of structural differentiation and social change but also in questions of agency, cultural values and meaning. His boundless intellectual curiosity has been brought to bear on questions of power, legitimation, charisma, trust, solidarity as well as on the role of elites, heterodoxies and protest movements in shaping both institutional continuity and change. His work stands out for its breadth of learning, its profound theoretical analysis and its ability to marshal vast amounts of historical evidence from a range of societies past and present. This empirical material is used by him in order to discuss a set of clearly formulated hypotheses. His extraordinary skill in bringing together abstract generalisations with concrete data in support of these hypotheses is a hallmark of his writings which has rendered them accessible to students and scholars across several disciplines and continents.

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Prof. Eisenstadt was always ahead of his times in taking up questions which became fashionable many decades later. For example, he emphasised the importance of trust and solidarity in the early 1950s in his work on social change in Israel. He published an empirical study on youth culture in the mid 50s, a subject which has been the focus of a great deal of attention since the 1970s under the influence of cultural studies. As early as 1961 he explored the fruitfulness and the limitations of applying anthropological methods to the study of complex societies, a matter of continuing debate among anthropologists today as they question the traditional intellectual division of labour between sociology and social anthropology. With his work on the political systems of empires he opened a new era of macro-sociological comparative analysis in 1963 at a time when decolonisation and the emergence of new nation-states exercised the scholarly imagination and the “Age of Empires” was considered to be over. I do not think that he deliberately chose to swim against the tide with his choice of topics. Rather he remained unconcerned about the fashions of the time as his themes were derived from his own abiding scholarly interests. He chose to address some of the central theoretical questions in classical sociology but his work also shaped the terms in which these issues have been discussed since. In Prof. Eisenstadt we honour an illustrious scholar who was, and continues to be, deeply involved in society and politics in the state of Israel and whose scholarship is also coloured by that experience; someone who has lectured at almost all major universities in the world but has not accepted a permanent teaching position outside his country. We honour in him a rooted cosmopolitan, someone whose moorings in Israel are as important as his reception of European intellectual influences, someone who has contributed as much to the intellectual life of his country as he has changed research paradigms in social sciences and humanities all over the world. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in Jerusalem with Martin Buber with whom he first studied Max Weber’s writings which exercised a formative influence on his intellectual pursuits. During the post-doctoral year he spent at the London School of Economics in 1947–48, he pursued this early interest in Weber’s comparative historical sociology with Edward Shils. But that year also introduced him to the comparative institutional analysis which was the hallmark of British sociology and social anthropology broadening his comparative framework beyond the Weberian one. Prof. Eisenstadt is commonly regarded


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as working in the Weberian tradition, in fact he has often been described as the Max Weber of our times. But such an understanding of his work overlooks the role of his teachers Morris Ginsberg, David Glass and T.H. Marshall in his intellectual life. More importantly, it neglects the equally formative influence on his work of social anthropologists such as Raymond Firth, Audrey Richards and Fred Nadel with whom he also studied at the London School of Economics and those like Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, Max Gluckmann and Edmund Leach whose work he admired and assimilated in many subtle and sophisticated ways into his own analytical framework. On his return to Jerusalem, in the then newly formed state of Israel, he took up a position as an assistant lecturer in the department of sociology headed by Martin Buber. Prof. Eisenstadt continued to teach at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem till 1990 where he was the Rose Isaacs Professor of Sociology from 1959 till his formal retirement in 1990. His published work has been as influential as his lectures and colloquia as a visiting professor in universities abroad. In a long and distinguished academic career he has been a visiting professor at universities or a Fellow of centres of advanced studies in the USA, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Latin America, Austria and Australia. He is a member of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Comparative Civilisations in Brussels. He received the prestigious Balzan prize for Sociology in 1988, followed by the Amalfi Prize in Sociology and Social Sciences as well as the Max Planck Forschungspreis. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Harvard, Helsinki and Tel Aviv. So the Central European University, Budapest is a latecomer in this respect. If the Central European University honours Prof. Eisenstadt a little after his eightieth birthday, it is because the university is only in its early teens and the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in its infancy. Belated as this recognition may be, we at the Central European University have several ties and affinities with his life and work. First there is a primordial bond. Prof. Eisenstadt was born in Warsaw in a family that had settled there from central Europe. Secondly, there is an institutional affinity. Two years ago the university decided to build an integrated department of sociology and social anthropology which would cover the comparative

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study of societies in all parts of the world. This is an intellectual project to which Prof. Eisenstadt has made an outstanding contribution. Last year as I struggled to formulate an integrated curriculum for the new department which would overcome the nineteenth century disciplinary division of labour separating the study of the modern West from the rest which has been institutionalised all over Europe and the USA, I drew inspiration from Prof. Eisenstadt’s comparative programme on multiple modernities. It was then that I discovered to my astonishment and delight an early article of his titled “The relations between sociological theory and anthropological research”. Written in 1949 for the British anthropology journal “Man”, it begins with the sentence “in my view there is no theoretical distinction between sociology and social anthropology”. The academic community at the Central European University not only shares this vision but decided to institutionalise it. In my view it is thus fitting that we celebrate the opening of the new department at the Central European University this year with the award of an honorary doctorate to Prof. Eisenstadt. But in addition to primordial ties and a shared comparative interdisciplinary social science perspective, three themes in Prof. Eisenstadt’s work are an important focus of teaching and research at the Central European University. All three resonate strongly with the experience of its students from many different post-socialist societies: (1) the legacies of the making and unmaking of several empires; (2) a recognition of the paradoxes and precariousness of democracies; and (3) finally the idea of multiple modernities with its sensitivity to the tensions between the political and the cultural projects of modernity which are resolved in a variety of different ways in different contexts. It is to a brief treatment of some of these ideas that I now wish to turn. In the Political Systems of Empires Prof. Eisenstadt explored the systemic conditions of the development, continuity and change of imperial regimes focussing on the role of what he called “free resources”, resources not embedded in various ascriptive groups or social sectors. Although a classical structural-functional analysis in many ways, this innovative study went well beyond the limits of such a framework. What set the book apart from the dominant structural-functional paradigm of its day was its questioning of the natural givenness, the taken-for-grantedness, of any social system. Instead of taking existing institutional arrangements as its point of departure, the study


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broke new ground by treating institutions and their continuity to be as much in need of explanation as the process of their transformation. It emphasised the central role of institutional entrepreneurs, elites and their coalitions in the construction and reproduction of different institutional settings. It not only recognised that cultural values and visions influence the actions of various groups but also traced how these ideals affected the dynamics of institutional development. On the one hand, it examined the specific mechanisms and politics by which bureaucracies maintained these regimes. On the other, it identified the importance of internal contradictions and conflicts among groups which in their complex and contingent interaction with external factors influence the course of development and the disintegration of empires. Going beyond the argument of the book, Prof. Eisenstadt later extended his study to an analysis of the composition and the cosmological visions of major social groups examining the role of heterodoxies and movements of protest in the comparative dynamics of empires and early state formation. In the light of these analyses he then re-examined the relationship between action, culture and structure suggesting the need to modify some of the basic concepts of sociological theory, for example, those of centre-periphery, systemic needs or functional prerequisites. Written 40 years ago, his work on empires and their changing fortunes has lost none of its significance, though Prof. Eisenstadt himself would probably be the first to acknowledge some of its limitations in retrospect. In fact, he has modified and extended his own earlier argument in the light of subsequent research, much of which was inspired by his own work. The Political Systems of Empire was sensitive both to the institutional constraints on social action and to the contingency of historical changes. But it also dealt with the diversity of their outcomes even under very similar historical conditions and structural features, a theme which would recur in Prof. Eisenstadt’s later studies of patterns of modernity too. The focus on the interrelations between institutional patterns and cultural orientations of various social actors would also remain a central theme in his later writings. For example, when in the early eighties he took up a classic anthropological theme, the patterns of exchange in friendship and in patron-client relations, he shifted the traditional anthropological focus to show how different patterns of trust in micro and in macro settings were related systematically to different institutional formations.

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If today many of these arguments, or this way of conceptualising the problem of agency, structure and culture seem self-evident to us, it is in no small measure due to the seminal contributions of Prof. Eisenstadt to these subjects. Most recently it is his ideas on the plurality of the origins and outcomes of different trajectories of modernity in different regions of the world, its structural concomitants, historical pathways and cultural embeddedness which have attracted a great deal of attention across the social sciences in many parts of the world. His idea of multiple modernities has changed our understanding of modernity and led to a reappraisal of many traditional premises of modernisation theory. He has made a strong argument for replacing the classical linear teleological narrative of modernisation, which equates it with westernisation, by a recognition of the symbolic and institutional variability of various dimensions and configurations of modernity in different societies. He has focussed on those movements which have redefined and appropriated modernity in their own terms, be they ideological or cultural, both within Europe and outside it. In numerous studies he has analysed the cultural and political programmes of modernity as it developed in western and central Europe with its distinct ideological and institutional premises and as it travelled to other regions of the world. As a result of the impact of his writings the idea of a homogenous and hegemonic western modernity which has dominated social science research for far too long has begun to be replaced by a recognition of the diverse origins, outcomes and contestations of modernity. Any pluralisation of modernity, therefore, must also acknowledge its multiple paths and patterns within Europe. Western European modernity, he has shown, is only one among many variations on the theme of modernity. Given its historical precedence and its global diffusion and dominance, European modernity continues to remain a point of reference for other modernities, though as Prof. Eisenstadt shows, it is often a rather ambivalent one. In the light of his work we can rewrite the history of modernity as a story of the continual constitution and reconstitution of a plurality of cultural and political programmes including some rather violent and repressive ones. He has analysed not only the radical break from the civilisations of the axial age which modernity represents but also the internal antinomies of this western project, its unique conception of autonomous human agency, its radical transformation of the nature of political order and legiti-


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macy, its restructuring of the permeability of the boundaries between centre and periphery within a society. Interestingly, he has contributed to the ongoing debates on globalisation by reminding us of the similarities and differences of contemporary patterns of globalisation in a historical perspective, thus pluralizing both modernity and globalisation. And he has also examined the transnational dimensions of fascist, communist and fundamentalist movements which have pursued different, and often contradictory, programmes of modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries. No other scholar since Max Weber has explored so systematically the specificity of western modernity and the rupture with the past which it marked in European societies. He has explored its emancipatory potential and its exclusionary dynamics, he has contrasted its ideals of inclusion with its practices and drawn attention to its violence and repression. But what makes Prof. Eisenstadt’s contribution to the study of modernity unique is his delineation of the common core of modernity together with an analysis of its enormous cultural and institutional diversity in different contexts including within Europe itself. At a time when the nature of European identity is a matter of public debate all over the continent and across the Atlantic, such a reformulation has enormous political implications, even if characteristically Prof. Eisenstadt does not spell these out himself. In a highly ideological and normative debate on “the end of history”, the “clash of civilisations” and on the “old and new Europe”, Prof. Eisenstadt’s dispassionate and nuanced analysis is a very welcome interjection indeed. Acutely aware of the pernicious potential of both modernity and globalisation, he does not celebrate either. His work strives instead to situate both sets of processes in a historical context and study their variations in different locations. And it retains an acute sense of their antinomies and of the relative autonomy and degrees of freedom of various actors in shaping these phenomena in different ways and directions. It changes the terms of the debate and offers an alternative intellectual perspective. A perspective which is exemplary not the least due to its refusal to yield to the temptation to turn sociological theory into a mere diagnosis of contemporary affairs. There are many other ideas of Prof. Eisenstadt’s that I could discuss which would be of interest to this audience. But I cannot hope to do justice to his writings, the list of which spans a formidable 61 pages. It comprises 592 entries enumerating articles in all major

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English language social science journals across the world. And it lists 94 monographs and edited books including translations into Hebrew, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. Their subjects range from classical sociological questions of structural differentiation and stratification to classical anthropological preoccupations like age sets among the plains Indians in north America. They include the absorption of immigrants in Israel, the generalisation of trust and patron-client relationships in Latin America, patterns of social change in India, Japanese civilisation in comparative perspective, charisma and institution building, the dilemmas of development in post-colonial societies, youth culture in Israel, the reconfiguration of the political in modern protest movements, the reconstruction of tradition in post-traditional societies, the modernity of religious fundamentalist movements, the deconsolidation of contemporary democracies and the dynamics of revolutionary change, to mention only a few of the topics which bear witness to the extraordinary range of his scholarly interests. He brings a wealth of historical and empirical material to bear on these issues moving effortlessly from the macro level to the micro level, linking social structure and cultural traditions with collective action by diverse groups of actors. Not everything he has written may be equally persuasive, but even when one disagrees with him one learns more than from most scholars. Prof. Eisenstadt is no stylist. What his prose lacks in elegance, it makes up for in clarity and the coherence of the argument. One always reads him with profit, but listening to his lectures is a special pleasure. I do not know if it is years of teaching experience, or just a natural gift, which enable him to deliver a public lecture without even a set of notes, let alone a manuscript. Never rambling, timed to the minute, these well-structured oral presentations, in which he never loses the thread of his complex argument, could go into print without any alterations. His lectures have the informality of a personal conversation with him and bear some testimony to his delightful sense of humour of which there is no trace in his writings. But they would not qualify as Eisenstadt lite. However brief his talks, or informal the setting in which they are delivered, they are full of stimulating ideas. Remarkable is the effortless ease with which he links the large picture to little details drawn from a vast variety of sources. So lightly does he wear his learning that even audiences with a limited acquaintance of the enormous range of secondary


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literature on which he draws find his talks and writings accessible. Yet even the specialist never fails to be impressed by the new insights she gains in her own fields of expertise from his erudition. Prof. Eisenstadt himself has identified the one common concern in all his writings to be the problem of human creativity and its limitations, or put differently the exploration of the potential range of human freedom in a variety of social contexts. I hardly need stress the importance of this issue for the faculty and students of the Central European University as an institution devoted to the ideal of the promotion of open societies all over the world but especially in eastern and central Europe after long years of authoritarian rule. His ideas on the paradoxes and precariousness of democracies are not meant to sour the fruits of democracy but to caution us about the challenges ahead. His writings on the subject may not persuade those currently involved in the task of its global diffusion to give up their efforts. They are not intended to do so. By complicating the currently hegemonial simple narrative of the triumph of democracy worldwide, they seek to warn us against the seduction of easy solutions. That is the privilege and the prerogative of the intellectual. Let me end this laudation on a personal note. Of all the scholars who contribute to this volume in his honour, I probably have the shortest personal acquaintance with Prof. Eisenstadt. But I have read with pleasure, and taught with profit, his writings for almost 20 years. Over the last few months in preparation for this laudation I have been able to renew my acquaintance with many of his writings, and to discover many more which I had missed earlier. Reading through the manuscript of his new book on “Political theory in search of the political”, which he gave me in Jerusalem this summer, I realised with some amazement that it would be his 95th published book. He is not only the most prolific reader that I know, but also the most prolific writer. Prof. Dr. Shalini Randeria The Central European University, Budapest

INTRODUCTION: CIVILIZATION, PLURALISM AND UNIFORMITY Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn expressed years ago the truism that “every man is in certain respects like all other men; like some other men; like no other man” (see Hannerz, 1996: 39). Two major sociological issues relate to this sentence, namely the appropriate unit of socio-historical analysis and the question of pluralism versus uniformity in society; these issues are at the center of this volume. More specifically, it deals with the tensions and dilemmas that in nearly every contemporary society oppose pluralism and homogeneity. Unlike the widest part of the literature that discusses this area of questions, the present frame of discussion is civilizational analysis and it looks at essential aspects of civilizations in order to approach it. To avoid confusion, the concept of civilization is to be distinguished from culture. This distinction developed in Germany where scholars included in the notion of civilization technological, material and organizational aspects of the social reality which tend to spread in society and beyond. In the same perspective, culture, on the other hand, was viewed as designating deeper spiritual and aesthetic aspects of social life and personality that are particular to specific societies and groups (see Elias, 1994). According to this distinction, different social groups can absorb given aspects pertaining to a same civilization reaching them from external or internal foci, and at the same time share different cultures. Hence, change in civilization does not necessarily imply corresponding change in culture, and civilization and culture do not necessarily develop at the same pace. In addition, it is also widely acknowledged that impacts of civilization may stand in contradiction with desirata of culture. This theme was already asserted by Wilhelm Mommsen in the middle of the 19th century, when he said that “it is humanity’s duty today to see that civilization does not destroy culture, nor technology the human being” (see Braudel, 1994: 5–6). This theme, even if the explicit terminology was not used, also appeared in Karl Marx’s notion of “alienation”

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eliezer ben-rafael and yitzhak sternberg

and Max Weber’s typology of rationality and its “iron cage” metaphor. An attitude that has also been exemplified in writings of scholars from the “Frankfurt School” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972). In other words, the distinction between civilization and culture enables a critique on civilization on behalf of culture. At the heart of these outlooks resides the fact that civilization and culture are both mainly concerned with choices of criteria of social action and perspectives on social life. Civilization and culture, it is true, are turned toward different “items” pertaining to different areas of activity and reflections. Yet, these areas are not completely separate from each other and may overlap to a varying extent: the use of technologies and the organization of consumption behavior, for instance, as firstly determined by civilizational perspectives are not alien to aesthetic or moral considerations that form the core of cultural preoccupations. Moreover, civilization and culture may also compete with each other with respect to the relative emphases individuals and groups set on the different relevant areas of action or reflection. Hence, the relations of civilization and culture are fraught with tensions and dilemmas. Furthermore, such tensions and contradictions can still be aggravated when individuals, groups, parties or organizations stand for opposed outlooks drawing in different manners from civilizational or cultural codes. It remains that contrary to the particularism of cultures, civilization is bound to world-historical processes (see Arnason, 2001; Eisenstadt, 2001a), constitute long-term developments involving selfconstraints coming up to transformations in human behavior—what Elias (1994) means by the notion of “civilizing process”. As such they raise a spectrum of unavoidable analytical and moral questions. According to Emile Durkheim, for example, “a man is a man only to the degree that he is civilized” (see Arnason, 1988: 89). Sigmund Freud expressed a similar view when remarking that “the word ‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors.” (Freud, 1961: 36). This notion is connected, among others, to the problématique implied by the theme of the “noble savage”, and opens a fundamental debate about the universal, nay even universalistic, nature of social development. At the same time, civilizations also refer to distinct sociocultural spaces that include diverse units such as states and societies. Hence, civilizational analysis usually “deals with units of larger dimensions

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and longer duration than the single societies that they encompass” (Arnason, 2001: 1910) and it is under this angle that Arnold Toynbee (1965) considered civilization as the central unit for socio-historical analysis. At this very point, however, this notion of civilization questions its relation to religion that, as it happens, also consists of a set of codes that mostly run across the borders of individual societies. According to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt “although in the history of human kind civilizations and religions were very closely interwoven—at the same time many religions have been only a part of the component or not necessarily the most central component of civilizations” (Eisenstadt, 1992b: 1; see also Kroeber, 1963). Yet, as argued by Fernand Braudel, religion can be seen as one of the most important traits of civilizations. According to him, “Christianity is an essential reality in western life: it even marks atheists, whether they know it or not. Ethical rules, attitudes to life and death, the concept of work, the value of effort, the role of women and children—these may seem to have nothing to do with Christian feeling: yet all derive from it nevertheless” (Braudel, 1994: 23). Braudel also suggests that the long historical continuity of civilizations should be part of their definition. “Civilization is in fact the longest story of all” says Braudel (1994: 34). For Durkheim and Mauss ([1913] 1971: 811) “a civilization constitutes a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole.” Moreover, according to Carroll Quigley (1979) only a culture that has some “instruments of expansion” can become a civilization. This large-scale dimension of civilization makes it “a family of societies” distinct from other such “families”—to use the words of Marcel Mauss. It is under this angle and at the level of world history that one may also speak of civilization as carrying a form of particularism (see also Arieli, 1992; Braudel, 1980; Febvre, 1973; Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952; Nelson, 1981b). In this broad context, the concept of civilization implies a pluralistic calling that stems from both the plurality of civilizations and plurality within civilizations. A plurality-condition that may add up to, and combine with, additional factors of pluralism, like the character of dominant and dominated groups (Toynbee, 1965) or diverse distinctions between “core” and “periphery” (Quigley, 1979). In all respects, what is at stake is the extent that differences—that is, pluralism—are tolerated at the cost of the common perspectives and uniformity carried primarily by civilizational codes.

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In practical terms, the dilemma of pluralism-uniformity comes down to the confrontation of socio-cultural groups in given social realities that may be willing to confront the societal center in view of bringing about changes in the social order. Such confrontations focus on the power relations prevailing in society and the possibility of bringing up new emphases and credos to the forefront of the public scene. This pluralism develops into multiculturalism where the very fact of pluralism or aspects of it are recognized as permanent and legitimate features of the social order, giving thereby expression, as suggested by Taylor (1994), to the eventual aspirations of groups to recognition. At first glance, it is true, a center is a priori interested in some cohesion of the setting which it controls while groups may aspire, in a no less natural manner, to assert their particular personality. Yet, at least as far as individual settings are concerned which both illustrate at any moment a particular culture and participation to a civilizational perspective, one may contend that not every sociocultural group is interested in retaining its particularism in front of the rest of society, and not every center together with the actors who stand behind it, are interested in minimizing the heterogeneity of the setting beyond a level warranting the endorsement of given common rules. Both in the case of socio-cultural groups and of the center and its supporters, the question which arises concerns then the extent that they draw their major identity principles from universalistic-civilizational perspectives and emphasize the individual’s participation to the general setting, or from particularistic-cultural allegiances which singularizes the society and divides it into socially meaningful categories. As far as groups are concerned, they often carry legacies of their own, especially if they originate from the outside, let alone from outer civilizational spaces. Beyond gradual adjustment to the environment, they may find difficulties to hyphenate their identity with the prevailing societal identity whether because of basic incompatibilities of perspectives or of their sharing particularly strong affinities to their original tokens—which is especially frequent with religious allegiances. Moreover, and this is particularly the case with contemporary transnational diasporas, the retention of ties with the original motherland or fellow-members settled elsewhere is also a factor encouraging the retention of particularism and politics of identity. Feelings of discrimination and deprivation—whether or not justified—

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are another ingredient that one often finds behind the group’s mobilization on behalf of its recognition as a distinct and respectable entity. On the other hand, changes of values and perspectives among members are also inevitable as they insert themselves in society, are exposed to predominant patterns of behavior and convictions, and undergo a degree of acculturation. Acculturation may even lead to assimilation when individuals accede to higher-status positions and are tempted by distancing themselves from their group of origin in order to better integrate new milieus. Such processes, however, are by no means unrelated to the viewpoint characterizing the societal center that may either encourage or on the contrary hamper processes leading to homogeneity. In this latter case, it is that which supports, from the “above”, the retention, nay even institutionalization, of pluralism regarding at least, some of the groups in presence. This stance of the stronger party of the scene is the primary factor in laying down the “rules of the game”. On the ground of its representation of society’s historical and cultural personality—and of course, under the influence of the interests of those who support its policies—, this party may combine, in different possible manners, universal values—such as freedom or equality—with particularistic outlooks, and specify in varying terms rules of the pluralism-homogeneity dilemma, such as the exclusiveness or accessibility of membership; regulations of—economic, political, or other—participatory rights; or entitlements to prominent positions (see Almond and Verba, 1963; Znaniecki, 1973). These rules where the imprint of civilization as well as culture can be revealed, manifest basic attitudes toward social divisions and, among other expressions, articulate fundamental orientations toward pluralism that may vary over time and space (Grillo, 1989). Unifying orientations perceive a setting where differences are secondary and doomed to disappear. This type of orientation may accept new members who are “different,” only on condition that they are willing to conform. It encourages a complete integration of newcomers but with no tolerance for the public manifestation of their particularisms. In contrast, pluralistic orientations recognize the social, cultural, and linguistic differences that exist in society. Permissive of differences, it is ready to institutionalize them as enduring features of the social order. At its limit, these orientations can be segregationist and refuse to leave to individual groups the choice between the retention of singularity or assimilation. Unifying and pluralistic orientations,

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however, are by no means mutually exclusive, and we may well conceive of a society where the center insists on unification and assimilation vis-à-vis some groups, but on pluralism vis-à-vis others. This rough characterization is enough, we think, to evince how far pluralism versus homogeneity can constitute a central axis of debate in society. An assessment that, to be sure, cannot but remind what we know about many contemporary societies, and more precisely, contemporary societies which participate to the modern civilization where universalistic claims and exigencies and particularistic demands and struggles often constitute an endemic constituent of the social order. Have not, it must be emphasized time and again, to come up to this point, societies had a long way to go through civilizational development. It is this parcours that is discussed in the first section of this volume. The historical trajectory Looking at historical civilizations or using the civilizational perspective, we have said, is fruitful for analyzing macro-historical continuities. However, it can also be productive for understanding major historical or cultural ruptures and breakthroughs (see Arnason, 2001). Thus, for example, Eisenstadt employs this civilizational perspective in order to depict what seems to him as two major turning-points in the history of mankind, namely the discontinuities relating to the axial age and the modern age. It is argued that these major historical ruptures were materialized by civilizations. Eisenstadt’s chapter which opens the first section of this volume defines what modernity as a civilization means, and further chapters delve into its historical trajectory. Eisenstadt, who forged the notion of “multiple modernities” to account for the diversity of forms that modernity can assume in different settings, discusses the analytical links of the notion of civilization to modernity, pointing out, more particularly, the tensions with which their interaction is fraught. In modernity, says Eisenstadt, the premises of the social order are not taken for granted, as people are freed from permanent authority or tradition. Society and the human experience are interpreted on the basis of a belief in autono-

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mous human agency. It is from this angle that conscious actions in the mundane order may be understood as capable of realizing utopian visions. By the same token, it is also understood that people may be moved by a multiplicity of interests in, and interpretations of, the common good. It follows that in this kind of society, centers are, in principle, accessible to peripheral groups which are expected to show political awareness, and an open political class emerges. Politicians are permanently confronted with the exigency to enlist—and compete for—public support; numerous problems become political issues and are often couched in ideological terms to constitute topics of conflict. Moreover, basic antinomies of the modernity program fuel antagonisms throughout society. Rational construction of society stands in opposition to emotional community solidarity; reflexive critical exploration contrasts with the commandingness of the mastery of the world and the social reality; the contradiction pluralism-totalism implies alternate institutional patterns. If one further adds to the cultural multiplicity and institutional variance of modernity, the varying constellations of power, the different civilizational traditions that modernity encounters in different societies, and the tensions inherent to the institutionalization of modernity itself, one can explain satisfactorily the confrontations that are generated between divergent interpretations of its basic premises. Exploring the roots of modernity in the footsteps of Karl Jaspers (1953), Arnason focuses on the genesis epoch depicted by the German scholar as “axial age.” That age constituted the epoch of “birth” of major civilizations that, over time, were themselves to undergo transformation in the formative processes of the principal molds of modernity that we witness today. Arnason elaborates an analysis of what he calls the axial “conundrum”. Around the middle of the last millennium bce, he explains, there was an accumulation of innovative changes in major civilizational centers unexplainable in terms of mutual influences. These innovations were bound to complex ways of articulating the world, and the age which they engendered was to exhibit a new world-making capacity out of the traditions from which it sprang. A variety of religious legacies was now initiated over several centuries, sweeping from Persia to China, and from India to Greece—including Judea/Israel. Most essentially, this period divides religions which came into being before and after this era—hence the very notion of “axial age.” That age’s salient strength was its

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emphasis—within a large diversity of contexts—on state formation processes which literally transformed societies. This exceptional period remained related to the past in different ways, but its most important—and general—achievement consisted of its affirmation of ontological distinction between ultimate and mundane realities. In actual fact, this was to constitute over time a most vital seed of the civilization of modernity. As shown further by Wittrock, the axial age encompassed not only deep-seated shifts articulated in world religions and the emergence of imperial political orders, but also a restructuring of societal principles that came up to a re-conceptualization of the social endeavor. Beyond its variance throughout Eurasia and its retention of a continuity vis-à-vis earlier civilizations, in its essence the axial breakthrough involved new attitudes regarding reflexivity, historicity and agentiality. These changes were expressed in new cosmologies, religious practices and institutional development. Among other patterns, a common crucial denominator of all forms of axiality consisted of the legitimacy of given patterns of dissent. On the other hand, as distinguished by Wittrock, one may also speak of different models of axial transformations—from the Mosaic variance which contrasted true and false, and religion and politics, to the Greek philosophicalpolitical legacy that contributed deliberations about the human condition. All these were ingredients in the development of modernity, but if one sees the axial age as the point of departure and modernity as the point of arrival, to the same extent that the point of departure was not one, neither was the point of arrival. Runciman emphasizes, at this point, that the most essential aspect of the Axial Age lies in the fact that it consisted of cultural revolutions which engendered a new fundamental tension between the transcendental and mundane orders. He contends, however, that, among the civilizations associated with the Axial Age, Rome is a major exception in this respect. Roman culture did draw a distinction between this world and the other one and it shared moral standards by which the powerful was judged. Moreover, that culture was open to outsiders, valued private religious beliefs and showed respect and fear for supra-human agencies, indicated undoubtedly a tension between the mundane and the transcendental. Yet no notion of a “Mandate of Heaven” was ever formulated, nor was any Roman ruler ever dethroned on the grounds of abstract principles of justice, or fidelity to divine commandments. Roman law, which referred to

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Roman religion, evolved without any theological input and never generated a dissenting movement. The junction of Roman law and Roman religion signified that a secularization of law went hand-inhand with a politicization of religion. In brief, the Romans’ concern was not with croyance but with savoir, and not with savoir-penser but with savoir-faire. The legitimacy of imperial decision-making was taken for granted and Roman society offered no institutional space for a prophetic would-be leader of a reformation movement. It is only when Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire that the tension between the mundane and transcendental orders was acknowledged, and Roman-Christian civilization joined, in this respect, the path of axiality. Western and Central Europe, research shows, have, in toto, illustrated not only divergences of development but also more than a few traits of convergence. However, these traits may take on different significance from one setting to another and from one phase to another. Kocka illustrates this point by focusing on a major notion in European thought, namely, civil society. Originally this notion conveyed the idea of an area of activities standing between the sphere of the household and the state, and referring to how families and individuals live or should live together. Civil society was increasingly understood as differentiating men from nature and in the eighteenth century was associated with autonomous social activity—industry, commerce or culture. Gradually—less so in England than in France and Germany—it came to imply critical attitudes toward tradition and, on behalf of utopian schemes, opposing the state as the defender of the societal status quo. Later on, it designated voluntary associations opposed to absolutism which opened citizens’ access to the political sphere. Receding into the background during the twentieth century, until the 1980s, “civil society” reappeared in the anti-Soviet critique in Eastern Europe, conveying a fervor for freedom and pluralism. From there it returned to the West—again, not everywhere with the same edge—as the promise of an alternative to worldwide capitalism, designating associative action, raising claims and conflicting interests as the core of utopian projects. The very spread of notions—like civil society—from one part of the world to another is linked today with globalization as a trend in which modernity has led the world. Assessing, under this angle, essential features of our time, Oommen emphasizes that modernization has implied structural differentiation, rationalization, a history-making

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project and modern life. The empirical actuality of these transformations substantiates the reality of multiple modernities which, in turn, account for the multiplicity of globality. Colonialism, the first phase of globalization, ascertained new conceptual dichotomies—the primitive versus the modern, the Orient versus the Occident and the New World versus the Old. Globalization then also implied cultural homogenization of urban populations—from the nuclearization of the family to parliamentarism, although (and this is the pluralization dimension), consumption styles and institutional structures pertaining to national legacies often retain an influence that is antagonistic to modernization. Conflict may ensue between revivalist traditionalist reactions and the hegemonizing tendencies of modernization. It is then the case that globalization intensifies the clash between traditional communitarianism and modernization, even though their unavoidable cross-breeding also nourishes a creative hybridism of innovative patterns that are neither traditional nor modern. The lack of systematic order that is the outcome of these transformations as well as the awareness of basic difficulties that characterize our era bring Alexander to insist on an additional aspect that can be followed up to axiality. This aspect is directly bound to the question of mundane-transcendental tensions which is important for the further development toward modernity. According to him, the dark spot in Axial Age theory is that it rests on the assumption that human beings tolerate the tension without backing away, ignoring Weber’s warning of evasions from the demands of this-worldly asceticism—what Fromm called “escapes from freedom.” Freedom might be too hard to support and Weber could see escapes from it in militarism and the enlisting after dangerous demagogues. Such patterns, according to Weber, illustrate the difficulty for individuals to remain adepts of moral universalism. Unable to bear the anxiety entailed by autonomy, egos may tend to split the world and to project the causes of anxiety onto others—which is discussed by sociologists under the title of “social closure.” This is further expressed in the fact that every collectivity creates an inside and outside, which Durkheim conceptualized as pure and impure. This problem that is bound to antagonisms and transgressions can be seen as intrinsically pertaining to modernity. Even fragmentation that is so evident in contemporary social life, Alexander contends, is fuelled by the energetic obsessions of this-worldly asceticism and by the drive to escape from

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it which results in the perversion of ethical demands. Modernism and barbarism are thus intertwined for better and worse. This analysis brings us to assess that the axial age legacy may still be seen on the surface of our globe through the civilizations which it has generated. Those civilizations substantially diverged from each other from their very beginning, but had in common some shared essential traits that we recognize in the development of modernity and which allow us to understand the multiple forms, and also the universal features, tensions and conflicts that modernity takes on everywhere. Understood in this light, the multiplication of modernities is bound to the expansion of globalization processes that, on the one hand, forward a relative homogenization of all societies in the world (Inkeles, 2001), but on the other, bring about the emergence of new cultures by means of creolization/hybridization (Hannerz, 1996), globalization (Robertson, 1995) and heterogeneity (Appadurai, 1990). These principles of pluralism refer not only to changing forces of convergence and divergence acting among contemporary societies, but also to the various components that participate in individual societies. This is the topic of the next section. Modernity and pluralism A modernizing and globalizing world witnesses the growing importance of the pluralism-versus-homogeneity dilemma within individual contemporary societies. A dilemma that engenders new social patterns, modes of action and identities, and which also implies tensions between divergent forces, strife and destruction. How to “arrange” pluralism and construct it is thus by no means a simple issue, and different strategies involve a diversity of costs and benefits. Pluralism, Werblowsky reminds us, primarily refers to an ideological attitude that admits the fact of plurality. As a situation, it represents the openness of groups to the influence of outsiders, up to the possibility of being affected and transformed. What is questioned here is how far groups are sure of their identities and unafraid of losing them through their relations with others. A conflict marked by religious labels, we are reminded, is not necessarily a genuine religious conflict, as demonstrated by the case of Ireland where adversaries belong to different faiths but are indifferent to doctrinal divergences. Whenever several

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identity components overlap, conflict may reach an explosive stage, as shown by the case of Cyprus, where Christian Greeks oppose Muslim Turks. Entzinger looks, in this respect, to the confrontation of modern states with immigration on a scale which disrupts the existing social order and forces societies to reconstitute their identities. He argues that many different options are being adopted throughout the Western world, according to degrees and patterns of institutionalization of pluralism—from the neutral state which considers culture to be a private affair or accords limited public recognition to particular groups, to the institutionalization of distinct collective interests in given spheres and the legalization of differences when different laws apply to different groups allowing them to determine their own standards. However, any society, it is contended, must require from its members a degree of identification with a common core of values and symbols, and a given degree of civic assimilation. Beyond this point, it is Entzinger’s standpoint that groups should be free to preserve their heritage in private and in the community. Inter-community tensions may well be the price implied by this essence of liberal democracy, but between assimilation and extreme multiculturalism, middle-of-the road approaches are commanding in a world of globalization, continuing immigration and growing transnationalism. This tolerant approach to pluralism is not completely endorsed by Schnapper, who looks into the depth of this problématique from a different standpoint. Democracy, she argues, actually encourages the emergence of ethnic and religious groups. Its very aspiration to integrate the population into citizenship implies severe tensions between two dimensions: the universal character of the project, its attachment to a definite social order and its respect of individual autonomy on the one hand, and the existence of particularisms, the respect for free expression of human emotions and collective life on the other hand. As a utopian project, citizenship is grounded on the separation of the political and the civic from the religious and the ethnic. The latter breaches the democratic project by favoring the retreat of citizens into communities. Moreover, the fragmentation of the society into communities also signifies that those who feel “repressed” in society may find shelter in ethno-religious enclaves and strengthen their ethnic identity. The welfare state itself contributes to this development which results in an increasing “ethnicization” of public policy as the limits of the state’s resources in front of the unlimited

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claims feed dissatisfaction and ethnic-religious identifications. Hence, civic inclusionism does not always overcome ethno-religious exclusionism. The legal recognition of particularisms runs the risk of aggravating social fragmentation in democratic societies. Pursuing in the same vein, Dahrendorf emphasizes that since 1945 totalizing tendencies have ended up in totalitarianism while pluralism was regarded as a condition of the liberal order. The heterogeneous nation-state expects to unite people of different creeds, cultures and ethnic origins under one constitution. Pluralism does not mean a blending of cultures but a toleration of differences within common rules. In actual fact, though, pluralism has failed to create unity and a sense of belonging. It is an ideal that engages the head but not the heart, while the rules of public life are barely sufficient to hold communities together. The result is conflict that may lead to deep cleavages, and the emergence of fundamentalism as a real threat. Pluralism appears to contain the eventuality of separateness without centre, and an image of the world in which “anything goes.” In this new reality, however, while the nation-state has lost a part of its charm and much of its power, it is still the most effective space for the liberal order to flourish. As for Touraine, he does not hesitate to claim the very destruction of the social. Economic and technological issues are increasingly important, while the state is loosing its grip on society. Religious powers raise imperative demands and the societal sphere is declining. The forces that command the world today can no longer be defined in social terms because they fail to control even themselves. Political parties and trade unions are loosing their influence, while mass media, associations of all sorts and NGOs are gaining dominance. The old idea that the liberty of the individual is best ensured by social participation is gradually replaced by the completely opposite idea, that the liberty of individuals is ensured only by his liberation from social roles. Multiculturalism leads society to fragmentation, sustained as it is by post-modern de-historicized assessments of the disappearance of unitarian principles of thought. Giesen throws additional light on this discussion of pluralism by focusing on liminal—often very harsh and destructive—contemporary situations where collective identities are transformed by references to archetypal figures. The triumphant hero who rose against oppression standing above rules has always been viewed as marking the origin of a social order that is accepted as “just”. Modern democracy,

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however, had turned triumphant heroism into a collective mode. On the other hand, there is also the failing hero who was defeated but kept his pristine purity, symbolizing the tension between the sacred and the profane, and still justifying, by his/her sacrifice, faithfulness to the collective identity. This figure contrasts with the liminal victims who were treated as de-humanized objects and have also been a type of modern figure. Only from a distance, subsequent generations will preserve the memory of those victims that will substantiate the symbolic representation of their collective identity. Perpetrators who have trespassed on basic norms are the counterparts of the victim. They were admired by followers as long that they were victorious but their defeat has pushed those followers into the difficult situation of former accomplices. Perpetrators may then become the focus of negative reference for a redefinition of the collective identity. These chapters as a whole show that the pluralism-versus-homogeneity tension constitutes—in this era of modernity—an engine of further social transformation. It generates new modes of action and identities, and, at the same time, carries conflict and destruction. Its roots are endemic to modernity, accounting for the emergence of ideologies that impact on the social dynamics. It is there when modern societies experience drastic population changes that weigh heavily on the social order and require a redefinition of horizons. A context that explains why societies find it difficult to require identification from their members with a common core of values, and why particularisms increase fragmentation. At this point, we turn back to cultural forces that have long been understood as “antithetical to modernity” but which are still among the forces—and not the least ones—that mould our world even though some researchers tend to ignore them. We mean religion and its relation to other major aspects of today’s society. A factor, indeed, that expresses, through the development of modernity, how far contemporary reality is not disconnected from its past. Religion, nationalism and pluralism Religion has for long been understood by scholars as the “culture that was,” that characterized mainly an era that has been rejected with the triumph of modernity—at least in the Western sphere. Through new looks at the genesis of modernity, elaborations of the

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concept of axiality and the delving into the complexities of nationalism, researchers have come to reappraise religion’s role in the emergence of the age of modernity. In fact, some aspects of the particularism of given versions of modernity are now related to the open or latent influence of religious codes conveyed by, and from within, major civilizational aspects—including the patterns taken on by the pluralism-versus-homogeneity dilemma. Schluchter starts this section by focusing on Weber’s analysis of ancient Judaism, one of the most important progeny of the axial age. Weber contrasts Jews with Indian pariahs by speaking of a voluntary, not imposed, ghetto existence; while, moreover, the Indian performs caste duties with the prospect of promotion in a better future life, Jews see themselves now as “elected” and understand ritual exclusion as a manifestation of inner morality. An ethics of conviction leading to an ethics of law brings Judaism to define its God as a personal transcendent creator. It was a “crucial turning point” in Middle-Eastern and Western development because it supported religious rationalization in combination with prophecy. While theocracy achieved supremacy, hand in hand with fossilization, the Jesus movement, at first an internal Jewish movement for renewal, achieved independence before the Pauline mission granted it a worldhistorical significance. Christianity, says Weber, was an urge towards universalization as the hour of conception of Occidental citizenship. This kind of analysis sees religious developments—like that from Judaism to Christianity—not as obstacles to the evolution of modernity, but rather as preconditions for this development. Tiryakian continues this discussion by turning to thirteenth-century Occitan-speaking Southern France. This area was then an urban, commercial and quite wealthy region, characterized by a social hierarchy that was less rigid than the feudal North, greater political participation of local notables, and a relatively liberal spirit. Catholicism was predominant but religious pluralism was strong as well. A center of Catharism and its Albigensian sect which stood for dualist transcendental visions and rejected monotheism, challenged the established Church. The Albigensians were led by spiritual leaders while among the other new movements advocating the return to the original ideals of the church, one noted the importance of the “Waldensians” who preached voluntary poverty. The Franciscans also preached similar values, but remained attached to the Church. It is the Albigensian Crusade organized by the papacy that crushed the heretics by reviving the

16


Inquisition. This was the end of Occitan pluralism, but from a comparative civilizational perspective, the episode hints that only the repression of heresy prevented modernity from emerging centuries before it did. This analysis suggests that the enemy of modernity was not religion as such but rather intolerant religious policies and institutional set-ups. Focusing on the Islamicate political culture in the medieval age, Arjomand emphasizes a convergent tendency in the development of Islamicate political culture. He points out the mutual accommodation of the Sharia and Greek and Perso-Indian sources. This encounter introduced a dualism of political and religious power in the normative order. Works on ethics and statecraft dominated the political thought of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mogul empires. Aristotle’s Politics and equivalent works were missing however, as were many key Aristotelian concepts. They penetrated the Islamic world only in the wake of modern constitutionalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as the panacea of rulers and patrimonial-state bureaucracies. This represented a missed opportunity to refashion the political science of previous centuries in a democratic direction. Failures of the Westernized state machinery, says the author, then stirred up velleities to reassert the Islamic world view and reinstate the Sharia in public life. The result was the reinvention of an Islamic political tradition with no resemblance to the historical synthesis of former centuries. Twentieth-century dispossessed traditional intellectuals formulated an Islamic counter-myth of their own against the modernized state, obliterating the theory of the two powers on the basis of an increasingly reified historical memory which decried the menace of Islam’s suffocation by Western cultural invasion. This invented tradition blurs today the understanding of the prospects for democracy in the contemporary Muslim world. Focusing on today European society, Hervieu-Léger’s analysis leads to assessments that are not foreign to Tiryakian’s and Arjomand’s concerns. She discusses religion’s relation to the shaping of social reality from the viewpoint of contemporary Western Europe. Never, she says, has denominational religion become eroded as much as at the present time. The decline is steep, both in practice and traditional beliefs whereas one witnesses widespread individual do-it-yourself constructions of beliefs. Yet all European societies still carry the marks of their particular and specific religious roots—even though they are today extremely secularized. Up to now, major institu-

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tions everywhere widely function by implicit reference to past religious models, while symbolic structures are still impregnated by them. This is so, even though dissociation has taken place between politics and religion and the latter has been gradually pushed back into the private sphere. What is new these days throughout a good part of Europe, however, is that groups of newcomers who never shared the original legacies of the veteran population weaken the reference to Christian civilization. A cultural-religious pluralization has taken place that is asserting a strong presence of Islam. This creates new difficulties on the road to integration that are widely accounted for by both the political culture of Europe’s countries, and the varieties of Islam brought by newcomers. The phenomena of internal cultural pluralization on the one hand and external cultural globalization on the other hand contribute simultaneously to the erosion, and the partial and paradoxical recreation, of different religious civilizations in Europe. It is in this context that the pluralism-versus-homogeneity dilemma now requires new kinds of reference to religion. The undeniable relation between religion, policies and societal structures related to modernity and modernization is then presented by Confino’s analysis of Eastern Orthodoxy. This Church has always been a politicized ecclesiastical organization where, at least in the Oriental-Empire version, the emperor was the head of the Church, making it a part of the State structure. This state of affairs represented endemic tensions as by its very theogony, the Church aspired to supremacy over the State. These tensions actually hindered the Church’s drive toward hegemony over the State and facilitated its submission. The Church never revolted against the State, despite its autonomy and expansionism in the outside where it consisted of a confederation of independent national churches united by common dogma and regular ecumenical councils. This structural decentralization was bound to the use of local languages in liturgies, which brought the Church closer to the people and separated the various national churches from each other. This trend blurred the distinction between church, state and nation. To be sure, this particular form of relations between Church and State is not alien to the versions of modernity witnessed in Russia and Slavic Europe, on the one hand, and the Balkan countries, on the other. We think here of both the institutional-structural development of modernity in these areas and the relation of religion to nationalism. Ben-Rafael focuses more particularly on this latter issue.

18


Since modern nationalism is always grounded not only on civic values but also in the idea of an organic collective united by a code stemming from traditions, religion may indeed constitute one of its founding elements. Jewish nationalism illustrates a link that may exist between religion and the principle of peoplehood which has always been an essential assumption of Judaism. However, nationalism in this case literally transformed religious contents to integrate them in the new national identity. It remains that the centrality of the reference to religion in Jewish nationalism had major consequences in the formation of Israeli society. Principles of action and symbols embedded in traditional Judaism have been endowed with new meanings and—in these new forms—have remained influential on many societal aspects. This is expressed today in the relations of sociocultural groups and the links between Israel and diaspora Jews. Moreover, the imprints of all these are also clearly visible in the relationships of the Jewish majority and the Arab minority within Israeli society. All in all, Zionists’ reliance on religious motives was certainly a factor in their success to enlist millions of followers, but it also widely accounts for the cleavages that arose and dictated a good part of this society’s further development. All in all, religious values and systems are a dimension of the development of modernity. Religion, even when it declines and looses its grip on individuals’ mentalities, definitely remains an axis of the pluralism-versus-uniformity, and conjunctively, of the dilemma inherent to the multiple-modernities reality. It is to this area of questions that the next section now turns. Modernity as world reality Hence, the civilization of modernity emerged from existing religions and cultural traditions; as such, it combined with them in various manners and could not be understood as a uniform straitjacket that deleted out differences between societies which belonged to different civilizational spaces. This is the very root of the multiplication of modernities, and it is in this respect that scholars refer to classifications such as Western and non-Western variants of modernities in view of emphasizing their respective unique features at the same time as their convergences.

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It is in this perspective that Shulman discusses here the variant of modernity illustrated by India. He contends that “modern” implies an awareness emerging from some institutional, socio-cultural depth, transformative of society and institutions. Expressions of this modernity found in Southern India indicate a sense of individual autonomy freed from ascriptive ties, a political vision embodied in state-systems, elements of a secular culture cutting through communal boundaries, and cultural experimentation linked with skeptical and radical epistemologies. Modernity in this sense began in Southern India several centuries before what is usually thought of as the modern age, and it evolved from within the local culture independently from sustained contact with the West. Shulman discusses, in this respect, the work of the poet Apparao in late nineteenth-century Andhra as the culminating voice in a long series. His characters speak a rich, colloquial, highly individualized language. His poem Brides for Sale thematizes one major target of reformists, namely, the practice of marrying off young girls for dowries to older men. These expressions of modernity, however, do not gainsay that many tribal elements were retained as evinced both in major rituals and the political domain. Moreover, it is not to deny either that Buddhist civilization, Brahminical institutions and other sources have left strong prints on this society. Gurujada Apparao’s Brides for Sale is only a reflection—particularly hard-hitting—of changes that unfolded over the years ever since a far much earlier time in this part of the world than in the West. Not less striking is the fact that politics as a whole acquired here an experimental significance and became a sphere for critical existential debates. Smooha brings in the contemporary example of Israel. Israel, he argues, responds only partially to the Western syndrome. It is Western in self-image, science and technology, higher education, market economy, procedural democracy and ethics. But on the other hand it is remote from this syndrome by features such as its criteria of membership, the centrality of the family, the focal position of the military, state intervention in the economy, the role of religion or the salience of ethno-national cleavages. Factors accounting for this singularity include the non-Western origin of the founding fathers of this society, the entangling unity of ethnicity, religion and nationality in Judaism, and permanent mobilization in face of a hostile environment. While Israel in the 2000s is more Western than it was in the

20


1950s—Israelis are more individualistic, materialistic and bourgeois— and Israelis’ self-image draws them closer to the West, the Israeli case still demonstrates that the Western model is not readily exportable, that globalization does not necessarily lead to convergence, and that, above all, cleavages may develop in modern settings along lines that are widely determined by singular cultural codes. Focusing on our contemporary experience from a viewpoint that emphasizes communicative aspects, Delanty sees modernity through translation theory. Modernity, he contends, is universal and may be spoken about in any language, but, at the same time, the notion of multiple modernities means cultural exchange where translations from one language to another transmit culture by transforming what they take over and inserting it in a new context. Translation signifies that a foreign element is brought into a culture, creating new hybrid forms that unavoidably re-codify identities, symbolic orders, cognitive structures and imaginings. The very emergence of modernity implied cultural translation as an endemic aspect of it expressing the condition of culture as communicability and that social actors all over the world were increasingly defining themselves by reference to global culture. However, by no means does this mean that they are all saying the same things. What Delanty calls “global culture” cannot be seen as constant nor translations as static. People, he contends, continuously reinterpret their situation in light of their on-going encounters with others. Globalization—as a process that intensifies connections, enhances possibilities and necessities for cultural translations and deepens the consciousness of globality—is the principal motor of modernity and its diversity. Hannerz pursues from here with a more structural analysis, asking about the relevance and meanings in our contemporary life of the notions of center and periphery. He reminds that in the past, the center was identified with sacred symbols and beliefs, and institutions engaged in their propagation. While the metropolis was viewed as a center of creative vitality, it was contrasted with the “rude and unimaginative” province. Turning worldwide, “metropolis” is now also contrasted with the “periphery” to underline the former’s exploitation of the latter. The intensification of communication while differences among people tend to multiply bring about the formation of new “creolized” or “hybrid” cultures at the confluence of local traditions and imported forms. These processes involve today, it is the author’s basic contention, a periphery that is active and displays new imagined

introduction

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worlds. From it run cultural counter-flows to the center, creating liminal spaces where one finds cosmopolitanism and openness to other cultures, together with conflictual drives and motivations visà-vis the political class. It is at this point that Allardt steps in by emphasizing the importance of core values and cultural programs as the essentials of an all-modernity consensus. Modernity, he says, contains propositional statements about the world, referring to institutional forms like the democratic nation-state, a market economy or research-oriented universities. Beyond these agreed-upon basics, however, one cannot speak of one modernity even with respect to Europe. The characteristic European specificity is the distinction between—and combination of—the striving for a social integration grounded in primordial definitions, on the one hand, and the attempt to build an integrative whole based exclusively on rational considerations, on the other hand. In other words, combining rationalistic and communal-romantic tendencies. However, it appears that Europe has moved since the 1970s toward “postmodernity,” meaning a weakening of class conflicts, a downplaying of modernization, a relativization of knowledge and an increasing importance given to identity and moral issues. This notion conveys a view of society made of ongoing processes constantly redefined and reinterpreted. Levine concludes this section by dealing with the general issue of communication between modernities. Dialogue signifies, in his eyes, a type of discourse in which parties take turns listening to each other, and responding to one another’s queries and requests. By no means is Levine optimistic, though: all human groups manifest ethnocentrism and, as a rule, tend to exaggerate the dissimilarities between in-groups and out-groups. Moreover, ethnocentric beliefs are fortified when intertwined with imperatives that stem from strong cultural mandates. And, indeed, the great civilizations have often extended their domain through the glorification of ethnocentric interests and exclusion. On the other hand, it is also the case that civilizations have favored hospitability toward strangers, tolerance for diversity, and understanding and compassion, that is, inclusionist orientations. Some civilizations have been able to generate developments in which traditional symbols are invoked in ways that combat elitist-ethnocentric molds in response to ethical demands. Such developments represent resources for dialogical engagement that may reduce clashes among civilizations.

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These chapters, as a whole, turn the attention to the practice of pluralism as a divided reality and it questions the potentiality of conflict and dialogue conveyed by collective identities characteristic of modern plurality. It is to this space of issues that the following section is addressed. Challenges of collective identities The foregoing converges to evince the importance in modern societies of processes that account for, and are expressed in, the formation and contestation of collective identities. Attributes like language, history, racial features, and religious allegiances, are all the more relevant factors here, as they encounter homogenizing forces that antagonize them and tend to marginalize them. On the other hand, though, tolerance that does not oppose groups which retain aspects of their singularity, also encourage ipso facto the development of pluralism. In any case, the formation of collective identities, wherever it takes place, is bound to the politicization of socio-cultural groups and their acting as agents of social change. However, in each modern setting, the emergence and development of cleavages is also widely determined by the specific configuration of modernity in the context of national cultures. This latter assessment is confirmed by Goetschell’s analysis which opens this section by comparing the situation of Jews in France and in Germany at their first steps of insertion in society, during the nineteenth century, as those two pillar-countries of West Europe were launching their take-off toward modernity. Jews, who had until then constituted enclaves in both countries, were now relocated in the context of the transformations undergone by these societies. The analysis shows how far the plight of Jews in each country differed extremely. The emancipation of France’s Jews was the product of the Revolution, and in Germany, of Napoleonic occupation; in France it was a fast process, but in Germany a development that was prolonged over decades; in France political emancipation preceded and facilitated economic and social incorporation, while the opposite occurred in Germany. The variations in the dominant cultures account for these differences in the plights of Jews, who exhibited quite similar orientations in both societies. Modernity itself, however, did not bring about the end of Jewish communities in either of these coun-

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tries, independently from the prevailing orientations—which was the common denominator of the two situations at the time. Sztompka considers the issue of conflicting orientations between minority and majority groups from the viewpoint of the integration of Eastern Europe into the European Union. The very process, he says, is possible because of the civilizational ground common to Western and Eastern Europe—Greek philosophy, Roman legalism and Judeo-Christian values. Which is not to deny that structural models adopted in Western Europe and the strength of Slavic movements in the East have long hampered integrative drives. Moreover, the “Homo Sovieticus” that was glorified in the USSR’s satellite-states after 1945 prevented rapprochement. The collapse of the Soviet Empire was to ignite the “return to Europe” at the level of collective identity. Though dormant historical enmities may still reawaken and the collapse of the communist bloc, the author acknowledges, has effectively caused the reaffirmation of old, latent national, ethnic, religious and cultural primordialisms. Moreover, Western Europe’s anti-Americanism, which is unknown in the East, may also create difficulties of its own. In a different context, Tambiah focuses on the Hindu-Muslim divide that is kept on the boil by the Kashmir dispute. Ever since 1947, ideologists of Hindu nationalism view the Muslims in India as the enemy within, and Pakistan’s Muslims as the enemy without. This conflict has its genesis in colonial late nineteenth century, and subsequently in post-independence nation-state making, in a plural democratic society dominated by majority politics marginalizing minorities. Although India was greatly affected by Islamic incursions and conquests, and the conflict endured over a long period, there is no tradition of contrasting antithetically Muslim and Hindu polities and religious systems. Yet, in today India one may see a rising level of rejection of Muslims accompanying a strand of anxiety regarding the alleged conversion of Hindus to Islam and Christianity. “Hinduism under siege” has become a rallying cry. Exemplified by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and on the other side by militant Muslims, the Hindu-Muslim cleavage is being assimilated to the grand theme of the “clash of civilizations.” Roniger explores again a very different environment—Latin America. In the 1980s and early 1990s, most Ibero-American countries embraced democracy and neoliberalism after years of authoritarian regimes. Democracy seemed then to herald as a new age. Yet already by the

24


late 1990s, both democracy and the new economic policies were discredited. Though most citizens still support democracy, their trust in the new system is decreasing, engendering institutional fragility, as several countries on the continent went through economic disarray. Democracy, it is true, still persists despite eventual outbreaks of violence but security concerns are now expressed in tendencies to seclusion along class and ethnic lines. Urban spaces become “privatized,” with groups refraining from entering each other’s neighborhoods. Accountability of the state and its institutions has eroded, and while elections are being held, disenchantment with politicians is profound. Politicians have in fact revived clientelism and populism. Seemingly, and according to the singularity of its own context and basic orientations, Latin America is one more example of the importance of original codifications of the social order in the unfolding of social pluralism and group confrontations. Martinelli brings us back to Europe by discussing the formation of identity on this continent which, in recent decades, is undergoing far-reaching transformation. His contention is that the basic elements of the European culture make up a code that, although differently declined in geo-historical contingencies, identifies a “European-specific” character. Its central core is the opposing-complimentary relation of rationalism and individualism. Another element is the nation-state where the nation represents collective primordial goals, and the state organized rationality. Democracy is still another component, and so is the relation to Christianity which distinguishes the temporal from the sacred. As a whole, these elements—loaded with inner contradictions—are not equally pervasive everywhere but are all relevant to the making of European identity. This is not to deny that European history has also been the source of aggressions and crimes, and in this respect, contemporary European identity is necessarily an object of reflexive reassertion that must be built around a morally defensible project concerned with a multicultural future. Epilogue: Modernity as program The practice of pluralism in the context of civilizational diversity explains how we can look at contemporary societies and at their development, in a manner that leaves room for convergence across civilizational spaces. Boudon proposes here an idea that sets in rela-

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tion the divergences and converges of civilizational developments. He returns to the classics of sociology reminding Durkheim’s sentence that “individualism, free-thinking is a phenomenon which begins nowhere, but which develops continuously through the course of history.” The social context, in other words, is taken into account by individuals, but their behaviors and the way they view their interests cannot be reduced to it. Actors, to some degree, are autonomous in thought and action. This position converges with Weber’s when he says that individuals are persons to be treated as citizens. It is under this angle that the social evolution represents the enfolding of “programs.” The invention twenty centuries ago of the notion of person was a crucial step in the realization of the Western program which is present throughout history, notwithstanding the regressions. It requests endorsing always better means to promote it. Accordingly, the individualistic idea is irreversible. The pluralistic extension of rights today is to be viewed as a development of the program that started with the notion of person and came up to the exigency of respect for the many possible ways of human selfrealization. Rationalization does not mean that societies are deemed to become standardized and the persistence of various cultures does not imply that increasing rationalization is not at work. The programmatist theory, a version of Eisenstadt’s “open-ended program”, shows that new ideas can be realized in indefinite fashions. Still widening the scope of this book’s overall discussion in view of its conclusion, Eisenstadt elaborates further on the idea of modernity as a program, adding to Boudon, that this program may convey both constructive and destructive aspects. He argues that identities are ingrained in the contradiction between humans’ flexible biological program and uncompromising life finitude, a contradiction that generates existential anxiety and a predisposition to construct a realm dominated by the sacred. The elaboration, under the influence of ontological premises, of collective boundaries expresses the search for order distinguishing the holy from the profane, defining —within specific situations and power configurations—similarities among “ins” and contrasts with “outs.” The constructive dimension of identities lies in the fact that they generate trust; their destructive dimension is bound to exclusiveness and ambivalence toward the social order, which may develop tendencies to sacrilege and violence. What is new within the frame of the modern project is that collective identities are no longer taken as given implying reflexive problematization,

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contestation and divergences of visions, they may become factors of conflictual mobilization. In the frame of nation-states, identities may even involve intrinsic tensions between the primordialism of the nation and the universalism of citizenship, favoring the influence of ideologies which justify violence. It is insofar as the primordial components of identities remain intimately interwoven with civil and universalistic components and allow for pluralistic arrangements, that their primeval barbarism may come under control. All in all, this volume deals with the comparison of modernities, from a general perspective of civilizational analysis, focusing on pluralism-versus-homogeneity tensions. Such tensions which can already be read in the descriptions of the axial age, come out with the greatest clarity in both the plurality and pluralism of modernities. The plurality of modernities stems from the variety of civilizations and cultural traditions that modernity encounters and combines with, through its expansion from Europe to the rest of the world. At the level of the individual setting, pluralism-versus-homogeneity tensions are generated by modernity’s spreading out among groups originating from different civilizational spaces or cultural legacies. Such encounters generate the different modernities which we observe all around, and the differences lead to both misunderstandings and conflicts, and dialogical options and enriching experiences. These differences widely account for the variety of challenges facing modernity in different societies and among different groups and which, in one way or another, often relate to the tensions endemic to modernity itself and which have their roots in its historical development— starting from the tension opposing universalistic aspects and primordial commitments. Such tensions spark off—in every combination of circumstances, under forms of its own—the political organization of social forces leading to conflicts that have become routine reality. No few examples, however, show that conflicts may directly concern the premises themselves of the social order and develop into relentlessly destructive forces causing bifurcations from “modernity programs”. It is this kind of tensions that Huntington discusses in “Who are we? (2004) where he investigates the acuteness of the challenges facing today’s America: “We Americans” face a substantive problem of national identity . . . Are we a “we,” one people or several? If we are a “we,” what distinguishes us from the “thems” who are not us? Race, religion, ethnicity, values, culture, wealth, politics, or what? Is the United States, as some have

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argued, a “universal nation,” based on values common to all humanity and in principle embracing all peoples? Or are we a Western nation with our identity defined by our European heritage and institutions? Or are we unique with a distinctive civilization of our own, as the proponents of “American exceptionalism” have argued throughout our history? Are we basically a political community whose identity exists only in a social contract embodied in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents? Are we multicultural, bicultural, or unicultural, a mosaic or a melting pot? Do we have any meaningful identity as a nation that transcends our subnational ethnic, religious, racial identities? (page 9)

These questions may take on different formulations in different settings but it seems that their substance is not alien to any modernity across the planet. It is this volume’s intention to delve into these pluralism-versus-homogeneity tensions of modernities which attack notions like social control, public authority, social division and cultural unification. Such notions codify what Norbert Elias means by “the civilizing process” and these pages show their dialectical relation to the idea of “decivilizing process”. The juxtaposition of these two question us about the moral evolution of mankind.

PART ONE

THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF MODERNITY

CHAPTER ONE

MODERNITY IN SOCIO-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Shmuel N. Eisenstadt Introduction I. The continual tensions and confrontations between pluralistic and totalistic tendencies constitute not only a basic fact in the constitution of modern institutional orders—but also a central component of the ideological dimension of these orders, and those confrontations have been of central importance in shaping the development of modern societies. In order to understand this fact, it is necessary to emphasize that modernity has to be viewed—indeed, following very much Weber’s indications—as a distinct civilization, with distinct institutional and cultural characteristics. According to this view, the core of modernity is first the crystallization and development of a mode or modes of interpretation of the world, or, to follow Cornelius Castoriadis’ later terminology, of a distinct social imaginaire, a combination of ontological vision, of a distinct cultural program, with the development of a set or sets of new institutional formations—the central core of both being an unprecedented openness and uncertainty.1 It entailed some very distinct shifts in the conception of human agency, of its autonomy, and of its place in the flow of time. Second—going to some extent beyond Weber, but as I shall show, at least implicit in his work—is that this civilization, the distinct cultural program with its institutional implications, which crystallized first in Western Europe and then spread into other parts of Europe, to the Americas and later on throughout the world, gave rise to continually changing cultural and institutional patterns that constituted different responses to the challenges and possibilities inherent in the core characteristics of the distinct civilizational premises of modernity.

1

Eisenstadt, 2001b, pp. 320–340; Castoriadis, 1991.

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shmuel n. eisenstadt

II. In this analysis I shall follow James D. Faubion’s recent exposition of Weber’s conception of modernity: Weber finds the existential threshold of modernity in a certain deconstruction: of what he speaks of as the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow a meaningfully and ethically oriented cosmos. What he asserts—what in any event might be extrapolated from his assertions—is that the threshold of modernity has its epiphany precisely as the legitimacy of the postulate of a divinely preordained and fated cosmos has its decline; that modernity emerges, that one or another modernity can emerge, only as the legitimacy of the postulated cosmos ceases to be taken for granted and beyond reproach. Countermoderns reject that reproach, believe in spite of it . . . One can extract two theses: whatever else they may be, modernities in all their variety are responses to the same existential problematic. The second: whatever else they may be, modernities in all their variety are precisely those responses that leave the problematic in question intact, that formulate visions of life and practice neither beyond, nor in denial of it but rather within it, even in deference to it . . .2

Thus, the core of this program was first that the premises and legitimation of the social, ontological and political orders were no longer taken for granted; second, that concomitantly there developed within this program a very intensive reflexivity around the basic ontological premises as well as around the bases of social and political order of authority of society—a reflexivity which was shared even by the most radical critics of this program, who in principle denied the legitimacy of these premises. The second core of this program was the quest for the emancipation of man from fetters of “external” authority or tradition, and the closely related “naturalization” of the cosmos, man and society. It is because of the fact that all the responses to the breakdown of the traditional order leave the problematic intact, the reflexivity which developed in the program of modernity went beyond that which crystallized in the Axial Civilizations. This reflexivity focused not only on the possibility of different interpretations of the transcendental visions and basic ontological conceptions prevalent in a society or societies, but came to question the very givenness of such

2

James D. Faubion, 1993, pp. 113–115.

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visions and of the institutional patterns related to them. It gave rise to the awareness of the existence of the multiplicity of such visions and patterns, and of the possibility that such visions and conceptions can indeed be contested.3 Such awareness was closely connected with two central components of the modern project, emphasized in the early studies of modernization by Dan Lerner and later by Alex Inkeles. The first such component is the recognition, among those becoming and being modernized—as illustrated by the famous story in Lerner’s book about the grocer and the shepherd—of the possibility of undertaking a great variety of roles beyond any fixed or ascriptive ones, and the concomitant receptivity to different communication messages which promulgate such open possibilities and visions. Second, there is the recognition of the possibility of belonging to wider translocal, possibly also changing, communities.4 This reflexivity also entailed a conception of the future in which various possibilities which can be realized by autonomous human agency—or by the march of history— are open. Concomitantly, closely related to such awareness and central to this cultural program there developed an emphasis on the autonomy of man; his or her—but in the initial formulation of this program certainly “his”—emancipation from the fetters of traditional political and cultural authority and the continuous expansion of the realm of personal and institutional freedom and activity. Such autonomy entailed several dimensions: first, exploration of nature and its laws; and second, active construction, mastery of nature, possibly including human nature and society. In parallel, this program entailed a very strong emphasis on the autonomous participation of members of society in the constitution of social and political order and on autonomous access by all members of the society to these orders and their centers. Out of the conjunctions of these conceptions there developed a belief that society could be actively formed by conscious human activity. Two basic complementary but also potentially contradictory

3 4

S.N. Eisenstadt, 1982; idem (ed.), 1986c. D. Lerner, 1958; A. Inkeles and D.H. Smith, 1974.

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views of the best ways to do this developed within this program. First, the program as it crystallized above all in the Great Revolutions gave rise, perhaps for the first time in human history, to the belief that it was possible to bridge the gap between the transcendental and mundane orders, to realize through conscious human actions in the mundane orders, in social life, some of the utopian, eschatological visions; second, there was increasing acceptance of the legitimacy of multiple individual and group goals and interests and of multiple interpretations of the common good.5 III. All these characteristics of the cultural program of modernity entailed, to use Claude Lefort’s terminology, “the loss of the markers of certainty” and, to go beyond Lefort—and very much in line with Weber’s analysis—the search for their restoration was manifested in the major institutional arenas of modern societies—in the political arena, in the constitution of collectivities and collective identities as well as in the visions of known personalities, of civilized premises, they were constituted as an integral part of the modern project. Thus, in greater detail, the modern program also entailed a radical transformation of the conceptions and premises of the political order, of the constitution and definition of the political arena, and of the basic characteristics of the political process. The core of the new conceptions was the breakdown of traditional legitimation of the political order, the concomitant opening up of different possibilities for the constitution of such order, and the consequent contestation about how political order was to be constituted to no small extent by human actors.6 By virtue of all these characteristics, the modern political program combined orientations of rebellion and intellectual antinomianism with strong orientations to center-formation and institution-building, giving rise to social movements and movements of protest as a continual and central component of the political process. It was within the framework of these characteristics of the modern program that there developed within it the distinct problematic of the charismatic dimensions of human activity

5 6

S.N. Eisenstadt, 1999b; idem, 2001b. Lefort, 1986; idem, 1988; Eisenstadt, 1999b.


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that constituted a central component of Weber’s analysis in general, and especially of modern societies. The breakdown of the traditional legitimation of the political order was closely connected with the transformation in modern societies of the basic characteristics of the political arena and processes—especially their “openness.” The most important of these characteristics were, first, the charismatization of the center, and the quest of the periphery to participate in the constitution of their center. Second was a strong emphasis on at least potentially active participation by the periphery of society, by all its members, in the political arena. Third were the strong tendencies of the centers to permeate the periphery and of the periphery to impinge on the center, blurring the distinctions between center and periphery. Fourth was the combination of the charismatization of the center or centers with the incorporation of themes and symbols of protest mentioned already above—equality and freedom, justice and autonomy, solidarity and identity. These themes became central components of the modern project of human emancipation. It was indeed the incorporation of such themes of protest into the center that heralded the radical transformation of various sectarian utopian visions from peripheral views to central components of the political and cultural program.7 Symbols of protest—equality and freedom, justice and autonomy, solidarity and identity—which can be found in the margins, peripheries, or in movements of protest in all human societies, became central components of the modern project of human emancipation. The incorporation in the modern political program, in the modern imaginaire, of such themes of protest into the center heralded the radical transformation of popular and/or sectarian utopian visions from peripheral or subterranean views into central components of the political and cultural program, and became also the ideological bases of the legitimation of modern regimes—as can be seen in the trilogy of the French Revolution—liberté, egalité, fraternité. The quest of the periphery or peripheries for participation in the social, political, and cultural orders, as it was closely interwoven with the incorporation of themes of protest into the center, and with the concomitant possible transformation of the center, was indeed often

7

Eisenstadt, 1999b.

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guided by the various attempts to reconstitute the markers of certainty in the political arena grounded in utopian visions—visions promulgated by various social activists, above all by the major social movements that developed as an inherent component of the modern political process. Out of the combination of the transformation of the incorporation of symbols and demands of protest into the central symbolic repertoire of society, and of the recognition of the legitimacy of multiple interests and of visions of social order, the continuous restructuring of center-periphery relations and of the reconstitution of the realm of the political has become a central component of political process and dynamics in modern societies. The various processes of structural change and dislocation which took place continually in modern societies as a result of the development of capitalism, of economic changes, urbanization, changes in the process of communication, and of the new political formations have led in modern societies not only to the promulgation by different groups of various concrete grievances and demands, but also to a growing quest for participation in the broader social and political order and in the central arenas thereof—indeed in the reconstitution thereof. These demands for participation in the center were closely connected with the crystallization of the basic characteristics of the modern political processes—the common denominator of which has been the openness thereof. While these characteristics are naturally most visible in open, democratic or pluralistic regimes, they are also inherent in autocratic and totalitarian regimes even if the latter attempt to regulate and control them in such a way as seemingly to “close” them. The first of these aspects of the political process in modern societies, attesting to such openness, has been the emergence of a new type of “political class” or “classes”—and of new types of political activists—a non-ascriptive class, the recruitment to which was in principle, if not in fact, open to everybody. The second is the continual attempts of that “class” or those “classes” and activists to mobilize political support through open public contestations. The third is the fact that such attempts at the mobilization of such support and governance are closely related to the promulgation of different policies and their implementation. Fourth are the very strong tendencies—unparalleled in any other regimes, with the possible, but very partial, exception of some of the city-states of antiquity—of


37

potential politicization of many problems and demands of various sectors of the society and of conflicts between them. It was in close relation to these tendencies that there developed in modern societies the continual struggle about the redefinition of the realm of the political which has been promulgated above all by different social movements. Unlike in most other political regimes in the history of mankind, the drawing of the boundaries of the political has in itself constituted one of the major foci of open political contestation and struggle in modern societies, and it was such contestation that constituted one of the most important manifestations of the loss of markers of certainty and of the search for their restoration. IV. The same basic dynamics developed also with respect to the distinctive mode of constitution of the boundaries of collectivities and collective identities that developed in modern societies. The most distinct characteristic thereof, very much in line with the general core characteristics of modernity, was that such constitution was continually problematized. Collective identities were no longer taken as given or as preordained by some transcendental vision and authority, or by perennial customs. They constituted foci of contestations and struggles, often couched in highly ideological terms.8 These contestations and struggles were focused around the basic characteristics of the constitution of modern collectivities, the most important among which were first the development of new concrete definitions of the basic components of collective identities—the civil, primordial, and universalistic and transcendental “sacred” ones—and of the ways they were institutionalized. Second, there developed a strong tendency to absolutize these components in ideological terms. Third, the construction of political boundaries and those of the cultural or “ethnic” and national collectivities became closely connected. Fourth, territorial boundaries of such collectivities were emphasized, giving rise to continual tension between their territorial and/or particularistic components and broader, potential universalistic ones. A central component in the constitution of modern collective identities was the self-perception of a society and its perception by other 8 Eisenstadt and Giesen, 1995, pp. 72–102; Eisenstadt, 2002b, pp. 33–87; Shils, 1975, pp. 111–126.

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societies as “modern,” as the bearer of the distinct modern cultural and political program—and its relations from this point of view to other societies—whether those societies that claim also to be—or are seen as—bearers of this program, and various “others.” The crystallization of such different modes of institutional arenas, of political order and collective identity and personality, constituted in modern societies continual foci of contestation and struggles, and focused around the tensions and contradictions that were inherent in the cultural program of modernity which were borne in modern societies by many political activists and intellectuals, especially by the major social movements. The combination and continual interweaving between these struggles has become one of the hallmarks of the dynamics of modern societies. It was indeed one of the most distinct characteristics of the modern scene that the constitution of collective boundaries and consciousness could also become a focus of distinct social movements— the national or nationalistic ones, and which were explicitly explored or implicitly indicated by Weber. While in many modern societies, as for instance England, France, and Sweden, the crystallization of new national collectivities and identities, of different types of nation states took place, without the national movements playing an important role, the potentiality of such movements existed in all modern societies. In some societies— in Central and Eastern Europe, some Asian and African, and to some extent in Latin-American societies—they played a crucial role in the development of the new nation-states. Parallel tendencies developed within the modern program with respect to the promulgation first of very distinctive conceptions of the formation of human personality, of the civilized person, emphasizing the autonomy of man and of the importance of the self—of its autonomy and self-regulation. Second, parallel tendencies developed with respect to the symbolic definitions, usually couched in highly ideological terms, of the relations between different arenas of life such as a family and occupation, work, and culture; between public and private realms; between different life-spaces; between different age-spans; between the sexes; between different social classes and of the different spaces of social and cultural life, together with the development of very specific symbolic institutional and organizational linkages and combinations between them, as well as also specific visions of history and “civilizing” vision or visions. These


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visions of the civilized person and of the structures of life-spaces were promulgated through the construction of specific narratives of history, of literature in which the visions of the best collectivity, of “civilized man” were continually represented and institutionalized through the major socializing and communicative agencies such as schools, armies and collective activities, and public ceremonials and festivities. Antinomies and tensions in the cultural and political program of modernity V. These contestations around different political programs, constitution of collectivities, of the visions of civilized persons—constituted part of the perennial search for the restoration of markers of certainty in modern societies. These contestations were to a very high extent interwoven with the internal antinomies and contradictions inherent in the modern program; closely related as they were to the various meta-narratives of modernity—to follow Tiryakian’s felicitous expression—the Christian, the gnostic and the chthonic9—giving rise to continual critical discourse and political contestations which focused on the relations, tensions and contradictions between the various premises of the modern cultural program and between these premises and the institutional developments in modern societies. But this search could never be fully realized, not only because of the internal characteristics of the cultural program of modernity, of the continual confrontation with the continually developing institutional reality, but also because the concrete contours of the different cultural and institutional continuous patterns of modernity as they crystallized in different societies have indeed been continually changing, as we shall analyze in greater detail later. The importance of these tensions was fully recognized in the classical sociological literature—Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, and above all indeed Weber—and was later taken up in the thirties, above all in the Frankfurt school in the so-called “critical” sociology—which, however, mainly focused on the problems of fascism, but then became neglected in post-Second World War studies of modernization. Lately it has again come to the forefront to constitute a continual component of the analysis of modernity.10 9 10

Tiryakian, 1996, pp. 99–118. For instance: Joas, 2002.

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The basic antinomies of modernity constituted a radical transformation of those inherent in Axial civilizations—namely, first, those focused on the awareness of a great range of possibilities of transcendental visions and of the range of ways of their possible implementation; second, on the tension between reason and revelation or faith (or their equivalents in the non-monotheistic Axial civilizations); and third, on the problématique of the desirability of attempts at full institutionalization of these visions in their pristine form. The transformation of these antinomies and tensions in the cultural program of modernity focused first on the evaluation of major dimensions of human experience, and especially on the place of reason in the construction of nature, of human society and human history; and on the concomitant possible problem of the bases of true morality and autonomy; second, or the tension between reflexivity and active construction of nature and society; third, between totalizing and pluralistic approaches to human life and the constitution of society; and fourth, between control and autonomy, or discipline and freedom. The first major tension that developed within the cultural program of modernity was that with respect to the primacy or relative importance of different dimensions of human existence. This antinomy focused on the evaluation of the relative importance, indeed predominance of reason as against the emotional and aesthetic dimension of human existence, often equated especially in the romantic literature with various vital forces often seen as epitomizing the autonomy of human will, as well as with so-called primordial components in the construction of collective identities. The emphasis on the emotional or “expressivist” dimension of human experience which could find its embodiment in the authenticity of community, while often oriented against universalizing of perception of reason in the Enlightenment, yet shared with it the strong emphasis on the autonomy of human will and activity inherent in the cultural program of modernity. Closely related were tensions between different conceptions of the bases of human morality, especially whether such morality can be based on or grounded in universal principles based above all in reason, in instrumental rationality or in multiple rationalities; and/or in multiple concrete experiences and traditions of different human communities. The second tension that developed within the cultural program of modernity was that between different conceptions of human auto-


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nomy and of its relation to the constitution of man, society and of nature. Of special importance in this context was the tension between reflexivity and the critical exploration of nature, man, society on the one hand, and a very strong emphasis on the mastery, even construction of nature and society, on the other. The emphasis on mastery of nature and on active construction of society could become closely connected with the tendency, inherent in cognitive instrumental conceptions of nature to emphasize the radical dichotomy between subject and object, and between man and nature—reinforcing that radical criticism which claimed the cultural program of modernity necessarily entailed an alienation of man from nature and from society. Closely related has been the tension between, on the one hand, the emphasis on human autonomy, the autonomy of man, of the human person and, on the other hand, the strong restrictive control dimensions—analyzed among others, even if in an exaggerated way, from different but complementary points of view by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault—which were rooted in the institutionalization of this program according to the technocratic and/or moral visionary conceptions or in other words, to follow Peter Wagner’s formulation between freedom and control.11 The tension which was perhaps the most critical, in ideological and political terms alike, has been that between totalizing and pluralistic visions—between the view which accepts the existence of different values and rationalities as against the view which conflates such different values and above all different rationalities in a totalistic way. This tension developed above all with respect to the very conception of reason and its place in the constitution of human society—a central focus of Weber’s analysis. It was manifest for instance, as Stephen Toulmin has shown,12 even if in a rather exaggerated way, in the difference between the more pluralistic conceptions of Montaigne or Erasmus which have entailed also the recognition and legitimizing of other cultural characteristics of human experience as against the totalizing vision of reason promulgated by Descartes. Among the most important such conflations of different rationalities has been that version of the sovereignty of reason which was often 11 Elias, 1978–1982; idem, 1983; Foucault, 1965; idem, 1973; idem, 1975; idem, 1988; Wagner, 1994. 12 Toulmin, 1990.

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identified as the major message of the Enlightenment and which subsumed value-rationality (Wertrationalität) or substantive rationality under instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) in its technocratic mode or under a totalizing moralistic utopian vision. In some cases, as for instance in the Communist ideology, there may develop some combination of both the technocratic and the moralistic utopian visions under one totalistic canopy. Concomitant tension between totalizing, absolutizing as against more pluralistic tendencies developed also in the definition of other dimensions of human experience—especially the emotional ones. In all institutional arenas and arenas of cultural creativity there developed tensions between emphasis on discipline with strong emphasis on guidance and regulation of the individual, as against autonomy and self-expression; between strong emphasis on clearly structured, strict totalizing conceptions of man and relatively sharp boundaries between different spheres of life and, on the other hand, more multifaceted and open ones. It was indeed this tension—between the view which accepts the existence of different values, commitments and different rationalities; of pluralistic multifaceted visions and practices as against the view which conflates such different values and rationalities in totalistic ways, with strong tendencies to their absolutization—that has been, especially when combined with the other tensions, probably the most critical from the point of view of the development of the different cultural and institutional patterns of modernity, and of the possible destructive potentialities thereof. All these tensions, especially the one between the totalizing and more pluralistic conceptions of constitution of human society, history and nature and of the place of human agency in these constructions; between some type of an overarching “logocentric,” usually some “grand narrative” and between a more pluralistic conception of meaning of life and of the good society, and of constitution of society, between emphases on different dimensions of human existence, between control and autonomy have existed from the very beginning of the promulgation of the cultural program of modernity; and between the universalistic components of cultural program of modernity and the traditions of the respective societies in which it was institutionalized and they constituted continual components in the continual far-reaching changes in the development of this program throughout modern history.


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It was within the framework of these characteristics of the modern program that there developed within it the distinct problematic of the charismatic dimensions of human activity that constituted a central component of Weber’s analysis in general, and especially of modern societies. Those tensions inherent in the cultural program of modernity were reinforced by those that developed with the institutionalization of this program. It was in connection with these processes of institutionalization that there developed those themes promulgated by Weber which were usually interpreted as the core of his view on modernity—namely the emphasis on the processes of disenchantment rooted in the flattening by virtue of the growing institutional rationalizational bureaucratization of the development of the modern world, of the creative dimension inherent in visions of modernity promulgated in the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and the Revolutions, which led to the crystallization of modernity; in the contradiction between an overreaching vision through which the modern world becomes meaningful and the fragmentation of such meaning generated by the growing autonomous development of the different institutional—be it the economic, the political or the “cultural”—arenas, giving rise to life in the iron cage and the concomitant processes of disenchantment (Entzauberung). VI. All the characterizations of the modern order emphasize very strongly the inherent fragility of modern order, of modern societies, as well as, even if perhaps less explicitly, their changeability and variability. These tensions, and the continual attempts to overcome them, to insert, as it were, new markers of certainty into the modern order, developed in all modern societies—but beyond their common core they developed in different ways in different modern societies. The institutional orders of modernity that developed with the institutionalization of the cultural and political orders of modernity did not—contrary to the assumptions of classical theories of modernization of the fifties, and even of the earlier classics of sociology like Spencer and even to some extent Durkheim, and which were very dominant in Weber’s time—develop in a uniform way throughout the world. Rather they developed in multiple patterns, in patterns of continually changing multiple modernities. This can be seen already with respect to the central dimension of the political program


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of modernity, referred to above, namely the promulgation of protest. The discourses of justice and the political mechanisms of regime change differ among different modern societies according to different cultural contexts. Sombart’s old question “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”13 formulated in the first decade of the twentieth century is perhaps the first recognition of such variability of the characteristic movements of protest in different modern societies—a variability which became even more visible when moving to other countries—Japan, India or Muslim societies. In all of these societies there developed modern institutional and ideological patterns and movements of protest which while sharing these basic mode orientations yet differed greatly from the “original” European ones and from each other. All these attested to the heterogeneity within the modern project; or, in other words, to the continual development of multiple and changing modernities. VII. It is of special importance for the analysis of continually changing multiple modernities that such distinctive patterns of modernity, different in many radical ways from the “original” European ones, crystallized not only in non-Western societies, in societies that developed in the framework of the various great civilizations—Muslim, Indian, Buddhist, or Confucian—under the impact of European expansion and in their ensuing confrontation with the European program of modernity. They evolved also—indeed initially—within the framework of the Western expansion in societies in which seemingly purely Western institutional frameworks developed in the Americas. Whereas it was sometimes assumed that European patterns of modernity were repeated in the Americas, it is now clear that North America, Canada, and Latin America developed from the start in distinctive ways. Indeed, throughout the Americas we can trace the crystallization of new civilizations, and not just, as L. Hartz claimed, of “fragments” of Europe.14 In these Western institutional and cultural frameworks, derived and brought over from Europe, there developed not just local variations of the European model or models, but radically new institutional and ideological patterns. It is quite possible that this was the first crystallization of new civilizations since that

13 14

Sombart, 1976. Hartz, 1964.


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of the great “Axial” civilizations and also the last to date. The crystallization of different modernities in the Americas—a fact to which Weber was very sensitive in his analysis of the North American (U.S.) experience—attests that even within the broad framework of Western civilization—however defined—there developed not just one but multiple cultural programs and institutional patterns of modernity.15 This was of course even more so with respect to the institutional orders that developed beyond the West. VIII. One of the most interesting illustrations of the crystallization of such distinct programs of modernity beyond the West is Japan.16 Japan provides indeed one of the most interesting case-studies, not only from the point of view of the comparative study of modern societies, but also from the more general point of view of the analytical and empirical distinctions between the structural and organizational, and the cultural dimensions of human activity in terms of the pattern variables. While in purely structural-organizational terms, modern Japanese society developed strong achievement and universalistic criteria, yet these criteria went together with a very strong immanentist orientation/setting and were embedded in the particularistic social setting— a combination which crystallized already in the Meiji restoration and state. The Japanese program of modernity ushered in by the Meiji Restoration was rooted in the non-Axial, immanentist ontologies, and it guided the crystallization of the Meiji state and later on the development of modern Japanese society, and shaped to some extent at least the specific characteristics of the major institutional formations of modern Japan. These formations were not grounded in the conceptions of principled, metaphysical individualism or in a principled confrontation between state and society as two distinct ontological entities. One of the most important such characteristics was the strong tendency to the conflation of the national community, of the state and of society. Such conflation has had several repercussions on the structuring of the ground rules of the political arena, the most important of which have been the development, first of a weak concept

15 16

Eisenstadt, 2002c; Roniger and Sznajder, 1998. Eisenstadt, 1996b.


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of the state as distinct from the broader overall, in modern terms national community (national being defined in sacral, natural and primordial terms); second, of a societal state characterized by a strong tendency to emphasize guidance rather than direct regulation and permeation of the periphery by the center; and third, a very weak development of an autonomous civil society; although, needless to say, elements of the latter, especially the structural, organizational components thereof (such as different organizations) have not been missing. The specific type of civil society that developed in Japan is perhaps best illustrated by the continual construction of new social spaces which provides semi-autonomous arenas in which new types of activities, consciousness and discourse develop, which however do not impinge directly on the center. Those participating in them do not have autonomous access to the center, and are certainly not able to challenge its premises. The relations between state and society have been rather effected in the mode of patterned pluralism, of multiple dispersed social contracts.17 Closely connected to these characteristics of civil society in modern Japan there has also developed a rather distinct pattern of political dynamics, especially of the impact of movements of protest on the center. The most important characteristic of this impact was the relatively weak principled ideological confrontation with the center—above all the lack of success of leaders of such confrontational movements to mobilize wide support; the concomitant quite far-ranging success in influencing, if often indirectly, the policies of the authorities and the creation of new autonomous but segregated social spaces in which activities promulgated by such movements could be implemented. Accordingly, changes in the types of political regimes, or in the relative strength of different groups, have not necessarily implied in Japan changes in principles of legitimation and in the basic premises and ground rules of the social and political order. All these characteristics of the political arena and of the relations between nation, country, state and society were very closely related to the specific strongly immanentist and particularistic ontological conceptions and their dynamics that have prevailed in Japan through17

Ibid.


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out its history. The strong universalistic orientations inherent in Buddhism, and more latently in Confucianism, were subdued and “nativized” in Japan. When Japan was defined as a divine nation, this meant a nation protected by the gods, being a chosen people in some sense, but not a nation carrying God’s universal mission. Such transformation had far-reaching impacts on some of the basic premises and conceptions of the social order such as the Mandate of Heaven, with its implication for the conception of authority and the accountability of rulers, as well as conceptions of community. Unlike China, where in principle the emperor, even if a sacral figure, was “under” the Mandate of Heaven, in Japan he was sacred and seen as the embodiment of the sun and could not be held accountable to anybody, only the shoguns and other officials—in ways not clearly specified. The historical roots of multiple modernities X. This discussion of the development of multiple institutional modes of modernity clearly indicates that these different cultural programs and institutional patterns of modernity were not shaped, as assumed in some of the earlier studies of modernization as natural evolutionary potentialities of these societies—indeed, potentially of all human societies; or, as in the earlier criticisms thereof, by the natural unfolding of their respective traditions; nor just by their placement in the new international settings. Rather they were shaped by the continuous interaction between several factors, many of which were indeed mentioned, the most general being the various constellations of power, i.e. different modes of elite contestation and co-optation in different political systems and different ontological conceptions and political ideologies. It was the constellations of these factors that influenced the nature of the emerging discourse of modernity, as borne by various political activists, intellectuals, in conjunction above all with the social movements constituting the major actors like processes of reinterpretation and formation of new institutional patterns. Or, in greater detail, these programs were shaped—very much in line with Weber’s many historical analyses—first by basic premises of cosmic and social order, the basic “cosmologies” that were prevalent in these societies in their “orthodox” and “heterodox” formulations

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alike as they have crystallized in these societies throughout their histories. A second shaping factor was the pattern of institutional formations that developed within these civilizations through their historical experience, especially in their encounter with other societies or civilizations. The third set of factors shaping such programs was the internal tensions, dynamics and contradictions that developed in these societies in conjunction with the structural-demographic, economic, and political changes attendant on the institutionalization of modern frameworks, and between these processes and the basic premises of modernity. Fourth, the different—continually changing—programs of modernity were shaped by the encounter and continual interaction between the processes mentioned above, and the ways in which the different societies and civilizations were incorporated into the new international systems, and the ways in which they were placed or were able to place themselves, in these systems, to insert or become inserted into the global system. The different international constellations have also to be taken into account as influencing the mode of modernization in a particular context. Fifth, such continually changing contours were shaped by the political struggles and confrontations between different states, and between different centers of political and economic power. Such confrontations developed within Europe with the crystallization of the modern European state system and became further intensified with the crystallization of “world systems” from the sixteenth or seventeenth century on. Sixth, these contours changed in tandem with the shifting hegemonies in the different international systems that developed concomitantly with economic, political, technological, and cultural changes.18 Seventh, such contours were shaped by the fact that the expansion of modernity entailed confrontation between the basic premises of this program and the institutional formations that developed in Western and Northern Europe and other parts of Europe and later in the Americas and Asia: in the Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Japanese civilizations.

18

Tiryakian, 1985, pp. 131–147; idem, 1994, pp. 131–148.


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Last, such changes were rooted in the continual confrontations between on the one hand different interpretations of the basic premises of modernity as promulgated by different centers and elites, and on the other hand the concrete developments, conflicts, and displacements that accompanied the institutionalization of these premises. These confrontations activated the consciousness of the contradictions inherent in the cultural program of modernity and the potentialities conferred by its openness and reflexivity; and gave rise to the continual reinterpretation by different social actors of the major themes of this program, and of the basic premises of their civilizational visions, and of the concomitant grand narratives and myths of modernity. It is the combination of such factors that can also explain some of the puzzling aspects of multiple modernities. Thus to give just one illustration, the combination of the prevalence of pluralistic organization of centers; the relative de-evaluation of the political system as the major arena for the implementation of the basic ontological visions of Hindu civilization and the history of relatively long centralized modern colonial and post-colonial regimes explain the rather astonishing fact that India has developed as a modern, vibrant democracy and continues to be so.19 XI. Most of these variations and changes of the institutional and cultural contours of modernity were closely related to the continual expansion of modernity. This expansion indeed spawned a tendency— rather new and practically unique in the history of mankind—to the development of universal, worldwide institutional and symbolic frameworks and systems. The expansion of modernity, not unlike that of the Great Religions or of great Imperial regimes in past times, undermined the symbolic and institutional premises of the societies incorporated into it, causing very intensive dislocations while at the same time opening up new options and possibilities. Because the expansion of this civilization almost always and continually combined economic, political, and ideological dimension forces to a much longer, its impact on the societies to which it spread was much more intense than in most historical cases. The development of international

19 Eisenstadt, Kahane and Shulman (eds.), 1984; Eisenstadt and Hartman, 1997, pp. 27–55; Hensen, 1999.

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“systems” or frameworks in the wake of military political and economic expansion were not of course by themselves new in the history of mankind, especially in the history of the “great” civilizations. What was new in the modern era was first that the great technological advances and the dynamics of modern economic and political forces made this expansion—the changes and developments attendant on them and their impact on the societies to which it expanded—far more intensive. The expansion of modern civilization which took place first in Europe and then beyond it continually combined economic, political, and ideological aspects and forces, and its impact on the societies to which it expanded was much more extensive and intensive alike than in most historical cases. Accordingly the expansion of modernity evinced in comparison with other civilizations some very distinct characteristics. All of these frameworks were multi-centered and heterogeneous, each generating its own dynamics, continual changes in constant relation to the others. The interrelations among them have never been “static” or unchanging, and the dynamics of these international frameworks or settings gave rise to continuous changes in various modern societies. But it is only in conjunction with the specific cultural programs of modernity as it crystallized first in Europe and then expanded to become continually interpreted throughout the world that the dynamics of these expansions and of the multiple worldwide systems can be understood. The combination of military, political and economic expansion with ideological vision rooted in distinct cultural programs was not, of course, in itself new in the history of mankind. It has indeed been characteristic of all Great Religions, of the Axial Civilizations,—to some extent of the Jewish one, above all of the Christian, Islamic or Confucian and to some extent also of the Buddhist ones. It was also characteristic of the Hellenistic and Roman Empires. But the cultural program of modernity, as it crystallized first in Western Europe from around the seventeenth century was characterized by specific ideological features which entailed some very distinct institutional implications, which are of crucial importance for the understanding of the dynamics of modernity and its expansion. Of crucial importance in this context is the fact that its basic modernity crystallized out of the dynamics of Western and European Christian civilization and societies and that the expansion of modernity entailed its continual impingement on other great civilizations, among them


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the major Axial Civilizations, generating continual confrontations between their premises and those of European modernity. As a result of this, a great variety of modern or modernizing societies, sharing many common characteristics but also evincing great differences among themselves, developed in the different historical contexts. In the crystallization of different institutional and cultural contours of modernities, of central importance was the characteristics of elites and their relations with other social sectors of their respective societies. Thus for instance the specific institutional and cultural dynamics that developed in Japan and which were briefly analyzed above were major characteristics of the elites and their coalitions in Japanese society. The common characteristic of these elites was that they were relatively non-autonomous and their major coalitions was their embedment in groups and settings (contexts) that were mainly defined in primordial, ascriptive, sacral and often hierarchical terms, and much less in terms of specialized functions or of universalistic criteria of social attributes. Linked to these characteristics of the major elites was the relative weakness of autonomous cultural elites. True, many cultural actors—priests, monks, scholars, and the like—participated in such coalitions. But with very few exceptions, their participation was based on primordial and social attributes and on criteria of achievement and social obligations according to which these coalitions were structured, but not any distinct, autonomous criteria rooted in or related to the arenas of cultural specialization in which they were active. These arenas—cultural, religious, or literary—were themselves ultimately defined in primordial-sacral terms, notwithstanding the fact that many specialized activities developed within them. It was the combination of all these factors in combination with its specific political ecological location that also explains the mode of the incorporation of Japan into the modern international systems. Other constellations of elites, their power relation with other social sectors of their respective societies of ontological conceptions carried by them and the impact of international forces and modes of incorporation into the emerging and continually changing international system, gave rise in other societies—be it indeed in the first, classical European modernity, in the Americas or in the multiple modernities that developed in the realm of Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist civilizations, to other ideological and institutional programs of modernity. In all these processes, it was the characteristics of

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elites—especially their autonomy as against being embedded in various particularistic groups, the ontological visions promulgated by them, and the relations between such elites and between them and the broader one—that were of crucial importance. A reassessment of the relations between structural and cultural dimensions of modernity XII. This basic fact that modernity did not develop in a uniform way but in multiple, continually changing patterns—manifest in different types of national and revolutionary states, and later on in the contemporary era in multiple new patterns, calls for a close reexamination of some of the assumptions of the classical theories of modernization, especially of the relations between the structural, institutional and cultural dimensions of modernity. In the classical theories of modernization of 50s and 60s of the twentieth century, it was the trend to continual structural differentiation and the concomitant development of distinct institutional arenas— the economic, the political, the “cultural” and the like—that were often seen as the major institutional core of modernity. There can be no doubt that processes of structural differentiation— so strongly emphasized by many of the classics of sociology—Spencer, Durkheim, and later on in the classical theories of modernization of the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century, constitute a basic component of the modern developments. It is, of course, true that the concrete institutional context of the crystallization and development of modernity—that of the initial phase of the development of capitalism, first mercantile then industrial capitalism, and of their continual expansion involved continually increasing structural differentiation and the development of the attendant potentialities, to follow Karl Deutsch’s nomenclature, for growing social mobilization.20 The crystallization of the cultural program of modernity, of the distinct mode of interpretation of the world and of the attempts to institutionalize it in new patterns, was indeed closely connected historically with the distinct structural-institutional dimensions of modern societies—above all with the decomposition of “older”—previously 20

Deutsch, 1963a, pp. 497–507; idem, 1963b.


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relatively “closed” social formations and of new spaces in which new institutional formations could be formed. While there can be no doubt that such processes constitute a basic component of the historical development of modernity—yet they do not tell the whole story thereof, and it is very important first of all to distinguish between several aspects of the structural components or dimensions of modernity. Thus first, great differences in “scope” or extent of such differentiation between different modern and modernizing societies could be identified. Beyond this, second, the extent to which such institutional arenas were indeed defined and structured as autonomous; as being regulated by their intrinsic rules or values, varied greatly between different societies and within the same society, in the different periods of its historical development; third, and in close relation to the former and most important, the modes in which those different structures or organization were organized and defined and the conflicts attendant on these processes—such as, for instance, industrial conflicts— were regulated, varied greatly between different modern societies, and it is these different modes that provide the core characteristics of the specific multiple complexes of different modern societies. Indeed, in societies—even those with seemingly similar “degrees” of structural differentiation, as for instance in the most fully industrialized societies like the U.S., the different societies of Western Europe, and Japan—the different institutional spheres such as the economy, polity, etc. can be—and indeed were—defined in different ways, entailing different modes of their institutional autonomy. Moreover there is no necessary correlation between any degree or type of structural differentiation, of development of autonomous institutional arenas and specific types of modern institutional formations. Such different formations may develop in societies with relatively similar level of differentiation and conversely relatively similar frameworks—e.g. pluralistic as against authoritarian regimes— may develop in societies with different levels of differentiation of the development of autonomous institutional arenas even if there naturally develop between them important differences in concrete institutional details. Contrary to some of the assumptions of many of the theories of modernization—“liberal” and Marxist alike—there is no necessary correlation between any specific modern institutional form— be it different types of capitalist or “guided” (socialist) economies; between specific types of political regime—pluralistic, authoritarian

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or totalitarian ones and the different components of the modern cultural program. The same is even more true with respect to the relation between the cultural and structural dimensions of modernity. A very strong— even if implicit—assumption of the studies of modernization was that the cultural dimensions or aspects of modernization—the basic cultural premises of Western modernity—are inherently and necessarily interwoven with the structural ones, became highly questionable. The actual developments in these societies have gone far beyond the homogenizing and hegemonic dimensions of the original cultural program of modernity. While the different dimensions of the original Western project have indeed constituted the crucial starting—and continual reference—for the processes that developed among different societies throughout the world, yet those processes did not simply “copy,” as it were, the Western patterns. XIII. Each of these dimensions or aspects of modernity, of modern societies—the structural, the institutional and the cultural ones—are analytically distinct, and they come together in different ways in different historical constellations coalescing in different ways in different historical contexts. Moreover, in one historical case—that of Tokugawa Japan—there developed many institutional, especially economic formations which could have perhaps led to modern market capitalist economy, without a concomitant development of a distinct cultural program of modernity (Randall Collins);21 and it was only under the impact of the West that such a program—indeed of a very distinct type—developed. These different modes of modern institutional order were greatly influenced among other factors by the different ways in which the basic civilizational premises of modernity were interpreted within those societies—or in other words, these modes were greatly influenced by the different interpretations of the central core of modernity—of the cultural program of modernity, very often constituting in each society foci of contestation. It is through the interweaving of such distinct institutional constellations with the different dimensions or components of the new mode of interpretation of the world, of the cultural program of

21

Collins, 1999, ch. 7: “An Asian Route to Capitalism.”


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modernity and the antinomies inherent in them that the various modern societies and their dynamics develop. The destructive components of modernity XIV. The development and expansion of modernity was not, indeed— contrary to the optimistic views of modernity as progress—peaceful. The crystallization of European modernity and its later expansion— was by no means peaceful. Contrary to the optimistic visions of modernity as inevitable progress, the crystallizations of modernities were continually interwoven with internal conflict and confrontation, rooted in the contradictions and tensions attendant on the development of the capitalist systems, and, in the political arena, on growing demands for democratization. The development of modernity bore within it destructive possibilities that were voiced, somewhat ironically, often by some of its most radical critics, who thought modernity to be a morally destructive force, emphasizing the negative effects of certain of its core characteristics. All these factors were compounded by international conflicts, exacerbated by the modern state and imperialist systems. War and genocide were scarcely new phenomena in history. But they became radically transformed, intensified, generating specifically modern modes of barbarism. The ideologization of violence, terror and war—first and most vividly witnessed in the French Revolution—became the most important components of the construction of modern states. The tendency to such ideologies of violence became closely related to the fact that the nation-state became the focus of symbols of collective identity.22 The Holocaust, which took place in the very center of modernity, became a symbol of its negative, destructive potential, of the barbarism lurking within its very core. These destructive forces, the “traumas” of modernity which undermined the great promises thereof, emerged clearly during and after the First World War in the Armenian genocide, became even more visible in the Second World War, above all in the Holocaust, all of them shaking the naive belief in the inevitability of progress and of

22 Giddens and Held, 1982; Schumpeter, 1991; Furet, 1982; Furet and Ozouf, 1989; Joas, 1996, pp. 13–27.

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the conflation of modernity with progress. These destructive forces of modernity were paradoxically ignored or bracketed out from the discourse of modernity in the first two or three decades after the Second World War. Lately they have reemerged again in a most frightening way on the contemporary scene, in the new “ethnic” conflicts in many of the former republics of Soviet Russia, in Sri Lanka, in Kosovo, and in a most terrible way in Cambodia and in African countries, such as Rwanda.

CHAPTER TWO

THE AXIAL CONUNDRUM: BETWEEN HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY Johann P. Arnason Changing interpretations of the Axial Age can be linked to the ongoing self-reflection of Western modernity.1 Both the underlying visions of history and the explicit questions asked by those who tried to make sense of a distant but decisive turning-point relate to modern experiences. This does not mean that we are dealing with a pure projection or (to use an undeservedly popular term) an “invented tradition.” Rather, the ideas in question have matured through a hermeneutical “fusion of horizons” that involves three sets of themes and problems. The debate on the Axial Age, its metahistorical meaning and its world-historical consequences has so far been highly discontinuous, and the main landmarks correspond to markedly different moments in the history of twentieth-century social and historical thought.2 But the shifts reflect a growing inclination to question selfuniversalizing projections of the West from a more comparative worldhistorical perspective, and thus to seek a more balanced starting-point for a discussion of Western exceptionalism (not to be mistaken for an a priori denial of it). At the same time, the attempts to understand a specific historical period, its defining characteristics and the dividing lines that set it apart from earlier and later phases, have followed a logic of their own and led to significant results. Finally, the exemplary cases of intellectual or religious transformation, seen as evidence of some kind of unity across cultural boundaries, also served to outline frameworks for the comparative analysis and mutual understanding of traditions and civilizations that had drawn on separate legacies of the Axial Age. The following comments will focus

1 2

For further discussion of this aspect, see Wagner, 2004. See Arnason, 2004.

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on the two latter themes; but the discussion will then shift to a recent interpretation which exemplifies the broader context of historical and sociological reflection, as well as the specific issues of “axiality” and its long-term-transformative logic. The problem of the Axial Age—more precisely: the question whether we should speak of it as a distinctive and formative historical period—can now, as a result of scholarly work in several interrelated fields, be posed with greater precision than in the first stages of the debate. The chronological setting can only be defined in broad and flexible terms: some earlier writers placed particular emphasis on the sixth century bce, but it now seems clear that comparative analyses of the Axial Age must deal with several centuries around the middle of the last millennium bce.3 During this period, there was undeniably—to quote an author who takes a skeptical view of traditional approaches—“a certain cumulation”4 of innovative changes to the cultural traditions of major civilizational centres, from Ancient Greece to Ancient China. Even this minimalist version of the axial thesis calls for some qualifications. Growing knowledge of early civilizations has brought to light trends and episodes that prefigured the more decisive (or at least conventionally acknowledged) achievements of the Axial Age. So far, however, this line of research is very unequally developed, and it seems unlikely that a balanced picture will ever be possible. Among the crucial cases, the Egyptian tradition is better known than its Mesopotamian counterpart; but the available evidence would still seem to allow for further progress on the latter side. As for the archaic backgrounds to Indian and Chinese transformations, the record is more elusive, the attempts at reconstruction more speculative and the prospects for further work more limited. But given the nature of the sources, the Chinese experience seems somewhat more accessible than the Indian one.5 Finally, there are historical borderline cases that may never be settled: in particular, it is still an open question whether the beginning of the Zoroastrian tradition should be ranked among the most momentous

3 For otherwise very different examples of emphasis on the sixth century BCE, see Burckhardt, 1978 (first published posthumously in 1905), who refers (p. 8) to “a religious movement of the sixth century BC, from China to Ionia”; and Nehru, 1936. 4 Assmann, 2000, p. 291. 5 For a recent interpretation of the Chinese evidence, see Pines, 2002.

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archaic innovations or included in the Axial Age. There is no consensus on the chronology, but growing support for a date in the early last millennium bce (at least among some scholars) may have strengthened the latter view. To sum up, the chronological demarcation of the Axial Age is bound to be fluid and contested, even more so in some cases than others, and more work on its prehistory is likely to raise new questions about its claims to exceptional significance. But if we accept that there are still—on balance—good reasons to regard the period in question as a prima facie challenging problem for comparative history, the next step is to consider the specific meaning and long-term logic of the changes that seem to have taken place in different but similarly formative settings. All interpretations of the Axial Age have centred on cultural (more specifically religious or intellectual) breakthroughs of such epoch-making dimensions that they could not find adequate expression in any simultaneous structural changes. Without entering into the debate between rival theories, a provisional phenomenological view would suggest that axial transformations affect the position and the possible role of cultural patterns within the social-historical world. New cultural orientations lend themselves to more varied social uses: they provide social frameworks for justification on one side and protest on the other, as well as for more detached forms of intellectual life. These innovations presuppose new and more complex ways of articulating the world, whether the primary cultural impetus to that shift comes from religion or philosophy, or from a mode of thought that cuts across conventional distinctions between them. Changes to the relationship between culture and society are reflected on the level of social structures: most obviously, intellectuals as a social group can play a more important role, both directly and through interaction with a broader field of social forces. Finally, the earliest modern attempts to re-envision the Axial Age made much of exemplary individuals—prophets and thinkers—who for the first time appeared as creators of meaning in history. But although the images of charismatic founders cannot be dismissed out of hand, we must now—on the basis of better insight into the mechanisms of tradition-building—allow for retrospective individualization. The question of substantive parallels or affinities between the various transformations is—as will be seen—a very difficult and still hotly debated one. But even the most cautious view of the evidence will, at this stage, admit the striking fact of roughly simultaneous

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transformations, comparable at least in the limited sense defined above, and clearly unexplainable in terms of mutual influences. It is probably true that interaction between different civilizational complexes counted for something in the general intensification of social life that preceded or accompanied the axial turn. Moreover, recent work has thrown new light on specific cases of intercivilizational contacts. The whole early history of Chinese civilization now seems to have been less isolated from the rest of Eurasia than scholars had previously assumed. Relations between India and the Ancient Near East—commercial, cultural and political—were clearly not unimportant, but it seems unlikely that connections can be traced in greater detail. By contrast, the Near Eastern context of Ancient Greek and Israeli innovations is now much better understood. However, all things considered, the broadly defined Axial Age still stands out as an example of separate and internal but prima facie similar developments, more significant than any encounters between cultural worlds. We are, in other words, dealing with contingent parallels of the kind observable in some other historical contexts; such cases invite comparative analysis, but it should always include a sustained effort to clarify and criticize the self-projections that may be built into perceptions of other civilizations and their histories. Ongoing debates in the comparative history of religion and philosophy suggest that analysts of the Axial Age still need to pay attention to that part of the problem. The Axial Age is commonly seen as a prime case of creative effervescence. But the lasting interest in it is also due to the continuity and world-making capacity of the traditions that grew out of this creative turn. Some analysts, mindful of the problems encountered in trying to find a common denominator for separate beginnings, rested their case on these long-term consequences. Marshall Hodgson argued that the Axial Age deserved this label “because it resulted in an enduring geographical and cultural articulation of the citied zone of the Oikumene into regions.”6 Hodgson’s particular emphasis on this aspect was linked to his advocacy of a multi-regional framework for world history in general and Afro-Eurasian history in particular; the evident importance of the Axial Age for that approach made it less urgent to answer the question of contrasts and paral-

6

Hodgson, 1974, p. 112.

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lels between the foundational ideas, figures and initiatives. Hodgson’s reflections on the latter issue were rather inconclusive, and his main theme was the specific history of rival but interrelated monotheistic religions, rather than any broader basis that they might have shared with other traditions. He traced the idea of “a supreme and unique God, not reducible within any image, visible or mental, but expressing a moral dimension in the cosmos”,7 to Irano-Semitic traditions in the Ancient Near east (or the Nile-to-Oxus region, as he preferred to call it). But the monotheistic innovations of the Axial Age did not give rise to a new regional identity. In that sense, this part of the world lagged behind the regional cultural complexes that crystallized around their respective traditions; the weight of its legacy— the oldest civilizations, the first intercivilizational empires and the earliest beginnings of cosmopolitan cultural exchange—seems to have become an obstacle to further changes. The definitive civilizational integration of the region was not achieved until much later: through the Islamic version of monotheism and the Islamicate traditions that took shape within its orbit (Hodgson used the latter term to stress the difference between a religious vision and a more composite civilizational pattern). At the same time, the other monotheistic world religion, which had had a powerful impact on the Nile-to-Oxus region but failed to impose a new identity on its older cultures, maintained its hold and laid foundations for new developments in a less central region. Divergent branches of Christianity became civilizational frameworks for two distinct parts of the European complex that had first emerged as a Greco-Roman cultural world around the Mediterranean. Hodgson’s approach exemplifies a way to define the Axial Age on the basis of enduring and visible effects, rather than contestable and in any case premature interpretations of cultural backgrounds. But further reflection will, whether it begins with the sources or the sequels, necessarily entail an effort to clarify the relationship between the two levels of inquiry. If it is true that the world-historical meaning of the Axial Age can only be understood in light of its multiple legacies, it is equally true that macro-cultural configurations of the kind emphasized by Hodgson derive their distinctive modes of unity and continuity from core meanings, and these meanings exist only in and through ongoing interpretation and reactivation of formative sources.

7

Ibid., p. 115.

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To indicate the questions that would result from the combination of these two perspectives, but cannot be discussed here, a few words may be said about basic differences between the main cases to be considered. All major civilizational complexes incorporate the axial connection into their representative self-definitions (and a more critical discussion must take off from there), but not always in the same way. The most durable and dominant self-defining references to the Axial Age prevailed in the otherwise very different Chinese and Judaic traditions: the imperial and the diasporic civilization par excellence. The multi-faceted Greek legacy did not crystallize into an autonomous and continuous tradition, and its most significant long-term effects unfolded—in markedly discontinuous ways—in civilizations more directly identified with transformations of Jewish monotheism. In the Indian case, the religious and intellectual current most clearly central to the Axial Age—Buddhism—was marginalized and submerged by other traditions, and the Axial Age innovations on which they drew—the foundations of classical Hindu thought— were projected back into a much more remote past. Finally, it seems clear that the uncertain chronology and diffuse historical contours of Zoroastrian religion are not unrelated to the destinies of the Iranian (or Persianate) civilizational formation. After an early and epochmaking imperial venture, tailored to Near Eastern precedents and conditions therefore not closely aligned with indigenous religious traditions of the rulers, the Iranian sphere was overshadowed by ascendant Hellenism; the Sasanian revival of Zoroastrianism, after a historical hiatus that disrupted cultural memory, was then followed by a violent break and effective absorption into another religious culture. The re-emergence of a Persianate civilizational sphere within Islam did not go beyond a very selective restoration of continuity. Among the cultural complexes that can (even if with some reservations) be traced back to the Axial Age, this was clearly the case where the connection was least visible at the level of explicit self-understanding. A proper comparative analysis of traditions and civilizations rooted in the Axial Age would have to link these preliminary bearings to broader perspectives. The overall articulations and qualifications of continuity are embedded in a more complex interplay of ideas and institutions (constellations of the latter kind are the basic components of civilizational frameworks). But at this point, the debate on the

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Axial Age and its legacies faces another set of problems. The historiographical division of labour has, on the whole, not favoured systematic study of the interconnections between ideas and institutions. As for the different civilizational complexes in question, scholarly work on their respective dynamics and trajectories is very unequally developed. Last but not least, the original formulations of the whole problematic were one-sidedly and inevitably Eurocentric, and although significant steps have been taken to correct this bias, there is no denying the need for more sustained work from non-European perspectives. This is an uphill task, and the persistence of Eurocentrism is not the only obstacle to progress. For all these reasons, interpretations of the Axial Age—seen as a formative phase of world history—must translate into long-term research programmes, open to adjustment and revision of basic assumptions. But in that context, strong hypotheses with a speculative thrust—prospecting a field to be further explored by comparative history—can be useful: they may sensitize us to dimensions and implications that would otherwise go unnoticed. Reaffirmations of speculative views might even help to avert the danger of fragmentation into case studies without a connecting project. Gauchet’s interpretation of the Axial Age With the problematic of ideas and institutions, the focus of the discussion shifts towards historical sociology. Eisenstadt’s work on the Axial Age and its civilizational paradigms is the first systematic formulation of that perspective. More precisely, it translates ideas originally developed within the philosophy of history into the language of historical sociology and integrates them into a theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of civilizations. Eisenstadt’s model links the cultural logic of world-views to the dynamics of institutional formations, the strategic action of political and cultural elites, and the transformative effects of social conflict. This reorientation of the debate represents a decisive and definitive achievement, even if the more specific claims attached to it can be questioned; it seems clear that both the transformations of world-views and the new direction of social change were more diverse than Eisenstadt was at first inclined to think, but these issues—and others related to them—can be discussed within the general historical-sociological framework. They are,

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however, beyond the scope of the present paper.8 Here I propose to discuss a different question. The historical-sociological turn may be seen as an incontestable breakthrough, but this does not necessarily mean that no place is left for the philosophy of history. We can easily envisage a productive dialogue between the two approaches; as will be seen, Marcel Gauchet’s “political history of religion” and its new perspective on the Axial Age answer that expectation. It should be stressed that references to the philosophy of history have no pejorative connotations: all macro-historical interpretations depend on philosophical presuppositions and raise philosophical questions. We are, in other words, dealing with a necessary component of all theorizing with large-scale and long-term ambitions, more clearly articulated in some cases than others, but never irrelevant. Nor is it being suggested that a strict and invariant dividing line can be drawn between historical sociology and the philosophy of history. The two levels of analysis interpenetrate in varying ways. Sociological themes are integral to Gauchet’s project; but when—as in the main text to be discussed here—key parts of the argument have to do with the dynamics of transcendence, the figures of subjectivity and the relationship between these two dimensions, it seems safe to conclude that philosophical concerns are coming to the fore. A short description of Gauchet’s project—one of the most ambitious undertakings in contemporary social and political thought—will help to clarify the background to the following discussion. There is, most obviously, an essential connection to ideas developed by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. These two thinkers came from within the Marxian tradition and broke with it in particularly creative and seminal ways, arguably more so than anybody else with a comparable intellectual biography; their roads beyond Marx intersected and overlapped in significant ways, not least with regard to the rediscovery of democracy, its problems and its promises; but they also diverged at crucial points. Gauchet’s work represents an original synthesis of insights from both sides. He shares with Castoriadis a strong emphasis on autonomy, understood as a conscious articulation and appropriation of the self-constitutive and self-transformative capacity

8 For a more detailed discussion, see Eisenstadt’s “Concluding statement” in Arnason et al., Axial Civilizations and World History, and the last section of my article in the same book.

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of human societies. But in contrast to Castoriadis, he does not invoke the idea of autonomy to defend a new version of the revolutionary project. His analysis of the complex and often counterintuitive forms taken by autonomy as an institutional principle—including modern bureaucracy and representative government—is closer to Lefort’s interpretation of democracy. At the same time, his analysis of political modernity is grounded in a universal-historical perspective that centres—more explicitly than Castoriadis or Lefort ever suggested— on political determinants and transformations. This is evident in the attempt to reconstruct a “political history of religion”, and more specifically in the portrayal of the state as the greatest historical transformer, albeit with thoroughly unintended consequences; as we shall see, this is the key to Gauchet’s conception of the Axial Age. The above summary covers only one part of the project. Gauchet also aims at a comprehensive reactivation and reformulation of questions posed by classical sociology, particularly those concerning religion, its role in the constitution of society, and its importance for the transition to modernity. He follows Durkheim’s lead in analyzing religion as a “meta-institution”,9 i.e. as a structurally and historically primary mode of societal self-constitution, and in singling out primitive religion as the paradigmatic case in point. But his account of the relationship between religious meaning and social life stresses the negative aspects much more than Durkheim ever did: for him, the religious mode of self-institutionalization is—more emphatically and importantly than for Durkheim—also a self-denial and a self-disguising of society as a creative force. If it is nevertheless to be understood as a detour towards autonomy, a detailed reconstruction of its developmental logic is needed. The achievement of autonomy through an exit from the religious universe is described in terms reminiscent of Durkheim’s (1969, 123) comment on democracy: “the most adequate way in which society becomes conscious of itself.” Durkheim had, however, left the interpretations of religion and democracy unconnected and unequally developed. Gauchet’s line of argument integrates the two thematic foci into a common framework. The reworking of Durkheim’s problematic throws new light on some well-known Weberian themes. Gauchet shares Weber’s interest in Christian sources of Western transformations, but argues that 9 Durkheim did not use this term, but it seems appropriate; to the best of my knowledge, it was first used by Poggi, 1972.

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the unilateral emphasis on Protestantism was misguided. In his view, general and enduring characteristics—and inherent problems—of Christianity were more important. But this also means that historical inquiry has to allow for a wider range of circumstances intersecting with the religious tradition in question. At the same time, the focus on political modernity sets Gauchet’s project apart from the Weberian vision of capitalism as the main transformative force. The “political history of religion” culminates in a critical but decidedly anti-utopian analysis of modern democracy. As for the dynamics central to this long-term trajectory, the concept of rationalization must be applied with greater reservations than in the Weberian frame of reference. Gauchet’s reasons for dissenting on this point can only be understood in the context of his more specific claims.10 Gauchet’s interpretation of the Axial Age is essential to his macrohistorical model, but dependent on more basic premises that should be outlined before going on to consider substantive problems. An analysis of primitive religion sets the scene for interpretations of successive historical formations.11 Gauchet’s reconstruction of this background draws on a variety of sources, including Mircea Eliade and Pierre Clastres, as well as a critical reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss. But the distinctive turn taken by this synthesis is perhaps best described with reference to Durkheim’s argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim’s view of primitive religion as the most undisturbed expression of religious essentials, and therefore the proper starting-point for scientific inquiry, seems to be echoed in the following statement: “By looking at areas where religion has survived, from America to New Guinea, we can form a concrete image of religion as it was in the beginning, in its purest and most systematic form, in the world prior to the State.”12 In a sense, Gauchet goes even further than Durkheim: for him, the “original radical

10 Gauchet’s main works are as follows: Le désenchantement du monde, 1987 (English translation: The Disenchantment of the World ); La révolution des droits humains, 1989; La révolution des pouvoirs, 1996; La démocratie contre elle-même, 2001; La condition historique, 2003. 11 I follow English usage in referring to “primitive” religions. But it should be noted that Gauchet has strong reservations about the term “primitive.” It suggests that we are dealing with religions or societies closer to the natural origins of humanity. In his view, this is an illusion. 12 Gauchet, 1997, p. 9.

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core”13 of religion is more fully present and more adequately embodied in primitive forms than in the historical ones. This stronger emphasis reflects a more fundamental underlying difference. Gauchet equates primitive religion with “radical dispossession, where the foundation was considered to be wholly other.”14 Such an understanding is not totally alien to the Elementary Forms, but certainly not fully translatable into Durkheim’s language. It presupposes a vision of history and a phenomenology of the human condition, neither of which is easily adapted to classical sociology. For Gauchet, it is an anthropological fact of the most fundamental kind that humanity entered history (at least the history that we can know) “by denying its capacity to create history.”15 This initial self— suppression of human creativity is, as he argues, an intelligible but not predetermined response to the ambiguous human experience of time: “our perception is divided between an ‘always already there’, which reduces us to nothing, and a ‘yet to be realized’, which throws us into the wide open space of action. On the one hand, we always arrive on the scene after things have been determined, so we have no grasp of them and have no choice but to comply with their rules in order to become part of and lose ourselves in them. On the other hand, we find ourselves thrown into the world as originating beings for whom there is no before, which is why we are beings of action who cannot avoid changing ourselves and our surroundings, even when we try desperately not to, as we have done for the greatest part of our history.”16 The socio-cultural regime conforms to the first aspect of this experience and strives to minimize. The second is a choice, in roughly the same sense that Marcel Mauss used to describe civilizational alternatives: it is contingent in the sense that no causal chain can explain its logic, but it is based on pre-given possibilities and develops them into a coherent pattern. Its defining feature is the acceptance of absolute dependence on a mythical past. The socio-cultural order, embedded in a cosmic one, appears as a creation of ancestors who accomplished their work in another time, and whose legacy

13 14 15 16

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. p. p. p.

9. 23. 15. 11.

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remains binding. The negating capacity of human beings is thus turned against itself and into submission to wholly external rule. In comparison to later images of divinity, the mythical ancestors may seem less exalted, but with regard to the total power vested in an imposed order, their sacred authority is unrivalled by any later products of the religious imagination. This is Gauchet’s reason for describing the earliest known form of religion as the most complete and consistent, but by the same token most clearly centred on a constitutive paradox: self-definition through self-dispossession. This paradox is, however, compounded by another one. The dispossessive nature of religion does not prevent its human creators from identifying with their world in a way that later and less stable societies may perceive as a lost treasure. Autonomy generates its own problems, both through unintended consequences of increasingly free action and through interpretive conflicts that accompany historical change. Since there are no a priori limits to this unfolding problematic, the debate on merits and demerits of the two alternative forms of historical existence will remain open. The negation of human autonomy affects all domains of social life. In particular, it reduces the scope and meaning of the political—never absent from human societies—to a bare minimum, and excludes the formation of a separate power centre It is the overall logic of archaic religion, not a premonition of dangers inherent in uncontrolled power, that explains the constitution of “society against the state”, to use the terms coined by Pierre Clastres. Conversely, the rise of the state is more than an institutional mutation: it changes the whole interpretive and symbolic framework of the human condition. For Gauchet, it is “the first religious revolution in history.”17 But if it is a uniquely momentous event, it is also a uniquely ambiguous one. The two sides are summed up in Gauchet’s description of the state as a “sacral transforming agent” (transformateur sacral ).18 The early state brings the authority previously vested in a religious Other back into the human world, but does so in a way that opens up possibilities and perspectives of further change.

17 18

Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 33.

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Since the implications of this turning-point are crucial to Gauchet’s interpretation of the Axial Age, they should be examined in greater detail. On the one hand, the sacred rulers who embody the state (their varying attributes and images can be disregarded in this context) invoke the authority of a higher order, reigning from time immemorial and immutably superior to all human activity. In so doing, they perpetuate the foundational pattern of primeval religion, back it up by more concentrated power, and articulate it in the more systematic form made possible by new cultural skills and resources. If the beginning of human history was, as Gauchet puts it, a “backwards entrance” in the sense that human autonomy was exercised through self-denial, there is a similarly backward-oriented side to the first major break with the archaic pattern. On the other hand, the early state “entangles the gods in history”19 and thus activates trends and forces conducive to more radical transformations. Gauchet notes three dimensions of early statehood that in the long run open up new mental horizons and give rise to new symbolic significations. First, the construction of a hierarchical order—an essential complement to the state—redistributes authority within society and changes the “forms of subordination and the tie between the individual and the collective.”20 When the instituting principle—previously kept at an imaginary distance from social practices—is translated into radically unequal relationships between groups and individuals, it is at the same time enmeshed in power struggles and exposed to questioning and protest. The hierarchical restructuring of society entails the humanization and latent problematization of hierarchy. Second, the new phenomenon of political domination brings in its wake a more far-reaching anthropological innovation: “both the intra-social relation and the relation to the extra-social tend to be subjectivized.”21 The intentional exercise of power, for the purpose of imposing and maintaining order, and with a claim to authority that raises the question of accountability, marks a new phase in the history of the human subject. Finally, a more or less explicit vision of conquest seems to be inherent in statehood from the beginning: “universal domination,

19 20 21

Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 40.

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the ultimate unification of the world under the authority of the most powerful, is latent in the narrower form of domination.”22 This is the first encounter with the promises and challenges of universality, and it has the potential to transform the whole range of human relationships, identities and beliefs. Hierarchy and subversion, power and subjectivity, conquest and universality: in all three respects, the early state thus appears as a motor of momentous and potentially divergent changes. It simultaneously reaffirms and undermines a cultural model of social order. Gauchet develops this argument in very general terms, without reference to particular cases. Moreover, his strong emphasis on the problematic of statehood as such and on it relevance to pre-literate polities (such as the African states) tends to obscure the specific importance of early civilizations. It is worth pausing to consider the implications of the model for the historical examples most closely related to our topic: the civilizations of the Ancient Near East. In light of Gauchet’s analysis, they would seem to represent creative and elaborate compromises, resilient but certainly not crisis-proof, between archaic visions of order and innovations generated through their implementation in an altered context. Episodes of significant but contained or abortive change might be understood as expressions of the underlying tensions. The very brief breakthrough of monotheism in Ancient Egypt is a case in point. It is less clear whether there was any comparable upset to the Mesopotamian tradition, but the Epic of Gilgamesh reflects an early concern with the human predicament in a theocentric world; this exploration of ultimate limits and faultiness was preserved as a literary monument, not as a source of interpretive variations. At another level, the tension between early state particularism and the aspirations to universal rule is most evident in the history of Assyria, the first city-state that became a regional empire. Gauchet’s line of argument is thus easily extended to more concrete cases. But the main topic to be discussed here is its bearing on the Axial Age. The latter is defined very broadly: Gauchet refers to “the enormous groundswell, which over several centuries (from approximately 800 to 200 bc) swept from Persia to China, from

22

Ibid., p. 41.

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India to Greece, including Palestine. This period divides religions into pre-and post, those coming before and those coming after it, which is why Karl Jaspers has called it the “axial age” of universal history, and the two groups cannot be conceptually reunited without referring to the enormous spiritual activity inscribed deep within the political division and its expansion.”23 As the quoted formulation shows, Jaspers’s work is taken as a starting-point; Eisenstadt’s 1982 essay on the Axial Age is mentioned in a footnote, but there is no reference to later writings or debates. Gauchet’s own view, markedly different from any other interpretation, is that the various breakthroughs of the Axial Age brought out into the open “the hidden logic of the State as an intrinsically religion-producing enterprise.”24 After a very long period marked by institutional containment of latent cultural meaning, a radical and irreversible reorientation of the religious imagination completes the change that had been initiated in the political sphere; at the same time, it opens a new round in the political history of religion. There is no attempt to explain why the overt religious revolution—in contrast to the tacit one spearheaded by early states—occurred when and where it did. Gauchet appears to think that the evidence will not allow us to go further. We would thus be dealing with a developmental logic that can be reconstructed in philosophical terms, but without any substantiated link to historical dynamics. When it comes to the interpretation and comparison of traditions, Gauchet takes a very cautious line. The doctrines and discourses of the Axial Age are, in every known case, intricate mixtures of old and new, and the modalities of compromise vary from one civilization to another. Revolutionary innovations do not expand into allround breaks with the past. And even if we try to isolate the new components, their common denominator is not so much a specific mode of thought as a set of general underlying trends: “The gap between the here-below and the beyond, subjectivation of the divine principle, and universalization of life values: these are the three main outcomes of the religious subversion embedded in the depths of the collective articulation and they break into social discourse

23 24

Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 44.

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during the spiritual upsurge of the axial age.”25 The affinity with Jaspers’s interpretation is obvious, and it is further underlined by remarks on the principle of individuality as another invention of the Axial Age: in the double sense of creative individuals opening up new horizons and the mobilizing appeal to individuality as inwardness. A more distinctive view emerges when Gauchet sums up the meaning of the Axial Age as a “metamorphosis of otherness.”26 This metamorphosis responds to prior changes in the relationship between religion and society, but at the same time, it opens up alternative possibilities of further innovations. The decisive step is a shift from temporal to ontological otherness: the alignment of sacred authority with political power had broken through the original barrier between a foundational past and a derivative present. When the axial breakthrough brings the implications of divine intervention and involvement in history to the surface, the otherness that has lost its mythical meaning is reaffirmed at the level of being. Gauchet reserves the term “transcendence” for this new articulation of the religious division between the visible and the invisible, which can also be seen as a “reunification of two dimensions that were initially separate, the original and the actual, the inaugural institution and the actually present forces of the invisible.”27 Although the early state had striven to preserve essential parts of an older religious imaginary, the new role of a “sacral transforming agent” was in the long run unsustainable without a redefinition of ultimate authorizing forces. But Gauchet rejects the idea that the turn to transcendence could be explained in terms of a search for legitimization. Rather, the radical transformation of the social world triggers a corresponding— but neither instant nor unambiguous—restructuring of the religious universe. The separation of the here-below from the beyond makes it possible to glorify and justify power in new ways, but it also opens up a whole new dimension of reflection, questioning and imagination that can never be brought under complete control. There is, in other words, a general shift towards a new logic of religious life and thought, going far beyond the institutional interconnections of religion and politics. At its most radical, the reorientation can lead to the constitution of a realm of faith, as distinct from the realm of 25 26 27

Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 52.

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law. It is this broader human relation to transcendence that Gauchet has in mind when he writes that “religious division was transposed into individuals and installed at the heart of universal being.”28 In that sense, the metamorphosis of otherness is accompanied by the discovery of inwardness. But the new beginning of the Axial Age is also a bifurcation of religious and intellectual history. Gauchet’s conception of history allows for radical and conservative options at every critical juncture; but since attempts to adapt or reproduce inherited patterns are undertaken in a new interpretive context, they cannot but participate in the ongoing mutations. This applies to the many currents and divergent traditions of the Axial Age, perhaps more so than in any other case. The different paths taken at this point affected the whole later course of history in lasting and significant ways. On the one hand, the metamorphosis of otherness and the experience of separation could inspire efforts to restore the unity of the world and return to a primeval condition of unbroken continuity. But such projects now called for explicit thinking of the totality that had previously been implicit in the mythical order, and the most effective response to that demand was a speculative denial of mundane reality as an illusion, to be overcome by absorption into an impersonal and ultimately indeterminate foundation. On the other hand, ontological duality could be radicalized into a polar contrast between two worlds, and this mode of thought was inherently conducive to more personified conceptions of the divine other. Although Gauchet seems inclined to think that elements and indications of both alternatives can be found in the main innovative cultures of the Axial Age, he stresses the long-term contrasts between separate traditions and geo-cultural worlds. The logic of “the fundamental fracture between immanent impersonality and transcendental subjectivism, between underlying identity and separated otherness”,29 manifested itself in the cultural patterns and historical destinies of major civilizational complexes. The more revolutionary trend, centred on the duality of a creator god and a created world, prevailed in monotheistic traditions and was taken to its ultimate consequences in Western Christianity. The restorative mode of thought

28 29

Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 48.

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persisted—in different forms—in Indian and Chinese traditions. Another bifurcation appears within the monotheistic framework: the Gnostic devaluation of the world contrasts with the theocratic demand for a thoroughgoing integration of worldly life into the religious one. The historical trajectory of Western Christendom may be seen as a winding path between these extremes, with orthodox and heretical projects coming into play at every juncture. However, a straightforward identification of the two paths with East and West would be misleading. This emerges from Gauchet’s discussion of philosophy and religion as twin expressions of the axial turn. It is often difficult to draw a dividing line, but in the most general terms, the interest in exploring cognitive issues and elaborating rational procedures can be distinguished from efforts to codify or redefine relations between the human and the divine. The prime example of this difference is the contrast symbolized—in retrospect— by Athens and Jerusalem. Gauchet’s comments on the Greek “religion of reason” show that he aligns philosophy with the restorative trend, whereas the religious dynamics of transcendence and interiority lead in the very long run to a more radical affirmation of human autonomy and rationality. On this view, Greek thought was fundamentally committed to the ontology of the One. The rational ordering of the cosmos was the most accomplished result of the quest for a more articulated—post-axial—version of primeval unity; even those Greek thinkers who went furthest in separating the intelligible sphere from the sensory one remained within the totalizing frame of reference. Gauchet links this persistent intellectual conservatism to the traditionalism that circumscribed political innovations. As he sees it, the polis combined “otherwise contradictory trends: the preeminence of the collective whole and the equal right of the parts.”30 He admits that the unprecedented redistribution of power within the polis opened up a new space for interpretive conflicts, and that they polarized in two directions: towards a relativizing emphasis on social conventions and towards an ideal of autonomous sagehood in retreat from the City. But neither the sophistic nor the Socratic path broke through the ontological barriers.

30

Ibid., p. 147.

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Critical reflections Gauchet’s detailed analysis of Christianity—the religion of incarnation and interpretation—and its key role in laying the foundations for the modern world is beyond the scope of this paper. The focus is on his interpretation of the Axial Age; to conclude, I will reconsider its main points and single out some major strengths and weaknesses. The discussion should begin with the emergence of the state. There are good reasons (and Gauchet has summed them up very convincingly) to regard the state as the most momentous innovation and the most radical transforming agent among the forces and phenomena commonly taken to mark the origins of civilization. Gauchet is also right to insist on the ambiguous implications of this transition to a new form of social life. The subordination of society to a separate power centre is accompanied by an upgrading of human agency on the part of the rulers. At the same time, the transformative ramifications of the new order are minimized by attaching it to pre-existing sacred foundations. It is at least a plausible hypothesis that the tensions thus built into the state—as a power structure and a symbolic constellation—translate into long-term dynamics. Our perceptions of the Axial Age are bound to change when these aspects of its prehistory are given their due. In particular, we cannot see the intellectual and religious transformations in question as breaks with a previously undisturbed continuity. Early states and their cultural elites already faced the task of balancing or reconciling continuity and discontinuity. The cultures of the Axial Age had to re-open that question, and even if we have some reservations about Gauchet’s account of the relationship between philosophy and religion, we can accept that the creative efforts and achievements were not all on the side of discontinuity: they also included rearticulations of inherited traditions in new contexts. Varying mixtures of these two trends left their mark on the cultural legacies of the Axial Age. To stress this pervasive but unequally developed ambiguity is, of course, to cast doubt on constructions that subsume the new beginnings of the Axial Age under a uniform and unequivocal logic; and by the same token, it becomes more difficult to shift from the idea of the Axial Age as a historical period to an analytical model or a typology of axial civilizations. In short, Gauchet’s analysis of the background to the Axial Age has some obvious merits. But there is a rub: his reconstruction of

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the cultural logic inherent in early statehood takes an uncompromisingly universalist turn and seems to disregard the evidence of diversity. More specifically, Gauchet stresses the sacral aspect of the state and treats it as an invariant factor; there is no discussion of divergent trends or alternative forms. The main point at issue is the relationship between kingship and priesthood. It would be thoroughly misleading to interpret it as a matter of secular and sacred power, interdependent but also prone to rivalry: both sides are actively involved in and structurally dependent on the relocation of the sacred into history. But the difference reflects the underlying problematic of the shift. The tensions are not wholly deflected to the level of long-term processes; they find a more direct expression in two faces of power, both embedded in sacral contexts, but not in the same fashion. The difference between kingship and priesthood, as well as the different ways in which it is defined and institutionalized, could therefore be taken as starting-points for more comparative approaches to early states. This diversifying factor also highlights the contingent character of key developments (not that Gauchet denies contingency, but his strong emphasis on dominant dynamics tends to limits its importance). Max Weber alluded to this in a brief aside, but did not take it further: he suggested that Indian and Chinese traditions might exemplify the lasting consequences of early and accidental shifts in the balance between royal and priestly power. A brief look at a broader range of cases may bring the problem into clearer focus. Among early civilizations, Ancient Egypt stands out as the extreme example of not merely sacred, but divine kingship. But even this exceptionally long-lived and self-contained power structure had to cope with tensions between kings and priests, and the brief but spectacular turn to monotheism would seem to have been an ambitious ruler’s response to that problem, The origins of the Mesopotamian political tradition are still a matter of debate, but even if the idea of an early temple-state has to be toned down, it seems clear that the power of the temples always set limits to the scope and status of kingship, and that this institutional pattern was linked to a selflimiting symbolism of kingship: contrary to Egypt, the king could not claim divine status (an abortive move in that direction under the first Mesopotamian empire had no noteworthy effects). The Egyptian and Mesopotamian models of kingship were associated with different types of statehood: Egypt emerged into history

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as the first territorial state, whereas the Mesopotamian region was divided between multiple city-states (in view of Gauchet’s comments on the imperial telos of the state as such, it is worth noting that the first overtly imperial turn was nevertheless taken in Mesopotamia). These alternative institutional forms were embedded in markedly divergent constellations of meaning. Varying ways of affirming the sacred foundations of rulership call for corresponding articulations of a broader symbolic order. Neither general considerations nor the fragmentary historical evidence would justify claiming causal primacy for the state; we can only speak of mutually constitutive connections, but it can be plausibly argued that the state—in other words: the political ordering of social life—represents the most central and dynamic component of the overall configuration. In the Egyptian case, an emphatic and totalizing version of sacred kingship brought the social and cosmic dimensions into very close contact: if we follow Assmann’s analyses, it embodied a conception of overarching justice and a vision of human participation in the maintenance of cosmic order. Even more importantly, the prerogatives and privileges of the sacred centre became starting-points for transformative processes that changed the meaning and expanded the scope of the original nexus between human and divine worlds. Both the broader access to immortality and the growing emphasis on inner life in later Egyptian religion can be understood as results of such developments. By contrast, the Mesopotamian pattern kept the rulers at greater distance from the gods and seems to have been less conducive to farreaching reinterpretations (this would fit Gauchet’s general view that strong conceptions of divine power can in the long run favour reflexive turns towards human autonomy). Mesopotamian traditions tended to perpetuate a more uncompromisingly theocentric world-view; it is still a matter of debate how significant this background was for monotheistic innovations in more peripheral parts of the Near East. The Egyptian and Mesopotamian case are the best known and most clearly contrasting ones, but some other examples could be added to the picture. More wide-ranging variations on the theme of sacred kingship seem to have developed on the peripheries of Mesopotamian centres than within the ‘zone of Egyptian cultural influence’. One of the more interesting cases is the Hittite Empire, where the institutionalized conception of kingship seems to have shifted towards greater emphasis on a legal framework according to some interpretations, this included the first explicit notion of the

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“king’s two bodies”: the mortal exterior and the sacred essence). An earlier variant of sacred rulership, more distant from the two main centres and much less definable on the basis of available evidence, had emerged in Minoan Crete; it is interesting both in its own right and as a predecessor to Mycenaean and post-Mycenaean Greece. In short, even a brief glance at the spectrum of archaic civilizations— in the most innovative and multi-central region—shows the range of diversity compatible with the shared pattern of sacral statehood. The problems posed by the “entanglement of the gods in history”, to paraphrase Gauchet’s formulation, are reflected in historical dynamics and managed (rather than solved) in ways that translate into divergent developmental paths. If the transformations of the Axial Age are see in light of this eventful prehistory, rather than against the background of a supposedly uniform archaic world, some traditional views will have to be reconsidered. Gauchet’s notion of a permanent containment, neutralizing the religious problematic of the state from its beginnings to the onset of the Archaic Age, is—mutatis mutandis—open to the same objection as the interpretations that posit an untroubled discontinuity of pre-axial world-views: it does not do justice to the historicity of early civilizations. But if we set out to contextualize the Axial Age, the long-term perspective discussed above must be linked to a more specific historical conjuncture. A few centuries before the Axial Age (around the twelfth century bce), the Near East and its Mediterranean margins experienced a massive upheaval which historians now know as the crisis of the late Bronze Age. While the relationship between external and internal factors (attacks from the periphery and decomposing power structures) is very unclear and disputed, the outcome is easier to describe: some major cultural and political centres were destroyed, those that survived were seriously weakened, and in the long run, the crisis seems to have prompted a shift towards more community-related forms of statehood. In this de-centred and destructured world, there was more scope for innovative developments in peripheral contexts, and the most momentous changes of that kind occurred in the two places that became primary sources of Western axiality, Ancient Greece and Ancient Israel. If we compare the elusive but unmistakably significant Near Eastern episode to events in other regions that were to undergo major transformations in the Axial Age, we first encounter a case of the contingent parallelism that often provides an anchor for comparative inquiry. At

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roughly the same time (the turn of the twelfth and eleventh centuries bce), the Shang kingdom—later included in the list of China’s ruling dynasties—was conquered by a peripheral and previously subordinate state; the victors went on to found the Zhou dynasty. Up to that point, there is a Chinese parallel to the crisis of the late Bronze Age. It is less clear whether the underlying structural factors are comparable—historians do not seem to have discussed this at great length. But in contrast to the Near East, the result seems to have been a very constructive takeover of the centre by the periphery. The new Zhou rulers built on Shang foundations and added new elements; the combination had a very lasting and formative impact on the later trajectory of Chinese history. As for the other major axial site east of Iran, the Indian case is very different from both China and the Near East, and it is much harder to construct a coherent picture. An early, distinctive and—at its most mature— very far-flung civilization collapsed long before the crises of the late Bronze Age, and it was not until much later that invaders from Inner Eurasia set Indian history on a new course (the idea that an Aryan invasion destroyed the Indus civilization has been completely abandoned). The discontinuity between the whole archaic phase and the prelude to the Axial Age is much more marked than elsewhere. The two sides of the historical context—traditions and conjunctures—are intertwined, and the connection is best understood in relation to the problematic of sacred rulership and its metamorphoses. The Near Eastern crisis resulted in what Jean-Pierre Vernant called a “crisis of sovereignty”, most acutely felt on the periphery. Vernant’s analyses show how important this aspect of post-Mycenaean Greece was for the formation of the polis and the new direction taken by Greek thought. Jan Assmann’s interpretation of Ancient Israel also suggests a crisis of sovereignty, but with a very different outcome: sovereignty is transferred from the king to a lawgiving god. In more general terms, the shared background to Greek and Jewish axiality was a regional setback to sacred kingship and a corresponding opening of perspectives that could be articulated in different ways in different settings. In China, the transition from Shang to Zhou does not seem to have involved a crisis of sovereignty; rather, the conquering elite redefined sovereignty in a way that preserved the essentials of sacred kingship but translated its core idea into a new language that lent itself to further rationalization. The notion of a mandate from heaven goes back to the beginning of Zhou rule, and

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it was to become a defining feature of the whole Chinese imperial tradition. As noted above, the genealogy of Indian traditions is much more obscure. But the social world of the Axial Age in India was in any case characterized by rivalry between priestly and warrior elites (the social power of the latter was gradually restructured into kingdoms). Jan Heesterman’s fascinating but admittedly speculative reconstruction of this background suggests that the rivalry was reflected in strategies of access to the divine world (through sacrifice), and that it ultimately gave rise to alternative forms of the religious rejection of the world that Weber had already identified as a defining feature of the Indian tradition. In short, the patterns of change during the Axial Age are not unrelated to earlier vicissitudes and divisions of sacred power. Here we cannot pursue this problem further. But to conclude the discussion, let us briefly return to Gauchet’s line of argument. Its most salient strength is the emphasis on early state formation as a radical transformation of socio-cultural life: a convincing case is made for bringing not only the long-term dynamic of state formation, but also the logic of its inherent meaning to bear on our understanding of the Axial Age. The above critical reflections do not contest this point: rather, they aim at a re-historicization of questions which Gauchet tends to pose in somewhat short-circuiting terms. The archaic modes of interaction between religion and the political sphere were open to redefinitions and differentiations, significant enough to set whole traditions apart from each other. This variegated background cannot be dismissed as external to the Axial Age. Past historical experience enters into the horizons of meaning. There is no denying the radical intellectual and religious innovations of the Axial Age; but this exceptionally creative period did not simply turn its back on the past. Different currents could relate to it in different ways. The Axial Age has sometimes been described as an “age of transcendence”; in response to that claim, Benjamin Schwartz argued that a generalized concept of transcendence could only apply to a new attitude, a “standing back and looking beyond.”32 He was referring to a shift in cultural orientations that can also be understood—in terms borrowed from Hans-Georg Gadamer—as an ascent from the life world to the world. It involves a broadening of experiential and interpre-

32

See the discussion in Daedalus, 1975, 2.

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tive horizons. Whether it leads to an affirmation of ontological transcendence, in the more specific sense of a distinction between ultimate and mundane realities, is another question. It did so, most clearly and momentously, in the case of the Jewish turn towards monotheism. But it could also find expression in an attempt to reintegrate a fragmented world, and to draw on correspondingly reworked older traditions for this purpose. This was the dominant trend in China. As suggested above, the historical-sociological analysis of the Axial Age must allow for differentiations of that kind. But here we must abstain from further discussion of details.

CHAPTER THREE

CULTURAL CRYSTALLIZATION AND CIVILIZATION CHANGE: AXIALITY AND MODERNITY Björn Wittrock In the following, I shall discuss three themes in S.N. Eisenstadt’s historical sociology that have inspired my own work within a wide network of historians, philologists and historically orientated social scientists, in which I have had the privilege of being involved for over a decade and where S.N. Eisenstadt has been a central figure. The ambition is to explicate and defend an understanding of the nature of historically informed studies of major societal transformations but also to acknowledge an intellectual debt of gratitude. Firstly, I shall outline one way to conceptualise the formation of modernity, with a focus on the transformations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, that makes it possible not only to link conceptual change to processes of socio-political transformations and upheavals but also to explore different varieties of modernity. Secondly, if the formation of modernity cannot, as in most standard social science accounts, be cast just in terms of socio-economicpolitical transformations, with conceptual changes relegated to the role of “ideological” epiphenomena, then the question arises whether modernity as a deep-seated cultural crystallization may or may not be thought of in relation to other processes of cultural crystallization in global history, in particular to what the one that S.N. Eisenstadt has written extensively about namely the so-called Axial Age. I shall argue that this is, indeed, the case. I shall elaborate an understanding of the historical study of macro-societal change as a research programme for a form of historical phenomenology not only of the constitution of modernity but of analogous processes of cultural crystallization in global history. Thirdly, such a study of the formation of multiple modernities raises fundamental questions about legitimate procedures in assigning meaning to events and processes in their historical contexts. In my view it either transcends or rejects three prominent ways of dealing with

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questions of meaning in history, namely those that we may associate with classical historicism, with modern speech-act theory, and with postmodernist radical constructivism. I shall briefly indicate where I believe some implications of an historical sociology in the tradition of S.N. Eisenstadt hold particular promise in this respect. The cultural constitution of modernity Both social scientists and social historians have tended to cast the constitution of modernity in terms of dual, interlinked, transformations in socio-economic and political practices. Terms such “the industrial revolution” and “the democratic revolution” and are just two examples of this type of conceptualisation which ranges from functionalist ways of theorising to Weberian and Marxian ones. What they have in common is a disregard for the fact that the formation of modernity also involved a profound change in the nature of discursive practices. These discursive transformations were not mere “ideological” epiphenomena. Rather, deep-seated epistemic and ontological ruptures; redefinitions opened up new horizons of expectations and hopes. These shifts made possible or, more literally, conceivable, if only as projects and imaginations, new institutional practices. The works of Reinhart Koselleck have played a pioneering role in enabling accounts that emphasis that the formation of modernity can not be reduced to the processes of transformation in political and economic practices that are referred to by terms such as the— to use, once again, Parsons’ terminology—“the democratic revolution” and “the industrial revolution”. Instead it has to be located within the context of a deep epistemic and cultural shift as well. For Koselleck, contrary to Parsons and a number of earlier scholars, the French revolution per se is a symptom rather than a cause of the arrival of new expectations and new imaginations of temporality, of the sense of co-temporality of the non-co-temporal, “die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”. In the new era the simultaneous existence of phenomena, that in an earlier era would have appeared so different as to be conceivable only at historical points separated by vast expanses in time, is a prominent feature (Koselleck 1985: 88ff ). In this sense the French revolution did not offer anything substantially new but entailed an acceleration, a Beschleunigung, of the passage of

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historical time so as to engender precisely this new sense of co-temporality of historical difference. One may add that Koselleck’s analysis of the European revolutions of 1848/49 emphasizes that the distinguishing innovative feature of them was not their substantive nature but rather their almost instantaneous spatial diffusion across most of Europe (Koselleck 1989). In recent years one may, apart from the many contributions by conceptual historians proper, also speak of something of a school of new historical sociologists, such Johann Arnason, Johan Heilbron, Hans Joas, and Peter Wagner, who trace historical interactions of ideational and macro-institutional transformations far beyond what has been customary among proponents of historical institutionalism in the social sciences. They and others have also explored the extent to which the rise of the social sciences themselves must be cast in terms of the fundamental transformation of European societies that the formation of modernity entailed. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries natural philosophy gradually gave way to a range of natural science disciplines. Analogously, moral philosophy was slowly transformed into a range of separate discourses. In the course of the nineteenth century these discourses came to distinguish themselves both from natural science and from literary discourse and came to label themselves social sciences. In this process of an epistemic sea change, historical reasoning, which had formed a central component of moral philosophy, came to form a discursive realm of its own, separate from philosophy and separate from the social sciences.1 One shift in intellectual and cultural transformation in this period pertains precisely to the concepts of society and history and to the new awareness of the structural and constraining nature of societal life. Pierre Manent has put forward the notion that society is a ‘postrevolutionary discovery’. True enough, and as is convincingly demonstrated by Keith Baker, the term society undergoes a long conceptual development in the French context in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—with a dramatic increase in the utilisation of the term in the mid-eighteenth century. It is also true that, in his critique of Louis Dumont’s analysis of Western 1 See, e.g., Heilbron (1995), Heilbron, Magnusson and Wittrock (1998), but also Brian (1994), Fox, Porter and Wokler (1995), Lepenies (1988), and Wokler (1987).

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individualism and holism, Marcel Gauchet argued that (this is Baker’s elegant summary): Individualism was not simply a symptom of the dissolution of the primacy of the social whole, as that had been understood in traditional religious terms. It was also a necessary condition for what he once again called (following Karl Polanyi) the ‘discovery of society’—its discovery in strictly sociological terms, disengaged from the religious representations in which it had hitherto expressed its existence. Not until the ideological primacy of individual interests was postulated, he argued, could constraints upon these interests be discovered in the operation of an autonomous social order subject to its own laws (Baker 1990, 112).

Johan Heilbron has pursued an inquiry into the constitution of individual interests (Heilbron 1995). In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such interests were conceived as amenable to the constraints of various notions of sociability. In particular, given a human condition short of true religious virtue, was there a prospect for a human existence beyond the borders of a Leviathan-like imposition of absolute order that would involve socially acceptable outcomes of the pursuit of the self-interests of human beings? Such inquiries were pursued in various ways in the different parts of Europe throughout the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. However, Heilbron and many others today agree that, even if there is a long process of gestation of the modern concept of society, the unique event of revolutionary upheaval requires that discursive controversy and political practice become joined in the formation of a distinctly modern era. Pierre Manent has elaborated a similar argument: “The Revolution offered the original spectacle of a political change of unheard-of scope, yet having no stable political effects, of a political upheaval impossible to settle, of an interminable and indeterminate event” (Manent 1994, 82). This description of the Revolution as an irreversible and interminable process of fundamental change was formulated, as pointed out by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, perhaps most clearly by one of the most well known thinkers of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville. In his memoirs, Souvenirs, written in the summer of 1850, he describes the revolution as one long upheaval “that our fathers have seen the beginning of and which, in all likelihood, we shall not see the end of. Everything that remained of the old regime was destroyed forever” (Tocqueville 1964, 30).


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Reinhart Koselleck’s conception in his early work Critique and Crisis is quite similar. He also links the temporal duration of the process of upheaval to its spatial, and indeed world-wide, extension, as well as to its increasing intensity in terms of modernity as a process that affects all human beings: The eighteenth century witnessed the unfolding of bourgeois society, which saw itself as the new world, laying intellectual claim to the whole world and simultaneously denying the old. It grew out of the territories of the European states and, in dissolving this link, developed a progressive philosophy in line with the process. The subject of that philosophy was all mankind, to be unified from its European centre and led peacefully towards a better future (Koselleck 1987a, 5f.).

In this process, horizons of expectations, to use one of Koselleck’s key notions, opened up that were previously unknown. It is also this sense of openness and contingency that serves as a forceful impetus to an examination of the structural conditions of the political body and entails a passage from political and moral philosophy to a social science. It should be pointed out, however, that the transition meant that five key problematiques—which today are more acutely open to reinterpretation than they have been for decades if not for a century—are being formulated or at least fundamentally reformulated and are entering into the new social science discourse. Firstly, the whole role of historical inquiry becomes a crucial one. On the one hand, historical reasoning becomes an integral part of the intellectual transition, and even abstract reason itself becomes historicised in early nineteenth-century philosophy. However, on the other hand, the moral and political sciences break up into a variety of new discourses that in the course of the nineteenth century coalesce and are reduced to a number of disciplines. This means that the stage is set for the divergence between a professionalised historical discipline and the other social and human sciences, a divergence that we still today experience as a major intellectual divide. Secondly, interest in language and linguistic analysis enters into all domains of the human and social sciences as a key problematique. One outflow of this is the constitution of textual and hermeneutic modes of analysis. A second one—familiar from contemporary debates on linguistic analysis and poststructuralism—is that of the relationship between text, interpretation, and consciousness. A third one is the effort to historicise language and linguistic development itself. Thereby

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a crucial link was provided to various collective entities such as the historic construction of notions of different peoples. This leads to a third problematique, namely that of constituting new collective identities. Membership in a collectivity could no longer be taken for granted in terms of the life experiences of the inhabitants of a certain village or region. Nor could a relationship of obligation and loyalty between the princely ruler and his subjects continue to constitute an unquestionable core of the body politic. That, however, meant that even the most basic categories of societal existence were open to doubt. Fourthly, the whole problematique of the relationship between notions of polity, society, and civil society was succinctly and acutely reformulated in this period of transition. The fact that once again these notions are probed and fundamentally re-examined should not conceal the fact that they were indeed in many ways not just reformulated in this period but rather discovered or even invented. Fifthly, assumptions about what prompts human beings to act and how to interpret their actions within a broader framework are at the very core of any scholarly program in the social and human sciences. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the fundamental categories that we still by and large draw upon were elaborated and proposed. Three or four such fundamental categorical conceptualisations were propounded. Each of them corresponded to a conceptualisation of what ‘society’ was constituted by. These categories might be described as follows: Economic-rationalistic; with a corresponding view of society as a form of compositional collective. Statistical-inductive; with a view of society as a systemic aggregate. Structural-constraining; with a view of society in terms of an organic totality. Linguistic-interpretative; with a conceptualisation of society as an emergent totality. The transition from a discourse on moral and political philosophy to a social science—analysed by, for example, by Robert Wokler (1987)—in rudimentary form has already taken place in the mid and late 1790s in France after the Revolution. It entails a decisive shift from an agential—some would say voluntaristic—view of society to one that emphasises structural conditions. To some extent, a simi-


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lar shift occurs in economic reasoning away from a broad concern about moral and political agency. In the course of the nineteenth century, ‘average economic man’ instead becomes cast in a web of structural properties and dynamic regularities rather than in a moral universe of individual action. Thus fundamental categories of agency and society that came to be elaborated and redefined during much of the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be discerned in rudimentary form already during the great transition. So too, however, can some of the features that came to affect these endeavors. One such tacit but crucial feature concerns the abandonment of the truly universal heritage of the Enlightenment project in favor of forms of representation and endowment of rights based on territoriality or membership in a linguistically and historically constituted and constructed community. Another feature was an emerging and growing chasm between moral discourse and other forms of reasoning about society. Thus, an earlier encompassing conception of the moral and political sciences was gradually replaced by social sciences that marginalized moral reasoning or consigned it to the specialized discipline of philosophy. Third, historical reasoning, which had been at the core of the intellectual transformation at the end of the eighteenth century, became a separate discipline and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a permanent divide emerged between history and the social sciences. The end of the eighteenth century was a formative period in the rise of the social sciences in conceptual terms. The shift in epistemic and institutional regimes that occurred at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not immediately usher in the set of disciplinary configurations in the social and human sciences that we now all too often take for granted. This occurred only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and then only in an uneven and partial process that did not become a universal pattern of ordering until well after World War II. However, it did entail, in a more or less rudimentary way, both the institutional form for intellectual activities and the epistemic forms that became constitutive of the discourses on society in the age of modernity. It is also possible to discern, across all confrontations and divergences, a fundamental acknowledgement of the idea that agency, reflexivity, and historical consciousness might help construct a new set of institutions but that this takes place within a complex web of

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interactions that jointly constitute a society. Thus, there existed a limited number of thematic foci underlying the cultural constitution of a new set of societal macro-institutions. Institutions of modernity: Promissory notes and cultural trauma In the previous sections I have outlined some of the ways in which the social sciences may be seen as emblematic discourses of modernity. The early history of these discourses was intimately linked to a deep process of cultural crystallisation that also entailed the emergence of the prospect of new types of macro-societal institutions. In the wake of the deep cultural shift at the turn of the 18th century, a distinctively new type of societal order manifested itself in the European context through the emergence of a set of institutional projects that became emblematic of the modern world at large. Preeminent among these institutional projects were those of economic organisation in the form of a liberal market economy rather than in a regulated mercantilist economy. Similarly political order came to be conceptualised as a modern nation state of compatriots or of a constitutional republic of fellow citizens rather than in the form of an absolutist monarchy with its distinction between ruler and subjects. In the realm of private interactions, new demands arose for a legally protected sphere where the State was only allowed to make interventions and undertake sanctions that were clearly specified and foreseeable. The new conception of the nature of the public sphere and political order was thus based on ontological assumptions about human beings of a radically new nature, namely the idea of the principled equal rights of all human beings to participation in the macro-institutions of the public sphere and of the state. In this sense, the formation of modernity in Europe was not just another period reminiscent of the axial age or of the early emergence of a bifurcation between secular and sacred power in 12th and 13th century Europe. In the political sphere, the new institutions involved a conception of political order as constituted and legitimated in terms not only of silent tolerance but some form of active acquiescence and participation. Thus centuries-old ideas of representation in the form of estates and parliaments were complemented with demands for participation and even popular sovereignty. In the Western half of


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Europe, the wave of demand associated with these ideas, what Parsons referred to as the Democratic Revolution, was a constant feature of political life from the late 18th to the mid 20th century when they were finally victorious across the board. In political terms it had entailed the gradual limitation of constitutional monarchical regimes and their eventual replacement by some form of parliamentary democracy. In the private sphere, there were parallel developments which basically entailed that age-old demands that princely rulers abstain from acts of arbitrary intervention and violence be superseded by demands that there be a legal-rational basis for all actions of government. Thus official acts are legitimate only if they are based on legal rules that are transparent and allow for consequences of actions to be predictable. Such transparency and predictability can become a reality only if the nature of political order accepts the rule of law as a basic principle rather than the volition of the princely ruler as its basic principle of operation. Such demands not only for legal protection but also for the universal application of legal order had long traditions in some—but by no means all—European countries. At the turn of the 18th century, however, they were voiced with increasing intensity. Furthermore their urgency was reinforced by the demands of new commercial and industrial activities. New public spheres also emerged outside of courts, academies and salons, outside of the control and purview of royally sanction and control. Whether in scholarly, political or artistic life, fora are created that are based on the idea that public discourse should not be subject to persecution or censorship but rather be able to express an opinion on all aspects of political and public life. One may say that they were premised on the legitimate articulation of a discourse not only about but addressed to and critical of the official power of the state. In what sense do these different institutional projects constitute a societal form that we may associate with the notion of modernity? Clearly it would be misleading to suggest that these projects became universally realised in the European context at the time of their intellectual conception. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead the new institutional projects remained embattled and highly controversial in practical affairs in Europe throughout the following century and a half. Even in Western Europe, a modern political order in terms of truly universal suffrage did not become a full institutional

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reality until the end of the Second World War. Despite these facts, however, it is still possible to speak in a meaningful way of modernity and its institutional projects as a societal reality in a specific sense of the word, namely as a new set of promissory notes. These promissory notes, formulated and promulgated and even partially implemented, if for brief periods of time, at the turn of the 18th century, came to have global relevance. At their core were notions of self-reflexivity, agency and historical consciousness. These institutional projects became the object of continuous discursive and institutional battles. However, they could never again be exorcised from the attention of such battles in the European context. The Vienna Congress and the Holy Alliance was a comprehensive effort to unthink the consequences of the French Revolution and to restore the Old Regime and make Europe safe for tradition. It became almost immediately clear that this program was an unrealisable one. Even the political thought of the pro-resurrection forces in France found it impossible to return to the intellectual landscape of pre-Revolutionary France. The new institutional projects, whether they were adopted or, as was initially often enough the case, rejected, became inevitable reference points on a truly global scale. The history of European dominance and colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is largely the history of gross violations of promissory notes of the institutional projects of modernity. The twentieth century includes histories of horrors of war and of not only traditionally authoritarian regimes but also state terrorism on a vast scale. These experiences indicate that a purely structural analysis of modernity is insufficient. The institutional structures of modernity were and are by their own inhabitants interpreted—and this is true not only of the victims but also of some of the perpetrators of some of the worst massacres— in terms of normative commitments and entailments and would remain inexplicable if the outside observer refused to pay attention to this fact. It is also this feature that makes it possible to talk about modernity without unduly imposing a rigid and misleading institutional gridlock on an unwieldy and complex historical reality. Thus modernity is not equivalent with universal acclaim of a small set of philosophical principles or the endorsement and implementation of a few crucial institutional projects. This also means that modernity can possibly best be delineated in terms of a conjunction, with global


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implications, of a set of cultural, institutional and cosmological shifts. In all other periods of cultural crystallisation before the formation of modernity, critical reflection has had as its focus not solely the physical limits of personal finite existence but in generalisable form it also brought out a discourse on ways that might bridge the chasm between the mundane and the transcendental order. Consciousness of the existence of such a chasm was in all cases also linked to consciousness about institutional practices that might serve to transcend that chasm. The discourse about such transcendence might be religious and philosophical as in the axial age or ecclesiastically ecumenical, as in the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe. In the formation of modernity in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, philosophical reflection was, however, also explicitly political. The political element consists precisely in the contestations about the constitution of a normative order that is enforceable, in the last instance by violent means. In this process there were, as already emphasised, wide differences not only between proponents and adversaries of different political reform projects but also of fundamentally different political regimes. However all such contestations now occur within the bounds of the ontological, and cosmological presuppositions of modernity. To my knowledge one of the few philosophically serious efforts in our own time to transcend those boundaries were the efforts by Heidegger in the interwar period. The state structures of Italian Fascism as well as of Soviet Stalinist Marxism-Leninism may best be described as alternative modernities. What Heidegger seemed to have envisaged were practices so fundamentally different in their ontological and cosmological presuppositions that it would have been meaningless to label them an alternative modernity or even an anti-modernity. It seems clear that his philosophical thinking for some years was directed at enabling the emergence of such a transformation that he led himself to believe was underway in his home country at the time. In this sense, his involvement with National Socialism may have rested on a misperception of the true nature of that regime but it was intimately related to his basic philosophical project of the times and not a mere contingency or an expression of opportunism. Until now, there is little in today’s various forms of fundamentalism that seems to justify a description of these phenomena as anything but part of modernity (see also Eisenstadt 1999a). Maybe, however, part of the attention, not to say, fascination, attached to

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these phenomena may have to do not just with the violence exercised by them—this seems to be little but another instance of the kind of ruthless violence, performed without any qualms, with which the twentieth century is replete—but rather the inkling of a fundamental challenge to precisely the cultural and cosmological presuppositions of modernity. The conjunction of new epistemic and ontological presuppositions and the range of institutional proposals put forth on the basis of these presuppositions constitute—what, in another context (Wittrock 2000), I have called—“promissory notes”. Such promissory notes form focal points for long-term processes of contestation and interpretation. In the course of such processes, they may travel in time and space far beyond the imaginations and expectations of any of the progenitors of the original shift. They entail a range of possible societal states of affairs that were previously—and literally—not “conceivable” but that can thereafter not be made, as it were, “unthought”.2 Discursive and cosmological shifts are not “ideological” reflections; they are necessary, but not sufficient, for the constitution of new institutional practices. The notion of promissory notes also—and as I have indicated above argued at some extent in another context (Wittrock 2001)— provides a way to make sense of what is sometimes called “cultural trauma”.3 This latter notion has been used to interpret experiences of deep violations of human dignity. I believe the simplest, and perhaps the only, way to make the concept analytically meaningful outside of the realm of psychology is to limit its use to instances where a fundamental and irreversible breach occurs of promissory notes that have become constitutive of key practices. Such a breach means that conceptually necessary assumptions inherent in the practice itself are violated. In this sense such violations do not merely encroach upon the integrity, or indeed the lives, of human beings, but bereave them of the means to interpret and articulate their experiences of those violations. If a large group of citizens of a country, as occurred in countless instances in the course of the twentieth century, are suddenly treated

2

Wittrock (2000). See also Eisenstadt, Schluchter and Wittrock (2001). For a discussion of these themes from a slightly different perspective see Joas (2002). 3


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by the authorities and by their neighbours not as citizens or compatriots but as enemies whose only redemption is death, then conceptually necessary components of citizenship have simply disappeared. Similar violations may, incidentally, also occur in person-to-person relationships. A child, who is molested by her or his own parent, has not just been grossly violated but is bereft of a crucial experiential horizon by the parent taking away irreversibly from the child a conceptually necessary component of the relationship between parent and child. If I am right, however, an analysis of cultural traumas presupposes an understanding of institutional practices. It presupposes an understanding of the way in which promissory notes have become constitutive of these practices. In particular for a theoretically and historically orientated social science it is necessary to rethink the formation of the key institutions of modernity and to understand the outlines of the cultural constitution of modernity and not to shortcircuit such an analysis by way of going straight to a structuralinstitutional account. A purely structural account will not be able to reflect critically upon its own foundations and will not be able to lend itself to a comparative and historical analysis that is not just a conceptual imposition of the experiences of a particular region of the world. This, I believe, is equally true whether the particular version of such a structural-institutional account is Parsonian, Weberian or, indeed, Marxian. An analysis of the varieties of modernity in the contemporary world must be culturally sensitive and open up for a dialogue across different historical and civilisational legacies. The constitution of modernity involved a process emanating at the North-Western edge of the Eurasian hemisphere but with repercussions that came to have global extension. In its core this process involved not just institutional changes but new conceptualisations of the fundamental dimensions of human existence. In this respect, the new understanding of the formation of modernity that we may associate with contributions by conceptual historians also raises the question of the specific nature of modernity relative to other processes of deep-seated cultural crystallization in global history.

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björn wittrock Modernity in global context

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the type of critical historical reflection on the European political experience relative to that of other parts of the world, and in particular that of East Asia and China and which was most closely associated with Voltaire, but echoed also in Kant’s critique of European imposition and in his appreciating comments on Chinese society, gradually disappeared. In its place came first a distinctly Europe-centred conception of world history with Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history as an emblematic expression. Later history emerged as an academic discipline with its focus on the European experience of the formation of a range of nation states.4 In its formative stage in the early nineteenth century, in the foundational works of Ranke, the main theme was the shaping of Europe through the confluence of the cultural traditions of Latin and Germanic peoples. Later most European historians would narrow their focus further and write narratives about the trajectories of individual nations. Sometimes these studies, as in majestic works at turn of the nineteenth century by Meinecke and Hintze, had a strong comparative perspective; sometimes their orientation was limited to the achievements of one particular nation. In the late nineteenth century, at a period in time when European global pre-eminence was at its peak, history largely came to be a scholarly exercise that served as a discursive parallel to the formation or reform of European nation states. The new investigations of social conditions and the back side of processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation were to become institutionally embedded, if in a slow and uneven process, in the research-orientated universities and other new higher education institutions.5 They formed an analogous parallel to the efforts of those nation states to cope with ‘the social question’. Thus the relationship of the new social sciences to an historical conception, other than that, which took the life of a given nation state as its starting point, could not be but a

4 The argument about that the formation of modernity entailed that a universalistic commimtent inherent in the Enlightenment was abandoned has in recent years been pursued perhaps most vigoursly by Robert Wokler, e.g. in Wokler (1998). 5 Wittrock and Wagner (1992) and (1996). See also Rothblatt and Wittrock (1993).


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tenuous one.6 The notion that the European experience should not be taken as the self-evident yardstick for the achievements of a civilisation was even more remote. To some extent this is true also of the intellectual giants of early social science, including Max Weber. Thus even if Weber’s most seminal works, such as his collected essays on the world religions, are masterpieces of global history, they stand in a complex and never quite resolved tension with other parts of his works. In the interpretation of his legacy for future generations of social scientists, as handed down most prominently perhaps by Talcott Parsons, it were these latter parts, emphasising the unique nature of Western modernity and its historical trajectory, that became the most visible and most frequently cited ones.7 It was only the disaster of the First World War, which came to shake the conviction of a historically assured pre-eminence of Europe in particular and a more vaguely defined Western world in general. In the wake of the war, a first wave of efforts appeared to write the history not of civilisation but of the rise and decline of different civilisations, accounts in which the achievements and predominance of Europe were cast in serious doubt. Often enough, such accounts were written from the perspective of the defeated nations and echoed a generalised conservative cultural pessimism. In a more conventional form this is true of Spengler, in an abstracted and radicalised form this is characteristic of Heidegger’s programmatic writings from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. In other cases, authors transcended those conventions and tried to reflect upon the cultural foundations of different political and societal orders from the vantagepoint of an historical scholarship characterised by the highest degrees of critical reflexivity. This is to some extent the case in the philosophical writings of Jaspers. It is even more tangible in the historical writings of such diverse authors as Marc Bloch, Franz Borkenau, and Arnold Toynbee. In their writings one may discern the outlines and

6

The argument in this section is largley based on a long-term research programme with results published in Wagner et al. (1991); Wagner (1999); Wittrock (1999); Wittrock and Wagner (1992) and (1996). An analogous line of argumentation is pursued in Wallerstein et al. (1996). For a discussion of the role of universities in this process see Rothblatt and Wittrock (1993). 7 This also entailed that an alernative, more historical, interpretation as propounded e.g. by Reinhard Bendix came to play a less prominent role as did Bendix’ own magnum opus, Kings or People (1978).

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the scholarly promise of a social science that brings in a comparative and critical account of world history. However, these potentials were certainly not the ones that became predominant or were realised when social science finally became institutionalised across the board in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Rather this occurred in the particularly ahistorical form of social science that had long been predominant in the United States and that became transposed abroad after the Second World War, linked to the notion of the so-called behavioural revolution. These efforts were often promoted within the framework of the new international social sciences associations that had been established with links to unesco and other forms of international scientific collaboration, shaped by the United States.8 Thus social science not only became less historical than it had tended to be in most parts of Europe at the turn of the century. It also became shaped by the fact that social science disciplines, and most notably so perhaps political science and sociology, in their theoretical core came to reflect the pre-eminent position of the United States in the post-Second World War world. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the curtailed form of theorising about world history that came to be known as modernisation theory. This type of theorising was explicitly premised on a view of world history cast in terms of a set of dichotomies between the traditional and the modern, the Western and the non-western, the rural and the urban, the stagnant and the dynamic. Implicitly it tended to be premised on a view of the world in which the particular experiences of one country, notably the United States, was taken as the yardstick against which the achievements and failures of other countries were measured. Thus even if social science, in its own long-standing self-conception, remained a discourse of modernity, these presuppositions tended to entail a social science that was reticent to theorise either world history at large and even those upheavals that came to constitute the particular Western trajectory. Thus the particular Western trajectory to modernity tended to be assumed rather than examined. Furthermore, the relationship of a European trajectory to global historical developments tended to be ignored or simply dismissed. These

8 For an overview of these developments see Wagner et al. (1990) and Wagner (1999).


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types of questions, so prominent in earlier and overtaken forms of philosophy of history, were simply irrelevant to the behavioural sciences of modern industrial societies and their increasingly urbanised and differentiated forms of organised social life. Within the discipline of history, a gradual process of disciplinary demarcation led to analogous results. Thus scholars, to whom questions of world history had been a central concern tended to lose their standing as exemplars and be regarded as falling outside of the bounds of the discipline and occupying a role as civilisational critics. As such they might be interesting perhaps but ultimately they were seen as failing to conform to proper standards of modern historical science. Arnold Toynbee is an obvious case in point, and despite his strenuous efforts to argue for the empirical and scholarly basis of his writing of history he was often depicted as a speculative writer. In other cases, such as that of Franz Borkenau, their works have simply fallen into relative oblivion. These scholars appeared as hopelessly overtaken in methodological terms long before the era of the behavioural revolution of the 1950’s and 1960’s, an event which further contributed to their neglect, as did in some cases their different political allegiances. Global interactions have become so prominent and immediately visible as to make obvious the existence of distinctly modern, yet clearly different, societies across the globe.9 No longer is it possible to credibly argue that different cultural, religious and historical traditions will become increasing irrelevant and eventually fade away in favour of one all-encompassing form of modernity and modernisation. It is in this context that there are renewed efforts to understand the different civilisational legacies and to explore various modes of interactions over long periods of time. Within social science this renewed interest often has come under the label of studies of globalisation. Paradoxically, globalisation studies often seem premised on assumptions close to those of earlier forms of theorising about convergence and modernisation. They describe the global and all but inevitable diffusion and impact of market interactions and capitalist forms of production. In so doing, they highlight a major antinomy in modernisation theory. Thus this type of theory started from a description of West 9 An exemplary introduction to debates on globalisation is Held and McGrew (2000).

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European or North American societies and then traced processes that would lead to the global diffusion of key characteristics of these societies. To the extent, that such studies had demarcated what were the defining characteristics of modernity, there was however nothing per se that would guarantee the continued geographical preeminence of Western Europe and North America. Clearly, if modernisation theory was taken to its logical conclusion there were no obvious reasons why European or North American societies might not be challenged and overtaken by late-comers in other parts of the world. The failure to draw this conclusion on the part of proponents of modernisation theory is indicative of their inability to tell clearly what features of Western societies were the defining ones of a modern society and which were just historically accidental. Present day globalization studies and theories about global networks are in conceptual terms strangely reminiscent of modernizations theory. Notions of structures may be replaced by those of networks, and Eurocentrism by globalism. However the core assumptions of earlier modernization theory in the form of a functional evolutionary account of history and a functional and non-agential account of society are remarkably familiar. In historical research the renewed interest has taken the form of an interest in what is often termed global history. What holds this wide area together is essentially an insistence, from a variety of different perspectives, on the legitimacy and scholarly viability of asking questions about long-term developments that transcend the borders of any given polity, or indeed geographical region. The empirical basis of such studies are of course ultimately the same as those of historical studies at large and will in one form or the other draw upon archival research of primary sources. However if the requirement is made that it is only those studies that are exclusively based on primary archival research by a given author her- or himself that should enjoy scholarly legitimacy, then global history will be ruled out by definition. However, highly respected historians have in all times conducted studies that go beyond the prohibitions of such a rule. Thus the relevant question is not so much whether global history is a legitimate scholarly pursuit or not but rather how criteria of adequacy can be articulated and what might satisfy a requirement for justification of some particular account.10 10

For a set of contributions to this debate see e.g. Engelstad and Kalleberg (1999).


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This, indeed, is a process that is now going on among historians on a worldwide scale. In this process, it is clearly the case that historians seek for ways of engaging with questions of global history that will not commit them to a representation of the world in terms of the interaction of a number of states and polities, nor of cohesive civilisational blocs. Rather there is a search for more sensitive modes of representation that highlights cultural and institutional legacies that are shared across such boundaries. Terms such as “connections” and “encounters” recur frequently. This is true of the master of global history, William McNeill, and an analogous form of analysis pervades the works of the intellectual pioneer in this field, Marsahll Hodgson.11 It is also true, to take but two recent example, of Sanjay Subramanyam and his notion of “connected histories” across the Eurasian landmass in the 14th to the 17th centuries and of Jerry Bentley and his focus on cultural “encounters” on a hemispheric scale.12 Similarly a group of young scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin have tried to spell out the “entangled histories” of different parts of the world in the age of modernity. It is difficult, for scholarly and maybe also for normative reasons, not to feel sympathy for these efforts. They seem to hold every promise to yield important insights. However, they do not relieve us of the need to go beyond a mere amassing of interesting insights in the hope that we might eventually be able to discern the contours of global historical developments. This is the point where social theory must confront global history. The idea of the axial age One step in the elaboration of the research programme, indicated above, might indeed be to examine some lineages in scholarship, that constitute what may never have been a mainstream promising,

11 This is the case already in his early standard work, originally published in 1967 with later editions (McNeill, 1999) but also in his shorter essays, e.g. McNeill (2000). Hodgson’s posthumous collection of essays (Hodgson, 1993) is a monument to this kind of thinking about global history. 12 Subramanyam (1997) and (1998); Bentley e.g. (1993) and (1998). For an overview of the treatment of global history, which served as the first major theme at the recent 19th international congress of historical sciences, see O’Brien (2000).

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and in some case all but forgotten, traditions in social thought and historical scholarship, but that seem exceptionally promising in such a wider perspective. One such important existing tradition of great relevance to a reconstructive research programme in social theory and global history is the one that is often associated with a work of Karl Jaspers. In the book, Vom Urspung und Ziel der Geschichte (published in 1949; English translation, The Origin and Goal of History, in 1953), he expressed the idea that our understanding of history, indeed the very origin of history, is related to the emergence and institutionalisation of forms of critical reflexivity. Needless to say, it is, to some extent, an arbitrary decision whether that moment is associated by the most basic human activities in the form of the emergence of language itself or with some other form of human articulation. Jaspers argued that the emergence and institutionalisation of critical reflexivity is associated with the emergence of forms of thought that clearly transcend activities associated with the daily lives and needs of human beings. Thus it has to be possible to identify the expression of forms of thinking that involve an explicit formulation of ideas about human life beyond the constraints of existence as it looks at a specific time and place. In other words, Jaspers believed that the distinctive feature in the emergence of human history, as opposed to the evolution of the human species, is the manifestation of a specific capacity. This was the capacity of human beings to reflect upon and to give expression to an image of the world as having the potential of being different from what it was perceived to be here and now. The emergence of such images of the world, based on critical reflection, marked, in Jasper’s classical formulation (1949), the transition from Mythos to Logos, a breakthrough in critical reflexivity and, indeed, the emergence of history in the sense of the epoch in human existence characterised by a reflexive, historical consciousness.13 He termed this period the axial age. In temporal terms he located it to the centuries around the middle of the first millennium bce.

13 In fact, Jasper’s notion was not altoghether different from the one Hegel proposed in his lectures on the philosphy of history, although in Hegel’s case the ascription, as in the case of Iran, and denial—as in his statement that India does not have a history—of such a capacity was heavily imbued with an empirical bias that cannot but be called Eurocentric.


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The idea of the axial age, as outlined by Karl Jaspers, had the character of a bold idea briefly sketched. The same is true of analogous formulations by Alfred Weber and Eric Voegelin. In the 1970’s this idea was taken up the Harvard sinologist Benjamin Schwartz and a group of prominent scholars, including Peter Brown, Louis Dumont, Eric Weil and Robert Darnton, in a special issue of the journal Daedalus, devoted to the theme “Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on The first Millennium bc”. The idea was explored later and elaborated by S.N. Eisenstadt who, with Wolfgang Schluchter as the other principal investigator, made it the focus of a sustained research programme. In collaboration with a large number of historians and linguists Eisenstadt extended the analysis considerably and systematically related it to recent advances in historical scholarship. For all its remaining openness, this theory—or rather this hypothesis—of the axial age is to date the most ambitious and encompassing one that outlines the key features of a first global cultural crystallisation. It has, without achieving universal acclaim but also without being convincingly refuted, been the subject of two decades of intense scholarly debate, involving ancient historians, historians of religion and philosophy, and linguists.14 My own ambition in this essay is to advance an understanding of the notion of axiality that makes it possible to relate it to some of the key problems in present-day historically orientated scholarship on major transformations of societies and, indeed, civilisational legacies. As already indicated, I am convinced that a purely structural and institutional analysis is grossly inadequate for this purpose. The concept of the axial age encompasses deep-seated intellectual and cosmological shifts that occurred in different forms but with striking, if relative, simultaneity, across the Eurasian hemisphere. These shifts were manifested in such different forms as the thought of Confucius and, two centuries later, Mencius in China, Buddha in India, the Hebrew prophetical movement and the classical age in Greek philosophy. Neither in the early formulations of Japers, nor in the more recent ones by scholars, collaborating with S.N. Eisenstadt,

14 Among these publications the following ones may be specially mentioned, viz Eisenstadt (1982), (1986c), (1987a), and (1992c, d and e), (1996b), and (1999a), as well as Eisenstadt et al. (2001) and Schluchter (1996).

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has there been an entirely successful effort to relate these cosmological shifts to other types of human activities. Maybe the most important direction in future research directions is to spell out the links between the set of intellectual and cosmological breakthroughs, that the concept of the axial age in a limited sense of the word denotes, and sea-changing institutional transformations. These are firstly the formation of the great world religions. This transformation is a consequence of the Axial Age but not an immediate and direct one. It only manifests itself in the form of a series of cultural encounters with ensuing articulations that synthesise cosmological elements from different and previously distinct civilisational traditions. Furthermore, the hemispheric-wide diffusion of these articulations in the form of world religions is in practical terms premised on a second transformation of the widest consequence, namely the emergence of a number of imperial political orders across the Eurasian hemisphere. This development, thirdly, also makes possible the consolidation of hemispheric-wide trade routes over land linking the Far West and the Far East. Thus the establishment of, what 19th century historians came to call, the Silk Route was stimulated by the meeting of Sinic and Hellenistic cultures in Central Asia, and the concomitant Western extension of control by the Han empire. Fourthly, there also occurs, in direct conjunction with the last two transformations, a path-breaking change in the institutionalisation of warfare and military organisation. In this process, the role of the Iranian imperial polities of the Parthians and Sassanians plays the foremost role. The concept of the axial age in a wider sense encompasses also these macro-institutional transformations. In other words, a profound cultural crystallisation—the dimensions of which refer to the imagination and representation of human existence—involved not just a process of cultural reconfiguration. It also meant the formation of culturally entrenched structuring principles for macro institutions. Such a conceptualisation of the axial age stands in a striking relationship of analogy in analytical terms to accounts of the formation of modernity. More precisely this is valid for such accounts that emphasise that the formation of modernity can not be reduced to the processes of transformation in political and economic practices that are referred to by terms such as the—to use Parsons’ terminology—“the democratic revolution” and “the industrial revolution”. Instead it has to be located within the context of a deep epistemic


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and cultural shift as well. It also has to trace historical interactions of ideational and macro-institutional transformations far beyond what has been customary among proponents of historical institutionalism in recent decades. A rethinking of the formation of modernity has taken place that focuses not only on an industrial and political revolution but also on the parallel revolution in intellectual and cosmological terms.15 In this revolution, there occurred momentous shifts along dimensions of reflexivity, temporality, agency, and a redefinition of the relationship between immanence and transcendence, as well as modes of articulation and linguistic interpretation. This means that it is, indeed, possible to elaborate a conceptual framework that should eventually allow for a recasting and a comparison of the formation of modernity relative to the cultural crystallisation of the axial age. In the sequel I shall first of all explicate the meaning of the Axial Age and delineate its key dimensions. I shall then examine three claims that Japsers saw as consequences of the hypothesis of the Axial Age. They are the claim that the axial age constitutes the origin of history in a specific sense, the claim that that the axial age ushered in the great world religions, and finally the claim that the Axial Age entailed the emergence of imperial political orders that replaced political entities of a small and fragile nature. I shall argue that none of these statements can be justified in the light of available empirical evidence. It is, however, also clear that none of them follow from the formulation of the idea of an Axial Age that I propose. Explication and definition of the axial age The first and most obvious question concerns the meaning of the concept of the axial age. We are indebted to Johann Arnason for having provided a brief conceptual history and a critical discussion of the uses of the term. My own view is that it is only with Karl Jasper’s The Origin and Goal of History that a reasonably clear delimitation of the meaning of the concept is proposed. It is this conceptualisation that serves as a basis and starting point for the subsequent

15 E.g. Foucault (1966); Koselleck (1979), (1985), (1986), (1987a), (1987b) and (2002); Heilbron 1995, Heilbron et al. (1998).

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elaboration of the hypothesis, something that for instance Benjamin Schwartz is explicit about in his classical introductory article to the 1975 issue of Daedalus. Jaspers’s empirical statements about the momentous change that he associated with the Axial Age may, as Arnason points out, involve statements that we today, against the background of now available knowledge, see as no longer tenable. However, Jasper’s conceptual delimitation of the idea of the Axial Age essentially rests on an assertion about a limited number of dimensions that are crucial in human existence. In my view, Jaspers’ position rests on the assumption that in the centuries around the middle of the first millennium bc a major shift occurred in the way reflectively articulate human beings in some of the high cultures in the Eurasian hemisphere reconceptualised their existential position. The breakthrough was manifest in different ways in the different civilisations of the Eurasian landmass. However in all its manifestations it involved dramatic shifts in five major dimensions, namely the following ones: Firstly, an increasing human reflexivity and reflexive consciousness; this is what Japsers saw as the most basic feature. It involved the ability to use reason to transcend the immediately given. Secondly, an increasing historical consciousness and an awareness of the temporal location and the limitations of human existence and thereby also a sense of relative contingency. Thirdly, an increasing awareness of the malleability of human existence, of the potentials of human action and human agentiality within the bounds of human mundane temporality or, as in the case of Iranian culture, with respect to the relationship between actions in a mundane and a transcendental sphere. Conceptualisations of agentiality tended during the Axial transformations to become increasingly premised on what might be termed more individualistic assumptions than had previously been the case. Fourthly, an elaboration of more reflective cosmologies in terms of either the immanence of human existence or a shift in the direction of the positing of a fundamental and discursively argued separation between a mundane and a transcendental sphere. Fifthly, an articulation and interpretation of such cosmologies in terms not only of their oral mediation but also of their textual inscription and the emergence of a set of rules for the authoritative interpretation of such texts. Such processes of codification and standardisation inevitably entailed breaches with some previously co-existing set of


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beliefs and practices. They also entailed the potentials for new interpretative contestations. Thereby, of course, the stage was set not only for the articulation and diffusion of orthodoxy but also for heterodox challenges. This, I maintain, is the core of the meaning of the Axial Age in its original formulation, and it is this core that has subsequently been elaborated in various ways. My understanding is that it is important to see that any particular articulation of a position on any of these existential dimensions will inevitably involve some assumptions that are contextually bound and culturally specific. It would for instance to my mind be illegitimate to tie the meaning of the Axial Age to an insistence on the occurrence of some specific cosmology, say one premised on notions of transcendence as opposed to immanence, or on some specific account of the dramatic increase in historical consciousness that we associate with the Axial Age. What is not culturally specific is the idea that the Axial Age is a period of deep change in the fundamental dimensions of human existence—reflexivity, historicity and agentiality. This change, furthermore, exhibits great variations in different parts of Eurasia, but it universally entails increasing reflexivity, historicality and agentiality. The change is broadly cotemporaneous across vast regions of the Old World. The Axial Age is then an epoch, but not the only one, of a profound cultural crystallisation that affects these inevitable existential dimensions in some of the high cultures across Eurasia. These shifts entail the consolidation or the emergence of a set of different cosmologies and make possible a set of different institutional paths of development of lasting importance. For all contestations about historical accounts, a delimitation of the notion of the Axial Age in this way provides not only a fruitful starting point for the study of global history and for an understanding of its relevance to the social and human sciences at large. It is, I claim, the only possibility of giving the notion of the Axial Age a meaning that does not entail an unjustifiable teleology and some form of cultural imposition. The axial age and the origin of history One problematic question, and one, which Arnason deals with at some length, is that of the relationship of political and societal formations

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before and after what is often termed the Axial breakthrough. It seems undeniable that Japsers argues that the Axial Age constitutes the origin of history, in the sense of the history of human beings who have consciously reflected about their own location in temporal and cosmological terms and tried to form their own existence from the vantage point of such reflections. This is an argument that tends to deny the historicity of previous civilisations in a way that cannot be made compatible with available historical research. Here Jaspers is all but echoing Hegel’s lectures on world history and Hegel’s characterisation of India—as opposed to Iran—as a nonhistoric civilisation precisely because India was, as seen by Hegel, lacking a form of reflection that would involve a critical stance towards its own traditions and the possibility of their transcendence. Contrary to what Jaspers asserts, several of the contributors of this volume highlight the fact that in both China, Greece and the Near East a key factor behind the dramatic increase in reflexivity and critical discussion may have been precisely the breakdown of the established practices and assumptions prevailing in earlier civilisations. Whether we look at Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia or China of the Shang and Zhou empires, it is simply not possible to defend what Jaspers seem to assert, namely that these civilisations somehow fall outside of history, even in the specific sense of the word employed by Jaspers himself. The important question is rather to what extent the axial transformations did or did not involve continuities relative to these earlier civilisations. Maybe the most fruitful way to approach this problematique is to focus on the relationship between two types of components, namely firstly the interpretation and redefinition by key Axial Age writers of an imagined legacy of their own societies and civilisations, secondly their own linguistic strategies and conceptual innovations that often involve the generalisation, or rather universalisation, of key characteristics in their interpretations of these traditions. Thus Confucian ethic involves not so much completely new conceptualisations but rather an articulation of tradition, synthetic in its own ways, and the universalisation of some of the most important virtues that had traditionally been seen as properties limited to aristocratic strata. In this case, as in several of the others, axiality is a form of reaction to a new type of human condition where neither the structures of kinship and physical proximity, nor those of a selflegitimising empire, suffice any longer to embed the individual in a


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context of meaning and familiarity. The emergence of the world religions is also part of this problematique. The more the Axial Age breakthrough is described in terms of an epochal rupture, the more the relevance of earlier intellectual and institutional traditions is de-emphasised. As a consequence historical and civilisational analysis will be less concerned with the specificity of individual traditions and more with the extent to which a given civilisation has or has not achieved an axial breakthrough. This question is directly related to the question of the relationship between the axial age as a cultural and cosmological shift on the one hand and institutional transformations of religious and political practices on the other. The axial age and the world religions A key question is the relationship between the Axial Age and the emergence and diffusion of the great world religions. The idea of such a relationship has been at the core of much reasoning concerning the Axial Age hypothesis. Again, it seems undeniable that the intellectual and ontological shift, described in terms of a breakthrough, has important links to deep-seated shifts in religious practices. It is however also clear that the exact of such links in many cases is open to quite different interpretations. Maybe one can say that the articulation and diffusion of Mahayana Buddhism occurred in a complex process of demarcation and synthesis of Indic and later, in artistic and perhaps also in ideational terms, of Hellenistic traditions, as they existed in Bactria, parts of Central Asia but also south of the Hindu Kush. Perhaps Christianity may be described as a kind of secondary breakthrough in the form of a synthesis of shifts in Hebrew and Greek Axial transformations. Maybe even Islam can be seen as a distant echo of the early Axial transformations, if occurring a millennium later. However, neither Mahayana Buddhism, nor Christianity emerges as widely diffused “world” religions until maybe the 4th to 6th centuries. It is only then that they become closely linked to imperial political orders in the Mediterranean region and in China respectively. Their subsequent wider diffusion across the North-Western and North-Eastern peripheries of the hemisphere is even more removed from the original Axial Age breakthrough. In both cases it means

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that their religious practices become transmuted and intimately interwoven with distinctly non-Axial traditions, whether in the form of the nature-orientated pre-Christian religions of the Celtic and Nordic peoples of Europe or the nature-orientated pre-Buddhist religious practices in Korea and Japan. In all these cases, however, world religions have some sources that are related to Axial transformations. However, the further developments of the religions, in terms of processes of standardisation, codification and routinisation, involve at least as much of processes that tended to stifle the reflexivity, the sense of historical contingency and agential openness that were inherent in the axial transformations. The Axial Age and the political order of empires In most interpretations of the Axial Age, a relationship is discerned between the Axial Age as a shift in cosmology and ontology and the emergence of imperial-like political orders on the other. This raises three questions that concern firstly the imagined nature of axial- and pre-axial age political orders, secondly the continuities of such orders and, thirdly, the consequences of the axial breakthrough for political orders. As to the first question, clearly, as argued by Arnason, Jasper’s characterisation of pre-Axial political orders in terms of “small states and cities” is not tenable. It is for instance simply not reasonable to characterise the pre-axial Chinese empires of Western and Eastern Zhou in these terms. There is no reason to deny the obvious fact that many pre-axial political entities exhibit features of an imperial order. This relates directly to the second question about continuities. Again, it seems clear that we discern continuities between pre-axial and axial political orders in different civilisations. Indeed, the political transformations that were possibly stimulated by the axial breakthrough may well be thought of as effort to preserve or resurrect features of an idealised political order of the past. Again, as already indicated, China, but also Iran, provides examples of precisely this. Thirdly, maybe the most important question from the point of view of the Axial Age hypothesis concerns the consequences of this axial breakthrough for the emergence of imperial political orders. Basically the problem here is that while such links may be hypothesised in individual cases, the nature of any kind of causation is tenuous at


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best. At the Western edge of the Eurasian landmass, the rise of the Roman Empire may be coterminous with events that may be associated with axial transformations. However, it would be unreasonable to describe this empire as in any way itself expressing a commitment to an axial age cosmology. On the contrary, emerging empires may rather be seen to entail processes of the stifling of the vivid contestation and critique involved in the original axial transformations. Conversely, the Han Empire is maybe the clearest example of a relationship between imperial order and philosophical reflection associated with the Axial Age breakthrough. This philosophical reflection, whether in the form expressed by Confucius or Mo or the one later associated with Mencius, occurs against the background of coterminous political upheavals and may more accurately be seen in the light of efforts to preserve features associated with an earlier imperial tradition than with any kind of cosmological reflection on a chasm between a mundane and transcendental sphere, more accurately as a kind of moral and political philosophy, with a stronger emphasis on the human mind than on transcendental-religious discourse. To some extent, and in a completely, different political and societal context, much the same may holds true for Greek philosophy in the same period where a pragmatic attitude and a focus on the life of a polis was often the self-evident starting point for philosophical reflection and debate, not a purported chasm between transcendental and mundane spheres. Analogously, the Maurya Empire during the reign of Ashoka, and the Achaemenid Empire, may perhaps be depicted as political manifestations of axial transformation of Buddhism in India and of an axially transformed Ahura Mazda worship in Iran. In the Indian case, though, this rather immediate link is of relatively short duration. The Iranian case, as the Chinese, is of a more long-standing nature but one where the cosmology involved is of a radically different nature than the one posited in some earlier pronouncement of the thesis of the Axial Age in terms mainly of a dichotomy between a transcendental and a mundane sphere. These observations lead to two conclusions. Firstly they underline the relevance of the delimitation of the concept of the Axial Age made previously and formulated in a way that focuses on deep-seated redefinitions in key existential dimension without elevating the outcome in any given civilisational context to the status of being the sole standard of the achievement of axiality.

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Secondly, they bring out the need to spell out links between shifts in these dimensions—manifested in new forms of basic conceptualisations and cosmologies—and institutional transformations in terms not of one single form of axial transformation but in terms of a set of different paths of axiality. This is the task to which we now turn. Overcoming teleology Jaspers rejected teleological reasoning. His formulation of the thesis of the Axial Age also marked an effort to overcome the idea of European cultural pre-eminence. It is clear however that much of the discussion around the Axial Age has been haunted by an implicit teleology, not completely unlike the one that has characterised much of the discussion of modernity and modernisation. Even if the Eurocentrism of earlier historiography—and historiosophy16—has been absent from virtually all formulations of the idea of the Axial Age, many of them have been unable to avoid an implicit teleology. This has been so in two respects: Firstly, some formulations have focuses on just one specific form of ontological transformation in the basic dimensions of human existence that I have chosen to delineate in terms of increasing reflexivity and sense of the temporal location of human beings and their agential possibility. This particular form of transformation then tends to be depicted as more genuinely axial than another one and indicative of the achievement of a true axial “breakthrough”. One typical example of such a conceptualisation is one that claims that a defining characteristic of axiality is the positing of a cosmological chasm between a transcendental and a mundane sphere. This is a view that I do not share. My own view is that the defining characteristic is an increasing reflexivity of human beings and their ability to overcome the bounds of a perceived inevitability of given conditions in temporal and social orderings. What particular cosmology this gives rise, e.g. one cast in terms of transcendence or immanence, is a mater of context and contingency. Therefore I propose an analysis that brings out different varieties of axial trans-

16 For an interesting discussion on these aspects see Assmann, 1992, 330–340. See also Koselleck (1986). I have spelt out my own view in Wittrock (2003).


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formations. I distinguish five different paths of axiality. This is the theme of the next section. Secondly, there is another, and perhaps more surreptitious, form of teleology involved in discussions about the Axial Age. Even if the existence of separate paths of axiality is recognized, the question remains how to view societies and cultures that seem to fall outside of the domain of axial transformations. In this perspective, societies and cultures that have passed through the gate of axiality have, as it were, entered the realm of responsible and autonomous action, of a new and higher stage of human existence. But what about the rest? This question will be addressed in the final section of the contribution. Five paths of Axiality It is, as already argued, possible to delineate a meaningful conceptualisation of the Axial Age as an epoch in global history that involved profound shifts in at least three fundamental and inescapable dimensions of human existence, namely reflexivity, historicity and agentiality. The Axial Age is not the only period where deep-seated shifts of this type occur. It is, in other words, not the only period of cultural crystallisation in global history. In terms of a redefinition along basic dimensions of human existence, the formation of our own modernity is, or so I have argued in several texts, another period of equally profound change, and this is, incidentally, one of the reasons for us to engage with the idea of the Axial Age today. The Axial Age is, however, probably the most consequential cultural crystallisation before the Common Era. The redefinitions, characterising a period of cultural crystallisation, will always occur in a given historical context and the practical and institutional implications of the shifts mean that a range, but certainly not an unlimited range, of new horizons of human practice open up. Thus while there is no one-to-one relation between a given shift in culture and cosmology and a particular institutional path of development, it is still possible to argue that in a given context some institutional paths are made conceivable, in a literal sense of the word, others not. There are five distinctly different paths of axial transformations linking cultural and cosmological shifts to institutional transformations,

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none of which should be given either empirical or normative preferred status. The contributions to this volume provide rich empirical evidence about these different paths. In the present context, I shall only outline their differences by the briefest indication. The paths are: Firstly, there is the development in the Near East whereby, in a complex process of influence and juxtaposition, the Mosaic distinction (to use Jan Assman’s terminology) between true and false in religion and, as a consequence, a distinction between religion and politics, is being drawn not, despite several preparatory steps, in Ancient Egypt but in Ancient Israel. Eventually this distinction, in the prophetic age and in second temple Judaism gives rise to a path of development that may perhaps be termed transcendentalinterpretative. One significant element is a process of textual inscription and standardisation but also of interpretative contestation and the interplay between carriers of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The participants in these contestations exhibit a remarkably independence relative to political power. Sometimes this reflects a withdrawal from it. However, more often their activities impinge upon the world of rulership, sometimes explicitly, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes as heterodox dissent or even rebellion, sometimes as support for established power. Secondly, there is a related path, fundamentally influenced by Near Eastern developments, but in key respects distinctly different. It is a tradition that gradually emerges in the Greek world and that may be termed a philosophical-political path of development. It involves contestation and deliberation that exhibit intense concern about human potentials and action, about the location of human beings in history and constant reflection on the human condition. However, in this case, a clear distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere, something absolutely central to the transcendental-interpretative tradition, is relatively insignificant. Nor can one speak of a standardised religious cosmology inscribed in codified texts. Instead contestation is dialogical, if often textually transmitted, and has a philosophical and largely pragmatic character with the political and moral life of a given community, a polis, as an inevitable reference point. The key protagonists in these contestations act in a context that is characterized by a previously unknown combination of intellectual independence, institutional autonomy and political engagement.


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Thirdly, there is the particular Chinese path that involves, at least from a period a millennium earlier than the Axial age proper, the gradual merging and synthesis of different regional ritualistic practices and political orders in a broad synthetic cultural tradition that may be termed universal-inclusive. Key features of not only cultural but also political order are clearly articulated hundreds of years before the Axial age and in some respects, Confucius, Mo and later Mencius and the legalists write against the background of a perceived loss of cohesion, and indeed the demise, of this earlier order and seek for a renewed articulation of it. Cultural and scientific developments can and have been described by a wide set of stepwise shifts but do nonetheless exhibit important ruptures and advances in the period of the Axial age as does certainly political and social thought with a renewed emphasis on both tradition, history and human agency. A fundamental feature of this path of axiality is that it is universalinclusive but at the same time characterised by a high degree of contingency even in the political sphere. Thus already in pre-axial Zhou political thought the Mandate of Heaven transfers the ultimate legitimacy to political order. However, it is a revocable mandate and improper conduct is incompatible with the maintenance of this mandate. Therefore Heavenly sanctioned imperial rule is nonetheless contingent and open to doubt, critique and potentially revolt. Similarly, there is a synthetic cultural order composed of highly different original tradition some of which may perhaps best be understood as forms of moral philosophy and in the case of two of major traditions, Confucianism and Daoism, with little if any concern for any distinction between a transcendental and mundane sphere. Precisely for this reason the universal-inclusive path of the Sinic world allows for and involves constant philosophical contestation between different traditions. In a sense a Mosaic distinction needs not be drawn in a context, where the relationship between political and religious order has always been of a much more open-ended nature than in the early Near East polities of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Fourthly, in India early Buddhism constitutes an axial challenge to Vedic religion. This challenge involves—through a process of semantic appropriation, transvaluation and contestation—a focus on those aspects of that have here been delimited as central to the Axial Age, namely a focus on history and agentiality, and thereby, brings out the potentials of a critical stance towards what are no longer seminaturalistic practices but rather conventions that may be transgressed.

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It is precisely in reaction against this challenge that there occurs an articulation of Vedic religion. Thus the Indic world of Vedic religion may have been distinctly non-axial. However, even Vedic religion could not avoid an engagement with the cultural systems that grew out of the early axial transformations. Whereas, both the philosophical-political axialty of Greece and the universal-inclusive one of the Sinic world had political order as its explicit or implicit centre of attention, the political implications of the Indic path—let us call it pluralistic-semantic—largely, and with the possible exception of the Maurya Empire under Ashoka, remained potentials or where entirely contingent. Fifthly, the geographical and political space where all of the major traditions of Eurasia actually interacted is that of the area of the Achaemenid Empire and its Hellenistic and Iranian successors. In many ways, cultural traditions in the Iranian lands came to serve as direct or indirect sources of inspiration for several of the world religions and imperial orders. On the other hand, knowledge of key aspects religious, and even political, practices not only in the Achaemenid Empire but even of the Sassanian Empire is lacking. Nevertheless the path of development of the Iranian lands may perhaps be termed one of a dualistic-agential tradition, where the relationship between political and religious order is seen as one of mutual dependence and close interaction, where there is a distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere but where the battles within these spheres have direct implications for all actions also in the mundane sphere. It is therefore at the same time a tradition with an articulated cosmology but in its dualistic conceptualisation of this cosmology it differs fundamentally from the cosmology of the mainstream of Judaism, Christendom and Islam. This however, also means that the cosmological distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere is consistent with a strong this-worldly orientation of practical engagement and action also in the realm of political order. The relationship of the main intellectual-religious carriers of this cosmology to political power is characterized by proximity and reciprocal dependence. As in other forms of axiality, there are also here forms of heterodoxy and dissent. However, on the whole, there is a more explicit and direct link to imperial power than found along the other paths of axiality.


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The Achaemenid Empire came to exert a far-reaching influence on later types of imperial orders in the region of the Mediterranean and the Near East. In the first millennium ad the Sassanian Empire was in its own self-conception the legitimate heir of the Achaemenid Empire. The Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire—for half a millennium the main competitor of the Sassanian Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern region—with its Hellenistic and urban legacy was structurally different from the Sassanian Empire. However from the 7th century onwards it increasingly, not least as a result of the loss of rich urban centres in Syria and Egypt in the wake of the original Islamic onslaught, came to exhibit many features reminiscent of the Iranian Imperial model. This was so in terms of changes in military-territorial organisation in a direction that in medieval Western Europe came to be called feudal. It was also the case in terms of a gradual change in relationships between political and religious order. The Achaemenid Empire was the first imperial political order to be premised on a cosmology that was axial and at the same time involved a close reciprocal, but not symmetric, relationship between the leading representatives of political and of cosmological-religious order. The same is true for the Sassanian Empire but also for the successor of that Empire, namely the new Islamic political order, at least as it emerged with the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate. As was the case with the Roman Empire, the Achaemenid Empire was characterized by a tolerance of minority cultures and languages. Unlike the Roman Empire, it did not engage in efforts to promote the language of the rulers, i.e. Old Persian, relative to the language of other peoples of the Empire. However, the Iranian Empires, as well as the classical Roman Empire, involved elements of ethno-transcendence, i.e. the assignment of a crucial place in the imperial project to an ethnically defined people that is linked both to the temporal extension of empire and to its divine protection. Both the Roman and Iranian imperial patterns are distinctly different from that of India but also from the cultural-political order of Ancient Israel and Ancient Greece during the early Axial transformations—and of course also from that on non-Roman and non-axial Europe. In both Ancient Greece and Ancient Israel the position of the intellectual carriers of interpretative elaborations was characterized by greater independence relative to the holders of

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political power. This is again one reason why it would be erroneous to assume a necessary relationship between axiality and imperial order. One may indeed argue, that the post-axial imperial orders, while often embracing a cosmology of axial origins, often involved severe institutional constraints and a reduction in intellectual autonomy for the carriers of axial thought. Perhaps we may summarize, with all inevitable simplifications, some of the points above in a figure. Figure 1. Five paths of axiality Region of Emergence

CulturalCosmological Focus

Ancient Israel

transcendentalinterpretative philosophicalpolitical universalinclusive pluralisticsemantic dualisticagential

Greece China India Iran

Relation to Political Power strong independence strong independence weak independence strong dependence strong dependence

Ethno-linguistic Force autonomous weakly ecumenical strongly ecumenical weakly ecumenical Ethno-transcendence cum linguistic pluralism

If anything, this figure highlights three conclusions indicated above. Firstly, a qualitative increase in reflexivity, historicality and agentiality is characteristic of the Axial Age and is the very premise for any reasoned distinction between political order and religious-cultural order and hence for the opening up of the possibility of a challenge to cultural claims of legitimacy of political order. Once this possibility has been conceptually permitted, it is a potential that can never henceforth be “unthought”, i.e. the potential of a fundamental challenge of established order can never again be permanently removed. However, the cultural-cosmological construct that allows for such a distinction may, but does not need to, rest on a crucial distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere. In fact in four of the five paths of axiality, this is not the case. Secondly, the institutional position of the interpreters of a given cultural-religious cosmology determines whether the potentials of the increases in reflexivity are being realized or not. Within all the five


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paths of axiality there were always interplay between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and there were always contending articulations of a given cultural-cosmological order. Often, as in the cases of both India and China, there was also always contention between deeply different cosmologies. Even in the case of Sassanian Iran, Zoroastrian orthodoxy had always to contend with heterodox interpretations (Zurvianism, Mazdakism). Thirdly, there are fundamental differences in terms of the ethnolinguistic force of the different paths of axiality. From the perspective of our own age, it is difficult not to reflect upon the fact that virtually all modern imperial orders reflect a form of Roman-Eastern Mediterranean path rather than the less impositional ones of some of the others axial paths or the more ecumenical path of one of them, i.e. China. From the point of view of modern social thought and with the newly awakened interest in imperial orders, it seems that the study of the Axial Age, if nothing else, might serve an urgent need to broaden the range of imagination of modern social and political thought. The Axial Age in global history: Axial and non-Axial transformations The Axial Age involved a series of momentous transformations that affected a number of cultures across Eurasia within a global historical perspective, relatively limited range of time. These transformations came to have far-reaching implications. However the rest of global history cannot possibly be regarded just as the unfolding of the consequences of an original breakthrough. Rather the axial transformations involved deep-seated shifts along the key existential dimensions of reflectivity, historicity and agentiality and constitute one, but not the only, period of cultural crystallisation in global history. All such crystallisations are manifested in a variety of institutional transformations that will determine important parameters for cultural and political developments for periods to come. However, this does not commit us to either a belief in the end of history, nor to a hypothesis that the particular reconfiguration of positions on these dimensions would have to be the same or even similar in different cultures or civilisations. Such momentous reconfigurations, in particular the Axial Age, the transformations of the eleventh to thirteenth

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centuries—what in another context I have term the period of Ecumenical Renaissance—and the formation of modernity, should also be examined in comparative terms. Here neither a purely structural account, nor one that just highlights the contingency of language, is of much help. It is also here that both the historical phenomenology of Karl Jaspers and the civilizational analysis of S.N. Eisenstadt raise important questions beyond those that most historical sociologists and speech-act theorists find interesting or indeed legitimate. Thus beyond speech acts proper and beyond both linguistic conventions and social structural conditions, there are unavoidable dilemmas posed by our very existence as reflecting human beings. One inevitable fact is the finite nature of our physical existence but equally inevitable is the need to adopt some kind of position relative to a few basic phenomenological dimensions. These dimensions, inherent in our existence as human beings, pertain to the finitude of our own existence, to universal anthropological necessities of drawing boundaries between the inside and outside of a community and of recognising the temporal and social location of our own existence relative to that of others.17 An articulation of the phenomenology of reflexive human existence is inherent in the human condition. Our very capacity to reflect upon our own situation entails the inevitability of a boundary between the world and ourselves; the world is no longer a seamless web from which we cannot even reflectively distance ourselves. This, of course, is what Jaspers saw as the origin of history in the sense not of biological reproduction but of the self-reflexivity of humankind. Reflexivity entails the unavoidability of some boundary between inside and outside, no matter where this boundary is drawn and how it is constructed. Our realisation of the finitude of our own existence entails a reflection on our temporal and historical location. These types of reflexivity and our realisation of the existence of orderings in relations between oneself and other human beings entail the potential of concepts of changing states of the world, of what social scientists today would call agentiality. Here two statements of caution are necessary. Firstly, the recognition of these phenomenological dimensions does not entail any single specific theory of historical meaning. It is compatible both with

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See Koselleck 1987b and 1989.


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an analysis—as that undertaken in the history of political thought by the Cambridge contextualists—that emphasizes the role of conventions and rejects that of hermeneutic interpretation as well as with a hermeneutic or historical intentionalist analysis. Secondly, the particular positions adopted along these phenomenological dimensions may of course, as highlighted by the contributions to this volume, vary dramatically across historical epochs and civilizations.18 Maybe a critic might say that these dimensions are so general as to be of little real interest or importance. Such a comment would, however, be mistaken. On the contrary, a historical phenomenology of this type has two invaluable characteristics. Firstly, it provides an analytical focus to the study of individual speech acts and contestations. I have suggested the term cultural crystallization to denote periods of fundamental reconceptualisations of positions on these phenomenological dimensions, leading to basic reconfigurations or reassertions of macro-institutional practices. Secondly then such an analysis, in what might be called, the Jaspers-Koselleck-Eisenstadt tradition of historical phenomenology, opens up for the possibility of reintroducing civilizational analysis into empirical historical research. The existence of varieties of axial transformations must, as already argued, be recognized. However, is there not a lingering, if implicit, teleology in such an analysis when it comes to societies and cultures that were not part of the transformations of the Axial Age? To some extent this is, and inescapably so, the case, if the notion of an Axial Age is to carry any meaning. However, one of the reasons we may call the Axial Age an epoch in global history is that its eventual implications were indeed global. The axial transformations faced nonaxial cultures and societies with a choice between accommodation and rejection. Accommodation sometimes took the form of wholesale conversion to the cosmology of a religion or a political order steeped in an axial cosmology. In other cases, it involved the addition of an axial cosmology to a set of distinctly non-axial cosmologies and practices. This was essentially the way that the Chinese cultural ecumene came to deal with Mahayana Buddhism in the centuries around the middle of the first millennium ad, namely as a set of beliefs and precepts parallel to those of Confucianism, itself

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See also Eisenstadt 1987a and 1992c, d and e.

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certainly part of the Axial Age, and Daoism, which was not, and, in the Western provinces bordering Central Asia, to some extent also, Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism. Christianity as a distinctly axial synthesis of Jewish and Hellenistic beliefs and practices came, eventually came to exemplify the first pattern of development within the ecumene of Latin Christendom; it was only in the Northern- and Easternmost peripheries of Europe, where the conversion to Christianity came even later than the arrival of Buddhism to Japan, that strong non-axial elements survived long after formal Christianisation. In South Asia, the emergence of Buddhism marks a moment of axiality and a demarcation against Vedic religion. However, it is precisely in reaction against this challenge that there occurs an articulation of Vedic religion. Much later, in the 8th to 10th centuries ad, what may then be termed Hinduism goes through another stage of a articulation, this time in conscious demarcation against Islam as a religion and cultural system that could not easily as Buddhism and largely also early Christianity be assimilated into the Indic world. Thus the Indic world of Vedic religion may have been distinctly non-axial. However, even Vedic religion could not avoid an engagement with the cultural systems that grew out of the early axial transformations. Thus axial transformations came to impinge upon and influence cultures and societies across Eurasia, whether or not there was a rejection or an embrace of some of the specific paths of axiality discussed in the previous section. Fundamental redefinitions along the dimensions of reflexive consciousness, of historicity and agentiality—to use once again the language of social theory—are what characterize periods of deep-seated cultural crystallization, be they the Axial Age in the analysis of Alfred and Max Weber, Karl Jaspers and S.N. Eisenstadt or be they the formative moment of a new era in late eighteenth century Europe in the analysis of Reinhart Koselleck, the conceptual historians and the new historical sociologists. These dimensions are no mere cumbersome ontological addition to conceptual history. It is existentially unavoidable for us as reflecting human beings to relate to them. However, precisely for that reason, they are also analytically necessary presuppositions for a historical phenomenology that is able to engage with conceptual change in global history. Ultimately, the cultural crystallizations that constitute formative moments in global history involve an institutional articulation and


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interpretation of the human condition, of what it means to conceptualise the finitude of our own existence in a world premised on assumptions of the potentially infinite malleability of the world upon which and into which our actions impinge and what human existence may mean in such a world.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE? ROME IN THE AXIAL AGE1 W.G. Runciman

I. According to Eisenstadt, the Axial Age revolutions, if such they were, “have to do with the emergence, conceptualization, and institutionalization of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders.”2 In Israel, Greece, China, and Iran, as in the worlds of Hinduism, Buddhism, and subsequently Islam, there appeared carriers of novel and influential ideas about the relation between worldly power and some other-worldly standard by which its possession and use should be judged. There might or might not be a single charismatic founder whose teachings spread from an initial circle of family and friends to a wider following of disciples and adherents, and the novel ideas might or might not combine with others which had originated elsewhere. But from the theoretical perspective from which this chapter is written, their appearance can be regarded as a textbook case of convergent cultural evolution. No individual case could have been predicted in advance, any more than could the longer-term consequences which would follow from the initial break with the past. But in each case, there was waiting, so to speak, an environment which would favour the probability of replication and diffusion of the new ideas once they had been coherently articulated, and the break with the past was from then on irreversible. There is, however, one major civilization in which no comparable break took place: Rome. Only when Christianity had become, for wholly other and equally unforeseeable reasons, the religion of the Roman emperors did the tension between the mundane and transcendental orders emerge within the Roman state and find expression

1 2

I am grateful to Mary Beard for helpful comments on an initial draft. Eisenstadt (1982): 294.

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in the attitudes and behaviour of both its rulers and their critics— including not least the intransigent members of monastic communities of the kind so important in the history of Christianity.3 Why did it not happen before? Two stereotypical answers immediately suggest themselves, the Durkheimian and the Marxist. But neither will do. From a Durkheimian view, Roman religion was so paradigmatic an example of a society’s worship of itself that the collective consciousness of the Roman people excluded any possibility of tension between the mundane and transcendental. From a Marxist view, the Roman ruling class was so firmly in control of the means of production that it was able to suppress any alternative ideology to which its exploitation of the rest of Roman society might give rise. But although the connection between Roman religion and Roman politics was always exceptionally close, they were never identical; and although the Roman ruling class was always ready to manipulate Roman religion to its advantage, there is at the same time ample evidence which shows its members acting from authentically religious motives (of ‘piety’ or ‘superstition’, as you please). In comparative sociology, the question ‘why not?’ is often as difficult to answer as the question ‘why?’; and it is particularly so in this case because so many of the conditions which might be expected to give rise, in Roman as in the other civilizations, to a similar Axial Age revolution were visibly present in some form and to some degree. First of all, it would be mistaken to suppose that Roman culture drew no distinction between this world and some other one. Cynical, philistine, and avaricious as many members of its elite may have been, they seldom questioned the existence of non-human agencies of some kind or other to whose influence human beings were, or could be, subject. When Marcus Aurelius (Meditations XII.38) said that we know the gods exist because we experience their power, he was enunciating what was a virtual truism even to the many Romans who did not share his own philosophical interests or outlook. Prayers, sacrifices, haruspication, incantation, spells, and curse-tablets (defixiones) invoking unseen powers were facts of everyday Roman life. As Cicero remarks at the opening of his dialogue On the Nature of the Gods, there is no subject on which there is more disagreement among the docti and indocti alike. But disagreement of the kind in which that dia-

3

Eisenstadt (1990): 130–1.

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logue is an exercise is quite different from the dominance of a wholly secular ideology in which what happens in the world is unanimously assumed to be brought about by nothing other than the workings of an impersonal ‘Nature’ coupled with the deliberate actions of human beings themselves. A small but illuminating example comes from the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (II.28) where the topic under discussion is earthquakes: are they due, as is controversial even among natural philosophers, to winds, to subterranean water, to some other physical cause, or to the numinous power of a god? To which question the Romans’ response was to decree certain days as holy, but without specifying a particular god in case the populus might thereby be involved in falsa religio. Second, it would be equally mistaken to suppose that Roman culture had no moral standards by which the treatment by the more of the less powerful was judged beyond the formal presumption that contracts, once entered into, should be kept by both parties. Hypocritical as Cicero is often held to be, there can be no doubt about his disapproval of abuse of power by a provincial governor like Verres, or his admiration for Brutus and Cassius as tyrannicides, and even his willingness to see the laws governing inheritance as framed for the benefit of men and therefore unjust to women (de Republica III.x). However unoriginal in its substantive content, his de Officiis is the expression of beliefs and values genuinely held. When Fronto advises Marcus Aurelius on the duties of an emperor, these specifically include a duty to correct the injustices of the law. The Younger Cato was, according to Plutarch, explicitly admired for his refusal to hand down bad judgements (Cato Minor XVIII.2). However resistant the Roman elite to any change which might threaten the stability of the state and their own privileged position within it, this never extended to a categorical presumption that might is always right. Third, for all the Romans’ periodic insistence on the autonomy of an indigenous Roman tradition, Roman culture had been open from its beginnings to Etruscan, Greek, and other exogenous concepts, cults, and creeds. Nor did these lack adherents. It is true that any seeming threat to the authority of the Roman state would be forcibly suppressed, of which the notable example is the so-called ‘Bacchanalian Conspiracy’ of 186 bce which according to Livy (XXXIX.14.4) threw the Senate into a panic ( pavor ingens). Astrologers were periodically expelled, ‘magic’ of the kind thought dangerous was outlawed, and refusal to conform to traditional ritual could, as

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with the Christians, invite active persecution. But such groups and movements were generally left to themselves unless or until reasons of state dictated otherwise. Philosophers, preachers, oneiromancers, mystagogues, and magi (of whom Jesus could be seen as just another one) moved freely about the Roman Empire and addressed whatever audiences were prepared to listen to them. However strongly and from whatever self-interested motives the Roman elite upheld traditional Roman religion, potential competitors were always present. Fourth, despite the weight of both literary and archaeological evidence for the public and political character of Roman religion, there is evidence also for the significance of personal and private religious beliefs and values in the lives not only of a wealthy neurotic like Aelius Aristides4 whose obsessive self-description survives in literary form but of the many humble Romans whose votive offerings and funerary inscriptions were in no sense part of the self-worship of the Roman state. The notion of personal salvation is amply documented in the evidence for the appeal of the mystery cults, notably Mithraism,5 into which initiation was on offer in the two centuries before the conversion of Constantine. It was not, to be sure, salvation in the Christian sense, but it did involve the explicit idea of the possibility of detachment from the mundane experience of the worshipper and a transcendental communication with some higher being. Fifth, the seriousness with which the Romans took omens, portents, prodigies, apparitions, and the prophetic implications of dreams testifies not only to the universal human hope of finding ways of predicting the future but also to an uneasy wish to ascertain the attitudes and requirements of the supra-human agencies capable of influencing their destiny and that of the Roman state itself. A fear that supra-human agencies to whom prayer and sacrifices are offered may be offended or displeased is explicit in the Roman cultural tradition, however shamelessly it might on occasion be manipulated for political ends. There were always sceptics and scoffers ready to deride the idea that the wicked are punished for their wickedness either in this world or the next, but there was also a plentiful supply of anecdotes whose moral is that they are. Whatever the intellectual merit

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Burkert (1998): 35–6. Claess (2000): 15.


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of their arguments, the scoffers never succeeded in expelling the idea of divine displeasure from Roman culture. There was, therefore, ample scope for a challenge to established political authority based on an articulated tension between the mundane and the transcendental. Yet there is no trace of any influential group or movement propagating any doctrine amounting to a notion of a ‘Mandate of Heaven’ that might be withdrawn from an unjust ruler, or to a conviction that flagrant abuses of power might in themselves bring down retribution from on high, or to a view of entitlement to rule as depending on conformity to some higher standard of virtue. It was merely felt, as one authority has put it, that ‘the gods could not be asked positively to maintain the state, while the Romans were behaving in a way that must undermine it’.6 Finley, having drawn attention to ‘the absence of any need to grapple with the problem of legitimacy’ in the Ancient World, goes on to say that ‘It is not at all obvious why a problem that came to the fore in the Middle Ages and has been important ever since should not have arisen in antiquity and I have no explanation to offer’.7 He does qualify his remark by reference to the Greek Sophists’ reflections on politics on the one hand and Christian theodicy on the other. But he sees acceptance of political authority in the Roman world as resting on nothing more than a ‘utilitarian consensus’ based on a recognition that political stability could only be achieved by conquest; and Rome was, as he says, ‘the quintessential case’. II. But why should there not be an Axial Age revolution in a conquest state? Ought we not expect that Rome’s uninhibitedly expansionist and predatory policy provoke the emergence of a group or movement determined to question the mundane behaviour of its generals and their armies in the name of some transcendental standard? There are occasional hints of a perceived need to justify wars of conquest as, if not strictly defensive, necessary to preempt iniuria which might be inflicted or attempted against Rome. But the doubts on the part of individual members of the Senate which can be traced in the sources, whether on the grounds that a war is not really necessary or that it is not really justified by the pretext given, fall far 6 7

Liebeschutz (1979): 100. Finley (1983): 131.

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short of a concerted challenge to an ideology which proclaimed the successful extension of Roman power by force of arms to be a visible demonstration of the favour of the gods. Polybius is as explicit (I.63.9) about what he saw at first hand as the Romans’ deliberate pursuit of hegemonia and dynasteia as he is about their deliberate search for a plausible excuse ( prophasis) to influence foreign opinion (XXXVI.2). Although some commentators have sought to argue that this is a misreading of the evidence in the light of presuppositions of Polybius’s own, it has been convincingly argued by W.V. Harris that “the grounds for rejecting the historian’s description of the dominant Roman attitude are lacking”.8 After the early days of the Republic, it became less and less plausible to characterize Rome’s wars as defensive and correspondingly more noticeable that there is no serious debate about the rights and wrongs either of the continuing pursuit of military glory by successive consuls or of imperial rule over alien nations which might wish to emancipate themselves from Roman influence but posed no conceivable threat to Rome itself of the kind that Carthage had done. Domestically, there was no lack of contenders ready to depose existing rulers and take power themselves, whether conspirators like Catiline and generals like Sulla under the Republic or rebels like Avidius Cassius and usurpers like Galba, Otho, and Vitellius under the Principate. But they never appealed to abstract principles of justice, or fidelity to divine commandment, or a vision of a purer and better world. Augustus’s careful euthanasia of Republican institutions, however deplored by Tacitus and others in the name of senatorial libertas, never provoked ideological denunciation in the name of a transcendental standard which might undermine rulers’ right to rule. Nor, although Syme’s classic account of Augustus’s rise to power is titled The Roman Revolution, was it either animated or justified by any political ideals remotely analogous to those which were to animate and justify the American, French, and Russian Revolutions. It was indeed, in Syme’s words, a ‘violent transference of power and property’,9 but not from a dominant stratum to a hitherto underprivileged one; as I have put it elsewhere, it was “merely the forcible replacement of one section of the nobility and its clients by another”,

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Harris (1979): 116. Syme (1939): vii.


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or at most a transference “from one set of members of the dominant stratum to another supplemented by some upward individual mobility by provincials into the ranks of the senatorial nobility”.10 Nor, in any case, is it as if a close overlap between politics and religion automatically inhibits the emergence of tension between the mundane and transcendental orders. On the contrary, as the example of Islam was later to show, it can directly give rise to it. In the empire created by the Prophet and his early successors as rulers, political and religious authority were even less distinguishable than in Rome. But unlike the Roman jurists, the jurists of the Islamic ulemate, through their differing interpretations of the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet, and the Sharia, provided would-be rebels and usurpers with ideological justifications which they eloquently and vigorously deployed. It was an empire which was as quintessential a case of expansion by conquest as the Roman Empire had been. But where the would-be usurpers who challenged the rulers of the Roman Empire were simply seeking to replace the incumbents of existing roles by themselves, the would-be usurpers of power in the world of Islam, however they might behave if and when they succeeded, laid claim to legitimacy as the true heirs of the Prophet’s mission which the existing rulers had betrayed. Nor is it enough simply to point to the conservatism amounting on occasion to self-conscious archaism of the Roman elite. The legitimacy of rulers can be as readily challenged when they depart from a standard of conduct set in a mythical past as when they fail to live up to the utopian ideals of a projected future. Indeed, the literary sources are full of complaints about the decline and disappearance of the virtues characteristic of the earlier days of the Republic when its exemplary leaders were supposedly frugal, ascetic, selfdisciplined, austere, and impervious to the temptations and trappings of riches. But the criticisms voiced of the decadence and corruption of their successors never carried personal disapproval into serious questioning of the system which had placed them in power. Again, the unrestrained degree of Rome’s enrichment by conquest might have been expected to generate an ideological movement aiming to return the institutions of the state to their earlier and purer forms and functions. But there is none. So what is it that is unique to the

10

Runciman (1989): 106.

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Roman case which might explain the absence of anything approaching an Axial Age revolution as Eisenstadt defines one? III. Once the question is put in that form, one answer immediately suggest itself. If there is a single feature of Roman civilization which distinguishes it from any and all others it is Roman law—a unique combination of culturally selected beliefs and values and socially selected roles and institutions whose pervasive influence extends from the XII Tables of the mid-5th century bce and the early days of the Republic to the late Empire and the codifications of Justinian. But if that indeed furnishes the right answer to the ‘why not?’ question, why should it be so? Systems of law can be of very different kinds and can evolve in very different ways. From a Weberian perspective, rational-legal legitimacy stands in contrast not only to charismatic but to traditional legitimacy. But the legitimacy which Roman law gave to magistrates and emperors was, in practice, a unique combination of the resolutely traditional with the pedantically rational-legal. Could it, therefore, be that combination which in itself created an ideological and political environment within which an Axial Age revolution would never occur? Anyone not a specialist in Roman studies who offers to comment on Roman law is aware of venturing into a field to which successive generations of specialists have devoted lifetimes of scholarship. But nobody who does venture into it can fail to be struck not only by extent to which legal and political roles were occupied by the same people but by the unquestioned appeal to ancestral custom—the mos maiorum—as the criterion of legitimacy for successive legal decisions. It is not enough just to repeat the platitude that law is inherently conservative, since the XII Tables had, as emphasized by Weber, much of the character of what he called ‘aisymnetic’ law—law, that is, which is the active creation of a lawgiver in whom authority has been vested because of a recognized need to bring about change by which political stability can be secured. But right through the Republic and the Principate, the system as it existed is consistently and even fervently justified by the wisdom of the maiores from whom the senatorial patres have inherited it and by the length of time for which it has been upheld. It is perhaps unwise to draw too heavily on Cicero simply because so many of his writings survive. But it is remarkable that when, in his enforced retirement from active politics, he set himself to write


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two dialogues of his own based on Plato’s Republic and Laws, his ideal republic turns out to be nothing other than the Roman state and his ideal laws those of the kind of state already agreed to be best, i.e. Rome. Similarly, when Tacitus (Annals XIV.42–3), in his account of the Senate’s ferocious but traditional (vetere ex more) reaction to the murder of the prefect Pedanius Secundus, reports the eminent Gaius Cassius Longinus as saying that he has never doubted that on any issue what had been olim provisum was melius and rectius and change always for the worse (in deterius), there is no reason to suppose that Longinus was not reflecting an attitude common among his peers. The jurists are explicit that it is improper to challenge the rationes for things that are a maioribus constituta, and that where there is no law to which reference can be made directly custom (consuetudo) is the appropriate guide. There is nowhere in the texts (so far as I am aware) any elaboration of what could be called a philosophy of law or of the notion of a legal right: for Buckland, “The conception of a right is so familiar to us as to seem obvious. But it represents a feat of abstraction which the Romans never thoroughly achieved”.11 Anachronistic laws were allowed simply to lapse rather than be formally abolished. Cases were argued not by reference to entitlements in principle that individual persons might have but to the procedures available to redress the wrongs they might be held to have suffered. It would be an exaggeration to say that no distinction is drawn between the letter and the spirit of the law, since ius may not guarantee aequitas. But aequitas is not justice as fairness to all so much as the procedural proprieties without which the application of the law may wrongly discriminate against an aggrieved litigant’s deserving case. IV. Roman law cannot, however, be seriously discussed in the present context without reference to Roman religion. At the time when the XII Tables were enacted, there was no very clear distinction between religious and legal rules. The shadowy leges regiae which preceded them seem to have been at least as much ius divinum as ius civile. The practices defining the roles of the members of the College of pontifices are an inextricable mixture of the sacred and the secular, and (if Livy is to be trusted) the pontifices were for a long period

11

Buckland (1963): 58, 293.

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the repositories of secret formulae and the authorities for the religious-cum-legal procedures which ordinary citizens were to follow in such matters as the burial of the dead or the maintenance of familial sacra in households with no male heir. They had, moreover, a power to interpret the XII Tables which, in the words of Buckland, “was in effect a power to alter the law”,12 and they were responsible both for controlling the calendar and for keeping an annual record of public events. They were credited (according to Valerius Maximus) by the maiores with the scientia by which ceremonial should be regulated. They held office for life, and were drawn from the leading families of the day. They might therefore be expected to have constituted the beginnings of a distinctive group or stratum with theocratic aspirations and the authority to pursue them. But no such development took place. Although the norms and practices of Roman religion were regularly adapted to changes in both their domestic and their foreign environment, they never changed in such a way as to bring them into conflict with the presuppositions underlying the ius civile and the entitlement of political office-holders to apply it as they did. The divisive conflicts were not about doctrine but about control of the priestly colleges. Roman law, as Weber categorically put it, evolved without any theological input whatever (‘Der theologische Einschlag fehlt der romischen Rechtsentwicklung völlig’).13 If there had been an appeal to the supernatural in the XII Tables, there was no trace of it left in the simplified legis actio.14 Priests never became, or even looked like becoming, the carriers of transcendental standards by which the conduct of the business of the state might have been publicly criticized or the authority of magistrates (and in due course emperors) seriously questioned. The same was true of the Roman jurists. They were neither an organized group of teachers, pupils, and successors promoting a distinctive doctrine of rights and duties, nor a set of detached intellectuals testing the rationale for the legal system as such. They were unpaid but prestigious advisers who gave legal opinions (responsa), instructed advocates on the conduct of particular cases, and helped in the preparation of documents. They disputed with one another,

12 13 14

Op. cit.: 2. Weber (1956): 466. Jolowicz and Nicholas (1972): 179.


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but the rival ‘schools’ or ‘sects’ referred to in our sources were not divided by religious or any other principles but at most by a greater or lesser readiness to depart from strict adherence to traditional authority. They gave no formal teaching. Their writings were perhaps more systematic, particularly in the later period, than Weber gives them credit for (he calls them ‘meist mässig rational geordnete Sammlungen von einzelnen Rechtssprüchen’).15 But nothing that they wrote could possibly be construed as subversive or even seriously critical of the system about whose interpretation and application they recorded their views. So far from being potential carriers of ideas of some transcendental order, they were, whatever their intellectual talents, unfitted by training, inclination, and interest alike for anything other than the application of traditional legal concepts and procedures to the circumstances and needs of those to whom they gave their advice. None of this necessarily prevented a group of like-minded members of the Roman elite from formulating a critical attitude of their own which might at least have raised the possibility of a challenge to the dominant orthodoxy in the name of a transcendental standard of some kind. But once again, that is precisely the direction in which their intellectual interests never did take them. Although not restricted purely to rhetoric, history, and natural science, their speculations were philosophical only in a form which not only avoided the issue of political legitimacy altogether but left both traditional law and traditional religion institutionally in place. Whatever Cicero’s own views about the Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic arguments deployed by his three protagonists in the De Natura Deorum, no more radical conclusion can be drawn from it than that there are serious grounds for scepticism about the influence allegedly exercised by the gods in human affairs; if, as some scholars including Momigliano16 have argued, this implies that Cicero was now paying no more than lip service to the traditional values of the Roman religious tradition, that is still a very long way from championing an alternative system of values with which they should be replaced. The Stoicism brought to Rome by Crates and Panaetius and later expounded by Seneca clearly had some impact on the higher echelons of Roman society, but exercise of the virtues which Stoicism sought to inculcate was

15 16

Op. cit.: 465. Momigliano (1984): 199–211.

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entirely compatible with acceptance of legal and religious institutions as they stood. To be told that the holders of power ought ideally to act with moderation, clemency, detachment, and self-discipline in a world ordered by reason where the vulgus should (as Varro explicitly stressed) adhere to the traditional forms of worship was inoffensive to magistrates and emperors alike. Nor (so far as they can be reconstructed from Athenaeus and others) did the writings of Posidonius, who was perhaps the philosopher most admired by the Roman elite, say anything to suggest that Roman imperialism was not comfortably in accordance with divine providence. Nor, finally, did Roman religion, for all its celebrated syncretism, ever generate a dissenting minority, or heretical movement, or schismatic sect whose members might have been the carriers of ideas of the kind which gave rise to the fundamental ideological changes which took place in the other major civilizations of the Axial Age. However many Romans outside the governing elite (or, in some cases, within it) may have flirted, or more than flirted, with the mystery cults, or engaged in more or less occult attempts to communicate with supernatural beings in either an upper or a nether world, or combined together in the name of a chosen divinity for cultic and ceremonial purposes of their own, these never amounted to selfidentification with a creed and associated set of injunctions about the right governance of the good society analogous to the split within Islam between Sunnis and Shiites (and in due course Wahhabites) or the split within Christianity between Catholics and Protestants. As remarked by Beard, North & Price,17 no Roman ever had a ‘religious identity’ like ‘Catholic’ or ‘Moslem’ (or for that matter ‘atheist’) distinguishable from identity as a citizen or family member. V. The answer to the ‘why not?’ question lies, therefore, not so much in the uniquely distinguishing feature of Roman law itself as in the unique joint history of, and relationship between, Roman law and Roman religion. From the early years of the Republic, a secularization of law went hand-in-hand with a politicization of religion and consequential conflicts over its control. The arrogation to himself of the office of pontifex maximus by Augustus was no more (as well as no less) than the culmination of a trend going back to the

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early 3rd century bce when a pontifex maximus (and a plebeian one at that) was also consul; and that occurred shortly after the civile ius, which in Livy’s words (IX.46.5) had hitherto been ‘repositum in penetralibus pontificum’, was first made public. It was not that the successive holders of political power—first, the senatorial oligarchs of the Republic and then the emperors and their favoured appointees— kept both law and religion under their direct control as part of an undifferentiated, all-embracing authority. As the codification of the XII Tables and the establishment of the priestly colleges already demonstrate, Roman society was not a ‘traditional’ one of the kind in which law and religion remain ‘embedded’ in such a way that the distinction cannot be meaningfully drawn. But whereas the law became increasingly disembedded from religion, religion never became disembedded from politics to anything approaching the same degree. This did not make either law or religion any less serious an activity to those who practised them. The members of the Roman elite devoted large amounts of time, energy, and money to both. In both, however, they were preoccupied much less with doctrine than with practice. Numerous commentators have been struck by the Romans’ obsessional concern with accuracy of performance of the details of their traditional rituals and the ‘superfluity of priestly zeal’ which Warde Fowler thought best illustrated by “that strange list of forms of invocation called Indigitamenta”.18 But, as it has aptly been put by Linder and Scheid, the Romans’ concern was not with croyance but with savoir, and not with savoir-penser but with savoir-faire.19 In the commerce rituel between men and gods, it was critically important to avoid maladresse: gods were not thought to care about the purity of heart of their devotees so much as about affronts for which the whole community, not merely the offending individual, might be punished. To be sure, insistence on accurate performance of ritual is abundantly documented across the ethnographic and historical record both in religion and in law. The proceedings must follow the prescribed sequence, due dates must be adhered to, the parties must be correctly addressed, and the traditional formulae are not to be varied without good cause. But what is missing in the Roman case is the articulation of any principled case for serious reform, even to

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Fowler (1922): 286. Linder & Scheid (1993): 54, 50.

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the limited extent of asking whether the concern with mere accuracy of performance might not have become excessive. Change was always permissible, particularly in the modifications to both legal and religious ritual which inevitably followed the transition from republic to autocracy: the extensive fragments of inscriptions which survive from the cult centre of the Arval Brethren illustrate this without the need to rely on literary testimony alone. But the legitimacy of imperial, as previously of senatorial, decision-making was taken for granted. Once lawmakers were no longer priests, but priests were always politicians, no systact could easily form, if at all, within the structure of Roman society whose constituent roles might have carried the novel ideas by which the preoccupation with procedure at the expense of principle might have been challenged. In comparative sociology, it is often the overlap between roles which is more important than the relative economic, ideological, or political power which attaches to them, and Rome offers a particularly striking example. The only potential carriers of ideas which might have initiated an Axial Age revolution were outsiders such as Jews or Greeks. But whatever the interest shown by members of the Roman elite in Judaism as well as in Greek philosophy, literature, and rhetoric, no Jew or Greek occupied an institutional role from within which political dissent might have been influentially articulated. In the Roman economy, outsiders (including freedmen as well as provincials) played an essential part. But neither in law nor in religion were outsiders ever in a position to change the presuppositions which underlay the decisions taken by the holders of power. Even if Roman culture offered some limited ideological space within which the invocation of a transcendental standard might have been both horizontally and vertically transmitted from preachers to acolytes, Roman society offered no institutional space for a prophetic would-be leader of a reformation movement of the kind which in later empires set out to “purge the power-holders and submit them to ancient and universal virtues”.20 VI. It remains to relate the argument of this chapter to the theoretical perspective from within which it has been advanced. If Rome

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Bayly (2004): 103.


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was as different from the other Axial Age civilizations as I have suggested, ought it not to be said to disprove the rule rather than prove it? But in selectionist evolutionary theory, there are no such rules—no would-be law-like generalizations, that is, at the sociological level. There is, rather, a universal underlying process of heritable variation and competitive selection operating at the three separate but interacting levels of biological, cultural, and social evolution. Distinctive species, cultures, and societies are all the outcome of distinctive parth-dependent sequences in which selective pressure comes to bear on the extended phenotypic effects of information transmitted either genetically (by strings of DNA passed from parents to offspring), culturally (by imitation or learning), or socially (by imposition of institutional inducements and sanctions). On the topic of Roman law and its relation to Roman religion, natural selection has little or nothing to contribute—unlike the topics of Roman monogamy and polygyny, where maximization of inclusive reproductive fitness is of obvious, if controversial, relevance.21 But Roman law and Roman religion and the relation between them offer a textbook example of co-evolution at the cultural and social levels. From this perspective, the Roman story is one in which the early mutations in memes and practices identified here had long-term consequences which, as so often, were neither intended nor foreseen. They turned out to be adaptive—that is, to enjoy a higher relative probability of continuing replication and diffusion down successive generations than their competitors—because of an environment of continuing success in warfare coupled with a close overlap between military, legal, and religious roles. ‘Adaptation’, it should be emphasized, is not to be equated with optimization. In no sense was either Roman culture or Roman society a best of possible worlds. But Roman law and Roman religion were both examples of what are called in neo-evolutionary theory ‘local fitness peaks’ where rival mutations have peculiar difficulty in successfully invading the established distribution of the memes and practices constitutive of a distinctive culture and society even though they fall demonstrably short of optimal design. All this was changed when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire and Rome experienced its own Axial Age revolution

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Betzig (1992): 309–49, 357–83.

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after all. But Constantine’s conversion (if such it authentically was) to Christianity, like Julian’s subsequent attempt to reverse it, is one of those unpredictable events which, although not random in the sense of uncaused (whatever that might mean), is random in the sense that its origins are no guide to its consequences. The spread of Christianity in the Eastern Empire during the third century ad was a necessary, although by no means sufficient, condition of Constantine’s conversion which calls for separate explanation within the theory of cultural selection.22 But the story of how Christianity became the religion of the Roman state and traditional ‘paganism’ an embattled heresy whose adherents were turned into ‘outlaws at last’23 is a story of a quite different kind which has no bearing at all on the argument put forward here.

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Runciman (forthcoming). MacMullen (1981): 101.

CHAPTER FIVE

CIVIL SOCIETY: SOME REMARKS ON THE CAREER OF A CONCEPT Jürgen Kocka Civil society is one of the many topics on which Shmuel Eisenstadt has written.1 The concept continues to be much in use, both in the social sciences and in public debates. This was not so two decades ago, when the concept was marginal. What has caused the remarkable career of this concept? A festschrift for Shmuel Eisenstadt may be an appropriate place to offer some thoughts on the history and the meaning of this oscillating concept as well as on its present attractiveness. The concept has a long history. For centuries it was among the central concepts in European political thought. In the medieval and early modern period, up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at least, the Aristotelian concept of politiki koinonia or polis—translated as societas civilis, civil society, société civile and bürgerliche Gesellschaft (for example by Leibniz)—survived. Notwithstanding its polymorphous use, three aspects of its meaning stayed relatively constant. First, societas civilis was seen as distinguished from and transcendent to the sphere of the household, i.e. the sphere of work and reproduction. Second, there was no clear delineation between civil society and state, quite the contrary, one spoke of societas civilis sive res publica, i.e. of a community not yet internally differentiated by the distinction between society and state. Third, civil society usually had something to do with the ways in which houses, families, estates and individuals lived or should live together. Its meaning transcended the strictly particular—it had to do with common things, with the common well-being, the commonwealth, with general aims, virtues and vices, with res publica, with Politik in an emphatic sense. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a redefinition was made. The modern meanings emerged, as was the case with so many central 1

Eisenstadt, 1993a; 1995d, pp. 240–42.

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concepts of our social and political language. Increasingly, civil society was understood as a process of civilizing or civilization, defined by a new type of difference: difference from nature or difference from barbarism. This was linked with the emergence of new kinds of European self-understanding, set in opposition to non-European parts of the world, especially the Orient. In these eighteenth-century discourses, civilizing was understood and civil society defined in various ways, or rather—related to different semantic fields. For example, in the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith and the French Encyclopédistes, civilizing and civil society had a lot to do with industry, commerce and property. Work, travail, became a centerpiece in the social order which these authors hoped to promote and which they called “civil society.” In the writings of Moses Mendelssohn, to take another example, one finds beautiful remarks on civilizing by education and culture, on Bildung of the intellect and of the senses; taste, sociability and savoir-vivre played a role. In the writings of a third group of authors, Zivilisierung was related to overcoming particularistic restrictions, to emancipation from the limits of birth, estate, business or even gender. Take Immanuel Kant as a case in point; for him the concept bürgerliche Gesellschaft opened itself up towards the idea of mankind, towards “une société qui embrasse tous les hommes”. In all cases, civil society was seen as a contrast to violence, barbarism and chaos. Step by step, the normative dimension of the concept became dominant. “Civil society” became a critical concept, critical of tradition and critical of the status quo, oriented towards somewhat utopian aims, a Bewegungsbegriff (Reinhart Koselleck) with an antitraditional, anti-corporatist, modern flavor: critical of the past and oriented towards the future. It stood for a project, not yet fulfilled, to be approached in the future. At the same time, chiefly in the eighteenth century, the concept was accentuated by separating civil society from the state or even posing it against the state. This happened primarily in the languages of countries with absolutist governments, i.e. on the European continent, less so in England. Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Kant wrote, needs Mitgenossenschaft. One can freely translate: civil society needs the selforganized and voluntary cooperation of its members. According to this view, the Vereine, the voluntary associations make a civil society, which cannot be founded on dominance and obedience (Oberherrschaft and Unterwürfigkeit), but on self-organization. In this way, “civil society”

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became a polemical concept with an anti-absolutist thrust and with an orientation towards the autonomous citizen of the future into which the dependent subject of the present would hopefully develop. As mentioned before, this anti-statist element of the concept was less visible in English, more present in German and French, and even there, civil society’s relation to the state remained important. On the one hand, changing government by due process of law, public opinion and parliamentary representation was a central aim of the program, of the liberal vision of which civil society had become a symbolic core. Civil society was defined by its relation to the public and ultimately to government and the state. It implied access by citizens to the political, at least as an aim. On the other hand it was clear that the kind of civil society one hoped to achieve would need the support of law, of representative institutions, of the state, of a more liberal state of course, but of a state. It was in the nineteenth century, under the influence of spreading capitalism and early industrialization, under the impact of new forms of inequality and emerging class structures that this eighteenthcentury concept was redefined again, particularly in German, e.g. in the works of Hegel and Marx. Now, the definition of bürgerliche Gesellschaft became even more clearly distinguished from Staat. Now it became understood as a system of needs, labor and markets, of negotiation and contract, of particular interests, conflicts and contradictions: more in the sense of a “middle class (bürgerliche) society” of the bourgeoisie than as a “civil society” made up of citizens (Bürger). In German the terms Zivilgesellschaft or bürgerliche Gesellschaft which traditionally had a positive connotation were superseded by the term bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which was increasingly used as a critical and polemical concept—both within and outside Marxist traditions, until very recently. The traditional, positive meaning was retained longer in English and in French, e.g. in the work of Tocqueville. On the whole, however, the term “civil society” receded to the background in other languages as well, playing only a marginal role until roughly 1980—with some exceptions, Gramsci among them. But in the late twentieth century the term “civil society” has experienced a brilliant comeback. In the 1970s and 80s it became an important term in anti-dictatorial critique, as expressed in East Central Europe, in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, where dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Bronislav Geremek, intellectuals like Iván Szelényi

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and György Konrád, used the term in their respective languages to speak out against one-party dictatorship, Soviet hegemony, communism and totalitarianism, in favor of freedom, pluralism and social autonomy. It would be beneficial to gain a clearer understanding of how this semantic revival of civil society took place in some quarters of the left. Perhaps Gramsci’s use of the term as a revisionist also played a role. Furthermore, there seems to have been some exchange between academic visitors from the West and intellectuals in the East Central European cities, an exchange that merits study. There may have been other roots as well in Latin American and South African movements on the left. From the early 1990s onwards, the term quickly spread. It is now used worldwide, in various political climates, among political centrists and on the left, by liberals, communitarians and anti-globalization activists, by authors such as John Keane, Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas—always with a positive connotation. When the term was translated back into German, Zivilgesellschaft was used in order to avoid the still-critical, polemical thrust of “bourgeois” which was associated with bürgerliche Gesellschaft.2 “Civil society” became attractive again in the victorious struggles against dictatorships which represented the clearest negation of civil society in the twentieth century. But in the non-dictatorial Western world as well, the term fit then and still fits now, into the general political, intellectual climate, in at least three respects. First, it emphasizes social self-organization as well as individual responsibility, reflecting the wide-spread scepticism towards being spoon-fed by the state. Many believe that the interventionist state has reached its limits by regulating too much and becoming overburdened. Second, “civil society,” as demonstrated by the phrase’s use by present-day antiglobalization movements, promises an alternative to the unbridled

2 For details and references see Kocka, 2000, pp. 14–20. For the conference “The languages of civil society—Europe and beyond” at the European University Institute in Florence, 6–8 Nov. 2003, three reports on the history of the concept were prepared (as part of the EU-sponsored network “Towards a European Civil Society” with the Social Science Research Centre Berlin as its speaker institution) by Peter Hallberg and Björn Wittrock (Uppsala); by Shin Jong-Hwa, Jean Terrier and Peter Wagner (Florence); and by Jody Jensen and Ferenc Miszlivetz (Szombathely). They will be published. A basic survey: Riedel, 1975, pp. 719–800, esp. 732–67 (749 Hume, 751 Mendelssohn, 757–59 Kant). Gramsci, 1975, pp. 751f., 800f., 1028. On this: Bobbio, 1988, pp. 73–99; Arato, 1981, pp. 23–47; Geremek, 1991, pp. 264– 273; Keane, 1998, pp. 12–31; Trentmann, 2003, pp. 3–8.

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capitalism that has been developing so strongly across the world. The term thus reflects a new kind of capitalism critique, since the logic of civil society, as determined by public discourse, conflict and agreement, promises solutions different from those of the logic of the market, based on competition, exchange and the maximization of individual benefits. Thirdly, civic involvement and efforts to achieve common goals are civil society, no matter how differently the goals may be defined. In the highly individualized and partly fragmented societies of the late- and post-industrial periods, “civil society” promises an answer to the pressing question of what holds our societies together at all. There are concerns that the state and governments are overreaching themselves. There are fears that markets are becoming overdominant and all-pervasive. There are worries about a possible over-individualization of our social and cultural fabric with unpleasant political consequences. These three concerns define the present mental situation which explains why the concept “civil society” is so attractive today, at least in large parts of Europe. It should have become clear that the concept’s opponents have changed over time from uncivilized nature and barbarism through violence and war, to the over-dominant state, capitalist dominance and fragmentation. And with changing opponents, the meanings change too, at least slightly. The concept is hard to stabilize. Still, if one understands the reasons for its current attractiveness, the contexts out of which it emerged, and the semantic baggage that it carries with it, one can attempt to offer a working definition. I would like to distinguish three dimensions in the meaning of “civil society”: first, civil society as a type of social action; second, civil society as a sphere or space between economy, state, and the private sphere; third, civil society as the core of a project not yet fulfilled. Understood as a specific type of social action, “civil society” is characterized by orientation towards conflict, discourse and agreement in public; by emphasis on individual independence and collective self-organization; by non-violence; by the recognition of plurality and difference as legitimate; and by an orientation towards general concerns reaching beyond strictly particularistic interests and experiences, although different actors always have different opinions of what constitutes the public good. Understood as a social sphere or social space, “civil society” encompasses a multitude of initiatives, networks, associations and movements;

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related to—but distinguished from—government (or the state), business (or the market) and the private sphere; a social space in which civil society understood as a specific type of social action dominates. Understood as a core element of a project not yet fulfilled, “civil society” preserves part of its utopian thrust, by which it is defined due to its Enlightenment heritage. This is where the descriptiveanalytical concept becomes most clearly normative. Definition is always partly a matter of decision, too, and there are many different shades of opinion. Some authors abstain from a clear definition, preferring to stress the historical fluidity, the openness and the “paradoxes” of civil society.3 But intellectually, this is not satisfactory and opens the door both to misunderstandings and a certain degree of essayistic arbitrariness. Some authors like John Keane tend to see large corporations and other economic institutions as major parts or actors of civil society.4 In contrast I have stressed the difference between the logic of the market and the logic of civil society. It is interesting to note that Ferguson already differentiated between commercial relation (on the market) and communicative relation (in civil society).5 But it may be appropriate to concede that while businesses primarily act according to the logic of the market, they can, under specific circumstances, be actors in civil societies as well—with both roles interconnected. Some scholars think that we should see family as part of civil society.6 The relation between family and civil society is underresearched. While families as spaces of privacy should not be seen as belonging to civil society, certain types of families—e.g. European bourgeois families of the nineteenth century—performed functions and provided opportunities which enabled and strengthened civil society. In this sense the family could become part of civil society.7 And there are those who define civil society in a more formalistic way, by seeing non-state and non-profit voluntary associations with or without political ambitions and functions as the defining element

3

As an example: Trentmann, 2003. Keane, 1998, p. 6. 5 Ferguson, 1995, pp. 208ff. 6 Budde, 2003, pp. 57–75. 7 On the conference in November 2003 (see above note 2) Paul Ginsborg, University of Florence, gave a paper: “Only connect”—Family and civil society. It will be published. 4

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of civil society, and not more. The consequence of this position is that also the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan, the Italian Fascist movements of 1920 and the Nazi Storm Troopers of 1930 have to be seen as parts of civil society. Along this line one can argue for instance that the strength of civil society in Weimar Germany contributed to its democratic instability.8 Along these lines, the “dark sides” of civil society like egotism, fragmentation and possible violence are stressed. In contrast, I think we should take seriously the long semantic and intellectual tradition which has associated civil society with civility, non-violence and the recognition of difference as legitimate. Seen and defined this way, violent, violence-prone, xenophobic, hategroups, and groups with a totalitarian spirit should not be regarded as elements of civil society. Rather, they violate central features of civil society while they fulfil others. It should be admitted however that in many cases the line of distinction is hard to draw. Carefully defined, the concept can be used in empirical research, not only in the social sciences but also in history as an instrument for comparison in European history and beyond. Some work of this kind is the way.9

8

Berman, 1997, pp. 401–429. Cf. Kocka and Mitchell, 1993; Hildermeier et al., 2000; Bauerkämper and Borutta, 2003; Kocka, 2004, pp. 65–79. 9

CHAPTER SIX

CHALLENGES OF MODERNITY IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION T.K. Oommen Conceptualizing any phenomenon in the singular—be it civilization, modernity or globalization—is intended to bring about homogeneity and tends to become a tool of hegemonization. For example, the term civilization was introduced into the French vocabulary in 1756 by Mirabeau and certainly till the 1790s, when diggings started in Egypt, it was used in the singular and widely believed that only Europe was civilized. Gradually several ancient civilizations— Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Chinese, Indian, Mayan, Aztec— have been discovered and the term has come to be used in the plural (see, Mazlish 2001: 293–299). This is a sea change in that Europe could not have any more claimed to be the sole civilizing agent although, of course, the civilizing mission could be viewed as the principal motive of colonialism (discussed below). The term civilization has several referents today; the three most common are anchored to religion, mode of production and region. The reference to Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Hindu or Jewish civilization imply that civilization is a non-spatial phenomenon as religions have been substantially deterritorialised. Further, while religion does contribute to the making of a civilization, numerous other factors too make for its formation. However, religion in its initial and/or predominant abode and in its transplanted sites does vary substantially. If so, one can legitimately speak of several civilizations within a religious formation. At any rate, to endorse the religionbased view of civilization would necessarily create the superior—inferior syndrome of civilizations. This difficulty is also common to designations such as agrarian, industrial or techno-scientific civilizations. But the fact is that all these elements co-exist in the same civilization in differing proportions. It is a truism that the basis of all industrial and techno-scientific “civilizations” is agriculture. However, the inherent problem in this

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mode of conceptualizing civilization is that some (e.g., agrarian) are invariably perceived as inferior and others (e.g., techno-scientist) are necessarily viewed as superior. Thus even as Huntington endorses the idea of plurality of civilizations, the clash between them is inevitable because the superior ones insist on retaining their superiority, at any rate in preventing their impending decline. He wrote: “To preserve Western (read Christian) civilization in the face of declining Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and European countries to maintain Western technological and military superiority over other civilizations” (Huntington, 1996: 311). That is, although it is widely held that Huntington’s categorization of civilizations is based on religion he does not directly talk about superiority or inferiority of religions but the superiority of the West in technological and military terms. The third referent of civilization is regional as in Chinese, Egyptian, European or Indian. None of these civilizational regions has monopoly in producing ‘religions’ or ‘technologies’ if one takes a longue duree view. Even if one endorses the untenable idea that civilisations belong to a superior-inferior continuum, none of them can legitimately claim that theirs have been perennially superior and others are permanently inferior. The point I am making is this: a shift from a singular to a multiple view of civilization (or for that matter modernity or globality, see below) will not necessarily ward off the tendency to think in terms of inferiority or superiority of civilizations. However, if one takes the view that the phenomena exists in multiplicity there is a possibility of viewing them as different and not necessarily inferior or superior. On the other hand, even the singular use of the term as in human civilization, enveloping the whole of humankind, also does not solve the problem. For one thing, the notion is meaningless in that only humans are capable of civilization, we know no nature civilization. Secondly, those who refer to human civilization in this view invariably denote the human capacity to control nature, to bring about technological advancement, alleviation of human distress, that which increase human efficiency and the like. They talk in terms of one global civilization (Schafer, 2001: 301–319) and/or modernity as a distinct civilization (Eisenstadt, 2001b: 320–340). While the crucial importance of the human agency ought to be squarely recognized in the formation of civilization, humans create civilization in conjunction with nature. It is the collaboration between human reflexivity

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and nature’s endowments which produce civilizations. Conceiving civilization as the human capacity to control nature is embedded in a homocentric view of the universe. In contrast, a cosmocentric view implies harmonious co-existence of humanity and nature. If different value-orientations are to be accommodated, including the homocentric and cosmocentric world views, we need to think of civilizations in the plural. If ecology and environment, flora and fauna, climate and geography along with culture, that is the human made part of environment, gives birth to civilization there would be differing civilizations. They are not inferior or superior but simply different. We need to recognise and respect these differences. The same holds true for modernities, the basic theme of this paper, to the discussions of which I turn now. I. The tradition-modernity dichotomy was almost universally endorsed in the 1960s and modernization is still viewed as a homogenizing process. The underlying assumption behind this proposition is that there are a wide variety of traditional societies and the series of ‘izations’—industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization and the like— will eventually bring about one modern society. But latterly the talk about multiple modernities rent the air of social science. (I draw substantially from a previous paper of mine in developing this section (see Oommen, 2001: 1–16). The immediate inspiration for this new conceptualization seems to be threefold. First, the empirical experiences of the now dismantled Second World which too was technologically modern like the First World, but was radically different from the latter, socially and politically. Second, the emergence of East Asia, as an economic power, particularly Japan and the Asian Tigers, which too are ‘modern’, but not quite similar in their modernity as compared to that of the First World. Finally, the ‘dependent modernity’ of Latin American society which shared the culture particularly religion and language of the First World but is quite different in its economic base—not a coloniser but an ex-colony. These different permutations and combinations in specific societies and several more could be added to the list as African modernity or South-Asian modernity, should have understandably gave birth to the current notion of multiple modernities. But an examination of the classical conceptual baggage of sociology unfolds at least four axes around which the notion of modernity was articulated. These are structural

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differentiation (Emile Durkheim), rationalization (Max Weber), the history-making project (Karl Marx) and modern life (Georg Simmel). The notion of structural differentiation gave birth to the dynamics of societal transformation variously conceptualized as a movement from simple to complex, tradition to modernity, community to society, sacred to secular, status to contract, folk/rural to urban, to list a few. The mechanisms involved in this transformation are believed to be (a) occupational differentiation and the consequent elaboration of division of labour, (b) diversification and the attendant heterogeneity and (c) plurality and the gradual evolving of a complex social network and interdependence in the place of the traditional cradleto-grave arrangement. In this process each society becomes different from the other, less and less self-sufficient, more and more specialized and hence results in increased complementarity (Durkheim 1964). On the other hand, a specific type of social differentiation has laid the foundation for increasing individuation of subjects, the route being organic solidarity brought about through industrialization. The most compelling element behind this process, it has been argued, is modern technology, so much so that modernisation is conceived as a process in which the progressive displacement of animate energy with inanimate energy occurs (Levy, Jr. 1966). But for differentiation to occur, the intervention through technology is not always a prerequisite. Thus differentiation in the West occurred both before the advent of modern technology (e.g., the bifurcation between state and church) and after it (e.g., the differentiation between civil society and market). In contrast, in one-party systems, in spite of technological sophistication, structural differentiation did not occur. Further, in spite of considerable progress in industrialization and elaboration of occupational division of labour both market and civil society remained under the control of the state. That is, while modern technology, elaborate division of labour and occupational differentiation are common to capitalist and socialist societies, there are basic differences between them. Both are ‘modern’ but their modernities differ. But it can be argued that socialist societies are not modern as the differentiation between their political (state) economic (market) and civil society structures are thwarted through excessive state domination. It can also be suggested that technological modernity shared by both capitalist and socialist soci-


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eties created a convergence between them. This means one can and perhaps one should distinguish between the ‘compartmental modernity’ of socialist systems and the ‘fully fledged modernity’ of capitalist systems. Which is to say, structural differentiation is not the only not even the most critical marker of modernity. This renders structural differentiation as a source of modernity incomplete and inefficient as it can account for only certain dimensions of modernity (cf. Luhmann 1982). This brings me to rationalization as a source of modernity. Rationalization is a process bound up with disenchantment of the world, its demystification. Accordingly, unforeseeable forces no longer interfere in social affairs, it is argued. The ‘good’ is defined less and less in relation to God, but more and more in relation to functioning society. In this rendition of modernity, reason and reality are isomorphic. Understandably, the rationalization process results in increasing fit between means and ends, it is believed. Science and technology, rather than religion or magic, becomes crucial. In this vein of thinking, capitalism is the embodiment of rationality and modern capitalism has its essence in rationality (Weber 1947). The essential features of rationality of modern capitalism are the calculability furthered by market place, the purely instrumental orientation of action, a highly technical system of book-keeping and the bureaucratic organisation of firms. Traditional affective constraints wane or vanish as a social world wherein social actors are increasingly, if not exclusively, guided by their instrumental interests emerging. The project of rationality assumes that the individual can gradually evolve and ultimately become autonomous guided by his interests, in an intelligible world. Perfection through reason is the guiding principle; and hence god is a dispensable entity; but rationalization of the world pre-supposes the depersonalization of social relations. However, the fact that functioning ‘modern’ societies are visited by irrationality, superstition and sentiments is widely acknowledged and recorded which points to the impossibility of a completely rational and hence modern society of this version. The hatred which thrives across religious, linguistic and racial groups and the animosity which prevails across even secular ideological communities in the modern world are not founded in rationality. In fact, human beings are more rationalizers rather than rational. This points to the limits of the modernity which can be unleashed through the axis of rationality.

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It is important to note in passing here the two features shared by the two sources of modernity—structural differentiation and rationalization. First, both seem to be accounting more for the modernity of capitalist societies and neglect the modernity of socialist societies. Second, both have the displacement syndrome and western epistemological dualism at their core. That is, reality is conceptualized as a duality—traditional/modern, rational/irrational—and it is presumed that in the onward march of social transformation one will displace the other. But available empirical evidence suggests that this is not happening. Three processes occur simultaneously: displacements, retentions, accretions. And what is more, what are displaced are not always irrational and those which are retained and added are not always rational. What we have is a collage of the old and the new, rational and irrational. Both structural differentiation and rationalization assume the displacement of traditional collectivism with modern individualism. True, modernity cannot be separated from the will of individuals who become unfettered actors in society. In fact, the birth of autonomous individual itself is an indication of modernity. In pre-modern societies, traditional collectivism prevailed. The conscious individual is a creator of history, who interrogates all established social relationships. To do this, the individual should be incessantly in the quest for knowledge, not only to meet intellectual curiosity but also to solve practical problems. This voluntarism cannot remain at the individual level, it should generate a new, modern collectivism manifesting in the working class mobilization eventuating in revolution giving birth to a new society. This is the Marxian project of making history (Marx and Engels 1988). The two versions of modernity fathered by structural differentiation and rationalization recognized traditional collectivism but did not yield much space for modern collectivism. In contrast, the version of modernity championed by the history-making project juxtaposed the two antagonistic classes and assumed that social transformation is a function of conflict between these classes. But this characterization was not entirely correct even in the case of European societies. There were (and are) several non-class antagonistic social categories— national, racial, gender, generational and regional. The existence of these social categories was not adequately recognized in the version of modernity which addressed the Marxian project of making history.


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However, the salience of working class movements articulating a myriad form—professional and occupational associations, trade unions and a variety of interest groups—cannot be denied. But their career climaxed in the West in the 1960s and a set of post-class movements—feminist, peace, youth, environmental/ecological, national/ethnic—all of which transcend the class dichotomy and boundaries emerged. These are the New Social Movements. This development was not anticipated by Marx or Marxians but this too has to be reckoned as a project of making history. The New History does not advocate class antagonism but class harmony and the project has the harmony of races, sexes, and generations as well as the harmony between humans and nature as its ultimate goal. The old version of history-making project has been abandoned because of its political authoritarianism. Dictatorship of the proletariat manifested as one-party regimes crystallized as party-states which are totalitarian and all-encompassing. The socialist state became not only the final arbiter but the only adjudicator between contending interests. In this process, it not only prevented the birth of market but relegated the civil society too to the background. That is, the project of making history, although started as a modernist venture has ended up as an antidemocratic and hence anti-modern project. I have noted above that neither structural differentiation nor rationalization adequately recognized modern collectivism. The Marxian project of making history did provide the space for modern collectivism but it recognised only class consciousness and dismissed the consciousness of other collectivities as false. In the project of making history in Socialist states the history of non-class categories was cognized as irrelevant and inappropriate. Indeed an effort was made to banish these inconvenient histories from collective memory and an effort was made to re-invent history in favour of dominant nationalities so as to facilitate their hegemonization. Russification in Soviet Union, Hanisation in China, Serbianization in Yugoslavia afford examples of this (see Connor 1984). This process has also occurred in capitalist societies, although through a different route, as exemplified by Frenchification in France, Englishisation in United Kingdom and Spanishisation in Spain etc. (see Oommen 1997). But relegation of collective memory and identity to the background of a wide variety of categories—age-groups and gender—in homogeneous societies and also of racial, national and religious identities in multi-racial and

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multi-cultural societies has prompted these categories to invent their specific histories and insist on their specific identities. In the absence of a common history, there cannot be a collective conscience or a common vanguard. This is the context of identity politics as against class politics; if in the latter the society is polarised into two classes, in the former a wide variety of identities crystallize. If in class politics and its history-making project protest was based on the political economy of exploitation, in the case of identity politics protest focus on the repression of identity too in addition to economic exploitation (Melucci 1989). If both structural differentiation and rationalization associated with capitalist modernity produced individual alienation, loss of non-class collective freedom and absence of identity-recognition resulted in alienation of collectivities in socialist societies. The break-up of Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia points to the search for a non-class, national identity on the part of marginalized nationalities. The fourth modernity that I am referring to relates to modern life-style. Modernity implies changes in perceptions of space and time and in the speed of exchange. Modernity involves rapid transactions, life in cities and accelerated pace of events. Modern life in cities is unsettled and it is constantly in flux. Due to these reasons barter is not possible and money assumes social importance in three contexts. First, as the symbol of movement and circulation. Second, as the universal equivalent of goods and services transacted. Third, as a universal leveling force. Money empties everything of its particularity, its specific value. Importance is decided in terms of how much money value one commands—the neighbourhood one stays, the car one owns, the amount of money one’s acting or painting can get, the number of copies one’s book sells and hence the royalty one pockets. Nothing has intrinsic value, everything has only money value (Simmel 1990). The modern life-style is made possible through the shrinkage of space and time facilitated through the revolution in transport and communication. From this, the distance to globality itself is short because globalization ultimately is brought about through a shrinkage in space and time and the easiness of exchange. This is further facilitated through money taking new form—for example, the credit card, wherein even the disadvantages of a multiplicity of currencies are done away with. That is, Simmel’s conceptualization of modernity is precariously proximate to the current notion of globality.


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All the four classical thinkers recognized the discontents of modernity. Durkheim recognized increasing individuation, Weber warned about depersonalization, Marx alerted about alienation and Simmel noted the loss of intrinsic worth. Through these processes the community is sentenced to death by modernity, individualism is celebrated and a homogeneity based on similarity in behaviour, attitudes and values emerge which has no organic base, but is merely aggregative. That is social actors are apparently similar viewed in terms of their life style but actually they are different in terms of their deeper values. This explains why individuals and groups who share the same life styles enter into persisting conflicts based on race, religion or language. Recall the conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Ireland or Kashmir. Part of the problem here arises from the monistic conceptualization of modernity as a movement from multiple traditions to singular modernity. Western epistemological dualism and displacement syndrome is at the core of this mode of conceptualization. It is an either-or paradigm which juxtaposes mind and matter, emperor and pope, church and state, sacred and secular. The fact is that this mode of conceptualization cannot grapple with the evolving empirical reality even of the West. Co-existence of religious, racial and linguistic diversities along with different secular ideologies has become an empirical fact which sits uneasily with the tradition versus modernity paradigm. Further, the ongoing process of transformation also indicates the existence of multiple modernities. It seems to be correct to think of different versions of democracy, capitalism, socialism, secularism and technologies. If so, plurality of modernity is a fact. In Europe, modernity’s source was endogenous—the internal dynamic of society—surfacing through a series of revolutions—the conflicts between aristocracy and clergy, the revolt of economic categories against clergy and aristocracy, and the proletarian revolution which targeted the bourgeoisie. The trajectory of modernity differs in other part of the world. For example, in South Asia, to begin with the source of modernity was colonialism. But the modernizing impact of colonialism was segmental: the élites exposed to higher education and secular ideology were the agency through which modernization impacted. Gradually the consequences started seeping down. The vertical transmission of the consequences of modernity started gradually enveloping the lower sections of society in South Asia. The promise of equality and justice in a modern polity which

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still hosted a traditional society gave birth to a new trajectory of modernisation. It was industrial urbanization, propped up by modern technology, which heralded the beginning of modernity in the West. Four mobilities—spatial, social, occupational and ideational—followed, which shuffled around individuals and groups. While the pace of change in the material and technological realms were substantial, the change in non-material and ideational realms were less. This led to the formulation of cultural-lag hypothesis (see Ogburn 1964). What is pertinent for the present discussion is that this trajectory affected the content of modernity in Europe, which in turn gave meaning to the convergence thesis: convergence between capitalist and socialist systems. In South Asia, the ideological dimension was sought to be changed first. The introduction of the values of equality, justice and freedom was far more unsettling in a hierarchical and traditional society than spatial mobility or technological change. In turn this produced a modernity of a different hue which assigned primacy to change of values rather than the role of technology. That is, the sources, patterns and consequences of modernity differed between say West Europe and South Asia. Therefore, not only that the simplistic unilinear movement from tradition to modernity is untenable but the movement seems to be from multiple traditions to multiple modernities. If this argument is correct the notion of singular globality too is untenable. Multiple modernity implies multiple globality because the point of departure inevitably influences the point of destination even when the process of displacement is the same. But the following points may be underlined: (a) displacement is never total and invariably partial, (b) the process of displacement differs across societies and (c) accretion of alien elements into societies is necessarily selective. For these reasons, the notion of a monolithic globality should be re-examined with greater rigour and care. II. The following points emerge from the preceding analysis. One, civilization is a spatial concept. Two, modernity is a temporal notion. Three, globality is de-spatialized temporal idea. This postulation can meet some of the challenger of modernity in the emerging age of globalization. There is a general tendency among social theorists to view ‘izations’—colonization, industrialisation, urbanization, modernization, globalization—either as negative or positive processes and


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having a definite direction. As against this, I want to argue that these processes have both negative and positive consequences and do not have any inherent direction. Through this stance, we avoid (a) any implied teleology and ( b) disengage globalization from a pre-conceived notion of progress. This position is necessitated not simply for conceptual rigour but also by historical experience. We can understand this by reviewing briefly the conceptual history of globalization. Broadly speaking globalization began with geographical explorations of sixteenth century and colonialism which followed it; colonialism and modernisation were the first two phases of globalization. Although different parts of the world were linked in a limited way even before colonialism, the globe of globalization entered the cognitive map of humanity with the process of colonisation: Captain Cook, Vasco de Gamma and Columbus were its initial agents. Colonialism however did not produce the ‘One World’ familiar to us to day; it has given birth to three dichotomies which conjointly encapsulated the world. These dichotomies were the primitive and the modern, the Orient and the Occident and the New World and the Old World. Europe, the Occident, was at once old and modern. The primitives, Orientals and the new worlders were in the periphery of the world society while Europe constituted the centre (see Oommen 2000: 153–190). The modern society of Europe was inhabited by whites and characterized by the territorial state, monogamous family and private property. Its polar opposite was the Dark Continent, Primitive Africa, inhabited by blacks and characterized by nomadic life, polygamy and communal property. The primitive man was illogical, given to magic and hence devoid of civilization. It was necessary to civilize them and colonialism was an instrument of the civilizing mission (Kuper 1988). Further, African tribes were viewed as peoples without history as well as pre-literates and hence not nations. Therefore, the principles of national self-determination, the basic tenet for modern (read, western) democratic nations, was not applicable to these primitives; colonialism was a stepping stone to create modern nation-states of the European variety in Africa. In the context of the Orient-Occident dichotomy the situation was different in that the Orientals were heir to ancient civilizations. But they lacked the concept of individual autonomy and hence not ready for modernization. Their long history steeped in traditional collectivism was a liability. Colonialism was a pre-requisite to transform the

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unwieldy ancient civilizations into neat modern nation-states (cf. Said 1978). The historical justification of colonialism was that it heralded the birth of modern world itself—it was contended. It is important to note here in passing that there were three Orients each of which was viewed with differing attitudes and orientations by the West. The Near Orient, broadly the Egyptian civilizational region, was geographically the most proximate and populated by one of the peoples of the Book—the Muslims—and yet the object of great hostility for a variety of reasons, particularly the prevalence of slavery and oppression of women. The Far Orient, the area of Chinese civilizational region was geographically and mentally distant and yet an object of some admiration for its technology, bureaucracy, literacy and religion. The attitude towards the Middle Orient— the Indian civilizational region—was mixed; it was admired for its ancient civilization, long history, Sanskrit language and above all the ‘Aryan race’. But it was despised for its institutionalized inequality manifesting through the caste system and the oppression of women. The point of interest for the present is that the grand Orient-Occident narrative actually contained at least three subsets which had differing implications for modernization and consequently for globalization. The third dichotomy produced by colonialism was applied to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand—the New World, which was treated as if it was an empty space. Colonialism in the New World was justified based on the Hobbesian doctrine of the right of the people living in densely populated regions of the world to migrate in search of their livelihood to sparsely populated regions. The original inhabitants of the New World were pre-literates who needed to be civilized. But even the immigrants, as they were drawn from a multiplicity of races and nations, did not constitute a people and hence the notion of national self-determination hailed as a great democratic principle in Europe was irrelevant in the New World. Democracy was given a new twist, individualism was foregrounded and nationalism of the European variety was put in the backyard in the New World. This explains the saliency of Human Rights in the New World. This also explains the importance accorded to Human Right, in the context of globalization, the United States of America being its chief protagonist. It is important for the present purpose to note that in all the three locales of colonialism—Dark Africa, Ancient Orient and the New World—colonialism introduced new values and institutions. The most


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important of these were the value of individualism and the institution of private property. In turn they gave birth to democracy, monogamous marriage and nuclear family. The introduction of modern communication, transportation and technology gradually led to the shrinkage of time and space, the basic pre-requisites of globalization. The second phase of globalization was couched in terms of the modernization project. Broadly speaking three revolutions produced three worlds. The first revolution to occur was the bourgeoisie revolution, which produced the First World with its anchorage in Western Europe. The values and institutions which colonialism sought to spread were the products of this revolution. The proletarian revolution followed and produced the Second World. This revolution questioned some of the values (e.g. individualism) and institutions (e.g. private property, multiparty democracy) of the First World. The leading value produced by the proletarian revolution was modern collectivism; it advocated one-party democracy and collectivization of property. Inspired by the values and institutions of the first and the second worlds, the colonial revolution triggered off producing the Third World. The first and the second worlds started the contestation for the Third World and the Cold War phase, the period of capitalist and socialist modernities, emerged. If colonialism produced three dichotomies, Cold War produced a trichotomy of the three worlds (Worsley 1984). In this rendition the Third World was characterised as the world of tradition, illiteracy, irrationality, under-development and over-population. It needs to be modernized. For this, modern (that is, European) knowledge is to be imbibed, western technology should be introduced, secular-values ought to be internalized and population should be controlled. Most of all, the persisting traditional collectivism of the Third World should be replaced by western individualism to sustain multi-party democracy. Unlike the Third World, the Second World was modern but its modernity was different from the modernity of the First World. The Second World was technologically sophisticated and secular. But it was politically authoritarian; it did not provide any space for civil society and the market was subservient to state. Indeed it produced a state-centric system which rolled the state, market and civil society into one entity. If the central thrust of the First World modernity was differentiation, the ethos of the Second World modernity was

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de-differentiation. To cap it all, the one party democracy which prevailed in the Second World was no democracy at all, it was contented (see Pletsch 1981: 565–90). In contrast to this, the First World was modern in all respects. Not only was it a haven of science and technology, it was rational, efficient and secular. Above all the First World was democratic and free. The Cold War was a struggle to annex the Third World into one of the modernities: the ‘natural’ modernity of the First World and the ‘enlightened’ modernity of the Second World. Apparently, the modernity of the First World triumphed and the modernity of the Second World succumbed. The Third World disappeared and Cold War got terminated. The world has become one; a worldsociety has emerged. This is the perception about the world in the Global Age. The basic value of the Modern Age was rationality, its central institution was nation-state and the central identity it fostered was citizenship (see Albrow 1996). Although rationality was touted as the central value orientation of the Modern Age, racism, religious intolerance, wars of great destruction, annihilation of species and habitats, even slavery, were all witnessed during this era. The nation-state encouraged rationality through technology-driven development, but it also fostered irrationality through patriotism. The hero of the nation-state, the citizen, was expected to subordinate all primordial identities—tribe, race, religion, language, region—singly or in combination to the citizenship identity. And yet, citizenship was invariably based on nationality, a primordial identity. That is, rationality and irrationality not only co-existed but the latter was even encouraged, sometime unwittingly but often surreptitiously. The de-linking of the structures of state and nation and pursuantly the identities of citizenship and nationality is the central challenge in the transition from the Modern Age to the Global Age (see Oommen 1997; 2002) Those who advocate the idea of one world see it in terms of one or another dimension: communication and transportation, life-style and consumption pattern, global production and finance, shrinkage of time and space, that is intensification of world-wide social relations, proximate to Simmel’s view of modernity as noted earlier. But there are those who define globalization as all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society; the global society. That is, globalization as a concept refers


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both to the compression of the world and intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole (Giddens 1990; Robertson 1992). To accomplish globalization, this should apply equally to all the inhabitants of the erstwhile three worlds. In turn this implies reciprocity between them and flow of ideas across them. But in reality the process of globalization as it occurs is quite at variance from this. The chief instrument of globalization is the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and it is enunciated and operated by the Brettonwoods institutions—the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation etc. on behalf of the erstwhile First World, particularly some of its constituents. As is well known SAP has several aspects: Minimalization of state, dismantling of developmental bureaucracy, de-legitimation of the concept of welfare state, promotion of free trade, privatization of the economy, institutionalization of multiparty democracy, observance of Human Rights. Admittedly, this is a mixed baggage. While the last two dimensions have acquired nearuniversal acclaim and recognition this cannot be said of other aspects. The most widely contested dimensions of SAP are the disproportionate importance it accords to market and the near marginalisation of state. It is very important to recall here that those who are subjected to the pressures of SAP are mainly the ‘democratic incapables’ of the colonial era—the primitives and orientals—and the ‘democratic misfits’ of the Cold War era—those from the former socialist states. Thus viewed, globalization is the third incarnation of the civilizing mission, the first two being colonialism and modernization. With this understanding of the conceptual history of globalization which situates the changing cognitions about the world let us look at the more direct manifestation of its social impact, the intention being to avoid the deficits of modernity in the ongoing process of globalization. III. Globalization, as other “izations”, has both negative and positive consequences as I have noted above. In what follows I shall identify four inter-related and interacting processes—homogenization, pluralization, traditionalization and hybridization—in terms of their positive and negative social impact and through that the challenges posed by modernity to globalization. The revolution in transport and communication did bring about a certain degree of homogenization in cultural patterns and institutional arrangements right from the time of colonialism. While modernization

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accelerated this process, homogenization seems to be climaxing with the on-set of globalization. The more visible aspects of homogenization manifest in the cultural context through common life style and consumption pattern—dress (e.g. jeans), food (e.g. McDonalds), music (e.g. popularity of Michael Jackson). Yet it is not true that this consumption pattern and life style have become or fast becoming universal. Generally speaking these are confined to the urban population and within that those who live in metropolitan centres, which is a minority. But this minority is the most visible segment of the contemporary world population and the similarity in their life-style leaves a deep social impact. Notwithstanding this, to argue that globalization brings about homogenization of life-style and consumption pattern is to mistake the part for the whole. The majority of world’s population is still untouched by the process of homogenization, cultural heterogeneity obstinately persists. However, homogenisation is more visible in certain other contexts— nuclear family, monogamous marriages, parliamentary democracy, private property and western technology. Here again some of these institutional arrangements (e.g. parliamentary democracy, private property) have a near-universal endorsement as compared with other institutional patterns. For example, joint family ethic has not disappeared from Asia and monogamy has not yet become the normative pattern in most Muslim societies. The homogenisation process in these institutional arrangements was initiated during the colonial era and gained momentum during the Modern Age. The process of homogenization assumes the effective functioning of displacement syndrome, that is, the belief that the old is necessarily displaced by the new. But this is not a correct perception regarding the dynamics of social transformation. It is true that some of the old elements/aspects are displaced but some others are retained and new elements are added to the existing stock of the old. Further, retention of the unique elements in the national heritages while incorporating exogenous elements facilitate ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson 1992). These processes—displacement, retention, accretion, glocalisation— conjointly produce pluralization. Pluralization concedes and commends the co-existence of a variety of consumption and institutional patterns. To go back to the examples I have used, along with McDonalds other varieties of junk food (e.g., pizza) and along with Michael Jackson’s other recent styles of popular music (such as rap by Eminem) come to be accommodated.


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Not only that. Several of the old patterns in food, dress and music persists with vehemence; cultural revivals are indeed common in contemporary world. This partial change and partial persistence gives birth to what I have designated as pluralisation. I have already hinted above the possibility of pluralisation in the institutional realm. Witness the arrangements of ‘marriage’ that exists today from simple temporary co-habitation without any legal or moral binding to highly committed and life-long marriages. Similarly, ‘families’ range from ephemeral dwelling units of couples to long term cohabitation of a wide circle of kin. Even as private property and parliamentary democracy are endorsed in form, their content varies across societies. The democratic pattern varies from two-party systems to multiparty coalitions. Property forms vary from exclusive private ownership, to joint-stock companies to co-operatives and collective enterprises. Even in the case of technology, the distinction between simple (traditional), intermediate and advanced (complex) technologies is not merely conceptual but is of robust empirical possibility (Oommen 1992: 131–9). That is, pluralization is a fact of contemporary social reality. I must add a caveat here. It is not my point that globalization causes pluralization. But I want to suggest that because of the processes of accretion and retention pluralization comes about as globalization proceeds. That is, globalization cannot be and indeed should not be homogenizing in its tenor, the central tendency of modernization. Pluralism does not reject a cultural item or an institutional device based on the locale of its origin, because it recognizes and respects other cultures. But generally speaking the non-west accepts many more of the western cultural items and west reluctantly takes to things non-western. Globalization which should imply flow of goods and ideas in multiple directions actually results in their flow in one direction, from the west to the non-west, from the centre to the periphery and hence hegemonizing in its tenor and orientation. One of the challenges of globalization is to reject this unilinearity and consciously move towards reciprocity. The hegemonizing tendency of modernization gives birth to a loss of meaning and an erosion of identity to the non-West. This leads to the revivalist syndrome, the resurrection of roots, a search for identity, a process of traditionalisation. However this tendency is not confined to the non-west. Americanization is resisted even by Europeans, particularly the French. Different nations even as they

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modernize and globalize want to retain their ‘national’ heritages. Sometimes response to modernity takes the form of cultural revival and results in the re-invention of tradition both as religious fundamentalism and also as religious reforms. If fundamentalism is invariably a literal interpretation of texts ignoring the changing contexts, reform is a creative reinterpretation of the text taking into account the change in the context. When traditionalization relapses into the search for cultural purity it engenders cultural relativism, the belief that one’s culture is the purest and it needs to be maintained in its pristine purity (Redfield 1957: 148). Globalization has to meet the challenge of containing fundamentalism and accelerating reform. Tradition, however, is not a monolith; plurality of tradition is widely recognised. Given the plurality of tradition the tendency of one or another strand of tradition to establish hegemony over other traditions cannot be ruled out. Generally speaking, the conflict between tradition and modernity is a conflict between the traditional hegemon and the homogenizing tendency of modernity. Dominated traditions do not have the power to challenge modernity and hence they tend to succumb or acquiesce. If modernity succeeds in successfully challenging the hegemonic tradition homogenization will occur. But this is unlikely to happen in all parts of the world with equal intensity as hegemonic traditions and their strength vary across the globe. This is evident from the persistence of fundamentalism/ revivalism—religious, political, economic and/or cultural—in different parts of the world. The plurality of tradition that I am referring to has another dimension—its verticality. Thus one may distinguish between Little and Great Traditions. The latter, generally speaking, obtains at the civilizational level often transcending nations and states. Little traditions exist essentially at the level of communities—some big, others small; some territorially anchored, others spatially dispersed. The confrontation between great traditions re-surface in the context of globalization, designated as ‘clash of civilizations’ by some scholars (see for an example, Huntington 1996). The intensity of clash across these great traditions depends upon their proximity or distance to the process of globalization. Thus one may postulate a continuum with globalizing great traditions on the one end and those great traditions which resist the process of globalization on the other. All the same globalization produces self-awareness and dignity about one’s heritage and culture.


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The clashes between great traditions transmit their tension vertically leading to conflicts at the level of local communities. These manifest in a million mutinies between religious, linguistic and tribal communities as well as racial and caste groups. The clashes between these little traditions are based on the specificities of their situations whether they occur in Ireland, Bosnia, Basque Land, Kashmir, Burundi or Los Angeles. These are not ‘clash of civilizations’ as such but are their local expressions which have a bearing at the macro level. Further, these local clashes feed on each other because of globalization, through the agency of communication, particularly electronic media. It is not my intention to suggest that globalization only intensifies the clashes between little traditions, it can also and often it does prompt communitarianism. The mass media often instills in their audience sympathy and concern for the victims of different types of disasters. Humanitarian work and charity result from this. Thus globalization does produce fellow feeling, fraternity and altruism. There is another aspect of communitarianism that merits reference. Modernity’s emphasis on homogenization tends to destroy the specificities of local communities. Therefore, people soon discover the deficits of modernity—anonymity, impersonality and bureaucratization. These render them rudderless creatures and they often yearn for the ‘return of the community’. New associations of friendship—clubs, eating jaunts, entertainments, picnics, excursions, tours and the like—come into vogue. Neighbourhood associations and other voluntary associations get established to meet instrumental and expressive needs. There occurs a resurrection of localism as a reaction to globalism resulting in the return of community (see Etzioni 1993). The cross-breeding of the traditional and the modern, the local and the global, gives birth to hybridity. Hybridisation creates new cultural elements and social patterns which are neither traditional nor modern, neither local nor global. Hybridization is different from pluralization in that it is neither co-existence nor elaboration. It is an effort to innovate, to break out of cultural and social dead ends. It is a product of the mutation syndrome. It is simultaneous engagement with both tradition and modernity and local and global (cf. Pieterse 1994: 161–84). This is evident in contemporary institutional arrangements and consumption patterns. If in the traditional societies living in joint family was the norm, in the modern society nuclear family came to be accepted as the

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standard. But it was realized that nuclear family with its aggressive individualism neglects not only the aged, the imbecile and the physically handicapped but even the ‘normal’ child. An appreciation of eastern family ethic gradually developed in the West. Inter-family arrangements to look after children intermittently are gradually emerging (e.g., in Scandinavian countries) instead of vigorously pursuing the ‘professionalization of mother role’, the refrain of modernity. Acute sexual division of labour which prevailed in the wake of modernization is gradually being replaced by sharing of domestic chores by husband and wife (Hochschild 1989). The possibility of lodging the aged parents in houses and flats proximate to those of adult children is being explored instead of their being dumped into Old Age Homes, which are invariably run with a commercial motive. In all these institutional arrangements of the Global Age one sees mutation of the traditional and the modern. The mutation between the local and the global too lead to hybridization as is evident in music, art forms or food items. Vegetarian hamburger, Indian rap music, European Curry, Japanese Pasta, and numerous other examples suggest the relentless march of hybridization. And yet, it ought to be noted that there is a hierarchy here. Generally speaking the cultural elements from the affluent and dominant ‘nations’ dominate over the cultural elements from weak, small and/or dominated ‘nations’. There is an unfortunate tendency to value positively everything from the dominant or groups—be they political institutions, economic organisations, family patterns, or eating habits and stigmatization of those from dominated ones. Nullification of this tendency is an important challenge before globalization. IV. The four processes—homogenization, pluralization, traditionalization and hybridization—that I have referred to above are resultants of the revolutions in transport and communication leading to ideational, spatial, social and cultural mobilities. Precisely because globalization contribute to the acceleration of these processes it is extremely unlikely that the world will become one socially and culturally. True, a commonly shared social and cultural layer is emerging and getting universal endorsement. But even as this layer is likely to be similar in its form, it is likely to be different in its contents in different locales. To wit Indian democracy, the ‘biggest’ in the world functions differently from the American, the most ‘successful’. Italian Catholicism is ‘conservative’ as compared with the Brazilian one


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which is ‘radical’. Indonesian Islam is ‘syncretic’, if Iranian Islam is ‘puritanic’. Thus beneath the common homogenous layer there lies many uncommon and differing layers. This is so because of the different histories and traditions of these societies which impact on the processes of modernization and hence globalization differently through cultural mutations and social hybridizations. The four processes operating independently and in interaction give birth to a world society which is much more complex than the protagonists of globalization would have it. It is not a movement from tradition to modernity, simplicity to complexity, heterogeneity to homogeneity. But it produces new permutations and combinations giving birth to diversity. The challenge of globalization lies in welcoming and celebrating this emerging diversity instead of opting for the engineered homogeneity of the Modern Age. Diversity as a social fact existed since the hoary past and modernity tried to destroy it through Project Homogenization. The challenge of the Global Age is to endorse diversity as a value, that is, transform diversity into pluralism. That is “. . . globalizations are not globally uniform but regionally and nationally variable” (Therborn 2000: 172).

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE DARK SIDE OF MODERNITY: TENSION RELIEF, SPLITTING, AND GRACE Jeffrey C. Alexander Modern societies in the 20th century first fissured, then shattered, into the warring camps of liberal democracy, the communist revolution and fascist reaction. So did modern intellectuals. The coinciding of these intellectual and social divisions was hardly unrelated. In fact, the social divisions can be framed, and in some cases were inspired by, the theoretical reflections of Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber. The terms of these divisions can be conceived as different answers to the question that has been revisited many times and in many ways: Is the universalism and abstraction that characterizes modern life good or bad? Modernity has encased human action and institutions with abstract ethical demands and impersonal requirements—from the moral and secular law to the rule of expert advice, from income tax to bureaucratic controls, from market exigencies and currency adjustments to psychotherapy, from surveillance to democratic control, from peaceful coexistence under international statutes and laws to stand-offs produced via armed confrontation, tense vigilance, and techno-war. The subsequent questions that arise in determining universalism and abstractions to be good or bad, given the abstract ethical demands and impersonal requirements, are: First, can they be lived with? If so, are they ‘user friendly’? Do they contribute to reform, humanism, justice, and inclusion? Do they make people fulfilled, authentic, or just plain happy? Do they make them civilized? The answers to these fundamental questions are: 1) yes, modernity is a good thing 2) not quite yet but someday soon if we do something radical, and 3) no, modernity can never be a good thing. The “yes” answer is found in Parsons work, taken from Weber.1 1 Parsons, 1971. Parsons also took this “yes” from Durkheim, especially the first two books of The Division of Labor in Society (1984 [1893]). To mention Durkheim

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The transcendentalism of the radical Protestant tradition has issued in liberal democracy, which is rule bound in a good way. The scientific revolution was a great step forward, and it promoted a form of objective truth seeking that allowed social problems to be evaluated and alleviated. The modern personality is protean and capable, and handles this new discipline in an autonomous way. Barbarism can only be a product of premodern societies; in modernity, therefore, barbarism can only be the result primordial residues from earlier life. It is the result of primo Modern abstraction, autonomy, and discipline that supply the resources, and also the will, for a civilizing process that institutionalizes idealistic utopias in thisworldly form. The second response, “not quite yet, but someday soon if we do something radical”, is the position of left-wing revolutionaries. Although the liberal standpoint is true, their position is only valid and accurate to a certain extent. That is, What they have not realized is that the great energy and bounty of civilization leads not only to objectification in the good sense (viz., Hegel in the phenomenology, where it produces growth), but in the bad sense as well. Objectification in modern societies produces alienation in Marx’s sense, reification in Lukac’s.2 There is a dialectic of the enlightenment, such that inequality and oppression come out of modernity, and not just freedom and solidarity.3 The latter are for the dominant and privileged classes; the former are for the lot of most of mankind. So the

and his relationship to modernity is to suggest the self-imposed limitations of the present essay. My ambition is to set the debate about modernity in the framework of the ambiguities of “rationalization” not only fact but as theory. This specific manner of framing the question of modernity has been enormously productive philosophically and sociologically, marking the German and German-influenced traditions most strongly, though it has emerged in other national traditions as well. Still, when American pragmatists like John Dewey spoke of rationalization, it was in a much different vein than the subjects of this paper. American pragmatists typically were more positive and optimistic, even if equally critical of capitalism. While there is little doubt that Parsons draws on this American tradition in his liberal incorporation of Weber, I wish to present his views on modernity, like the others, as systematic responses to the rationalization theme. For my most recent critique of Parsons’ one-sided optimism about modernity, see Alexander, “Contradictions in the Societal Community: The Promise and Disappointment of Parsons’ Concept.” 2 Lukacs, 1971 [1924]. 3 Adorno and Horkheimer, 1973 [1944].

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modern age has produced turmoil and strife, not amelioration and equilibrium. But history has provided an opportunity to overcome this ambiguous legacy of the Axial age, in order to make it “good”. The Puritans of old, under the yoke of modern abstraction, created capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Bearing the same cultural and organizational burden, the new Puritans—Marxists, Leninists, or Maoists—would create communism and workers democracy. Revolution is this-worldly asceticism in our own time.4 Yet, the result is a just order; the deracinating promise of bourgeois modernity will finally be fulfilled in the next historical time. The third response to the question posed is No, modernity, tout court, simply is not a good thing. The abstraction that men are bound to live with is fundamentally “other,” and unbearable for that reason. It sets up tensions that tear man away from himself. The passions of human nature cannot be corrected or civilized through abstract morality, the hypocrisies of which man must be fundamentally in rebellion against.5 Modernity unleashes, not enlightenment, but an even darker dark age. It cannot be saved through disciplined revolution, which would only make it worse. It must be discarded. Some of these critics have argued that an alternative to modernity can be found by just saying No, by taking the route of other-worldly or this-worldly mysticism.6 Others have insisted that modernity must be destroyed by violence of a right-wing, not left-wing, form.7 Both kinds of critics agree that the new world must set aside the tensions of the axial age. Unity must be restored. Depending on which path to restoration is chosen, there will be concreteness, not abstraction— release, not discipline—fusion, not division—play, not work. Only if abstract morality and inner-worldly discipline are set aside can humans lead a truly human life.8 4

Eistenstadt, 1978. Nietzsche, 1956 [1872, 1887]. 6 Roszack, 1969. 7 On the role that desire for transcendence played in radical right wing ideology, see Nolte, 1966. 8 In simplifying so as to make its polemical point, this paragraph points once again to the self-circumscribed framework of this paper, which considers the history of modern society and thought entirely from within the framework of rationalization theory in its classical and modern from. A fuller treatment of the “no” reaction against modernity, for example, would have to explore romanticism. The 5

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The historically specific conflicts in which these three answers were encoded during the 20th century apparently have come to an end. It seems unlikely that communist and fascist revolutions will rise again as alternative answers to the question of modernity, at least in the forms that are horrifically familiar to us today.9 But, despite the escatological expectations of “1989,” it has become clear that the more fundamental arguments over modernity remain. From postmodern nihilism to antimodern fundamentalism, there is still basic disagreement over the question of modernity, and the radical alternatives to liberal democracy remain robust if less ideologically coherent. Eisenstadt’s sociology allows us to frame this ontological anxiety of modernity in an historical manner. In his theory of the Axial Age, he explains that “fundamental contradictions” are immanent to modernity, tensions that can never be resolved and which take different social forms, depending on the balance of forces at hand.10 These tensions reach their greatest intensity in the Western modernity, where this-worldly asceticism first had its day and profoundly affected the other civilizations spawned in the axial age. I wish to explore the results of these tensions in what may be a new take on the issue. The Axial Age marked a sharp break from the unified cosmos, or at least from the more incrementally stratified cosmos and social structure of archaic religious and social life. It established a sharp and unbridgeable break between the heavenly, ideal world and the mundane world inhabited by mere human beings. Especially in what became known as the Western tradition, not only the Judaic-Christian but also the Greek, this development took especially severe and radical forms. Rituals were attacked for making things to easy. Salvation became a serious problem, and grace often an unattainable or at

aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development of romanticism forms the key counterpoint to rationalized modernity. Emerging in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature, music, art, and philosophy—for one of the best general accounts of this movement, see, e.g., Abrams, (1953)—romanticism did not necessarily take an antidemocratic or anti-Enlightenment form. As Seidman (1983) pointed out, while Romanticism often opposed hyper or distorted rationalization, it did not oppose rationality in a broader sense, which would include such themes as expressive individualism, authenticity, creativity, and reciprocity. For this broader argument, see Taylor, (1989). 9 Furet, 1999. 10 Eisenstadt, (1982): 294–314. Alexander, (1992): 85–94.


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least unfathomable goal. Human beings were submitted to harsh judgments from a righteous and wrathful god. Judged by a powerful and distant god, man learns to judge himself in an equally unforgiving way.11 He must wear Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” and submit to Kant’s categorical imperative. The social results of this-worldly asceticism, whether religious or secular, are there for all to see. The Calvinists created not only capitalism but radical democracies—Walzer’s revolutionary saints, Eisenstadt’s puritan-like Jacobins.12 This duality, with its guilty sense of obligation to find grace in this-worldly action, made Westerners into world transformers, history’s greatest empire builders, whose dominion spread far beyond the West to transform and “modernize” the entire world.13 For liberal moderns, the tensions and opportunities of Axial civilization continue to mark the vital characteristics of the modern age. It helps us understand the restlessness that surrounds us, the existential demand for self-examination so that we can act in good faith, not blaming others by shifting responsibilities away from ourselves.14 It explains the need for continuous discipline and achievement, and for the feeling that charisma can never be fully institutionalized.15 Grace is available but can’t be bottled, even if it can be sold. But we are not only liberal moderns. There is a persistent unease with civilization,16 and there are different answers, as we have seen, to the question of modernity first posed by the Axial Age. There is a dark spot in Axial Age theory that needs to be pressed much further, a weakness in the structure and culture of modern societies that has not been sufficiently, or systematically, explored.

11

Weber, (1927). Walzer, 1965; Eisenstadt, 1999a. 13 Eisenstadt, 1987. 14 These quintessentially modern feelings are captured by such terms as “ontological anxiety”—first employed, in a psychoanalytic version of existentialism, by Lang (1966) and later by Giddens (1984)—and “psychological man,” which Philip Rieff (1968) developed. The structural status of such anxieties explains why psychotherapy can make a claim to have been the most important and influential cultural invention of the twentieth century, and why so much contemporary popular literature is devoted to self-help guides for the perplexed and restless. 15 Eisenstadt, 1995a. 16 Freud, 1961 [1930]. 12

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I would phrase the question this way. Does the separated “ideal” that is posited by the Weberian tradition remain whole and transcendent in the manner that liberal social theory suggests? Transcendent. The ability to tie the Axial age breakthrough to human progress, to the institutionalization of principled ethics and democratic reform, rests on the assumption that human beings can tolerate the tension without flinching or backing away. Perhaps this assumption, and this ability, seems obvious enough, but Max Weber himself expressed doubts. In “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,” Weber outlined different kinds of flights from the demands of this-worldly asceticism.17 Each of these efforts undermined the capacity of ethical judgment to exercise compelling moral demands. They undermined dualism, and they provided expressive outlets for symbolic process that took a mystical form. Weber speaks of aestheticism, of art for arts sake, which is closely connected to the Nietzschean rejection of the good for the beautiful and to his attack on the sustainability of modern moral claims. Weber also speaks of eroticism, demands for impulse release, and romantic love, whether the love of another or of divine representatives of god. Weber presents here a range of forces that undermine discipline and autonomy and tempt moderns into bad faith. They are, in Fromm’s words, “escapes from freedom.”18 There is in the mind of every modern person the conviction that freedom might be too hard, too unkind, and too intrinsically fulfilling. There is some evidence in Weber’s writings that he sees this need to escape not merely as a “micro” problem, or an incidental one, but as a systemic and dangerous macro-social strain. He speaks, for example, of militarism and various forms of popular enthusiasm as providing flights from asceticism that are positively sanctioned by society.19 It is this strain in his theorizing that explains Weber’s attention to plebiscitarian democracy,

17 Weber, (1946). For a broader discussion of Weber from this point of view, and a systematic comparison to Sartre’s dialectic of freedom in Being and Nothingness, see Alexander, 1988: 185–206. In the background to this discussion is Mitzman’s (1970) compelling and original, if also flawed interpretive. 18 Erich Fromm, (1941)—Fromm’s work should be seen as part of the dialogue about the dialectics of rationalization; he was a connected to the Frankfurt school and a Freudian analyst, as well. 19 For a recent and penetrating study that applies this perspective to contemporary American life, see Gibson, 1994.


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which offers masses of people the chance to experience the charisma of the demagogue. Weber saw these modern prophets as distorting the Hebraic heritage and feared their great potential for wreaking havoc on the institutions of modern life. While expressed in this admittedly fragmentary manner, Weber’s insights into flights from modernity illuminate how difficult it is to maintain transcendental abstraction, or moral universalism, in the modern world. Illustrations of such flight mark modernity from its beginnings. Consider, for example, the experiments of the Puritan settlers in early America.20 Despite the fact that their covenant with God made it formally impossible to know whether or not they were saved, the Puritans soon found ways. They established the “half way covenant” to allow their children to be born into the church, to achieve election without having to earn it. They allowed good works to become evidence of good faith, rather than its result. When these Puritan Americans first conceived of themselves as God’s chosen people, they conceived this status in the covenantal terms of the ancient prophets. Yet, it soon became a signal of their having already been saved. It awarded them a special righteous status that ensured their own goodness as compared with the faithlessness of others. It is hard to continually sit in judgment of one’s self. It is much easier to release the tension and embrace the innocence of the already saved.21 Wholeness. The flight from transcendence in modern society is also connected to the way its regulating ethical structure has been continuously polarized. Righteousness has always been defined in connection with wickedness. Goodness has been inseparable from evil.22

20

For this framing of the early American experience, see Morgan, (1958) and, most generally and powerfully, the various works by Perry Miller (1956, 1965, 1967). One of the great intellectual historians of American history, Miller’s reflections about grace, salvation, social rationalization, and psychological release form an extraordinary counterpart to Weber’s sociology. There has even emerged a “left-Millerism” that constructs violence less as a deviant than as a deeply institutionalized search for grace, e.g., Slotkin, (1973) and Gibson, loc. cit. Edward Tiryakian took off from this Miller tradition in American Studies in his thoughtful and imaginative discussion of the dilemmas of modernity (cite). 21 Both because of the American nation’s Puritan-Protestant religious core, and because of the vast influence of Perry Miller’s historical framing, the escape from this-worldly tension and the paths this escape have taken can be seen as a constant theme in the non-Marxist criticisms that American thinkers have leveled against themselves and their nation. See, e.g., Riesman (1950), Cherry, (1970), Slater, (1970), Bellah, (1975) and Bellah et al., (1985). 22 Alexander, 2003.

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The fundamental fact of this splitting, of this binary thinking, allows us to understand the tension relief, the flight from transcendence that Weber described, in more systematic and theoretically sophisticated ways. In psychoanalytic terms, this splitting can be understood in terms of Anna Freud’s classical theory of the mechanisms of defense.23 Unable to stand the anxiety entailed by autonomy and self-control, the ego splits the world and projects the causes of anxiety outside the self, onto others. The stress and strain are out there, not in here; we can now defend ourselves against tension by fighting against these outside threats. This conceptual language allows us to connect ethical polarization to the flight from transcendence. But there are other theoretical languages that allow us to explain this process in more sociological ways. One is through the theory of social closure, which such thinkers as Dahrendorf, Erikson, Parkin, Brubaker, Lamont, and Giesen have conceptualized in a more instrumental or more cultural manner.24 Closure theory operationalizes Weber’s pessimism, via a model of social organization. Every collectivity demands a boundary, creating an inside and outside. Closure applies to small groups, such as sects, but also to larger societies, such as political parties and religions, and to nation-states and civilizations as well. Closure theory needs to be culturally expanded. Semiotics shows that all thinking is binary, that all concepts are defined by their opposites. The late Durkheim, who inspired Saussure and thereby fathered semiotics, put a moral and emotional spin on this understanding.25 He conceptualized inside and outside as sacred and profane, as right and left sacred, as pure and the impure. These ideas were developed by early anthropological theories of pollution and taboo, then by Caillois and Batailles, and later still by Mary Douglas. These thinkers demonstrated that pollution and stigma are fundamental processes in social life, even or perhaps especially in its modern form. This move makes both antagonism and transgression into fundamental processes of modernity.26

23

Freud, (1936). Dahrendorf, (1959); Erikson, (1966); Parkin, (1979); Brubaker, (2002); Lamont, (1982); Giesen, (1998). 25 Alexander, (1988); Alexander and Smith, 2004. 26 Batailles, (1985); Caillois, (1959); Douglas, (1966); “Drag Kings at the Totem 24


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These lines of organizational and cultural thinking clarify, in a theoretical rather than empirical manner, why the beneficent power of ideal regulation that the Axial Age introduced, and modernity promised to perfect, has so continuously been fragmented and brought down to earth. This declension has been fuelled by the energetic obsessions of this-worldly asceticism and by the insistent drive to escape from it. What results is the perversion of the ethical demands imposed by the Axial Age. In conclusion, it is because transcendence can be so easily undermined and wholeness so consistently broken that modernism and barbarism have so often been closely intertwined. We are the righteous ones that God has chosen. They are the evil ones who afflict us, and they are responsible for the troubles we are in today. We are pure, and they are polluted. We are innocent, and they are guilty. Our salvation depends, not on regulating our own desires and actions, but on purifying the outside world of those polluted others. By destroying them, we can ourselves be saved. It is no wonder that God’s grace has been so hard to find in societies that have been formed by this-worldly asceticism. The search for alternative pathways to (secular) grace has propelled self-defeating revolutionary experiments, of the left and the right. But it has also inspired humanizing kinds of mystical flights. Hinduism and Buddhism have made increasing incursions into the religious life of the Western educated strata. New Age movements have reversed Weber’s historical preference for instrumental rationality in a more secular way. The deep underground spring that feeds this recent outcroppings is romanticism, which at the very beginnings of industrial society made its case that moderns should be vessels rather than merely tools of the divine. From that time on, romanticism, for better and for worse, has been interlarded with ascetic modernity. The ambition of this paper has been to explain why.

Ball: The Erotics of Collective Representation in Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud,” in Alexander and Smith, loc. cit.

PART TWO

MODERNITY AND PLURALISM

CHAPTER EIGHT

PLURALITIES AND PLURALISMS Zvi Werblowsky ‘Plurality’ designates a factual situation to wit a situation of variety and diversity as perceived by individuals who collectively perceive themselves as a distinct group or sub-group vis à vis “others”. ‘Pluralism’ (in my current usage of the term) refers to an ideological attitude that admits and tolerates, or even affirms, plurality as a cultural and social reality, inevitability or even value. Pluralism in this sense is, of course, rejected by those who see it as a danger to a desirable, indeed essential, homogeneity, undermining and disintegrating a real or imagined “identity” deemed to be not only a social and psychological necessity but a summum bonum. Expressing the latter view, T.S. Eliot once noted that a population should be homogenous . . . where two or more cultures exist in the same place, they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background . . .

This quote could very well have been attributed to a Zionist discoursing on Israel as a Jewish state. However, the idea that a Zionist could have spoken these words is dispelled once we turn to the continuation of the quote expressed by Eliot which reads: reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

The free-thinking Jews mentioned above are apt to act as leaven or yeast, penetrating, transforming and secularizing—which are all tantamount to disintegrating —a previously homogenous Christian society, whereas the orthodox, or at least a denominationally committed Jew, may carry with him the idea of being in a ghetto, residing in the surrounding society, but not of it; unless, the society defines itself by other means. The qualifying phrase “in the same place” which appears in the first sentence of the Eliot’s quote brings to light the issue of extensive

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pluralism, which is (perhaps) unobjectionable, and intensive pluralism, which is only possible within strict limitations. From the latter perspective, pluralism is, at best, a euphemism for a millet system. Having said that, I reassure that there is no immediate danger of a coalition of “free-thinking” Jews and Palestinian Arabs undermining the character of the State of Israel, nor, for that matter, is there a coalition of free-thinking Copts and Muslims threatening the character of Egypt. There are many kinds of pluralism e.g., external tolerance or even affirmation of plural identities vs. the internal intolerance required to safeguard collective identity—or at least a certain conception of it (as Socrates realized in Athens). These in turn relate to, and are defined by, a variety of “pluralities” (ethnicity, historical consciousness, language, religion). Should and can plural entities, rather than clash and compete for hegemony, co-exist and possibly even enrich one another (whatever that may mean) without the dissolution of their individuality which continues to be considered a major value? Should minority cultures and population-groups (aboriginal tribes, local dialects, religious sects ancient and modern) be treated as “endangered species” to be preserved at all cost? In due course we shall single out religion for closer examination, as its “sacrality” renders it a particularly potent “identity-marker” as well as a test-case for the theoretical and practical applications of ‘pluralism’. Understandably enough, and almost logically rather than paradoxically, it is precisely the age of globalization that is also the age of urgent concern with ‘pluralism’. The galloping processes unleashed by the accelerating speed of technical innovation, of which transportation and the near-instantaneous transfer of information are merely some of the more conspicuous examples, has led to a globalization of economic, political and cultural systems; the origin of which is in the ‘West’ and in western “hegemony”. But there is a difference between the “endogenous” development of western modernity and its reception and absorption, both “imitative” and ambivalent elsewhere. This also accounts for the initial misconception, abandoned long ago, that modernization equals non-plural, uniform westernization. Some forty years or so ago Eisenstadt already told us to look in the various societies and cultures for the possibility of the development of parameters of modernity differing from the ones developed in Europe and not defined by a uniform set of charac-

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teristics or indices and irreversibly moving in the same fixed direction. Since then the expression “multiple modernities” (a truly pluralistic concept!) has become the commonly used word referring to a series of processes with a common core, generating similar problems to which, however, different responses have been and are being given. Of the innumerable examples with which I could illustrate my present argument I shall choose the one to which Eisenstadt has devoted a monumental study: Japan—the one civilization which Huntington did not quite know how to classify since it does not prima facie belong to his China-Islam axis. Japan, as Eisenstadt has shown in great detail, is a prime example of an old home-truth which in the Latin middle-ages was rendered quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. Whatever is received, it is received (we might also say absorbed) according to the mode of the recipient. The Jewish philosophers and kabbalists translated hakol kefi hamekabbelim. My present tòzen (“advance eastward”—a term used already in ancient texts for the spread of Buddhism from China and Korea to Japan) is concerned not so much with modernization as with another exemplary aspect of the experience of, and reaction to, massive hegemony on the part of a civilization conscious of its identity, not to say uniqueness. This experience is, of course, not limited to the East. Every group absorbs influences from outside which affect and transform it and which, in the process of such adoption, are themselves adapted and transformed in accordance with what is supposed to be the receiver’s basic character. Some would use the terms culture and civilization to distinguish between the two levels. (Huntington uses the two terms interchangeably). The Meiji separation of Shinto and Buddhism (shinbutsu bunri) was, as we all know, an expression not of religious intolerance but of ideologized Nihonism. Ruthless as it was, the crusade was rather humane. There simply were too many Buddhists in Japan who could not all be massacred like the Albigenses in Catholic France, or expelled like the Jews in Catholic Spain, or persecuted and crucified like Christians in Tokugawa Japan. If ‘globalisation’ is associated in the contemporary mind with the U.S. and symbolized by McDonalds then it may be useful to remind ourselves that in the pre-global universe of the Japanese the dominating hegemon, culturally more than economically, was China. Hence not only the Chinese importation called Buddhism but also

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the Japanese-Confucian (viz. neo-Confucian) symbiosis was repudiated by the School of National Learning and their predecessors as a foreign corruption of the true Japanese spirit, the yamato damashii. ‘National Learning’ (kokugaku) meant authentic Japanese learning (wagaku). Kangaku (Chinese Learning) could easily be cast in the role of the main whipping boy and source of all evil as long as China was politically and culturally dominant. China’s dramatic decline and the equally dramatic rise of western influence, yogaku (“western learning” and culture) took the place of kangaku as the villain of the piece. These ambivalences, of course, are not specifically Japanese. Especially since the 19th century non-western civilizations (including orthodox Judaism) keep repeating their answer to the Clash of Civilizations with more or less the same favourite formula: western technology (including nuclear weaponry for Gandhi’s India)— yes, by all means; western civilization—no! The earlier Japanese slogan wakon—kansai (“Japanese spirit and Chinese knowledge”) has now been replaced by wakon—yosai (“Japanese spirit and western technology”). Theoretically one might interpret this attitude as a charter for pluralism which, in a global age, should lead to civilizational two-way traffic instead of confrontation, were it not for the shadow of hegemonic dominance blackening the horizon. Pluralism, as I have said before, implies an existing plurality. Rapprochement of pluralities requires that each side be sure of its identity and be unafraid of losing it. Cultural plurality means that every group has its own definitions of narrower or wider identities and homogeneities, and of their relation (congruence or difference) to other identities. This is a very complex affair and not simply a matter of “inventing” (I have deliberately chosen this ambiguous word because of its original meaning which is ‘finding’, ‘discovering’) some allegedly trans-cultural and supra-particular common denominator of values—for example the U.N. Bill of Rights—or, in the case of religions, implying a vague reference to some ultimate spiritual reality—for example, the by now almost traditional jamborees of “world-religions”, especially of “world religions for peace” or for interfaith dialogue or whatever. Whether held in Assisi (which is certainly more appealing than the Vatican) or on Mount Hiei. Every culture has to invent—that is both discover and construct— the nature, character, dynamics and limitations of the pluralisms that it can advocate or endure.


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Of the factors and elements constituting the identities of the candidates for rapprochement I want to mention, by way of example, only a few of the better known in order to illustrate how their specific weight varies from one case to another: historical memory, language, religion. Religion can function as a major identity-marker also when initially absorbed from outside but then so thoroughly internalized as to become an essential part of a group’s self-definition. Catholic Poland, Buddhist Thailand, Sinhalese Sri Lanka and Muslim Malaysia are cases in point. A conflict that is known by religious labels is not necessarily a religious conflict. In Ireland both sides speak the same language (not Irish!) and the murderous conflict in which Catholics and Protestants are locked is not about the doctrine of the Eucharist or the status of the Holy Virgin. In Belgium both sides are “Catholic” and the conflict therefore ostensibly polarizes around language. The India/Pakistan case cannot, of course, be compared to either Ireland or Belgium. Often sets of ‘binary’ opposites coalesce; Canada could serve as an example. The main sanctuary of France is not the cathedral of Reims or Chartres, not even the Panthéon or the Arc de Triomphe, but the Académie Française. Switzerland has added a fourth idiom to its list of national languages and apparently nobody feels this to be a threat to his Swiss identity. India had good reason to fear that the imposition of one national language might be perceived as a particularist hegemonic act jeopardizing a wider national identity. I am not speaking here of the unique sacrality inherent in the Hebrew language or, for that matter, in the kotodama of Japanese which makes them different from all other languages. When several elements coincide in an identity-marker the conflict can become explosive: Cyprus (Greek/Christian v. Turkish/ Muslim), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese/Buddhist v. Tamili/Hindu) and Israel— Palestinians are alarming examples. The ethnic component is increasingly and indeed frighteningly in the ascendant. Is the state the only guarantor or even source of unity? I am asking the question not so much philosophically with a view to William James’ A Pluralistic Universe as to Carl Schmitt’s Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat. Basques probably do not object to membership in the European Union, but they want to do so as Basques and not as Spaniards. A President of the French Republic exclaimed, nota bene as guest of the Canadian Government, “vive le Québec libre”. There is no record of his ever having exclaimed, when in France, “vive la Corsique

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libre”. Globalization is one of the biggest of the currently fashionable ‘big’ words. One of its oddest manifestations is the multiplication of nation-states in which ethnicity determines geography. Here is pluralism with a vengeance! The U.N. currently has close to 200 member-states—most of which share a not unfounded fear of the hegemony called “globalization”, though all of them indulge in their own particular agendas of hegemonic practice. Let me return, in conclusion, to my earlier, perhaps unduly sarcastic, remarks about the popular jamborees of world-religions and say a word in praise of religion, especially the so-called universalistic religions and even more especially the bible-derived monotheistic religions. A few weeks ago (23–24 September 2003) such a jamboree took place in Kazakhstan, significantly titled “The Congress of World and Traditional National Religions”. Traditional National (to avoid the apparently more pejorative “tribal”) Religions are therefore as respectable as the universalistic so-called “World Religions” which, of course, are ‘traditional’ too. That is probably why pluralism in Kazakhstan stopped short of the less traditional so-called “new religions”. In any case religions and their gods are pluralizable, regionizable, tribalizable, nationalizable. Monotheism is not. The view that the plurality of manifestations of the cultural phenomenon usually subsumed under the term ‘religion’ is ultimately a matter of variations on a common theme may be a perfectly legitimate ideological position or even theological corollary of the structure of certain religious systems but it is surely incompatible with others. What now? Should we be satisfied with distinctions such as aggressive vs. peaceful universalism (e.g., regarding missionary activity), or theoretical vs. practical intolerance, or perhaps retreat behind a relativism that looks at all claims to validity revise to: looks at the validity of all claims— whether absolute validity or relative validities or combinations of both—as a plurality of cultural and religious language-games. This, of course, would merely be a post-modern version of the jolly old ‘common denominator’ game. The study of contemporary religion is fascinating not least because it seeks to comprehend how religious cultures, each with its particular and specific claim to validity, struggle, each in its own way, to “invent” i.e., to discover, construct and define on their own terms, the nature, character, dynamics, theological legitimations as well as immanent limitations of the inescapable demands of pluralism in a global world. The common denomina-


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tor, at least for some of them, would thus be their openness to what might be called the pluralist imperative. To the ancient teaser “can tolerance tolerate intolerance?” we can now add the question “how much plurality can pluralism bear?”

CHAPTER NINE

MULTICULTURALISM REVISITED Han Entzinger Cultural diversity and the state Sociologists and political scientists have long been fascinated by the way in which public authorities, the state, come to terms with pluriformity. The concept of the modern nation-state finds its roots in the social contract: the idea that the confrontation of diverging individual and group interests in a society should be regulated by means of political institutions that acquire their legitimization through democratic decision-making. The genesis of this phenomenon has been wonderfully described and analyzed in what I think is one of the jewels of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s monumental work over the past half century—the book Paradoxes of Democracy (Eisenstadt 1999b). It is a short text—almost an essay—but one that very well reflects his profound knowledge and his rich experience in these matters. One of the main reasons why in the Western world the modern nation-state was able to develop the way it did, was the sufficient degree of cultural and political homogeneity among individuals and groups who were part of it. The idea that everyone—or virtually everyone—belonged to the same nation provided a sense of togetherness and a collective identity, which became stronger than the divisive forces that equally existed. As the institutions of the nationstates expanded, largely through improved communications and the development and spreading of educational and social policies, the sense of togetherness was further reinforced. Those states that included more than one pre-existing nation—e.g. Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Spain—have more or less successfully learnt how to cope with their differences. They usually do so through forms of institutional devolution. Besides, over the years, most modern nation-states have also come to terms with religion and its potentially divisive power in societies that are not homogeneous in that respect. As Shmuel Eisenstadt stated, bringing the City of God into the city of man almost by

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definition excludes pluralism. It is that tension that the modern nationstate has been able to overcome, at least seemingly. Much more recently, the modern nation-state has again been confronted with a potentially divisive phenomenon, which is immigration. It should be stated right away that immigration is not new to all democratic societies in the world. In certain cases it is even part of the “national ideology.” National identity has been constructed and shaped around immigration in countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia. However, that does not imply that immigration is unproblematic in those countries. Immigration not only disrupts the existing social, economic and political order, but it also forces societies to reconstitute their collective identities—an issue recently back in the forefront of the social sciences. Nation-states always look somewhat like gated communities: they are weary of newcomers, even though they know very well that their future may depend on them. This weariness is particularly acute when newcomers look different and behave differently, as newcomers often do. Their initial response is one of exclusion, rather than of inclusion. Countries that have much more recently been confronted with immigration, particularly those in Western Europe—and increasingly also those in Central Europe—tend to be even more weary of its consequences. The basic question here is how liberal democratic societies that formally acknowledge cultural pluriformity, actually handle the increase in pluriformity that—almost by definition—comes along with immigration. Of course, in our Western societies people are free to organize themselves on the basis of common interests, and in the majority of cases this also applies to immigrants. A more pluriform society is also likely to produce a more pluriform civil society and a more pluriform market. That is not our primary interest here. The idea is how the state itself comes to terms with plurality, or with multiculturalism, as it is often referred to in the context of immigration. On the basis of the comparative work carried out by many of our colleagues and myself on a considerable number of immigration countries in the Western world, it is possible to develop a continuum that reflects the degree of institutionalization of difference that results from immigration. On this continuum I distinguish five positions, which I shall briefly describe. 1. The neutral state, which treats all its citizens in the same way and considers culture to be a private affair. The Jacobin French tra-

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dition is probably the purest example here: immigrants are welcome, but in the public sphere they should behave “like us” (Schnapper, 1994). The strong emphasis on the need for civic integration in the USA is another example. The democratic institutions and their functioning cannot be disputed, let alone be duplicated in parallel institutions. Immigrants simply have to accept the existing arrangements as these are, but they are encouraged to participate in those arrangements. Immigrant cultures are banned from public life (this is less so in the USA than in the classical French tradition), but perfectly acceptable in private life. Immigrant organizations, however, cannot be sponsored by the state, since the state is neutral. This approach is considered to be equally fair to everyone. However, what is often overlooked is the cultural bias that is almost unavoidably built into the major mechanisms for selection and attribution in any society. Such bias tends to favor the mainstream population and to exclude newcomers. 2. Partly in response to this shortcoming, certain forms of public recognition of immigrant and minority cultures have developed, thus enabling these to become institutionalized with some state support. We distinguish two positions here on our continuum, one of “weak” institutionalization or institutionalization with only internal effects, and one of “strong” institutionalization, which also has external effects. Internal institutionalization limits itself in essence to culture in its strictest sense and to matters immediately related to the cultural heritage and to cultural peculiarities of an immigrant community. Public endorsement mainly aims at enabling the community to preserve its specific identity by creating opportunities for sharing and transmitting (e.g. through the support of ethnic organizations, ethnic newspapers, broadcasting facilities etc.). One step further is to create opportunities for the transfer of culture to the next generation. A major instrument here is teaching one’s mother tongue to the second generation. This is usually not a problem as long as the community creates its own facilities, but public support to mothertongue teaching has become a divisive issue in several immigration countries. 3. The third position is that of external institutionalization. The development of parallel institutions, each based on different cultural traditions, may be facilitated or even encouraged here in some of the major fields of society. This is the classical concept of a plural society, studied by anthropologists in colonial society (e.g. Furnivall 1948).

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In Western societies, such as the Netherlands and Belgium, it has also become known as “pillarisation” (or verzuiling) (Lijphart 1975). During most of the twentieth century, these two countries offered the most far-reaching examples of institutionalization of parallel, yet separate interests along the lines of religious or ideological identities. The different communities (Catholics, Protestants, socialists, humanists, liberals, Jews, etc.) each had their own institutional arrangements in a variety of social spheres: schools, hospitals, newspapers, trade unions, broadcasting organizations, sports clubs, etc. Where public support was at stake, it was meticulously observed that every community obtained a fair, i.e. a proportional, share of the public funds available. The communities were largely free to decide for themselves how to spend this public money.1 When pillarised countries were confronted with large-scale immigration, the immediate reflex was to add a few new pillars to the existing pattern. The new communities should be given their own institutional arrangements as well. This reflex was somewhat stronger in the Netherlands than in Belgium, where the omnipresent rivalry between the two pre-existing linguistic communities complicated the institutional accommodation of newcomers. One of the most interesting consequences of institutionalized multiculturalism is that the Dutch government now finances several scores of Muslim and Hindu schools in the Netherlands under exactly the same conditions that apply to Catholic and Protestant schools. 4. A common characteristic of the three positions discussed so far is that the law is the same for everyone, even though there may be separate institutional arrangements for certain communities. This is no longer the case with the fourth position that implies legal pluralism. We do not find many examples of this in the modern liberal nation-state, precisely because equality before the law is one of its most fundamental principles. In imperial and colonial days, by contrast, examples abounded: the Ottoman Empire, for example, had

1 Interestingly, the much-condemned system of apartheid in pre-1994 South Africa had the same roots as pillarisation: the basically Calvinist idea that communities who share the same cultural background should be self-governing in as many fields as possible (“sovereignty in one’s own circle”). The big difference, however, was that under apartheid a hierarchy of communities existed: some had more rights and entitlements than others.


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a variety of legal systems, some of which were territorially based, but some of which also applied to specific minority communities, such as Roma, Jews or Muslims. Today we have to look at nonWestern countries to find examples of ethnically based legal pluralism (e.g. India, Nigeria or Malaysia). However, certain traces of it may also be found in the West, particularly in family law and in penal law. Moroccans, for example, who reside in Western Europe, but who marry in Morocco—as many of them do—will be married under Islamic law. Women have fewer rights under that system than under its Western counterpart, even though the King of Morocco recently announced some modernization in this respect. A judge in a Western country is not supposed to apply different legal standards to members of different communities. However, that same judge has a right to take account of the suspect’s cultural origins when establishing the verdict, as much as that judge has a right to take account of any other claim in mitigation. This has led to debates in a number of Western countries on how to deal with honor killings, genital mutilation and other practices of certain Muslims, which they justify with an appeal on their religious beliefs and traditions (Carens 2000). 5. The fifth and most extreme position is self-determination for one or more cultural communities that live in a given country. Several examples of more or less successful forms of devolution in multinational Western states were mentioned earlier (e.g. Belgium, Canada). In the case of recent immigrants, this is not really an option. It would be too strong a challenge to the unity of the nation-state, as immigrants also feel loyalty towards another state. This is usually not the case with regional minorities. Besides, most immigrant communities are too dispersed for this. It is, however, not totally inconceivable. A prerequisite seems to be that immigrant communities first turn into national communities. This was the case, for example, with Jewish or German minorities in several Central European countries. It is obvious that this will take generations, and it is not very likely to happen to any of the newly established immigrant communities in the modern nation-state. It may be a solution for the future of the Middle East, but as I am not at all an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations I will not go any deeper into this. There are also many risks to this option. The recent history of the former Yugoslavia is a sad illustration of this. There, self-determination rapidly turned into “ethnic cleansing.”

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The five positions I have just described are far from static. That is, the positions may remain unchanged, but countries and their policies tend to move along the continuum. Approaches may change as immigration changes, as governments change, as the economy and the employment situation change, et cetera. The initial choice of a country upon its first confrontation with immigration often tells us more about that country than about its immigrants. Thus, it is understandable that France opted for the “culture is a private affair” approach, while the Netherlands preferred institutionalized multiculturalism. In order to be effective in defending their interests, immigrants should familiarize themselves as much as possible with the habits of the country where they live and get organized in accordance with the pattern commonly used in that country. In his comparative study on lobbying practices of the Moroccan community in four different European cities, Hassan Bousetta found that in each case Moroccans were more effective as they adapted themselves better to local circumstances (Bousetta 2001). On the whole, it is interesting to observe that the further one goes North in Europe, the more traces one finds of institutionalized multiculturalism. This is not always because it is the traditional way of dealing with diversity, as is the case in the Netherlands. The fact that the North European countries have a particularly strong public sector may equally be of importance. A strong public sector almost seems an imperative for state supported multiculturalism. Surprisingly, therefore, institutionalized multiculturalism seems to flourish better in a welfare state, where opportunities for public intervention tend to be stronger than in societies where more is being left to private initiative or the market. Exploring the limits of multiculturalism In recent years we have witnessed considerable changes in the way many countries in Europe are dealing with immigration and its longterm effects. France’s recent struggles with the headscarves indicate that that country cannot totally ignore the relevance of cultural difference, although its traditional ideology points in a different direction. The presence of almost five million Muslims in that country, the significant transformations in the banlieues of Paris and other large cities, simply require certain forms of recognition and acceptance of


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difference and practically forces the authorities to establish contacts with community leaders. Germany has woken up from its long lasting dream of immigration as a temporary phenomenon, and is now actively promoting integration. Most countries that first tended to recognize or even emphasize the merits of cultural diversity have now begun to stress the need for more unity. Virtually all countries in Northwestern Europe have now introduced compulsory integration and language courses for some of their newly arriving immigrants (Michalowski 2004). Awareness seems to be growing that diversity has its limits. Ongoing immigration forces the liberal nationstate to reconsider its mechanisms of incorporation, particularly of those newcomers whose origins lie in countries that are not liberal democracies themselves. This phenomenon is not limited to Europe; we also observe it in Australia and in the USA—where it has become even more acute in the aftermath of 9/11. So far, only Canada seems to be able to escape from it, probably because it has a highly selective immigration policy, which makes Canada the only OECD Member State where the level of education goes up as a result of immigration. The shift in appreciation of immigration and its ensuing diversity has become particularly visible in two countries: Denmark and the Netherlands. Both countries have a strong welfare state tradition. They used to be very much preoccupied with the material wellbeing of their newcomers. That has changed now: these countries’ asylum and immigration policies are among the strictest in Europe, and the pressure for acculturation, if not assimilation, has become much stronger—even though it is not at all clear to what these new immigrants actually have to assimilate. Institutionalized multiculturalism in Denmark never was very strong, but in the Netherlands it has come under fire, particularly since the brief Pim Fortuyn episode in Dutch politics, in the politically turbulent year 2002. Yet even though the current pressure for assimilation may be too strong a reaction to the leniency of the past, the concept of institutionalized multiculturalism was equally ill-reflected for various reasons. Let me elaborate five of these reasons. 1. Institutionalized multiculturalism takes “ethnic origin”—or actually “nationality” in the sense of “citizenship”—as a master status. This term was introduced by Hughes (1994) to denote a sociological marker, so overriding that it rules out all others, including religion, language et cetera. If ethnic origin is a master status, every immigrant

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is seen primarily as a member of his or her “ethnic community”— the common term in the Netherlands is “ethnic minority”—and is treated accordingly. Already in the 1980s, Robert Miles warned against the divisive effects that this approach could have on society as a whole (Miles 1989). Adopting a neo-Marxist perspective, he claimed that the UK had deliberately racialised or ethnicised immigration, so as to drive a wedge between the established population and the newcomers. Non-Marxists may also see disadvantages to this approach. What happens, for example, to those migrants who wish to leave their community? Moreover, by using the immigrants’ country of origin as the major criterion for status ascription, enormous differences tend to be overlooked, for example in ethnic belonging (Turks vs. Kurds, Arabs vs. Berber) or in political orientation. In the early 1990s, for instance, when the world was witnessing how Yugoslavia fell apart in ethnically based rival states, the Dutch authorities continued to insist that the different factions of the “Yugoslav minority” in that country co-operate in order to qualify for public funding. Using “ethnic origin” as a master status becomes even more difficult for the second generation. Generally, their identification with their parents’ country of origin tends to weaken. In the case of Muslims, however, we observe a certain shift from a national identification towards an identification with Islam. 2. Institutionalized multiculturalism requires forms of codification that are often not so easy to achieve. A good example is mothertongue teaching. What, actually, is the mother-tongue of a secondgeneration immigrant child? Is it their parents’ language, or is it the local language of the country where that child lives? Many immigrant children master the latter better than the former, though by no means always perfectly. How to act if the parents’ native tongue is not the official language of the country of origin, as in the case of Berbers from Morocco or Algeria, or Kurds from Turkey? Once this dilemma has been solved, the question arises which books should be used in mother-tongue lessons. Those of the country of origin, which may often be hyper-nationalistic and based on completely different teaching methods? Or should special books be developed for children living in diaspora? If so, given the fact that mothertongue teaching is part of the official curriculum, are enough teachers available who possess the formally required qualifications? Comparable problems may arise in matters related to religion. Over the years, most liberal democracies in the West have devel-


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oped arrangements regarding the complex relationship between state and religion. The position of clergymen in public institutions such as prisons or the army is clear, but can it simply be copied for imams? Many Muslim communities in Europe are served by imams from elsewhere, often from the country of origin. Should they be given the same rights and privileges as Protestant, Catholic or Jewish clergymen? How to assess the potential risk that their activities may lead to unwanted forms of foreign involvement? 3. The previous example illustrates that institutionalized multiculturalism generally presupposes a common core. Such a common core is not always present in the case of immigrants who have recently settled in another country, particularly not if their presence is seen as temporary. This has been the case for a large number of newcomers who have migrated to Europe in the past decades. Europe’s long-lasting reluctance to recognize their presence as permanent has contributed to the phenomenon that many migrants who currently live in Europe hesitate to identify with their country of residence. A survey, which I carried out with two colleagues among youngsters of Turkish and Moroccan origin living in Rotterdam, indicated that four out of five of these youngsters identified themselves primarily or exclusively as Turks or Moroccans (Phalet et al. 2000; Entzinger 2003a). Only 22 per cent of the Moroccans and 16 per cent of the Turks in our sample considered themselves both Moroccan/Turkish and Dutch, and a mere 2 per cent of both groups identified themselves primarily as Dutch. Thus, identification with the Netherlands as a nation proved to be very limited. Both groups, however, identified significantly more strongly with Rotterdam as a city. This, however, does not seem to be a good starting-point for institutionalized multiculturalism, which requires a common basis for understanding. Traditionally, multiculturalist societies almost tacitly assumed the exclusive loyalty of their members to the society of which they were a part. In Dutch “pillarisation” this loyalty has been epitomized by a common language, a shared national tradition and shared symbols. Institutionalized multiculturalism becomes much more problematic if the minorities concerned lack a sufficient degree of identification with the nation-state that actually grants these facilities to them. Under such circumstances it can easily lead to exclusion, possibly even with silent approval by either side. The receiving society then sees multiculturalism an instrument for keeping the newcomers in its margins. By doing so, it can avoid conflict or postpone

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the need for acceptance and change. This situation may legitimize the country of origin in its efforts to exercise political and other influences on its diaspora citizens. Of course, in today’s globalizing world we are getting increasingly familiar with transnationalism, a phenomenon that has become quite popular in certain academic circles (Portes et al. 1999; Vertovec & Cohen 1999; Faist 2000). Migrants can indeed identify and have contacts with more than one country at a time. However, an almost complete avoidance of contacts with the receiving society, as is the case for certain immigrants in Europe, forces that society to reconsider its diversity policies. 4. A fourth reason why institutionalized multiculturalism has been losing ground is its growing complexity as immigration continues and becomes more diverse, and as the number of immigrant communities grows. It may be feasible to set up arrangements of the types discussed earlier for four or five communities, but it becomes much more complex if their numbers increase further. Besides, many groups are too small and too much dispersed to create a sound basis for “own” institutional provisions. This is a strong conceptual difference with classical Dutch pillarisation—as described by Lijphart (1975)— where the various groups needed one another in order to reach compromises and to create majorities. At the national level, today’s immigrant communities simply are too small for that, and therefore not sufficiently relevant. Only in larger metropolitan areas with substantial immigrant or ethnic minority populations, in Europe and elsewhere, can we observe that ethnicity or immigrant status continues to play a role in the forging of alliances and in local policymaking. This phenomenon was first analyzed and described for New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their classical Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer & Moynihan 1963). 5. Perhaps the most important objection against institutionalized multiculturalism is that it insufficiently accounts for shifts that take place in immigrants’ cultural orientation. Every social anthropologist knows that identities are dynamic, defined as they are by the surrounding conditions. This is even more so for migrant identities. There is overwhelming research evidence that migrants’ identities and their orientations change as time goes by. For those who are familiar with one of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s earliest works The Absorption of Immigrants, this is not new (Eisenstadt 1954). In that work, still a “classic” in migration studies, he analyzed the sequence of the adaptation process of newcomers to Israel, in which he found a number of regularities.


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Times may have changed since 1954. However, even in times of increased globalization, the average immigrant still does acculturate to and integrate into his or her new society, even though that does not necessarily imply a complete loss of the initial cultural identity. Pretending that immigrant cultures, or any culture, can remain unchanged is simply false. Such ideas needlessly “fossilize” cultures, and therefore tend to exclude their bearers from their environment, rather than to include them. Alternatives to multiculturalism Our preceding exploration of the limits and the limitations of institutionalized multiculturalism leaves us with the question about possible alternatives. Nathan Glazer, co-author of Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), in which he and Daniel Moynihan analyzed the relevance of cultural diversity, published another book with an equally catchy title in 1997, called We are all multiculturalists now. The message of that book is that, as we have all become multiculturalists, multiculturalism has become meaningless. And indeed, in recent years the academic as well as the public debate in several immigration countries at either side of the Atlantic has been shifting back towards assimilation. Herbert Gans (1997) tried to achieve a Reconciliation between “Assimilation” and “Pluralism.” Rogers Brubaker (2003) even speaks about The Return of Assimilation?, although still with a question mark. In politics as well, the current trend seems to favor unity over diversity. That trend began well before the events of 9/11 and the increased efforts by many countries to fence themselves off from unwanted foreign influences. The debate may be on Leitkultur, as in Germany, on headscarves, as in France, on bilingualism, as in the United States, on the national curriculum, as in Britain, or on mandatory integration courses, as in the Netherlands. The heart of the matter is that more pressure is being put on immigrants to identify with their country of residence, its culture, heritage and basic values (Entzinger 2003b). Many politicians and their followers see this as a necessary condition for maintaining a sufficient degree of cohesion and solidarity in a society. Some of them even use old-fashioned nationalist rhetoric to underline their views. The question is, of course, how far a liberal democracy can go in requiring its newcomers to

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adapt to its basic values, particularly those that are not codified in legislation. To what extent can this approach be reconciled with freedom of religion, and also with other freedoms and rights to which anyone, including migrants, is entitled in a liberal society? My personal viewpoint of this is that any society, including immigrant societies, must require from its members a certain degree of identification with a common core. But, in the footsteps of Habermas and Parekh, I shall not go any further than advocating a sufficient degree of what the former calls Verfassungpatriottismus (“constitutional patriotism”), and the latter calls civic assimilation. (Habermas 1995; Parekh 2000). Newcomers may be required to identify unconditionally with the public sector and its institutions, even though these are not totally unchangeable. Newcomers may be forced to comply with the demands of these institutions, among which the law has a very prominent place. Otherwise, they must be free to preserve their own heritage and their own ties and connections, if they wish to do so. At most, the public authorities may have a facilitating role in these matters. This approach leaves more room for individual and group differences in the private sphere than in the public sphere. Of course, this will produce social and cultural tensions and clashes of the types described, inter alia, by Carens (2000). However, the essence of a liberal-democratic system is that it must give room to divergent ideas and divergent behavior up to the point where these actively seek to overthrow the system. This is by no means always the case in situations of cultural pluriformity. Flexibility and a great capacity for absorption have always been dominant characteristics of our Western, strongly individualist cultures. To illustrate this last point I once more quote some of the results of our survey of Rotterdam youngsters (Phalet et al. 2000; Entzinger 2003a). It is remarkable how strongly both native and immigrant youngsters are aware of differences between the public and the private spheres, and of the fact that different attitudes may prevail in each of these. In the public sphere 80 per cent of the Moroccans and 75 per cent of the Turks were convinced that integration should be the rule. They showed themselves willing to adapt to the rules of Dutch society, basically on the condition that the Dutch would accept them as fellow-citizens. By contrast, in the private sphere this readiness to adapt was only expressed by 35 per cent of the Moroccans and 32 per cent of the Turks. The Dutch control group, asked about


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their views on these matters, showed a similar pattern, although those in favor of immigrant adaptation were far more numerous: 94 per cent in the public sphere, and 57 per cent in the private sphere. However, the remaining 43 per cent of the Dutch youngsters we interviewed still felt that immigrants should be free to preserve their own cultural identity in the private sphere. To what extent do these opinions reflect reality? If we look at the degree of endorsement for values that dominate the public sphere, such as respect for democracy, for freedom, for plurality, for difference, for individualism or for equality, differences between the three groups in our research are indeed quite small. Those differences that do emerge tend to disappear as the educational level goes up, and as the length of residence increases. Apparently, these two factors encourage the youngsters to familiarize themselves with attitudes that dominate in Dutch society. In the private sphere, however, attitudes differ considerably between the Dutch and the immigrants. First, we found striking differences in the role of religion in private life. The vast majority of our Turkish and Moroccan respondents called themselves Muslims, even though only half of them actually claim to observe the basic rules of Islam. The role of religion proved to be far less significant for our Dutch respondents. Secondly, the idea that others, in particular the parents, should have a say in the choice of a marriage partner is much more widespread among Turks and Moroccan youngsters than among their Dutch counterparts. Likewise, attitudes regarding ethical matters such as abortion, euthanasia and the acceptance of homosexuality strongly differ between immigrants and Dutch. It is interesting to observe how skillfully many immigrant youngsters are able in everyday life to reconcile their more liberal interpretation of public values with a more conservative interpretation of those in the private sphere. This is particularly true for young women who, in doing so, often serve as “cultural brokers” between their parents and the outside world of life in Rotterdam. Our research illustrates once more that the public and the private spheres may be distinguished from one another, but not always separated. Future dilemmas and confrontations in our increasingly multicultural societies will primarily become manifest in areas where these two spheres meet (Walzer 1997). Answers to such challenges will have to be formulated at the individual and at the institutional levels. This will continue to lead to conflict; a multicultural society without conflicts is unthinkable. One easy answer to such conflicts

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seems to institutionalize cultural difference. As we have seen in this chapter, this clearly has its limits. Another easy answer is to force newcomers to assimilate to mainstream values. Such an approach tends to undermine the basic principles of a liberal democracy. Between these two lies a difficult road that combines the need for clearly defining the conditions for immigrant adaptation with the need for a lasting acceptance of cultural difference. Globalization, continuing immigration and growing transnationalism will force us to explore that road much more actively.

CHAPTER TEN

ETHNIC REVIVAL AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL IN “PROVIDENTIAL DEMOCRACIES” Dominique Schnapper The conception of modern society as one which tends to be bureaucratic, peaceful and rational has been radically called into question by the witnessing of the revolutions and wars of the twentieth century, yet the debate about the element of rationality and the element of political passions or ethnic-religious emotions in modern democratic societies continues. No one has contributed to the development of this discussion as much as Shmuel Eisenstadt. In this chapter I pay homage to him through a discussion of political modernity and the principle of citizenship. In a previous article, I discussed the theories of sociologists who aimed to understand ethnic and religious revival in modern democratic societies by grouping their ideas in terms of theories of “survival” and theories of “compensation” (Schnapper, 1993). For authors concerned with the first group of theories, whose thought has dominated sociology for a long time, modern societies have undergone a progressive phase of rationalization which paralleled a receding of religious life and the weakening influence of the religious on collective life. Similarly, ethnic affiliations progressively weakened as the process of nation building developed. So, in a more or less clear manner, it was argued that religion and ethnic affiliations were incompatible with modern society, which had embarked on a process of rationalization. Thinkers influenced by Marxism, American theorists of assimilation, sociologists of development or sociologists of nationbuilding—from different premises—converged in seeing religious and ethnic phenomena as surviving elements essentially. To summarize their conclusions, we can cite the following statement: “Ethnicity is one of the forms of Gemeinschaft that has survived (underlined by me) in a rationalized, bureaucratised society” (Greeley, 1972: 27). I contrasted these survival theories with those more recent theories which focused on the notion of “compensation” in the face of the modern

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project of rationalization. Observing the ethnic and religious revival, sociologists drew on the ideas of Max Weber, who demonstrated the structural irrationality of the world which had become “disenchanted” with rationality. Far from being simple surviving phenomena, religious and ethnic renewal could be analyzed as the products of modernity, linked to the eternal desire of human beings to give sense to their experience in the face of ‘evil’ and misfortune. I would like to develop these analyses in the light of the knowledge and reflections which have accumulated over the last ten years. It seems clearer to me today that the “survival” theories, which imply a programmed withering away of ethnic-religious identifications are obviously unsatisfactory. On the one hand, we can only note that these identifications and the passions that they create, far from burning themselves out over time with the spread of the democratic principle, seem on the contrary to be multiplying and affirming themselves in a more striking manner. On the other hand, the revival movements are not only the domain of those social groups and movements which are pre-modern or marginal, but rather of those social groups which participate the most actively in the economic and political aspects of modernity. Compensation theories therefore appear more fruitful, in that they show successfully that the ethnic and religious revival movements are products of modernity itself. Yet the term “compensation” seems to me today to be too marked by psychology and, above all, the analysis in terms of product of modernity requires further elaboration. I would therefore like to understand this double revival process and develop the idea of a link between modernity and religious and ethnic renewal through a sociological analysis of contemporary democratization. I would like to argue that, in transforming itself as a result of the “democratic dynamic” (Schnapper, 2002), the so-called “classical” citizenship (Schnapper, 1994) tends to encourage the emergence of ethnic and religious revival—a phenomenon which invites us to reflect on the future of democracies. Citizenship as a rational project or the pre-eminence of the civic principle “Citizenship” has become such a fashionable term, politically and scientifically, that it has lost some of its real sense and by extension has been diluted in meaning. I would therefore like to return to

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what seems to me to be essential in what we now call “classic” citizenship. Citizenship has a legal sense—a range of rights and responsibilities—but it is first and foremost a principle of political legitimacy. Citizens are not only subjects of law and rights; each one of them is a holder of an element of political legitimacy. It is the whole body of citizens, constituted in a political collectivity, or in a “community of citizens,” which, through elections, choose their governors, and then check and sanction their actions. It is the whole body of citizens which is the source of power and which legitimates the execution of government decisions. The governed acknowledge that they must obey the orders of the governors because they chose those who give them orders and therefore they remain under their control. This is what is meant by well-known expressions such as the citizen is “king” or the citizen is “sovereign.” Modern democratic society is self-constituted; it generates its own legitimacy and no longer draws on any exterior legitimacy. Citizenship is also the source of social fabric. In modern democratic society, the ties that exist between individuals are no longer religious or dynastic, they are political. Co-existence no longer implies sharing the same religion, being subjects of the same monarch, or being subjected to the same authority. It implies being citizens of the same political organization. Modern democratic society’s founding principle is to integrate populations through citizenship: by going beyond their diversity and transcending their differences. It is this notion of the transcendence of all particularism which is at the heart of the citizenship idea. To go back to Article 3 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, constituted as a “nation”, individuals act in the public space not as concrete individuals who bring with them their historical or social characteristics, but as citizens. This is why they become citizens, regardless of their historical or religious specificities. The new principle of legitimacy, declared in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century, affirmed civil, legal and political equality for individuals who were diverse in their ethnic-religious origins and unequal in social terms. Despite the prejudice of the period, in France, citizenship was extended to Jews in September 1791, only a short while after the declaration of the new principle of citizenship. The new political organization was based on the philosophical conception inherited from the Enlightenment that individuals were

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able to distance themselves, at least partially, from their roots and enter the public space and communicate with others. Man could cease being the simple product of his belonging to a real group. His humanity was defined precisely by his ability to break with the determinations which would restrict him to a culture and a destiny imposed by birth. This humanity was defined by his ability to free himself from prescribed roles. Citizenship not only implies the transcendence of particularisms; it is also founded on the sovereignty of the individual-citizen. This constitutes one of the tensions of the democratic principle. The tension between the transcendence of particularisms and that of the sovereignty of the individual can be broken down into three dimensions: the tension between the universal project of citizenship, its open principles, and the reality of particularisms; the tension between the necessary social order and human emotions; the tension between the principle of individual autonomy and the participation of individuals in collective life. The principle of citizenship is based on a dual historical separation: that of the political from the religious, and that of the ethnic from the civic. It is based on the growing autonomy of diverse aspects of social life. More precisely, it is founded on the elaboration of a civic order as a mode of transcending the ethnic and religious affiliations and passions; that is, emotional identifications shared by particular historical collectivities (collectivités historiques) (Schnapper, 1998: 75). Citizenship was established against the simultaneously inclusive and exclusive passions linked to the identification of individuals with historical collectivities, which are both ethnic and religious, or “ethnic-religious” (Schnapper, 1993). Sociological enquiry has shown, through the study of inter-ethnic relations, the limits of this process of rationalization in human relations. The very object of study—inter-ethnic relations—would not even exist if democratic societies fully respected the principle of citizenship which they claim is theirs. And yet the history of democracies reveals the serious breach of the citizenship principle. We can evoke what was for a long time perceived as the “black problem” in the United States. The history of slavery continues today to affect relations between those who are socially perceived as “Black” or “African-American” and other Americans, although the universality of citizenship and equality of their civic rights were declared following the Civil War. The status of Jews in the France of October


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1940 also demonstrates how the most established principles remain fragile and that it was thus possible to exclude a part of the population from the body of citizens, to the indifference of the majority of the population, traumatized as they were by the defeat. Colonial society is another example. It was founded on the legal inequality of its composing members, although modern democratic legitimacy implies the accordance of civil, political and legal equality to all. This is how that legal monstrosity developed, namely the accordance of nationality without citizenship rights. In 1862, the Court of Algiers declared that “although French, the native was not a citizen.” As one jurist noted: “Common citizenship should have led to universal suffrage and above all, a single electoral college, with no distinction between citizens concerning the exercise of their public rights” (Luchaire, cited in Emeri and Zyllerberg, 1991: 135). In colonized Algeria, full citizenship and its logical consequence—the single electoral college—was only accorded in 1958, just before the disappearance of a colonial society, undermined by its own contradictions. In addition to these breaches of the citizenship principle, breaches that re-occurred on numerous occasions in history, we cannot help but observe the persistence of identifications even within the most established democracies. The idea of citizenship is certainly founded on the “principle of equality between rational and free beings” according to the expression used by Eric Weil as regards natural law, yet it is clear that it is never actually realized according to such terms. To argue that citizenship has been realized in this way would amount to a confusion of the principle or rationale of political organization and historical reality. The nation is itself a particularism. Being part of a national society is based on all sorts of particular and particularizing elements, which we can qualify as “ethnic:” the practice of a common language (apart from a few exceptional cases), the sharing by all nationals of a common culture and a singular history, participation in common institutions, whether this concerns school or the workplace, as well as more strictly political practices. The immediate familiarity that develops between nationals, regardless of the differences which distinguish them, is the product of the specific socialization and a shared experience within a given national society. Every individual is normally attached to his/her familiar environment within which, s/he has developed his/her individual identity, linked to a collective identity. Each individual regards his/her nation and personal specificities as one of the dimensions of his/her own identity.

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The abstraction and rationality of citizenship cannot, alone, organize democratic society. On its own, the civic principle is not sufficient to allow individuals to live together—individuals who need to share a culture, values and emotions in order to “make a society.” Democratic societies cannot only be “civic.” They are also inevitably and simultaneously “ethnic” (in the sense of a shared history, be it real or invented, a shared culture and a common project) and “civic” (Schnapper 1994). The specificity of a society organized according to the principle of citizenship as opposed to other modes of political organization is that the values and institutions of citizenship must, in the final analysis, prevail over ethnic or religious particularism, and over domestic and clan-like solidarities. Furthermore, the French Revolution demonstrated insufficiency of Reason in regards to the organization of social life. The revolutionaries opposed to the pre-modern world a “Reason” which was neither rational nor controlled, but just as zealous as the religious zeal it was supposed to surpass. The People and the Homeland took the place of God as objects of identification which, from then on, were seen as spontaneous. The zeal of individuals in the name of Reason was no less zealous than their ethnic-religious identifications. In addition, passions are neither necessarily exclusive nor condemnable. It is inevitable and perhaps even desirable to “develop” holistic values when they do not contradict common values. As Louis Dumont argued, the art of politics also involves “bending the law, or rather adding to it secondary elements, which if applied without limitation, would contradict the original spirit of the law” (Dumont 1991: 270). And as Todorov has also pointed out: “Demanding equal legal rights for all does not in any way imply a renunciation of a hierarchy of values; cherishing the autonomy and freedom of individuals does not oblige us to reject all sense of solidarity” (Todorov, 1989: 436). Should we therefore conclude that the effects of citizenship on the different forms of social life are limited because of the limits of human rationality, and that the rise of ethnic, religious or ethnic-religious forms that we are observing today reflect the insufficiency of rationality in its attempt to respond to the need for shared emotion and explanation of individual and collective misfortunes which the premodern ethnic-religious world provided? This interpretation is based on the notion that only rationality can


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characterize modern society. If citizenship emerged out of rationality alone, then the theories of survival or compensation would effectively fully take into account the persistence of ethnic and religious revival. Since humans are not only rational animals, revivals would emerge, on the one hand, because the past never totally disappears, and on the other hand, because modern societies only tend to be bureaucratic and rationalized (“survival” theories) and because rationality alone does not respond to the human need to construct metaphysical meaning out of evil and misfortune (theories of “compensation”). Yet this explanation seems to me to be insufficient, because it does not throw light onto the utopian or Promethean character of citizenship. Citizenship as utopia or the refusal of all limits Rationality is not the only characteristic of citizenship. It also involves an indissolubly utopian dimension. It is certainly utopian to establish as the principle of legitimacy and as the objective of social organization, the freedom and the legal and political equality of diverse and unequal individuals. Yet, despite this principle or this utopia, like all human societies, democracies impose certain constraints, which, by definition, limit the freedom of everyone; they also remain hierarchical and as a result, curtail the equality of all. Citizenship goes against nature; its principles are contradicted by daily social experience. It is possible for everyone to observe that “certain individuals are more equal than others” as the well-known phrase states. Declared equality is often scorned. As a result, does this not then create the return of the “repressed,” leading to a situation where passions and emotions linked to ethnic-religious identifications become reinforced? Does not the utopian character of citizenship run the risk of causing even more damage than the acknowledged and institutionalized inequality of the pre-modern social order? Here we recognize the theory of racism proposed by Louis Dumont. According to Dumont, in declaring the equality of circumstances, by eliminating the differences of status and by not acknowledging the very real inequalities, modern societies generate a perverse effect which gives rise to racism. Hierarchy which is unacknowledged by the declared principles of social order always runs the risk of resurgence, and like all things repressed, its resurgence takes on the pathological and hideous form of racism.

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Without taking this analysis to its logical conclusion, one can argue that the utopian nature of the society of citizens, allied with the Promethean project of mastering the natural world through scientific and technical progress, explains the refusal of all limits which characterizes democracy today. I’ll just briefly give some examples: the refusal of limits in the definition of the political body, and as regards the material and moral well-being of individuals, reticence regarding the acceptance of a limit to the age of procreation, reticence regarding the acceptance of adversity, old age and death—everything which conditions the human condition. The dynamic of democracy first of all exercised its influence on the definition of the political body. As we know, after having declared the universality of the citizen, the revolutionaries of 1791 in France then proceeded to exclude a whole series of categories of the population from “active” citizenship. The poor, indigenous peoples of the colonies, women, and young people only possessed the rights of “passive” citizens. The history of universal suffrage reveals the potentially universal vocation of citizenship. Indeed, the above categories of the population were gradually accorded citizenship rights in the name of the universal values of the Revolution: the poor, and the indigenous peoples in 1848, women in 1944, young people aged between 18 and 21 and the newly naturalized in 1974. It was in the name of universal principles that the colonized peoples demanded the citizenship rights that the colonizers had declared, but then reserved for themselves alone. There is an internal dynamic within democracy, which tends, in accordance with its own values, to enlarge the political body. Today, when it would seem that universal suffrage has been established, three great debates are raging as to the legal limits that still affect the definition of the political body. The first of these debates concerns children. At what age do they really become full citizens? Up until what age is it legitimate not to accord children the right to vote, although they are subject to the constraints of the political order? Some argue that the vote should be accorded at 16 years of age, or even earlier, as soon as they are obliged to exercise a certain amount of responsibility, be it civil, penal or financial. The second area of debate is expressed through the theories of those who argue in favor of citizenship rights based on residence. According to those in favor of residence-based citizenship, the exclusion of nonnationals from strictly political practice (the right to vote and to be


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elected), whilst they already benefit from equal economic and social rights, contradicts democratic values, since through their very presence or “residence,” foreign nationals are an integral part of the national society. In other words, imposing nationality as the pre-requisite for citizenship is regarded as illegitimate. It is argued that citizenship rights should be automatically granted to all those residing on the national territory, and some even argue that citizenship rights should be accorded to those who are illegally resident. Finally, at the instigation of international activists who defend the political rights of animals, a third debate is developing around the Great Ape project. This debate, although somewhat absent in France, is very active in the Anglophone world. These thinkers argue that it is in keeping with democratic values, that the Great Apes (orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas), which share most of their genetic capital with humans and, like humans, are subject to the consequences of political decisions in the human societies in which they live, should be accorded political rights. These thinkers adopt similar positions to the advocates of deep ecology who argue in favor of according rights to the natural world. The debates around these theories illustrate the weakening of the frontier between human beings, defined by their freedom and responsibility, and animals—a barrier established by Christian tradition and humanist thought. This push to extend the limits of the political body continues to develop, thus demonstrating the force of the democratic dynamic. A book which was recently translated into many European languages over the last few years—thus revealing the vast interest in the question—gives us another almost caricaturelike example. The book is entitled Towards a General Democracy: Direct, Economic, Ecological and Social Democracy. Indeed, the title is explicit; it is in favor of what we can call “total democracy,” a democracy that knows no limits or bounds.1 The contemporary development of social rights in particular reflects the democratic ambition to guarantee concrete equality for all. The development of the welfare state, which was fully established at the end of the Second World War in liberal Europe is the instrument of social rights. The term “welfare state” should not be limited to its strict or classic sense, that is, implying the protection of individuals against disease, old age, family dependency, unemployment, nor

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Fotopoulous, 2002, See p. 8, pp. 13–14 and p. 189.

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should it only be understood in terms of assistance to the poorest and most marginalized members of society. This original welfare state, which progressively developed since the mid-nineteenth century onwards and which was consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War, is now just one of the dimensions of collective intervention. The contemporary state, which we can call providential, is now expected to guarantee everyone’s security, education, cultural and sports education and even recognize specific cultural identities. It is constantly extending its interventions in order to respond to the needs of individuals. We are aware of the considerable growth in the amount of money targeted at education through the school and university system in the widest sense (including specialized and vocational training as well as continuing education). Likewise, we are also aware of the growing budget dedicated to so-called cultural olicy, which, in France,2 is initiated by the Ministry of Culture (this policy is known to have obtained up to 1% of the whole governmental budget) and increasingly devolved and developed by local authorities. What we can call the sports welfare state is no less negligible in size, since in France, the ministers aim to obtain a budget which comprises 0.5% of the total state budget and the local authorities are increasingly organizing and financing sporting practice at all levels, through the recruitment of professional sports coaches, qualified organizers and specialized civil servants. State intervention is also developing in what we can call the domain of ethnic identities. It is in this spirit that official multicultural policies have been adopted for example in Canada and Australia, both of which are countries which have received mass immigration. These policies involve the transfer of a part of the country’s collective resources so as to ensure the survival of the so-called “cultures of origin” of the migrants, thanks to ethnicity administrators: social workers, translators, specialized teachers, cultural association coordinators and media presenters. In France, the principle of Republican universalism, which voluntarily ignores all “ethnic” categories, in theory, opposes the adoption of multicultural policy. However, for the last two or three years, the increasing “ethnicization” of public policy has in fact been developing, under the guise of geographical

2 This phenomenon concerns all European countries, but it is the most developed and theorized in France.


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and social criteria. Hence successive Town Policies have been adopted over the past twenty years in order to: (1) “re-dynamise” the poorest neighborhoods, where the population of foreign origin makes up the majority of inhabitants, and (2) encourage the integration of these inhabitants. In the same vein, there is the Education Action Zone policy (ZEP), involving the accordance of greater funds to schools in these neighborhoods—a measure which would be described as “a multicultural policy” in other countries. In all cases, it is a question of trying to define new categories of the population who continue to be defined in social or geographical terms—but which crudely correspond to ethnicised categories due to the spatial concentration of these populations—and allowing them to benefit from the transfer of a part of the collective resources, so as to re-establish or guarantee concrete equality for all. This is the reason why the welfare state deficit is not solely linked to the economic and financial crisis. Rather, it is a structural deficit. By definition, the need for security, well-being and equality are indefinite and self-perpetuating as societies transform. Individuals’ demands become more and more pressing as they are given satisfaction. This phenomenon is illustrated by the new professions that are constantly being invented in order to respond to growing demands and which go as far as to include domestic pets, who have now become the objects of medical care. The welfare state feeds dissatisfaction because the response to demands is always delayed and the resources are by definition limited, unlike the unlimited number of demands. This desire to guarantee “real” equality—to use the classic Marxist opposition between “formal” and “real” freedom and equality—has the effect of particularizing the state’s actions. The state decides which new categories of the population are to benefit from a new, specially designed policy. In the face of the ever-growing demands, the state responds by ever-more specific measures in order to guarantee more security, more well-being for individuals and greater equality for all. As a result, state intervention increases and becomes increasingly specific, and so entrenched that it is not easily reversed. A section of society becomes “welfar-ised,” or “providential;” that is, it becomes linked to the intervention of the welfare state and its inevitable bureaucratization. A final illustration of the refusal of limits as regards the human condition: the cult of the body, sporting success, youth and health,

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all of which have become the most important values in democratic societies; the desire of certain women to bear children after the natural age of procreation; the refusal of misfortune and hardship which leads to the use of euphemisms (“visually-challenged” for “the blind,” “physically-challenged” for “the handicapped,” “people of reduced height” for “dwarves”); the difficulty that democratic society has in according elderly people a place in society, often resulting in their marginalization in specialized institutions; the dismay that death produces regardless of the age when it occurs—all these phenomena give us ample examples of this refusal to accept the limits of the human condition. Democratic modernity sets itself the goal of realizing the Promethean task of overcoming nature and prolonging human life, thanks to the remarkable advances of science and technical exploits. Democratic society is a society of performance. The utopia that is fed by democracy is non transcendental. It affects concrete and everyday life experience; its logic is immediate in nature. In “welfare democracy” or “providential democracy,” each individual’s search for comfort without limits—physical, mental, intellectual and in terms of identity—tends to become the main objective and legitimacy of social organization, to the point where it becomes possible to conjugate two seemingly opposite principles—total liberty with total protection.3 The democratic individual favors concrete immediacy at the expense of any sort of transcendence, accords legitimacy neither to tradition nor transmission, and does not aim to construct a future project in the name of an Idea. Democratic individuals are unwilling to die for God, nor for the Homeland. Ethnic-religious emotion in “providential democracies” “If the sprit of most humans were focused on the search for material goods, one might expect a prodigious reaction in the soul of some men . . . I would be surprised if amongst a people solely preoccupied with its well-being, mysticism did not make some headway.” (Tocqueville 1840, t. 3, 2ème partie, chap. 12). The positivism of the democratic utopia puts up little resistance to the development

3

Upon arrival in the West, the Soviet writer, Boukovski, argued that what he had before him was an adolescent society searching to accumulate contradictory advantages.


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of human emotions and human questioning of the ultimate meaning of human life. The unlimited vocation of the democratic process and the deceptions that are inevitably fed by a project which is at once utopian and concrete, leads to the emergence of passions, emotions and identifications of a religious and ethnic nature, the forms of which are new. We cannot understand the renewal of ethnic-religious identities solely through survival theories, which imply that these identities are destined to disappear as democracy influences forms of social life. We cannot understand this renewal only through a theorization of the compensation of an excessive rationalization of modern society, because this society is not only rational; it is utopian as well. We should understand ethnic revival and religious revival on the one hand, in terms of the process of rationalization and on the other hand, in terms of the utopian ambition of democratic society which is intimately connected to this process. The refusal of all limits, added to the demands for concrete and immediate results, inevitably leads to dissatisfaction and disappointment. The democratic individual cannot help but observe that his/her aspirations for security and an ever-greater material and mental wellbeing has its limits. Given the ambivalence of the notion itself, highlighted by philosophers ever since Aristotle, the desire for equality cannot be wholly satisfied. The passion for equality engenders in individuals a sense of failure, envy and even resentment. This is all the more the case as the pre-eminence accorded to the individual over the collective means that the search for one’s “authenticity” becomes a value of utmost importance. Everything that characterizes the individual becomes highly valuable and merits respect. But doesn’t the aspiration for equality by contemporary homo democraticus, coupled with the search for authenticity, tend to undermine the principle of the transcendence of particularisms, which is at the very basis of citizenship? Religious and ethnic identifications are spontaneous and democratic institutions can but recognize them, even if this recognition entails their control so that the identification of some individuals does not threaten the equally legitimate identifications of others. Democratic order therefore necessarily implies that religious and political institutions organize the transcendence of ethnic, religious or ethnic-religious particularisms. The religious institutions on the one hand, and on the other hand, the political institutions which organize representation

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(party membership, electoral participation, the activities of parties, parliamentary practice etc.) have the function of controlling identification and ethnic-religious emotions. The tensions between the rational control of the religious and political institutions and spontaneous outbreak of emotion; between the individual’s desire for wellbeing and the conditions that govern the latter’s participation in collective life, have indeed, been managed or “regulated” by the institutions, which in the French tradition are known as the institutions of the “Republic”, that is, the institutions of what is now defined as “classic” citizenship. The Republicans directly reproduced the model of regulation of beliefs and practices that were guaranteed by the ecclesiastic institution. Civic morals were directly borrowed from the catechism; the work of the schoolteachers, by extending it, replaced that of the parish clergy; the hierarchy of the state was modeled on that of the Catholic Church. With the establishment of “providential democracy”, the individual becomes central, particularist identifications tend to take precedence over universalist aspirations; the expression of shared emotion is valued over self-control; church and democratic institutions are weakened by systematic or radical criticism. Since the individual-citizen is the source of political legitimacy, he/she is highly unlikely to accept institutional legitimacy in the name of tradition. The individual-citizen grants him/herself the absolute right to criticize the very notion of institutions. A consequence of this is the emergence of religious and ethnic revival movements whose common feature is the rejection of all forms of institutionalization and the adoption of forms which are at once emotional and free—in a sort of marketplace for all beliefs and identifications, where each individual can freely choose what suits him/her. Several sociologists have analyzed these phenomena in terms of New Religious Movements (see for example Champion and Hervieu-Léger, 1990). When the legitimacy of the notion of transmission is contested, individuals reconstruct the ties which they choose or invent, in the religious, family or political domain. It is once again their well-being that individuals are seeking when they develop original, individual and temporary stances with regards to religious belief or when they invent equally individual and temporary collective historically-based identities—regardless of whether these are real or imagined identities. Many sociologists celebrate this invention of ties between free and equal individuals (Singly, 2003), but it would be foolhardy to forget that this possibility is reserved for those who


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have economic, cultural and social resources, i.e., for those who actually have an ability to “create ties” out of individualism. We should not forget that strong institutions protect the most vulnerable and the weakest members of society. These spontaneous and immediate references to beliefs and historical collectivities challenge the institutions of the community of citizens. As a result of its own internal dynamic, democratic aspiration runs the risk of undermining its own legitimacy. By increasingly recognizing ethnic-religious particularisms in the public space, by legitimating the outbreak of spontaneous emotion at the expense of institutional control, by challenging the political and religious institutions inherited from the past, democratic practice weakens common institutions and the control they once exercised over human zeal and emotion. The civic is a principle of inclusion, even if in reality, it inevitably has its limits. On the other hand, ethnic-religious belonging is a principle of exclusion, even if it can in reality be corrected and amended. The very principle of the society of citizens implies a society which is open to all those who are able to participate in political life. A society which is organized around the principle of citizenship is, by definition, more open to others than communities which are defined in religious, cultural or historical terms. All national organizations envisage the foreign national’s right to gain access to the political community, as long as a certain number of conditions fixed by the state are respected. It is possible to obtain French, Swiss or German nationality through naturalization, even if the conditions imposed on the candidate differ in each case. On the contrary, one belongs to the “Corsican people” by birth; one does not become Corsican. Moreover, if Corsica were to become a sovereign nation, it would not be able to envisage the legal and administrative means by which certain individuals would be able to obtain Corsican nationality. Rabbis render entry into the “Jewish community” as it is defined by religious tradition, difficult. However, the state of Israel has admitted as Israeli citizens, a large number of individuals who are not Jewish, or who would not be recognized as Jewish by rabbinical courts. To what extent is it feasible to institutionally recognize specific identities without calling into question the shared public domain where, within a given nation-state, individuals who identify with particular historical communities, can live together thanks to the rules of citizenship? To what extent can historical or religious multicul-

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turalism be recognized in the public domain without compromising the values of a common project? In terms of “classic” citizenship, the answer is clear. If the cultural specificities of certain groups are compatible with the demands of a common existence and collective values—that is, the freedom and equality of all—citizens and legally resident foreigners are entitled to cultivate their specificities in their private and social lives, as long as the norms of public order are respected. This right is guaranteed by the principle of the rule of law and modern democracy. However, these specificities should not form the basis of a particular political identity, recognized as such in the public space, which should remain common to all, thanks to the practices and the language of citizenship. Today, the thinkers of a moderate or controlled communitarianism and those Republicans who are sensitive to liberal values, theorize ways to take into account the democratically-informed objective which allows all individuals to develop their abilities and project themselves as authentic. But how is it possible to reconcile the equality of the citizen and the recognition of cultural diversity within political institutions? Even if individual identity is effectively inseparable from collective identities, this does not mean that these identities should be recognized in the public domain. It is important to deal with these problems not only in philosophical or sentimental terms, but in terms of social and political institutions which allow us to concretely ask how institutionally i.e. by what institutions, rights and liberties, which are an absolute imperative, can be reconciled with identity-fuelled demands. Whatever conditions govern the recognition of cultural rights, the legal recognition of particularisms in effect runs the risk of provoking a process of endless claims. On what basis is it possible to recognize the usage of language in the public space—Arabic, for example, instead of Chinese? Or giving privilege to one of the types of Breton over another? Why accord cultural rights to certain historical groups and not to others? On which criteria of justice can such decisions be based? The logic of particularism has, at its ultimate end, the individual. If it is consecrated by the political institution of “cultural rights,” social pluralism—which is both an inevitable and desirable aspect of democratic societies—could lead to political inequality. The danger of social fragmentation within democratic societies becomes accentuated in a context where the rules of the market and democratic individualism lead everyone to cultivate one’s


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own personality. It is not possible to give an example of a modern society, which through its institutional recognition of cultural pluralism, has not induced social and political pluralism. Once democratic values encourage tolerance vis-à-vis everyone’s search for one’s own “authenticity,” and once the democratic individuals criticize the institutions which used to manage the differences and particularisms through a sphere of common citizenship, the question of how people can live together is inevitably raised. Accepting the expressions of “authenticity” made by each individual or group runs the risk of undermining the citizenship principle, which necessarily implies the transcendence of particularisms through the establishment of common institutions. If the church no longer governs manifestations of faith and if the “Republic”—in French political vocabulary—or citizenship is no longer able to impose the transcendence of particularisms and ethnic-religious emotions and identifications, are we not witness to a “double deregulation” of what was once guaranteed by the church and the laws of the Republic (Hervieu Léger, 1997)? And yet, isn’t it necessary to cultivate strong institutions capable of both managing the tensions inherent to the democratic order as well as protecting society’s most vulnerable members? Doesn’t this “double deregulation” of religious and political institutions constitute a risk for the democratic project itself, as well as for the future of democracies?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DOUBTS ABOUT PLURALISM Ralf Dahrendorf A recurring topos of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s analyses of the civilisation of modernity is the distinction between “pluralistic” and “totalistic” modernities. “The central focus of the dichotomy between totalising and pluralistic visions has been that between the view which accepts the distinctiveness of different values and rationalities as against the view which conflates such different values and above all different rationalities in a totalistic way.” And again: “The central focus of these tensions in the realm of political discourse of modernity was that between on the one hand the acceptance of the legitimacy of plurality of discrete individual and group interests, and of different conceptions of the common will, of the freedom to pursue such interests and conceptions, and on the other hand of totalising orientations which denied the legitimacy of private interests and of different conceptions of the common good and which emphasised the totalistic reconstruction of society through political actions.” Einsenstadt is nothing if not subtle, and it is therefore a gross simplification to say that he likes the pluralistic and dislikes the totalising modernities. Still it is probably true to say that in the sociopolitical discourse since, say, 1945, pluralism was generally regarded as desirable, as a condition of the liberal order to which we aspire, or should aspire, whereas totalising tendencies end up in totalitarianism with its destruction of liberty and human dignity. As an inveterate defender of Enlightenment values, of the open society and the constitution of liberty, I must therefore tread carefully as I raise one or two questions about the orthodoxy. Let me begin at the most difficult end of the issue, that of totalising modernity. As one reads Eisenstadt, one is struck by a possibly deliberated ambiguity between two kinds of such totalisation, one “technocratic” and the other, “emotional”. At one point he contrasts the pluralists Montaigne and Erasmus with the “totalising vision of reason promulgated by Descartes”. Elsewhere however he refers to

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the “collectivist” features of totalising visions, of their emotional quality, their tendency to conflate the secular and the religious. The same ambiguity spoilt, in my view, the otherwise powerful end of the first volume of Karl Popper’s Open Society where the philosopher seems to conflate the rigid control system of a totalitarian order and what he calls the “return to the tribe”, that is to essentially premodern relations of status rather than contract. It is true that the Nazis have used tribal language and premodern images of “blood and soil” to camouflage the ruthless organisation of all subjects just as the abuse of religion of modern-type total power in present-day fundamentalist movements is camouflage. Ernest Gellner’s deconstruction of versions of “nationalism” has made this point forcefully and effectively: contemporary nationalisms are for the most part not the return of primordial allegiance but the deliberate use of a language of solidarity for the mobilisation of people by ruthless modern leaders. My own preference would be for using the terminology of closed, or totalitarian societies strictly for modern techniques of exercising power without checks and balances. This would enable us to study ideologies as elements of a superstructure invoked to serve those in power rather than as causes of “totalisation”. It is in other words not variants of Islam which bring about anti-Western mobilisation but such mobilisation which invokes variants of Islam for its purposes. This approach would then allow us to think without prejudice about the role of substantive values and beliefs in free societies. Community and religion, family and status group need not be denounced from the outset for their “totalising” potential. They, and other communities of values, can be examined as possible answers to those questions of belonging which do not seem to go away even in the most firmly anchored liberal order. They are in fact the core of the doubts about pluralism to which I now turn. Living with diversity is one of the great achievements of the modern civilisation in its liberal guise. Yet, it is in fact a much older project. Did not Aristotle state that “from those who are entirely alike no polity can be built”? The heterogeneous nation-state, nonetheless, is a modern phenomenon. At its best it manages to unite people of different creeds, cultures and ethnic origins under one constitution. In that sense it is the application of the pluralist vision. But as we look around the world, we do not find many examples of truly heterogeneous nation-states. The United States of America provided an example of sorts, but it took the country a long time—

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and much violent conflict—to come to terms with its minorities and today Arthur Schlesinger is not the only one to note the “disuniting of America”. Switzerland is perhaps an example, but one may well doubt whether it can be described as a nation-state. Israel is in some ways an example, but only within the common assumptions of the varied Jewish communities gathered in this country. Sometimes I feel that the only real example of a truly heterogeneous liberal community is London whose nearly ten million citizens are as varied as one can imagine. But in London too we find one feature which I believe is almost generally characteristic of pluralist arrangements: In the public sphere London is a successful community of many cultures; but the nearer one gets to the personal sphere, the more separate its cultural communities remain. Jewish Finchley and Bangladeshi Tower Hamlets, West Indian Brixton and Indian pockets in many places are clearly recognizable and unmistakably different from each other. There is a plural input into the common sphere, but at the same time a plurality of separate cultural spheres. In the 1960s, some of us fought a losing battle against the slogan, “separate but equal”. We thought that this was not enough. Equality was only the beginning of a process which we thought would end up with total intermixture, e pluribus unum in an almost biological sense. Today, after the experience of affirmative action and race riots in European cities and numerous small and not so small clashes of civilizations, one is tempted to say that “separate but equal” is in many cases the best we can hope for. Pluralism will not mean a blending of cultures but a clearly delineated toleration of differences as long as certain common public rules are accepted. Pluralism fails to create unity. Above all it fails to create a sense of belonging which is so important for people. It is one of those abstract ideals which engage the heads but not the hearts of people. The consequences of such pluralism without integration are quite serious. The rules of public life are barely sufficient to hold communities together. The groups involved are themselves not static either in numbers or in aspirations. Demography plays a part: Catholics, or Palestinians, or immigrants—it is said—have more children and will soon try to dominate the rest by the sheer weight of their numbers. The result is conflict, hidden at first, then occasionally explosive, and potentially leading to deep cleavages bordering on divisive civil wars. Where this is not the case, the demand for

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rigid proportionality is never far. In earlier days, the Dutch called this process, verzuiling, the creation of pillars which could not be moved, pillars of culture the strength of which is defined by the size of groups. Affirmative action may have had a benevolent purpose when it was first introduced, but if every fifth professor has to be black, and every local government electoral state include a proportion of Asians or whatever, societies freeze and cease to be creative and open for change. Is there no other way to deal with plurality, and notably with a diversity of cultures? What about the good old values of toleration, of leaving diverse individuals and groups free to do their own thing? Is there not such a thing as active tolerance, an attitude of acceptance and engagement with respect to a plurality of cultures? And might this not be the answer to the emotional gap left by the principle of living in a “separate but equal” condition? Perhaps this is the case, but as we think it through we soon encounter another doubt about pluralism, which arises from what might be described as the post-modern fallacy. You cannot build a civil and civilised society on the principle that “anything goes”. Pluralism as an active project of toleration and freedom has to be bounded somehow. The other day (on 21 October 2003) the House of Lords had a debate on one of its favourite, if quaint and somewhat esoteric subjects, hunting with dogs. In the middle of dreary speeches, a respected young Labour peer of Pakistani extraction, a television producer who is openly gay, Lord Alli, got up and made a dramatic speech not so much in defence of hunting as in defence of pluralism and toleration. Freedom, in my view, is a precious thing. You have to want freedom very, very badly. You have to want freedom badly enough to allow two men to walk down a road, holding hands and kissing. You have to want freedom badly enough to watch British Muslims burn a Union flag. You have to want freedom badly enough to allow people to get onto horses and hunt. The house was impressed. In the end an alliance of libertarians like Lord Alli—and myself—, hereditary peers attached to the traditional hunt, and mere opponents of government defeated the proposed ban. Yet Lord Alli’s powerful words also raise questions. How about burning the flag? The symbolic value of the Union Jack is not as great as that of the Stars and Stripes in the US; but it is still a symbol of the constitution which must surely override the sectional

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interests of the plurality. And how about the two men holding hands? Yes, they should be allowed to do so, but must they do it while walking down a road, that is in public? Is it not one necessary condition of an effective pluralist society that some of the diversity is displayed only in private? Above all: what exactly holds a society for which freedom is precious and which therefore accepts plurality in the preferences of its members together? How does it avoid self-destruction by the gradual slide from pluralism to anomy? How does it define the boundaries within which plurality becomes fruitful without closing itself off from the unceasing exploration of new horizons? Shmuel Einsenstadt’s analyses are sustained by an impressive developmental optimism. For him, the imagination of societies is virtually unlimited. If problems such as those of pluralism arise, something new will be invented, and this will still be a version of modernity. “In all societies these attempts at interpreting modernity are continually changing under the impact of changing historical forces, giving rise to new movements that will come, in time, to reinterpret yet again the meaning of modernity.” There are truly “multiple modernities” including “de-Westernised” ones which are not only viable but acceptable. If this sweeping view of comparative civilizations leaves the Westerner a little breathless, and one remains nearer home in one’s analysis of the contradictions of modernity, the key question remains unresolved: How can we avoid the two risks of pluralism, that of tenuous verzuiling, of separateness without centre, and that of total fluidity, of a world in which anything goes? This is where the distinction between “pluralistic” and “totalistic” modernities ceases to be helpful, because it fails to enable us to answer the question of the basis of solidarity in pluralistic societies. A set of dominant values and concomitant institutions is needed to make diversity fruitful and avoid the twin risks of anarchy and anomy. This is of course an old subject, and historical societies have found a number of answers to the issue. In the case of the United States what Tocqueville identified as “civic religion” had and continues to have a strong binding force. In the case of Britain, the much-maligned class system served to uphold a sense of dominant values by which all tended to abide. The same may also be true for countries like Sweden, though there it is less flagrantly based on social class. All these historical ligatures however have been under pressure for some

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time. The result has been a sense of confusion and dissolution, and coupled with it, a growing readiness to embrace totalising substitutes for the loss of benign sources of solidarity. Versions of fundamentalism have often taken the place of traditional linkages. Liberal alternatives are not easy to find. Jürgen Habermas has long advocated what he calls (with a term borrowed from the conservative publicist Dolf Sternberger) “constitutional patriotism” as a source of solidarity in pluralist societies. Unless this assumes some of the features of a “civic religion”, as it used to in the United States, it seems a strangely abstract project. This is even more the case if one follows the more recent attempt by Habermas and others to apply such sentiments to Europe, the European Union. Some of the exaggerated hopes of intellectuals in the so-called European constitution—it is in fact merely a treaty between states—have to do with the search for an identity which creates a sense of solidarity. In the light of day however this is a very long way away if it is ever to be a realistic prospect. My own preferences are of a more traditional kind. When John Stuart Mill talked about “nationality” as a definition of the political space within which a hundred flowers can blossom, he had in mind sets of values associated with what we loosely call countries. To be sure, it is hard to contradict Eisenstadt and others when they point out that the nation-state has lost some of its charm and much of its power in an age of globalization; but it is still there, and it is still the most effective space for the liberal order to flourish. Larger spaces of action are diffuse and removed from checks and balances, and smaller ones have a built-in totalizing tendency. Beyond the nation-state, I would be more reluctant than Shmuel Eisenstadt to allow Western values to be submerged in an ocean of multiple modernities. De-Westernization is more often than not deliberalization. The enlightened belief in the responsible use of reason, and the institutions which go with the acceptance of the basic uncertainty of the human condition, are quite a good guide to a world in which pluralism is contained without totalising risks. It may not be enough to return to Kant and further to Hume, but it is a good beginning.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE END OF THE “SOCIAL” Alain Touraine It seems at the outset somewhat meaningless to speak about the end of the “social.” Are we becoming pure individuals, determined by our innate characteristics, by the influences which we have received and by the shape of the advertising and propaganda which imposes choices on us? Should we even admit that there is no longer any marked difference between poor and rich, women and men? Obviously, expressions of this type are meaningless and we are constantly appealing to sociological knowledge to help us get rid of a purely universalistic and individualistic vision of our behavior. This vision seems to us to contradict our real-life experience which accords so much importance to the various social circles to which we belong, to our profession, to the language we use and to our levels of income and education. This practical experience of sociology is reinforced by the knowledge that we have of the extension of the interventions of society on its own working and its changes. More information, more demands and more resources have meant that policies concerning urban planning, education, labor, employment, etc. have increasingly modified our surroundings so much, so that today society spontaneously appears to us as the outcome of social policies, plans and projects which link social life and political action and which have rapidly caused the geographical or historical determinants of the forms of collective life to disappear. We could continue with observations of this type but they are so elementary that there is no point in so doing. My only aim here is to avoid a misunderstanding: the title of this chapter, and this must be clear from the outset, is not proclaiming that I wish to introduce a new form of moralism and to attempt to discover the non-social determinants of social action. In fact, the idea I present here is very different. Some societies see themselves as acting on themselves through specifically social categories; we are accustomed to using categories like classes, norms, institutions and socialization. However,

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we are not unaware of the fact that other societies have used concepts of another sort, in particular political ones, to do the same task. The first centuries of modernity were dominated by the use of political categories and the main fields of analysis were the formation of absolute monarchies—after that of the city-states—then the appearance of nation-states, first in the Netherlands and in Great Britain, then later in the British colonies in America when they gained their independence, and above all in France at the time of the Revolution. All these political changes have been of major importance. For a long time, our vision of society was shaped on the basis of political terms and analyses. And since our representation of social life has not always been “social,” why should we not wonder today if this “social” vision is not beginning to disappear or even whether it has not already been replaced by another vision? But before making a judgment about the disappearance of this social representation of society, we ought to specify the content of this vision. It is primarily defined by recourse to the idea of society, which is not merely a means of describing a concrete entity—we talk about “English society in 1900”—but also a principle for evaluating Good and Evil, as a principle of definition of values, norms and forms of authority: anything which reinforces society, its integration, its capacity to act upon itself and also to adapt to necessary changes, is good; anything which undermines this integration, increases its internal conflicts and renders most social relations unmanageable, is bad. This concept of society is based on notions of institutions and socialization: institutions give legal shape to the treatment of a number of important social functions and are also responsible for enforcing respect for established norms. The word “socialization” has been used to speak of all forms of education, which implied that the aims of education, at school or in the family, were effectively to train citizens and workers. This is an indication of the extent to which the idea of society has really been the keystone of the whole social representation of social life. The concept of society is so strong that good sociologists attempt to restrict its applications rather than to extend them. It is indeed tempting to consider that all the aspects of a concrete society, historically and geographically defined, form a system, fulfilling positive or negative functions for society. In fact, many sociologists have recalled, quite correctly, that phenomena which were very different in kind, and had little relation to one another, could be juxtaposed

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in the same space and time. Marxist sociology has pushed the idea of society to the extreme by giving an unlimited power of explanation to the idea of capitalism, defined in terms of social relationships of production, class domination and the subordination of all aspects of social life to the domination of profit and its beneficiaries. We are still living, in part at least, in a period of post-Marxism in which we are offered key principles of explanation which are social in nature and effectively account for a great variety of observable phenomena. The most important example of this post-Marxism today is provided by radical, particularly American, feminism, of which the most outstanding analyses endeavor to show that all the categories concerning women and sexual behavior have been constructed to provide monopoly to heterosexual relations in which women are dominated. The only powerful enemy of the idea of society has been that of rationalization, that is to say, the triumph of reason. Today, like yesterday, many defend the idea that human beings act, both individually and collectively, in function of the rational pursuit of their interests and that social organization calls on increasing rationality which can be seen both in the use of new technologies and in the capacity to forecast consumer behavior. But this sort of vision, which has many practical applications, cannot be easily applied to the population and social organization as a whole. A great deal is said about the irrationality of the working classes, the bureaucratic routine and the lack of long-term perspectives for small entrepreneurs or farmers to explain the non-rational aspects of a society. These limits of a rationalist vision are so powerful that sociology, based on the idea of society, has always been critical of its optimism and the simplistic nature of this elementary form of utilitarianism. The inadequacies so frequently mentioned of a purely “economistic” representation of social behavior have led most sociologists to prefer analyses loaded with subjective meanings and references to norms and values. This social representation of society, which corresponds to what we call sociology or, at least, classical sociology, cannot be identified with a political position. Nor is it enough to oppose conservatives to radicals or communitarians to liberals. Firstly, because terms of this sort always have a very restricted geographical sphere of application: whoever seems a moderate in Buenos Aires is considered a radical in Boston and a conservative in Berlin. In fact, by far the majority of sociologists lie within a

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political arena which is fairly well defined by the central importance given to the concept of society. It is difficult to imagine a Nazi or Stalinist sociologist and almost impossible to imagine a racist sociologist because, in all cases, the individuals in question would have to give up what constitutes for the others their definition as sociologists. It is true that a certain number of sociologists have been members of the communist party, but their membership was almost always short-lived and without influence. Specific historical situations, like the anti-fascist struggle in Europe and in North America may have pushed some sociologists and intellectuals in general to identify with a vision of the world which was more political than specifically sociological, but none of that lasted very long; whereas the distance separating Parsons or Weber from Durkheim or Bauman is limited if we bear in mind the confrontations which have torn the world apart over more than one hundred years. Sociology has been constructed on an image of society which has had difficulty in understanding the most extreme behavior whether good and bad, but has maintained almost constantly certain criteria for the professional evaluation of their own work. It would be easy to pursue at length this evocation of a past which is still to a large extent present and which some think will reappear practically unchanged in our intellectual future. But I have said enough in defense of the unity of sociology and also to define it as a certain way of constructing and representing social reality based on specifically social rather than political or religious categories. My aim is not to criticize sociology or to accuse it of having neglected or under-estimated certain aspects of social life or of having put too much trust in most of its institutions. I have not borne a negative judgment on classical sociology, any more than I have on political philosophy, as it has developed from Machiavelli and Thomas More to Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. To avoid getting myself involved in an almost endless critical overview, I have contented myself with indicating the clarity of the move from a “political” conception to a “social” conception of social life and of stressing the strong unity of the intellectual sphere thus created. The question which I would like to ask is: has this social representation of society—sociology—come to the end of its history and do we see the emergence of another image of social life? Or, on the contrary, are we witnessing an increasing fragmentation of studies on social life, which means that today we search in vain for an overall definition of sociology or of what is going to replace it?


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The justification for asking such a wide-ranging question is the experience that we all have of the over-spilling or the weakening of an image of society acting on itself, in function of its interests, its orientations and its resources. We have to take note of the presence of such large-scale phenomena and trends which are so undeniable that each on its own is enough to seriously undermine sociology as it has been defined here. A few words suffice to describe this destruction of what was the sphere of sociological thought. On one hand, there has been an increase in importance of the economic and technological factors which are not socially controlled and which disrupt social life. From the post-war period until recently, we have gone from a period dominated by state interventionism to a period in which markets, financial and commercial networks, etc. predominate. Concomitantly, we are seeing a mobilization of beliefs, religious powers and political-religious demands which exceed what can be managed by the institutionalized mechanisms for change. The social sphere tends to disappear somewhere between the economic world and the cultural universe, interests and beliefs. We must eliminate the idea that one side represents reason, markets and liberalism and the other an identity often associated with a nation, an ethnic group or a religion. It is wiser to find in each actor the contradictory presence of these two orientations, neither of which is capable of elaborating the social mediations, institutional or representative rules which would enable the dual aspect of his or her behavior to be integrated. Even if it is an over-simplistic manner of speaking, we could say that today the United States is at one and the same time the main purveyor of scientific and technical progress and of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, the most extreme belief of which is the one which the new conservative ideologists have formulated into a unilateralism which breaks with the previous thesis of globalization. On the other hand, the Islamic movement is impelled by a strong demand for identity, but it often uses financial resources which come primarily from oil and which enable countries which are not, in fact, very developed to intervene at world level. The fact is that social groups are affected by the decline of the “social” frame of reference. Those who speak of desocialization base what they say on good arguments because all forms of socialization, ranging from the family to neighborhood groups, are seriously weakened and, at the same time, norms are disappearing and mass

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culture leaves little possibility to those who wish to impose their point of view. At the level of personal life, this desocialization often takes the form of frequent breaks in occupational life which, for many, consists of a haphazard series of temporary jobs, part-time contracts or unemployment. How can we define ourselves as social actors when our main concern has become to defend ourselves, and our loved ones, against the misfortunes, crises and catastrophes which can hit us unavoidably without warning? In fact, the forces which seem to command the world today can no longer be defined in social terms. The best example is that of money, and in particular of the market; the second is war, including the monopoly of information and forecasting. The world which we refer to as social, of which we were attempting to understand the norms and the procedures, as much to criticize as to adopt them, seems to be drifting and even disintegrating, torn between money and war. We could call societies today “post-social,” meaning they no longer have internal control over themselves. One could, for example, imagine speaking about Israel in these terms, a country founded on a set of collective goals and development projects, a capacity for the integration of newcomers, with scientific amenities of the highest level and which is dragged by the weight of war towards situations, conflicts and policies which are very far from the still recent model of construction of the State of Israel. This remark is even more appropriate for the Palestinians whose national construction is still in the making and marked by the violence done to them. The efforts to construct a Palestinian society seem to be constantly overwhelmed and destroyed by being dragged into war and by the desire of some to fight to the death. When all that is destroyed, the sphere of sociology, like that of social life, quite simply disappears. At a much less dramatic level, how can we fail to see in many parts of the world, the disappearance of what can be called an economic system? In many countries, domestic production represents a very small percentage of national income. The main components are the money sent back by emigrants, foreign subsidies, smuggling and trafficking in arms and in drugs. Only recently the idea that a country could be defined without reference to its production, its forms of labor and its social relationships of production, corresponds to real cases. The situation has changed rapidly and we may indeed ask whether rises in productivity and the possibility of obtaining a high standard of living in return for a


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limited number of hours of labor would not give more decisive importance to the market and to war than to production and distribution. In other words, are “post-social” societies not dominated by violence? It is however impossible for us to wholly indulge in this type of vision of the planet at the beginning of the century and the millennium, for while the forces of death and speculation are powerful, it is not true that the lives of human beings, even those who live in the worst conditions, can be reduced to the domination exercised by non-controllable forces. Politics have not disappeared, quite the contrary. In contrast with the first image which we have just evoked, it is the extension of the public space which is the easiest to see. The public sphere formed at the time of the bourgeoisie, particularly in the eighteenth century, was overtaken in the nineteenth century by the elections and by information and education processes which involved an increasingly large proportion and finally by far the majority of the population. Today, we live in a society which we refer to, quite correctly, as a society of mass communication, and behind the parties and trade unions which are in decline, associations and NGOs have sprung up, forming what we call rather strangely “civil society,” whereas it is in fact a question of a new level, much broader than the previous ones, of political life. We are all concerned by what is going on in the whole world, from events in our private lives to the catastrophes and hopes which deeply affect the population as a whole. Thus political and social facts are visible everywhere in such a way as to constantly occupy our attention. However, the world of information and communication remains relatively external to each of us; that is to say, we do not perceive our world, our environment and our own existence in political and social terms. These terms are present in the world of television which, it is true, has an important place in our lives, but we participate in it as consumers. Television does not construct our world; it distributes images to us that most of us accept willingly but only in so far as we do not feel involved. We “receive” the programs; we do not create them and if we choose them in function of our demands for a specific type of consumption, we do not exercise, or at least not directly, an influence on the programs. Should we then content ourselves with this dual image of our postsocial world: the alliance of money and power on one hand; and, on the other hand, the ubiquitous presence of mass communication which constructs a world of entertainment around us, but which in

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no way provides us with a mode of construction of our own experience, since the programs from which we have to choose have no direct reference to our personal life? Finally, the third component of our experience: the private sphere, which can also be known as beliefs, culture, passions and anything which is primarily defined by its non-social content. This world of private beliefs is not determined in social terms any more than is the world of the market, of war or of the mass media. In the private sphere, individuals are no longer confronted with anything other than themselves and their lives can no longer be expressed in any other terms than those of their experience, which is the definition of private life. This definition is both weak and strong. It is strong because the private sphere not only resists by defending itself against the most brutal forces, but because it occupies all the space which used to be that of social statuses and roles. But, once again, is it possible to conceive of a construction of the social sphere on the basis of the private sphere? Or must we accept in its entirety the conclusion already envisaged: the complete disappearance of the personal subject, both social and political or even religious, that is to say, of any principle of organization and representation of social life or, if we can use this expression, of any subject for itself? It is impossible to accept this type of conclusion, particularly for those who have studied collective action and conscience. We must therefore endeavor to pierce the mystery of private sphere, to find there something other than the gaze of self upon itself. There are, in the private sphere, requirements which are produced by political or social pressures. The appeal to private life, to a subject oriented toward itself, is not an expression of weakness but of strength, not of flight but of positive initiative. What each individual seeks in his private life is not the trace of past social or political life, which has been erased; it is the means for a fragmented subject to resist all the forms of domination and all the languages which have become restrictive and meaningless. Because we no longer find any support around us for the required reconstruction of the sphere of community life, we appeal to what does seem to us essential to defend: pure interiority, concern for oneself, resorting to all forms of behavior which bring us back to ourselves, instead of distancing us even further. We find similar approaches in all the previous models of struggle against dependency: the appeal to the nation against the king, to workers against the employer, etc. An active attitude which implies


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our hope in our possibility to limit the hold of the external world on us and, inversely, our capacity to construct, in the outside world, bases of support, forces of organization and communication, institutions and training methods, which reinforce the free subject. This theme can be easily developed: the subject is the central reference by which we resist the environment and construct a mode of evaluation and judgment capable of guiding our behavior. But we must waste no time in considering this a libertarian form of protest, like that of a solitary individual clinging to a raft in the middle of a storm. If there were no other possible images of liberty and liberation, we would have to lose hope and give ourselves up to the waves which, sooner or later, would swallow us up. Luckily, these romantic images do not give an accurate account of our situation and real activities. Concern for oneself can be based on what best resists all forms of social domination and all processes of disintegration. In the first instance, reason. The appeal to reason is primarily a universalist approach. In opposition to money and war, reason, whether applied to science, law, economics, administration or to public works, provides an essential element of what is known as modernity. The belief in rational thought is associated with the idea of universal—that is, individual—rights set above all other social attributes. A central expression of this respect of individual rights is the universalist principle of citizenship as opposed to all forms of religious, political or other communities. Some may wish to add that rationality implies distribution of resources and in particular rules for the production and circulation of goods, services and capital determined by it. But this sort of sentence is fraught with possible misunderstandings; it is better to leave it aside. It is impossible to state that freedom of trade ensures the best distribution of resources, when this is refuted every day by observable facts. On the other hand, any system of production has to seek a high level of rationality, even if this level is not best reached by the absence of any social or political control of the economy. This bringing together of the recognition of individual rights and the universalism of reason has founded modernity. The 1789 Declaration of Rights states that everybody, whatever their origin, opinions and interests, had the same rights. Maybe this analysis gives the impression of taking a step backwards from a social and even political definition of social organization,

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based uniquely on natural law, perhaps even on a religious conception of human experience. This impression is not false. To leave behind a pure “social” vision of social life, we have to base ourselves on universalist principles; we do this with increasing frequency and insistence by referring to human rights to better condemn totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. But this only takes us half way and we have to round off this reference to the Enlightenment by an approach which is not in opposition to it but which gives it a content and therefore a very different meaning from its own. The appeal to human rights has long since descended from its metaphysical pedestal. In past centuries, in some parts of the world at least, we have seen natural law becomes civil and political rights. This was proclaimed most explicitly by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. But very rapidly, this call for civil rights which corresponded to a political vision of society, was bypassed and replaced by major battles for the conquest of social rights and in particular the right to work, which were developed as from the end of the nineteenth century, in the first instance in Germany and in Great Britain. And now the decline of the “social” representation of social life confronts us with the need to defend the right of each individual to defend his or her culture, that is to act according to both their personal projects and the heritage they have received, especially from their family and by virtue of their awareness of belonging to a cultural, religious and linguistic community. It is possible and necessary to go further still by invoking the right to live and to choose one’s sexuality to begin with, and then one’s personality as a whole, shaped both in the family environment and by real-life experience. The result is that we are getting closer and closer to the theme of private life as an extreme form of individualism. We demand recognition in all aspects of our personal life. The old idea that the liberty of the individual is best ensured by participation in social life and its institutions is replaced by the completely opposite idea— namely that the liberty of the individual is only ensured by his liberation—at least in part—from social roles and attributes. We no longer believe in the creation of a wise and rational society; on the contrary, we accept more negative images of society as a terrain where violence is never controlled. But it is difficult to be precise about exactly where there is continuity or discontinuity between the universalism of the Enlightenment


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and this more all-encompassing notion of rights that everyone now demands. The two terms which have just been linked and of which the union can define, I think, a non-social and post-social mode of analysis of social reality: rationality and personal cultural rights, do seem to be essential for a representation of contemporary culture but each one of them, in isolation, leads to one of the dead-ends in which we find ourselves trapped today. Private life is more present than any other factor in the construction of reality today. We no longer stand facing the outside world, dreaming of conquering it and becoming its master, as Descartes invited us to do; we are introspective and faced with ourselves and even more preoccupied with the authenticity of our experiences than with controlling our emotions. But private life, left to itself, gets lost in its own reflection. In most cases, what seems to us to be totally private is nothing of the sort, as is demonstrated by the well-known studies on the choice of names for children, an eminently private choice and which is nevertheless to a large extent predictable. The appeal to rationality also appears to be something new, because the twentieth century has been dominated by thinking which criticized the pretensions and illusions of rationality in reaction to the scientism and positivism of the previous century. But a pure form of cultural, political or social differentialism would make it totally impossible to construct a general analysis and to establish communications between subjects which are completely different from one another. We must therefore integrate with each other the two major orientations which have just been defined. If we admit that these two orientations do share the fact that they are not defined by a social content, it is permissible to think that the union of these orientations constitutes in itself the greatest force of resistance, either to domination by money or to domination by the state. This constitutes a break with the previous period, when forms of social organization or conflicts were thought of and formulated in terms of social rights. This is due to the decline, at least in relative terms, of the nation-state, the social and political framework par excellence which set its seal on every event in social life. Let us take one of the most controversial problems of the present day: that of the rights of minorities. No major modern country is confronted with the situation which faced the Austro-Hungarian

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Empire or the Ottoman Empire or yet again the countries where minority nationalities opposed one another with considerable force. It is no longer a case of a movement of “nationalities”, as in the nineteenth century; today on the contrary we see a certain number of countries that consider it necessary to reduce their policies for integration. This is the case in particular in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, the United States where a sizeable Hispanophone population has settled. In Germany the situation is rather different; there a Turkish population has been maintained in a low degree of national integration largely due to the German conception of nationality, which is defined by ius sanguinis. To summarize this point: the demand for cultural rights today is of a different nature from the movements of nationalities, the demand for independence or, at least, for autonomy in cultural, educational and also territorial matters. The movement of nationalities was primarily political but also social, and often the two types of demand were interrelated. What is striking in the present-day demands for cultural rights is that their political dimension is weak and often they are not political at all: take, for example the women’s movement or the defense of sexual minorities. While the former, and still existing, movements of national minorities tended to find their unity in demands which copied the model of the nation-state, the present rise of multiculturalism has to be put in the context of the combination formed by this idea along with the appeal to reason and the insistence on the private sphere; I have already stated that there was an extremely close relation between them and the demand for cultural rights. What this really means is that the idea of multiculturalism does not have a general meaning but takes on very different meanings depending on whether or not it is based on a rationalist position and on the defense of the rights of the individual. In the absence of an appeal to reason and to human rights, the call for multiculturalism may very rapidly lead to a fragmentation of society into communities, each of which is governed in an authoritarian manner or in any event without any reference to the elementary principles of democracy. Let us not lose sight of the fact that our main preoccupation must be—not the merits or demerits of multiculturalism—but the manner of campaigning against the domination of negative non-social forces such as money, war and violence, by relying on the two inter-related principles which I have just recalled, which are non-social or post-social principles.


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The difference between the demand for cultural rights associated with the respect for individual rights and reason and the same appeal for cultural rights, distinct from the two other dimensions, is very clearly shown in the discussions which have perturbed France and many European countries in relation to the permission or refusal by public bodies for girls in grammar or secondary schools to wear the hijab, the Islamic headscarf within the school precincts. The important thing here is not to take a position for or against this practice in the name of the general principles which are in fact very confused on both sides. The main thing is to recognize the existence of two groups amongst these young Muslim girls. The first category, the one which emerged most distinctly at the beginning of this social movement, and particularly in the media, was that of the young girls who called for their rights, or for their desire to combine their Muslim appearance with a normal school life. Sometimes this demand is expressed directly; sometimes it takes more indirect forms when these young girls indicate that wearing the headscarf makes it much easier for them to leave the house and to escape the control of their elder brother or their father. Others mentioned the headscarf as a form of protection against attacks by boys on the way to school. In any event, the main idea was the search for a combination of belonging to a religious community and participating in a modern economy and society. But as the themes of integrism and communitarianism gained momentum, this category has become less and less visible. There is no doubt that a higher proportion of these young Muslim girls who demand the right to wear the headscarf are responding to the pressure of the family or neighborhood group and that, in the areas which are being ghettoized, there are appeals for the destruction of considerable aspects of the educational system but also of the health-care system, often at the initiative of self-appointed imams. We see grammar school girls who are allowed to wear the scarf then immediately demanding to be excused from gym, but also from biology classes because they do not accept discussions about sexuality in terms which are not acceptable to their religion. They also request to be excused from history classes, especially when the subject-matter is the creation of mankind. Similarly, in hospitals, a refusal of communication between the sexes is developing: men wish their wives to be examined exclusively by women. Whereas in the first case, the issue at stake was primarily a private cultural right, the right to display one’s religious beliefs in a part of the public sphere, in the

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second case, on the contrary, it is a question of an attack which involves the institutions and the refusal that the organization of the school or the hospital be defined by rules which come themselves from laws adopted democratically by an elected parliament. In the past two or three years, the present circumstances, at world level, have created a fear of terrorism which leads to a systematic rejection of everything which appears to be linked to the world of Islam as a whole. The result is that for a rising proportion of the population, the young girls who wish to wear the scarf at school appear to be manipulated by Islamic groups and, consequently, to constitute a political danger. It is impossible to deny the deep differences between these two categories. To speak only of cultural rights and moral liberty seems to be naïve if we do not consider the attacks which threaten what we consider to be key and even founding elements of our modernity. But, on the other hand, there is nothing to justify us denying the sincerity of a considerable number of these school-girls. We have numerous accounts of their desire to find a pathway to modernity which would not force them to break with a cultural heritage which is in fact transmitted by a strong family and communitarian organization. The solution to be adopted can only depend, in the logic of democracy, on the capacity of each of the groups concerned to make themselves heard and gain the support of the majority. Today, the fear of radical Islamism is so strong that the modernizing Muslim girls with their headscarves are almost inaudible. This should not last because we see everywhere, as far as Iran, women who consent to wear the hijab as long as they have access to the world of work and who are very aware of the difficulties which exist in combining Islamic tradition with the modern world, but also of the need to succeed in so doing. The intention of this analysis has been to show the field of problems, ideologies and conflicts which characterize the “post-social” vision of social life, a vision which, for lack of a more explicit term, will have to be called cultural, but with the accent on the opposition which exists between the forces of destruction of the cultural subject and those which, on the contrary, render its existence possible. The respect of individual rights and the appeal to reason are two forces which are not social by nature but which have the capacity to oppose attacks carried out on modernity, democracy and liberty, by money, war and violence. This conclusion should enable us to put aside the theme which is


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so widespread today, and considered almost to go without saying, that of post-modern society. Post-modernity is defined by the disappearance of any unitarian principle of thought and action, of any correspondence between a unitarian principle of this type and a historical period or a geographical region. When we used to speak about industrial or post-industrial society, Western culture, rationalism and universalism, we were setting ourselves clearly within a historical period and a geographical zone. This is how sociology came to be considered a critical form of thinking about modern Western societies, critical thinking which opened up numerous discussions and which often identified with the domination exercised by the governing elites of this industrial world over all sorts of ethnic, social or cultural categories. The partisans of the idea of post-modernity reject this image—at times evolutionist, at times historicist—of progress (its successes and failures), and of its internal struggles. They introduce a profound dehistoricisation into the analysis, reinforced by the new insistence placed by the humanities on language, communication and signs, whereas in the previous generations the accent was on the description and analysis of societies. It is indeed tempting when we see the attributes of industrial society disappearing, even when it is succeeded by a society of information and communication, to reject en bloc any historical representation of social life. In opposition to this temptation, I have endeavored to introduce the idea that the decline and disappearance of the “social” vision of social life could be followed, not by the disappearance of any overall representation but by the emergence of a new vision, as different from the “social” vision as the latter was from the “political” vision. I have attempted to stress that a new type of representation and social action is taking shape under our eyes, and even with our active participation which deserves the same attention as that which industrial society defined when it was produced in Great Britain and in a few other parts of the world. My attempt is even aimed at combating the discouragement and confusion which invade all those who seek to understand the present on the basis of the past and thus become increasingly pessimistic. It must be admitted that to defend the hypothesis of the creation of a new type of society does demand a more difficult effort than to accept the vague notion of postmodernity. We must now consider the most visible transformations in the move from a social to a post-social paradigm. This type of reversal

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is very different from the slow but regular advance towards equality to which so many thinkers have referred in the past. It is true that we must salute women’s victories and support their efforts towards equality which could result, as many feminists have indicated, in the gradual elimination of the categories of sex and gender, since in many professional activities and other areas, it would not matter whether one dealt with a woman or a man. But the position which I have just taken is different in kind. It is no longer a question of a gradual disappearance of inequality and consequently of the advance towards a unisex society, but on the contrary of the reversal, not from a masculine cultural model to a feminine cultural model, but from masculine domination to an outdistancing by and for women of the polarization and ranking which have characterized masculine society. This remark is confirmed by the fact that the pairs of opposites which have played such a central role over the past centuries social thought are attacked and demolished. On all sides, the separation between body and mind, intelligence and sensibility, the interior and the exterior, private and public life, war and peace, are destroyed or transgressed. Everywhere, we see the reconstruction of a reintegrated, reunified notion, beyond a polarized view of social life, but quite opposed at the same time to the completely destructured image of a post-modern society. Thus what seemed to us in the first instance to be the decline of the “social” representation of collective life can now be re-interpreted as the birth of a post-social, cultural model of representation and action. This post-social model has nothing to do with post-modernity, but, on the contrary, it forces us to raise the issue of hypermodernity, because it is in this new model of representation and action that the self-transforming action of society appears to be the strongest and above all with the least intermediaries. The political model, like the social model, led to the creation of objects of knowledge and action defined in an almost “natural” manner, especially since Auguste Comte, with the result that political or sociological theories were often tempted to free themselves from a historical analysis to lead into a general theory of systems. This general approach which has nurtured and sustained social thought brilliantly for so long is now on the way out. The creative capacity, instead of grappling with outside objects, has turned inwards to become an end in itself and to better resist both economic and military forces and communitarian ideology.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF LIMINALITY Bernhard Giesen Ten years ago I had the privilege and the pleasure of writing a paper with Shmuel Eisenstadt. Its topic was “collective identity”—a concept that was starting its intellectual career at that time (Eisenstadt/ Giesen 1995). The main part of the paper addressed theoretical and conceptual issues and tried to embed the concept into the tradition of Grand Theory. The article ended with some remarks on the differences between Japan and Germany with respect to their way of coping with the past. Both references set the stage for most of my intellectual agenda and research activities during the past few years. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the following remarks start with some theoretical statements concerning the concept of collective identity and end with some observations concerning the differences between Germany and Japan. Identity as an a priori of action Collective identity is a notoriously complex and essentially fuzzy concept (Wagner 1998; Brubaker/Cooper 2000; Giesen 1999). This holds true not only because—from an actor’s perspective—boundaries are contested and communities are constructed, but also because—from an observer’s perspective—collective identity cannot be conceived of as a simple descriptive term denoting empirical reality. To conceive of identity as an empirically observable property of individuals or groups amounts to falling into the trap of misplaced concreteness or of reification. But it would be also misleading to think of “identity” as a mere artifact of outside observers, as a concept that summarizes or typifies “naturally different” persons. Instead, identity has to be regarded as an a priori—in the Kantian sense of the term—of action, for the actor as well as for the outside observers of action. If we talk about actions, intentions, aims, interests, plans, responsibility,

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guilt etc. we have to presuppose a source of agency, an actor who is distinct from his actions, but whose existence relates different perceptions and states of mind to each other, who can choose between a limited set of alternatives and who can hence be held accountable for his actions (Anscombe 1966). Individual as well as collective actors have to be viewed as transsituational and continuous from the perspective of outside observers, as well as from the actor’s point of view. This a priori reference to a continuous and accountable self constitutes identity. We cannot think of acting without implicitly assuming this continuity of the actor, his/her accountability and intentionality. But in most situations of everyday life we are unaware of these a priori of action. Only on special occasions does our individual “self ” become the issue of special attention and awareness. We try to think about it, reflect on it, talk about our “personality” and how it is expressed in actions. In a similar way communality is tacitly assumed in everyday acting. We act as if we would see the world in the same way, as if we would have the same interests, as if the sharing of resources would be natural and self-evident, and when doing so we rarely reflect on our collective self or communicate about the question who we are, where we came from and what we are heading for. As far as this most elementary but tacitly assumed communality of perspectives in everyday acting and the basic solidarity of cooperation are concerned we may rightly question whether the high-flung concept “collective identity” should be used (Brubaker/Cooper 2000). But there are special occasions in social life, when a collectivity takes a reflexive turn on itself and raises questions about who we are and what our enduring collective self is. Here, the distinction between the collective self and its expression in action comes to the forefront, and here, with respect to this reflexive turn, it makes sense to describe the issue of social communication as “collective identity.” Identity and its representations Identity as the presupposition of and the reference to a continuous subject is absolutely certain for the actors, but it is also inaccessible for empirical observation as it escapes objectification and defies description. As an analytical a priori, it shares this status with the

collective identity and the representation of liminality 247 concept of “nature,” of the Kantian Ding an sich, of time and space, and, of course, with the concept of God in postaxial-age religions. Nature and objectivity as well as identity and subjectivity cannot be described and observed, but they have to be categorically presupposed when we describe a particular object or a particular action. These a priori have to be carefully separated from their symbolic representations. Modern science has accepted the difference between reports about empirical observations and natural objects; although aiming at truth, empirical statements will never provide an exhaustive and completely true description of natural objects. At its very best, scientific discourse can allow us no more than to distinguish between more and less falsity in theories (Popper 1965). What holds for the relation between natural objects and their scientific descriptions can also be found in the relation between the identity of a subject and its representations in social communication. These representations will never give a complete, exhaustive and undistorted account of identity. Therefore any attempt to represent identity in social interaction is not only patterned by embeddedness in a social situation, but it can always be contested and questioned. It represents only one perspective among others; at best, it is only partially true. Any one confronted with a description of his/her identity (or of his self ) can easily reject it: “That is only a part of me, it is a distorted image etc.” And this response is not just a desperate attempt to avoid facing the truth, but instead is perfectly appropriate. What we are fighting about in identity wars and identity politics is not identity as such, but particular representations of identity, that are claimed and denied, rejected or recognized (the only case in which identity as such is denied is the case of the victim who is dehumanized and treated as an object, as a case of a category, without a name and without a place to remember him/her as a person). In distinction to these symbolic representations, identity is absolutely certain but untransparent to us. This holds true not only for our enduring existence but also for the events limiting it. We know that we have been born, but we cannot report the experience of birth; we know that we will die some day but we are unable to communicate the experience or our own death. It is only the birth and death of others that we are able to observe and to describe. In talking about representations, a further distinction has to be made. Representation has at least three dimensions that can be

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separated from the perspective of analysis and observation, but in many cases from the perspective of actors as well. The first dimension is the semantic one. From the point of view of semantics, representation appears as symbolic classification, as a grid of distinctions, even as a text that can be analyzed with respect to basic codes, oppositions or categories. Symbolic representations of identity cannot just consist of the name of the actor. The actor’s name is just an indexical device hinting at the assumption that there is an actor at all. Instead, symbolic representations have to position a particular identity within a symbolic classification, they have to narrate the story of the actor, they are—in this respect—“texts.” But representations of identity, although frequently reduced to this semantic or cognitive dimension, are not just texts. In addition to this existence as free-floating symbolic structures, representations have also a performative dimension—they have to be enacted, practiced, presented and staged in particular locations. This performative dimension differs clearly from the purely semantic or cognitive one and it opens up a field for a new variation—this time on the level of patterns of action and communication. The same founding myth of a nation e.g. can be represented as a mimetic ritual, as a sculpture, an official ceremonial address, a private oral narration, a television broadcast or as a novel that is read by individual persons in privacy. Each of these practices of representation refers to the same symbolic structure (script, narrative, text etc.) but it implies a particular mode of communication that differs strongly from the others, and these differences of practices, routines and rituals matter. Communication in museums is radically different from a ritual dance; likewise, reading a novel in privacy is radically different from singing an anthem at a collective rally. All these practices of representing, however, converge in one important aspect: they “construct” a common collective identity among the participants and address those who are assumed to be insiders. The presence of outsiders, if it is not excluded, has to be ignored or neutralized. If interventions by outsiders cannot be ignored, they are usually viewed as offensive and as an issue that provokes strong aversive responses on the part of insiders (Goffman 1959). Similar responses can also be observed with respect to the practices of representing individual identity. Confessions and diaries, personal letters and conversations with a therapist are usually treated as confidential and are protected by strict rules banning any communication to outsiders.

collective identity and the representation of liminality 249 This exclusion of the outsiders’ view indicates the extraordinary vulnerability of representations of identity but it also hints at the power of outside observers. Only if they do not know the secret, can we dispense of their recognition. Representations of identity are obviously, not just an (individual or collective) actor’s self-definition that has to be accepted and recognized unconditionally by outsiders. Let us consider, at first, the case of individual identity. Ego who defines his identity cannot dispense of alters approval because ego’s own identity remains untransparent to himself—it is almost impossible to think of one’s own identity in complete isolation without at least referring to an imagined other. In order to imagine and to describe this untransparent identity, in order to calm down his own insecurity, ego needs the communication with others, their agreement and approval. Thus several individual persons can agree on a common collective identity—I recognize your identity and vice versa— because we are alike and equal. The construction of collective identity is, however, not just a matter of arbitrary convention and a bilateral contract between insiders. Representing identity is an irredeemable discursive endeavor. It has to represent identity as legitimate and justified in terms of a given culture that embraces ego and alter. But the range of cultural discourse can rarely be confined to the clearly marked boundaries of a group. The semantics of representation can hardly be concealed from the view from outside (in Hegel’s sense, “The mind goes wherever it wants”). Therefore it cannot dispense with recognition by outsiders, it has to cross the boundaries by communication, it has to refer to the approval of possible third parties, of a generalized other, of outsiders, and it has to represent an identity as justified and legitimate to outsiders as well. Representing liminality Social reality as distinct from physical reality is constituted by some fundamental boundaries or categorical distinctions—such as the distinction between nature and culture, between anarchy and order or between rule and exception. Demarcating these boundaries, contesting them and reconstructing them is at the core of social life. The social process is continually spinning around these positions of liminality. We cannot escape the question whether an action is

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supporting an order or disrupting it, whether it can be subsumed under a rule, or whether it is exceptional and whether this exception is legitimate or deviant. With respect to the temporal dimension, we cannot avoid the question of the origin. Setting a mark for the beginning of a community and accounting for the process of origin are as constitutive for social reality as the distinction between rule and exception or between order and chaos. This thrust for representation and imagination is becoming even more urgent since our own origin—as we have outlined above—is basically untransparent for us. The second part of this chapter will present four archetypical figures that imagine the liminal situation (Turner 1969) between inside and outside and that account for the question of origin. These figures are the triumphant hero, the tragically failing hero, the victim, and the perpetrator. As symbolic representations of liminality these figures can be substituted for each other if the historical situation and the perspective change; heroes can be turned into victims as in the case of fallen soldiers in modern wars, victims can be rephrased as heroes as in the case of terrorism, perpetrators appear as heroes and heroes as perpetrators depending on the perspective from inside or outside of the community. There are, however, general trends concerning the dominant figure of liminality in the modernity discourse about collective identity. This chapter will argue that we are witnessing a far-reaching change from heroic to traumatic figures in the mythical foundations of collective identity—at least in the western world. Triumphant heroes Many foundation myths of political communities refer to the figure of the triumphant hero who rises against oppression and foreign rule or leads his people to the Promised Land. The triumph over the adversaries and the conquest of the Promised Land marks the origin of the just order, or the mating of people and land. By definition, the hero is in a liminal situation: he stands above the rules, defies conventional wisdom and the risk of death, he crushes the existing order and ventures out to the unknown (Rank 1910; Campbell 1971). In a position between gods and ordinary human beings he (or she) is subjected to no rules, commands a divine violence and creates the new. The triumphant hero represents autonomy, uniqueness and sov-

collective identity and the representation of liminality 251 ereign subjectivity. With the advent of modernity, the sovereignty of the monarch relied on this charismatic core of political authority. The divine right of kings and the notion of absolute princely authority presuppose a superhuman reference as embodied in the figure of the triumphant hero. Modern democracy turned triumphant heroism from an individual into a collective mode. Rising against the personal rule of the prince or against foreign domination, the people break the unjust social contract, relapse into a state of nature, violently seize power and establish a new constitution by themselves. The revolutionary selfconstitution of the demos is the central foundation myth of modern democracies. It imagines the people as the collective sovereign that exists before constitution and law are established and that has to be appealed in order to change it. The myth of the revolutionary birth of the people not only imagines the origin of the claims, but also legitimizes public protest marches, acts of civil disobedience or the symbolic occupation of public spaces by protesters. Because these forms of protest are related to the collective heroism of the people on the barricade they are—to a certain degree at least—sanctified in democracies. Political authorities cannot treat them straightforwardly as acts of lawbreaking—whoever violates the parking rules is fined, but thousand protesters blocking a road are exempted from legal persecution because they are symbolically related to the revolutionary birth of the demos that existed before the law did, and that is considered to be the source of the law. Solemn ritual performances and annual celebrations remember and reenact the revolutionary origin of the demos. Its ritual form is the public parade displaying the power of the people in front of its representatives and representing the people’s triumphant seizure of public spaces. The annual Soviet parades celebrating the October Revolution, the French parades on Quatorze Juillet, the American celebrations of Independence Day, and the many postcolonial parades in Africa and Asia are cases in point. Although still quite common all over the world, the routinized national memorial celebration runs the risks, however, of all attempts to routinize charisma—it fades out and is slowly turned from a serious national ritual into a matter of public folklore and public holidays.

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The tragically failing hero is defeated by the adversity of the world, but in his defeat and because of his defeat he can preserve his pristine purity and sacredness ( Jaspers 1946). In contrast to the victorious hero, who must accept compromises in order to stabilize and routinize his rule, the tragically failing hero symbolizes the irredeemable tension between sacred and profane. He was defeated but not rendered profane. He, too, represents liminality but he demarcates the chasm as unbridgeable. The defenders of Massada, the early Christian martyrs, Imam Hussein—the murdered founder of the Shia, the defeated Serbs of the battle of Kosovo, the failed Irish insurrections against the British rule, the Japanese “nobility of failure” (Morris 1975), the Warsaw uprising against the German occupation, the defenders of the Alamo, even the German resistance against Hitler are mythical embodiments of tragically failing heroism that became an integral part of the respective national or religious mythologies. The most important ritual form of remembering failing heroism is not the public parade, but the historical museum or the memorial site. In the historical museum, mostly silent visitors representing the living people are confronted with the remainders and relics of the dead heroes. In contrast to public parades, there is no position for the ruling political authorities in this ritual form. Telling the stories of courageous resistance and desperate uprisings not only saves the honor of the community, but also inspires the people’s resolve to be on the alert and never again allow the enemy to defeat “our people.” A more complex reference to failing heroism in constructing identity can be found in the melancholic abstention from profane engagements as futile and vain. Existentialism and romanticism, but also stoicism and monastic retreatism, are cultural movements that—as different as they are—center the chasm between the thisworldly and the otherworldly realms and recommend distance and abstention from profane involvement as the prime path to personhood and subjectivity. Hence, even some ways of constructing the axial-age tension outlined so brilliantly by Eisenstadt crystallize in the figure of the tragic hero (Eisenstadt 1986c).

collective identity and the representation of liminality 253 Victims Heroes who, in triumph or failure, were able to remain unique and sovereign subjects represent the liminal position between gods and humans. At the opposite end of the human condition we find the liminality of the victims. Victims are human subjects who are treated as objects, as cases of a category without a name, a face and a place within the community (Bauman 1989; Todorov 1996). The perpetrators tried to scatter their remains and blur their traces in the outlands of human society. Nothing should remind us of their existence. Like heroes, they are exempted from the regular social order but— unlike heroes—they are pushed beyond the margins of social community, they live in extraordinary spaces, in camps (Agamben 1995). Heroes are incomparable; victims are counted by their numbers. They were recognized as persons before their victimization and they are still viewed as persons from an outside perspective, but the perpetrators have turned them into profane objects that can be killed, traded, used or deported like cattle (Giesen 2004). Being a victim means not only to be reduced to a profane object but also to encounter mortality and, in many cases, death as well. Death is the liminal horizon of human life—absolutely certain, but impossible to communicate as our experience (Heidegger 1986). The mind has to ignore the possibility of its own mortality. While death as voluntary sacrifice is invested with profound meaning by most cultures, death by victimization disrupts the web of meaning—it does not fit into a meaningful sequence of narration. It is an inconceivable event (Caruth 1996). Therefore, the experience of the surviving victims resists being told to others, the trauma remains enclosed in their bodies. Only from a distance, after a long time or from the position of following generations, can the horror and suffering be uttered and worked through (Alexander/Eyerman/Giesen/Smelser/Sztompka 2004). This is exactly what happened in the classical cases of victimization that were ultimately transformed into central representations of collective identity in the respective communities. When they occurred, the Holocaust, African American slavery, the Great Irish Famine, the Armenian genocide were widely ignored (Laqueur 1980). They entered the arena of public attention only after a period of latency elapsed. Subsequent generations assisted by a few surviving witnesses, try to preserve the collective memory of victims and to

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give them back their names, their faces and their place within the community. During the last century the figure of the victim has gained in attraction as a symbolic representation of individual and collective identity (Giesen 2004). A well-known case is that of Benjamin Wilkomirski who claimed to have escaped the Vilna Ghetto as a child and to suffer from a trauma of victimization. After much public acclaim for his autobiography, critics discovered that it was pure imagination and fiction. The suffering of the past seems increasingly to provide an attractive reference for the imagination of collective identity: the victim replaces the hero as a figure of heightened subjectivity. Conflicts and debates about public recognition of a group’s claim to victimhood are, certainly, driven by hidden interests. Big money is at stake; self-appointed advocates of victims stage their cause in public arenas and require compensation. But revealing these interests does not answer the question why these claims are publicly recognized, why people visit monuments remembering the victims of the past, why, today, serious intellectual debates about collective identity focus more on victims than on heroes? Explanations of this remarkable phenomenon cannot ignore the level of structure and culture. The collective identity of victims is, of course, a retrospective one: it is not our own suffering here and now, but the suffering of the past, the suffering of others that is turned into an identity of the present. As individuals, African Americans and Jewish Americans today can hardly claim to be victims, but they can claim the collective identity of a group whose members have been victimized in the past. The figure of the victim seems to gain salience as a pattern of collective identity when the surviving individual victims are disappearing (Giesen 2004). There is also another structural reason for the increasing focus on victims. In identifying with the victims of the past we retroactively avoid the position of the bystander, the uninvolved third-party who ignored the suffering and failed to intervene (Hilberg 1992). When we identify with victims and remember their suffering, we reverse their depersonalization; we give them back their names, their faces, and their place within the community. A hidden and haunting awareness of the dangers of objectification in modern social systems might foster this retroactive recognition of personhood. What has been treated as an object is invested with the qualities of a subject again (Bauman 1989).

collective identity and the representation of liminality 255 Perpetrators The perpetrator is the counterpart to the victim. Through their voluntary decision, perpetrators have moved beyond the regular social order and have trespassed against the basic norms valid in a community. In particular they have, without further authorization, decided about the life and death of others and thereby have disdained the sacred core of other persons (Giesen 2004). The liminal position of perpetrators results—similar to those of heroes—from a sovereign subjectivity that has cut its ties with regular order and legal norms. Unlike heroes, however, the extraordinariness and rule-breaking power of perpetrators, their venturing out into the wild outlands lacks recognition and respect on the part of the social community. It is the admiration of the social community that sacralizes the often violent deeds of the charismatic hero. Without this support, heroes are turned into evildoers, demons, perpetrators. Sometimes this shift of perspective is produced by a major historical event—a defeat or a change in political authority. Before their death or defeat, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were viewed as redeemers and as demons thereafter; their special forces—the SS, the Cheka etc.—were heroes before and perpetrators afterwards. Such a total change of perspective is performed by the social community through ritually expelling the perpetrators, by putting them on trial, killing them, or banning their actual or symbolic presence. Far more difficult to cope with is the situation of followers and bystanders, who admired the perpetrators but were not directly involved in acts of victimization. These ordinary members of the community had acted according to the regular social order, had ignored and disregarded the signs of horror and crime, and they had continued to trust in their political leaders. After the defeat or the change of regime they had to realize that, by their very inactivity, they had been accomplices in a mass-murder. This traumatic experience occurred in postwar Germany. After the war, German national identity underwent indeed a traumatic sequence. A period of latency, during which a coalition of silence about German guilt united the new Federal Republic, was followed by a period of “speaking out” in which a new generation, the “68ers”, accused their parents’ generation of responsibility for the Holocaust (Assmann/Frevert 1999; Dubiel 1999; Giesen 2004). Following this public accusation of an entire generation, a new political ritual of

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remembering the responsibility for the genocide of the European Jews was established. It was originated by Willi Brandt’s sudden and unexpected gesture of atonement at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in 1970 (Giesen/Schneider 2004; Rauer 2004; Schneider 2004). The German chancellor, undoubtedly innocent as a person (he was persecuted by the Nazis), kneeled down as a representative of the nation of perpetrators. Here, the individual guilt of perpetrators and collective trauma of the nation of perpetrators are disconnected. Since then a new public culture of mourning and confessing the collective guilt of the nation has been spawned in Germany. It resulted in historical exhibitions and historical research, TV series and public addresses and has produced an extraordinary sensitivity of public life with respect to anything that can be interpreted as belittling the German guilt. The ritual of publicly confessing and affirming the guilt of the past was not limited to representatives of the German nation. During recent decades it has spread rapidly among European nations that— retrospectively—discovered their entanglement in collaboration and their failure to intervene. After celebrating the tragically failing heroism of resistance France is increasingly concerned with Vichy, with collaboration in the Shoah (Papon) and with the French roots of anti-Semitism (Sternhell 1996), Poland is debating its own genocidal involvement in the case of Jedwabne (Gross 2001), the former Norwegian president Bruntland noted that more young Norwegians died in the ranks of the Waffen-SS than as victims of the German occupation, the Pope apologizes for the lack of official intervention against the genocide, the Italian post-fascist leader Fini visits Auschwitz, the disregarding of reports about the Holocaust by American and British authorities and the lack of intervention is publicly debated in the United States (Laqueur 1980) etc. The once clear-cut distinction between Germany as the nation of perpetrators and the occupied European nations as the victims is gradually becoming blurred. Most nations were entangled in collaboration and many now acknowledge it by official apologies offered by political representatives who—like Brandt—are innocent as persons. Germany has reluctantly rediscovered her own victims who died in the Allied bombing raids, as refugees fleeing from the Russian invasion or as prisoners of war in Siberia or Eastern Europe. A widespread awareness of victimhood and perpetratorship seems to be providing a new collective identity for Europe, if not for the West.

collective identity and the representation of liminality 257 Searching for the conditions fostering this surprising turn, we can point to the structural boundary separating the individual perpetrators from those who claim the collective identity of perpetrators. If we, as innocent persons, feel shame, remorse and atonement on the part of the collectivity we belong to, then we strongly oppose the past of our collectivity—it should never happen again. We know that there is a bond of belonging between the perpetrators and ourselves, but we strongly disapprove of their actions and identify with the victims. In this axial reversal, we even hope to get rid of this bond of belonging. We may ask, however, why this public attention for victims and perpetrators occurred in the second half of the previous century but remained a rare and exceptional phenomenon in preceding centuries. A tentative answer can be found in the changing conditions of international observation. Until the nineteenth century, public celebrations of triumphant heroism and victories were hardly noticed by the neighbor nation whose members could feel humiliated because they remembered as a defeat what, beyond the border, was celebrated as a triumphant victory. Today, in contrast, any ostentatious triumphant ritual is no longer a local affair, but is closely watched by the international community. When, for example, Ulster Unionists march in Northern Ireland to remember the victory at the Battle of the Boyne, they have to account for this global audience that rejects triumphant heroism which might be offensive to others. Finally we have to address intercultural differences in this sensitivity for victims and perpetrators as figures of heightened subjectivity. Obviously not all nations join this move towards ritual confessions of collective guilt performed by political representatives. For years, Japan resisted international pressure to publicly admit its national responsibility for the Nanking massacres, and Turkey even outlaws any public statement that considers the Armenian genocide to be a matter of national responsibility. This remarkable difference is probably rooted in the basic cultural code of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in distinction to the Japanese and the secular Turkish ones. The Judeo-Christian tradition centers the redeemer, the messiah, the ultimately innocent hero who sacrifices himself in order to save the guilty community. Isaac and Christ are such innocent individuals and many saints tried to repeat that self-sacrifice of the innocent person. This figure of the innocent self-sacrificing hero could be connected to the Augustinian idea of the original sin that was

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transmitted from generation to generation. Furthermore, the JudeoChristian tradition is a paradigm case of an axial-age culture: the mundane history is contrasted sharply with the impersonal principles of the transcendental realm, politics and moral are opposites (Eisenstadt 1996a). Taken together, these cultural codes crystallize in the figure of the innocent individual who charismatizes himself by assuming the guilt of the collectivity he represents. In a way the German chancellor Willy Brandt performed Christomimesis when he kneeled down and humiliated himself ritually in order to save his people (Giesen 2004). In contrast, the non-axial-age Japanese culture can hardly conceive of the community as guilty. Individual persons can be wrong and guilty, but the Japanese nation is seen as primordially sacred: the Tenno himself is divine and there is no way of appealing to higher principles for criticizing the representation of the sacred (Eisenstadt 1986c). It has been noted before that Japan is a paradigm case of a culture of shame that can be contrasted to the Western culture of guilt (Benedict 1946). For reasons that are different but equally fundamental, Turkey bans and persecutes any open admittance of a national responsibility for the Genocide on the Armenians. It was Kemal Atatürk and his followers who planed and executed the mass-murder committed on Armenians because they were considered to be a threat for the ethnic purity of the Turkish nation state (Bayraktar/Seibel 2004). Thus genocide lies under the foundation stone of modern Turkey. But since there was no defeat that forced a conversion of heroes into perpetrators (as in the case of Germany) the Turkish authorities can continue to revere Atatürk as the founding hero and ignore his responsibility for the genocide. The Japanese and Turkish cases testify not only to the importance of comparative analysis of cultures ( Japan is indeed God’s special gift to comparative sociology as Eisenstadt constantly underlines) but they also show the shifting imaginations of liminal figures. Like other symbolic representations of collective identity they too are cultural constructions determined by a certain temporal and social perspective. With history passing and social boundaries being crossed triumphant heroes can be converted into perpetrators, tragically failing heroes can be interpreted as victims, and we discover that among the nation of victims there were also collaborators, and that among the nation of perpetrators there were also tragic heroes and victims.

PART THREE

RELIGION, NATIONALISM AND PLURALISM

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WEBER’S SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION AND ANCIENT JUDAISM Wolfgang Schluchter Forward Max Weber’s study of ancient Judaism, on which he worked after 1910, is particularly well-suited to shedding light on the approach of his mature sociology of religion, with its comparative and developmental orientation. This is particularly the case if systematic questions and those bearing on the history of his works are linked. Having devoted himself from the very beginning of his career to ‘Mediterranean’ antiquity, he was naturally familiar from early on with aspects of the history of Israelite-Jewish religion. However, this knowledge did not find literary expression in his work until 1910. Neither in “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” of 1904/05 nor in his study on the “Agrarian Conditions in Antiquity” of 1909 we find more than sporadic remarks on the history of Israelite-Jewish religion. This can scarcely be mere chance. It is much more plausible to conjecture that Max Weber was not working intensively on the history of Israelite-Jewish religion until the period from 1910 onwards. For even in the “Replies to Critics”, which resulted from the Fischer-Rachfahl debate, following the publication of the “Protestant Ethic”, ancient Judaism does not play a major role. And the last “Reply” appeared in 1910. Admittedly, it was not Weber’s intention to give a history of the religion of antiquity in the “Agrarian Conditions”, nor was the further prehistory of ascetic Protestantism a subject of controversy in the Fischer-Rachfahl debate, so that no discussion of ancient Judaism from the point of view of religious history should be expected in these writings.1 But even if these texts

1 In the “Agrarian Conditions”, Weber analyzes the capitalism of antiquity as a system and relates it to ancient forms of state organization. He does not take an interest in religions and their consequences on economic attitudes. In the “Replies”,

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are not taken as “testimony” that the writer ‘was not working’ on the religious history of ancient Judaism, there is plenty of evidence that actually it was only after 1910 that, in connection with Max Weber’s now awakened interest in Asian religions, he was also more specifically examining the history of Israelite-Jewish religion. This eventually came to fruition with his study “Ancient Judaism”, that from the start encompassed the whole spectrum from ancient Israel to early Christianity.2 I shall deal with my theme in four steps: I shall start by saying something about the major projects, which were complementary, though not executed simultaneously, on which Max Weber was working from 1910 until his death, and which both remained unfinished. These were his Grundriss article, known under the title “Economy and Society”, and the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie: comparative studies on the economic ethics of world—or rather cultural— religions (1). 3 There follow reflections on the unconventional combination of comparative and developmental viewpoints which underlies his reconstitution of major processes in religious history (2). I shall then show that he takes the creations of the Old Testament, the Bible of the Jews, as the “turning point”—one might even say the point of departure—for one of these great processes in religious history, the development of the Israelite-Jewish-Christian and Islamic religions (3). Finally, I shall consider whether it is tenable to designate the ancient Jews as a pariah people which, from the “forcible internment”4 onwards, that is to say, from the Babylonian exile until the fall of the second Temple, voluntarily brought itself into this situation. Max Weber’s formula on the subject: from a political to a confessional community.

his concern is the defence of the original thesis of the study on Protestantism. Weber does indicate in various places that he intends to ‘extend’ his investigations forward and backward, and indeed in his final reply to the critiques of the “Protestant Ethic” of 1910 there is even mention of a projected return to ancient Christianity, though not to ancient Judaism. Cf. Weber, 1982, p. 322. 2 This choice of title is far from self-explanatory, and signals a special approach to the topic. 3 The title does indeed specify world religions, but Weber says expressly that Judaism is not a world religion, but rather a cultural religion. For the distinctions between the concepts of cultural, world and redemptive religions, see Schluchter, 1988, here vol. 2, pp. 24ff. 4 Weber, 1920, p. 4 (hereafter: RS III). Weber even goes so far as to assert that voluntary ghetto life had existed “long before forcible internment”.

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1. The uncompleted major projects It is known that Max Weber scholarly writings from 1910 until his death dealt with two major projects, which gradually became distinct and then developed separately: his contribution to the Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie, later entitled Grundriß der Sozialökonomik, which he called first “Economy and Society”, then “The Economy and the Societal Orders and Powers” and finally, it seems, “Sociology” (in the following: his Grundriss article); and his “material economic cultural sociology”5, the core of which should be sought in the “Essays in the Sociology of Religion” (“Religionssoziologische Skizzen”), later entitled “Comparative Essays in the Sociology of Religion”, part of it being “The Economic Ethics of World Religions” (“Vergleichende religionssoziologische Versuche”). He originally intended to publish these essays together with his Grundriss article. As this was prevented by the outbreak of war, he published them separately from 1915 onward in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Finally he wanted to publish them as Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, in combination with earlier texts, some of them revised, some extended, together with unpublished essays mostly still to be written. The first volume of this gigantic undertaking appeared in 1920. Part of this project was the study on ancient Judaism, which he first had

5 This quotation is taken from the “Preface” to the publication of the 1st part of the Grundriß der Sozialökonomik, dated 2nd June 1914. The “Preface” is written by Max Weber. The choice of words ‘material economic cultural sociology’ certainly seems strange. ‘Material’ is indeed comprehensible in this context, as Weber was trying in his Grundriss article to disregard the relationship of economics to the particular elements of cultural content, among which he mentions “literature, art, science etc.” (MWG I/22–1, p. 114). What ‘economic cultural sociology’ may be, however, is less clear. It must either be an analysis of culture from an economic standpoint, or else a sociology of culture. This remarkable conceptual definition could, though, be the expression of Weber’s intention of emphasizing the importance of each side of the causal relationship to both his theoretical and historical ponderings, that is to say the economic conditioning of ‘culture’ as much as the cultural conditioning of the economy. More will be said on this later. This would then lead to an economic sociology of literature, an economic sociology of art, etc. However this may be, possible candidates for this “material economic cultural sociology”, apart from studies in the sociology of music, which already existed at this stage, include the essays in the economic ethics of world religions. As the footnote of 1915 in the Archiv shows, these were obviously alluded to with the rest. On the “Preface” and other documents relevant to reconstructing the history of the emergence of the major projects, see the compilation of Johannes Winckelmann, 1986, here, p. 165, and for an overall view, Wolfgang Schluchter, 2000, pp. 179ff.

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presented from October 1917 onwards as a sort of ‘serial novel’ in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.6 But there was to be a revised version of the Gesammelte Aufsätze. Like the Grundriss article, which breaks off all too soon, the collection ends prematurely with the revised “Intermediate Reflection”, which leads on to the religions of India. Of the four volumes Weber anticipated, only the first one was published with his authorization. The first fact to bear in mind is that Weber’s “material economic cultural sociology”, in which I include the essays in the sociology of religion (“Religionssoziologische Skizzen”), was originally to appear as a supplement to the Grundriß der Sozialökonomik together with his article “The Economy and the Societal Orders and Powers”. This is shown by the “Preface” to the Grundriß taken in conjunction with the footnote that accompanies the separate publication of the essay in the sociology of religion dealing with Confucianism in October 1915. “The first parts”, Weber writes here, are published “unaltered, just as they were written down and read to friends two years ago.” And he adds that the essays were originally meant to appear simultaneously with his Grundriss article, in order to “interpret and supplement the section on the sociology of religion (though also to be interpreted by the latter on many points).”7 This “section”, however, was not available to the scholarly public at the time. Presumably also written down in 1913,8 it considers, under the title “Religious

6 Max Weber starts the publication of the essays in ancient Judaism in October 1917 with a footnote that deserves attention, clarifying his further plans: “The following presentation (of ancient Judaism, W.S.) is published here omitting the discussion of the Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian conditions. In a future collection and revised publication (for China, provided with source references and revised), in combination with other earlier essays, some of them unpublished, the missing part will be inserted”. Cf. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Volume 44 (1917/1918), p. 52. As Weber never got as far as to ancient Judaism when compiling the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, the omitted discussion of the Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian conditions still remained unpublished, possibly unwritten. Nevertheless, comparative references to these conditions occur repeatedly in the study itself. 7 Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik Band 41 (1916), p. 1. Weber used this expression again in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. He simply changed “two years ago” to “two years before”. Cf. Max Weber, Gesammelte 1920, (hereafter RS I) und MWGI/19, p. 83. Where an edition of Max Weber Gesamtausgabe is available, quotations are also referenced to this. 8 On this subject, see also the editorial report of Hans G. Kippenberg in MWG I/22–3, pp. 89f.


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Communities”, on the one hand the class conditioning of religions, and on the other hand the connection between cultural religion and economic attitudes. Weber had already expounded the latter relationship in his study on ascetic Protestantism. Now he is not only pursuing both interrelations, but he also includes all the cultural religions that he considers important, in addition to ascetic Protestantism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Early Christianity and Islam. They form the material for defining concepts and for obtaining regularities, ‘laws’, as well as their qualification. As already stated, the outbreak of the war prevented the publication of the Grundriss article and the essays at the same time. The section on “Religious Communities” was left for revision until after the war.9 Even during the recasting of the Grundriss article in the years 1919/1920, it remained untouched. While Weber continued to work on his essays from 1916 onward, we may suppose on the basis of the old manuscripts, the sociology of religion section of the Grundriss article remained unaltered. This was not in accordance with his plans, as we learn from the “Preliminary Remarks” (“Vorbemerkung”) to the first volume of the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie that he had submitted for printing. He had still not been able, he writes there, to use the ethnographic-folkloristic material adequately for his approach to the sociology of religion. And he goes on: “I hope to be able to do something [to rectify this omission] during a systematic treatment of the sociology of religion.”10 This hope, however, turned out to be in vain. The sociology of religion contained in the Grundriss article remained in the state of 1913, but the historically oriented essays in the Sociology of Religion of 1913 were taken further. Thus the two major projects did not develop simultaneously. The knowledge gained in the essays was no longer put to use in the chapter on the sociology of religion in the Grundriss article. Of course, this does not alter the complementarity of the two major projects. One could even say that this made it possible for Max Weber to strive for this

9 This is not quite true, as Weber got out the manuscript at least once more, to use it as the basis for a lecture at the University of Vienna in the summer term of 1918. This was a sort of probationary term that he had insisted on, to see whether he could accept the invitation to succeed Eugen von Philippovich. Weber then declined this offer. See also MWG, I/17, p. 12. 10 RS I, p. 15.

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complementarity with even greater effectiveness. For while Max Weber was seeking to broaden the essays by extending the studies on Protestantism to studies on Confucianism and Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and, via ancient Judaism, on Talmudic Judaism, Early Christianity, Oriental Christianity, Islam and Occidental Christianity, he was endeavouring to condense the Grundriss article, on the basis of the pre-war manuscripts and in the light of new insights. How this was to be achieved, we can see from the two editions of the “Sociology of Domination”: the pre-war version, in the layout of the Grundriß der Sozialökonomik, takes up about 200 pages, while the postwar version as submitted by Weber for printing has been compressed into about 50 pages. For the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie we are in possession of a plan sent by Weber to his publisher Paul Siebeck in 1919 which he followed in the preparation of the first volume. However, we have no comparable plan for the projected new version of the Grundriss article. One thing is clear, though: in his work on the Grundriss article in 1919/1920, Weber no longer adhered to the table of contents of “The Economics and the Societal Orders and Powers” to be found in 1914. According to this table of contents, the complete analysis was to culminate with the sociology of domination, with which he intended to make the transition from structure to process.11 This idea is now given up, the sociology of domination is now placed after the economic sociology, but before “Class and Status” and before the sociology of communities, religion, law and the (modern) state. As previously remarked: The revision of the sociology of religion, unlike the sociology of domination, was never carried out. Indeed, with the exception of the remark quoted above,

11 In this connection, cf. in particular MWG I/22–2, p. 114. This passage is especially important in clarifying the original objectives of the Grundriss article. Weber expressly emphasizes that what matters to him is “a general analysis, taking the particular only by way of examples”. He intended to discuss only the “general forms of structure of human communities”. And further: “The content-related directions of community action are only taken into consideration insofar as they generate forms of structure which are specific in nature and at the same time economically relevant. The limit thus defined is no doubt extremely fluid, but invariably means that only a few highly universal varieties of community are examined. In what follows, this is done first only with regard to general characteristics, where-as—as we shall see—it will only be possible to discuss their forms of development with some degree of precision at a later stage, in connection with the category of ‘domination’.”


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there is also no indication of how he had planned this revision. For the construction of the chapter on religion in the Grundriss article, the only evidence that has come down to us is the table of contents and the manuscripts from the time before the war; for the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, on the other hand, a later plan exists. Although the development of the two major projects was not simultaneous, their complementarity was conserved. The reason for this is not merely pragmatic, but also methodological. Max Weber’s conception of his Grundriss article was meant to achieve a “coherent sociological theory and exposition”, as he expressed it in a letter to his publisher Paul Siebeck in December 1913, while the essays in the sociology of religion, written in 1913, were meant as historical investigations. “Theoretical constructions with illustrative use of the empirical—historical investigation with use of theoretical concepts as the ideal borderline cases”, was the way that, as early as 1904, in the essay on objectivity, he had defined the relationship between the theoretical and historical perspective in economics.12 This definition is used again in the “Basic Sociological Terms” which serve to introduce the new Grundriss article and are applied in general to the relationship between sociology and historiography: Sociology, he says here, creates type-concepts and seeks for regularities governing events, while historiography, in contrast, aims at “causal analysis and the explanation of individual actions, patterns, personalities of cultural significance”.13 And for this purpose, one might add, a comprehensive sociological theory should be useful. Nevertheless, Weber does not seek primarily to determine the relationship of disciplines, but to clarify a scientific stance that employs both perspectives, an approach that he himself practised. The study on ascetic Protestantism of 1904/05 was already an example, as far as he was concerned, of a historical investigation, in particular a religious-historical investigation. The essays in the sociology of religion, written in 1913 and continued from 1915 onward, are the same. Yet the subtitle, essays in the sociology of religion, not on the history of religion, which later were even described as comparative essays in the sociology of religion, certainly seems to contradict this interpretation. Is sociology, to Weber, not primarily a generalizing social

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Weber, 1920, p. 205 (hereafter: WL). Weber, 1956, p. 9 (hereafter: WuG).

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science? There is no doubt that it is, just as to him economics represent a generalizing social science, both being cultural sciences.14 But as in economics, this is not denied by the distinction between the theoretical and historical perspective within a single discipline. “Not the ‘material ’ relationships of ‘things’, but the intellectual relationships of problems”, in Weber’s words, constitute the foundation of scientific works. On the basis of the “specific viewpoints, from which light may be shed on the meaning of given cultural elements”, the distinction between disciplines will be engendered.15 Thus the analysis of cultural reality is necessarily one-sided, and this one-sidedness is not only logical, but also pragmatically justified, because the “schooling of the eye to observe the operation of qualitatively similar categories of causes and the constant application of the same conceptual apparatus [provides] all the advantages of the division of labour”.16 But the disciplinary commitment to a specific viewpoint does not invalidate the logical distinction between the theoretical and historical approach. Indeed, for a long time Weber hesitated to characterize his approach as sociological, because he feared that he might be misunderstood as seeking to overcome the necessarily one-sided analysis of cultural reality from a special viewpoint by a general social science which would eliminate this distinction. This he considers impossible on logical grounds. For this reason he first expressly acknowledges the fruitfulness of a socio-economic analysis of cultural reality. For, to quote the essay on objectivity: “Liberated from the outdated belief that all cultural manifestations can be deduced as the product or function of ‘material’ interests, we on our part believe, on the contrary, that the analysis of social manifestations and cultural processes from the special viewpoint of their economic conditioning and consequential scope was a scientific principle of creative fruitfulness and, applied with care and an absence of dogmatism, will remain so for all the foreseeable future.”17 But parallel to this statement, he

14 In the essay on objectivity, it is stated: “If we decide to give the name of ‘cultural sciences’ to such disciplines as observe the processes of human life from the point of view of their cultural significance, then social science in our sense is included in this category.” Cf. Max Weber, WL, p. 165. In his lectures at the turn of the century, Weber was already terming economics a social science. 15 Ibid., p. 166. 16 Ibid., p. 170. 17 Ibid., p. 166. In this connection, it should not be forgotten that the purpose of Weber’s essay, in addition to the aims of the new Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft


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also wrote a study that was specifically based, not on the economic conditioning of religious manifestation, but on the religious conditioning of economic manifestations, examining phenomena which specifically do not fall within the compass of an economic viewpoint, even if, in the context of an economic approach, a distinction is made between economic, economically conditioned and economically relevant.18 For economically relevant phenomena are first and foremost non-economic in nature. And for this reason, Weber is primarily concerned in this study to employ a “conceptual-methodical apparatus” which departs from that of socio-economics, and to present a causal attribution which, in a complicated manner, links hopes of salvation and their religious significance with economic attitudes. Here he also intended to show how ideas can operate in history, specifically as factors of conditioning and not always as factors conditioned, as postulated, for example, by historical materialism “as the common denominator in a causal explanation of historical reality”.19 But even if we abstain from such a ‘Weltanschauung’ and content und Sozialpolitik, was to emphasize continuity with its predecessor, the Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik. The latter, however, had “treated the topics that it dealt with as socio-economic matters, right from the start.” Ibid., p. 161. 18 This Weber did, as is known, in his essay on objectivity, though here he was to extend the scope of the socio-economic approach beyond the bounds of the permissible. Cf. ibid., p. 162. It immediately becomes clear that this approach in particular is not sufficient to encompass the religious conditioning of such economic manifestations as the ‘spirit’ of modern capitalism, since for this purpose, to employ a subsequent formulation, seen from the economic viewpoint, the other side of the causal relationship is important. Also, in his distinction between the economic, the economically conditioned and the economically relevant, strictly interpreted, Weber does not speak at all of a socio-economic approach, and thus of the specific viewpoint of the analysis, but only of socio-economic problems. In my view, it is therefore erroneous, to define Weber’s approach in 1904 and thereafter as socio-economic. In reality, even the study on ascetic Protestantism definitely does not fit this designation. For “the processes of daily life, no less than the ‘historic’ events of high politics, collective and mass manifestations as much as the ‘unique’ acts of statesmen or individual literary and artistic achievements are simultaneously influenced by [material interests, W.S.],—‘economically conditioned’. On the other hand, the totality of all the manifestations and conditions of life of a given historical culture exert an influence on the form of material needs, the way in which they are satisfied, the formation of material interest groups and the type of their power resources and thence on the type of process of ‘economic development’—it becomes ‘economically relevant’.” WL, p. 163. It is also true that the distinction between the economic, the economically conditioned and the economically relevant can be transferred in an analogous way to all value spheres and life orders, and to all the regulations and powers of society. Thus cultural manifestations may be religious, religiously conditioned or religiously relevant. 19 Ibid., p. 166.

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ourselves instead with an “economic interpretation of history”20 we have still to take the non-economic factors of historical life into consideration. From an economic viewpoint, we are concerned with (rational) action under conditions of material scarcity in the battle with nature and with other people. True, from a religious viewpoint, this is also our concern (material and ideal interests), but not this alone. Here the focus is rather on the question of meaning, the question of one’s own destiny of salvation, and the scientific reply to this question requires an interpretation of history which is not only economic, but also ‘spiritual’.21 Sociology is therefore a discipline which, like economics, sheds light on social manifestations and cultural processes from specific, and thereby necessarily one-sided viewpoints, and develops a conceptual-methodical apparatus to this end. This is exactly what Weber does in his contribution to the Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie, later entitled Grundriß der Sozialökonomik, but already in his dispute with Rudolf Stammler, which is the basis of the latter work. The dominant viewpoint for sociology is the interaction of economic and non-economic factors in different value spheres and life orders: the economy and economic powers in their relation to the other societal orders and powers are at issue, and these relations are to be examined from a theoretical and a historical point of view. This leads me on to my second step. I have given it the heading: “Comparison and Developmental history”. How does this heading fit into our deliberations so far? 2. Comparison and developmental history First of all, there can be no doubt that the primary purpose of Weber’s revised Grundriss article of 1919/1920 is to establish sociological concepts and to determine regularities, ‘laws’ of social life. This is not the case in the studies on the economic ethics of world religions, where sociological concepts and regularities are applied. This pronouncement is in no way invalidated by the fact that both the major projects are based to a considerable extent on the same

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Ibid., p. 167. Cf. in this connection WL, pp. 166f. It was not by chance that Weber, in a letter to Rickert, described his procedure in the Protestantism study as a ‘kind of spiritual construction of modern economics’. 21


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material. Indeed, Weber expressly states that sociology draws “its material, as paradigms, very largely, though by no means exclusively, from the realities of action which are also relevant from historical viewpoints.” It constructs its concepts and seeks rules “above all also from the point of view of whether it can thus be of service to the historical causal attribution of manifestations of cultural significance.” And he goes on: “As in every generalizing science, the peculiarity of its abstractions dictates that its concepts with respect to the concrete reality of historical fact must be relatively empty of content. What it has to offer in exchange is the enhanced precision of concepts.”22 In this sense, the three pure types of legitimate domination taken from the revised Grundriss article with respect to the concrete reality of historical rulership are concepts relatively empty of content, while the description of the structure and culture of Chinese patrimonial bureaucracy in the study on Confucianism (and Taoism) is relatively full of content by comparison. In the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie too, we certainly find passages which serve concept formation rather than their application; the “Preliminary Remarks” (“Vorbemerkung”), the “Introduction” (“Einleitung”) or the “Intermediate Reflection” (“Zwischenbetrachtung”) come to mind, as these passages all adhere closely to the Grundriss article; in fact they are extracts from “Religious Communities”.23 They introduce and then lead on to the “causal analysis and explanation of individual actions, patterns and personalities of cultural significance”.24 This is finally also made clear in the “Preliminary Remarks”, written in 1919/1920, to the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Here it is stated that the collection is intended to help to “identify the specific character of occidental rationalism, and within it, of modern occidental rationalism, and to explain its origin”.25 Weber requires of himself then, from the point of view of method, a historical investigation in logical terms, undertaken from a sociological viewpoint. The study on ascetic Protestantism had already been just such a historical investigation. And the study on ancient Judaism is another one. 22

Max Weber, WuG, pp. 9f. The “Introduction” und “Intermediate Reflection”, in particular, are pre-formulated in the “Religious Communities” section of the Grundriss article of 1913. See Schluchter, 1988, II, p. 576. 24 WuG, p. 9. 25 RS I, p. 12. 23

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It is certainly not possible to interpret Weber’s switch from the theoretical to the historical viewpoint as a lapse into narration in historiography. The Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie are also attempts at a comparative sociology of religions, because they not only have a problem of identification to solve (recognition of the specific character of the manifestation), but are also conducted from a sociological viewpoint. Specifically, the concern here is with both sides of the causal relationship, as already set out in the Grundriss article of 1913: the class conditioning of religion on one hand, the religious conditioning of economic attitudes on the other. These two sides of the causal relationship must be comparatively delineated, but made plain from a historical viewpoint (individualizing, not generalizing concept formation!). To this extent too, the Grundriss article and the essays in the sociology of religion are complementary. The first work pursues these two relationships from a theoretical viewpoint, through generalizing concept formation, the second from a historical one, through individualizing concept formation. And the fact that both sides of the causal relationship are now pursued in the “Economic Ethics of World Religions” distinguishes them from the study on ascetic Protestantism, but does not alter their historical caliber. For Weber expressly states that in the study on ascetic Protestantism he only dealt with one side of the causal relationship, the “conditioning of the emergence of an ‘economic ethic’: the ‘ethos’; of an economy by the specific content of the religious creed”. In the studies on the economic ethics of world religions, however, he deals with both sides of the causal relationship, that is to say that he includes also the other side that had been voluntarily left in parentheses in the study on Protestantism. As he formulates it with all the clarity that could be desired: “The later (with respect to the study on Protestantism, W.S.) essays on the ‘Economic Ethics of World Religions’ attempt, in an overall view of the relationships of the most important cultural religions to the economy and to social class, to investigate both sides of the causal relationship in whatever depth may be necessary to find points of comparison with the occidental development still to be analysed.”26 Thus Weber certainly did not understate the difference between the studies on ascetic Protestantism—the 1904/05 study was sup-

26

Ibid., p. 12.


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plemented in 1920 and now enriched with the almost entirely new essay on the Protestant sects—and the studies on the economic ethics of world religions. This can also be detected with very little difficulty from the “Table of Contents”, authorized by himself, of the first volume of the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. According to this, the “Preliminary Remarks” written in 1919/1920 applies to all the essays, i.e. including the revised version of the “Protestant Ethic” and the essay on the “Protestant Sects”; the “Introduction” and “Intermediate Reflection”, on the other hand, apply only to the “Economic Ethics of World Religions”, notwithstanding the fact that all previously published texts were revised. Indeed, the conceptual apparatus that had been developed since 1904/1905 is used throughout; in the essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”— spirit now without quotation marks—, this is especially true of the insertions, which, as elsewhere, are the primary constituent of the revision. (See Appendix C).27 The primary function of comparisons is to identify peculiarities, not to explain them.28 Furthermore, they serve to construct sociological concepts. As the construction of concepts is not central to the essays on the economic ethics of world religions, the principal use of comparisons here is to determine the specific characteristics of occidental cultural manifestations. As the above quotation shows, Weber wishes to pursue Asiatic cultural manifestations only insofar as it is necessary “to find points of comparison with the occidental development still to be analysed.” We could rephrase this: In this way, the difference characteristic of occidental development compared with Asian developments will be identified. Once this has been done, it will be known what “crucial turning points” await clarification. With respect to religious history, it is not only the turning point related to ascetic Protestantism. More relevant are the turning points that arose before and after. The subsequent phenomenon that Weber wanted to examine was the Counter-Reformation. For the preceding turning points, Weber gives the decisive indication in the revised

27

This applies especially to the concepts of asceticism and mysticism. This formulation needs some qualification, however, in that comparisons naturally also play a role in causal attribution, as any experiment with a control group will show. Even thought experiments obey the same logic. And it is not by chance that John Stuart Mill recommended the method of differences to the ‘moral sciences’. Nevertheless, comparison and causal attribution are two different things. 28

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edition of the study on ascetic Protestantism: “That great process in religious history of the disenchantment of the world, which started with the prophets of ancient Judea, and, in combination with Greek scientific thought, rejected all magical means of seeking salvation as superstition and sin, reached its conclusion here (in ascetic Protestantism, W.S.).”29 In 1904/05, in the first version of the study on Protestantism, Weber had not yet spoken of a great process of disenchantment of the world in religious history,30 nor of the significance of the “Hellenic intellectual culture”, the Pauline mission, Roman law, “the Roman church resting on the Roman concept of office” or the “medieval order of estates” for the emergence of modern rationalism.31 All this he includes now in the occidental development still to be analysed. Of course, one can only comprehend the perhaps decisive turning point that caused differences by going back to the “creation of the Old Testament”. Part of this creation, however, is ancient Jewish prophecy, especially prior to the Exile.32 The differences linked to these cultural manifestations point in one and the same direction: a “religious ethic of innerworldly conduct which is highly rational, that is to say free from magic and all forms of irrational striving for salvation”.33 Seen from the point of view of religious history, this is a development which deviates from those prevailing in Asia. This becomes clear to Weber in his “extremely superficial

29

Ibid., pp. 94f. Even in the first version of the study on Protestantism, however, Weber draws already attention to the affinity between Palestinian Jewry and English Puritanism, also known with some justification as “English Hebraism”, for the latter shows a tendency “to treat the pronouncements of the Bible ‘like paragraphs of a book of law’” (ibid., p. 179), and therefore to disseminate the spirit of “formal legality”, of “self-righteous, sober legality”. Yet this spirit cannot be traced back precisely to the “time of writing of the Old Testament scriptures”, but to Jewry, “as it gradually evolved under the influence of many centuries of formalistic-legal and Talmudic education” (ibid., p. 181). Among the canonical scriptures, he mentioned in this connection only the book of Job, and in the Apocrypha, the book of Ecclesiasticus, thought to date from the beginning of the second century BC. This last, however, is linked to German Pietism, not to English Puritanism (cf. ibid., pp. 179f.). There is as yet no mention, though, of the creation of the Old Testament, the role of the Levites and the Prophets, or even of voluntary ghetto existence, the pariah-people condition. These links are not established until the second version of the essay. 31 E.g. the enumeration in RS III, p. 7. 32 Cf. in this connection RS III, pp. 6f. 33 Ibid., p. 6. 30


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tour of the world of Asiatic culture”.34 For Asiatic developments are not favourable to the shaping of a religious ethic of rational innerworldly conduct. Weber formulates his position on this question in the summary of his studies on Confucianism and Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism as follows: Wherever a higher stratum of intellectual strives to fathom the ‘meaning’ of the world and its own life by reflection, and—after the failure of this strictly rationalist endeavour—to comprehend this through experience and then raise this experience indirectly by rationalistic means into its consciousness, the way will somehow lead into the silent hidden realm of Indian indefinable mysticism. And where, on the other hand, a higher stratum of intellectual, rejecting these attempts to flee the world, instead consciously and deliberately finds the highest possible goal of inner fulfilment in the grace and dignity of a beautiful gesture, it will somehow arrive at the Confucian ideal of nobility. But a significant part of all Asiatic intellectual culture is composed of a mingling and interweaving of these two constituents. The concept of merely acting in accordance with the ‘challenge of the day’ to achieve that relationship with the real world which is at the heart of the whole specifically occidental sense of ‘personality’, remains as remote from it as the purely impersonal rationalism of the West, which seeks to master the world through practical means by discovering its own impersonal system of laws.35

The occidental development so far analysed and to be further analysed by Weber therefore requires a developmental-historical viewpoint of broad scope. Development means to him neither undirected change nor progress. When Friedrich H. Tenbruck, who otherwise distinguishes pertinently between religious-historical disenchantment and modernization embracing secularization, opines that Weber has thus switched his allegiance to the camp of the classical evolutionists, the misunderstanding could not be more profound.36 Weber espouses no theory of inclusive steps, such as that presented in Hegel’s evolutionary model.37 Neither does he simply follow Darwin’s theory of evolution, although in terms of logic, he comes close to it. His concept of development is conditionally teleological in form, requiring constructs of

34

E.g. RS II, p. 363. (MWG I/20, p. 526). RS II, p. 377 (MWG I/20, pp. 542f.). 36 Tenbruck, (1975), pp. 703ff. 37 Cf. for further details the preface to the paperback edition of my book Schluchter, 1998, pp. 25ff. 35

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value-related ideal types. These are heuristic means for causal attribution. At issue is always a particular developmental history whose reconstruction requires three steps: identification (What is the defining characteristic of a cultural manifestation?), causal attribution (How did this manifestation arise?) and prioritization (What weight can be attributed to one causal factor in relation to other causal factors?).38 The first question can only be answered by means of comparisons, the second and third only by counterfactual arguments using the categories of objective possibility and adequate causation, as Weber develops them with reference to von Kries and Radbruch.39 Here he rightly stresses that the problem of prioritization in historical processes—the key to judging between adequate causes—can mostly not be settled, or in any case only with difficulty. When all this is borne in mind, it becomes easy to understand why he included the following remark into his plan for the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie in 1919: “The issue everywhere is how to handle the question of what is the foundation of the economic and social defining characteristic of the Occident, how it arose and, in particular, how it stands in relation to the development of the religious ethic.”40 Thus in his historical investigations, Weber describes the religious developmental history of cultures without becoming entangled in the coils of classical evolutionism. His studies on the logic and methodology of the social sciences as cultural sciences aim to separate two pairs of questions: the question of the relevance of a phenomenon from that of its validity, and the question of development from that of progress. For both these distinctions, it was Heinrich Rickert who had laid the logical groundwork. A prerequisite for the first separation is to be able to distinguish between theoretical value relatedness and practical evaluation; the second demands the capacity to

38 The proposition that a consequence can have more than one cause is a commonplace that should not be ascribed to Max Weber. Some Weber interpreters see this ‘realization’ as his greatest achievement. If this were so, it would hardly be worth giving him any attention today. He did indeed have most sophisticated concepts of causality and attribution. To understand this, one need only read his remarks on “objective possibility and adequate causation in the consideration of historical causality”, in which, admittedly, he did not achieve absolute clarity. See also WL, pp. 266–290. 39 In this connection see WL, pp. 271–277. 40 News bulletin, 11.


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distinguish a conditional-teleological construction from a mere sequence of changes on the one hand and from progress on the other. From the point of religious history, there are thus, as Weber sees it, a number of culture-bound developmental histories, each having its own origin, from which, with the passage of time, lines branch out, but also intersect and under certain circumstances even merge: the Confucian-Taoist, the Hindu-Buddhist and the “Israelite-JewishChristian religious development”, of which the Islamic religious development is a later descendant.41 Weber deals with these religious developmental histories asymmetrically. As the quotation cited above makes clear, he is interested in Asia only insofar as it provides points of comparison for the occidental religious development which is to be further analysed. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are indeed used throughout in the Grundriss article (together with Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism) to serve the comparative viewpoint, based on differences; in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, in contrast, they appear primarily in a developmental sequence. Compared with Asia, their internal differences fade into the background, however: the image of the divine that emphasizes the personal, supernatural creator God, not the eternal uncreated order; salvation that must be won through conduct willed by God, not through gnosis; the path to salvation that leads through actionism and asceticism, not contemplation and mysticism; the salvation-oriented organization that favours the formation of communities, not the individual master-disciple relationship. By these differences—and they are not the only ones—the characteristics of Near-Eastern-Occidental development are defined with respect to Asiatic developments. Their expression, however, was also partly caused by those crucial turning points, that Weber cited at the beginning of his study on ancient Jewry. They determined the general direction of Israelite-Jewish-Christian religious development, which he summerized in the notion of disenchantment.

41

Cf. RS III, p. 2 Fn. and p. 7.

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3. The Old Testament as a “crucial turning point” in the total cultural history of the Near-East and the West Among these “crucial turning points” or “switch yards”, Weber accords outstanding significance to the ‘creations’ of the Old Testament, the Bible of the Jews. This was, so to speak, the moment of the fundamental decision that later divided European and North American cultural developments from the rest, that of Islam included. These ‘creations’ are discussed in detail in the study on ancient Judaism. In this respect, they take on a key role for the portrayal of the special development of the Near-East and the Occident. In the study on ascetic Protestantism, Weber had come to comprehend the provisional end point of this great religious process of the disenchantment of the world. With the study on ancient Judaism, he now traces it back to its point of origin. In this study too, Max Weber combines comparison and developmental history. He starts with an unusual comparison. He takes as an ideal type the Indian caste system, the ritual segregation of groups and their interconnection through division of labour—intermarriage and commensality no, commerce yes—and compares it with the position of Jewry, which he terms “a pariah people in a casteless environment ”.42 At the same time, he emphasizes the differences that subsist with respect to the lowest Indian caste, the Pariahs. The emphasis is on self-isolation, the “voluntary ghetto existence” of the Jews compared to the imposed ghetto existence of the Indian Pariah caste. The promises of salvation also differ: while the Indian must perform the duties of his caste, with the prospect of individual promotion within the caste order in a future life, which in fact stabilizes the caste-system, the Jewish people is promised a God-given political and social revolution, which will one day elevate it to the rank of master race. But above all, Weber sees ritual exclusion as no more than the external manifestation of an inner morality whose commands make the highest demands upon the believer. It is a religious ethic of rational innerworldly conduct which, as he says, “to a large extent still underlies the European and Middle-Eastern religious ethic of today”.43

42 43

RS III, p. 5. Ibid., p. 6.


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Weber takes his unconventional comparison between Indian religion and Judaism even further: thus he contrasts the Brahmins with the Levites, who represent disparate professional groups versed in ritual and the law. But he also contrasts Yahweh with Brahman (and the Tao), the thought of a personal, transcendent creator God with that of an uncreated, immanent and eternal order, which leads to different conceptions of transcendence. But the hypothesis of voluntary ghetto existence and the resulting status of a pariah people is the primary aim of this comparison. I shall return to this hypothesis in the last part of my exposition. Before we come to that, it is more important to note that after his comparative introductory section, Weber changes over to developmental history. He is concerned with the religious ‘creations’, which in the end are decreed by that religious ethic of rational innerworldly conduct: the oldest collection, the Book of the Covenant, and the Decalogue, which can today be dated to about 1000 to 800 BC; the Law of Deuteronomy, which presents a programme of reform for the period during and after the Exile, which probably originated about 550 to 500, and the most recent collection, the sacred law and priests’ codex, which are dated to about 500 to 400 BC. But what fascinated Weber above all was the prophetic books, especially Isaiah (including Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah), Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Amos44—and not forgetting the book of Job. But in the prophetic books, he saw the foundations of a sublimation based on an ethic of conviction, of the material put together in the collections, which leads to an ethic of law only.45

44 This arrangement in the canon does not correspond to the supposed historical sequence. After this comes first Amos (c. 780 to 750), then Isaiah (c. 740 to 700), then Jeremiah (c. 625 to 595), last Ezekiel (c. 600 to 570), who is already a prophet of the period of Exile. Deutero-Isaiah, the second Isaiah (Isa. 40–55), was already seen as a book in its own right and, as a later interpolation in the Book of Isaiah, dates its origin to the end of the period of Exile. Weber broadly adheres to these crude datings. Nevertheless, he does speak of the “pre-Exile prophets from Amos to Jeremiah and Ezekiel”. Ibid., p. 281. 45 The Torah numbered 613 rules, 248 commands and 365 prohibitions. To Weber’s mind, this normative material forms the foundation of the prophecy. In his view, these rules from the “pre-Exile teaching of the Torah”, the “Levite Torah”, constitute the content of the Jewish ethic (ibid., pp. 250f.), though this did not deviate strikingly from the religious ethics of other peoples. Only with the prophecy did it become stamped with its specific characteristics: “the central religious conviction that lies behind it.” Ibid., p. 333.

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Weber is imprecise in his dating, and of course dependent on the state of debate of his time. In his analysis, he only follows a very crude chronology (before, during, and after the Exile). Neither is the study strictly chronological, but is constructed in accordance with the important analytical viewpoints: it deals first with the socio-economic and socio-political situations in Syria and Palestine and their representation in law, especially the covenant with Yahweh and the constitution of the confederacy, its transformation into a monarchy, the north-south schism ( Judea and Israel) and the exile in Persia (Babylon) and Egypt respectively. There follows a description of the conception of God and of worship, and of the bearers of a theologization of the law: the Levites. Next comes the presentation of the pre-exile prophetic message as part of a prophecy of doom, which favours an ethic of conviction, based on the canonized ‘laws’ systematized by the Levites. (At this point, Weber applies his general pronouncement about the relationship between priests, prophets and the laity from the chapter on religious communities in the Grundriss article to a historical case, continuing with the distinction between magic and a religious ethic, divine coercion and worship). Finally, the prophetic message of the Exile (and post-Exile) period is presented as prophecy of hope, especially the prophetic theodicy of suffering (Isa. 40–55) with eschatological features,46 formulated in Deutero-Isaiah, and the gradual transformation of the political community into a confessional one. The hypothesis: prophecy dies away step by step in the course of this process. At the same time, Weber deals with important ‘external’ factors of tension too: little Israel is constantly under threat from the surrounding great powers; the hilly, fertile north provides living conditions different from the desert south; the settled farmers co-exist with difficulty with the pastoral nomads; the city, with its urbanbased patrician class stands in opposition to the country side. Weber depicts the Jewish people as culturally elevated and autonomous, but marked by the experience of collective menace: the experience of the irrationality of the world, which he is known to have considered the driving force behind all religion, takes the shape here primarily 46 Deutero-Isaiah is the first prophetic book to work out a theodicy, linked here to an eschatology. What is expressed here for the community is expressed in the Book of Job for the individual. Apocalyptic elements are also to be found in the book of Isaiah.


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of the experience of political deprivation (exile, subjection, inner enslavement, the downfall of the northern kingdom, repeated exile). The creations of the Old Testament arose not least as a reaction to all this. They provide motivation for actively grappling with a situation threatening not only to the community but also the individual. But why were they able to become a “crucial turning point”, a “switch yard” of Middle-Eastern and Western development? Because they supported religious rationalization. Weber indeed determines the degree of rationalization that a religion has reached by reference to two yardsticks: in first place he takes the “extent to which it has rid itself of magic”, and in the second place the “the extent of the systematic unity into which it has brought the relationship of God and the world and thence its own ethical stance towards the world.”47 When these two yardsticks are applied to Israelite-Jewish religious development, it is immediately plain that religious rationalization has progressed a long way in relative terms. The Levites in particular rationalized their worship in contrast to the esoteric Egyptian cult of the dead and the orgiastic cults of Baal in the north, thereby desacralizing the clan (yardstick 1); the prophetic message, however, sublimated Levite teaching of positive rituals and ethical commands into an ethical attitude, emphasizing the central significance of the ethical relationship of the people as a whole and of each individual to the world (yardstick 2). Weber summarizes his view as follows: Moses was indeed the originator of an important religio-ethical development. But only Levite rationalism in combination with the prophetic message was successful in stabilizing Israelite-Jewish religiousness “against any subversion from outside”;48 only this combination gave it the capacity to survive even in the face of the most unfavourable external circumstances. Certainly, this alone would not have been enough; self-ghettoization, a ritual and also real separation from the social environment, had to be added to it, especially as the fall of the second Temple brought with it the definitive destruction of the political confederacy.

47 48

RS I, p. 512 (MWG I/19, p. 450). RS III, p. 280.

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4. The (mis-)construction of a Jewish pariah people’s situation from the Persian-Babylonian exile stage up to the fall of the second Temple This leads back to the hypothesis that Weber had derived from the India-Palastine comparison: can it be said that the assertion of voluntary ghetto existence, of a special position due to ritual separation, of the status of a pariah people in a casteless environment, is really true of ancient Jewry? There can be no question here of bringing counter-evidence to bear. This has been done frequently in the secondary literature;49 I am not historically competent for the task. What I find much more interesting is to look behind Weber’s construction. What was his motivation for it? The most striking feature is that Weber depicts the process during and after the Persian-Babylonian exile, from a cultural viewpoint, as a constant narrowing of spiritual horizons: the ritual rules move into the foreground relative to the legal and ethical commands, the prophetic message is transformed from a prophecy of doom to a prophecy of hope, and in the end is completely stifled by a theocracy laying hands on everything around it. Thus the cultural narrowing goes hand in hand with an institutional fossilization. Movements in favour of renewal within Jewry are opposed, some stifled, some pushed to the periphery, like the Essenes, for example (Weber could of course have known nothing of Qumran.)50 Jewry formed itself into an association that was internally homogenous, but externally insular. Max Weber—like every reader of the New Testament—knew that even if we consider only the descriptions of the religious conflicts to be found in the history of the apostles, written about 90 AD, we find a strange contrast with this construction of inward and outward fossilization. The Jesus movement is after all first and foremost an internal Jewish movement for renewal, and as it becomes increasingly independent, the inner Jewish conflicts persist, and even gain in strength. Sadducees and Pharisees dispute the role of the Resurrection and the Spirit; the strict Jewry of Jerusalem fights against

49

Examples of this can be found in Schluchter, 1981. There is much argument as to whether the Qumran community (sect) and the Essenes were one and the same. This question I leave open. Whatever the truth of the matter, the texts from Qumran reveal a Jewish apocalyptic movement which displays great similarities with certain currents in early Christianity. 50


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the lax Jewry of the Diaspora; Jewish and Gentile Christians argue about the role of circumcision, and even of the Jewish ritual prescriptions in general. One gains the impression of a conflict-laden religious pluralism within Jewry and on its periphery, not to mention the conflicts with Greek and Roman tradition in which both Jews and Christians are becoming entangled.51 Weber himself speaks of a “profusion of cults, schools, sects and orders of every kind” characterizing not only Asia, but also the ancient Occident, a religious pluralism restrained only by ‘reasons of state’, where it did finally meet an inflexible limit.52 In the fragment on the Pharisees, Weber again underlines this religious diversity.53 None of this tallies with the picture of cultural and social rigidity. What led Weber, so knowledgeable about Antiquity, to this perception?54 We might first answer: this perception arises as a back-projection of mediaeval conditions on to antiquity (the ghetto), and a postReformation concept (confessional community) is inappropriately applied. Yet in my view, this too is only half the truth. There is a more profound reason for the (mis-)construction. Weber paints a background against which the Pauline mission stands out in a clear light. He sees this as an act of liberation of world-historical significance. It was this above all that preserved the creations of the Old Testament for early Christianity as it freed itself from the imposition of Jewish modes of thought. For, as Weber puts it: “Among the most important spiritual achievements of the Pauline mission was that it kept this holy book of the Jews alive to become a holy book of the Christian religion; at the same time, it eliminated all those ethical features taught in it, which specifically anchored the Jews ritually in their characteristic state of a pariah people, as no longer obligatory, having been annulled by the Christian saviour.”55 Without this

51 Belief in the Resurrection and in an eschatological renewal of the world, which dominated early Christianity and the apocalyptic tendencies in Jewry, were foreign to Greek thought. Concerning the dispute that arose from this during Paul’s stay in Athens, Acts 17, 16. 52 RS II, p. 364 (MWG I/20, p. 527). 53 On this subject, see the essays in Schluchter, 1985. 54 Of course, this picture is not complete invention. Because of its laws, which were “diverse from all people” and bound up with its separation, anti-Judaism was already existent in antiquity, going hand in hand with acts of violence against the scattered Jewish communities. An example of this can be seen in Esther 3–15. 55 RS III, p. 6f. But it should not be forgotten that the opposition between universalism and particularism was among the fundamental tensions present in

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construction of the status of a pariah people, the act of liberation would not be quite so spectacular. It is a fact that Weber sees a turning point for further development in the disagreement between Peter and Paul, to whom the company of the apostles had entrusted responsibility for the mission to the Jews and the Gentiles respectively. For as represented by Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians, dated c. 54 AD, not only he but also Peter ate at the same table with Gentiles, thought the latter denies this to the Jews, which Paul sharply admonishes (Gal. 2, 11–21). In the challenge that was bound up with this, of breaking through ritual barriers, Weber saw an urge towards universalization, which he calls the hour of conception of occidental citizenship. For “without this emancipation from the ritual, compartmentalized separation of the Jews, founded on the prescriptions of the Torah . . . the Christian community would have remained, just like the Essenes and the Therapeuts, for example, merely a small sect within the Jewish pariah people.”56 It is clear enough that Weber is adhering to a dramatic conception that brings the world-historical role of Paul to the fore. But it can also be seen that between ancient Jewish prophecy and ascetic Protestantism there are developmental links which, in the right circumstances, can lead to fundamental changes of direction. The development process does indeed take a long time, but is not inevitable. Again and again, it is necessary to invent, and from time to time to re-invent. I close with a quotation that I find particularly impressive: hardly ever, says Weber, have totally new religious concepts arisen in the centres of any of the rational cultures. Not in Babylon, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Paris, London, Cologne, Hamburg or Vienna, but in the Jerusalem of the pre-Exile period, in the Galilee of the late Jewish period, in the late

post-exile Jewry, and that there were definite tendencies, not least under Hellenistic influence, towards a world-religious understanding of Jewry, including proselytism. Weber was fully aware of this, but considered—probably with justice—that the opposing trend was the stronger. The peak period for the world-religious orientation seems to have been during the second century BC, at the time of the re-establishment of the temple cult in Jerusalem by Judas Maccabaeus and the regaining of political freedom, though the latter only lasted a short time and was not liberating either. ( Jerusalem was to fall under Roman rule in 69 BC). It was a period in which a vigorous Diaspora Jewry also developed. 56 Ibid.


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Roman province of Africa, in Assisi, in Wittenberg, Zurich, Geneva and in the outer zones of the Dutch-North German and English cultures, such as Friesland and New England, have new rational prophetic or reformatory entities first been conceived. The reason is everywhere one and the same: new conceptions of a religious nature can only arise where man has not forgotten how to face up to event in the world with his own questions. And it is precisely the man who lives far away from the great cultural centres who has occasion to do so, when their influence begins to affect him in his central interests and to become a threat.57

This can also be formulated in the abstract: economics and sociology are only able to develop into social sciences as cultural sciences when they are rooted in a theory of human action which does not assimilate human creativity to mere utility.

57

Ibid., p. 220.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CIVILIZATION OF MODERNITY: 1203 AND 2003 Edward A. Tiryakian The new dynamics of civilization transformed group conflicts into potential class and ideological conflicts, cult conflicts into struggles between the orthodox and the heterodox. Conflicts between tribes and societies became missionary crusades. S.N. Eisenstadt (2003a: 40)

Preface Shmuel Eisenstadt is undoubtedly one of the great navigators of modern social science, one who has taken some clues from an earlier explorer of modernity, Max Weber, and gone on various expeditions charting the ocean of modernity and its civilizations. He has steered safely past the Scylla of marxism and the Charybdis of functionalism to map out the course of the civilization of modernity, and has recently presented us with various results of his epic saga (Eisenstadt 2003). If we consider that out of his nearly 700 publications in 7 decades, several hundred are comparative and historical, with the problematic of modernization and modernity, including their “disruptive and dark side”, as core concerns, and if we consider that he has circumnavigated the worlds of “axial age and non-axial age” civilizations (1986c), from Israel (1992b), to India (2003a), to Japan (1996b), to the Americas (2001b), and many others along the way, well, then, in one sense, what we are left to offer him is “commentary”, rather than new continents and seas that he hasn’t mapped.1 My “commentary” for this occasion springs from Eisenstadt’s essay on the “Origins of the West” (2003a: 578–611). We need not spend 1 Willfried Spohn offers an important commentary in making the case that Eisenstadt’s treatment of comparative civilizational analysis “represents one of the most forceful heterodox conceptualizations in contemporary macro-sociological theory,” (Spohn 2001: 499).

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time on explicating it. Suffice to point that it is a pregnant “revisit” of that perennial challenge for comparative-historical sociology, Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis concerning the development in the West of the civilization of modernity. I will draw attention as a reference point to Eisenstadt’s observation: Thus, Weber’s insights about the crucial role of monasteries and heterododoxies . . . in the playing out of the different basic themes and tensions and in the trans-formative problematic of Western Christian civilization, were in principle indeed correct (2003a: 590).

The medieval background to the Reformation was indeed noted by Weber, but was not a primary focus of his account of modernity. It was still, one might say, a period, a late period at best, of the “enchantment of the world”,2 and the modern world was not really entered until the 16th Century awakening of Luther who opened up the gate of the Reformation and the new consciousness of the world with the transformation of the Calvinist sects. My “commentary” is a reconsideration of part of the religious and cultural setting of the “medieval” period.3 I hasten to make a disclaimer that I have only a very amateur knowledge of the 13th Century and of its major historical sources and it is a period I have not previously written about. But since in an earlier occasion honoring Shmuel Eisenstadt I ventured some new thoughts on centers of modernity (Tiryakian 1985), this is an opportune time to do so again by taking a somewhat off-beat comparative historical ingress to the civilization of modernity. And if we take the effort to look at this very distant setting eight centuries or so removed from us, we may find some unexpected materials that relate to critical themes in Eisenstadt’s comparative studies, the themes of creative tensions of “heterodox” orientations, “multiple modernities”, and “Jacobin tendencies” of modernity.

2 Weber and Marx may be said to share the same view on the medieval period through the prism of Enlightenment historiography, as exemplified by Voltaire (in his influential The Age of Louis XIV). A contrasting view is that of Saint-Simon who took the medieval period as a prototype of an “organic” period of Western civilization, marked by the meshing of structural conditions and dominant ideology. 3 The date “1203” does not have any particular significance. I use it as a marker for the setting of the civilization of modernity in the European South, shortly before the terrible wave of religio-political repression marked by the onset of the “crusade” in 1209.

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The 13th Century is, I propose, a very relevant setting to gain a perspective on the central theme of this conference, the theme of “Pluralism versus Homogeneity”, for that tension was a defining point in Western Civilization at that time. But if the main part of my “commentary” is to bring this out, I will also use the outcome of the setting not only to raise the question of why did the nascent civilization of modernity have a breakdown—a question which is related Weber’s problematic regarding non-Western civilizations, especially the “high ones” comparable to the West—but also to raise the deeply disturbing question of whether another civilizational breakdown is on the verge as a post 9/11 consequence in the country which perhaps has taken the civilization of modernity to its furthest extent. I. Does the 13th Century have any import for a critical understanding of modernity, especially where we are concerned in our day with global aspects of modernity in the frame of homogeneity versus pluralism?4 Although it has had considerably less attention by non-medievalist scholars than later ones (and consequently closer to our times), it has been keenly viewed in the 20th Century through different prisms. It may be well to consider several of these before bringing out our own evaluation of its bearing on the theme of our book. One pairing of perspectives is what I would term a “maximalist” and a “minimalist” 20th Century perspective on the 13th Century. By “maximalist” I simply mean an author giving maximal gaze on the totality and importance of that period; “minimalist” here means that in its treatment the period is of minimal importance for our contemporary situation. The former is shown by an unabashed, unmitigated admirer of the 13th Century, James Walsh, in a work that had had multiple editions on the eve of World War I (1912). As the suggestive title proposes (The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries), the century saw the beginnings of modern democracy, the establishment of great universities and centers of higher education, which provided not only the necessary theological and philosophical knowledge for the ranks 4 That dichotomy, homogeneity vs. pluralism, derived from the globalization literature, is reminiscent of the pattern variables that informed modernization analysis a generation or two ago.

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of the clergy but also, in the figure of Roger Bacon, the early promotion of experimental study and empirical knowledge based on observation. Walsh went on to show the creativity of the century in literature and the arts (Dante and Cimabue as innovators) in law and jurisprudence, in innovative social services (the establishment of hospitals), in the advancement of women (Walsh 1912: 331), and not least in the beginnings of modern commerce (the Hanseatic League, for instance), linking countries in trade as an alternative to endemic warfare.5 Briefly, this historical perspective is a portrayal of an early and unsurpassed high point of a Euro-Christian civilization, one that provided a model of an integrated civilization of modernity not only for traditional Catholicism but also for some sociological figures like Saint-Simon’s “organic period” of social organization and Sorokin’s concept of “idealistic” integration is the cyclical aspect of Western civilization. What I term the “minimalist” view on the 13th Century is provided in one of the least remembered writings of sociologist George Homans. Unlike his later attempts at theory construction, ultimately privileging psychological reductionism of social phenomena into their “elementary forms” of operant conditioning, his first major work is grounded in archival research on village society in 13th Century England (Homans 1960). Homans sought to reconstruct from records a whole social order, a sort of the social organization of everyday social life; and it is apparent from his discussion that he was motivated to carry out this research much the same way that anthropologists (at least at the time of publication) sought to in a monograph the depiction of the total social order of a society. Homans’s English Villagers is synchronic, not diachronic, and the historical setting is in the deep recess of the background. The cultural, religious dimension of village life gets some attention as part of an orderly social system, but not in terms of any significant basis of orthodoxy/ heterodoxy.6 What is noted by (young) Homans that makes the 13th Century an ingress worth noting is that it is with that century that

5

“Hansa did more than almost any other institution in northern Europe to establish the reign of Law,” (Walsh: 424). 6 Quite different, as will be noted in the next section, is the depiction of French 14th Century village life by Annales historian Le Roy Ladurie, drawn from the context of heterodox and orthodox confrontations.


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“it is the earliest century from which enough records of the right sort survive to tell us in some detail about the life of English countrymen . . . [and] the one in which the social and economic order of the Middle Ages was the most prosperous and least challenged,” (1960: 4). If there is an almost halcyonic depiction of the period by Homans, quite a different frame is presented in the study of heterodox movement drawn by Cohn in his classic study of eschatology and revolutionary chiliasm (1961). The materials he adduces of radical beliefs underlying popular movements of insurrection, such as the Radical Franciscans, the Flagellant Brethren, and especially the antinomian Brethren of the Free Spirit (1961: 189) challenged medieval hierarchy and on other occasions vented religious fury on the Jewish community. The violent current of fundamentalism spawned in the Thirteenth Century is followed by Cohn into later centuries, into the Reformation with an extensive discussion of the Anabaptists and the “prophet-king” Thomas Müntzer. From the point of view of the traditional orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism, Luther was of course a dangerous schismatic with a salvific doctrine of grace that displaced the authority of the clergy and above all that of the papacy. However, the Anabaptist challenge to Lutheranism was from the heterodoxic emphasis of the primitive Church taken as a community of equals sharing all things in common, and therefore being a radical challenge to the feudal order resting on status and privileges of wealth.7 Cohn does not view the medieval period (which in his study is not limited to the 13th Century but also takes in the 14th) as an integrated sociocultural order much less as a civilization having a bearing on modernity, except in the negative sense of letting loose violent social movements of protest, particularly coming from the poor and dispossessed. Thus Cohn notes in the concluding notes of the chapter on Müntzer that Marxists have claimed him (perhaps erroneously, he suggests) as a prototypical hero of class warfare (1961: 171). He concludes his study observing that the millennial beliefs

7 Although beyond the scope of Cohn’s discussion, it may be said that the Reformation is a period of clashing interpretations of Christian fundamentalism. In more general terms, in all great religious traditions there are critical moments when segments claim for themselves “orthodoxy” and brand other segments as “heterodox”.

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gained currency amidst a disintegrating social order and formed the source of a “peculiar subterranean fanaticism . . . which in our day have convulsed the world,” (1961: 319), probably intending by the latter the totalitarian regimes which Eisenstadt later encapsulated as “Jacobin” aspects of modernity. Extending Cohn’s analysis, that antinomian underground legacy of the 13th and 14th Centuries could be followed later than the Reformation, in succeeding stages of modernity. The trail leads to 17th Century England among the communitarian and radical egalitarian movements that figure prominently in Christopher Hill’s classic study of urban protest (1972), to the early 19th Century revolutionary movements that linked religious and political visions (Billington 1980), and down to the turbulent contestations of various new social movements of the late 1960s. The latter joined political protests of a secular nature with religious symbolism and ecstatic drug-induced visions challenging the rationality and stratification of the larger society in often violent movements of protest; yet in other settings, communal movements of “hippies” sought a return to a primitive, egalitarian setting, often set apart from the urban centers of hypermodernity. That broad world of the “counter-culture” (Yinger 1982), which I take broadly as a multidimensional, transnational challenge against authority based on heterodox visions of “the good society”, has had far-reaching precipitates from an original antinomian core.8 The three studies of the 13th Century discussed above are essentially descriptive of the European setting; we need to go beyond them to a more comparative and analytical level to do justice to the theme of the civilization of modernity. II. More germane for the purpose of the present essay is the impressive comparative economic historical study of Abu-Lughod, which straddles the 13th and 14th Centuries. She undertakes it not as an economic 8 In his introduction to The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, Eisenstadt notes there were broad common conditions and processes in the first Axial Age which, however, became articulated in widely varying different modes of “reconstruction of trust, solidarity, power and division of labor, generating different institutional types of ‘answers’ . . . and different possibilities of secondary breakthrough,” (Eisenstadt 1986b: 25). On a global basis, it would be highly fruitful for a comparative civilizational analysis to see the varying responses and precipitates of the late 1960s to the new challenges of modernity.


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historian but as a sociologist seeking to broaden the frame of “world system” analysis developed by Wallerstein and behind him by Annales historian Braudel (Wallerstein 1974–79, 1983; Braudel 1979). Recall that for the latter two, European modernity, or at least the channel of modernity, lay in the development of modern capitalism from the fifteenth/sixteenth century onwards, paving the way for European hegemony on a global basis. Braudel’s succinct “afterthoughts” to his monumental study of the development of capitalism in the West (1992) is, unwittingly, a note of European “triumphalism”: When compared with the economies of the rest of the world, the European economy seems to have been more developed thanks to its superior instruments and tools of the bourse and various forms of credit (1979: 34).

Braudel gently chided Wallerstein’s theme of the world-system having come into being in Europe in the 16th Century (the key starting point of modernity for Marx and Weber before them). Braudel acknowledged that world economies, understood as the economy of one area of the Earth forming an economic whole having a center in a dominant city, existed prior to then, even outside Europe (Braudel 1979: 81). But even with the presence of market systems, outside Europe there was no capitalism as we have come to know it. One more observation of Braudel before moving on (or back!) to the 13th Century. He takes note of Weber’s claim of modern capitalism being a creation of Puritanism, but promptly dismisses it on the grounds that the northern European countries which took over the center of economic development at the end of the 16th Century invented nothing in either technology or in business management from the old southern European centers, especially Venice. Weber’s error was basically to exaggerate the role of capitalism “as promoter of the modern world” (1979: 67). Ironically, Braudel seems to retrace somewhat hurriedly Weber’s Eurocentrism but taking a different path of why modern capitalism did not develop outside the West. Where Weber studied at length the cultural factors which impeded the high civilizations of China and India. Braudel considers en passant, the economic ingredients lacking: the absences of fairs and bourses in China, while fairs in India were linked with a traditional past (1979: 34). In graded fashion, they and Islam and Japan had many of the layers of economic life that are relevant for capitalism, but in the last economic history analysis, they fell short of an economic breakthrough.

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Abu-Lughod introduces an important corrective to the privileging of the West in the development of world economy in the past five centuries or so. She basically looks at multiple modernities linked together economically in the same broad time frame of the 13th Century, a world system marked by commercial interchanges in broad overlapping zones. Her contention is that if we look at that period (which in her study spills over into the 14th Century),9 ruptured from the following one by the Black Death that in the aggregate took one-third of the European population in the second half of the 14th Century, no particular culture had a monopoly on either technological or social innovations, no particular psychological outlook, no particular religious outlook, no particular form of economic organization prevailed. Hence, she asserts, it is erroneous to argue that “only the institutions and culture of the West could have succeeded,” (Abu-Lughod 1993: 17). Her comparative-historical perspective critiques sociohistorical interpretations of Western hegemony, grounded in the 19th Century, by taking as units world cities that were nodes in the great commercial oceanic and overland trade routes that linked China to Western Europe, from Hangchow to Bruges. Viewing the 13th Century as “a period of heightened urbanization” (1989: 282), Abu-Lughod traces the rise of commercial urban centers globally, how they had more in common with one another than with their rural populations, and, finally, the cycle of decline partly from the Black Death, partly from internal political conditions, that led several of these centers to drop off in the following century from the world system. All things considered, the overarching economic system of international trade was more complex and more sophisticated than any prior one, and, for that matter, on par with that of the 16th Century. Components outside the West were not the “periphery” and the system might have continued to evolve, save for what might be imputed to historical hazards such as the demographic catastrophe of the Bubonic plague and political upheavals on the eastern flank with the collapse of the Mongols. The net result, according to Abu-Lughod, was a sort of vacuum that made it facile for the Portuguese and the

9 “This book . . . takes the position that . . . the century between A.D. 1250 and 1350 constituted a . . . critical ‘turning point’ in world history,” (Abu-Lughod 1989: 12).


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Dutch to take over in “the new European approach to trade-cumplunder that caused a basic transformation in the world system” (1989: 361). Abu-Lughod has added an important corrective to truncated “EuroWhiggish” perspectives on modernity, so to speak, that tell a success story from the 16th Century to the recent modern. But her story-telling leaves out or minimizes some ingredients. First, although the focus of Before European Hegemony is on urban centers as strategic to international trade, she dismisses cursorily rather than discusses Max Weber’s pregnant discussion of the distinctness of Western cities in the development of a capitalist civilization (Weber 1978). For Weber, the Western city, especially that of Northern Europe, was a unique locus of legal emancipation from seigniorial authority, which would make possible free labor.10 And besides this contribution to political economy, Weber also in his discussion of the medieval city pointed to the cultural import of Christianity in destroying the religious significance of clan ties, unlike Islamic cities of the caliphate which, according to him, “never overcame the divisiveness of Arab tribal and clan ties,” (1978: 1244). Most of AbuLughod’s rather meager discussion of Weber—understandably since her major stimulus is world-system analysis—is aimed at negating the cultural claims in his comparative religious studies. These argued that the Wirtschaftethik of the religions of China, India and Islam provided a hostile environment for the development of modern capitalism in the form of merchant-accumulators and industrial developers. The latter actors, she posits somewhat enigmatically, “were very much present in the thirteenth-century world; what they lacked were free resources,” (1989: 364). The cultural aspect of civilization is thus residual in both the major historical accounts of modernity (or pre-modernity) provided by Braudel and Abu-Lughod. An important corrective to this is the suggestive programmatic essay of Wittrock (2001), which has much more affinity with the Eisenstadt “paradigm”, if we may call it that. Also arguing like Abu-Lughod for reconsidering the formation of modernity in the medieval period, Wittrock underscores its central 10 “The urban citizenry therefore usurped the right to dissolve the bonds of seigneurial domination; this was the great—in fact, the revolutionary—innovation which differentiated the medieval Occidental cities from all others,” (1978: 1239, emphasis Weber’s).

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importance in a comparative civilizational framework (heavily influenced by Jaspers and Eisenstadt) by invoking the notion of ecumenical renaissance. The term refers to “a set of transformations that occur across the Eurasian civilizations in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium ce, roughly from the 9th century to the middle of the 13th century,” (Wittrock 2001: 38). What he suggests as an extension of the “Axial Age” hypothesis of Jaspers and Eisenstadt is that the imperial/political orders of the Eurasian hemisphere (such as the Ottoman Empire, the Song dynasty, the Fatimid in Egypt and a revival of Byzantium) had new internal challenges; these led not only to the transformation of political and economic practices but to a “deep epistemic and cultural shift as well”. From these cultural crystallizations that sought to transcend the chasm between the mundane and the transcendental order came new institutional practices and philosophical reflections. While the emphasis on the cultural and cognitive is an important addendum to the comparative macroeconomic, urban perspective on the medieval period, Wittrock’s bold brush strokes need refinement in places. Although passing mention is given to “intense patterns of transregional trade” in this period, no mention is given to AbuLughod’s more systematic comparative study of the linkages of hemispheric-wide trading networks, including how these might have a bearing on the ecumenical renaissance.11 Second, perhaps because the essay is necessarily a condensed form of a research program, there is no in depth discussion of any civilizational complex outside the West nor of intercivilizational encounters that might have stimulated or influenced the “ecumenical renaissance” either within or across borders. The recent illuminating study of Arjomand regarding the interaction in 13th Century Islam of its medieval civilization and the development of guilds, on the one hand, and the integrative political and religious policies of the Caliphate as its symbolic center, on the other (Arjomand 2003b: 3), adds needed substance to Wittrock’s comparative framework, the latter being still heavily

11 What seems more important to his perspective is the challenge to political arrangements institutionalized in the Axial Age period by new political forces (in the form of “new nomadic incursions”, largely from Central Asia). These challenges produced or stimulated new cultural visions and solutions that paved the way for new institutions, such as, in the case of the West, the university as an autonomous center of new cognitive understandings and as a center for the training of elites.


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weighted towards accounting for Western modernity (2001: 43–45). There is great need to follow this up with comparable studies of other high civilizational centers that partook in different ways of the “ecumenical renaissance” in the 13th Century, notably those of India and China,12 and linking their cultural, political and economic intersections to place in proper perspective the significance of the period for an accounting of modernity that gives greater scope to the paths of “multiple modernities”.13 What has been advanced so far in this discussion is that the 13th Century, usually bypassed in the mapping of the trajectory of modernity, is in fact “worth the detour”. It might even be considered on a comparative civilizational level as a potential “axial age of modernity” in the sense of new broad and extensive economic and cultural linkages between major regions, linkages arising from political as well as economic interactions (not all of a peaceful nature, given the Mongol invasions in Central Asia and the Western crusades in the Middle East). Of course, despite the new levels of intercivilizational encounters and their resultants in new “roads to modernity” (again invoking Nelson 1981a), no new global civilization of modernity crystallized in the 13th Century. But something did occur in one region which has a direct bearing on the Eisenstadt paradigm, that part of his analysis which points to the tensions between orthodox and heterodox orientations as orthogonal, pulling the established

12 Regarding China and its cultural renaissance in the Song period in the form of “Neo-Confucianism” as a cultural synthesis, see Tu Weiming (2000: 196f.) and Hsu (2001: 445). 13 Curiously, though Wittrock makes no mention of him, the suggestion for such an emphasis on the 13th Century was proposed by Nelson thirty years ago in discussing intercivilizational encounters and the civilizational breakthrough in the West in the moralities of thought and in the logics of decision which open out the possibility of creative advance in the direction of wider universalities of discourse and participation in the confirmation of improved rationales (1981a: 99). Nelson went on to discuss in terms of differential utilization of intercivilizational encounters during this second “Axial Shift” period of the 12th and 13th Centuries how this provided the West with a new point of departure “for the great searching of the Western spirit” (1981a: ibid.). By contrast, if we join Arjomand to this point, an Islamic medieval breakthrough faltered due to a gap in the reception of Aristotle, specifically the fact that Aristotle’s Politics, which Thomas Aquinas used and which had far-flung consequences in the development of Western consitutionalism, was not translated into Arabic as were other of Aristotle’s writings (Arjomand 2003b: 45–48). For a broader analytical and comparative treatment of “multiple modernities”, see Eisenstadt (2000b) and the entire issue of Dædalus in which Arjomand’s essay appears.

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social order in different paths. These contrasting orientations, grounded in transcendental visions of ultimate reality, are cultural in their symbolic manifestations and have far-reaching importance for social mobilization as well as institutionalized behavior. In our own lifetime we have seen periodic moments of heterodox orientations challenging the social order that the Enlightenment brought as a “paradigm of progress”—such as much of the “counterculture” a generation ago. And we in the West are given to believe that the terrorist activities stem from a heterodox radical form of Islam. What a civilizational analysis of modernity may benefit from at this point is to take as a case study one instance where orthodox and heterodox orientations were found present at an early point of Western modernity after the Axial Age shift, and the point that I will discuss is the 13th Century, when the institutionalized orthodoxy in the West was severely challenged by several heterodox currents, with one in particular that became branded as a dangerous foes spawning “heretics”. What that “heresy” was, how successful was it, and what measures were taken to curb it can tell us important aspects of the path modernity took and did not take in the West. III. If, as Bowersock states, “for the competition of transcendental visions in the institutional history of the Roman Empire, the second century is of paramount importance as a formative age,” (1986: 281), the 13th Century is of no less importance in tracing the later path of modernity in terms of competition of transcendental visions. It provides an instance where one vision and its institutionalized practices won a major battle, but may have lost the war. Southern France, the wide region known as the “Midi” and embracing the important sub-regions of Provence and Languedoc, had distinct cultural aspects in the 12th and 13th Centuries. It was an area where the prevalent vernacular was Occitan or the “langue d’oc” in contrast to the French of the seat of the monarchy in Paris, which spoke the “langue d’oil”.14 The ethos was different in various

14 Occitan as a Romance language with variants was the language of the troubadours and is still spoken today throughout the area, shading into Catalan. It had an enduring literary renaissance in the 19th Century with the Félibrige group of poets and writers headed by Mistral. In the 1960s and 1970s a new radical region-


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respects, in contrast to the greater hierarchical aspects of the feudal North, the South was more marked by a greater degree of political participation by local councils and burghers, by greater equality of women, and in general by a more liberal spirit (Duvernoy 1994: 63). It was also an area marked by urbanism and commercial wealth in the midst of a rural agrarian setting.15 For purpose of the present essay, what was salient in the region was the pluralism of religious orientations, and, remarkable for its time, the open expressions of heterodoxy, albeit the Catholic faith which ultimately depended upon the papacy was an essential part of the institutional order. One might say that for the latter part of the 12th Century toleration of dissent was the norm, with public disputations regarding the true Christian doctrine. Unlike Islam which had been driven out of the Midi much earlier, the Jewish community, scattered throughout the Occitan region (see map in the appendix) but particularly strong in Narbonne (Nelli 1968: 183), although limited in its civic participation, was not repressed or subject to harassments it suffered elsewhere in Europe. It was in Narbonne that a gnostic tradition found fertile soil in the form of the Kabbala with its emphasis on esoteric knowledge, quite different from the more exoteric rationalism of Maimonides (1135–1204) across the Spanish frontier, and Gérard Israël notes that this and other philosophical differences spawned in Jewish communities in Provence a vigorous “effervescence” (Israël 2002: 157). Judaism aside, in the Languedoc that had as a major seat of the polity the hereditary Count of Toulouse, like elsewhere in the Mediterranean south, various dualist currents had made their way westward from distant Middle Eastern origins.16 Dualist transcendental visions had been present for the length of the early period of Christianity as an organized religion, with the most common form

alist impulse made itself felt seeking for “Occitania” cultural if not political autonomy from Paris (see Lafont 1973). 15 For a detailed look at everyday life in a typical Languedoc town, Montaillou, see the masterful study of LeRoy Ladurie based on official 14th Century transcripts of an Inquisitor (Ladurie 1978). A map in the appendix of this essay shows the location of Montaillou. 16 It might be noted that Nelli (1968: 183–86) discusses many interesting points of overlap between the Kabbala and the doctrines of the heterodox sect that I focus on, the “Cathars”. It would suggest there were many points of contact between religious and intellectual leaders of the two communities.

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of dualism being the rejection of monotheism and the acceptance of an “evil” lord of created matter, and a “good” God of the spirit. I will not take space to go into the variations of this dualism, though it should be noted that it had (and has had) a great deal of appeal, while at the same time it has incurred theological wrath as the basis of a very dangerous form of “heresy”. In Languedoc in the 12th Century, one dualist sect, which also had a strong presence in Northern Italy and elsewhere in Germany in lesser numbers, appeared and rapidly made converts, among the court nobility and urban patricians as well as among commoners. This sect, which has historically come to be known as “Cathars” or “Albigensians”, names given by its detractors, was in effect a parallel Christian church, which rejected the sacraments and the authority of the established orthodoxy.17 The adherents were both a laity who could conform to the general practices and beliefs, and the “parfaits”, a religious elite that included bishops. The laity lived the lives of ordinary urban and rural dwellers; they did not form a separate community. The “parfaits” (literally, “perfects”) lived extremely ascetic lives, abstaining from all meat and meat products, practicing celibacy, and partaking of strict fasting. They had “houses” but did not live in monasteries unlike some of the Catholic religious orders. Because of their exemplary behavior, they provided spiritual leadership in at least two important activities. One was the occasional public disputes that brought together in a symposium Catholics, Cathars, and nonbelievers to argue about the meaning of the New Testament and the proper behavior for a Christian stemming from the teachings of Jesus; these public debates—verbal tournaments of great popular interest—took place in the second half of the 12th Century. Even when there was no public debate, the parfaits engaged in public preaching and were attentively listened to by the public, and not just by believers. A second significant practice of the parfait was to

17 I will use the name that has stuck, “Cathars” (from the Greek kataros, “pure”), although it might be more proper to use in its place the designation “goodmen” (“bonhommes”) which their neighbors and fellow men in terms of approbation and to differentiate them from other non-Catholic sects, such as the “Vaudois” (Waldensians, followers of Peter Waldo of Lyon), and the less numerous Beguines (Duvernoy 1994). For detailed materials on the beliefs, rituals, and organizational structures of the Cathar religion and its societal setting, see Duvernoy (1976).


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administer the rite of adult baptism by the Spirit, the consolamentum, and thirdly, the rite for the moribund, the convenenza, of critical importance for the salvation of the soul. All the believers viewed the creation of the material world, nature and matter, as the work of the Evil God, while the Good or hidden God was the God of the Spirit, which in humans is held captive as the soul by the body. Essentially, the Cathar religion appears as a simplified form of Christianity, in beliefs, rituals and organizational structure, from that of the orthodox Church of Rome. The clergy of the Cathars seemed on the whole better educated, more conversant with Scriptures, than a good number of priests, many of whom practiced concubinage and benefited from the practice of tithing (Ladurie 1978: 306–26). The parfaits won the respect and esteem of all the social strata, from commoners to nobility and even had the tacit support of the reigning ruler of Languedoc, the Count of Toulouse. By 1200 or so, Catharism seemed poised to provide the Midi with a new religious foundation for its social order, one whose transcendental vision was more consonant with the Occitan civilization than was the vision of Catholicism. It was for the latter an immense challenge which it answered in several ways. First, the latter half of the 12th and beginning of the 13th Centuries was not only a period of new wealth and urban opulence (generated by the multiplication of trade and commerce with the East, as discussed by Abu-Lughod). But it was also a period where affluence bred a reaction of asceticism in the form of grassroots movements of voluntary pauperism as a return to the ideals of the primitive Christian church.18 Two such movements stand out. In the case of Peter Waldo and his followers, drawn from affluent urban circles, the ideal of poverty meant that one should venture forth to preach and lead the evangelical life, even if this meant defiance of the established hierarchical church. As a sect the “Waldensians” had a theology practically identical to that of orthodox Christianity, but had no ordained priest and recognized no bishops much less the Pope. Yet it had much support where it spread,

18 To some extent, the American Peace Corps under President Kennedy, which sent thousands of middle-class college-educated students to Third World countries, seems like an echo of the impetus of Peter of Waldo to go out to the countryside and identify with the poor.

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especially among the lower urban and rural strata, since the preaching of the Waldensians was done in the vernacular, not in Latin, and they refused to pay indulgences; since the Waldensians, like the Cathars, did not believe in purgatory.19 The dual challenge for orthodoxy of the appeal of voluntary pauperism, especially in the rapid spread of the Waldensians, and of addressing the problem of a lax official clergy which enjoyed a material life that contradicted the ideals of the primitive church was answered by the other great movement of voluntary pauperism, that launched by Francis of Assisi. Living an exemplary life of asceticism outside the monastery, the Franciscan order (which provided the impetus for the Mendicant orders in Western Christianity) became a significant movement to counter the Cathars, by engaging in disputes with the parfaits and becoming an alternative presence in urban areas. Orthodoxy also countered the heterodox challenge by seeking capable intellectuals who could argue the “true faith” with “heretics”: this was found in the presence of a newly formed order founded by Dominic Guzman at the turn of the 13th Century. The Dominican order was recognized by the Pope and its members excelled in preaching, being sent to counter the preaching of the “heretics”. Unfortunately for the Languedoc as a whole, moral persuasion did not remain the sole strategy of the orthodox to counter the threat of heterodoxy. In an age when costly crusades to regain lost territory in the Holy Land had met with uneven success, holding on to if not regaining the spiritual territory of the Languedoc became a primary concern for the new prelate of the Church of Rome, Innocent III. He called for a crusade against the “heretics”; since these were Christians, the crusade that took the name of “The Albigensian Crusade” (Cathars were particularly numerous in the city of Albi) was the only of the crusades of the 13th Century directed not at Islam in the Holy Land but at a Christian sect inside Europe. And it was not just a “holy war” to extirpate religious error but also rapidly became a war of military conquest, of the North and its allies against the South. The conquest did not take place overnight, for there was strong military resistance against the invaders by the

19 For major treatment of Waldensians and Cathars, see Thouzellier (1969) and Duvernoy (1994).


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local authorities, whether or not they were Cathars.20 But by the middle of the century, the superior military power of the North had triumphed; the hub of Languedoc, Toulouse, was stripped of its hereditary rulers and the region with loss of its autonomy incorporated into the Kingdom of France. Perhaps more severe than the military onslought was the orthodox onslought against heterodoxy, for the crusade was defined as a crusade against heresy, and the heretics par excellence were the Cathars. The Inquisition was revived and enormously strengthened in its powers to summon, interrogate, and turn over heretics to the secular arm, either for extended and even life-long imprisonment in specially constructed dungeons, or, for cases of unrepentants who would not abjure their heresy, to be burned at the stake in a public ceremony. And for the most part, the parfaits opted for the stake rather than recant. I will not dwell on the procedures of the Inquisition in seeking and establishing the guilty (Lea 1969); heresy was seen to be a virus which might manifest itself in seemingly innocuous statements or practices, and the practices of ferreting out heresy became in effect an industry, ripe for abuse since the powers of the inquisitors was in effect unlimited. The inquisitors received specialized training in the art of interrogating, and when the Inquisition at a later stage combined interrogation with torture, the effect was to terrorize a population and induce a state of paranoia as to what might be considered a sign of heresy. The Inquisition became a state within a state, in a double sense, of having autonomy from secular authorities (at least as long as the established church provided legitimacy for the ruling powers) and having autonomy within the hierarchical structures of the Church, since even bishops and cardinals might be accused of and condemned for heresy. In effect, at a significant cost of lives, orthodoxy achieved its goal by the middle of the 14th Century. Homogeneity in the definition of the “true faith” had been achieved and pluralism was taken out of the public sphere. In place of the lax ambience of Languedoc civil society of 1200 ad, dissidents had seemingly disappeared by the middle of the 14th Century. As a form of religious industry, the

20 For an extensive discussion of the prolonged fighting and the ultimate destruction of the last Cathar strongholds in the Pyrenees, see Bordonove (1991).

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Inquisition in the 14th Century turned its attention to the problem of non-Christians and saw the Jews as marginally heretical in terms of teachings of the Talmud regarding the divinity of God. After the Cathars, it was Jews who became considered undesirable aliens, and after a period of respite with French popes at Avignon, the return of the central ecclesiastical power to Rome was attended by increased harassment of the Jewish community, including the forced surrender and burning of the Talmud (Israël 2002: 167–218). The significance of the Cathars as a sect that challenged the institutional church and whose territory became the object of military attack has had multiple perspectives, though overall it may appear as a footnote in the history of France and Medieval Europe. Catholic historians and apologists in the 16th Century saw the Cathars as precursors of Luther seeking to wreck the unity of Christendom (Vicaire 1979), while Protestant historians in the 16th and 17th Centuries tended to look more favorably on the Waldensians than on the Cathars, though finding in both sects a basis for establishing a long-term Protestant tradition denying the centrality of Rome (Bedouelle 1979). In the 19th and 20th Centuries, the historiography changes, with new controversies and newly discovered documents of the period, but an explication of these is outside the scope of this essay.21 What remains as a sociological research program is the “elective affinity” if not actual linkage of the Cathars and their social setting with the Protestant sects of the 16th and 17th Centuries which Weber (as Parsons has noted) saw as having brought an important “breakthrough” (Weber 1963: xxix) with the key salvific orientation of thisworldly asceticism. Were there Cathars who managed to escape the religious and civil authorities and go underground, or managed to practice in secret their cult (as Christians may have been able to do in Japan in the 16th Century or some Jews in Spain despite forced conversions), and become progenitors of the Hughenots? The dualism that runs in Puritanism and the Protestant sects, the notion of the “elect”, is not that far removed from the parfaits and their abstention from the pleasures of the flesh. Perhaps the Cathars were a step ahead since they practiced greater gender equality, and the Cathars

21 For an important set of papers regarding this historiography see Historiographie du catharisme, Cahiers de Fanjeaux, no. 14 (Toulouse: E. Privat 1979).


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rejected the Old Testament, but still, there are some intriguing common denominators. These will have to wait another occasion to be drawn out, perhaps an international conference to celebrate a centennial anniversary. IV. From a comparative civilizational perspective of modernity, the 13th Century offers a rich laboratory of investigation. Perhaps the key question underlying a research program that might follow in the wake of Björn Wittrock’s call for a new global history noted earlier is something like this: why did not a civilization of modernity emerge and become institutionalized a thousand years ago? There was unprecedented contacts and encounters between the major centers of the Eurasian land mass and a case can be made for each— the Christian West, the Islamic Middle East, the Hindu South Asia and the Confucian East Asia—having a material and cultural efflorescence. Yet, the promise of a civilization of modernity did not actualize, and if anything, a fragmentation seemed to take place, not only between themselves but even, to some extent, within themselves. The materials discussed in this essay do not address this broad comparative query, but for the case of the West, it suggests that the repression of heresy, and in particular, the brutal repression of “Catharism” was a critical turning point. On the one hand, from the point of view of orthodoxy, the challenge of dissent that could undermine the unity of church and state by undermining the legitimacy of both was successfully met, at least for three centuries. On the other hand, there was a price paid for “ontological security”, not only the price paid by the thousands of “heretics” who were burned at the stake and the greater numbers who perished in solitary confinement. The price paid was also more than the unlawful confiscation of property from families accused of heresy or of assisting heretics. The price paid was the setting up an institution which became a veritable “state within a state”, ultimately responsible only to the Pope, and which could even attack clerical dissent going as high as Cardinals as being “heretical”. It may not be too difficult for readers to discern a certain tie-in of this with Norman Cohn’s already mentioned study of 13th Century chiliastic thought and its legacy for the fanaticisms of the 20th. The Gestapo, the KGB, the stasi and other agencies of state control of the 20th Century sought in their turn to extirpate dissidents and heretics using tactics of interrogation and torture, short of burning

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at the stake, not altogether different from that of the Inquisition and its secular arm. This could readily be seen as a “Jacobin” tendency of modernity, an orientation of bringing about homogeneity of beliefs and behavior, not by persuasion which is one political option, but by coercion, which is an alternate political option. The demise of Nazi Germany and the collapse of Soviet communism seemed to have paved the way for a continuation if not extension of a “civilization of modernity” marked by a commitment to technological progress, political democratization, and the freer circulation of goods and services world wide, while at the same time allowing for cultural differences and a new appreciation and respect for “others”. Francis Fukuyama’s noted essay (1992) at the beginning of the last decade was, tacitly, a vision of a new onset of such a civilization of modernity, a rekindling of the vision of the Enlightenment. Carried to its full extent as a new pax Romana guaranteed by American hegemony, this vision might accommodate a new era of “multiple modernities” within an overarching “civilization of modernity”. September 11th has been a rude awakening from this vision. In the context of this paper what is most troubling is that the response of the country that has been so much of an epicenter of modernity in the 20th Century may in fact be taking a sharp turn away from the moral, normative aspects of modernity and returning to the regressive, coercive ways that orthodoxy came to deal with heterodoxy in the 13th Century. The war on terrorism is, in one obvious sense, unfortunately perhaps, a dichotomized “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996), of radical “anti-modern” Islam against “modern civilization”. But there is a more disturbing way of looking at it, beyond a sterile “barbarism versus civilization” prism. I will not dwell on the irony that the perceived architects of 9/11 terrorism view the United States as a Satanic force not only because of its support for Israel but also, and perhaps more profoundly, because it is corruptive of traditional morality and domestic values, and that this is precisely why the present American administration and its conservative supporters hold “liberals” in askance. Structurally, the fundamentalisms involved are isomorphic. What is ominous are not the measures for external protection so much as those for internal protection. The latter are of two sorts. One is protection from dissent and public debate by a climate of invoking the war on terrorism as a defense of the country, its peo-


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ple and its values; hence, public criticism is muted in the spirit of patriotism. Second are much more tangible measures and practices designed to achieve homogeneous conformity, of the domestic population and of overseas allies. Within the United States, the USA Patriot Act22 and amended provisions of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act have not only greatly increased the surveillance, searches and data gathering powers of the federal government, beyond traditional constitutional safeguards, but also set up secret courts where detainees are kept indefinitely without benefit of counsel. How different is the lot of the hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and those of other inmates at American and British detention camps, “subjected to violent and coercive interrogation, including beatings, withholding of pain medication, sleep deprivation, and loud noise intended to be disorientating”, with the recalcitrant ones “rendered” for questioning to foreign countries (Dworkin 2003: 37), from what Lea says about the detainees of the Inquisition: The Inquisition shrouded itself in the awful mystery of secrecy until afar sentence had been awarded and it was ready so impress the multitude with the fearful solemnities of the auto de fé. Unless proclamation were to be made for an absentee, the citation of a suspected heretic was made in secret (Lea 1969: 159).

Just as the accused and convicted heretic had no appeal in the 13th Century to customary courts, only to the Pope, so also in the military tribunals set up for terrorists “hearsay evidence and involuntary confessions are admissible” and “there is no appeal except to the secretary of defense and the president” (Dworkin 2003: 37). Quite forcefully, Dworkin, among others, points to the grave danger of civil liberties in the American administration’s policies of dealing with terrorists, including American citizens accused of terrorism. Not only has the Patriot Act been extended in its purview to investigate and prosecute more “ordinary crimes” but also there is strong temptation for this to be seen as having a duration beyond the emergency situation of 9/11 to something lasting at least a generation, just as the Inquisition became institutionalized into a permanent organization that lasted into the 19th Century. Thus, there is need to heed the

22 Formally, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tool Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, signed into law on 26 October 2001.

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warning that “the government’s anti-terrorist policies may be an irreversible step to a new and much less liberal state,” (Dworkin: 38). The issue that Dworkin raises is that the American administration’s policies regarding terrorists or alleged terrorists, even if technically legal in a national emergency, are of concern to more than Americans. If these policies violate people’s fundamental human rights—“rights at the foundation of the international moral order that nations must respect even when under threat” (Dworkin: 37)— then these policies are wrong and immoral. In the 13th Century, human rights had not entered into the consciousness of civilization. The civilization of modernity has accepted this as a normative cornerstone. But we have already seen tragic examples in the last century of societies that had identified with the civilization of modernity breaking off from it and developing “Jacobin” enforcement of homogeneity. Terrorism today, like heresy a thousand years ago, is a threat to the social order of modernity. But the response may itself lead to a reactionary breakdown with far-reaching unfortunate consequences.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE ISLAMICATE CIVILIZATION Saïd Arjomand The primary interest of civilizational analysis is in the directionality of social change by identifying distinctive civilizational processes and rationalities, and in the understanding of the diversity of developmental patterns by such devices as comparative typologies. This interest, however, is by no means incompatible with the kind of value-relevant analysis Weber took great pains to justify. Like development and modernization as such values a generation ago, there is today keen interest throughout the world, including the Muslim countries, in such themes as the conditions for the growth of democracy and civil society as values not of Western but of modern civilization as defined by Eisenstadt (2003a, 1: 23–25). For instance, the Journal of Development (ketab-e tawsa'eh), which belongs loosely speaking to the intellectual wing of the reform movement in Iran, recently devoted four consecutive issues, 11–14 (2003), to “origins of despotism in Iran.” Our commitment to understanding civilizational rationalities and developmental paths is in no way incompatible with valuerelevant and critical enquiries of this nature.1 In fact, I take the promotion of critical, historical and cross-cultural self-understanding at the global level our professional duty. The ensuing comparisons of the critical point of divergence of the Islamicate and Western paths to political modernity is accordingly shaped by a value-relevant concern with the cultural preconditions of the constitutional rule of law and democracy.

1 Such commitment should not turn us into apologists of old or new nations and cultures and result in any kind of feel-good soft-ware support for international diplomacy. In other words, civilizational analysis and explanation of multiple modernities must remain distinct from politically correct cultural relativism and apologetic pan-modernism or pan-rationalism.

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saïd arjomand Eisenstadt, civilizational analysis and Islam

What we might call the Weberian paradigm for civilizational analysis focused on the impact of world religions on social action and social organization. Culturally, the impact was through the motivation of social action generally by ethos of the world religions, and more particularly by their ‘economic’, ‘political’ and ‘social’ ethics (dietary, sexual, domestic regulations and rules for ritual purity). Weber’s conception of rationalization related this ethical regulation of the life system to the worldview of the respective world religion through the requirement of meaningful consistency (Sinnzuzamenhang). Sociologically, the impact of the world religions was transmitted through the social strata or classes that constituted their respective social bearers or carriers (Träger). Here, too, the notion of rationalization as a developmental pattern links the institution-building of the formative periods to the religious solutions to the problem of the meaning of human life through the ideal interests of these bearers of the world religions and their meaningfully consistent reconciliation to material conditions and historical contingencies. (Arjomand 2004) Eisenstadt’s comparative civilizational analysis makes more explicit and amplifies the sociological dimension of Weber’s paradigm. On the one hand, he offers a more pluralistic picture of civilizational dynamics by highlighting Weber’s analysis of the transformative impact of heterodoxies within the world religions. (Eisenstadt 2003a, 1: 17–19) Tension among contending interpretations and their respective bearers within the same world religion and civilization is stressed by distinguishing orthodoxy and its official representatives from heterodoxies of unofficial challengers who offer contesting interpretations of the central values of the tradition and create movements of cultural and political protest. On the other hand, he emphasizes the degree of autonomy of the elites representing orthodoxy in relation to the ruler and political power as a determinant of the strength of their civilizational impact.2 According to Eisenstadt, whether Buddhism, Confucianism or Islam remain confined to the religious sphere or

2 I have similarly treated the degree of the autonomy of the Shiìte hierocracy from the patrimonial state in different periods as a key determinant of their impact cultural impact on Iran. (Arjomand 1984)

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have a broader impact in a civilization largely depends on their autonomy from the rulers. This explains the different civilizational impact of Confucianism and Buddhism in Japan as compared to China and Thailand, and of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia as compared to the Middle East and North Africa. (Eisenstadt 1993b) In a major work inspired by Weber’s idea of the world religions as the core of civilizations, Marshall Hodgson (1974) argued that Islamic law facilitated great social mobility but not institutional development. The Sharià ignored public law and state action, and left too little room for initiative to the Caliph in theory. Consequently, social activism tended to take the form of revivalist movements outside the framework of the state and of governmental institutions. Eisenstadt has put forward a model of the inner dynamics of Islamic civilization centered on constant tension between an Islamic primordial utopia—the ideal of the Golden Age of pristine Islam—and the historical reality of patrimonial Sultanism, coexisting with autonomous public sphere dominated by the religious elite, the ulema, as the guardians of the Shari'a and orthodoxy. He points to “a very interesting decoupling . . . between the makeup of the public sphere and access to the decision-making of the ruler.” The de facto separation of religious authority and rulership, entailing “this decoupling of a vibrant public sphere, autonomous from the . . . realm of rulership” is in fact the distinctive feature of the Islamicate in contrast to the Western civilization, where the participation in the public sphere was linked to political decision-making. (Eisenstadt 2002a: 153) Drawing on Hodgson and on Ibn Khaldun’s depiction of the cycle of the rise and fall of puritanical Muslim dynasties, as interpreted by the late Ernest Gellner, Eisenstadt further constructs a model of oscillation between military patrimonial regimes with limited pluralism, on the one hand, and intolerant “proto-fundamentalist” and “Jacobin fundamentalist” ones, on the other. (Eisenstadt 2002) The tension between the orthodoxy and heterodoxies is incorporated into this model. Cook (1999: 276) argued persuasively that there is a “striking misfit” between Weber’s conception of sect, derived from Christianity, and the intensely political character of religious schism in Medieval Islam. Eisenstadt similarly approaches heterodoxy under “sectarianism and political dynamics.” (Eisenstadt 2003a, 1: 421–29) Eisenstadt’s model of the religio-political dynamics of the Islamicate civilization is appealing for its simplicity, for discarding the

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Euro-centric view of social evolution and dynamics, and as he later explained (Eisenstadt 2003a, 1: 418–19), for discarding “the myth of Oriental Despotism.” It is, however, too general to account for the tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Islamic history, and in fact applies mainly to the protest movements within the Sunni orthodoxy and not to the Shi'ite and other apocalyptic sects. I shall touch on this complex issue of orthodoxy and heterodoxy (whose applicability to Islam has indeed been questioned) only indirectly and in connection with attempts by the former to control the latter. Eisenstadt’s model also leaves out, however, the non-religious political ethos of Muslim societies, and trends in institutionalization and development of non-religious culture. The purpose of this essay is to supplement his model by fill this gap with respect to political ideas. As the focus of Eisenstadt’s analysis has gradually shifted from the historical developments in the Axial Age (1986b) to a typological conception of ‘axial civilizations’, the significance of common or interconnected cross-regional patterns and the role of intercivilizational encounters has come to the fore. As Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock (forthcoming, p. 12) point out, the typological thesis forces us to move from the model of (ahistorically conceived) insulated civilizational complexes with distinctive dynamics to world-historical transformations and intercivilizational processes. This requires historicization of axial constellation, especially in later formative periods, often involving intercivilizational dialogue. I will thus consider the reception of Aristotle in medieval Christianity and Islam as a common encounter with the Greek civilization with, needless to say, different outcomes. Intercivilizational influences on the Islamicate and Western transformation The importance of civilizational encounters in the formative periods of the Islamicate civilization was exaggerated in the Eurocentric scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but has been minimized or altogether denied as a result of the growing post-World War II tendency to derive every conceivable feature of the Islamicate civilization from the Islamic doctrine. To avoid such reduction of civilization to religion, Hodgson (1974) coined the term ‘Islamicate’ (rather than Islamic) civilization, which I have adopted for the same


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reason. Hodgson’s implicit restriction of the formative era of the Islamicate civilization to the 692–945 period, however, predisposed him to underestimate the importance of the intercivilizational contacts in the later Middle Ages. Wittrock’s (2001) provocative suggestion of a “Eurasian ecumenical renaissance” focuses our attention on common patterns of development across Eurasian civilizations, and the search for common patterns turns to highlighting inter-civilizational encounters as an easy way of explaining commonalities. The two critical factors making for the great transformation of the thirteenth century are the Mongol ecumenical empire, with branches in China and Iran as well as Russia, and the “dialogue between the living and the dead involving Greeks, Arabs [read Muslims] and Europeans.” (Huff 1993: 13) Where the former facilitated the most significant encounter between the Islamicate and the Chinese civilizations, the latter marked the divergent path of late axial development of Christian and Islamicate civilization set in motion by their respective encounters with the same Greek civilization of antiquity. The Chinese Islamicate encounter requires a separate treatment and is beyond my competence, but I will mention one significant scientific encounter concerning astronomy as it concerns the protagonist of the next section of this paper. Huff (1993: 50) notes the transmission of trigonometry to Chinese astronomy through the employment of “Arab” astronomers in the Astronomical Bureau in Beijing from the thirteenth century onwards, he does not seem aware of the fact that, on the Iranian side, Nasir al-Din Tusi employed Chinese mathematicians and astronomers in his famous observatory in Maràgheh (see below), translated the date of the year of the Pig (1203) to various other calendars and “made extensive use of Chinese technical jargon . . . and the Chinese names for the ten celestial stems and twelve earthly branches of the sexagenary cycle.” (Lane 2003: 218) Whatever the impact of such specific cultural exchanges, there can be no doubt about the flourishing of Persianate culture and revival of the very idea of Iran, with the pictorial assimilation of the ancient Persian kings to the new Mongol rulers in the illustrations of Ferdausi’s Shàhnàma (Soudavar 1996), in the Il-Khanid period. George Lane (2003) aptly subtitles his comprehensive study of the reign of Hülegü (1256–65) and his successor as “a Persian renaissance” and reminds us (Lane 2003: 30) that the troops of the Atabeg of Fars, the great patron of learning and culture and of the

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great Persian poet, Sa'di of Shiraz (d. 1291), who wrote the most moving elegy on the demise of the last 'Abbasid Caliph, in fact accompanied the Mongol conqueror in the fateful siege of Baghdad in 1258. The encounter with the Greek civilization was, however, of much greater axial significance for Christianity and Islam. The transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical texts through Arabic and of the Muslim medical treatises to Europe in the Middle Ages is indisputable. As is generally known, the major civilizational encounter between Western Christendom and the Islamicate civilization resulted in the transmission of Greek philosophy and sciences as well as mathematics and medicine as developed in the Muslim world. The importation of institutions has not been proven, however. George Makdisi (1981) has argued that the institutions of higher learning also traveled from the Muslim world to the West as a part of this civilizational encounter. But there is little evidence for the influence of the fully developed madrasas on the nascent European universities in the thirteenth century. Makdisi’s argument for the influence of the mosque-khàn model on the Inns of Court as the first English law colleges set up in London in the twelfth century by the Knights Templar returning from the Holy Land, cannot be accepted as the alleged model rests on a misreading of the textual source. (Mottahedeh 1997) Inspired by Makdisi, Monica Gaudiosi (1988) claims the law of waqf as a source of the English law of trust or use, and argues that the 1264 statutes of the House of Scholars of Merton, the deed of trust that set up the first Oxford College, can “be analyzed as a waqf instrument.” (Gaudiosi 1988: 1250) But she can only show generic similarities between the deeds of trust and waqf rather than giving any direct proof of borrowing. It is true that the influence of the trust’s founder was as great as that of a waqf endowment. Walter de Merton names members of his own family as the primary beneficiaries. Hugh of Balsham, the Bishop of Ely, founded the first Cambridge College, Peterhouse, in 1284 pro utilitate rei publice. It was, however, explicitly modeled on Merton and reserved the appointment of the master and confirmation of fellows for the Bishop. (Leedham-Green 1996: 21–22) Merton College was soon incorporated by a subsequent deed of 1274, however, and it was not the unincorporated Inns of Court or Peterhouse but, as we have seen, the corporations of masters and/or scholars of Paris or Bologna that


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provided the blueprint for European universities3 and assured their autonomous civic agency. Makdisi’s (1981) argument from the literal correspondence of ijàzat al-tadris and licentia docenti is somewhat stronger, but he goes too far in claiming that “Islamic seeds were planted for what was soon to become a second magisterium in Christianity, that of the professors of theology.” (Makdisi 1990: 128) Again, this probable original influence cannot explain the enormous growth of the university trained doctors of theology who outnumbered the priests and bishops at the Council of Basel in 1439 by 300 to 20. (Makdisi 1990: 129) The political tradition in medieval Islam One of the least appreciated features of the Islamicate civilizational synthesis, perfected in the thirteenth century, is the composite medieval Muslim conceptions of state and society. This is largely due to the fact that the prevalent interpretations of medieval Islamic political thought are inordinately influenced by one particular genre of juristic writing in the form of systematic deduction of political authority from the caliphate, which H.A.R. Gibb (1955) regarded as defining the “constitutional organization” of medieval Muslim polity. The historicity of this view, however, is open to serious questions. The juristic theory of the caliphate emerged fairly late in the eleventh-century, and cannot be taken as representative of medieval Islamic political thought, which drew heavily on the Perso-Indian tradition of statecraft and was formally influenced by the Greek practical philosophy. My argument, by contrast, is that certain features of pristine Islam invited the political thought of other civilizations or more precisely, the Indian science of government and the Greek political science. With the cultural integration of Iran into the Muslim Caliphate, especially after the 'Abbasid revolution in the mid-eighth century, the Indian borrowing via the Middle Persian translation emerged as an integral part of the Arabic and Persian literature on statecraft.

The first university at Cracow, established in 1364, was modeled on Bologna, and students elected the Rector. When it was reestablished in 1400, like Heidelberg (1386) and other more recently established universities, it used the Parisian model for its constitution, with the masters electing the Rector. (Podlecki, J. & Walto≤ 1999) 3

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The reception of the Greek political science was a part of the translation of Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic a century later, and was developed into the discipline of practical philosophy or political science (Arjomand 2001). Rather than focusing on the caliphate and the sacred law (shari'a), the typical conception of political order found in the Persian literature of the medieval period on statecraft and the political ethic was that of a world order constituted by the two powers of prophecy (nobovvat) and monarchy (saltanat). From the end of the twelfth century onward, this idea of the two powers constitutive of order was developed into a type of political theory that is called “Islamic royalism” in this essay. Islamic royalism came to represent the constitutional organization of Muslim polities after the Mongol overthrow of the Abbasid caliphate. (Arjomand 2003a) Before comparing the Greco-Islamic synthesis I have called Islamic royalism as expressed by Tusi with the Greco-Christian synthesis exemplified by his contemporary Aquinas as the point of divergence of Western and Islamicate political thought, let me briefly consider the failure of a somewhat different synthesis of the Shi'ite and Sunni political theories that excluded the Greek elements and minimized the Perso-Indian ones. I refer to the constitutional reforms of the late 'Abbasid caliph, al-Nàsir li-Din Allàh (1180–1225), who sought instead to integrate the Shi'ite Sects and Sufi Orders into an expansive Islamic orthodoxy under the Caliphate. The grand civilizational synthesis and its failure An irreversible bifurcation of supreme authority into Caliphate and Sultanate (monarchy) began with the Buyid (Arabized as Buwayhid) seizure of power in Baghdad in the mid-10th century ce, and lasted for a little over three centuries to the mid-13th Century (1258, to be precise). The Caliphate and monarchy were different concepts and drew on two different political theories. Monarchy was the older Near Eastern concept, and the imperial (post-Medina) conception of the Caliphate was elaborated with increasing reference to it. (AlAzmeh 1997) I have argued that a “theory of the two powers” had been in the making since the 'Abbasid revolution: the ethico-legal order grew around the idea of the Shari'a, independently and at the same time as the conception of the political order as monarchy


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(Arjomand 2003a). After the mid-10th century bifurcation of supreme authority into Caliphate and Sultanate, attempts were made to synthesize the two sets of political ideas and theories. The pair of wellknown mid-11th century revisions of the theory of Caliphate under the identical title of al-Ahkàm al-Sultàniyya integrated monarchy into it as “authority (emirate) by seizure.” The condition of dual sovereignty in Baghdad had continued unchanged, with the Seljuk Sultans displacing the Buyids in 1055. By the second half of the 12th century, the differentiation of the two powers had become much clearer, and the Seljuks forcefully maintained that the function of the Caliph as the Imam of the community of believers (umma) was restricted to the religious sphere (Ràvandi, 1921: 334; Hartmann 1993: 109). Al-Nasir tried to reverse this wellentrenched trend through a innovative and long sustained policy of invigorating and controlling urban associations as an institutional mechanism for mobilizing support for the Caliphate throughout the Muslim world. His attempt to end the condition of dual sovereignty was initially successful. He demolished the Seljuk palace in Baghdad in 1187, and had the last main-line Seljuk Sultan, Togril III, defeated and killed at the age of 25 in 1193. But trouble began immediately with the rival dynasty of Khwàrazm-shàhs from Central Asia, whom al-Nàsir had used as an ally to destroy the Seljuks. The Khwàrazmshàh Tekish soon filled the place of the Seljuk Sultan and insisted on the right of the Sultan to exercise secular power. After his death in 1200, his son, Mohammad II, went even further and broke with the 'Abbasid Caliphate altogether, setting up a puppet Caliph, who was a descendant of 'Ali and whose name was put on the coins and in the Friday sermon instead of al-Nàsir. (Hartmann 1993: 997) What al-Nàsir’s called “the rightly-guided mission” (al-da'wa alhàdiya) and I would call his constitutional policy had two important aspects: one legal, the other sociological. On the legal front, he sought to strengthen autocracy by bringing the Sunni theory of the Caliphate closer to the Shi'ite doctrine of the Imamate. On the sociological level, his goal was the wedding of Sufi orders and the Futuwwa associations of the men and youths of the city-quarters, including the artisans. Both these policies also promoted the integration of the Shi'ite sectarians to the Sunni body politic, especially as the Futuwwa culture idealized the first Shi'ite Imam, 'Ali. The urban reforms of al-Nàsir and their sociological consequences have been examined elsewhere (Arjomand forthcoming). My concern here is with the

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synthesis of Sunni and Shi'ite elements in his constitutional theory. Although the Caliph himself was the architect of this integrated constitutional policy, a critical role in the formulation of its ideology was played by his counselor and spiritual master, Shaykh 'Omar Sohravardi. As against the traditional Sunni idea of the Caliph as the defender of the Shari'a, Sohravardi’s theory of the Caliphate primarily presented the Caliph as the Imam who was the intermediary between God and the community of believers and an inspired interpreter of His Law (as in the Shi'ite doctrine);4 and secondarily considered the Caliph selected by God for [spiritual] perfection (kamàl ), and constructed his relationship to the subjects on the model of a spiritual master and his disciples (as in Sufism). The traditional reference to the consensus of the community (ijmà' ) was dropped altogether in this theory (Hartmann 1975: 111–21, 266). Consequently, the autocracy of the Caliph was enhanced in a charismatic and anti-legalistic direction. Al-Nàsir studied Islamic law and had himself certified as a doctor (mujtahid ) in all the four Sunni (orthodox) schools of law. He also did not neglect supporting the colleges (madrasas) and orthodox learning, but added public meetings and debates at Sufi convents to the repertoire of activities in the public sphere. This ingenious meeting point of the college and the convent could have had tremendous consequences for the trajectory of Islamicate development. He even brought the radical Shi'ite Ismà'ili sectarians back to the fold of an official, Caliphal Islam, reinforced by Sufism, made a major attempt to reconcile the moderate, Twelver Shi'a and the Sunnis, and appointed many Twelvers viziers. Last but not least, he recruited the artisans and urban youths into the Futuwwa, constituted as an order of chivalry with ranks and elaborate ceremonies, into which he recruited the princes of the Islamicate world according to his international policy of reassertion of Caliphal suzerainty over the entire community of believers. Al-Nàsir himself had been initiated early in his reign, and in 1207 he unified all Futuwwa orders as “the purified Futuwwa,” and declared himself its supreme head (qibla)

4 To make good this claim as the heir to “the heritage of Prophecy” (miràth alnubuwwa), Caliph al-Nàsir published and widely disseminate a collection of the Prophetic Traditions he considered authentic. (Hartmann 1975: 216–32)


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and pole (qutb), appropriating these terms from Sufism. Hunting of birds and other sports were also brought under the Caliph’s supervision and he established his monopoly over raising pigeons to be used both for communication and for gifts to new nobility who were ranked according to the kind of pigeon they formally received from the Caliph. Members of the unified Futuwwa order called each other “comrade” (rafiq), the term being appropriated from the Ismà'ilis. Leaders of the guilds and city-quarters were invested with the Futuwwa trousers (shalwàr) and admitted to different ranks. Missionaries (another idea taken from the Ismà'ilis) were sent out to spread the Caliph’s “rightly-guided mission” and promote his new integrated order. The trousers and paraphernalia of investiture were sent to Muslim princes from northern India to Egypt, and the entire subjects of the prince were admitted to the Futuwwa order upon his investiture! The one group he wished to exclude from the unified community was the philosophers, whose libraries in Baghdad were burned. (Hartmann 1975: ch. 2; Mahjub 1971: 52–59) In terms of Eisenstadt’s model, al-Nàsir’s reforms represent a remarkable attempt at the creation of civilizational unity by the incorporation of heterodoxy, in the form of both the moderate Shi'ism of the Twelvers and the revolutionary Shi'ism of the Ismà'ilis, into orthodox Sunni Islam under the Caliphate. Differences notwithstanding, all this surely amounts to a remarkable and totally independently conceived analogue to the Papal policies of alliances with the cities, support for the Dominican and Franciscan Orders and the promotion of Papal monarchy. The Papacy’s success in constituting the Franciscan and Dominican orders and maintaining its authority over their convents in the cities of Western Europe contained heterodoxy by controlling popular religion and stemming the sectarian tide until the Reformation. Al-Nàsir’s ambitious attempt “to translate civilizational unity into an integrative power structure,” however, failed even more clearly and faster than the two parallel Western attempts, namely the Holy Roman Empire and papal monarchy (Arnason 2003b: 10). It was left to the heterodox Nasir al-Din Tusi, an Ismà'ili who later converted to Twelver Shi'ism and served a non-Muslim, Mongol emperor, to craft a synthesis of the Islamic, Perso-Indian and Greek political concepts that remained the basis of Islamic royalism of the early modern Muslim empires. That it was first presented to the governor of an Ismà'ili fortress in Khorasan may well have been accidental, but it reinforced a predominantly

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secular conception of royal authority that can partly account for the remarkable accommodation of religious diversity and tolerance of heterodoxy in these Muslim empires. Islamic royalism, however, did not foster democracy, as did the Thomist synthesis of the Greek political science and the Christian religion. Differential reception of Aristotle’s political ideas Thomas Aquinas was an exact contemporary of Nasir al-Din Tusi; they both died in 1274. They were both closely associated with the institutions of higher learning. Aquinas was a professor of theology at the University of Paris in the formative era of European universities, and sides with its secular masters in including Aristotle in the syllabus. Tusi was the supervisors of the religious endowments and madrasas of the Il-Khànid (Iranian Mongol) empire, and made a serious attempt to capture the madrasas for the teaching of philosophy. The Roman law of corporations enabled the European universities to claim that legal status and use it autonomy to make the reception of Aristotle definitive. The law of waqf which was the legal basis of the madrasas did not have a similar concept of corporation, and Tusi’s promotion of philosophy was reversed within a generation as it lacked a permanent legal foundation. The graduates of European universities acted as effective bearers of political Aristotelianism in the long and uneven path to representative government and democratization in Western Europe. Despite his failure to reorient the teaching in the madrasas, Tusi’s political ethics was taught there as practical philosophy in the early modern period. It remained marginal, however, and was not integrated in to the main disciplines of Islamic law and jurisprudence. Elsewhere, I have covered the initial reception of the Greek political science in the tenth and eleventh centuries and argued that the rational legitimation of religion is the philosophical theory was a potential challenge to the traditional legitimacy of the shar'i order. This made a clash between Islam and Greek philosophy, including political theory, inevitable, and a rejectionist civilizational response by the pious traditionalists gathered momentum and eventually displaced philosophy to the margin of institutionalized learning. In the course of a long and complex Kulturkampf, the rejectionist response was formulated by the jurists who proposed to revive the institution


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of the Caliphate with a program of Shari'a-based government (Arjomand 2001). They developed a theory of the caliphate as a branch of Islamic jurisprudence. In terms of our dichotomy, this theory realistically allowed for the possibility of “authority by seizure,” but advocated the subordination of the political to the shar'i order under the suzerainty of the Caliph. This is the theory that Gibb considered the basis of “constitutional organization” in Islam, to the exclusion of all other writings on political ethics and statecraft. In the generation after Tusi, the political ideas of the eleventh century Caliphal legitimists inspired the Siyàsa al-shar'iyya (Sharia-based politics or policy) by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) who lived in Syria and wrote in the face of the triple threat of the Mongols, the Shiìtes and the Crusaders. The science of civic politics, as formulated in Tùsi’s Ethics, had already subordinating its Greek form to the spirit of Perso-Indian statecraft. Under his followers, it slowly merged with statecraft, facing its programmatic Islamic counterpart of theories of shar 'i-government which may in fact have been increasingly accommodated (Tabàtabà"i 1994: ch.4). The Muslim synthesis of Perso-Indian statecraft and Greek political science was thus complete, and henceforth found expression in variants of the theories of the two powers: monarchy and prophecy (as embodied in the Shari'a and interpreted by the ulema). (Arjomand 2003a). Aquinas’s major contribution to Western political thought consists in his transmission of the key Aristotelian political ideas in his reception of politics as an independent science and the most important of practical sciences (Aquinas 1965: 198–99). He also put forward a remarkably Aristotelian definition of law as “nothing else than a rational ordering of things which concerns the common good, promulgated by whoever is charged with care of the community” (Aquinas 1965: 112–113). This paved the way for making the integration of Aristotle’s natural law into divine law as “participation in the eternal law by rational creatures” (Aquinas 1965: 114–15) the cornerstone of Thomism. Human laws proceed from natural law to more particular dispositions, and are “directed to the common good of the city” (Aquinas 1965: 130–31). Therefore, Human law has the quality of law only in so far as it proceeds according to right reason; and in this respect it is clear that it derives from the eternal law. In so far as it deviates from reason it is an unjust law, and has the quality not of law but of violence. (Aquinas: 120–21)

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Furthermore, Aquinas elaborated his “constitutionalism” (Sigmund 1993: 219–22), using both Aristotle’s ideas of the commonwealth (res publica), in which the whole body of citizens rule for the attainment of the common good, and of a mixed constitution as the judicious combination of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, defined by the participation in some respect of all the members of a city or nation in government (Aquinas 1965: 148–49; Pennington 1988: 448), together with a corporatist differentiation of community following Artistotle’s division of the city (Quillet 1988: 526–30). Aristotelian political ideas could be readily combined with other legal notions. In combination with the canonistic corporate theory, they produced the constitutional conception of the structure of the church (Pennington 1988: 448). And in combination with Roman corporate theory and public law, they gave birth to the modern idea of the state (Canning 1988: 361). As we have seen, the reception of Aristotle in the Muslim world had taken place some three centuries earlier, and the Mu`tazilites had used him as the First Teacher to defend the faith by creating rational theology (kalàm). There was, however, one startling Muslim omission in the Arabic Aristotelian corpus. Unlike Aquinas, Nasir alDin Tusi and the Muslim philosophers were unfortunate in that the one and only work of Aristotle which was not translated into Arabic was his Politics. They therefore tended to mistake Plato’s Republic as the natural extension of Aristotle’s Ethics, as Averroes did explicitly. To make good the lacuna, Nasir al-Din Tusi had written Akhlàq-e Nàseri, a much expanded translation of the commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics by Ibn Moshkuya (d. 1037; Miskawayh in Arabized form), which was to remain the main work on political ethics and statecraft taught in the colleges of the early modern Muslim empires. Partly for this reason, with Tusi and after him, Persian norms constituted much of the substance of the new political theory, Greek practical philosophy its form. To give one crucial example, Tusi’s treatment of justice begins with an interesting general philosophical discussion, but when he turns to the topic in the chapter on statecraft and kingship, which is immediately followed by the need for spies in statecraft, the Greek spirit is subordinated to the ethos of the Persian social hierarchy (Arjomand 2003a). Tusi’s groping toward the missing concepts of the Philosopher is evident. In Akhlàq-e Nàseri, he develops (207–12 307–8) the Aristotelian notion of “the common good” (Tusi: 207–12 as “maslahat-e 'omum”;


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307–308 as “khayràt-e moshtarak”). In a short tract he wrote much later for the Mongol emperor Hülegü, the idea of common good is applied systematically to distinguish between the king’s personal (khàssah) revenue and expenditure and those pertaining to “public royal goods” (màl-e masàleh-e pàdshàhi ). Gifts, benefices and jewelry should be paid for from the privy purse, while the public revenue of the kings should be spent on the army and the bureaucracy, the poor and orphans, couriers and ambassadors, and a postal service throughout the empire (Arjomand 2003a). Nevertheless, it is clear that Tusi could not go far enough on his own, and his synthesis contains only a remote echo of Aristotelian political thought as compared to that of Aquinas. Conclusion: Political modernity and the Islamicate civilization Through the mutual accommodation of the Shari'a and a political culture derived from Greek and Perso-Indian sources, the civilizational encounters under consideration introduced an unmistakable element of pluralism—or at any rate, dualism—in the normative order of medieval Islam. The consummate presentation of this medieval synthesis, which remained definitive for the early modern Muslim “gunpowder” empires as well, is found in Tusi’s Akhlàq-e Nàseri. Works on ethics and statecraft by Tusi’s epigone as well as his own treatise dominated the political thought of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, and other than the immediate Islamic rejectionist reaction of the Hanbalite Ibn Taymiyya, to be discovered and cherished by the contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, there was no Islamic reaction before the reassertion of the Shari'a in the lateseventeenth century Ottoman empire and the reign of Auranzeb and Shah Wali Allàh of Delhi in the eighteenth century.5 So down to that century, a university-educated European and a madrasa graduate, if they could communicate in a common language, would have shared the Aristotelian division of the human sciences into ethics, economics and politics as pertaining to the management of the individual self, the household and the polity. This is similarity, however, somewhat

5 The fact that the Islamic reaction was so late in coming should cast doubt on Huff ’s (1993) attribution of the failure to develop modern science to medieval Islamic ethos, which was in fact less hostile to science than the medieval Christian ethos.

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deceptive as the development of political thought in the two civilizations had followed a sharply divergent path. The unavailability of Politics in the Muslim world meant continued unawareness of many key Aristotelian political concepts that became available to Aquinas and others in the thirteenth century and shaped Western political thought, such as the commonwealth (res publica) and the rule of law (government by laws and not men), with the citizen being the ruler and the ruled at the same time (Aquinas 1965: 138–39). These ideas penetrated the Islamicate world as the implicit conceptual substratum of modern constitutionalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only much later did modern translations of Politics appear, and then as something of an antiquarian text in the history of philosophy. The real thrust of modernization in the debilitated early nineteenth century Muslim empires, the Ottoman and Iran, did not come from the strata with an interest in political science but from the rulers and the servants of the patrimonial state. The latter’s interest in the rationalization and defensive modernization of armies and bureaucracies gave them no incentive to uncover the Aristotelian substratum of modern constitutional law or to refashion Tusi’s political science in a democratic direction. Francis Robinson (1999: 241) ingeniously develops the idea that by taking Weber’s understanding of developmental history of world religions and his typology of religious rationalism, we can make sense of the fact that failures of the Westernized state machinery has “often been accompanied by a reassertion of Islamic world view and a reinstatement of the Shari'a in public life.” The result has been an ideologically concocted reinvention of the Islamic political tradition that bears no resemblance to the historical synthesis analyzed in this essay. The modernization of the Ottoman (later Tunisian, Egyptian and Turkish) and Iranian states dispossessed the ulema as an elite by taking over or eliminating many of their social and judiciary functions. In the twentieth century, the dispossessed traditional or “organic” intellectuals of Muslim societies formulate an Islamic counter-myth of their own against the “idol” of the modernized state. The political edge of this alternative Islamic social myth became increasingly sharpened as the century was drawing to a close. The late-twentieth-century “political Islam” obliterated the theory of the two powers from an increasingly reified and holistic historical memory, and discovered a hero in Ibn Taymiyya, whose apprehension of the abovementioned triple threat matches their fear of suffocation by the


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Western cultural invasion. Ibn Taymiyya’s monistic idea of “Shari'abased policy” was simplified still further into a vehemently rejectionist anti-Western myth of the “Islamic State” with the primary function of the execution of the divine law. Thus has the Islamic political tradition been reinvented in our time. Needless to say, this invented tradition requires elaborate separate treatment, but without understanding their divergence from the historical tradition, we cannot assess the prospects for democracy in the contemporary Muslim world.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MULTIPLE RELIGIOUS MODERNITIES: A NEW APPROACH TO CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOSITY Danièle Hervieu-Léger The debate over “secularization” How many writings, colloquia, seminars and symposia have been devoted to the question of secularization in the last thirty or thirtyfive years? While no one can be sure, it is certain that the speculation by the sociologists of religion as to the reality of the phenomenon, its nature and extent, have taken on a character close to obsession. The difficulty of answering these questions has left some constantly proposing that it is time to abandon this notion, which is now clearly impossible to sustain. Yet we keep coming back to it, as if unable to tear ourselves away from the contemplation of a hypothesis which has governed the social sciences—sociology in particular—since their beginnings: the notion of the irreversible shrinking of the place and importance of religion in modern societies. This inaugural hypothesis of sociology has been expressed in many different ways (some of them mutually contradictory) by the founding fathers of the discipline. We could say, in outrageous simplification, that it combines three principal themes: that of the rational reduction of belief in a world disenchanted by science and technology; that of the religious emancipation of the individual conscience in a world where individual autonomy is increasingly asserting itself; and lastly, that of the relegation of religious activity to a specialized sphere. An analysis, on the one hand, of the historical process by which religion has withdrawn itself from politics, and the observation, on the other hand, of the generalized decline of religious practice in European societies, lent this hypothesis a solid empirical foundation. This picture of the secularization of the modern world did not imply the disappearance, pure and simple, of religion. But it did postulate, at the very least, its inexorable privatization. Religion was evolving into a personal, private matter of conscience, with little or no

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incidence on the social definition of identities or the political dynamic of the State. This view has not stood up to the reality, observed since the late sixties, of the massive presence of religious manifestations on the public scene of contemporary societies, and the rise of spiritual movements all over the world. Faced with this evidence that the process of secularization has not reached completion, even in societies where the advance of modernity is most extreme, the sociologists of religion have had to make severe modifications to their analytical tools. First came the realization that the continuous renewal of knowledge and the acceleration of social and technological change, the increasing uncertainties that go hand in hand with the changeability of conditions and status, and the prodigious development in communications that has revolutionized our relationship to time and space, far from causing beliefs to peter out, have in fact all contributed to favouring their proliferation. The ultra-modern age has turned out to be a period of pullulation of small systems of meaning constructed by individuals from the resources at hand, to cope with the continual reshaping of their experience of the world. The individualized production of these little narratives of belief completely turns upside down the management systems of the great “codes of meaning” of which the religious institutions claim to be the guardians. In this movement, the authorities responsible for the official management of these resources find that they are now, at least partially, ruled out of order in their pretensions to announce and prescribe the true faith for each individual and for society as a whole. But the generalized practice of do-it-yourself belief construction is not the last word of religiosity within modernity. Another phenomenon that has become apparent at the same time is the extent of assertions of community and identity in which the resources of religion are brought into action. From Latin America to the Balkans, from the republics of the former Soviet empire to India, from the MiddleEast to the Philippines and Indonesia, no region in the world has been left out of the rise in the power of the ethno-religions. In North America—and even in Europe—it has been realized that the position of institutional religion is probably much less transient than had been postulated by the classical theories of the secularization of modern societies. What could be done to face up these body-blows dealt to the vision of secularization as a universal law of the modernization of societies?

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One solution was simply to sweep away the classical theories of the relationships between religion and modernity and conclude that the whole concept of secularization had never amounted to any more than a huge optical illusion or a fiction with a purely ideological foundation. Certainly this way of starting at the other end of the problem formed the principle of a flourishing school of literature at the beginning of the eighties, when there was widespread exploration, for example, of the supposed omnipresence of the sacred in modern societies (even in football matches and rock concerts) and prediction of the return of God into the public arena. The intellectual flaw in almost all of this literature lies in the way that the demonstration, in furtherance of the cause, fails to take account of one inescapable historical fact characteristic of all modern societies: the definitive disjunction between the world of belief and the organization of society. Another approach, more interesting from the sociological point of view, emphasizes the interruptions and reversals which have always been, and still are, liable to perturb the process of modern rationalization and to oppose the logic of disenchantment which is at the heart of the principle of secularization. This approach itself comes in two versions. The first lays stress on the crisis situations and effects of de-modernization—and hence of “de-secularization”—that they produce. This view—which makes religion a compensatory resource that helps in coping with the hiccups and disillusionments of progress— offers a lifeline in extremis to the classical view of secularization as a loss of religion by associating contemporary religious developments with a break (supposedly reparable) in the progression of modernity. But it is unable to grasp the issues of the religious productions of modernity itself. It is powerless, for example, to take into account the spread of spiritual currents and movements underpinning personal fulfilment, which are in perfect accord with the modern culture of the individual. The interpretation of the so-called New religious movements at the turn of the seventies brought out a second, contrasting school of thought. This version links these developments, not to a failure of modernity, but to the appearance of that individual subjectivity and culture of the self that characterize “post-modernity”. The growth in individual demands for meaning, the breeding ground for the contemporary religious renewals, is linked, according to this view, to the state of uncertainty inherent in societies subjected to an increasing pressure of change. The disqualification of

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the “great narratives” purveyed by the religious institutions and the dissemination of small systems of meaning cobbled together by the individual are responses to this uncertainty. These relate to the logical systems of narrative construction of the self that are inseparable from a world subject to the rule of an individualism of expression and the culture of authenticity. We recognize here the essential elements of a theme recited with a plethora of variations by the contemporary sociologies of religious modernity. But although this last view may be able to take into account the phenomena of individualization and subjectivization of belief that characterize the spiritual scene in Western societies, it altogether leaves out the paradoxical aspects of the religious communalization of ultra-modern societies. For the fluidity of individual spiritual paths does more than nourish those flexible forms of networks of religious communalization whose development was foreseen by Ernst Troeltsh as early as the beginning of the century. It also cohabits with the vigorously structured forms of the collective religious identity. On one hand, it can be seen that the deployment of peer forms of mutual validation of belief, subject to a flexible system of free exchange of truths, engenders, as its counterpoint, intensive forms of community validation of belief which give precedence, in contrast, to the exclusive sharing of the truth among pure, redeemed believers. I would say, in this connection, that the expansion of “soft” religion paradoxically nurtures the affirmation of “hard religion” (or strong religion, to refer to E. Sivan’s latest work).1 On the other hand, the great religious institutions continue to occupy privileged positions on the market for symbolic goods, a market which is admittedly liberalized, but on which the operators are not all positioned on a footing of pure, perfect competition: the degree of religious impregnation of non-religious mentalities, practices and institutions, even in the most laicized societies, should not be underestimated. Towards a sociology of “multiple religious modernities” Entangled in all these contradictions, efforts to renew the classical analysis of secularization could easily reach a new dead end. They

1

Almond, Appleby and Sivan (2003).


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have been revived by another observation, more recent this time: this concerns the exceptional character of the religious situation in Europe, and even in Western Europe, with respect to the religious changes that are coming about in the rest of the world. It is less than ten years since the sociologists of religion have been observing empirically that Europe is the only geographical and cultural area in the world (in common perhaps with Canada, and certainly with Quebec) where the ideal-type scenario of secularization as the expulsion of religion is genuinely applicable, in contrast to the other continents, including the United States. Nowhere else than in Western Europe has denominational religion been eroded to such a point. A catastrophic fall in recruitment to the clerical body, weakening of the direct political influence of the churches, together with a decline in belief in a personal God, an increase in cultural ignorance of religious traditions (of Christianity above all), the autonomous expression of personal moral conscience with respect to the ethical prescriptions of the religious structures, and finally, accelerated internal secularization of the major churches: all these indicators confirm the steadily deepening secularization of European societies in both their dimensions: objective (the institutions), and subjective (conscience and mentalities). This movement takes on its full significance within a religious history of politics, which stresses the concrete role that Christianity has played in the European domain as “a religion of the end of religion” (M. Gauchet). The essence of the problem, then, is to decide how much significance to give to this history from the point of view of the genealogy of modernity as a whole. Does European-style secularization constitute the ideal-type pattern for all religious modernity, or are we forced to admit after all that it is only one among a range of possible configurations? The former view has long dominated the intellectual landscape. Today, we know that it is no longer tenable. But how can we transcend it to think through the relationship of modern societies to religion from a new standpoint? Researchers are currently faced with two tempting options, at first sight contradictory. The first is to replace a general and supposedly universal theory of religious loss in these societies by a theory no less general, and with equal pretensions to universal validity, of a generalized fuzziness of beliefs in a globalized universe. This first deceptive window on the scene seems today to draw inexorably into itself a sociology of contemporary forms of religiosity which devotes considerable energy

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to an inventory of the galaxy, which is in unlimited expansion, of contemporary belief. The empirical confirmation of the individualized dissemination of beliefs and of the explosion of forms of dialogue providing for their validation in ultra-modern societies is made to serve a new, homogenizing reading of modernity, under the vague heading of globalization. This observation allows us to lump together, as part of a lagging anti-modern world, all the identifying manifestations of contemporary religiosity, forgetting that these are present at the very heart of the societies which have plunged fastest and furthest into this same “ultra-modernity”. By the same token, it avoids taking into consideration the major problem constituted by the polarization of contemporary religious modernity, in all its local variants, between soft religion and hard religion. But there is a second temptation, which is, conversely, to concentrate solely on the identification of these variants, taking it to the point where recognition of the empirical diversity of religious configurations in the different historic and cultural contexts of contemporary societies simply destroys all notion of modernity. I shall give just one example. It is estimated today that the refined identification of the multiplicity of religious cultures existing in Europe has become indispensable as a counter to the new simplification associated with the recognition of the “European exception” in religious matters. But insisting on the artificiality of the sociological construction of this exceptional character, adopted as the pivotal element in the description of the European model of modernity, can lead in some cases to a sort of theoretical abdication. The inventory of religious diversity of the Old World is a way to avoid the issue of analysing the process of exculturation of religion that transcends this very diversity, and which it is essential to analyse in order to make a comparison, for example, between the modernities of America and Europe. When I speak of American and European religious modernities—in the plural—I already emphasize the new lease of life that can be found by contemporary religious sociology, now that it is deprived of the support of the classical analytical tools, in the exploration of “multiple modernities” inspired by Shmuel Eisenstadt. If the notion of “multiple modernities” furnishes a means of escaping the attraction of the deceptive views that I have just mentioned, it stresses plurality while remaining anchored in a conceptual framework of modernity as a specific type of civilisation, even though it simulta-


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neously refuses to determine any specific description of modernity. By basing itself on those dynamics that produce configurations of a world view in a state of perpetual renewal (a world that is autonomous, open and in process of realization)—a world view positioned in a set of specific institutional formations, it opens the way for a pluralization of the figures of description of the modern civilizational model. And this is exactly the tool needed by a present-day sociology of religious modernities. This is a view with which it is possible to take into account the role of Christianity in the construction of the civilizational matrix which, with the Enlightenment and the great revolutions, took shape in Western and Central Europe when the “programme” of modernity, if I may so express it, went into orbit. But it also enables us—to the extent that it lays stress on the pluralization of modern modes of thought induced by the contradictions running through the institutional application of this programme—to grasp the diversity of the positioning and role of the religious in contemporary societies which nevertheless are all participants in this programme. In fact, this view does not just boil down in the end to a single description of the effects of modernity on religion (the converse of the way the classical theory of secularization works), it offers an invitation to grasp the historical configurations of the contradictions inherent in the programme of modernity (the contradiction between the postulate of the autonomy of individual subjects and the imperatives of social control, between the necessity for change and the need to ensure continuity of the collective bond, between the pragmatic vision of a world to be constructed here and now, and the utopian call to the advent of a completely different world, between a realist acceptance of the world as it functions and the reference to transcendence, between the pluralist self-assertion of communities and the universalist goal of a common, united world, etc.). These contradictions crystallize in a specific way and, through the way that different social groups adopt them, take their place as elements in a variety of cultural programmes perpetually reworked. From this viewpoint, for example, the polarization of the contemporary religious scene (taking all traditions together) between soft religion and hard religion is no longer positioned on an axis of modernity/anti-modernity. But within the dynamic of modernity itself, it can be composed, as it were, of two antinomic modalities, interdependent and inseparable from each other, of a process of reconstruction of the relationship to the universal and the pluralization of

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the systems of truth, which itself derives, at least in part, from the “de-occidentalization” inherent in the globalized age of modernity. The European model: a second look at a singular configuration of religious modernity But the prospect revealed by S. Eisenstadt does more than merely invite us to identify the plurality of the cultural and institutional configurations that are progressively brought into play on the basis of, and by ambivalent reference to, the original occidental programme of modernity. In my view, it offers an equally persuasive invitation to explore the internal dynamics of the differentiation and homogenization that produce the continual definitions and redefinitions of the programme itself. Within the constraints of this presentation, I shall make no attempt to set out all the theoretical and methodological implications of the latter proposition. But I would like to give a brief illustration of its scope, by taking a fresh look, in this light, at a few of the elements in the description of the singular configuration of European religious modernity. Europeans are further removed than most—as I remarked earlier—from the figure of the “practising believer”, receiving his religious identity from the community to which he has belonged since birth and in which he obeys the prescriptions of observance laid down by the institution responsible for the transmission of the faith. I myself have adopted two descriptive figures to exemplify the mobility of the individual paths that characterize the European religious scene. The first is that of the pilgrim, following his personal spiritual path, stage by stage. The second is that of the convert, who chooses the line of belief in which he feels at home.2 These descriptive figures are not valid exclusively in the European area, but it is in Europe that they best designate the movement towards religious individualization that disorganizes the classical forms of religious adherence and dissemination. This process of subjectivization of religion constitutes the culminating point of the long history of its gradual relegation to the sphere of the private. Historically, indeed, Europe (with processes that differed according to nation) was the

2

Hervieu-Léger (1999). And also: Hervieu-Léger (2001).


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scene of the assertion of political autonomy in contrast to the tutelage of every religious norm imposed from above. Europe was the laboratory of the “end of religion” and of the invention of political sovereignty, from which emerged—from the bottom up—the whole set of norms that govern collective life.3 Today it is the laboratory of the absorption of the symbolic resources of religion into the contemporary culture of the individual. This does not mean that religion has disappeared. It still persists as a personal choice and a mode of individual identification. But it serves less and less to nourish collective identities and is certainly no longer, in any country in Europe, the source of the framework of ethical norms that governs the life of its citizens. However, to describe the European religious situation, it is impossible to record only the objective indicators of loss (the decline in practice and the erosion of traditional beliefs) and to evaluate the extent of individual do-it-yourself constructions of belief. For such a view can take us no further than the most visible layer, that of the relations explicitly cultivated by individuals with the “great religions”. To measure the presence of religion in European societies, we have to delve more deeply. We have to position ourselves at the level of the politico-cultural structures and the ethical and symbolic structures that form the framework for communal living in the societies concerned, and which have been moulded in depth by religious traditions, Christianity in particular. We can then determine that even within the Christian realm, the construction of this modern problem of autonomy has followed different courses, visible, for instance, in the frontier that continues to divide Catholic Europe from Protestant Europe. This difference can best be illustrated by taking the case of France and Germany. The German problem of autonomy, anterior to any political problem of autonomy, was born of the experience of the Reformation. It is founded on the assertion of a religious individualism which disputes the very foundations of authority in the church and frees the believer’s relationship with God from all institutional mediation. The conception of the individual and the sovereignty that this entails is radically different from the fundamentally political construction that established itself in France through

3

Gauchet (1998).

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the dual and indivisible struggle against despotism on the one hand and religion on the other that was crystallized in the revolutionary experience.4 For a more profound analysis of the differences in the civilizational workings of religion in Europe, we would have to distinguish other relevant differentiations within these Catholic and Protestant sub-groups. Thus, within the broadly Protestant part of Europe, the English, German and Scandinavian perceptions of the Enlightenment, themselves rooted in different constructions of Protestantism, generated political cultures, conceptions of the relation between the State and the citizen, and notions of sovereignty and representation, that are far from homogeneous. Now every society in Europe today still bears the marks of the religious roots that are specific to it. In a country like France, where the historical work of laicization went particularly deep and the objective and subjective loss of religion can be particularly clearly illustrated, the phenomenon of catholic encoding of culture, institutions and mentalities remains extraordinarily significant. “We are all Catholics,” Sartre declares in Being and Nothingness. This formula is noteworthy in its emphasis on the mirror that the laity hold up to the figure of the Roman church whose direct hold over society and the individual it had laboured to break. More broadly, the whole programme of the major institutions—schools, hospitals, justice, the University, etc.—was established, and functioned for a long period, by reference (rendered implicit, of course) to the Catholic model.5 It is impossible to comprehend the manner of expression in public debate of numerous questions which have strictly nothing to do with religion (from the quality of food to ethical regulation of science, from the management of hierarchical relationships in business to the future of rural society, from the expectations that society has of the State to practices in social activism) without gauging this Catholic impregnation of culture. But this function of symboliccultural encoding operates in a completely different way, though with equal force, in every country in Europe, from Scandinavia to Great Britain, from Germany to Belgium or the Netherlands, in Italy or Ireland. In every country in Europe, the style of political life, the content of public debate on social and ethical problems, the definition of the areas of responsibility of the State and the individual, con4 5

Bouretz (2000). Dubet (2003).


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ceptions of citizenship and the family, visions of nature and the environment, but also practical rules of civil behaviour, relationships to money or modes of consumption (etc.) have taken shape in historicalreligious contexts which continue (up to a point) to direct them today. This is not because the religious institutions have retained any effective capacity to impose norms (we know that they have lost this everywhere), but because the symbolic structures that they moulded conserve a remarkable power of cultural impregnation that survives the loss of official beliefs and the collapse of observances. But this differentiated impregnation operates, we must never forget, within a common world shaped by the long history of dissociation between the spheres of politics and religion, one of the products of which is the specific style of a religiosity centred on the individual. The European model of religious modernity is positioned, with all the differentiations that I have just mentioned, in the context of the cultural and political programme of a European modernity which it is no longer possible to take as the definitive model of modernity as such. The great question that faces us today is clearly that of the future of this civilizational matrix, moulded over the duration of a long historical period. Several sets of factors contribute to the weakening of this cultural pedestal, at once unified and plural. In each case, the problems encountered reveal and accentuate the tension which is growing between the process of homogenization of the European religious scene by secularization on one hand, and the sometimes contradictory activation of different religious cultures present in this same European area, on the other hand. The first factor—which is also the most visible—is the cultural and religious pluralization of Europe linked primarily to the phenomena of immigration, and especially the definitive settlement of the immigrant populations within the host countries. The heart of this phenomenon of pluralization is obviously the strong presence of Islam in the different countries of Europe. This presence draws together those European countries that face the same problems of mutual acclimatization between widely disparate religious and cultural worlds. It also imposes a comprehensive re-assessment of the relationship between religion and culture in the different societies involved. But at the same time, it reveals the diversity of the responses elicited in these societies to the demand of Islam for recognition within them. While it is true, for example, that the size of the Muslim populations in Great Britain, France or Germany means that Islam can no longer be ignored in these three

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countries, it is also clear that the road to integration of these populations differs considerably, as a function partly of the political culture of each country, and partly of the special character of each of the varieties of Islam concerned (Pakistani, North African or Turkish, in the three cases in point). The different ways of dealing with a question such as the wearing of the veil in school is a good illustration of the fact that Islam has become a reality which simultaneously unites and divides the different European countries. The same dialectic of proximity and distance comes into play with regard to the phenomena of cultural globalization in which Europe is involved as much as all the rest of the planet. On the one hand, the spread of a homogenized media culture, the accelerated development of the circulation of goods, people and ideas, the homogenization of modes of consumption and the generalized subjection of exchanges—including exchange of symbols—to the mechanisms of the free market, tend to erode the cultural idiosyncrasies, especially religious, of European societies. On the other hand, the dynamics of this very cultural homogenization engender reactions which may favour the revival of these same cultural idiosyncrasies and bring back to the surface national political and symbolic issues relating to religious matters which might have been thought completely obsolete. While it may be imagined that the growing hegemony of NorthAmerican culture and values may arouse in opposition the assertion of a European culture armed with its own references and values, we must also reflect that it tends to generate the formation of “reactive identities” which, even within Europe, nourish strengthened areas of competition which may be inseparably denominational and national. The fight to defend the “cultural exception” certainly finds nourishment in the soil that supports the religious worlds that cohabit in Europe, but these religious worlds, which are themselves differentiated, may bring to it elements of content that are in plain contradiction. The phenomena of internal cultural pluralization on one hand and external cultural globalization on the other hand have the potential to contribute simultaneously to the erosion and the partial and paradoxical recreation of different religious civilizations in Europe. It is this dual trend that permanently defines and redefines the singularity of a European religious modernity. It is through this movement also that the place of European modernity is defined and redefined in the constellation of those “multiple modernities” that Shmuel Eisenstadt has taught us to consider.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

RELIGION AND POWER IN THE HISTORY OF THE EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH Michael Confino The nature of the relations between church and state in Eastern Christianity is a subject of debate and raises conflicting opinions among scholars, laymen, and clerics. These relations encompass political, ecclesiastical, and theological issues with numerous ramifications and components, closely linked in each given case to specific historical circumstances. Out of the major topics and their interpretations, this paper will deal with only one which has been variously formulated as: the presence in Eastern Christianity of a close identification between church and state; the alternative notion that there existed rather a situation of interdependence between them; and the question, Was the church a “servant of the state,” and to what extent? These formulas are not mutually exclusive, and there is indeed some overlapping between them; nevertheless they often denote distinct interpretations, and in the historiography of the subject they have served at times as code words for different approaches. Obviously, these are also quite complex issues, resistant to one-dimensional conceptualization and clear-cut definitions. In any case, the main purpose of this paper is not to look for the best formulas, but to find out the real operational arrangements which existed in different historical situations between the church and the state in the political and cultural spheres. Because of the closeness of the latter formulas, and their common problematic and interwoven arguments, they will be examined here analytically and comparatively, not thematically one after the other. Finally, it has to be said from the outset that the limited purpose of this paper is to add some nuances to the existing body of scholarship in this field, and not to tackle the wide range of the subject’s complex problematic. Moreover, in a topic encompassing a wide geographical area, numerous nations, and a long span of time, there are always, on the one hand, general features, common to

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many of the entities involved; and, on the other hand, specific ones, peculiar to each and every church and nation. Both types will be touched upon albeit with different degrees of emphasis. The paper is divided into two parts, with the first devoted to an overview of some salient features of the church-state problematic in Eastern Orthodoxy; and the second to an examination of church-state relations mainly in Muscovy and Russia, and occasionally in the Orthodox countries in the Balkans. Church and state: the view from the East It should be noted from the outset that during long periods of time Eastern Orthodoxy was a very politicized ecclesiastical organization. Georges Florovksy observes that it was “essentially a social religion,” and Pedro Ramet writes that it had “from the beginning a social and political concern.”1 This characteristic will be kept in mind in the present enquiry, with regard to the three main features examined in the first part of the paper, for their role in the shaping of church-state relations in Eastern Orthodox Christendom in Europe: the legacy of the past, the influence of some basic tenets of its creed, and its structural makeup. The weight of the past The Byzantine Empire lasted almost 1200 years and outlived most of the other great empires. The influence of its civilization expanded from Russia to Ethiopia, through the Caucasus, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean regions. Peoples owe to Byzantium their literacy and literature (Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia), others the beginning of their art and architecture (Romania, Georgia), and many—their Christianity, including the specific Eastern Orthodox turn of the perennial question of “church and state.”2

1 Florovsky, 1974, quoted in Pedro Ramet, 1988 p. 3. For some comprehensive and interpretative works see French, 1951; Schmemann, 1963; Pelikan, 1974; Ware, 1995; Binns, 2002. 2 The literature is immense; for some relevant general works and monographs, old and new, see: Runciman, 1933; Ostrogorsky, 1940; Angelov, 1946; Every 1947);

religion & power in the eastern orthodox church

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Constantine’s conversion to Christianity was of the utmost importance not only for the fate of the church, but also for the theology of an empire, for—in the accepted religious belief—he was converted directly by God, rather than by ordinary men. This fact sanctioned implicitly his power both in the church and in the empire and represented one of the most lasting and solid basis of the emperor’s position in the church. The early Eastern Church enjoyed the protection of the Roman emperors who, after conversion to Christianity, transferred their capital to Constantinople. In the Eastern Roman Empire, the emperor was head of the church, and the church was part of the state structure. Emperor Justinian (527–565) held that there existed a relationship of “harmony” between secular and ecclesiastical authorities. To this should be added the principle of symphonia (first formulated in 535 in Justinian’s sixth Novella,) which became a fundamental Orthodox tenet. In practice the “harmony” implied that the emperors took part in the internal life and activity of the church and at times even in the formulation of cannon law and the appointment of bishops. In this situation it was in the order of things that the state would use its power in order to support the decisions of the church and secure their implementation on its territory. The concomitant result of this relationship was that the church used the secular power of the state in order to implement what it considered religious orthodoxy and to fight “schismatics” and “heretics.” In any case, it has been pointed out that for Byzantine theorists it was axiomatic that the church could not survive without protection of the state (a view which requires qualification, as we will see below); in this view, later on, when Byzantium began to decline, the church became even more dependent on secular authority for physical protection and financial assistance.3 Thus we may say that this relationship, so to speak, spared Byzantium and the Eastern Church a “War of Investiture,” but although

Berkhof, 1947; Brehier, 1949; Barker, 1957; Browning, 1980; Alexander, 1985; Hussey, 1957; idem, 1990; Whittow, 1995; Treadgold 1997; Herrin, 2001. 3 See Richard Pipes, 1974, ch. 9, pp. 221–245. This succinct and brilliant chapter is a critical analysis of the Orthodox Church’s role and history; it offers insightful interpretations and raises questions open to debate. I have addressed here some of them as formulated in this treatment; see also Brehier, 1969, pp. 430–506; Hussey, 1957, pp. 85–99.

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such a war didn’t take place, the history of Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium and in other countries was a long and protracted tale of tensions between the ecclesiastical and the secular power. Contests were permanent and conflicts endemic. When “harmony” existed, it meant quite often either a willing or a reluctant submission of the church to the powers. One of the reasons of the church’s opposition stemmed from the fact that Byzantine theory emphasized the supremacy of the church over the state, and the same above-mentioned church theorists in Byzantium who held that the church could not survive without protection of the state, extolled also the proud Byzantine tradition of the primacy of the ecclesiastical power over the secular.4 If this is so, and if such conflicting situations did exist, then the formula “close identification of church and state” should be understood as a kind of precarious equilibrium between common interests and conflicting goals of the church and the state, influenced also, of course, by the nature of the personalities, the aspirations of the secular rulers and the ecclesiastical heads in each and every historical situation. In a sense, the long and protracted cooperation cum confrontation between the Eastern church and the state was quite often a clash of egos and of personal will, and not only an ecclesiastical and political dissension. Such were the cases, for instance between loan Tzimisces and patriarch Michael Cerularius in the tenth century, and between Andronicus II versus Calecas in the fourteenth. Finally, if in the early Eastern Roman Empire, Justinian (a man with a bent for dogma) took upon himself to occasionally make pronouncements in theological matters, this practice did not take roots and it was not to be seen again in Eastern Orthodoxy in any place during the following fourteen centuries. Thus, for example, no tsar of Muscovy or emperor of Russia could or did issue any laws concerning faith or establish any principles of Christian or ethical doctrine, nor did he ever legislate in matters of dogma or ritual; this was unconditional usage in Muscovy and explicitly formulated in the

4 On this issue the noted historian Michael Karpovich holds a different view: “At any rate, neither in Byzantium nor in Russia did the Church as a whole ever exhibit either a strong tendency to assert the supremacy of the spiritual power over the secular, or such a tenacity in defending itself against the encroachments of the State as were characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church in the West” (M. Karpovich, 1944, p. 13.)


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Fundamental Laws of the Russian empire. It was also strictly observed in current practice. As for the Balkan states in modern times, which, after their emancipation from Turkish rule, chose kings from various European dynasties, most of whom were Catholics or Protestants and some had to convert to Orthodoxy in order to be enthroned, it goes without saying that none of these newcomers had the standing and the will to meddle in the internal affairs of the local Orthodox church, let alone to utter opinions on canonical matters and Christian dogma. This was the case, for instance, with the princes of the Danish Royal House in Greece; the Battenbergs and the SaxeCoburgs in Bulgaria; the Hohenzolern-Sigmaringens in Romania.5 The limits of the secular ruler’s power over the church can be clearly seen even in the case of well established emperors with undisputed legitimacy. Thus, when we analyze, for instance, Justinian’s attempts to force a compromise between the Orthodox and the Monophysites, in which even this most “caesaropapistic” emperor could not succeed but to force only a shaky dogmatic agreement in his role of “manager” of the church. Similarly, the Byzantine emperors failed to impose their views on the church regarding Arianism, monothelitism, iconoclasm, and those of the crusading period were no more successful in dictating to the church in the matter of reunion with the reformed papacy of the West.6 When forced to choose between preserving the Byzantine state with Western aid or the integrity of the church, the Orthodox church, in effect, abandoned the empire and became itself the bearer of the ideal of the universal Christian community. The empire atrophied, but the Byzantine church prospered beyond the frontiers of the Byzantine empire, most notably in Eastern Europe, and proved thereby that it had been less dependent

5 A notable exception in this respect was king Otto I, a Protestant and Bavarian prince, who, ruled in Greece from 1832 to 1862. He had the church submitted to the civil authority, interfered in its internal affairs, and made it for all practical purposes an agency of the state, very much alike the Bavarian Protestant church after the 1818 Constitution. Deposited in 1862 folowing a military revolt, he was succeeded in 1863 by George I, a Danish prince. 6 Most of the works listed above in note 1 devote chapters or sections to the relations between Byzantium and the Roman Catholic west; for two recent monographs and documents dealing with shorter periods see Davids 1995; Ciggaar 1996; for a brief summary and selected examples of these relations, see also 1967, ch. 4 (“The Legacy of Dead Empires”), pp. 50–69; the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade is a well known historical episode, and does not need a detailed description here.

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on the empire than one might have thought. As Shmuel Eisenstadt succinctly put it: “Despite its close relations with the state and the secular world, [the Byzantine church] survived the downfall of the state and continued to thrive thereafter.”7 This fact alone is a clear refutation of the view, mentioned above, that “the church could not subsist without protection of the Byzantine state.” Quite the opposite. A short aside is in order here regarding the term “caesaropapistic”. The inverted commas used above are intentional, for in the long history of Eastern Orthodoxy from Justinian to Nicholas XI, Russia’s last tsar, the term is a misnomer and no more than a metaphor. I will not elaborate at length on this issue or try to elucidate why some authors (Arnold Toynbee, for instance) persisted in using this term with regard to Eastern Orthodoxy, even when proved inadequate.8 The essence of this controversial question was clearly formulated years ago by Shmuel Eisenstadt, to wit: “In general, the relation of the Emperor to the Patriarch, of the secular to the ecclesiastical, in Byzantium is best expressed not by the misleading word ‘caesaropapism,’ but as one of ‘interdependence’.”9 “Interdependence” indeed seems to me a more realistic and a more appropriate notion for the understanding of the Eastern Church. It is also a better alternative not only to “caesaropapism,” but also a more powerful paradigm for the analysis of the entire “church and state” problematic in this case. By the way, the Orthodox tenet of symphony of powers, mentioned above, holds that sacred and secular power are inextricably connected and interdependent. Thus, it appears that in terms of real life situations, even under Justinian, the state could perhaps control the institutional church, that is, the hierarchy, but could not control the charismatic element in the church, the monastics and the laity who looked to them for leadership, and the church’s strategic decisions regarding its integrity, theology, and canonical independence. It is important, in several respects, to keep in mind these characteristics, particularly when discussing the so-called “Russia’s Byzantine heritage.” The most obvious reason is that since Byzantium did not have a caesaropapist

7

Eisenstadt, 1963, p. 55; see also p. 191. For Toynbee, see below, note 10; see also Cyril Toumanoff’s one-sided and negative essay, 1946, pp. 213–243. 9 Eisenstadt, p. 54. See also Ahrweiler, 1975, pp. 130–132. 8


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regime, it could not bequeath such one to subsequent generations of states, polities, and ecclesiastical organizations. And the same can be said about the even less appropriate notion promoted by Toynbee and others that Byzantium and the Orthodox Church were “totalitarian organizations.”10 Alexander Kazhdan, a specialist in Byzantine history and culture, also holds that Byzantium was a “totalitarian state,” but he adds also four important qualifications and elucidations which make one wonder what exactly the term “totalitarian” should mean in this context.11 At about the same time, and during long periods (approximately from the fifth to the eighth century), there were not yet strong monarchies in the west with whom the Roman church had to compete (because of the collapse of political authority and the ensuing feudalization of the social order). Thanks to this relative power-vacuum, so to say, the church developed secular interests of its own, not only in Rome and in Italy, but also in wide areas of western Christendom. When vigorous secular authority made its appearance in the west, there too the road was open toward conflicts and confrontation. The western church asserted its superiority and several popes, in particular Gregory the Great (590–604), proclaimed the supremacy of church

10 See Toynbee, 1948, pp. 164–183. Here is, in Toynbee’s words, a short summary of his thesis: “What are [Byzantine’s] society salient features? Two stand out above the rest: the conviction (mentioned already) that Byzantium is always right, and the institution of the totalitarian state.” Subsequently, when the state succeeded to transform the church “into a department of the medieval East Roman state,” it reduced the church ipso facto to a position that made it totalitarian too. And finally (exculpating in fact Lenin, Stalin, and even Ezhov, at the tune of “C’est la faute a Byzance”), this is the heritage which Byzantium bequeathed to Russia from St Vladimir to the Bolsheviks. 11 11 Kazhdan, 1989, pp. 26–34; he writes: “. . . we can call the Byzantine empire a totalitarian state. And it was the only totalitarian state of the European Middle Ages. As such, Byzantium gives us material to observe a totalitarian state over a long period and to analyse its liabilities and assets, its roots and mechanism.” (p. 32). The four elucidations are: 1. Kievan (Rus’) temporal society absorbed very little of Byzantium in terms of political thought and practice, weaponry, etc.; 2. As for Muscovy, “Only in the fifteenth century when Russian grand princes began to build up their centralised monarchy did they discover their Byzantine ancestry; Russia did not inherit Byzantine totalitarianism but used the model for their [sic] political ends” (p. 34); 3. Countries like Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, that were in direct contact with Byzantium, did not develop a tendency to totalitarianism; 4. “On the other hand, totalitarian governments could be traced in various European countries whose contacts with Byzantium were very slight, such as Spain and France from the fifteenth century onwards” (p. 34).

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over state, and required the implementation of all the rights and prerogatives attached to this status. But this state of affairs didn’t last long. The militant stand of the papacy and the gradual strengthening of the secular power led inevitably to acute and endless conflicts, during which the secular rulers interfered in church affairs and in the nomination of popes, and above all arrogated to themselves the investiture of clerics and the distribution of spiritual offices. Sufficient to read the list of wrongdoings which Pope Gregory VII ( 1073–1085)—famous for bringing emperor Henry IV to Canossa— attributed to the brachium seculare to see the extent of the church’s submission and its manipulation by emperors, kings, princelets, dukes, and lesser notables. Gregory VII issued indeed his dictatus papae on papal world dominance, but the subsequent history of the papacy, with its popes and antipopes, scandals and nepotism, embezzlement and luxury, futile dethronments and contested excommunications, bears witness that the church didn’t enjoy a status of supremacy (nor of spiritual leadership) over the secular rule. After all, the Reformation came, at least in part, as a result and as a remedy to this deplorable situation. Thus, in spite of conventional wisdom, it seems that in many respects till the beginning of the early modern times (about the sixteenth century or so), the western church cannot be advantageously compared to Eastern Orthodoxy, including the cardinal issue of church-state relations. In any case no substantial dichotomy or fundamental contrasts can be observed in this regard between the western and the eastern churches. How things evolved in this respect during the subsequent periods is a weighty question which deserves serious treatment in its own right. Doctrinal influences on church-state relations The tenet postulating the supremacy of church over state was rarely implemented, not only because of unfavorable political constellations and the overwhelming strength of the secular power, but also because of inner tensions within Eastern Orthodox theology and worldview, tensions which hindered the drive toward hegemony of the church (at least till the late Middle Ages) and facilitated its submission to the state. It has been said also that in Eastern Orthodoxy another strong inhibiting factor of the drive to hegemony has been its propen-


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sity to elevate the tenet of resignation and humility. As succinctly formulated by the noted scholar Richard Pipes: The basic doctrinal element in Orthodoxy is the creed of resignation. [. . .] An aspect of this resignation is humility and dread of hubris. Orthodox theologians claim that their church has remained truer to the teachings of Christ and the practices of early Christianity than either the Catholic or the Protestant ones on the grounds that the latter, having become tainted by contact with classical civilization, have attributed far too great a role to analytic reason, a stand which has led them to the sin of presumption, whose main manifestation is the ambition to appropriate prerogatives pertaining to the state. Orthodoxy preaches patient acceptance of one’s fate and silent suffering.12

This interesting interpretation invites several questions. Thus, are humility and resignation a differentia of the Eastern Orthodox church? Don’t they exist also in the creed and teaching of western Christianity? And why, under certain circumstances, the tenet of resignation did not prevent the church in the west as well as in the east to try to achieve hegemony in the state and over the secular power? Finally, resignation is certainly a significant tenet of Christianity, but the question has always been: resignation to whom and to what purpose? The practical behavior of Christian churches in history indicates that resignation was existentially mandatory in certain cases, but criticized and counterindicated (on theological grounds) in others. Furthermore, with the passage of time there were more and more exceptions to the ideal (and idealized) attitude of resignation and humility in the worldly dealings and political activity of the Orthodox churches in most countries. Indeed, notwithstanding the church’s purported other-worldliness, once the inquiry switches from theological and religious attitudes to what the church as an institution did, one sees—particularly in Russia and in Greece (during and after the Ottoman rule)—that it was to a great extent implicated in the internal and foreign affairs of the realm, and above all with the burden of survival, with all the compromissions that this entailed. In the case of the Greek Orthodox church, for instance, this attitude led it to search and obtain the Sublime Porte’s support in carrying out an abusive and debilitating policy of ecclesiastical Hellenization

12

Pipes, pp. 221–222.

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(with its inevitable influences on the wider national culture) towards the “sisterly” Orthodox churches of Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, and on the first place—in trying to impose the Greek language in the liturgy and prayers of these non-Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians,13 (this came in addition to the Greeks backing occasionally Turkish repressions of the Bulgarians).14 For that reason resentment and distrust of the Greeks were not less intense in these nations’ historical memory (even to these days), than their harsh feelings toward the Turks.15 In the case of Russia, “otherworldliness” did not always inhibit (even among the “black clergy”) active participation in secular affairs (from politics to dynastic conspiracies). This was so even in cases when one would expect a greater urge to avoid worldly affairs; thus, discussing the revival of starchestvo (holy eldership) in Catherinian Russia, Laura Engelstein writes: “Though the [spiritual] elders emerged in answer to the aggressive secularism of the eighteenth century, they did not preach withdrawal from the world. Perhaps reflecting prevalent Enlightenment views, they counseled a spiritual life that encouraged engagement as well as retreat.”16 This was, then, a relative withdrawal of sorts.

13 In the case of the Bulgarians, this represented an ironic and unwelcome twist of history. In the 860s, when the Bulgarians decided to convert to Christianity, they chose Byzantium over Rome as their mentor (after a fierce competition between the two). One of the main reasons for this decision was that the Byzantines did not insist on the use of Greek in the liturgy, while the Roman Church required Latin. In fact, two clerics, Cyril and Methodius, had already invented a cyrillic alphabet for the translation of holy books and prayers from Greek into Old Slavonic. 14 See Ramet, 1988, pp. 7–8. 15 It has been often observed that anti-Semitism was extremely weak and inconsequential in Bulgaria. I can venture here from personal experience (being born and raised there) a hypothetical proposition that for Bulgarians anti-Hellenism served as a substitute for antiSemitism (you may have to hate somebody, but not everybody). Negative stereotypes of the “Greek” were similar to those attributed to the “Jew” in other countries, such as Greece and Romania for instance. From elementary school onward, kids were bred (before and after the 1930s) with intense anti-Greek feelings and representations. Textbooks, in first grade and up, told as a rule the story of Emperor Basil 11 Bulgaroktonos (Bulgaroubietz: Slayer of Bulgarians), who, after the battle of the Belassitsa (Balathista) Mountain on 29 July 1014, had over 14,000 Bulgarian war prisoners blinded leaving a one-eyed man to every hundred to lead them back to tsar Samuel, who died of the shock. The story was illustrated with drawings of endless columns of hapless blinded soldiers heading home in vast and gloomy plains. 16 Engelstein, 2001, p. 141.


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In other words, even if we admit the role of resignation and humility in the shaping of the Orthodox mindset, the question remains as to what was their practical effect in everyday life, that is in the political performance of the church, since we have to look not only at what some theologians preached and monks practiced, but also in what the church as an institution did. Actually, not unlike the papacy and most Protestant churches, in rules of practical conduct the Orthodox church—especially in Russia—tried to adapt itself to changing circumstances, and still preserve, even if in an imperfect form, what it regarded as its fundamental spiritual values. The result was that at times it found itself under the domination of the state, helping (or not opposing) it to oppress and persecute so-called “enemies of the state,” but also “schismatics” (thus serving the policies of the church’s orthodoxy). But this happened in western churches too (Spanish Catholicism being maybe the most telling example), and the difference between the Orthodox church and the others seems to have been one of emphasis rather than of substance (and the extreme case of some Catholic and Protestant churches under Nazi rule in the Third Reich, and also in Croatia, Slovakia and France bears witness to this). In the end, as will be seen below, the Orthodox church in Russia, for instance, lost its institutional autonomy under Peter the Great, and became a part of the state bureaucracy, but this development should be analyzed within the specific historical circumstances under which it occurred (and about which more will be said below). Organization Another integral characteristic which may have had an influence on church-state relations is the Eastern Orthodoxy Christianity’s internal organization. In simple terms the latter is, in fact, a confederation of independent churches without any central authority. Its unity is founded on the possession of a common dogma and on the theoretical possibility of holding Ecumenical Councils. In matters of faith each national church is bound by the decisions of the ancient Ecumenical Councils, but in all other respects it enjoys complete independence vis-a-vis the others. The different churches define themselves within the combined framework of the state and the nation, the state being either a national Christian one (like Bulgaria or Serbia,

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for instance), or a poly-ethnic non-Christian one, like the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, or a multinational “multi-Christian” non-Orthodox monarchy, as the Habsburg Empire. In the Ottoman and Habsburg empires it was the link between nation and Orthodoxy that played a major role both for the local church and for the national awakening and identity, as was the case for example in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania. (Paradoxically, in spite of this role of the church in preserving group identity, most of the leaders of the struggle for independence were anticlerical, influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and wanted the subordination of religion to the secular power; theirs was, in short, a secular nationalism.) Thus, being composed of independent national units, the Orthodox church is by definition decentralized. Its basic organizational principle is autocephaly; each of the national units is autocephalous or “selfheaded,” and has its own head who is not submitted to a higher ecclesiastical authority.17 It may be said that “it has no papacy” (or equivalent institution) and consequently it has no central and higher authority to give it cohesion. (The case of Bulgaria’s temporary dependence of the Patriarch of Constantinople is an exception confirming the rule, and Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy’s links with the Patriarchate of Constantinople will be examined below.) On the other hand, looking at the history of the papacy—particularly from the early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century—it cannot be said that the existence of a central authority was an unmitigated blessing, in view of the scandals, internal strife and unsavory situations which befell the Catholic church as a result of the papacy’s policies and behavior (a fact which should not conceal the Eastern Orthodox churches’ own internal fights and blemishes.) Thus the lack of a papacy, i.e. of a central and superior authority, cannot be held as an organic shortcoming of the Eastern Church, although theoretically the structural decentralization may have weakened at times Orthodoxy’s ability to stand up to secular authority. The question is, as Michael A. Meerson put it, “If there is no superior bishop or pope, in the Orthodox church, what then holds it together?” In

17 For a recent examination of this topic see Walters, 2002, pp. 358–364; see also Ramet, pp. 3–19. 18 Meerson, p. 33.


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his view: “Attachment to the heavenly king, [and] the act of communion in sacraments.”18 This structural decentralization contributed to promote the right of the Orthodox church’s national branches to use the local language in liturgies and theological writings. This practice brought the church closer to the people, and had the twofold effect of strengthening the bonds within the community of believers, and also separating the various national churches from each other. In this respect the Orthodox church seems to be closer to the Protestant congregations; and although it has been often asserted that it had nothing corresponding to Latin to give its members a sense of oneness transcending national boundaries, such positive effect is highly dubious considering the fact that in the Catholic church only the hierarchy understood Latin, while the mass of the believers did not, and one wonders what kind of “oneness” this gap could generate. (And has this “oneness” ever prevented bloody wars between western nations whose peoples attended mass officiated in Latin?) In fact, as John Meyendorff has convincingly argued, instead of being a weakness, part of the inner strength of the Orthodox church was its traditional theology, transmitted to the laity through the medium of the vernacular liturgy.19 Historical events and circumstances, not less than theological tenets and ecclesiastical policies in Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, and the Middle East during the centuries, resulted in that the main trend of Orthodox Christianity was centrifugal, away from the ecumenical and towards the regional and the national. “And this trend, in turn, has tended to blur the distinction between church, state and nation,” which means also, by the same token, that it has tended to strengthen the bond between the church, the state, and the nation. This was so in Russia, and to an even greater extent in the Orthodox churches in the Balkans.20

19 See Meyendorff, 1982. To illustrate this point I may add the following example. Recently a guest of mine, an Italian Catholic, attended mass in the church of Abu Gosh, an Arab village near Jerusalem; as usual mass was conducted in Arabic. When leaving the church, my guest had this comment: “It was very strange and perplexing. I imagine that during the centuries this must have been the feeling of millions of western Catholics when mass was read in Latin.” 20 Pipes, 1976, p. 224.

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michael confino Russian Orthodoxy: traditions, old and new21

For about two centuries after the introduction of Christianity—from 988 till 1240—Russia formed, ecclesiastically speaking, part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The metropolitans and the bishops were Greeks by birth and education, and the ecclesiastical administration was guided and controlled by the Byzantine patriarchs. But from the time of the Mongol invasion, when the communications with Constantinople became more difficult and educated Russian priests had become more numerous, this complete dependence on the patriarchs of Constantinople ceased. The Russian princes gradually arrogated to themselves the right of choosing the metropolitan of Kiel—who was at that time the chief ecclesiastical dignitary in Russia—and merely sent their nominees to Constantinople for consecration. In about 1448 this formality was abrogated too, and the metropolitan was consecrated by a Council of Russian bishops. A further step in the direction of ecclesiastical autonomy vis-à-vis Constantinople was taken in 1589, when during the reign of tsar Fedor I, Boris Godunov succeeded in procuring the consecration of a Russian patriarch, equal in dignity and authority to the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria. During this long period of several centuries, in the words of the noted historian Michael Karpovich, the church played a great and creative part in the history of Russian culture and the State. Not only did it control the spiritual life of the people, being the only educational agency in the country, but also became the chief guardian and exponent of the slowly growing idea of national unity. When, in the later part of the Middle Ages, the princes of Moscow undertook the political unification of Russia, it was the Church that

21 There is a vast literature on Russian Orthodoxy (exegesis, theology, catechetics, canon law, church history, monasticism, etc.). It is richer on pre-Petrine Russia than on the imperial period. In terms of ecclesiastical publications the Soviet regime is a hiatus during which appeared either anti-religious propaganda or (after the late 1930s) nothing at all. At that time the center of activity moved to the west (mainly to France) where emigres scholars and theologians, and non-Russian specialists published from the 1920s original and valuable studies. In Russia a renewed interest in these subjects is apparent in the 1990s (on this trend see Freeze, 2001, pp. 269–278). For some general works see: Dvornik, 1926; Florovskii, 1937; Fedotov, 1946; Taube, 1947; Seraphim, 1952; Kartashev, 1959; Tal’berg, 1959; Smolitsch, 1964; Billington, 1968; Pascal 1976; and the works cited in note 1 above.


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rendered them the most determined and particularly effective support. It contributed to the rise of the Tsardom of Moscow by lending it its own moral prestige and, in the persons of some of its outstanding representatives, it took a direct part in the work of national consolidation. Moreover, it supplied the young Russian Monarchy with a ready-made theory of divinely ordained royal absolutism which it borrowed from its spiritual parent, the Church of the Byzantine Empire.22

At that time, in all matters of external form the patriarch of Moscow was a most important personage in the inner circle of government. He had an influence in civil as well as in ecclesiastical affairs, bore the official title of “Majesty” (Velikii Gosudar’; lit.: Great Lord), which had previously been reserved for the civil head of the state and habitually received from the people scarcely less veneration than the tsar himself. But in reality he possessed very little independent power.23 And in spite of the church’s frequent objections, the tsar was the real ruler not only in civil affairs, but to a certain extent in ecclesiastical matters as well. Nevertheless, as the late Marc Szeftel succinctly put it, a religious coloration imparted in Muscovy to every aspect of public life gave unique status to the authority of the church, which it so blended with that of the tsar as to create the impression of diarchy. During the imperial coronation, the thrones of the tsar and the patriarch stood side by side in Moscow Cathedral of the Dormition. If the tsar participated in the church’s crucial moments, he did so not because he had the right to govern the church but because as an ‘Orthodox sovereign’ he had the duty to protect it. Two factors bolstered this position. First, the tsar’s ‘autocracy’ never was legally defined in Moscow. Second, there was a limit with regard to the Orthodox church beyond which no member, even a tsar, could pass. Above all, whatever influence he exercised over the life of the church, internally the latter remained completely autonomous, ruled by a national synod which elected the patriarch of Moscow.24

22 Karpovich, 1978, pp. 12–13. On this and other important topics, there are valuable informations and interpretations in the following collections of articles: Nichols and Stavrou eds., 1978; Le Christianisme russe. Entre millenarisme d’hier et soif spirituelle d’aujourd’hui, a special issue of Cahiers du monde russe et sovihique, 1988; Hosking, 1991; Batalden, 1993; Kivelson and Greene, 2003. 23 Karpovich concurs to this assessment: “And yet, in reality, almost from the outset the Church became a subordinate member of the alliance, with the State firmly retaining full measure of control” (“Church and State,” p. 3). 24 Marc Szeftel, 1978, p. 128 (emphasis added); see also Bushkovitch, 1992; Baron and Kollman, 1997.

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During the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) (also remembered by the people as “a time of impostors”), when “there was no Tsar and no master, and chaos reigned in the land,” the church-state relations were overshadowed by the internal and international turmoil which befell upon Russia. After the stabilization which followed the rise of Mikhail Romanov to the throne (1613), and particularly after the promulgation of the new Code of Laws ( Ulozhenie) in 1649 by his son tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645–1676), the relations between the very religious but authoritarian tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and the very ambitious and impetuous patriarch Nikon of Moscow (1652–1667), a staunch proponent of theocratic diarchy, had the potential to generate conflict.25 The crisis erupted in 1658 and lasted till 1667, when the tsar had a Church council attended by the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch (representing also those of Jerusalem and Constantinople) decide to deprive Nikon of the patriarchal see and of the rank of bishop, and order his incarceration in the remote Therapontov Monastery.26 Nikon’s policy and ambitions for a theocratic diarchy in the realm were not an exception in the tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the past, and particularly since the fifteenth century, Russian Orthodoxy’s creed, endeavor, and policy strove to establish a regime of diarchy in the tsardom, in which the tsar is first, and the church holds a wide array of spiritual and administrative functions in accordance with the tsar’s policies, and in common assent with him. At times the church succeeded to fulfill this aspiration, at times it did not. In any event, there were periods when such a regime of

25 Karpovich thinks that patriarch Nikon “attempted to advance in Russia the medieval Western doctrine of the supremacy of the spiritual over the secular power . . .” (“Church and State,” p. 14). This view is open to debate, and is not endorsed in this paper. Kliuchevskii’s psychological portrait of Nikon remains a classic piece of historical analysis, and worth to be read again despite the one hundred years and more since it was published (see Kliuchevskii, 1957, vol. 3, pp. 298–313. Aristeides Papadakis follows Karpovich’s view and holds that Nikon “sought to break the Byzantine past by setting the church above the state,” and he defines the patriarch as “a Russian Hildebrand.” (Papadakis, 1988, p. 54). 26 For an exhaustive and still useful treatment see Kapterev, 1909. This conflict should not be confused with Nikon’s attempts at liturgical reforms which led to the great schism in 1666; in his magisterial work (1959), Pierre Pascal gives a brilliant analysis not only of the religious schism (raskol) generated by them, but also valuable information on the “church and state” issue at that time and the personalities involved.


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diarchy existed de facto.27 The break in this tradition—and it was indeed a deep and lasting one—occurred under Peter the Great (16891725), when the subjugation of the spiritual power by the state became almost complete.28 The attachment to tradition and to the letter of external observances characteristic of Russian Christianity was rudely shaken by the tsar’s militant iconoclasm; and the resulting feeling of indignation and bewilderment among the clergy and the believers was aggravated by Peter’s ruthless methods.29 The last patriarch in imperial Russia was Adrian; after his death in 1700, Peter—having in mind perhaps the lessons of the conflict between his father tsar Alexei and patriarch Nikon—left the vacancy unfilled and appointed Stefan Yavorsky (a cleric loyal to the throne), “keeper and administrator of the patriarchal see,” an office he held formally until his death in 1722. But the year before, in 1721, Peter had already issued the Ecclesiastical Regulation or Church Statute (Dukhovnyi reglament) which provided for a reorganization of the church administration, a program of education, and the abolition of the patriarchate, replaced by a collegial body called the “Ecclesiastical College.” At its first session the latter renamed itself the “Most Holy Ruling (or Governing) Synod,” (Sviateishii Pravitel’stvuiushchii Sinod ). The Ecclesiastical Regulation was written for the most part by Feofan Prokopovich, an Orthodox bishop strongly influenced by Protestant doctrine, who was entirely devoted to Peter and shared his views on ecclesiastical reforms.30 The Holy Synod was organized according to the same administrative principles as the other “colleges” (Kollegii, or ministries, inspired by the Dutch and Swedish models), except that

27 This was the case, for instance, during the reign of the first Romanov, when patriarch Filaret (1619–1633) was the virtual co-regent with tsar Mikhail, and was officially recognized as such. It should be said, though, that in addition to his skill and prestige, Filaret owed his elevated position to the fact that he was the tsar’s father. 28 Karpovich’s interpretation is different, and he sees Peter’s ecclesiastical reform as “less revolutionary that it might seem at first glance. It was a consummation of a long historical process rather than a sudden break with the past” (“Church and State,” p. 15). In this respect he follows the grand interpretation of Vasilii Kliuchevskii who held that Peter’s reforms were a continuation of trends and changes that began in the second half of the seventeenth century; in his view Peter’s innovations consisted less in the substance of things, than in the harsh and brutal means he used to implement the reforms. 29 For a good treatment of this subject see Cracraft, 1971. 30 Muller, 1972.

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its twelve members, appointed by the tsar, were drawn from the ranks of the higher hierarchy, including the monastic clergy. Its main functions were defined as “the preservation of the uncorrupted doctrine of Orthodox Christianity and proper norms for the conduct of church services, the combating of heresy and schism, the verification of reports concerning miracles and saints, the extirpation of superstition, the supervision of preaching, the choice of worthy hierarchs (bishops, archbishops, and metropolitans), the supervision of ecclesiastical schools, the censorship of ecclesiastical books, and several others.”31 The Holy Synod was under the supervision of an Over-procurator (ober-prokuror), always a layman, who acted as “the sovereign’s eye”; he had “for all practical purposes the status of a cabinet minister,”32 and although formally not a member of the Synod, he became the actual head of the church administration (the official and statutory title held by the tsar was not “Head of the Church,” but “Supreme Judge”). The Synod employed an array of officials to carry out its ecclesiastical, administrative, and policelike functions.33 This synodal system of church governance was adopted also, after their emancipation from Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century, by Greece, and later on by Bulgaria. Although the Russian Orthodox church, not unlike those in the west, never succeeded to become the supreme power in the realm (a status it didn’t aspire to anyway), it had, until 1721, as mentioned above, its autonomous administration, headed by ecclesiastical dignitaries (first the metropolitans of all the Russians, then the patriarchs, and finally the “keeper and administrator of the patriarchal see”) who recognized no secular authority except that of the Crown. The tsars interfered at times in ecclesiastical affairs, but there was some truth in Feofan Prokopovich’s view that the Church continued to remain “a state within a state.” If this was also the perception of the tsar, then the reform was intended to bring it to an end with the creation of the Holy Synod in 1721. And although in purely religious matters the Holy Synod was to exercise “the full rights and power of the patriarch,” this signified also the incorporation of the

31

Treadgold, pp. 22–23. Szeftel, 1978, p. 133; for a different opinion on this point see Gregory L. Freeze, 1985, pp. 90–91. 33 See Muller, pp. 142–153. 32


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Church within the framework of the state administration. This curtailment of the church’s autonomy had at least one positive result; in the view of Gregory Freeze, an authority on Russian ecclesiastical history, this link between the church and the state structure was instrumental in creating an improvement in the church administrative functions. It allowed also the Holy Synod to exercise a more effective control over the various ranks of the clergy, and to enhance the training of the priests.34 On the other hand, Freeze questions the notion of the church “incorporation” within the state, and considers that “the church preserved until 1917 its special status as an institution parallel to, not inside, the state apparatus.” Moreover, he holds also that, “Set apart structurally and organizationally from the state, the Synod retained considerable operational autonomy and, especially, the capacity to defend ecclesiastical interests, to function more like an interest group than a mere department of the state bureaucracy.”35 This is certainly correct, but it does not invalidate the fact of the church’s incorporation in the state structure. As is well known, in bureaucratic organizations, and particularly in state bureaucracies, various departments (ministries, agencies, bureaus, etc.) achieve various degrees of relative independence and autonomy from the central government or from superior authorities. (And this is so even in the most centralized and authoritarian regimes.) In Russia, the case of some provincial Governors (for example Mikhail Speranskii in Siberia, General C.P. Kaufman in Central Asia), who took great liberties in fulfilling their task and acted almost as Vice-Roys or Roman proconsuls, is well known. Thus, in real life, the Synod was part of the state bureaucracy, and at the same time held a considerable degree of autonomy thanks also to the spiritual aura attached to its “field of competence.” The Holy Synod continued to function as a ministry of ecclesiastical affairs until the fall of the monarchy in 1917, when the patriarch ate was restored. Tikhon, the first patriarch, was elected in 1918; after his death in 1925, the Soviet Government, like Peter the Great, abolished de facto the patriarch ate and did not let an ecclesiastical assembly to convene in order to elect a successor.36 Later on, by an

34 35 36

See Freeze, 1977; 1983. Freeze, pp. 89, 92. See Evtuhov, 1991, pp. 497–511.

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ironic twist of history, the patriarch ate was restored in 1943 by no other secular ruler than the ex-seminarian Iosif Stalin. It was not by accident, as Marxists use to say, that at exactly the same time and for the same political reasons, the same Iosif Stalin disbanded the Comintern—this epitome of the greatest secular religion in the twentieth century.37 Apparently, both religions were linked in more than one way. On the face of it, Peter’s ecclesiastical reform, then, seems to represent a turning point in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. With various qualifications, such is the prevalent view in the historiography of the subject from P.V. Verkhovskoi, to lames Cracraft, to Marc Szeftel, to Richard Pipes; as seen above, Kliuchevskii and Karpovich shared this view too, while stressing also the continuity of some intellectual and spiritual trends originating in pre-Petrine Russia.38 Gregory Freeze holds a more nuanced view on the role and status of the church after the Petrine reform; without explicitly calling into question that this was a turning point in the Russian Church’s history, he implicitly shows that the change in its status and functions after Peter was not as profound as usually assumed, and that the church enjoyed a non-negligible degree of autonomy and self rule. 39 To the best of my knowledge, the only truly dissenting voice from these relatively concurrent views is that of Pierre Pascal, prominent scholar, remarkable teacher, and great expert on Russia thanks to the many years he spent there. On the question of when did the break occur, he holds that in terms of the church’s spiritual life the break was in the great schism generated by Nikon’s ecclesiastical and liturgical amendments in 1666. In his words: “Depuis Nicon, la Russie n’a plus d’Eglise. Elle a une religion d’Etat. De la à la religion de l’Etat, il n’y a qu’un pas. La religion de l’Etat a été instaurée par le pouvoir qui en 1917 a succédé à l’Empire.”40

37 The fitting expression “secular religion” in reference to marxism and twentiethcentury communism was coined in the 1930s by Raymond Aron, a credit almos never given to him. 38 Verkhovskoi, 1916; the other works have already been quoted above. 39 Freeze, 1985. 40 “Since Nikon Russia has no church. She has a state religion. From that point to [establishing] a religion of the State there is just one step. The religion of the


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Opinions diverge, then, on the scope of Peter’s transformations, and on the subsequent status and role of the “reformed” church, for on the one hand, traditions, beliefs, and practices don’t fade away overnight, but on the other hand, the reform set for the church possibilities for new directions of spiritual evolution, internal organization, and rapport with modernity. Against this background, two more questions need to be addressed. First, what were the goals which prompted Peter’s reform? Second, what were the sources and influences on church-state relations which inspired them? Peter’s ecclesiastical reform: goals and influences The goals of Peter’s outright reforms have been extensively researched, well described and meticulously analyzed, and they don’t need here a detailed presentation. His aim was modernization for the sake of efficiency and rationalization: modernization of the army, of the central and the local government, of the administration, of the ecclesiastical establishment. These transformations entailed secularization (a crucial element regarding ecclesiastical matters), rationalization, bureaucratization, and standardization of all the branches and subdivisions of the state apparatus and of the social fabric. Mandatory shaving off the beards was an anecdotic but also telling example of this urge to modernize, to regulate, to equalize. The church did not escape this mighty urge carried out with ruthless determination and the harshest of means. What were the sources of inspiration of these policies in the ecclesiastical domain?

State was established by the government which succeeded the Empire in 1917.” Pierre Pascal, Avvakum et les debuts du raskol, p. 574; quoted in Agursky, 1988, p. 493. Strangely enough, recent research has confined to oblivion both Pascal and Agursky in spite of their authoritative works in Russian religious history; alternatively, when findings and ideas of theirs are used, no credit is given them and no attribution of authorship. One such example is the above mentioned article of Agursky: post-Soviet historiography in Russia and in the west “discovered” (and presented as “innovations”) religious aspects in the bolshevik project, and religious motivations in Stalin’s bent to monolithic ideology, contracted, as it were, during his seminarian years. None of these cases mentions Agursky’s (let alone Boris Souvarine’s) pioneering works in this field. For the new “Stalinologists,” Souvarine, author of the first major book on Stalin and stalinism (1935), remains taboo as in the Soviet times.

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On this issue too there are different schools of thought. Arnold Toynbee, for instance, in his article “Russia’s Byzantine Heritage” (quoted above) and in other writings, argued that the church-state relationship in Russia (like her entire political and spiritual development before and after Peter) stems from Byzantine tradition and is predicated by the fact that Byzantium was a totalitarian state, that the Orthodox church was subjected to it and by the same token bore the features of this totalitarian polity. This was, according to Toynbee, the essence of the “Byzantine heritage” bestowed from the times of Justinian to Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great to Stalin. Unfortunately, Toynbee did not explain how he understood the meaning of the term “heritage,” and how “heritages” (spiritual, political and otherwise) are handed down the centuries to different peoples in various places. Moreover, he didn’t say either whether, in his text and in this context, “totalitarian” is a metaphor or just an anachronism: an additional blemish of his obviously a-historical thesis.41 Another view holds that the sources and influences of Peter’s ecclesiastical reform, as those of his administrative reforms in general, can be established with a considerable degree of certainty, and therefore there is no need to resort to metaphysical speculations and conceptual anachronisms to explain them. In this view, Peter’s system of church-state relations derived from two sources: first, from the Byzantine tradition as interpreted by old Moscovy; second, from the legal pattern existing in Protestant states, which was the model for many Petrine reforms. Let me begin with the later. This second source of the 1721 ecclesiastical reform was the example of legal church-state arrangements in Protestant lands (British, German, and Swedish), for it incorporated essential features inspired by this states such as canonical territorialism, the collegial principle, the bureaucratization of the church, and the oath to the tsar by the Holy Synod members (including the priests and the monks). Synodal members resented the oath, and in particular the quality of “high-

41 Toynbee, 1948 see above n. 10. As another example illustrating the weakness of the “Byzantine heritage” thesis one may turn to the often cited theory of “Moscow, the Third Rome.” In fact, this theory was not identical with Byzantine universalism. The messianic and nationalistic elements with which it was tainted had little to do with Byzantine tradition, and were not part of a “Byzantine heritage.”


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est judge” attributed to “the graceful Sovereign,” that is to the tsar (or tsarina). But this was also the limit of the Protestant model in Russia, and Orthodox doctrine made it impossible for the Russian monarch to follow the Protestant pattern of summus episcopus, for, in the first place, he did not belong to the clergy, and secondly because Eusebius’ idea of the emperor as a koinos episkopos was never accepted by Byzantine as well as by Russian Orthodoxy. But even if applied this would not have meant neither “totalitarianism,” nor “casaropapism,” and Toynbee would have been surprised maybe to find such an “heritage” coming to Russia not from Byzantium but from Lutheran lands.42 Actually, Russian emperors and empresses were not more caesaropapist than the kings and queens of England, and, for the sake of argument, in Marc Szeftel’s view they were even less.43 The other originated from the resilience of Orthodox faith and practice. The reform of 1721 did not destroy entirely the Muscovite version of Byzantine tradition described above; Peter adjusted it to conform with his ideas and political requirements. Hence, both the Orthodox church and the Russian state strongly emphasized the religious and mystical qualities of the tsar’s power which continued to resonate strongly in the popular mind, not only during a short span of time after 1721, but until the Revolution in 1917. What was the Muscovite legacy? Following Byzantine example, which they adapted to the local conditions, Muscovites stressed the intimate association between the temporal and spiritual powers, an association which at times, as explained above, looked like a diarchy. Church and state worked hand in hand against any foreign enemy, domestic rebellion, or heretical challenge in order to protect a world order established by God. Inevitably, as in Byzantium, such an alliance made the church dependent upon the tsar for protection, but there was nothing “totalitarian” in this lien de dépendance: in Russia as elsewhere the church became dependent upon the tsar not because of some totalitarian propensity, but mainly because he also had the

42 A similar case can be seen in the Greek Constitution of 1833 which made Orthodoxy an extension of the state. Papadakis writes that this settlement, authored by king Otto I and the German Protestant Georg von Maurer, “was fundamentally Protestant and Western, alien to Byzantine tradition of church-state relations. It was [. . .] inspired largely by the modern secular state rather than by any Byzantine pattern” (Papadakis, 1988, p. 51.) 43 Szeftel, 1978, p. 130; see also Karpovich, 1978, p. 16.

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big battalions—les gros batallions—and it was wiser not to fight them, as the hapless patriarch Nikon of Moscow learned from personal experience. But in spite of certain continuities with seventeenth-century political, intellectual, and spiritual developments, Peter’s reform modified the Muscovite pattern in that the highest administration of the church underwent change, not by initiatives from inside, but as a consequence of external factors and state legislation. Thus, administratively, the church passed under state control (and the degree of its strictness or leniency is immaterial in this context.) Moreover, the secularization of Russian public life, accompanied now by a clear definition of autocratic absolutism, removed the last restraints on the sovereign’s power over all of his subjects, including the church. This was, in fact, the Russian version of Europe’s “enlightened despotism,” as practiced at that time in other countries too, and as advocated by the philosophes and a pleiade of eighteenth-century enlightened luminaries.44 Summing up the essential features of the relationship which obtained since the eighteenth century, Marc Szeftel writes: “Whatever the relative weight of church and state during the imperial era (and there cannot be any doubt that the state dominated the relationship), the two forces were closely intertwined. The state gave the Orthodox church complete support in many essential ways. Orthodoxy was the dominant faith of the empire, enjoying a monopoly on religious proselytism. It exercised censorship over the religious content of all books. Bishops delegated clergy to attend ex officio the meeting of zemstva self-government institutions. Governors were required to act as the church’s brachium seculare on behalf of Orthodoxy’s struggle with heresies. But most of all, the church enjoyed the state’s material support.”45 Moreover, for most of the period under examination, while granting this support “the state did not establish direct control over the church finances.”46 Above all, the religious and mystical 44

In Russia, by the middle of the eighteenth century, this led to what Viktor Zhivov has called “the cultural synthesis of absolutism,” which included religious and secular forms of expression; see Zhivov, 1996, pp. 368–369; see also Nichols, 1978, pp. 67–89. 45 Szeftel, 1978, p. 136. This support was of paramount importance after the secularization of the church landholdings (and the serfs attached to them) by Catherine II in 1764; this act deprived the church of its main source of income. 46 Freeze, 1985, p. 88.


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qualities of Muscovite church-state relations persisted at least until the beginning of the twentieth century, and its most striking and important manifestation was the rite of coronation with the primordial role played in it by the church. As brilliantly demonstrated by Richard Wortman in his Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy,47 the rite of coronation, on the one hand, conferred sanctity on the new tsar, on the other hand, placed him firmly within the context of traditional Orthodox tsardom. Whatever the important political meaning of this ceremonial may have been, the religious element carried much greater weight. It was an unalterable fact that only the church could confer sanctity; the tsars knew this well and subsequenty it remained alive till the very end of the monarchy. It may serve as an ironic reminder that Nicolas XI, the last Russian tsar, was a forceful albeit pathetic and fatal incarnation of this belief and behavior.48

47

Wortman, 1995; vol. 2, 2000. On this period see Curtiss, 1940. Paradoxically, after the constitutional reforms of 1906, the church came under the legislative control of the Duma; see Szeftel, 1978, pp. 131–135. 48

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FROM RELIGION TO NATIONALISM: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE JEWISH IDENTITY Eliezer Ben-Rafael Religion, nationalism and identity Many researchers see in nationalism a modern phenomenon produced by post-Enlightenment culture (Stille, 2003). Nationalism, it is argued (Vujacica, 2001), is a by-product of industrialization—a secular ideology that overcomes the resistance of traditions and gives meaning to necessary sacrifices. For Gellner (1983), nationalism consists in the emergence of a culture which invents the nation. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) see in the nation practices which inculcate new values by assuming continuity with the past. The nation-state with its territory and language is a product of modern “social engineering,” replacing kin and religion as loci of individual loyalty (Anderson, 1991). Yet many scholars share today a view that stands more in accordance with the multiple-modernities perspective (Arnason, 2003a; Eisenstadt, 2003a, vols. 1–2). Brubaker (1992; 1996) grounds nationalism in both modern civic values, which define the community as a voluntary fraternity, and the idea of an organic collective—the nation—united by a culture stemming from traditions. Looking at this vision, one unveils the role of religion as a founding element of nationalism. Sahlins (1989) shows that religious strife in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe was the early phase of the development of nineteenth-century nationalism. Colley (1992) emphasizes that nationalism often started with the demonizing of a religious “other” and the description of one’s own camp as a holy nation (see also Marx, 2003; Armstrong, 1982). Shafer (1972) describes the nationalization of religions and churches in England or Sweden—not to mention Russian and Greek Orthodox churches—in relation to the development of nationalism. Moreover, a religious war engendered the Netherlands and was the first example of a national liberation

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war. In all these, religion was the ally of nationalism and, with the rise of latter, left strong prints on its further evolution. Religion itself might undergo politicization and play a role of its own within the polity—sanctifying the nation-state through “messianic politics,” for instance—while nationalism itself may tend to become a “political religion.” All in all, nationalisms draw on the religious background of the population, even where the nationalists reject it personally. Nationalism, says Anthony Smith (1991; 1998), emerges on religious foundations and is infused with their motives, though in each society, it may mix sacred and worldly notions in a different manner and with different consequences. Nationalism raises new concepts of collective identity that transform traditions and religion but rarely turns its back on them. It draws symbols from the “warehouse” of traditional symbols and alters their meanings, but still uses them to indicate an allegiance to a past that is both idealized and criticized. Idealized because it asserts a collective “historical destiny,” and criticized on behalf of new civic values (Schama, 1989; Tamir, 1993). This perspective throws light on Jewish nationalism, since the religion-people link has always been a primary code of Judaism; this affinity of Zionism to values of traditional Judaism has been noted (Katz, 1960; Avineri, 1981; Eisenstadt, 1992b). What has not yet been considered is how, more precisely, religious value contents were transformed to become ingredients of the national identity, and what specific consequences this process entails for the new society. The more intriguing of these issues—as nationalism—has here effectively created a new society, not only thanks to references to religious axioms but through confrontation with religious forces. Moreover, the reliance of national identity on religious contents, it appears here, does not necessarily follow one path only, and this may account for tensions and conflicts that may then constitute new endemic features of the public scene. It is against this background that we focus here on the question of collective identity—as widely understood in the literature (LeviStrauss, 1961; Giddens, 1991; Taylor, 1998). We see by definition (Ben-Rafael, online 2001), a collective identity as necessarily implying three facets associated with different basic principles or dilemmas between principles—in Levi-Straussian terminology, one would speak of “deep structures” (Levi-Strauss, 1958). The first asks how people describe their link to the collective and their obligations to it; that

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is, the practical implications of their self-definition as members of a collective. The second asks how individuals describe the social, cultural or moral singularity of the collective. The third facet asks about how individuals perceive the collective’s locus vis-à-vis “others”— that is, out-groups. These three facets of collective identity are not necessarily perceived in the same manner and with the same acuity by all individuals within the same collective, and different formulations may emerge as a result of circumstances, influences, experiences or value preferences. We contend that the Jewish case of national identity illustrates all the patterns whereby traditional contents, symbols and axioms undergo “structural transformations” (Ben-Rafael, 1997). By this we mean that principles of action disembedded from their conceptual anchorage are integrated in a new perspective and granted new—but related— meanings. Regarding our specific purpose, we mean that nationalism integrates basic principles of action vis-à-vis the world and society, by disembedding them from the religious cosmogony and setting them in a new perspective with new meanings. Once a part of the national identity, such principles take on meanings that accord with, and support, its aspirations to justify the establishment of a nationstate. A transformation that implies drastic changes of attitudes of individuals vis-à-vis their experience and environment, but which is, at the same time, presents itself as the culmination of the collective’s destiny. It is with this perspective in mind that the following analyzes the transformation of the Jewish religious identity into ingredients of various formulations of the national Jewish identity. The caste syndrome Traditional Judaism has always been characterized by an emphasis on religious faith as the primary element of the collective’s uniqueness and its most crucial identity attribute. “The Jews,” says Saadia Gaon (quoted in Weinberg, 2002), “are a People only thanks to their Torah” (God’s Teaching). From the Biblical era and the epoch of the Talmud to Hassidism and rabbinical culture, this identity did change emphases under the influence of the environment (Schmueli, 1980), but at least ever since the Talmud, the principle of the “God and Torah of Israel” was Judaism’s dominant aspect. It justified the preservation of the Jewish people as the carrier of the word of God,

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and gave significance to the numerous commands that it took on itself—including collective responsibility for fellow Jews. These commands, moreover, also included allegiance to the Land of Israel as both the past and destiny of the People, implying a relation to nonJewish “others” as “alien”—as also implicit in the dietary laws that forbade eating non-Jews’ food. Yet the Jewish faith is also fundamentally monotheistic, which commands a no less fundamentally universalistic perspective. This tension between the particularism of the People of God and the universalism of God itself is “solved” by the principle stating that by its own redemption—through obedience to the Commands—the nation will redeem not only itself but also the world as a whole. This is the meaning of the portrayal of the Jewish nation as a “Chosen People” charged with the redeeming humanity by observing its obligations “within itself ” and “among itself.” We find it most appropriate to label this type of collective identity as “caste.” It consists of social practices merging discourse and action, on the grounds of religious legitimacy and through a perception of “purity” (Smith B., 1994). Maintaining purity requires keeping at distance from non-members, which is paradoxically justified by an image of the society and the world that inserts the caste, as a distinct collective, within the wider setting (Dumont, 1977). In the eyes of its members, this collective plays a “transcendental” role in view of a “supreme” purpose, for the benefit of all including those who see the people of the caste rather as “despicable,” even as pariahs. Modernity and the questioning of axioms With the coming of the modern era and Jewish emancipation, the caste syndrome found itself in the eye of a storm of revolutionary ideas, and soon lost much of its influence over the Jews. Many now expressed their Judaism in new ways, and championed the notions of equality and personal freedoms (Russell, 1996). They were convinced that economic and technological developments would bring down social barriers and discrimination. Indeed, the processes that took place in the course of the nineteenth century triggered a radical change in relations between Jews and non-Jews, bringing them closer together. On the other hand, the same process spawned modern anti-Semitism: at the same time as the Jews were allowed to return to England and make their home there, for example, it became the fashion in elite circles to try and persuade them to convert to Chris-


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tianity (Ragussis, 1995); while Jews were admitted into the French army, the Dreyfus affair sparked a wave of anti-Semitism.1 Above all else, the transformation of the Jews was spurred by their internal dilemmas, which were cast in a new light by Europe’s national, democratic and industrial revolutions. Post-traditional outlooks regarded the basic issues—the “deep structures” of Jewish identity—as questions that could be given new answers which would ultimately construct the space of “modern” Jewish identities. A first question related to the concept of the “Jewish People,” and asked whether it could still indicate a collective whose definition was primarily religious, or whether it should now be seen as a community in the social, cultural, and even ethical sense. In other words, did the term still refer to an actual collective whose existence in the modern world needed no justification beyond the mere fact of its being a collective entity? A second question, related to the concept of the God and Torah of Israel, i.e. the singularity of the collective in the traditional identity, is how could the singularity of Jews be indicated in the new secular reality? In reaction to the previous religious attitude, growing numbers began to wonder whether Judaism might not better be seen as a culture, a collection of symbols and a history. A third question concerned the concept of the “Land of Israel,” the response of traditional Judaism to the place of the collective which defines any other place as Galut, that is, exile. In the traditional view, the Land of Israel is an actual geographical location to which the Jews will return “at the time of redemption.” It was now asked whether this was in fact the homeland of the Jews, or whether it could be treated as a metaphor with moral, cultural, or ideological meaning. The traditional answers of Judaism were only the lot of a minority, the Orthodox (Urbach, 1971). Numerous other answers to these three questions can be found in the plethora of new forms of Judaism (Ben-Rafael, 2002)—from Jewish enlightenment and Reform Judaism to the Bund and territorialism. Among all these, Zionism—Jewish nationalism—would soon take the lead among those different forms of Judaism.

1 In the early 1890s, it was discovered that someone in the French army was spying for the Germans. The generals chose to place the blame on Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer. Tried and found guilty, Dreyfus was exiled to Devil’s Island. As a result of tireless efforts on the part of his family and well-known writers and public figures, Dreyfus won a retrial in which his name was cleared.

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eliezer ben-rafael Zionists’ identity transformation

At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism proposed a national solution to this crisis of orientations that then prevailed among Jews. From the traditional beliefs, it retained the traditional definition of Jewish life outside the Land of Israel, as “exile,” but instead of placing its hopes for redemption on observing the commandments, it called for acting. In point of fact, Zionism was influenced by Europe’s nationalist ideologies that based nationhood and statehood on the principle of territory. It thus called for a “territorialization” of Judaism whereby Judaism would be converted into a national identity by immigration on the very piece of land that would be the site of messianic redemption and was also “the land from which we came” (Katz, 1960; Avineri, 1981). This reference to traditional-religious values in a “modern-nationalism” mode explains the echo that Zionism obtained among the many, and especially the elite in search for a cause that would represent a Jewish collective future. Hence, Jewish nationalism breaks away from traditional Judaism by requiring redemption independently from religious devotion, through the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in the Land of Israel. This rupture, however, represents a secular and political answer to a question which, in itself, is religious—the definition of the diaspora not just as a demographic fact, but as exile. Moreover, it is toward the “promised land” that Jewish nationalism aspires to lead the people and to remove it “from Galut.” Hence, Zionism exits the caste syndrome but not Judaism. It agrees that this people has only one religion, and that this religion has only one people. The Jew who embraces another faith abandons Judaism, and the non-Jew who converts to Judaism integrates into the Jewish people. This symbiosis is reflected in traditional symbols retained as national emblems as well as in institutional arrangements grounded in religious affiliation.2 Yet from another perspective, Zionism is at a disadvantage in respect to traditional Judaism. The caste model links the redemption of the Jews to that of the whole world, while Zionism aspires

2 The most notable institutional arrangements in this context is the Law of Return which stipulates that Jews—and this notion refers here to the child of a Jewish mother or an individual who has converted to Judaism—are allowed to immigrate, acquire Israeli nationality and benefit from special aid for integration.


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to Jewish redemption alone, or according to its term—the “normalization of the Jewish people.” Seemingly conscious of this shortcoming, the Zionists have long tried to give universal meaning to their image of the Jewish future by stressing its connection to some universally utopian concept—such as with the notion of “Socialist Zionism.” In other words, they tended to present Zionism as offering an example of a social utopia for the world at large. By doing so, they denied the principle of caste, foregoing any aspirations that conflicted with the demands of secular society, with which Zionism also associated itself. The price they paid, of course, was exposing Zionism to the criticism of proponents of the caste model, who saw it as a form of “collective assimilation” into the non-Jewish world. The Zionist leaders—David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Berl Katznelson, Zalman Shazar and others—responded to the critics by claiming that Zionism endeavored to build an “enlightened society” in the Land of Israel, where the “Chosen People” would be “a light unto the nations.” In their opinion, that was what the “normalization of the Jewish people” meant (Gorny, 1990). By taking up this challenge to combine a modern secular ideology with a uniquely Jewish inspiration and orientation, the Zionists hoped to present an ideological alternative to the view of the Jewish nation as the carrier of the promise of messianic redemption. The notion of “exemplary society” (hevra le-mofet) which this aspiration conveyed included the republican principle of cultural unity (mizug galuyot or fusion of exiles) that should direct the engineering of “the ingathering of the exiles” (kibbutz galuyot). The intention was not only to welcome Jews from all over the world, but to create a new national Israeli culture as well, whose exemplary character would be determined by its dedication—in a secular spirit— to the ethics of Judaism, socialism and liberalism. A crucial element in achieving this objective was the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language and its adoption as the legitimate national tongue. Essentially, the successful creation of a spoken language from classical Hebrew3 was due to the fact that in the collective memory of Jews almost everywhere, Hebrew was “the original Jewish tongue” and the language of Scriptures. The Zionists in Israel

3

This was greatly facilitated by the work of the secular writers of the Jewish Enlightenment movement that developed in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe a first wave of modern Hebrew literature and journalism.

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could call on this knowledge to turn Hebrew into a national language to be used also for secular, everyday, purposes in a sovereign Jewish society, out from Diaspora.4 This revival of Hebrew is the best example of this “appropriation” attitude of Zionism toward religious and traditional values. Plucking a holy language from the sacred texts and “tossing it out onto the street” to be used for the most prosaic of activities might be considered iconoclastic. It is particularly surprising in view of the fact that those who reinvented Hebrew as a spoken language already had a common tongue—Yiddish.5 Adopting Hebrew, more than any other pattern showed the basic aspiration of Zionism to present itself as the heir of the Jews’ long history, and as the potent agent of a secular/nationalist transformation of this people into a culturally unified and modern nation. This example shows how far Zionism aspired to be perceived as a movement that was breathing new life into Jewish symbols and endowing them with contemporary significance. It was one of the prime sources of Zionism’s power: it broke the monopoly of Orthodox Judaism over the symbols of Jewish tradition. The devotion to these symbols would also be the foundation on which universal Jewish solidarity with the State of Israel would later be built. Hebrew thus became the central hallmark of the new society, symbolizing the unique Jewish experience in Israel as an alternative to life in the Diaspora, and implying that this experience was superior to any other Jewish reality (Glinert, 1990). Here lies the source of Zionism as a new form of Jewish identity, creating a distinction between the “Jewish people” in general and the “Jewish nation” in Israel. Taken out of the exclusive hands of scholars and rabbis, Hebrew became the marker of a new collective. The linguistic revolution also served as the basis for implementing the ideology of national integration when mass immigration began to arrive from numerous countries (Bachi, 1974). Nevertheless, the

4 Obviously, the initiators of this linguistic revolution—the pioneers of the first decades of the twentieth century—actually had to invent its lexis and syntax to meet the demands of a new time and place, and thereby, to expose it to a plethora of influences, bringing it closer in nature to European languages, as well as to Yiddish and Arabic. 5 This is the only case in history in which a new language, not native to any of its speakers, successfully became the language of a group which already shared a common tongue.


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desire for linguistic and cultural unification did not only contribute to the unity of the new society but also to further divisions therein. In fact, the same models that sought to produce unity promoted new distinctions. The very call for unification indeed implied recognition of the special status of those portrayed as the worthy role models— the generation of “pioneers.” Furthermore, as in any immigrant society where newcomers are striving to put down new roots, here too being “native” became a source of social prestige. It is the children of immigrants who fulfill their parents’ lofty ambitions and ensure the success of their endeavors. In the case of Israel, the native-born also carried the bulk of the security burden and the armed struggle that developed with the Arab environment from quite the earliest stages, reinforcing their image as the “salt of the earth.” In addition, the sons and daughters of the pioneers were also highly conscious of being the children of people who had adopted a new national Jewish identity, and of themselves representing a “new kind” of Jew who had never known life in the Diaspora. The fact that they were also a minority group for a long time, within a population of where the majority was made of immigrants, added to their luster. As an “elite” which prided itself on this status, they created their own symbols, the most conspicuous of which was a typically nonchalant use of Hebrew that could be acquired only by being born “within the language,” that is, in the country (Katriel, 1986).6 This influence was linked to the Zionists’ self-image as the antithesis of Diaspora Jewry that in their eyes bore the signs of dependence. Quite a few of the sons and daughters of the pioneers displayed a similar attitude to the Diaspora Jews who settled in the country, seeing in them people who continued to bear the “stigma of the Diaspora.” In contrast, they saw themselves the essence of “Israeliness” that sprouted from the new form of life in the country. For a long

6 A “no-nonsense” language—a laconic style of speech which abhorred euphemisms and high language in general—this Hebrew underscored the connection to the Middle East by incorporating numerous Arabic words, and encouraged a blunt, casual, and “natural” way of speaking. By doing so, it expressed repugnance for verbosity, protocol, formality, and sophistry, all traits attributed to Diaspora Jews (Rubinstein, 1977). The sabra activities of hiking the length and breadth of Israel, belonging to a youth movement, spending time on a kibbutz, and serving in the army produced new words that were unfamiliar to those who “didn’t belong” (Shamir, 1970).

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time, entry into this elite was not easy, for those who had arrived in Israel as youngsters but were not born here, those who had left the ultra-Orthodox community but were still close to forms of religiosity, or Yemenites who had been in the country for many years but remained attached to community values. That culture has, however, undergone profound change over the decades. The collectivistic approach that prevailed prior to the establishment of the state and in the first years of statehood has been replaced by a much more individualistic model following demographic, economic and political developments. The étatist ideology that gained in strength during the 1950s and 1960s stressed the need to move from utopia to nation-building. “Pioneer” was redefined to relate to anyone who “contributed” to the state: not only farmers and settlers as in the past, but also professionals, public functionaries, and business people. The country born out of war and strongly afflicted by security concerns reserved a place of honor for the armed forces, and now placed great stock on a military career. Mass immigration which tripled the population within a few years brought to the country a broad array of cultural groups that diffused new perspectives and perceptions. Thus a new social order came into being. In this new social reality, numerous myths were shattered, among them the superiority of physical labor, which had been central to the pioneering ethos. Now higher education and professionalism were also considered legitimate pursuits. At the same time, immigration and wars resulted in a constant strengthening of Israel’s relations with the Jewish world, now viewed as the country’s “natural partners,” in contrast to the anti-diaspora mood in vogue among Zionists years before. These economic, social, and cultural processes also had an impact on the drastic change that overtook the leading forces of society. Along with a constantly growing middle class came features of Western consumer society while the “1948-generation” (the generation of the War of Independence) had become bureaucrats, financiers, politicians, and businessmen. As this elite came to be defined in terms of achievements, the meritocracy adopted a more formal standard language. The disdain for “foreign” languages disappeared as international communication gained in importance. English became virtually a second language at all levels of education, professional life, and business, and fluency in English was now a status symbol. Even in this context, some signifiers of native culture persist today


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and can still be discerned in patterns of speech, dress, and behavior, but their sources are now mainly the army, high school, the university, or pubs. While many of those identified with this culture at the start of the twenty-first century belong to the middle or upper class, “nativeness” has, however, inevitably lost a considerable chunk of its appeal as it now characterizes a relatively large sector of the population, and not a restricted cohort anymore. Paradoxically, this fact encourages more than a few individuals to preserve their own features. People who have not internalized the (currently quite unclear) sabra version of Israeli culture, whether born in or outside the country, stand at some distance from it. Though these distinctions seem today quite secondary in comparison the wide “middle-classization” that can be indicated under the influence of the cultural impacts of the Israeli experience and modernity itself—the influences of which run from consumerist culture to liberal and civic values. It is this wide social category that can be labeled Israel’s non-ethnic middleclass—even though mostly of Eastern and Central European (Ashkenazic) origins. Today, this class is the principal carrier of Jewish nationalism in Israel. This Jewish nationalism articulates its singularity in secularized symbols and in a new Hebrew culture, referring to a territory from where Jewishness is viewed as distinguishing Israel from the diaspora. Even here though, the debated questions—“how Jewish,” “Jewish in what way,” and “in what sense Jewish”—remain more than elsewhere part of the public agenda and are debated by a number of parties. Hence, here too, one speaks of several Jewish Israeli identities, rather than of one. To understand this pluralism, however, it is necessary to emphasize that Jewish nationalism, like other nationalisms, also convey civic values, is attached to democracy, and since the creation of the state develops toward liberalism.7 Though, that no regular Constitution exists yet is due to the fact that it would require formalizing the status of religion and its relation to the national principle. The difficulty of clearly distinguishing religion and peoplehood is the major reason that this task has not yet been undertaken—fifty years after the creation of the state. Any attempt, indeed, to find a definitive modus vivendi re-awakes unavoidable confrontations

7 This is expressed in Fundamental Laws regulating the work of institutions and warranting individual freedoms.

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of irreconcilable approaches—especially between those who insist on the necessity in democracy of subordinating religious symbols to civic values and those who, on behalf of religion, raise exigencies from the political center unacceptable to the secular public. These debates which—tireless and stemming from several directions—are instructive of how the special relation of religion and nationalism that exists in Israel is bound to the formation of significant cultural and political cleavages within the national society. One line of division involves the ultra-Orthodox and targets the very roots of the legitimacy of the social order. Ultra-Orthodoxy: an alternative to nationalism? Orthodoxy emerged in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. A minority now in many Jewish communities where the winds of modernity blew powerfully, this stream numbered all those who aspired to retain their dedication to the belief in the divine source of the commandments and the ban on altering them. Quarrels between modernists and traditionalists throughout Europe led in 1912 to the creation of Agudat Israel in Katowice, Poland. This political party of a special brand aspired to reinvent a concept of “Jewish People” able to challenge modern individualism (Mittleman, 1996). The party’s founders, including Germans caught between tradition and modernity, as well as Eastern Europeans, turned more resolutely toward the retention of modes of life symbolizing the past.8 In essence, the new framework sought to respond to the secularization of social life that was pushing religious observance to the sidelines and was placing enormous difficulties in the path of those who remained faithful to halacha (Talmudic law). Interestingly enough, the way in which this form of Judaism chose to organize itself—the model of a political party with a comprehensive platform—was itself an indication of the influence of modernism. Agudat Israel wished to bring together all observant Jews and tried to put this principle into practice by means of an organi-

8 They consisted of Mitnagdim from Lithuania who adhered to Jewish classical holy learning, and members of major Hassidic movements which emphasize the value of spontaneous and emotional religious experiences. The Hassidim are themselves divided into different groups led by charismatic leaders.


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zation typical of secular public life—its own Bible-inspired denial of any distinction between religion and politics notwithstanding. The question of how much to “modernize” was, however, soon to cause dissensions between Germans and Eastern Europeans in the new party. The former displayed willingness to make concessions to modernism, while the latter regarded the party primarily as a tool for fending off the new influences. Germans like Hirsch, Rosenheim and others held that Judaism was, above all, a humane religion, and that Agudat Israel propounded a message of universal redemption. In contrast, Eastern Europeans, who were more numerous from the very start, demanded that the party devote less time to ideological debates with modernism and more to the conflict with secular Jewry. In time, it was this attitude that prevailed (Bacon, 1996). While the German “modernists” who sustained the integration into general society of observant Jews soon detached themselves from Agudat Israel, the more radical Orthodox—who would ultimately become known as ultra-Orthodox—considered themselves committed to the higher aims of Judaism: a life of religious study and intense involvement in Jewish communities. It is from this point on that the ultra-Orthodox in Israel evolved in their own way. From the time of the arrival of the first Zionists, they isolated themselves, using Yiddish as their vernacular, and developing their own educational system (Friedman, 1986). Yet despite this “monastic” tendency (Friedman, 1986), over time they could not entirely keep themselves apart from Israeli Jewish society. Hebrew gradually seeped into the families and communities, until the younger generation was speaking more Hebrew than Yiddish. As the women do not attend yeshiva and often work outside the home in addition to their family responsibilities, Hebrew became their major language of communication, and Hebrew has gradually become the first language of the major groups in the ultra-Orthodox public. This trend is encouraged by the fact that the ultra-Orthodox initiate contact with the secular sector to promote their own specific interests, and are also determined to benefit from all the facilities offered by the welfare state.9 These developments are evidence that with the existence of a Jewish state, the ultra-Orthodox can hardly remain

9 Hence, Yeshiva students require exemptions from the army and large families request special housing assistance.

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indifferent to their environment. Furthermore, the nature of the connection of ultra-Orthodox with secular Jewish society also derives from their view of Jewish identity. As we have seen, they regard themselves as fulfilling the true destiny of the Jew which alone will bring about redemption. This destiny, however, will be realized only when it is recognized by the whole of the Jewish people, therefore virtually compelling the ultra-Orthodox to pay heed to their status in society as the genuine guardians of Judaism. This orientation is not necessarily understood by the secular who may see their conspicuous markers—dress, rituals, esoteric interests— as expressions of alienation from the prevailing culture. This does not, however, prevent the ultra-Orthodox from considering themselves an active and significant—indeed, perhaps the most significant— force in society. This is evidenced by the fact that, unlike their counterparts in other places, in Israel they use the official language of the country among themselves, have their own political parties that participate in national politics, and are deeply involved in all spheres of public life. In this sense, even if they remain an integral part of world ultra-Orthodoxy, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox are decidedly “Israeli” and grant positive significance to their participation, if not to a Jewish State, at least, to the “State of the Jews”. They tend then to get closer to the national religious—even though they are still very different from them at crucial respects. The radicalization of the national-religious For years, national-religious Israelis have taken an active part in political Zionism, representing its “observant wing.” On this basis, the national-religious leadership developed frameworks that replicated, in religious forms, those of secular society: kibbutzim (collective settlements), moshavim (cooperative villages), a university, and so on. On the linguistic front, they always were—again, in contrast to the ultra-Orthodox—among the most zealous defenders of Hebrew, and were responsible for standard versions of religious texts for ritual use in nationwide frameworks (the army or national ceremonies). This is a reflection of their aspiration to make a unique contribution to Israeli national culture through their familiarity with traditional sources. This sector, however, is also confronted by a fundamental dilemma.


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As a community openly professing to be part of mainstream society— they view themselves as fully belonging to modernity—the nationalreligious are committed to a flexible approach to the secular public in matters of religion. At the same time, their religious orientation defines the Jewish faith as the faith of the Jew and this orientation drives them, like the ultra-Orthodox, to aspire to influence the Jewish society as a whole. It is in this context that a “vanguard-like” approach has developed, starting in the 1960s, within a group of activists who opposed the established leadership of their movement and its efforts to maintain accommodative religious-secular relations. The Six-Day War and the occupation of areas such as Samaria and Judea, which are part of the Biblical “Land of Israel,” pushed these activists onto center stage. Citing sacred texts that spoke of the “Divine promise” of the Land to the Jews, the new leadership claimed it was a religious duty to hold onto and settle these areas at all costs. It should become, they believed, a central principle of national policy. With the rise to power of the right-wing parties in 1977, their endeavors gained momentum, as dozens of new settlements were created across the pre-1967 border between Israel and its Arab neighbors (BenRafael and Sharot, 1991; Ben-Rafael, 1994). As Israeli-Palestinian negotiations began about the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, political contention with the national leadership over withdrawal from the territories intensified, leading to the emergence of extremist groups, some of which even became involved in underground activity. The crisis point was reached in November 1995 with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a fanatic opponent to the Oslo Accords. Unlike the ultra-Orthodox, for whom religious law represents the collective’s behavioral and moral principles, the national-religious camp’s ideology consider the singularity of the collective to lie in its overriding duty to fight for the control of the “holy land.” The concept of the Land of Israel is not merely the most important of the three aspects of Jewish identity—a hierarchy found in probably all varieties of Zionism—but it also takes on uncompromising mythical meanings that also redefine, in totalistic terms, the singularity of the collective as a territory-bound entity. Leibowicz (1976) comments here that this nationalist-religious orientation represents an imagined world that draws from the “sacred” descriptions of the Biblical Kingdom of Israel on the one hand, and from the no less mythical descriptions of a messianic future on the other. A political messianism that

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engenders tensions with those in the national-religious camp who continue to represent the original—and pragmatic—desire of observant Jews to integrate the national society rather than to lead it. Fighting over about legacies: the Mizrahim In Israel, however, religion also intervenes in the polity in questions relating to the development of ethnic problems. Underlying the ethnic rifts among Israeli Jews is a particular form of ethnicity that we label eda (pl., edot). This Hebrew term refers to a group whose members see themselves a priori as part of the broader collective, but who share their own singular understanding of that collective. Hence, for instance—and this is variously true of most groups that immigrated from North Africa and the Middle-East (Mizrahi; plural: Mizrahim)— Yemenite Jews, the ideal-type of this kind of group, always thought of themselves as part of the Jewish people, and were thus ready, upon arrival in Israel, to consider themselves part of the IsraeliJewish collective. Their immigration was largely motivated by their religious traditionalism, which had led them to understand that the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel heralded the time of redemption.10 Yet they soon found that typical patterns like styles of prayers, rites de passage or family models appear here as somehow peculiar to them—even though they themselves had always considered them as Judaism itself. Hence, while they showed readiness to adapt to their new environment,11 they still felt no eagerness to waive whatever made them “Yemenite Jews” and which they clung to for centuries— when in the country of the non-Jews. Later, by attending post-secondary schools or universities and taking up a career, Yemenite children became part of new social frameworks and were more exposed to the culture prevailing in their environment. The more willing they are to turn their back on their traditions, the easier it is for them to “cross over” and join the

10 As Yemenite Jews saw it, it was their faithfulness to this Judaism throughout the generations that had brought them to the Holy Land by Divine Will. According to this “traditionalist” Zionism, religious fervor in the Diaspora had been as important as the efforts of the pioneers who set down the basis of the Jewish State. 11 In fact, the last of the Yemenite Jews to immigrate to Israel, who arrived in the 1990s, could barely recognize themselves in their “Israeli” cousins, and several asked to return to Yemen.


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middle class which, although predominantly Ashkenazi, wishes to illustrate an “all-Israeli” secular culture and is ideologically open to the social integration of Mizrahim, at least when they are entitled to this status. Secondly, as an eda, the Yemenite population believes the Jews are to be “one nation.” This is true even among the underprivileged who are unable to implement this aspiration themselves, have little exposure to the dominant culture and show a tendency to stick to their communities (Ben-Rafael and Sharot, 1991).12 Interestingly enough, however, those communities which remained influenced by religiosity and tradition, in time produced a religious elite that became increasingly powerful. In the early stages, it won the support of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox, casting it as an ultraOrthodox group. Yet it did not take long for Mizrahi yeshivas to be established under the leadership of their own rabbis and scholars. Moreover, unlike Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox who operate within a population that sets itself apart from the secular public, the Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox remain an integral part of their community at large, particularly in low-status areas, in the context of the conspicuously traditional character of this population. Furthermore, and again in the context of their traditionalist environment, their activities in the community are not limited to religious affairs alone. Rather, they serve as public, nay even political, leaders, as was quite typical for religious authorities in the past. This process was to lead to a breaking of the long-standing public taboo, in Israel, against any attempt to establish a party on the basis of eda. And indeed, Shas, a Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox faction carved out a firm place for itself in the political arena, politicizing the new Mizrahi religious elite under the leadership of a charismatic Mizrahi rabbinic authority, Ovadia Yossef. By significantly increasing the proportion of religious representatives in the Knesset, Shas established itself as a leading force in the religious sector in general while, at the same time, it presented demands typical of a low socio-economic community—its genuine electoral constituency.

12 As Weingrod (1990) demonstrates, the hilula—a festive visit to the tomb of an individual considered a “saint”—has been gaining in popularity. Another example of this phenomenon is the Moroccan Mimouna, the “holiday of bread” that follows Passover, which gradually became so established that it now has the nature of a public holiday for “all edot.” In addition, the religious practices of the different communities are often preserved in the many synagogues constructed for a specific eda.

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In a very similar manner to the elitism of the Ashkenazi ultraOrthodox as well of the national-religious, here too the motivation behind the party’s efforts reveal an ambition to ultimately define an all-Israel calling. In this case, this self-appointed mission is revealed in the systematic replacement of “Mizrahi” by the term “Sephardic” in the movement’s rhetoric. This latter term generally denotes a relatively small cohort of descendents of the Jews of Spain. Yet, it is Yossef ’s contention that the Sephardic culture that predominated in the yeshivot in the Land of Israel for hundreds of years, constitutes the variety of Judaism which is the only one that can be truly considered to belong to the Holy Land. This legacy should therefore be adopted by all Israeli Jews in the area of public, let alone national, cult and rites. Since, moreover, the Judaism practiced by Mizrahi communities is assumedly closer than that of the Ashkenazim to the Sephardic legacy, this endows the Mizrahim with a calling of Israelwide significance, namely, bringing Israel’s religious culture back to its “true” legacy. In this spirit, Shas is working to introduce new forms of prayer and ritual into those Mizrahi synagogues that are willing to do its bidding (Leon, 2003), which, admittedly, is demanding considerable sacrifices from these communities—i.e. setting aside their own traditional rituals and texts. Religious cleavages, Russians and Israeli Jewishnesses In sum, the relation of nationalism and religion in the case of the Jews has brought about a variety of cleavages. One cleavage revolves around the role of Talmudic law in the “codification” of the social order; a second, around the link of religious beliefs to national policies, and a third, around the competition of legacies in areas where the religious rite applies. In all cases, it is spoken of actors moved by a kind of “mission” who aspire to gain influence over the center without making do with the widening of their space of freedom, outside center’s control. The context of the evolving of these cleavages, which by no means simplifies the problématiques that these cleavages represent, is the allegiance of Israeli Jews in general—including the non-observant—to traditional symbols. Surveys indicate that the majority of Israeli Jews by no means disassociate themselves from the sources of Judaism. Many of those who do not hesitate to describe themselves as secular


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celebrate the Jewish holidays and observe some of their rituals. As a rule, they respect the custom of a family dinner on Friday night, at which women light Sabbath candles; the majority fast on Yom Kippur, have Hanukkah candles on their table, and take part in the Passover ritual meal. A broad consensus approves the practice of circumcision, bar mitzvah, and a religious wedding. Actually, many Israeli Jews, including the non-observant, equate Jewishness with Israeliness (Farago, 1989) and strongly identify with both Jewishness and Israeliness. It is as Israeli Jews that they feel themselves part of world Jewry (see Levy, 1996; Oron, 1993). It is on this basis that Liebman and Katz (1997) claim that the influence of religion is greater than what might be assumed from the fact that a large proportion of the secular public expresses disapproval of the religious parties. Levy (1996), however, cautions that the same symbols are given different meanings by different groups. The differences, according to Oron (1993), relate less to behavior than to attitudes where the rift between the religious and the secular is real. Hence, Israelis believe the country is split between the religious and the secular, with the two sides having conflicting interests, while, at the same time, most respondents tend to fall into intermediary categories in terms of behavior, e.g. “partially observant” rather than “strictly observant” at the one end, and “absolutely nonobservant” at the other (Katz, 1997). Against this backdrop, where the option of religiosity is always open, one also finds a “new religiosity” that exhibits some of the features depicted by Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1998) as “religiosity without church.” This phenomenon spreads over under the forms of theater groups, clubs, artistic milieus, places of learning or festivals, and illustrates an emphasis on direct religious experience. It binds religiosity to soul-searching by underrating ideological and political commitments. It is widely open to external influences—in fact, it originates from the outside—and has become an important phénomène de société that might find expression, some day, in the shaping of Israel’s national agenda (Friedman, 2003). On the other hand, the above also explains why the Israeli society, where the majority is not observant, is, paradoxically enough, not too friendly to non-Orthodox liberal Judaism which, in the diaspora, is most popular among Jews. Besides the vicissitudes of politics and power games, one major reason is that Orthodox Jewry shares with Zionism—each from its own angle—that Jewishness is the primary collective identity of Jewish

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individuals. This approach contrasts with ethno-religious forms of Jewishness that, in the diaspora, take for granted that the Jewish identity is secondary to encompassing non-Jewish national identities. Hence, in spite of the fact that non-Orthodox Diaspora and nonobservant Israeli Jews are close to each other due to their aversion for religious bigotry, they differ deeply in their attitude of principle toward Jewishness. The relation of religion and nationalism in Israel bears a particularly complex impact when it comes to the absorption of a large group of non-religious individuals like Russian Jews.13 These immigrants cherish the Russian values and symbols that they brought with them, and which they consider a basic part of their identity. They constitute a force for multiculturalism in society, on the basis of markers of singularity that are essentially non-Jewish, and the large number of newspapers and journals in Russian which they have founded in Israel testify to this aspiration—and so do the continued creation of Russian literature by immigrant authors, the frequent public events held in Russian which they organize, and more (see Ben-Rafael, Olshtain et al., 1996). Yet this by no means denies the Russians’ strong desire to integrate themselves in Israeli society, their gradual familiarization with notions of Judaism, and their rapid acquisition of Hebrew. To some extent and despite their original distance from everything Jewish, they come to adopt patterns already illustrated by the veteran non-observant population for which the synagogue is the house of prayer which they do not visit. This rapprochement to Judaism, we clearly see here, is basically due to the embeddedness of Jewish symbols in the national culture as it is developed by schools, literature and the public life—notwithstanding the no less tangible fact that Russian Jews are also the staunchest support of any proposal entering the public agenda aiming at the limitation of religious laws. In brief, the introduction of a non-observant group of immigrants like the Russian Jews is also strongly influenced—in a variety of directions—by the singular relation that exists here between religion and nationalism.

13

These immigrants began to arrive in Israel in 1989, and by 2003 constituted some 17 percent of the Jewish population. This category was generally lacking in any Jewish culture and education, after 80 years of Marxist-Leninist culture.


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Israel’s Arabs: the alternative models Another outcome—of no less significance—of the link between Jewish nationalism and religion concerns Jewish-Arab relations within Israel. Here it concerns the meeting of two distinct religion-nationalism alliances, since on the Arab side too, nationalism and religion are by no means alien to each other. The very notion of “Arab” today includes Muslims as well as Christians, but at least in view of the Arab Moslem overwhelming majority, the Arabs’ religion is unquestionably Islam—though not only theirs. Hence, throughout the Arab world, no single state can be found that is not defined as a Muslim or Muslim-Arab republic or monarchy. The tensions that are specific to the Israeli case, as a Jewish state, derive from the fact that it also aspires to constitute a liberal democracy. Arabs are officially recognized here as a national minority and consequently afforded the rights that accompany this status: Arabic is the country’s second official language and the language of teaching in Arab public schools; political institutions, parties, associations, press and literature constitute the Arab population’s life framework. In line with the attitude of the Israeli establishment, the Arabs themselves are determined to preserve an Arab-Palestinian identity (Nakhleh, 1975), notwithstanding their exposure in numerous areas to the modernity-side of the prevailing culture and their concomitant acquisition of Hebrew and of English as well (Ben-Rafael and Brosh, 1995). Yet one must also admit that the free flow of relations between Jews and Arabs is damaged in the context of the conflict that sets Israel in opposition to its Arab environment and, mainly, the Palestinians next door. While this reality should not prevent continuous efforts to fasten the status of the Arab minority in a democratic country, it is probable that it is only when this conflict comes to some end, that opportunities will be fully available to reconcile Jewish nationalism and its obligations vis-à-vis the Arab minority. Even then, however, the particular relation that exists between religion and nationalism excludes a solution “à la Française”, at least as far as Jews are concerned.14 The French—“homogenizing”—model of all-national

14 This model finds difficulties among Moslem Arabs as well, as illustrated by the example of the Muslim population of France itself.

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identity, indeed, excludes any religious or ethnic particularism from the definition of the national collective. This model invites all groups to join the Nation by rejecting to the margins of their social, political and cultural endeavor any loyalty that does not accord with allegiance to the Nation itself which, as described by Schnapper (1998), delineates a “communauté des citoyens.” In this model, anyone can mix provided that she or he withholds public expressions of their affinities with specific sociocultural identities. To be sure, such a zero-sum model where individuals may win every privilege of citizenship if they accept the rules but face exclusion if they don’t, is not conceivable in the Jewish case. In this case, the all-national identity is deeply embedded in references to religious legacies and cannot admit—under current formulations at least—that membership in other religions is compatible with membership in the Nation. On the other hand, a model that might be more appropriate to the Israeli situation may well be the United Kingdom’s where—in a pluralistic vein—there too, one finds a state-religion, Anglicanism, topped by the supreme national authority—in this case, the Queen herself—even though millions of nationals belong to different faiths (Sachs, 1993). A model that remains anchored in democracy thanks to legal dispositions and prevailing values which minimize the costs, and valorizes the benefits, of non-membership in the dominant group. The post-Zionist debate For the time being, however, the Israeli case cannot be compared to the UK, since Jewish-Arab relations in this country are, in one way or another, influenced by the evolving of the state’s conflict with its neighbors—the non-Israeli Palestinians—who always were a focal point of identification for the minority. What is more, in the same context of the relation of Jewish religion and nationalism, allegiance to the Jewish world outside Israel is, furthermore, a basic “given” of Israeli Jewishness. This allegiance may be understood as somehow contradictory to the natural tendency of Israeli Jewishness to develop an unmediated allegiance toward the region and its peoples—within and outside Israel. This problématique which is at the heart of ongoing polemics among Israeli Jewish intellectuals also relates to the ways religion is bound here to nationalism. Zionism, one should recall, was born in the diaspora and it is from there that it issued


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the call for the territorialization of Judaism in the Land of Israel. This aspiration, however, commanded another one, that of inserting Jewish national existence in a new and unfamiliar environment—the Middle East. Understandably, the emphasis on the link to the Diaspora underlines the fact that Zionism represents the continuity of a Jewish history where religion and nation are deeply interwoven. On the other hand, emphasizing insertion in the Middle-East signifies insisting on the newly territorialized Jewish nation as an entity in its own right. Both poles coexist—with tensions—in Zionism. Hence, Zionists who settled in the country and underwent a radical change of life conditions and styles were led to contrast their experience from the diaspora. By adopting Hebrew as their first marker, they came to view themselves as “another kind” of Jew, and many even used the term to contrast themselves with diaspora Jews. “Hebrew” seemed appropriate because, like the language, through reference to the Bible it underscored the links with the land and the region, and at the same time signaled an allegiance to a historical culture. This “solution,” however, only revealed the fundamental tension in Zionist ideology which aspired, as an national ideology, to speak on behalf of all Jews the world over, but at the same time, afforded higher moral status to those who renounced the diasporic endeavor and settled here, to be a part of the new territorial nation. As early as the 1930s, several intellectuals—eventually called Canaanites—took this tension to its ultimate conclusion and advocated that Jews who had immigrated to Israel should cut themselves off entirely from Diaspora Jewry, renounce the label “Jew” and keep only to a de-Judaized “Hebrew” in order to enable the development here of a nation comparable to any other.15 This program proposed to directly relate the new Hebrew-speaking community to the distant past in this country as narrated in the Bible, and to willingly ignore the two thousand years of diaspora. From the beginning, this Canaanite stance was sidelined to the margins of the public scene, but over time, it joined forces with the post-Zionist left. At the difference from the Canaanites, post-Zionists—whose presence has

15

In 1951, Ratosh founded the Young Hebrews Center whose organ, Alef, lobbied for a constitution that would dictate total separation between religion and state and annul the established connection between the Jews and Israel (Gorny, 1990).

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been felt mainly since the early 1980s—are not critical of Diaspora Jewry, but of Israeli Jews themselves, who define the country as a Jewish state and not “the state of all its citizens”—which should include non-Jews on equal footing with Jews. This camp focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, placing the blame for the hostility on Israel and Zionism, and more importantly with respect to this analysis, it advocates eliminating the reference to Judaism as the basis of national identity (Furstenberg, 1995) contending, in the spirit of naïve materialism (Orr, 1994), that, as a religious belief, Judaism is doomed to disappear—just as all other religions will presumably disappear in the wake of the advance of science and secular culture. In this, both Canaanites and post-Zionists agree to assert a common velleity to detach the country from any religious allegiance and to request, on this basis, its “de-Zionization.” The Israeli nation, they contend, should be based on territory and be socially and culturally pluralistic. The Jews in Israel belong to the Israeli nation in the same way that those who reside elsewhere belong to other nations (Agassi, 1990; Agassi, Buber-Agassi, and Brant, 1991). Anti-nationalists, whether Canaanite or post-Zionist, see Jewish nationalism emptied from its substance as soon as it is detached from the contributions of religion, and this detachment is necessarily bound to dissolve Jewish nationalism. Hence, in addition to the quarrels between the religious and the non-observant that the relation of religion to nationalism brings about here, one more ground of dissension concerns the question of the validity itself of a nationalism that effectively responds affirmatively to the accusation of maintaining links to religion (see also Silberstein, 1996). In one way or another, these “critical” approaches which denounce these links in the contemporary Israeli reality are not without reminding the two-three generations of Jewish intellectuals and militants who, at the turn of the previous century joined radical causes like revolutionary socialism and communism, and did not care to sacrifice their affinity to Judaism on behalf of an utopia where Jewishness— like any particularism—would necessarily lose any social, political or cultural raison d’être. For the time being, and as far as the overwhelming majority of Israel’s Jews are concerned, crucial importance is widely attached to the Jewish identity which, more often than not (among observant and non-observant alike) mixes religious ingredients with nationalism. Israeli Jews are not ready to reduce Judaism to either religion or


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to a bluntly secular nationalism completely detached from Jewish legacies; moreover, they are not ready to revive in this country the diaspora condition of an ethno-religious group. Their basic aspiration is to continue to make up a nation—whatever the precise formulation of this nationalism—and they are conscious that by defining Israel as the state of the Jews, Zionism spawned complex problems which, in one way or another, relate to the fundamental—undeletable— relation between religion and nationalism. In conclusion: the structural transformation of Jewish identity Our analysis leads us to several conclusions that might provide input for comparative projects of nationalism studies. We may state the following succinctly: (1) The Israeli case clearly confirms that religion or religious motives may be important components of nationalism. As in other well-known cases (from England to Greece), we have here a nationalism that was well prepared by a “national” religion which contributed important ingredients to the nationalistic ideology. (2) The notion of structural transformation may designate the pattern illustrated by Jewish nationalism when it adopted basic principles of action vis-à-vis the world and society originally embedded in the caste syndrome, but which now received new meanings and consequences in the context of a new perspective. We exemplified this pattern with the notion of Redemption which referred traditionally to the messianic era, but was taken over by Zionism to mean the voluntary Return to Zion. Similarly, Zionism endorsed the traditional understanding of Diaspora as problematic (that is, as Galut) but inserted it in a nationalist perspective that insisted on the suffering bound to dependence and non-sovereignty—instead of the longing for God’s mercy. Ingredients of Zionism, these principles set Jewish aspirations under the same light as the aspirations of other peoples to a nation-state of their own. Moreover, transformed, these tokens requested a drastic change of attitudes by Jews vis-à-vis themselves, their life experience, and their culture—though, by no means, did they now require a total detachment from Judaism. In actual fact, they concurred with the traditional assertions that the ultimate destiny of the People is Redemption, and that this Redemption is to

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take place in the Promised Land. In this manner, Zionism adopts traditional symbols, secularizes and “nationalizes” their meanings, and draws from the singularity that they draw out, its legitimacy as the culmination of Jewish history. (3) A most crucial element that Zionism draws from traditional Judaism concerns the endemic link between Judaism as a religion and Jewishness as Peoplehood: it has definitely retained that Judaism is the only religion that Jews may adhere to and that any other affiliation ousts Jews from the community.16 This position remains an article of conviction among Zionists, notwithstanding the fact that many of them are not observant or even believers. Zionism, however, still removes itself from traditional Judaism in this respect when it does not specify that the Orthodox rite commands the non-Jew to become a Jew.17 Hence, here again continuity and discontinuity are interwoven: the basic association of religion and Peoplehood is respected, but it is also re-defined in a way that allows for new meanings and contents.18 (4) Nationalism, in the Jewish case like in many others, also draws its inspiration from ideas stemming from cultural developments that took place outside the sphere of religion in the last centuries. Here, we think primarily of the ambition to create a nation-state, the justification of new contours of the collective and the installment of new civic—universalistic values. This concerns Zionism to no lesser extent than other kinds of nationalism: its aim has always been the creation of a nation-state for Jews similar to others. It defines the ingathering in the country in terms of a new Jewish nation which differs—through solidarity—from Diaspora Jewry. For decades, the main Zionist streams have viewed civic values and democracy as essential to their endeavor. (5) The Israeli-Jewish case also illustrates that religion may make different contributions to the crystallization of diverse formulations

16 According to Talmudic law, even a converted individual remains a Jew but this law has been overshadowed by the ancestral custom of considering the conversion of Jews to other faiths as “loss”. 17 In Israel itself the Orthodox holds a monopoly over conversion for mere political reasons, but individuals who have been converted to Judaism by liberal rites are accepted as such upon immigration, by the Israeli legislation. 18 As a rule, liberal conversion insists more than the Orthodox rite does on social allegiance than on religious rigor.


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of nationalism. Hence, while the non-observant insist on the secularization of traditional symbols and tend to emphasize general and universalistic values, other forces remain more straightforwardly faithful to versions of nationalism that are closer to original religious contents. These forces become breeding-grounds for cleavages and political confrontations that mark the evolving of the setting. As a rule, in the very context of the specific relation of religion and nationalism in this case, religious forces tend to present themselves as a special elite, i.e. as authorized “guardians” of religious interests assumedly of “general crucial importance”—the role of Talmudic law in the social order, the relation of religious commands to national policies or the predominance of given legacies over others in public cult. (6) The Jewish case of nationalism also shows that the link to religion, in a majority-minority setting, excludes the eventuality of mutual assimilation of the two camps. This denies the validity here of a republican model which would ignore the particularism of both the majority and the minority. It is rather a pluralistic model, in a vein reminiscent of the UK, that should be of relevance in the attempt to reconcile the ambitions of a dominant group to determine the collective’s overall personality and its obligations to respect the rights of the minority’s full democratic participation through the proliferation of compensatory rights and privileges. (7) Last but not least, we also learn from the Israeli-Jewish case how far a society grounded in a nationalism which draws values and symbols from religious traditions may be prone to intellectual and academic debates about the very validity of its national ideologies, on the ground of the eventual total detachment of protagonists from religious values per se. All in all, the Zionists’ reliance on religious motives was certainly a contributory factor to their success but it also widely accounts for the development of the cleavages that have wracked it ever since. To be sure, as a modern society, Israel also experiences other conflicts, and especially class quarrels—in fact, it rates among the highest among the nations of the world in the number of labor disputes and strikes. Yet in spite of its eventual acuity, this dimension remains secondary in national politics, where two other parameters clearly dominate. The first is the right-left cleavage which refers here mainly to hawkish versus dovish attitudes toward Israel’s conflict with the

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Palestinians. Obviously, this parameter is the direct reflection of Israel’s life circumstances. The second parameter pertains to our present discussion; it refers to forces stemming from communities and sectors who have claims relating, in one way or another, to the relationship between religion and nation.

PART FOUR

MODERNITY AS WORLD REALITY

CHAPTER TWENTY

WHO INVENTED MODERNITY IN SOUTH INDIA, AND IS IT MODERN? David Shulman Introducing the term Let us assume that a word like “modern,” if it is not empty or merely tautological, implies, among other things, a certain kind of awareness, and that this awareness, if it is real, does not emerge without some institutional, socio-cultural depth. We might also posit that a newly modern awareness, widely shared, would be transformative of social and institutional dynamics in any given historical context. A set of analytical features characterizing such changes can no doubt be suggested. I would want to examine, for example, changing notions and roles of the individual person and his or her self-definition; shifts in the metaphysics of politics; newly emergent temporalities and with them a strong sense of (retrospective) history;1 a reorganization of spatial modes; the appearance of new elite formations, with related developments in the conceptual or ideological spheres within which they compete; the discovery of a modality, or a sensibility, that might be called “secular,” in some specific sense; perhaps above all, an expansion and transfiguration of the collective imagination. I will return to some of these themes in the conclusion to this essay. It would seem unlikely that such an awareness together with its wider concomitants would first come into play in a rather peripheral setting like that of the town of Vizianagaram in what is today northern Andhra Pradesh, not far from the Orissa border. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Vizianagaram was a frontier town, recently founded, not large by the standards of those times, and very remote from the historic centers of south Indian Telugu civilization in the

1

See Motzkin 1992.

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deltas of the great rivers or in the inland plateau of Telangana. Yet it was here that in 1892 the maverick genius Gurajada Apparao composed his famous play, Kanyasulkam (“Girls for Sale”)—almost universally acknowledged as the first fully “modern” text in Telugu. This play, first published in 1897 and republished in a much expanded version in 1909, became the classic statement of Telugu modernity and, though often misunderstood, largely set the agenda for a century of wide-ranging cultural experimentation and innovation in Andhra and in Madras Presidency more generally. In what follows, I will attempt briefly to introduce the poet, his text and context, and to speculate on the historical logic that brought him, and his new modes of thinking, to the fore. One problem, before we begin, has to do with our habitual insistence on a rather narrow time slot within which modernity is considered plausible. There is, indeed, much that is new, indeed unparalleled, in Apparao; but in many ways he is also directly continuous with developments rooted in the history of late-medieval Andhra, from the fifteenth century on. I have argued elsewhere, together with V. Narayana Rao, that features we think of as “modern” achieve systematic expression in Telugu in the works of Annamayya (15th century), Pingali Suranna (late 16th century), and in the Telugu Nayaka poets of Tanjavur and Madurai (17th–18th centuries).2 Such features include a highly developed sense of the autonomous individual subject, freed from ascriptive ties and newly centered in his or her singular body; a considerable historiographical literature, at least as modern as Gibbon or his immediate predecessors;3 a distinct political vision embodied in small-scale state-systems of a new order and in kings who claimed to be divine;4 an aestheticized, “secular” culture cutting through communal boundaries;5 a certain flair for cultural experimentation linked with skeptical currents, on the one hand, and with emergent, radical epistemologies, on the other.6 This is not the place to rehearse the arguments; suffice it to say that, in our view, modernity in south India begins several centuries before what is usually

2 I want to thank Velcheru Narayana Rao for illuminating discussions of all the Telugu works mentioned in this essay. 3 Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam 2001. 4 Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam 1992. 5 See Shulman, in press. 6 Narayana Rao 1996.

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thought of as the modern age, and that it evolves mostly organically, from within, without being dependent on sustained contact with external, especially Western, forces. Thus Apparao is, in a way, the culminating voice in a long series of innovative poets and thinkers— hence, perhaps, the remarkable resonance and impact of his work. Kalinga There is also a more specific background to the Kanyasulkam and the Vizianagaram cultural production of which it was a part. The city, some 50 kilometres north of today’s large port-city of Visakhapatnam, very close to the coast, is situated in the heart of the region sometimes known as southern Kalinga. It is a setting of remarkable physical beauty—a fertile, rice-growing plain bounded by the sea to the east and the high hills of the Eastern Ghats to the west. Vizianagaram District is mostly Telugu speaking, but culturally this area is perfectly continuous with the Oriya-speaking northern Kalinga (presentday Orissa) and marked off by many conspicuous diagnostic features from deltaic Andhra to the south. Historically, too, Kalinga, in both its segments, has its own particular integrity. There is, for example, a pronounced tribal element, evident both in the formation of the major ritual systems (such as the Jagannatha temple at Puri) and in the political domain. Tribal kingdoms and city-states, “Hinduized” in various degrees, still exist in the uplands; they have profoundly influenced the development of all the little kingdoms on the coastal plains, including Vizianagaram. If we go further back in time, we can see traces of the flourishing proto-Mahayana Buddhist civilization that once saturated Kalinga with stupas, monasteries, and schools. These Buddhist communities were eventually replaced by Brahminical institutions—also of a distinctive type—but a vital substratum of diverse heterodox traditions survived here right up to the present day. A particular variety of Tantric Yoga developed in Kalinga and continues to generate living lineages of teaching. We can see something of it in Laksmidhara’s famous sixteenth-century commentary on the Saundarya-lahari; and there is a strong local tradition that Santarama, the author of the foundational text of Tantric Yoga, the Hatha-yoga-pradipika, came from Kumili, just north of Vizianagaram (the original home of the Pusapati dynasty that concerns us here). Whether or not this tradition is historical, there is unquestionably a

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strong presence of esoteric currents, probably rooted in the ancient Buddhist milieu, throughout the wider Vizianagaram area. This point is far from trivial. Kalinga esotericism is eloquently represented within the Kanyasulkam itself, as it is in many of the courtly productions from nineteenth-century Vizianagaram.7 It is not by chance that a modern consciousness first broke through to the surface in south India, as in the West, in a setting rich with active links to the medieval heterodoxies.8 We know something of the foundation and rise of the Vizianagaram state in the first half of the eighteenth century (although the Pusapati dynasty traces its origins back to one Madhava Varma in the seventeenth century, from Pusapadu, near Vinukonda in the southern delta).9 Devotees of the golden goddess Kanaka Durga of Vijayavada, the Pusapati kings set off—allegedly with the blessing of the Nizam state of Hyderabad, nominally ruling under the aegis of the Mughals— to seek their fortune in the wilderness (manyam or manne) of southern Kalinga.10 Officially, the Pusapatis became tax-farmers within the Hyderabadi-Mughal system and consequently won the high-flown title Manne Sultan Bahadar, “Sultan of the Wilderness.”11 In reality, they were largely independent competitors in the century-long tugof-war among a host of local palegallu rulers for control of the region’s rich resources. By the early years of the eighteenth century, this struggle had eliminated all but a few major players: the Pusapatis (ruling from Kumili), and the small-scale dynasties centered in Madgula—in effect, a tribal kingdom with its ritual center situated high in the hills, at Paderu—and the low-land fortified city-states of Srngavarapu Kota, Golakonda, and Bobbili. Our sources, mostly kaifiyyats written by village accountants (karnams) at the request of the famous Colonel Mackenzie in the early nineteenth century, allow us to reconstruct the final stages of this conflict; largely through the ruthless machinations of a wily diwan, Burra Buccanna, Vizianagaram

7 Kanyasulkam 5.4. The Mukhalinga-ksetra-mahatmyamu offers another perspective on this layer of the tradition (see below). 8 See Eisenstadt 1999. 9 See Pusapati rajulayokka purvottaram, 1; discussion by Berkemer 1993: 252. 10 According to the Ranga-raya caritramu of Dittakavi Narayanakavi (1.115), Madhava Varma came to this region together with a Mughal adventurer called Sher Muhammad Khan; for his services, Madhava Varma was rewarded with the Vizianagaram kingdom. See Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam 2001: 63. 11 Pusapati rajalayokka purvottaram, 4.


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succeeded in dominating its rivals and drawing them into an emergent fiscal and military system operating from the new capital of Vizianagaram—founded in the second decade of the eighteenth century (according to tradition, on Vijaya Dasami, in the autumn Navaratri festival, in the Vijaya year 1713–1714). Several traditions speak of the founding of this aptly named “city of victory” (more properly transliterated Vijaya-nagaram; I retain the old Anglo-Indian spelling in order to differentiate it from the wellknown imperial state far to the south in the western Deccan). The site was, not surprisingly, chosen for security considerations: large hills protected it to the east and north; to the west was the village of Devulapalli; the fort-palace was constructed on the edge of a lake fed by mountain rivulets.12 Originally, there was nothing here but wilderness and a small village called Rega; the area was full of tigers and subject to predatory raids by Muslims (mlecchulu). Still, after the founding of the fort by the first real royal figure, Peda Vijaya Rama Raja, the entire Pusapati clan, with its women and children, marched there from Kumile in four days.13 Some say that Peda Vijaya Rama Raja first discovered the site on a hunting expedition; to his amazement, his hunting dogs were savagely attacked there by the rabbits they were hunting. The king asked a Muslim saint, Denkha Shah Wali Baba, who was meditating in the shade of a tree, about the meaning of this strange reversal. Denkha Shah said: “Kumili will be ruined. Build a new fort here. Heroic manliness ( paurusam) is in the soil.” So Vijaya Rama Raja moved his kingdom to Vizianagaram and built the first, mud-walled fort. An oral account collected by Georg Berkemer insists that the founders of the fort—two royal brothers14— deliberately ignored the Muslim saint’s directions for building the fort nearby, instead constructing it precisely on the spot where the hunting dogs were attacked by a (single) hare; as a result, the new state lost its chance to conquer the entire world.15 Denka Shah’s tomb is situated today about halfway between the royal fort and the Square Shrine (sadur gudi) of the dynasty’s tutelary goddess, Paiditalli— another “golden lady.”

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Ibid., 9–10. Ibid. 14 This seems to be a memory of the historic rivalry between the brothers Peda Sitaramaraju and Peda Vijaya Rama Raju. 15 Berkemer 1993: 275. 13

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It is perhaps necessary to stress the inter-communal aspect of the foundational myth as well as its typically heroic coloring. Even more salient is the state’s self-perception as a wilderness kingdom, remote from the more settled and stable political systems of the delta and the interior. This is a kingdom of tigers and tiger-like warriors who inhabit a peripheral domain alive with sorcery, magical Yoga, tribal deities, fishermen, hunters, and powerful local goddesses, rather wild themselves.16 Conspicuous by their absence are the Brahmin communities usually associated with various patterns of political homeostasis in south India. Although we do hear, occasionally, of land-grants to Brahmins,17 and we can also trace the rise of large-scale Sanskritized temples (at Mukhalingam, Rama-tirthalu, Padmanabham, Palukonda, and so on), it seems that the early Vizianagaram state legitimized itself mostly without Brahmin assistance. This state is founded upon a heroic, wilderness ethos, the local goddess who creates a habitable space for kings and subjects, and a motley crowd of itinerant magicians, alchemists, musicians, poets, wrestlers, tiger-dancers, and unconventional Yogis. Indeed, this peculiarly Kalingan mix continued to flourish at the Vizianagaram court throughout the nineteenth century, right up to the generation of our unconventional Brahmin dramatist, Gurajada Apparao. Such is the mise en scene of incipient modernity in Andhra. Like so much cultural innovation, the invention of the modern takes place not where we might expect it (in this case, in the great political and commercial cities of Rajahmundry, Nellore, or Madras) but somewhere on the remote margins of south Indian history, a spooky, rather sleepy provincial town in the shadow of the tribal domain of the mountains, completely surrounded by forest. There is one more critical feature of the historical process at eighteenth-century Vizianagaram—the final loss of coercive force by a dynasty that claimed to generate only heroes and that based its claims on their physical and moral prowess. I cannot rehearse the details of this process, some rather well known by now.18 Suffice it to say that in 1757 Vizianagaram successfully manipulated a French-

16 Don Handelman and I are preparing a monograph on the cult of Paidi Talli at Vizianagaram and the socio-political universe in which it is enacted. 17 Thus an early king, Raghunatha, a Vaisnava, is said to have given two or three agraharams to Brahmins: Pusapati rajulayokka purvottaram, 3. 18 See detailed discussion in Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam 2001.


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Hyderabadi band of irregulars under Charles de Bussy to attack and destroy its last real enemy, the Velama rulers of Bobbili; but following this Pyrrhic victory—which cost the life of the Vizianagaram king, Peda Vijaya Rama Raja—the Vizianagaram state found itself pitted against a new and far more powerful force, that of the English Company centered in Madras. A futile last stand at Padmanabham, very close to Vizianagaram, in 179419 paved the way for the English takeover of the kingdom’s finances. When the dynasty was granted control over its own fate once again, in 1848, it understood that politics and warfare could no longer mix. As a result, the kings turned their energies to the intense cultural production that eventually included Apparao and his radical text. The acme of Vizianagaram’s golden age was attained under the relatively short rule of the legendary Ananda Gajapati (r. 1879–1897), the so-called Abhinava Andhra Bhoja (that is, a re-embodiment of the paradigmatic patron and connoisseur of medieval India, Bhoja of Dhara, now present again in the Telugu land).20 Gurajada Apparao and the Kanyasulkam The poet was born in 1861/6221 into a Niyogi Brahmin family well versed in the ways of political power and closely linked with the Vizianagaram court; his father, Venkata Rama Das, was a revenue officer and khiledar occasionally employed by the Pusapati ruler. After early schooling in Cipurapalli, Apparao shifted to Vizianagaram town, where he completed a B.A. in 1886 at the Maharaja’s College—at that time, one of the finest educational institutions on the east coast of India. The following year he began teaching at the college (English, Sanskrit, and history). Soon he was also appearing at court, where he became close to the king and eventually received an appointment as court epigraphist. Although he published a body of poetry (first in English, later in Telugu), some of it remarkable, the Kanyasulkamu is unquestionably his masterpiece. After the death of Ananda Gajapati in 1897, Apparao maintained his role at court through his close ties 19 See ibid., 79–92, following the Padmanabha-yuddhamu of Chatrati Laksmi Narasa Kavi. The second (Chinna) Vijaya Rama Raju lost his life at Padmanabham. 20 See Rama Rao 1985. 21 There is a dispute about the precise date, which depends on a reading of his horoscope.

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to the late king’s sister, Riva Rani. At his early death in 1915, aged 53, he left behind several unpublished works including another seminal but unfinished play, Bilhaniyam, an extensive diary of many years (still unknown in its original Telugu), and a comprehensive history of Kalinga. His house, just around the corner from the palace-fort in Vizianagaram, is today a public library and national monument.22 These bare facts tell us little of his achievement. Throughout the twentieth century, Andhra modernists claimed him as their main precursor (together with Kandukuri Viresalingam, who was active further south, in Rajahmundry); but for the most part, they misunderstood the subtle awareness that he sought to express. His agenda coincided only rather superficially with the meliorist social vision of the reformers. As Velcheru Narayana Rao has written, “His program was to clear the path so that a modern Telugu prose could emerge, and to modernize Telugu sensibilities with a new kind of poetry— a sort of cultural revolution, to create the basis for the emergence of a new class of people who would have both the cultural confidence to assimilate alien influences without being defensive, and who would also possess the intellectual strength to retain what was valuable in their past.”23 To this end, Apparao fashioned almost single-handedly a Telugu prose based on vernacular speech instead of the somewhat artificial language of the pandits—though he was familiar with the robust prose of the karnam historians who preceded him. No attempt to come to terms with his work can ignore this intensely controversial linguistic and stylistic break-through, which goes well beyond the realm of language per se. The characters Apparao puts on stage speak a rich, colloquial, highly individualized Telugu; each of them is a strong subjective presence giving voice to a personal experience of the world. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Telugu; some would argue that a century later this precise, symphonic, oral eloquence has yet to be imitated or successfully extended. On this level alone, Apparao is modern through and through. As its name implies, Brides for Sale thematizes one of the classic reformist targets in late nineteenth-century Andhra: the practice of 22 A vast secondary bibliography exists in Telugu on Apparao. Noteworthy is the incisive biographical study in Russian by Petrunicheva 1985. See, first, Narayana Rao 2003: 281–87. 23 Ibid., 284.


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marrying off young girls, for sizable fees, to older men, often widowers. The usual result was a life of misery for the young bride, inevitably widowed at a young age. Apparao’s royal patron at Vizianagaram, Ananda Gajapati, an active modernist in many ways, initiated legislation—the Kanyasulkam Bill—in the Madras Legislative Council with the aim of prohibiting such marriages; this initiative was not approved. In the program advocated by the Andhra reformists, proscribing the sale of young brides was only half the struggle; the other side of it was enabling widow remarriage. Both these issues figure prominently in Apparao’s play. The plot, to summarize very baldly the extraordinary profusion of witty dialogue and melodramatic events, revolves around the desire of an elderly Brahmin villager, Lubdhavadhanlu (“Greedy Scholar”), to buy as his new bride the young daughter, Subbi, of another Brahmin, Agnihotravadhanlu. The latter is more than willing to go through with the deal, but the girl’s mother is staunchly opposed; she induces her brother, Karataka Sastri, to stop the match by a ruse— in hard bargaining, he sells Agnihotravadhanlu another bride, who is none other than Karataka Sastri’s own (male) disciple, disguised as a girl. The complicated masquerade requires deft manipulation by the play’s true heroine, the world-wise courtesan Madhuravani, who brings her most recent lover, Ramappantalu, into play as a middleman. After the wedding is duly performed, the eager bridegroom soon realizes the catastrophe he has brought upon himself; and when the new “bride” disappears, Lubdhavadhanlu finds himself in danger of being charged with murder. Interwoven with the main plot is the somewhat disingenuous love of Girisam, a man about town with half-baked education in English and an infinite resourcefulness in advancing his selfish interests, for the young widow Buccamma, Agnihotravadhanlu’s other daughter. A supporting cast of lawyers, policemen, a village priest-magician, corrupt ascetic, astrologer, and servants, fills in the contours of this varied and, in a certain sense, realistic social universe. Elements of the plot, and the sophisticated parodic impulse working through it, have medieval sources—for example, in the tenth-century Sanskrit drama by Rajasekhara, the Viddha-salabhanjika, which was well known in Andhra. We could also trace a clear line of succession from the sixteenth-century Telugu novels by Pingali Suranna, mentioned above. But the development of the plot is, in a way, less crucial than the particular tone or tones Apparao has established. Here

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the entrepreneurial cad Girisam, the first voice we hear on stage, may be said to have pride of place. He is somewhat reminiscent of Musil’s Mann ohne Eingenschaften, a near-contemporary—driven by the same inner confusion and strangely attractive hollowness. No summary could ever do justice to Girisam’s role in the play; nor can we begin to explore seriously, in the present context, the cultural and psychological complexities that form the Kanyasulkam’s true subject matter.24 Still, to convey at least something of the flavor, I want to cite one extended passage from Act 4, near the mid-point of the play (in Velcheru Narayana Rao’s supple translation). The bogus wedding has just taken place, and the scene reverts to Agnihotravadhanlu’s house where Girisam is “instructing” his pupil, Venkatesam, in questions of practical metaphysics: Venkatesam: [explaining why he was slapped by his father] I didn’t say my morning prayers. Girisam: Couldn’t you at least pretend you were praying? Venkatesam: I thought he [my father] wasn’t watching. Girisam: You should never do that. When you pretend, pretend all the time. Not just when someone is watching you. You know I meditate every day, like a heron in the lake. Venkatesam: What do you meditate on? Girisam: On food. I say to myself, “God, please let this old man end his worship soon so I can get food on my plate.” Venkatesam: You should pray to god with the right chants. Is it not a sin to ask for your meal? Girisam: Ignorance!25 You don’t know anything about religion. I should train you in religion after this wedding is over. I have studied all religions, taken the essence of all of them and created a new religion. I am going to spread it in America. But let me answer your question now. What was your question? Is it right to meditate on food? See what your Upanisad says: annam brahmeti vyajanat. It says, you fool, know that food is God. What does the white man pray for every day? “Fathe, give us our daily bread.” So what should we pray for? We should pray for rice and lentils. [. . . .] Venkatesam: [I should ask for] thick curds and pretzels. Girisam: Excellent! That’s originality. Even your own mother will not give unless you ask. God doesn’t either. Make a list of all the things you want and insert it into your chant. [. . .]

24 V. Narayana Rao is preparing a complete study to be published with his translation of the text. 25 Italics marks the verbatim insertion of English terms into the Telugu text.


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Venkatesam: You stole a pack of tobacco from the Bhukta’s. Won’t god be angry with you for your sin? Girisam: See, when I was young, my uncle—who was a firebrand like your father—twisted my earlobes and made me read Upanisads. In one of those Upanisads—damn it, I forget the name—a student asks questions and a teacher answers them. You are the student and I am the teacher— just like in that Upanisad. If someone records your questions and my answers on a palm leaf, it will be a sacred text—after a couple of hundred years it will be known as Tobaccopanisad. What’s so sinful about stealing tobacco? You just smoke it away, right? Moreover, it’s good for the world to steal tobacco from those idiots who inhale snuff. Venkatesam: How’s that good for the world? Girisam: I’ll tell you how. If you smoke cigars, the smoke goes to the sky like steam from a locomotive and turns into clouds that rain. If you inhale snuff, the sky gets dry from that pungent smell. Only your nose drips a few drops, making your clothes dirty. So we should, by all means, steal all the tobacco from those who inhale snuff and smoke it all as cigars. If God, however, says: Sir, Girisam-garu, you did commit a sin and you have to honor hell with your presence, I will give him a lecture and confuse him. Venkatesam: What’s your lecture going to be on? I’m curious. Girisam: What will that be? O Almighty God, did you create me to be independent of you or dependent on you? If I am created to be independent of you, I did what I did and who are you to ask? If you trouble me with your questions, I will organize a National Congress in Heaven. Or, if I am created to be dependent on you, you are the one to take responsibility for my sins and you will be the one to be punished. Therefore, you go to Hell yourself. If you give me power over Heaven in your absence—for just six hours—I will fix a few mistakes in your creation. Venkatesam: What are those mistakes, sir? Girisam: Serious mistakes. You yourself will agree. Is it not a mistake to create a stupid person like your teacher in the high school? Venkatesam: Yes, it is a mistake. Girisam: Making a beautiful young girl like your sister a widow—is it a mistake or not? Venkatesam: Surely a mistake. Girisam: There are a million more like this. And how much of God’s creation is wasteful? For instance, how many seas are there? Venkatesam: Seven. Girisam: Seven senseless seas. After creating a sea of milk, why do you need a sea of curds and a sea of clarified butter? This is pleonism—redundancy. Now, another stupid mistake: God dumped this totally useless salt-water sea in our neighborhood and placed seas of milk, curds, clarified butter, and sugar-cane juice in places impossible for anybody to reach. If God hands over his power to me for one year, I will bring the ocean of milk to Bhimunipatnam, the ocean of fresh water to Visakhapatnam,

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and the sea of sugar-cane juice to Kalingapatnam. I will make the entire Eastern Ghats a tobacco forest. When I give this lecture, you know what God will say? He will say, “This man is impossible to defeat.” [. . .] Then God will ask his angels to take me on a horse cart, show me around heaven and let me choose the best house in the place. I will tell them that I want my favorite student Venkatesam to live with me. They they will bring you on an airplane. We will live happily ever after. Enough religious instruction for today.26

We can pause for a moment to notice the brazen iconoclasm of Girisam’s “lecture” (he himself uses the English word). No one, I think, would deny that Girisam is a true modern. It is not only a matter of the obvious skepticism recruited to rationalize self-driven needs. There is also the limitless pretension: even heaven and its ruling deity are no limit for Girisam’s confident vision. He would not, it is true, be the first Telugu hero to beat God at his own game— Nirankusa, a medieval trickster, triumphs over Siva in a fateful game of dice and walks away with the ultimate prize27—but Girisam seems to see further, not so much into the farther reaches of the cosmos as toward an open-ended human world of opportunity and adventure. In this, he lampoons the famous Swami Vivekananda, who brought a Neo-Vedantic, refurbished Hinduism to the World Congress of Religions in Chicago in 1895. In Apparao’s caustic prose, Vivekananda turns into another egotistical pretender, probably less capable and self-aware than our Vizianagaram dandy. Then there is the ruthlessness and its shameless rationale, another clearly modern feature: “When you pretend, pretend all the time.” (Literally, Girisam is speaking about “putting on a guise”, vesam veyyadam). Logic is brought to bear, with devastating effect: stealing tobacco is no sin if God has made the thief “independent,” and if he hasn’t—then the sin is God’s. Needless to say, the theological point is familiar from classical discussions; never, however, has it been used to such single-minded subversive effect. Similarly with the recycling of puranic geography and Upanisadic cosmological lore— the past is never absent, never redundant, only reframed ironically so as to unravel and dissociate its semantic burdens. The cycle of life and death so powerfully set forth in Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 6.2.1–16

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Kanyasulkam 4.5 (pp. 99–101). Nirankusopakhyanamu of Rudrakavi: see Handelman and Shulman 1997: 96–106. 27


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and Chandogya Upanisad 5.3–10—those who sacrifice and give charity pass from the smoke of the cremation pyre into the night and thence, by stages, reach the moon, becoming space, air, rain, food, and semen—has been turned into a sly argument in favor of smoking cigars. Tobacco smoke goes to heaven and induces rain. Cosmology, simplified and touched up, now serves a nihilistic, perfectly modern hedonism. I have used the term “parody” and will stand by it. Girisam’s speech, like any real parody, is committed simultaneously to two incongruous codes, neither of which can be wholly set aside. But this is, again, a peculiarly familiar, modern form of parody, in which both codes, the ridiculed classical and its apparent, materialistic replacement, are doubly twisted and turned back on themselves. This is just where the modernists went wrong in reading Apparao. They fail to see how savagely he has mocked the language, the social program, and the limited intellectual horizon of the nineteenth-century reformers. If the Upanisads are, in the end, no more to the point than an anachronistic cosmo-map of oceans of curd and sugar-cane juice, neither are the recently formed national “Congress” or the utilitarian ideology of the British and their south Indian epigones of any real relevance to the baffled citizen of late nineteenth-century Vizianagaram.28 There is more. A third pillar of the reformists’ campaign, after widow remarriage and the banning of the trade in child-brides, was the so-called “anti-nautch” movement aimed at outlawing the institution of courtesans (“nautch girls”) that had helped preserve classical artistic forms for well over a millennium throughout south India. A lethal combination of Victorian prudishness and Brahminical Puritanism had, by the 1890’s, already begun to wreak havoc with the lives of many accomplished Madhuravanis, thus threatening the corpus of poetry, dance and music that they represented (also the social fabric in villages and small towns). Apparao’s Madhuravani is, perhaps, his most powerful portrait as well as the only one of his characters to emerge unscathed and triumphant at the end of the drama. In the immediate sequel to the section cited above, Girisam makes yet another attempt to win the shy Buccamma’s affection; and in the course of his flood of arguments, the anti-nautch campaign, too, comes in for implicit ridicule:

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See also discussion of this passage by Petrunicheva 1985: 51.

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Girisam [to Buccamma]: You are still protected by your parents. No man can approach you. But your parents won’t live forever. Once they are gone, you, too, will be independent. Who knows how your mind will work then? Once you stray from the straight path, you will regret not marrying Girisam the proper way. You will think: “If only I had married him, I would have children and wealth and all happiness.” Where will I be then? In heaven, waiting for you. After this wedding, Venkatesam and I will return to the city. I will long for you and give up food and sleep. How long can anyone live without food and sleep? I will keep thinking of you and spend many sleepless nights. Then one day in the middle of the night, I’ll be sitting in an easy chair, in front of me there will be an electric lamp and a life-size mirror and I will look at myself in the mirror and I will say to myself: “This handsome face, these wide eyes, this charming mustache—all these are of no use. What good are they, when my Buccamma doesn’t want them?” In despair I will open the drawer and pick up the double-barreled pistol, aim it at my heart and shoot myself. Buccamma: Don’t, don’t do that. If you say such things, I’ll cry. Girisam: Immediately the gods will send their sky-chariot and take me to heaven. Will I be happy even in heaven? No. The gods’ beauty queen Rambha will come bedecked with jewelry and will fall all over me, cooing, “My sweet Girisam, I have never seen a more handsome man than you. Come, give me a kiss.” And I will say to her: “Go away, I am anti-nautch.”29

It is hard to imagine a sharper blow at the reformers with whom Girisam ostensibly identifies himself. We might also note that a new ideology of romantic love, conspicuously present in Girisam’s seductive conversations with Buccamma, is also pointedly and repeatedly subverted. A similarly delicate undermining of innocent romance takes place in two of Apparao’s best-known poems, “The Comet” and “Gold.”30 On Experimentation If we were to stick to the level of literary explication, it would, no doubt, be possible to elaborate a theory of modern irony as characteristically marked by this kind of double twist—an initial ironic or parodic perspective itself rendered ironic in a wider, more com-

29 30

Kanyasulkam 4.5 (p. 103). Narayana Rao 2003: 5–9, 227–29, with the translator’s remarks, 284–87.


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prehensive vision woven into the first-order statement of subversion. A similar case could be made for what passes as modern realism, another salient feature of Apparao’s play. Realism of this type includes a hidden core of dark fantasy that borders on the grotesque (as in real life). In general and theoretical terms, probably only the notional spectrum of alienation, the true staple of all modernist poetics, remains dependably naïve. But in a volume honoring Shmuel Eisenstadt, we should, I think, try for a somewhat more integrative approach. Gurujada Apparao’s Girls for Sale is only one, particularly hardhitting reflection of the changes that overtook southern India in the late nineteenth century, though it does have the merit of being the first full-fledged literary articulation of these changes. We are unable to offer a deeper analysis here; much work remains to be done on the enormous cultural output of the nineteenth-century Vizianagaram court—the sources are there, waiting only for a serious reader. Still, given the particular background sketched out above and our small sample of the text, we can, I think, make several tentative points. The particular configuration of a distinctive modern ethos and its associated institutional dynamics emerged much earlier in this part of the world than in the West. Its roots lie in late-medieval developments that intensified in scope and impact in the course of the eighteenth century. A particularly charged and effective field came into being in the peripheral zone of northern Andhra (southern Kalinga), with its strong continuities to the ancient heterodoxies and its ongoing generation of esoteric and iconoclastic visions (the Kalinga lineages of Tantric Yoga and the performative traditions of dance, martial arts, and local rituals). The political structures of Apparao’s Vizianagaram rested mostly upon these promising, somewhat novel foundations. Nonetheless, these structures clearly remained weak in comparison with the state-systems of the Nayaka south, for example, or even of the late-Mughal north. Vizianagaram produced no true Jacobins— the opportunistic Girisam is the polar opposite of the type—and also no Weberian bureaucrats in their iron cages. A once-heroic kingship transformed into an aestheticized, non-sectarian, in some sense “secular” political domain became preoccupied not so much with the culture of power as with the power of culture—that is, with the elaboration of a certain kind of public space. In this respect, weakness in the domain of coercive force and centralized resources became a major source of strength.

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What were the characteristics of that new space? It certainly included new values that were largely context-free, always an innovation in South Asia. We can hear them in Girisam’s skepticism, his utilitarianism and his ludicrously overstated, ultimately superficial belief in progress. Elsewhere in the play we find the notion of an abstract, normative body of law that includes some element of egalitarian rights. A radical individualism lies at the heart of this newly crystallizing sensibility; it infuses every line of Apparao’s great work. It was, I think, there before, but in Apparao we find it thematized, explicit, and mature. But there are at least two other, newer dimensions to the space of kingship in colonial Vizianagaram. One has to do with a concept of society that far transcends earlier Telugu models. Both Girisam and Madhuravani think in terms of an organic social world—inhabited by exotic and conflicted groups—that has become a domain for large-scale human experimentation. Within this domain, still remarkably inclusivist in the traditional Hindu mode, it is easy to detect the sort of turbulence that derives from conflicting claims to legitimacy. Madhuravani thus boldly confronts the somewhat stolid, priggish figure of the modern lawyer, Saunjanya Rao, with his strong antinautch prejudices and reformist ideology; a medieval set of values incarnate in the sophisticated, humane and worldly courtesan achieves one last victory over an emerging system of supposedly universal and abstract norms. ( Jan Heesterman claimed long ago that the defining feature of South Asian modernity, in contrast to the medieval Hindu organization of social and political life, is its re-internalization of totalistic, transcendent truth-claims, now vested in the state.)31 In nineteenth-century Vizianagaram, kingship presided over this laboratory of social transformation in mostly instrumental ways. What is even more striking—this is the second dimension of change—is the fact that politics has itself acquired an experimental charge. The Kanyasulkam was naturally dedicated to the king, Ananda Gajapati, who had made the campaign against selling child-brides his own special concern;32 and while Appararao’s play, like many of the courtly

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Heesterman 1971 and 1979. See the author’s English preface, always reprinted in editions of the text: “No one is better aware than the writer himself, how great are the imperfections of the piece, and how unworthy it is of presentation to such an exalted personage and 32


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productions at Vizianagaram, was intended for a public far wider and more diverse than the court, its congenital relation to the poet’s enlightened patron and to the cultivated sensibilities he fostered should never be forgotten. We could formulate this relation in various ways, taking account of the dramatically expanding spheres of cultural consumption in Apparao’s generation; but here again an important insight of Shmuel Eisenstadt can help. In classical South Asian polities, the political sphere has its necessary presence, dynamic structures, and integrity—yet it is usually not seen as embodying, in itself, the ultimate existential values of the civilization. In Eisenstadt’s term, the political has been “de-ontologized” in Hindu India. It would, of course, not be difficult to cite exceptions; and we have argued elsewhere that the Nayaka states of late-medieval Tamil Nadu show us the beginning of a new pattern, in which the domains of kingship and divinity have begun to merge.33 Still, by the time we reach Ananda Gajapati Raja at Vizianagaram, it is clear that we are dealing with a small-scale state, a center for unusual intellectual and cultural intensity, which has “re-ontologized” precisely this domain. Politics has become a sphere for critical existential experimentation. The Kanyasulkam shows us how this happens in almost every scene. Such is the stuff of a transfigured imagination, as hinted at the outset of this essay. Ananda Gajapati, the prototype of the modern Andhra monarch, only a generation away from the moment when the kings of Vizianagaram would successfully transform themselves into elected politicians, needed Gurujada Apparao to imagine him into existence. Indeed, this role belongs traditionally to all the great Telugu poets who enjoyed the patronage of some local or trans-local king. It is the poet’s task to re-conceive his patron as king. Dependence has always been asymmetrical along this axis. At the same time, the Vizianagaram kings were eager to forge their own links to ultimate values, or to the ultimately real, and to enact these links in a range of telling milieux.

ripe Scholar as Your Highness, but he has ventured to seek your Highness’s indulgence, as he deems it the highest honour and his greatest ambition to be permitted to dedicate the fruits of his intellect, poor though in merit, to a Prince with whom knowledge is an absorbing passion and whose appreciative encouragement of letters, has attracted to his court literary stars of the first magnitude and inaugurated a brilliant epoch in the history of Telugu literature.” 33 Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam 1992.

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Thus in Kakaraparti Krsna-kavi’s Telugu poem on the famous shrine of Mukhalingam, to the north and west of Vizianagaram—another nineteenth-century text generated from the matrix of Vizianagaram patronage—we meet King Visnuvardhana Madhukarna Gajapatideva, a puranic counterpart to the Pusapati kings. This mythic ruler conquered the entire world and then arrived, somewhat fatigued, at the bank of the Vamsadhara River, near Mukhalingam. He went to sleep and dreamt that the god, Mukhalingesvara-Siva, told him the long, complicated story of his, the god’s, arrival there and then ordered the king to build him a temple. One royal function, clearly, is to listen to a god eager to relate his autobiography when the mood strikes. The story complete, the king awoke; the god, naturally, had disappeared. Where, exactly, was the Gajapati ruler to build the new temple? There were lingas everywhere, and no way to know which one belonged to the deity who had spoken in the dream. In this quandary, desperate for a practical solution, the king consulted his minister, who sagely advised him to go back to sleep. With luck, Siva would appear one more time in his dream, this time with more adequate and detailed directions.34 Then again, he might not. It is not every Prime Minister who would send his superior to bed (though many might want to). Not every kingdom would put at its core a dreamy, visionary king, straining to shape reality in the elusive contours of his dream. It might, however, happen in a small town perched on the edge of a vast wilderness ruled by no-longerheroic connoisseurs, the patrons of Yogis, wrestlers, singers, local gods and local poets, themselves intent on re-imagining a radically unsettled world. The story, no doubt, is an old one—its retelling at the Vizianagaram court, a moment entirely modern.

34 Mukhalingesvara-ksetra-mahatmyamu 3 (pp. 53–57). I am indebted to Velcheru Narayana Rao for making this text accessible to me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

IS ISRAEL WESTERN? Sammy Smooha Israel is Western in its self and international image. It is also considered Western in social science writings though not always explicitly. Some scholars see Israel as an exceptional case, and many do not openly declare it as Western, but few question its deviation from to the Western model. Troubled by lingering doubts about this stock view of Israel, I will examine the degree to which Israel qualifies as Western and attempt to uncover the forces that expedite and inhibit its Westernization. A better understanding of Israeli society is the main but not the sole purpose of this study. The Israeli case can shed some light on the necessary conceptual distinction between “Western,” “modern” and “developed,” on possible non-Western trajectories of modernization and globalization, and on the question whether the post-Communist states that joined the European Union in May 2004 are indeed Western. Distinguishing Western A distinction must be made between “modern,” “developed” and “Western.” To become “modern” means to abandon old traditions and practices and to replace them with new patterns. The essence of modernization is the capacity, desire and legitimacy to change and to adopt novel norms and habits. The process of modernization is pervasive in all contemporary societies. While most societies are modern in the basic sense of being nontraditional and change-oriented, only a minority of them are “developed.” “Developed” countries are high in human and economic development and capital. They have advanced market economies and democratic political systems. The United Nations (UNDP 2003) and World Bank (2003) gather and publish data on various indicators

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of development. The top group of countries in their development scales is considered “(highly) developed.” They are high in human rights, per capita income, non-poverty, employment, gender equality, school attendance, technology diffusion, life expectancy, health services, personal safety and environmental quality. Most of the highly developed countries are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As “developed” is a subcategory of “modern,” “Western” is a subcategory of “developed.” The term “Western” refers to the countries of Western Europe and to their overseas transplant societies. Thus the West includes the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all of which were formed by West European settlers. The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Sweden are no doubt the leading examples of the Western model. Although Western states differ in language and culture and in the exact shape of their political system and economy, they have a great deal in common when compared to other countries. They are all rich, democratic, secular, not so nationalistic, and bourgeois in outlook and way of life. Lest the picture is too positive, it must be stressed that the West is also plagued by a decline of community, loss of warm relations between people, tough competition and an over-use of alcohol and drugs, to name just a few of the social ills of the West. Although each of these characteristics can be found in many non-Western countries, this configuration is unique to the contemporary West. For instance, Kuwait is rich, India is democratic, Japan is highly industrialized and Turkey is officially secular, but none of them is Western because none displays the other features of the Western model. The West is not only “modern” and “developed” but also “postmodern” to some degree. The economy is based on high-technology and post-industrial (only a small portion of the labor force is engaged in production). Rationality, scientific knowledge and materialism are no longer considered as desirable absolute truths. The “nation-state” is incapable of homogenizing and uniting the diverse population. “New Age” is a viable subculture in the Western culture. These and other traits of post-modernity or late-modernity characterize certain population segments in Western countries. The distinctiveness of the West is a controversial issue. Although many accept the idea of multiple modernities and the side-by-side coexistence of world civilizations, they disagree on the nature of relationship and degree of uniqueness of the present civilizations. On

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the one hand, Fukuyama (1992) posits a relatively homogenous world created by the eventual triumph of the hegemonic and homogenizing Western civilization. On the other hand, Huntington (1996) emphasizes the separation and clash between unique civilizations. Eisenstadt (2003a: 519–533) takes a middle-of-the-road position that recognizes the prevalence of different civilizations but accentuates the interactions, and the great diversity and conflicts within each civilization that blur the boundaries dividing them. He sees marked differences within the Western civilization—between the United States and Western Europe, between countries within Western Europe, and between cultural and institutional patterns and trends within each Western country. The endeavor to answer the question “Is Israel Western?” can benefit most from Huntington’s view of Western civilization as unique. He singles out eight cultural and institutional forms that characterize the West: the classical legacy, Western Christianity, European languages and a single common language, separation of the secular and religious authority, rule of law, social pluralism and civil society, representative bodies and individualism. What makes Western civilization unique according to Huntington is, however, not each of these features: Individually, almost none of these factors was unique to the West. The combination of them was, however, and this is what gave the West its distinctive quality. These concepts, practices, and institutions have simply been more prevalent in the West than in other civilizations. They form at least part of the essential continuing core of Western civilization. They are what is Western, but not modern, about the West. In large part, they are also the factors that enabled the West to take the lead in modernizing itself and the world (1996: 72).

While drawing on Huntington, Eisenstadt, and other comparativists, my operative model of Western civilization includes various characteristics that Western societies share in common at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To be Western, a society should satisfy all or most of the Western criteria, among which are the following: 1. Permanent and clear borders of state and society. 2. Western image, orientation, ties and membership. 3. Demography of zero or negative population growth, non-familism, economic regulation of immigration, and a population that is nonWesternized or Westernized to a limited extent. 4. High levels of research and development and an advanced higher education system.

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416 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

A post-industrial economy. Separation of military from society. A liberal or consociational type of political democracy. Separation between state and religion. A civic-territorial form of nationalism. An individualistic and bourgeois way of life.

This is a partial list of characteristics possessed by Western countries.1 It is based on the simple supposition that to belong to the West is to display all the standard requirements of group membership; namely, a desire to be a member, admission by that group as a member, observance of the group’s code of behavior and maintenance of strong relations with group members. The list can serve as a test of fitness to the Western model, and its use would provide an all-round view of this rather complex issue.2 Applying the Western model to Israel Israel has been the subject of many macro-analytical studies but none has dealt with the question of the degree to which Israel is Western. The implicit assumption of these studies is that Israel is indeed Western and should be judged by Western criteria.3 The Western qualifications of Israel within its pre-1967 borders will be assessed below by the above ten criteria of Western society, state and culture. Permanent and clear borders The preliminary and most fundamental characteristic of Western countries is possession of permanent, recognized and peaceful state borders and an unambiguous membership in society.4 Israel evidently fails this critical test. It still lives in a hostile environment, has inse-

1

For a list of indicators of Westernization, see Lauristin 1997: 30. With regard to individualism as the core value in Western culture, see Triandis 1995. 2 The comparative sociological literature does not identify the Western model as a distinct social type. Other terms are usually used, including developed, postindustrial, advanced industrial, capitalist and core. See, for example, Lenski 1994 and Hopkins et al. 1996. 3 These studies include Eisenstadt 1985, Horowitz and Lissak 1989, Shafir and Peled 2002, Kimmerling 2001, and Barnett 1996. 4 Divided Ireland is an exception in this area as in some other spheres, the most important of which is the continued central role of religion in state and public life.

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cure and internationally unrecognized boundaries, and controls extensive territory beyond the Green Line. Its borders are in dispute, both internally and internationally. There is a sharp discrepancy in Israel between state borders demarcated by “control” and frontiers delimited by “sovereignty” (Kimmerling 1989). Israel further fails the related test of clear-cut societal boundaries that distinguish Western societies. Israel controls over 10 million people in the area of Mandatory Palestine, but over a third of them are non-citizen Palestinian Arabs, subject to some form of military rule. It also has about a quarter of a million foreign workers whose stay in the country is neither permanent nor temporary. Israel declares itself the homeland of the Jewish people and extends the automatic right of immigration and citizenship to any Jew or to any person closely related to a Jew. This makes 9 million Diaspora Jews and an additional 3–4 million persons related to them eligible for immigration and instant citizenship and accords them a certain right of hold over Israeli society. While 1,025,000 Arabs are citizens of Israel, their societal membership is not considered full in a society that defines itself as Jewish. Besides, the Israeli law is applied to a quarter of a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza but not to the Palestinians there. Horowitz and Lissak (1989) see these ambiguous territorial and social boundaries as a distinguishing feature of Israeli society, thereby indirectly conceding the un-Western character of Israel. Image, orientation, ties and membership Israel clearly passes the test of Western image, orientation and ties, and even membership in the West as much as possible. Image. Israel projects the image of a Western state. Israel’s political and intellectual elites claim that the state is indeed Western in its culture, economy, political democracy and way of life. The West and the international community in general reciprocate by viewing Israel as part of the West. Orientation. Israel has a strong orientation to the West. When Israelis think of their conduct and achievements, they always refer to the West. Public leaders, intellectuals, journalists, judges, scientists, academicians, sportsmen, entertainers and other leading figures evaluate Israel’s and Israelis’ performance by Western standards. In Israel,

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the general statement “this is the way it is done in the world” means “this is the way it is done in the West.” Israel’s powerful attraction to the West should not be taken for granted because there are several good reasons for Israel to shy away from the West. Zionism, Israel’s founding and main ideology, lacks a clear goal to make Israel Western. Among all branches of Zionism, as well as among the Jewish elites and the Jewish majority, there is consensus that Israel should be Jewish, democratic and modern; however, none of these three objectives requires Westernization. In addition to Hebrew, Jewishness may refer to Orthodox Judaism, Jewish heritage, or anything created by Jews, but it does not necessarily imply the adoption of Western ways and values. The founders of Zionism and Israel undertook to cast a new Jew and a new Jewish society that would be unique and exemplary, but by no means clones of a Western mold.5 The Jews have another strong reason to be reserved about the West. It is under Western Christianity that they were accused of killing Jesus, treated as a pariah people and subjected to centuriesold, virulent hatred, persecutions, pogroms and anti-Semitism. It is in the West, and as recent as the past generation, that the hatred of the Jews climaxed in unprecedented proportions: a systematic scheme to exterminate the Jewish people by Nazi Germany, a Holocaust that the Western powers did little to stop. Another possible reason that Israel might be reluctant to be Western is related to its geo-political location. Since it is located in the Middle East and interested in living in peace with the Arab world, Israel may feel a need to be integrated into this region in order to be accepted by the surrounding peoples and countries. By becoming Western, Israel reveals its alien nature and its objection to Middle Eastern patterns, which reinforce Arab antagonism. Despite these potential substantial objections, Israel’s actual pull to the West is staggering. Of the Jews polled in a representative public opinion survey, conducted in March 1995 (TSC 1995), 47.9% wished Israel to be most similar to the United States and Canada; 34.8% to Belgium, France and the Netherlands; leaving insignificant proportions attracted either to Italy, Spain and Greece (3.4%), and

5 For a succinct presentation of Zionism and its continued relevance, see BarOn 1993.

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to Jordan, Egypt and Morocco (2.4%) (11.6% did not answer). When further asked to choose where Israel should be integrated in terms of culture and way of life, 73.9% preferred Europe and America, compared to only 9.8% who favored the Middle East (11.0% rejected both, and 5.3% did not know). In another survey taken in September 2003, 78.0% of the Jews favored Israel’s integration into the Western world rather than into the Arab and Moslem states in the region, and in the area of culture 68.3% preferred Israel to integrate into Europe-America rather than the Middle East.6 Several key reasons apparently underlie Israelis’ staunch disposition toward the West. In their eyes, the contemporary West constitutes success, richness, abundant opportunity, power, progress, freedom, protection of individual rights, a sense of morality and advanced science and technology. Western countries dominate the world economy, politics and media and are at the forefront of cutting-edge developments. Since Israeli Jews identify themselves with all these values and assets, they want to be Western. They explicitly adopt Western standards in various areas of life and judge their practices and accomplishments accordingly. They are driven by excellence and take the successful West as a model of emulation. Israel’s firm Western commitment also stems from the substantial assistance it receives from the West. Many believe that Israel could not have been created and would not have survived without Western backing. Israel lives on political, military, economic and moral support from the West. The Western composition of the Jewish Diaspora also pulls Israel to the West. Seven out of the 9 million non-Israeli Jews live in the West: 5.3 million in the United States and about one million in Western Europe (mostly in France, the United Kingdom and Germany) and the rest in other parts of Europe. But the hearts of the two million Diaspora Jews who reside outside the West (mostly in the Commonwealth of Independent States and Latin America) lie in the West, and they would move to the West if forced out and if admitted to the West. Zionist and Jewish, Israel maintains ties with and receives ample help from Western Jewry. A non-Western orientation on the 6 This survey was conducted by the author as part of the project of index of Arab-Jewish relations. It was based on telephone interviews with 700 Jews who constituted a representative sample of the adult Jewish population in Israel. Sampling error is 3.5%. The fieldwork was carried out by Dahaf Research Institute.

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part of Israel may adversely affect the status of the Jews in the West and harm Israel-Diaspora relations. The founders and leaders of Israel spoke with admiration about the West and with contempt about the East. The idea of the Jewish state, set forth by Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was reminiscent of bourgeois Austria at the turn of the twentieth century. Jabotinsky, the leader of right-wing Zionism, and Ben-Gurion, the leader of labor Zionism and the founder of the State of Israel, expressed a definite desire to make the new Jewish state European and warned against the cultural danger posed by the Jewish immigrants from Arab countries.7 Ties. Israel does not only meet the criterion of being imagined as Western and oriented to the West but also satisfies the requirement of firm and ramified ties with the West. Israel passes this test very well. Indeed most of Israel’s current military, commercial, scientific, technological, cultural, tourist and sports relations are with the West. In world politics, Israel is part of the Western bloc. It maintains very close relations with the United States and good ties with Western Europe. The United States acts as a political protector, defending Israel in the United Nations and other international forums. It is no small matter that during the 1980s and 1990s Israel enjoyed onethird of total United States foreign aid, and it is still one of the highest per capita foreign aid recipients. Israel’s special standing in the United States also stems from the strategic activity of the Jewish community in domestic American politics. Thanks to their concentration in urban centers and key states, strong political consciousness and activity, contributions to campaigns and access to the mass media, American Jews are able to master political clout that is disproportional to their meager numbers (less than 2% of the population). Israel’s perceived and actual ability to influence decision-making in the United States, directly or through American Jewry, is an asset that attracts other countries to Israel in hope that it would intercede on their behalf with the United States. Israel is part of the Western global security system. Its military capability and the threats to its survival are taken into account by

7 For a sample of quotations from Zionist leaders in this regard, see Smooha 1978: 87–89.

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the West’s defense strategy. The West is committed to Israel’s survival and counts on its strength for its own defense. For this reason, Israel can be considered a de facto ally of the West. Israel’s military technology and tactics are Western. Many Israeli-made weapons have essential American components and hence their sale is restricted, requiring the prior approval of the United States. Israel contributes to the West by testing and upgrading some of the Western weapons. It also shares in Western intelligence-gathering and in the fight against terrorism. The Israeli economy is equally tied to the West, and the bulk of Israel’s trade is with the West. In 2002, Israeli imports totaled 33.1 billion US dollars, of which 72.8% came from Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand; exports amounted to 29.3 billion US dollars, of which 74.4% went to these Western destinations (CBS 2003: Table 16.5). A formal treaty provides for duty-free trade between Israel and the United States although Israel continues to impose sales tax and VAT on American goods as a source of revenue and as a means of protecting Israeli products. Yet Israel is bound by the joint agreement to gradually reduce these taxes. Israel’s cooperation with the West in the area of science and technology is remarkable. Most Israeli scientists are at least partly trained in the West. They are integrated into the Western scientific networks and communities and take part in Western research and development projects. Israelis are frequent travelers. Although they reach almost every corner of the globe, most travel to the West, especially to Western Europe and the United States.8 The only exception to this rule are the young backpackers, who prefer to go, following their discharge from the army, to South America or to the Far East, mainly for budgetary reasons. Membership. Due to its geographical location in Asia, Israel—like Australia and New Zealand which are located in Oceania—is not and is not expected to be a member of Western international organizations, especially the Western bloc in the UN, NATO and the

8

In 1999, 2.3 million trips abroad by Israelis were reported, of which 53.6% to Europe, 21.9% to United States and Oceania, 12.8% to Asia, 1.8% to Africa and 9.9% were unknown (CBS 2003: Table 23.5).

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EU. It does however maintain close and special ties with them. For years Israel has waged a failing struggle to join the Western bloc in the UN because it is denied membership in the Asian bloc and as a result deprived of representation in certain UN committees and organizations. On the other hand, Israel is not interested in becoming a NATO member or an official US ally, in order not to be limited in its national security policies and military actions. Israel is an associate member of the EU, enjoying a favored status that makes it easier and cheaper for her to trade with Europe (Monin 2003). It is also earmarked to join the new Wider Europe program of the EU. Full membership in the EU is not a goal that the Jewish state is seeking, because it may reduce its sovereignty. The EU is based on the principle of free movement of goods, capital and people. Most importantly, Israel’s immigration policy of admitting Jews only will be annulled. As an EU member and a holy land, Israel may be flooded by millions of Moslem and Christian immigrants from Europe. The Palestinian right of return can also indirectly be fulfilled through European citizenship. Israel is a full member of many European organizations. It is a member of the Council of Europe, a part of EU scientific and research organs, and a participant in European sports and songs contests. It is the vision of Israeli elites to end the Israeli-Arab conflict in order to exit from the Middle East and accede to the Western world. The conflict ties Israel to the region, disrupts its globalization and inhibits its integration into the West. Demography Being a modern and developed society, Israel is basically similar to the West in demography. To illustrate, in 2001 life expectancy for men was 76.1 years and for women 80.9 years, and infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births was 5.1, putting Israel on a par with OECD and Western states (CBS 2003: Table 28.2). Israel’s divergence from the West in socio-demographic characteristics is rather striking, however. Most significant is the total fertility rate of 2.89 in 2002 (CBS 2003: Table 3.12) that places Israel much higher than the West which is marked by negative replacement rates. Israel’s annual population growth, which consists of both natural increase and immigration, was 1.9% in 2002 (CBS 2003:

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Table 2.5), compared to zero or even negative rates in most Western countries. The Israeli population is younger than in the West. In 2002, 28.4% of the population were children under 15, compared to 20,2% in 2001 in the OECD countries; the aged (65 and older) constituted 9.9% and 13.3%, respectively, of the two populations (CBS 2003: Table 2.18; OECD 2003: 6–7).9 Israel differs appreciably from the West in its familism, namely, the centrality and strength of the family. Israeli familism is expressed in universality of marriage, a low rate of divorce, a small percentage of children born out-of-wedlock, a small proportion of single-parent families and the lifelong support of children by parents (Katz and Peres 1986). For instance, in 1995 only 3% of Jewish men aged 45–49 and 5% of Jewish women aged 45–49 in Israel were never married (Della Pergola 2004: 30) and in 2001 only 15.4% of all married couples in Israel got divorced within 15 years of marriage (CBS 2003: Table 15.4). These Israeli rates are very low in comparison to Western countries. Parents in Israel are expected to financially support their children all their lives, and not until graduation from college or marriage as is practiced in the West (Spilerman and Elmelech 2003). For this reason parental wealth plays a central role in the living standards of young adults in Israel (Spilerman 2004). Contacts between parents and married children are also extremely common and intense. Israel also diverges markedly from other Western countries in its strict ethnic policy of immigration. As a society of immigrants, it keeps the doors open to Jews and, with negligible exceptions, does not admit others. For this purpose, it defines Jews in terms of ethnic ancestry and religion, and ignores economic and political considerations. The 4 million Palestinian Arabs and their descendents who left as refugees from the area that became Israel in 1948 are denied the right of return.10 While in Western immigration countries, like the United States, Canada and Australia, ethnic criteria have also

9 For an analysis of demographic trends in Israel in a comparative context, see Goldscheider, 2002, and Della Pergola 2004. 10 In 2003 the Knesset enacted a temporary law denying a right to Israeli citizenship to Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza who marry Israeli Arab citizens. The official grounds for this human right violation are the use of marriage as a means for fulfilling a right of return to Israel and the involvement of some naturalized Palestinians in terrorism.

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played a significant role in immigration policies, Israel is unique in applying such a policy exclusively and consistently. Israel is also almost alone in extending basic services to immigrants and most importantly, in granting them automatic citizenship and the immediate right to vote for parliament.11 Furthermore, over a quarter of Israel’s total citizen population is definitely non-Western: Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews. The Arab citizens, who make up 16% of the population, are increasingly modernizing but have remained either reserved about or opposed to the West. They regard themselves culturally and nationally as part of the Arab world and the Palestinian people and do not wish to be Western. Constituting around 10% of the total population, ultraOrthodox Jews try hard to keep the old ways as much as possible, to reject Western values and to believe that redemption will come by strict observance of traditional Judaism. While Western countries do have non-Western populations, such as indigenous peoples and Islamic immigrants, none has the substantial proportion that Israel does. Unlike Western countries, the dominant European group in Israel has constituted a numerical minority. Jews from Moslem areas and Arab citizens comprise the majority of the population. With the mass-immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, European Jews are increasing in number, but they still form a minority of around 47% of the entire population. This ethnic composition of the population gives a somewhat Mediterranean look and flavor to Israel, not found in any other Western state. Another special feature of Israel is the extreme scale of residential separation along religious-national-linguistic lines. About 90% of its Arab citizens live in all-Arab villages and towns, and a large majority of the rest reside in separate Arab neighborhoods within the Jewish towns. Although this almost total residential isolation is a historical legacy and substantially voluntary, it has considerable implications

11 Germany is quite similar to Israel in its law of return, extending admission for settlement, automatic citizenship and support to ethnic Germans. The German law of return is, however, restrictive when compared to the unrestrictive Israeli law. It does not give a right of return to Germans who voluntarily left Germany (for instance, millions of German descendants who live in the West are not entitled to return). Quotas are also imposed on the number of ethnic Germans who return annually. For similarities between Israel and Germany on immigration policies, see Levy and Weiss 2002.

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for the provision of equal rights and opportunities to the Arab national minority. Although Israel’s demographic divergence from the West has declined over the years, it has remained substantial. Research & development and higher education Advanced industrial societies invest considerably both in research and development and in higher education. Both are necessary to maintain and to develop the economy and the high level of services. Educational standards are rising continuously because of the increasing use of sophisticated computers, communications, automated processes and technological machinery. The excellence of higher education and attendance rates provide the main key in these societies for adequate functioning, economic growth and quality of life. Israel does well in research and development and is at a par with the advanced West. In 2001, it spent 4.8% of its GDP on civilian research and development, a very high percentage that puts it at the very top of countries in the world (CBS 2003: Table 28.14).12 It is very high and first in the world on various indicators of information and communications technologies (ICT) and in the registration of patents (CBS 2003: Table 28.15 and Table 26.8). Israeli scientists publish about 1% of all publications that appear in refereed scientific journals all over the world in the natural sciences, medicine and technology (Council for Higher Education 1994: 54). On the index of scientific publications per capita, Israel ranks sixteenth. Israel also compares well in expenditure on education and higher education. In 2000, Israel spent 8.2% of its GDP on education (the OECD average was 5.9%) and 12,508 dollars per college or university student, higher than most OECD countries (CBS 2003: Table 28.13). Israel underwent a near revolution in the system of higher education in the 1990s. The number of students rose from 76,000 in 1990 to 180,229 (not counting the 36,710 students studying in the Open University) in 2002, of whom 65.2% were in universities,

12 In 2001 Israel’s expenditure per capita on research and development was 1,029 dollars (in terms of purchasing power parities) which was 122.7 points compared to the 100 US baseline points and 2–3 higher than the OECD rates (CBS 2003: Table 28.14).

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23.7% in colleges, and 11.1% in teacher training institutions (Council for Higher Education 2003). The enrollment rate of people aged 20–29 in 2000 was 20.1% in Israel as compared to 21.2% in the United States, 21.2% in Germany, 23.6% in the United Kingdom and 33.4% in Sweden (CBS 2003: Table 28.3). About half of the students studying for undergraduate and graduate degrees attend one of Israel’s seven universities, which are devoted primarily to research and only secondarily to teaching. These research universities enjoy full academic freedom and institutional autonomy, despite the fact that the bulk of their funding comes from the government. Faculty are hired and promoted according to merit and scientific productivity, measured mainly by publications in English in refereed journals. The strict application of these meritocratic standards compels Israeli faculty to seek training in Western universities, to strive for research grants, to take active part in international conferences, to promote contacts with Western researchers, to spend sabbaticals and leaves of absence in the West and to compete hard for publication in top journals.13 This standard is intended to protect Israel against provincialism and low quality. As a result, Israeli universities can be ranked among the top twenty universities in the United States in terms of research productivity and publication record. Economy Israel fulfills the Western economic standards only partially. The Israeli economy is a post-industrial, market economy that scores positively on some economic indicators. To mention just a few, 26.4% of all people aged 15 and over in the labor force in 2002 had college education (CBS 2003: Table 12.7). Israel’s occupational distribution in 2002 resembles that of the most industrialized societies: 1.5% were employed in agriculture, 26.9% in industry and 71.6% in services (professional, technical, managerial, clerical, sales, and personal and public services) (ibid.: Table 12.19). This favorable structure prevails only in several select countries, including the United States, United Kingdom and France, in which 66% to 73% of the 13 Israeli scientists’ non-provincial orientation can be illustrated by their international contacts. In 2001 46.6% of them traveled abroad for two months or more during the past 5 years (usually for sabbatical years and extended leaves), 85.5% traveled abroad for up to two months (for conferences and other short-term stays) and 54.7% hosted foreign scientists (CBS 2003: Table 26.6).

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labor force is engaged in services (Israel Institute of Productivity 1994: 32). Furthermore, Israel excels in the forefront branches of technology. It is the only small country in the world that is said to have a nuclear capability, in both the production and delivery of nuclear weapons. The development of missiles and communications and medical equipment is another high achievement. The Western industries of electronics and computer software are also the fastest growing industries in Israel, contributing to a rising share of the GDP. Yet, despite all attempts since its proclamation in 1948, Israel has remained at the bottom of the Western core economies. Israel’s GDP per capita in 2001 reached 17,505 dollars, significantly lower than the Western average. Israel trails behind the West even in terms of PPPs (purchasing power parities). In 2002 the PPP per capita in Israel was 20,437 dollars as compared to 26,300 dollars in Germany, 30,000 in Ireland and 35,200 dollars in the US. Israel’s PPP per capita was 86% of the OECD average and its GDP per capita was 83% (CBS 2003: Tables 28.7–28.9). In 2001 Israel was placed in the “high human development” category, that contained 55 countries, on the United Nations Human Development Index; it ranked 22, at the very bottom of the Western countries (UNDP 2003: 237). In 2002 unemployment reached 10.3% in Israel, double the OECD rate (CBS 2003: Table 28.5). The Israeli economy is heavily subsidized by capital imports, without which the standard of living would fall significantly; many services would have to be cut, which would in turn shift many employees from services to production. Lower participation in the labor force is one of the most crucial reasons for Israel’s economic under-achievement. Of all people aged 15 and over in 2001, only 54.3% participated in the labor force as compared to 64.2% in Sweden and 66.9% in the United States (standardized figures, CBS 2003: Table 28.4). The low participation rate in Israel, which adversely affects its GDP per capita, is due partly to the large number of people in the military and partly to the non-participation of Arab women (only 17.1% in 2002; CBS 2003: Table 12.10) and ultra-Orthodox men. Israel has been undergoing economic globalization since 1985, and Israeli governments have voluntarily pursued the economic policies that are obligatory for EU member states. The policies of privatization and deregulation have liberalized Israeli economy to the extent

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that in 2004 it ranked 29 on the economic freedom index of 161 countries, scoring 2.36 on the 1–5 scale and placed in the “mostly free” category (Miles, Feulner and O’Grady. 2004). Despite these changes, the non-private sector of the Israeli economy is still one of the largest in capitalist societies—93% of the land is publicly owned, and intervention in the economy by the Israeli government is unprecedented for non-socialist economies. The government maintains a policy of full employment, owns the public utilities and the militaryindustrial complex, has a very large public service, imposes certain controls on hard currency transactions (Israel’s own currency is not convertible), licenses imports and exports, fixes interest rates, supplies subsidized loans to industrialists and to certain categories of citizens in need, controls the budgets of local governments, signs wage agreements for the entire work force, collects very high taxes and fees and renders many services. Economic globalization and liberalization have augmented inequalities in Israel to alarming proportions exceeding Western levels. In 2002 poverty, defined as a disposable income below 50% of the national median income, inflicted 18.1% of families, 21.1% of adults and 29.6% of children in Israel. The Gini index of disposable income inequality was 0.36 and of gross income inequality 0.54 (Institute of National Insurance 2003). These figures turn Israel into one of the most inegalitarian countries in the West. The situation worsened during the second Intifada because of the zero economic growth and the severe cuts of transfer payments during 2001 to 2003.14 Military The Israeli military is considered Western in its organization, knowhow, high technology, fighting spirit and subordination to the civil authority. A closer scrutiny would show, however, its particularity and deviation from Western standards. In Israel the military is still a people’s army, unlike the professional military in the West. Army service is compulsory for both men and women and some of the men also serve in the reserve army for an

For figures relevant to inequality in Israel compared to other countries, see the annual report and international comparisons on the website of the Adva Center: http://www.adva.org. 14

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extended period. Men are not given an option to substitute civil for military service. Military service is regarded as a cornerstone of civic status and persons who do not fulfill their army duty—Arabs, ultraOrthodox Jews, the disabled and evaders—are frowned upon and considered not full Israelis. The military experience is part of being an Israeli, a quite unique Israeli situation. Israel differs from the West in having its military central not only to individual and family life but also to society at large. The military is a cardinal institution in Israeli society. Seen as a guarantor of national survival, it commands a lion’s share of state resources and 9% of the GNP. National security considerations and concerns pervade all Israeli spheres of life. Decisions about layouts of infrastructures, such as highways, include heavy security components. The relatively large number of children per family is also influenced by the high-risk attributed to soldiering in Israel. Free Jewish immigration to Israel is not only fulfillment of an ideological Zionist mission but also a coveted addition to the national fighting capability. A major obstacle to gender equality is the edge accorded to men for their military service and combat duties. The question of militarism poses a critical issue. Some scholars deny the existence of militarism in Israeli society (Lissak 2001). They claim that the military, its ethos and commanders, have not grown out of proportion despite the constant state of belligerency. But even from a functionalistic-structuralistic perspective, militarism is necessary for a society that has had to survive in a hostile environment for over a hundred years. People should be socialized and believe that the military can solve problems, including territorial-political disputes like the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Over the years, as both soldiers and civilians, the Jews have developed an iron wall mentality that helps them fight the Arabs and makes them insensitive to the Arabs (Lustick 1996). This is the kind of cultural or civilian militarism that many Israeli Jews internalize (Kimmerling 1993; Ben-Eliezer 1998; Levy 2003). While the military in the West has, over time, become professional, removed from society and geared to peacetime, the Israeli military has maintained symbiotic relations with Israeli culture, politics and society and has been fashioned for protracted violent conflict.

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Israel prides itself in being the only genuine democracy in the Middle East, and indeed it maintains a good democratic record. The elites and general public show a strong commitment to democracy. All citizens enjoy all types of rights: human rights like dignity and privacy, social rights like social and welfare services, civil rights like freedom of speech and association, and political rights like the right to vote and to stand for public office. The judiciary is impartial and independent. The Supreme Court is liberal and active in checking governmental actions. The press is free and highly critical of the government. The army is under civilian control and does not unduly influence political decision-making. While still enjoying a fair amount of freedom of action, especially in dealing with non-citizen Palestinians, the secret services are steadily being brought under public scrutiny. The political parties play an active role, have elected governing bodies and most of them hold primaries for their heads and parliamentary candidates. Parliamentary and municipal elections are fair and held regularly. The civil service and the governing elite are not corrupt. Israeli democracy has survived deep divisions and wars since 1948 without any severe crisis or breakdown. These features make Israel a resilient democracy, but not necessarily a first-rate democracy. According to the Freedom House 2003 world surveys of independent countries, Israel scored 1 (first on a 1–7 rating) on political rights and 3 on civil rights, and was classified as a “free” country (Freedom House 2003). In 2003 Israel Democracy Institute launched the Auditing Israeli Democracy project for comparing Israeli democracy with 35 Western and non-Western democracies and for monitoring its quality over time. The fundamental assumption of the project is that the political system in Israel is a Western democracy. The comprehensive evaluation uses 31 objective indicators as well as public survey attitudes toward democracy. Since the authors refrain from ranking the countries on an overall index of quality of democracy, they find Israel fluctuating on the various indicators and failing to meet high standards: In comparison with democracies elsewhere in the world, Israel’s situation ought to arouse concern among proponents of democracy. Although its relative position in the institutional aspect is good, in general, even this aspect is not without its problems: voter turnout is decreasing, and belief in the integrity of government has diminished somewhat. Israel’s

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problematic area is concentrated in the rights aspect: freedom of the press is low, infringement of human rights is high (the evaluation includes the territories of Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip). The percentage of incarcerated criminals is mounting, inequality in distribution of income is rising, and the inequality between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority remains unchanged. Moreover, it is apparent that comparatively, Israel suffers from instability. In sum, from the relative ranking across all the indicators, Israel may be classified as a formal democracy that has not yet succeeded in incorporating the characteristics of substantive democracy (Arian, Nachmias, Navot and Shani 2003: 296).

The quality of Israeli democracy is worse than this reserved assessment. Israel does not have a constitution or an equivalent of a constitution, and as a result the rights of individuals and minorities are subject to restrictions. In 1992, the Knesset passed two laws: “Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation” and “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom.” Although they are each entitled “basic law,” both were enacted by a simple majority, and they lack a binding constitutional authority (Gavison, 1998). Yet the Supreme Court takes advantage of them in buttressing its judicial activism for broadening the limits of democratic rights and freedoms.15 Israel is also situated in a permanent state of war. During the War of Independence in 1948, the government declared a state of emergency that has never been lifted. Consequently, the government and the military possess sweeping legal powers, including administrative detention, declaration of curfews, closure of areas, land confiscation, use of military courts against civilians and censorships and banning of books and the press. These excessive powers are used to legislate parts of the budget law and to deter and to restrict minorities and dissidents (Hofnung 1996; Barzilai 2003). Furthermore, Israel declares itself as both democratic and Jewish. Along with equal rights for all, Jewish dominance is institutionalized and Jews are accorded special status. Israel’s language, holidays, days of rest, times of remembrance, emblems, symbols and heroes are all Jewish. Through the Law of Return and immigration policy, the

15 The leader of this undertaking is the President of the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak. See Barak 1992.

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state reserves and enlarges the Jewish majority. The teaching of Jewish heritage, traditions, history and literature are mandatory subjects in the schools. Zionism is a de facto state ideology. The Zionist organizations (the National Fund and the Jewish Agency), although they officially cater only to Jews, are entrusted by the state with certain vital state functions, such as the planning and funding of new localities and the extension of additional services to the elderly. It is legally forbidden to form a political party that denies Israel’s right to be a Jewish and democratic state, and a party and a person that take such stand are not allowed to run for Knesset elections. As a democratic and Jewish state, Israel does not fit either model of Western democracy—liberal or consociational. Liberal democracy, best exemplified by the United States, is built on the principle of equal individual rights, free association and mixing of people, and privatization of group statuses. Consociational democracy, typified by Belgium, provides, in addition to individual rights for all, collective rights for minorities and cultural groups. It is based on the idea of accommodation through the retention of group differences, and the management of disagreements and conflicts between communal groups through negotiation, compromise and power-sharing (Smooha 2002a). Rather than dealing with its deep Arab-Jewish division through liberal or consociational democracy, as in the West, Israel resorts to “ethnic democracy,” that is, a non-Western system that combines democratic rights for all with structured dominance of the majority over the state and its exercise of control over the minority. Inflicted with tensions and built-in contradictions, this political system provides fewer rights to the minority than do Western types of democracy (Smooha 2002b). Israeli democracy does not maintain civic equality, treating Arabs and women as second-class citizens. Its Jewish character confers a favored status upon Jews. Non-Jews are seen as outsiders and totally or partially denied certain entitlements, such as access to some lands or benefits to discharged soldiers. The spread of religious compulsion imposes restrictions on the non-religious majority and has an adverse impact on women, because personal status is regulated by religion. In addition, rule of law is highly deficient in Israel. On the one hand, Israeli law, courts and law-enforcement agencies are shaped by Anglo-Saxon traditions, operating impartially and effectively.

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Political corruption, nepotism and bribery are at the same level as in Western countries and are much less widespread and serious than in Eastern Europe and developing countries. On the other hand, there are several major problems in the maintenance of rule of law. Equality before the law is neither considered as a sanctified norm nor a well-observed practice. Arabs, both citizens and non-citizens, do not enjoy the same rights and protection of the law as Jews (Rattner and Fishman 1998). Some Israeli laws and regulations deny certain rights and privileges to non-Jewish citizens (Kretzmer 1990). Another difficulty is the inadequate attitude of the average Israeli citizen toward the law. Whereas a Westerner takes the law as universally strict and obligatory, the Israeli citizen regards the law as soft and negotiable. When the law is inconvenient, the Israeli tries to get around it, to bend the regulations and to argue with law-enforcers (Sprinzak 1986). The Israeli resorts to protektzia (personal favor), when needed and available, in dealing with the bureaucracy. In the public eyes, the use of protektzia is not considered a law violation or an infringement of the principle of equality before the law (Danet 1989). In addition to rank and file illegalism, there is also elite illegalism (Sprinzak 1993). Some political leaders are prepared to modify or even deviate from established democratic procedures and laws that are not in tune with security considerations, partisan interests, or their own political survival. If many High Court rulings go against it, the government tries—and in many cases manages—to amend the law in its favor in order to avoid the political cost of such rulings. Law-abidingness and law enforcement in Israel have been subject to an erosive process over the years (Hanegbi 2004). The protracted occupation of the West Bank and Gaza casts a giant shadow on Israeli democracy. Although the 3.5 million Palestinians who live under military rule live outside Israel’s ceasefire borders and do not wish to become Israeli citizens, the fact that they have been denied civil and political rights since 1967 is incompatible with democracy. Under Israel’s control, differential and unequal laws and separate legal systems apply to different populations.16

16 These fundamental deficiencies of Israeli democracy, especially its built-in inequalities and exclusions, prompt some scholars to argue that Israel is not democracy at all. See, for instance, Ghanem, Rouhana and Yiftachel 1999.

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Religion The West is by and large secular. The wars between state and religion were fought during the modern era and ended, in the last century, in de jure or de facto separation of church from state. In consequence, religion is squeezed into the free market to compete with other institutions for attention, support and money. In this respect Israel is definitely non-Western. No war has as yet been waged between state and religion, and the conflict is pushed to the backburner. The population is divided into religious communities and everyone is registered by the Ministry of the Interior into a single religious category. The official religious communities are entrusted with a monopoly over marriage, divorce, custody of children, burial and, in the Jewish case, also with the crucial definition of who is a Jew. The state lavishly funds religious services, synagogues, religious schools, yeshivas (Talmudic colleges) and a plethora of other religious associations and activities. It exempts scores of thousands of yeshiva students from military service and provides them with tuition and subsistence allowances. The state recognizes and empowers only Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism, ignoring Conservative and Reform Judaism. Public transportation does not run on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. The public schools and mass media are infused with many religious symbols and contents. This integration of religion and state generates considerable tension among Israeli Jews. To mention just the most serious hardships, Jewish women are clearly discriminated against in secular Western terms (some of them are not allowed to marry or are left deserted: they are neither permitted to serve as religious judges nor as witnesses in rabbinical courts). The offspring of mixed-marriage couples encounter the hurdles of ambiguous status. Many people are denied the right to marry because there is no provision in the Israeli law for inter-faith and civil marriage. Conservative and Reform Rabbis are neither recognized nor authorized by the state to fulfill official religious functions, such as officiating at marriages. Unlike Judaism in the West, that stresses its universalistic, humanistic and moralistic aspects in an open, competitive environment, the monopolistic Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel is excessively ritualistic, politicized, nationalistic and ethnocentric (Liebman 1993; Liebman and Cohen 1990). The central place of religion in state and public life in Israel and

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the marked measure of institutional religious compulsion run counter to the limited religious observance by Israeli Jews. Although they are attached to Jewish traditions (Levy, Levinsohn and Katz 2002), most of them do not practice religion, even in comparison with American Jews (Oren, Lewin-Epstein and Yaar 2003). For most of them, Judaism means Jewishness (membership in the Jewish people) rather than the Jewish religion. It is more a historic heritage, land, language, customs and folklore than religious beliefs and precepts. Almost all Israeli Jews think that one can be a full Jew without being religious. Nationalism Nationalism in the West is predominantly civic, territorial, subtle, receding and undemanding. Jewish Israel clearly deviates from this liberal pattern.17 Unlike Western countries, Israel, as a state and a society, lacks a nationalism of its own. There is no Israeli nationalism based on a common citizenship and territory and shared by all Israeli citizens. There is Jewish nationalism for Jews, and Palestinian Arab nationalism for Arabs. The base of Jewish nationalism is Jewish ethnic descent, Judaism ( Jewish faith) and the Jewish people (Hebrew language, Jewish history, Jewish culture). This is an ethnic nationalism of a kind that is widespread in Eastern Europe but is weak in the West. It is by nature a divisive, less tolerant nationalism, constituting a firm basis for ethnic democracy, militating against the separation of religion, nationality and state, and making for a certain degree of exclusion and inferior status of Arabs and other non-Jews in Israel. It grants Diaspora Jewry a right of intervention in the internal affairs of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. A shift by Israel to liberal-civic nationalism and to privatization of religion may result in intermarriage, emergence of a new Israeli nation composed of Jews and non-Jews, and estrangement of Israeli Jews from Diaspora Jews. Zionism, Israel’s ideology of Jewish nationalism, curbs these risks. While nationalism in the West has been on the decline since WWII and has been tempered by globalization, regional cooperation and

17 For a discussion of the different types of nationalism and presentation of Zionism in comparative perspective, see Smith 1992b and 1995.

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unification, and by multiculturalism, Jewish and Palestinian nationalism still run high in Israel. National identities, interests and commitments are still paramount, deeply dividing Jews and Arabs within Israel and in the region. In Israel, contribution to the public good is still an ever-present, major demand; while in the West individual concerns are pivotal. Israelis are expected to take the national interest into consideration, not just to cater to their private careers and kin. They are supposed to make personal sacrifices for society, to volunteer for various tasks, to fight and to die if necessary for the country, to pay high taxes and to feel guilty when emigrating from the country. Israeli Jews are also expected to feel a close affinity and strong emotional solidarity with millions of Diaspora Jews and to welcome and help new immigrants, though in fact many feel indifference, even a conflict of interests vis-à-vis non-Israeli Jews and newcomers. Israeli Jews are constantly mobilized for national projects, such as the settlement of the Negev, the Galilee, and even the controversial Golan Heights and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The long-term trend points, nevertheless, to a decline in Jewish nationalism in Israel. Private affairs are increasingly gaining priority and legitimacy. This is well reflected in the spread of the Freier syndrome (the opposite of the “pioneer”), according to which the Israeli will not do anything without getting a fair reward for it and will not let others or the state take advantage of oneself (Roniger and Faige 1992). Israelis are becoming more and more bourgeois in their mentality and conduct. Despite this general trend of change of Israeli society, individualism as a value and a behavior has to compete hard with collectivistic and communitarian orientations (Roniger 1999) and nationalism runs high and at a significantly higher level than in the West (Don-Yehiya and Susser 1999). Way of life The Israeli way of life is still not Western although it is increasingly becoming so. There is a continuous trend toward the embourgeoisement of Israeli Jews, bringing them closer to Westerners.18 This

18

For discussion of the trend of “The Americanization of Israel”, see Israel Studies, special issue, Spring 2000, volume 5, number 1, and especially Azaryahu 2000.

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Israeli drift toward the West is incomplete, though, and remains far from eroding the special Israeli way of thinking and behaving. Israelis resemble other Westerners in their modern way of life. In 2002, 92% of them lived in towns and urban localities (CBS 2003: Table 2.12) as compared to under 80% of the populations in highincome countries (World Bank 2003). Israeli Jews come closest to Westerners in the set of values known as the Protestant ethic. They share with Westerners the belief in the ability to control one’s life and destiny and in hard work, the drive for achievement and excellence, tough competition, a positive orientation toward change and innovation, setting a high amount of income for saving and wealth accumulation, a high regard for science and technology, a wide exposure to media, an emphasis on information gathering and learning and a strong consumerism and materialism. Israeli Jews also increasingly adopt Western leisure pursuits. The young are engaged in pop music, disco dancing, movie going, television watching and Internet usage, much like other Western youth. Compared to Westerners, however, Israeli youth and adults have remained remarkable in their high rate of book reading, intensive domestic and international tourism, and a high incidence of beach-going and sun-bathing (Katz et al. 1999). In some key areas, Israelis differ appreciably from Westerners. Social relations are still strongly marked by spontaneity, warmth, personal and non-technical contacts, neighborliness and a sense of community. These patterns stand in contrast to the alienation and impersonality that characterize social relations in the West. Israeli manners are also peculiar. Israelis are known for their directness, chutzpah, use of first names, roughness, informal but fashionable dress, assertiveness, aggressiveness, impoliteness, frequent invasion of privacy, inattentiveness, interrupting speaking manner and inconsiderate driving. Improvisation is also a common Israeli trait. Israelis tend not to plan ahead in detail, but leave a wide margin for improvising. They believe in their ability to cope with contingencies and embarrassing situations.19

19 An exploratory study of software development in Israel reveals “the commando syndrome” of Israeli developers. To quote: “Clarifying the meaning of the term ‘commando’ in the Israeli mind may be best done with a list of terms closely associated with it in the Israeli culture: imaginative, unconstrained, informal, quick,

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Other spheres of life in which Israelis differ appreciably from Westerners are socio-demographic characteristics, familism, and the army as a central life-interest that are discussed above. Factors promoting and impeding Westernization The overall picture of Israel is of a modern and developed, but only semi-Western, country. The forces and processes of Westernization are potent, however. Among them is the overwhelming reality that the West is Israel’s best ally and chief source of military, political, economic and moral support. Israel is strongly attracted to the West also for being perceived as the most affluent, progressive, ethical, democratic and successful region in the world. The democratization that Israel has been undergoing increases its resemblance to the West in political system and values. Besides, globalization draws Israel closer to the West in economy, politics, law, culture and leisure. The historical shift toward non-belligerency, despite serious setbacks, strengthens the Western values of individualism and materialism in Israeli society. Finally, the Jewish Diaspora’s current concentration in the West obligates Israel to attach itself to the West as long as it retains its vision as the homeland of the Jewish people. If these forces in favor of Westernization are so diverse and decisive, why then has Israel not developed as a Western society and what is inhibiting its development in this direction? Israel as a society was built by non-Westerners. The origin and life experience of its Jewish population are basically non-Western. Less than 10% of the present Jewish population originated from the West—mostly from Germany, France and the Anglo-Saxon countries—whereas over 90% hailed from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The fact that only a small proportion of Israeli Jews came from the West or experienced life in the West first-hand is true also for the Ashkenazic dominant group in general and for the leaders in particular—those who have

small-scale, flexible, resourceful, front line, hard work, difficult, self-reliant, aggressive, lack of sense for order and administration, specialized, intensively trained, effective, action-oriented, trouble shooting, elitist, arrogant, improvisational, reactive”, “‘Commando properties’ are very useful in product development and focused software problem solving but are less so for long-term business strategy, marketing planning, patient attention to customer needs, or the immersion in different cultures to understand subtleties” (Ariav and Goodman 1994: 21).

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shaped and managed Israeli society from its inception. While these East European Jews may have been Western in orientation, they have been preoccupied with concerns incompatible with Western patterns. Another key factor is the fusion of ethnicity, religion and nationality in historical and contemporary Judaism that has precluded the emergence of a new Israeli civic nation grounded in a common territory and shared citizenship. Despite being a modern, secular and revolutionary national movement, Zionism accepted this peculiar nature of Jewry because of its East European roots.20 Israel is a relatively new entity that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. It lacks the centuries-long history of Western civilization. Like immigrants and descendants of immigrants to Western countries, Jews who come to Israel endure rapid change; in Israel, however, change takes the form of modernization, not Westernization, because no Western model has been in existence for the immigrants to follow. With the passage of time, though, Israel may gradually lose its peculiarities and converge with the West. The Israeli-Arab conflict, which has been part and parcel of Israeli society from its inception, is a primary factor forestalling its full Westernization. The implications of this conflict are evident in many areas. To mention just a few, the dispute with the Arab world feeds the Arab economic boycott of Israel, severely limits investments by multi-national corporations and deters the government from shifting fully to pro-market policies because of fear of social dislocations. National security considerations and survival threats dictate a policy of Jewish immigration at all costs, maximal mobilization of society, collectivistic orientation, cohesion and other clearly non-Western patterns. Some of these historical impediments combine with other current obstacles that block Israel’s way to the West. Zionism still constitutes a powerful force containing Israeli Westernization. It is a nonWestern form of ethnic nationalism which is central in the lives of Israeli Jews. As such, it magnifies the particularistic forces of Jewish

20 Sternhell (1998) analyzes the far-reaching implications of the East European origins of Zionism for Israeli society. He shows that the project of Zionism was ethnic nation-building rather than forming a just, socialist society. Shapiro (1977) also traces the low-rate and formal nature of Israeli democracy to its East-European origins.

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ethnicity, nation, language and religion at the expense of common territory and shared civility. As long as Zionism remains the main ideology of the state, and thus emphasizing its Jewishness, Israel will encounter difficulties in becoming fully Western. Among Israeli Jews there are a strong political right-wing and a religious sector that reject Israel’s Westernization project. They are suspicious of globalization and orientation toward the West, fearing their destructive impact on Judaism and on Israel’s Jewish and Zionist mission. Religion and Jewish survival and identity are by far more precious for them than universal values and materialistic success. They see in the West the evils of anti-Semitism and assimilation.21 Another main stumbling-block is the volatile character of the Middle East in which Israel is situated. It is an unstable, unreliable and undeveloped region, making the Jews feel insecure and apprehensive. While they wish to disengage from the Arab and Moslem world and to be absorbed into the West, they sense the need to maintain a high level of mobilization in order to secure their survival. The continuity of the Israeli-Arab conflict in even a mild form militates against full incorporation into the West because it slows down the transformation of Israel from a mobilized to a civil society. Conclusion The examination of the issue whether and in what way Israel is and is not Western aims not only to better understand Israel but also to raise questions about what is Western, the possible trajectories of modernization and globalization without Westernization, and the problematic transformation of post-Communist states. “Western” is a sub-category of “developed” which in turn is a sub-category of “modern.” It refers to the civilization of Western Europe and its derivative settler societies in North America and elsewhere. “Western” encompasses the set of features distinguishing these countries. A society outside the original Western bloc is classified as Western if it displays a minimal combination of these qualities. Like other concepts in the social sciences, the term “Western” lacks an

21 Ram (2003) calls this Israeli stream “neo-Zionism” and argues that it has become dominant since Rabin’s assassination.

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accepted standard definition, but it is possible to identify the institutional characteristics common to Western societies. A detailed application of the Western model shows that Israel qualifies only partly. Israel is Western in self-image, orientation and ties, science and technology, higher education, market economy, procedural democracy and Protestant ethic. But it is not Western in the absence of permanent borders, blurred criteria of membership in society, high natural increase, centrality of family, focal position of the military, state intervention in the economy, not-high standard of living, strong role of religion in public life, lack of robustness of the law, weaknesses of democracy and salience of ethno-nationalism. The main causes for Israel’s failure to become Western are the nonWestern origin of the founding fathers and charter group, the entangling unity of ethnicity, religion and nationality in Jewry, the East European roots of Zionism, and the need of total mobilization for surviving in a hostile environment. These inhibiting forces continue to slow down the ongoing process of Westernization that Israel has been going through as a result of steady democratization, accelerated globalization and painful transition to the peace (non-belligerency) era. Israel in the 2000s is much more Western than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is constantly Westernizing in many areas of life. Israelis are becoming increasingly more individualistic, materialistic and bourgeois, adopting more openly and fully the positive and negative traits of the West. Israel’s Western image, desire to extricate itself from the Middle East and to integrate into the West are potent forces that draw it closer to the West. The Israeli case-study demonstrates that the Western model is not readily exportable, globalization can occur without Westernization and the claim of the post-Communist European states for being Western should be scrutinized. The examination of the Israeli case rejects the thesis that globalization necessarily leads to homogenization of and convergence between societies all over the world and to their recasting into the hegemonic, capitalist, Western mold. The non-Western origin and experience of the Jewish population, the short-span of Israel’s development, the protracted Israeli-Arab conflict and the ethnic nature of Zionism are powerful and historically specific factors discouraging Westernization. Israel responds to the forces of globalization and close ties with the West by combining emulation of certain Western patterns with new ways and syntheses. Semi-Western Israel makes it clear that there are non-Western

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alternatives of development and modernization and that globalization leaves much diversity and localism in the world today. What is true of Israel may hold true for Japan, China and South Korea in the Far East and for some post-Communist states in Central-Eastern Europe.22 A study of the transition of Estonia, for instance, conceives of its re-independence in terms of return to the Western world, namely, that Estonia was Western during the inter-War period, was forcibly annexed to the Soviet-Eastern civilization in 1940, and it has made its way back to the Western civilization after its liberation in 1991 (Lauristin and Vihalemm 1997). Although Estonia, like Israel, meets certain Western criteria, it fails other standards, as evidenced in its ethnonationalism, the appropriation of the state by its ethnicEstonian majority and the denial of citizenship to most of its Russianspeaking residents (Linz and Stepan 1996). The accession of Estonia to the EU in 2004, along with nine other countries, would accelerate its Westernization but it would not necessarily make it sufficiently Western. The Israeli case shows that despite globalization, international images and wishful thinking, societal change takes various trajectories and molds, and that there are alternatives to Westernization.

22 For a discussion of the limits of homogenization resulting from globalization, see Barber 1995, Warde 1994, and Eisenstadt 2003a.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS AND EUROPEAN MODERNITY Gerard Delanty A wide range of social theorists have developed arguments for a conception of multiple modernities. These approaches have provided an important corrective to the association of modernity with Occidental cultural modernity and the view that modernity succeeds tradition. In particular, the work of S.N. Eisenstadt has provided a foundation for a theory of modernity based on globalization and a comparative historical sociology of civilizations that rejects such dichotomies (Eisenstadt, 2003a). What remains undeveloped is the application of this theorization of modernity to Europe. Much of the debate on multiple modernities has referred to nonwestern modernities and a good deal of it has been influenced by postcolonialism (e.g. Gaonkar, 2001). The proposal in this chapter is that theorizing on Europe itself can greatly benefit from the notion of multiple modernities and that current transformations be seen in light of a wider transformation of European modernity. To speak of European modernity presents an immediate problem: given the diverse nature of Europe how can we speak of European modernity? Is the multiplicity of Europe to be understood as an expression of multiple modernities? If this is the case, as I believe it is, the problem then is what is the nature of the relation of the ‘modernities’. Unless every national culture is to be seen in terms of a model of modernity—in which case modernity will be infinitively pluralized to a point the concept losses meaning—we need a conception of modernity that, on the one hand, reflects the fact of different forms and routes to modernity and, on the other hand, retains to some degree a universalistic dimension. Is is possible to conceive of modernity as entailing multiple forms and at the same time speak of modernity? This problem has often been discussed in terms of reconcilling universalism and particularism. In this paper a case will be made for conceiving modernity in a way that avoids the universalistic and particularistic dilemma.

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Drawing from a theory of cultural translations, it will be argued that modernity entails a particular cultural logic by which translation becomes the very form of culture. Modernity is ultimately the condition of universal translatability. In this view, what is universal is the capacity, or cultural competence, to translate cultural particularality. This does not mean the obliteration of all cultural differences or the imposition of a universal global culture on the local; it means rather the emergence of a universal language or cultural framework into which all cultures can be translated. If all cultures were eradicated by universal translatibility, there would be nothing left to translate and this clearly has not occurred; in fact the opposite has been the case. As a condition of universal translatibility, modernity arises when cultures become embroiled in the logic of translation. The key feature of this is the communicative relation of cultures to each other via the medium of a third culture. This third culture—globality, world culture, universalistic discourses—does not necessarily exist as a distinct overarching culture or a lingua franca, but as a medium of translation and increasingly is becoming more and more embedded in local cultures. Throughout history the world religions and universalistic languages—Latin, Sanskrit, English—served this purpose which today is being carried forward by the Internet and ofter media of communication as well as by new discourses—such as democracy and human rights. The result is that cultures are becoming more translatable. What is significant is less the fact of multiple modernities than different modes of cultural translation, which can be related to major civilizations. Thus, what is often called ‘multiple modernities’ is best seen as referring to different modes of cultural translation rather than simply to multiple societal forms. In this view, modernity is a particular way of transmitting culture which transforms that which it takes over. A central contention of the paper is that European modernity was shaped by cultural translations between its major civilizations which gave rise to different, but interpenetrating, forms of modernity. The European civilizational constellation was based on an intensive project of cultural translation in which modernity was engendered in different civilizations. Emerging out of this was a transformation of culture itself into the very form of translation. This chapter develops this argument in three steps. First, I discuss the idea of cultural translation as a sociologically relevant notion. Second, the idea of cultural translation is related to modernity with

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the argument that the multiple dimension of modernity can be seen in terms of different kinds of cultural translation. Thirdly, a notion of modernity as a condition arising from cultural translations is applied to Europe, which, it is argued, consists of a civilizational constellation. It is shown that European cultural modernity was based on different logics of translation that arose in the encounters between these civilizations. In particular, it was animated by a culture of translatability that gave to Europe some of its enduring characteristics but which are ultimately to be identified with a condition that is inescapably global. The idea of cultural translations The idea of cultural translations is a relatively new notion in social theory and is related to theories of translation developed in a variety of fields of inquiry. The theory of translation can be divided into four bodies of literature, which can be briefly commented on: (1) linguistics and comparative literature (2) philosophy (3) sociology and (4) cultural/postcolonial studies. (1) The most developed use of the idea of translation is in linguistics and comparative literature where it is largely addressed to the translation of texts (Gentzler, 1993; Graham, 1985; Venuti, 1992; Venuti, 2000). However, in a few studies within cultural history, the question of translation has been applied to a broader concept of culture, but has not been developed beyond some suggestive ideas (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1990; Cronin, 1998; Shamada, 2002). In general, the idea of translation remains of the level of the translation of texts. A major exception being the volume Budick and Iser (1996) and Assman (1997), but the application of the concept of the translatibility of culture has yet to be developed to modernity. (2) Within philosophy, there is an important body of literature stemming from the hermeneutical tradition. A key work in this tradition is H.-G. Gadamer’s Truth and Method as is Alisdair Macintyre’s signal essay on the topic, ‘Tradition and Translation’ (Gadamer, 1975; Macintyre, 1988). In recent times, and from a largely postmodern perspective, there has been a new interest in translation based on Walter Benjamin’s classic 1923 essay, ‘The Task of the Translator,’ which argued that in translation the original undergoes a change and something new is created (Benjamin, 1982). The essay introduced

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the idea that in translation an element of foreignness is brought into culture. The politics of translation has also been discussed as a central idea within many philosophical works, since Wittgenstein introduced the idea of language games (Sassower, 1995, see Chapter 5, ‘Translation as a Political Agenda’; Quine, 1960; Fuller, 2002). Postmodernist/poststructuralist conceptions of translations have emphasized more and more the idea of a radical cultural dimension to translation (Benjamin, 1989). (3) Within the social sciences, the idea of translation has been an assumption in much of British social anthropology, although until recently this has not been acknowledged (Asad, 1986). In sociology it has been slower to develop, but there have been some important developments. The sociology of translation was first presented as a general methodology within the social studies of science (Callon, Law and Ripp, 1986). In this usage, translation referred to the process whereby one thing represented another thing so well that the voice of the represented was effectively silenced. According to Steve Fuller, commenting on the idea of a sociology of cultural translations, actornetwork theory is built on it (Fuller, 2000: 367; see also Fuller 2002). Johan Heilbron has written on the sociology of book translation as constituting a cultural world system. (4) Increasingly the idea of translation is making its way into cultural studies/cultural theory and postcolonial studies where it draws from cultural history, anthropological and philosophical ideas (Cronin, 1996, 1998; Anderson, 1998: 281). The idea of cultural translation has been most prominently highlighted by Homi Bhabha in his book, the Location of Culture (Bhabha, 1994: 224–35). In a chapter entitled ‘How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation’, he argues for a conception of translation as the performative function of communication. Central to his discussion, which remains on a purely speculative level, is the question of the discursive constitution and contestation of cultural phenomena, such as the Rushdie blasphemy controversy. Related to this, but not directly discussed by Bhabha, are questions of symbolic violence and cultural translation. The idea of cultural translation as initiating innovation has been briefly commented on by Selya Benhabib, in a work on multiculturalism and the cultural challenge to democratic theory in which she argues against any notion of ‘radical untranslatability’ (Benhabib, 2002: 23), and by Stuart Hall.


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One of the most detailed applications of the idea is James Clifford’s work on travel and cultural translation (Clifford, 1997). Here cultural translation is related to the cultural dimensions of globalization, such as various kinds of localization, hybridization and vernacularization. (See also Ang, 2003). In sum, there is yet little of a systematic theoretical nature developed on cultural translations or little empirical application of the concept. Yet, the existing literature offers a useful point of departure for an innovative research programme on multiple modernities. The idea of cultural translation is more than interpretation and also points to something more than the cultural hermeneutics of textual translation: it entails a connection with societal encounters and the process by which social imaginaries are shaped. The basic idea to be developed is that translation is inherent in the very nature of culture, which is not static but dynamic and transformative. The essence of culture in modernity is the translation of otherness; it is a mode of communication rather than being identifiable with particular norms, beliefs or values. Collective identities and cultures are formed in a continuous process of cultural translation, which can be understood as a mode of self-understanding based on a relation to otherness. The concrete implication of this is that collective identities themselves become altered by cultural translations. Culture is never translated neutrally, but enters into the self-understanding of collective identities. An analysis of the cognitive mechanisms and modalities of such translations is important for an understanding of how culture is constituted. The capacity for translation—of languages, memories, narratives, experiences, knowledges, identities, religion—is the basis of communication, tradition and cultural possibility and entails a continuous process of social construction. Translation as a cultural process is a mode of cultural transmission in what is critical is the nature of the transmission. It has been widely recognised that translation is not a simple act of replication. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued, ‘every translation is at the same time an interpretation’ (Gadamer, 1975: 346). The very idea of translation refers to something that transcends both self and other. In Gadamer’s words: ‘The horizon of understanding cannot be limited either by what the writer had originally in mind, or by the horizon of the person to whom the text was originally addressed’ (Gadamer, 1975: 356). Translation can never overcome the

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fundamental gulf between two languages, he argued in this seminal work on the nature of truth, tradition and interpretation. Translation arises, he argues, because of a need to bridge this gap but it cannot overcome it. While Gadamer makes the point that translation is never the norm in ‘ordinary communication’ (which is based on mutual understanding of a shared language), or even when one speaker is speaking a foreign language, it is increasingly becoming the space in which many forms of communication are played out. Migration, globalization, and new information and communication technologies have changed the nature of communication to a point that cultural translation has become a central category. The suggestion, then, is that the cultural logic of translations tends towards mixed or, to use a recent term, hybrid cultural forms; it is a logic of mutations, innovations, appropriations, borrowings, recombinations, transferences and substitution. Cultural translation in this sense concerns the symbolic and cognitive process by which cultural aspects of a given collective identity are appropriated by a different one, which will variously adapt, transfigure, subvert it. In the resulting re-codification of identity, new symbolic orders, cognitive structures and social imaginaries are created. The kind of hybridity that is suggested by it, in the words of Homi Bhabha, ‘is not simply appropriation or adaptation; it is a process through which cultures are required to revise their own systems of reference, norms and values by departing from their habitual or “inbred” rules of transformation. Ambivalence and antagonism accompany any act of cultural translation because negotiating with the “difference of the other” reveals the radical insufficiency of our own systems of meaning and signification’ (Bhabha, 1997). This could be called the condition of living in translation. Translation as a cultural process is also about power; as Talal Asad has pointed out, it presents a challenge to critically examine one’s own language through the lens of another (Asad, 1986: 157). This is particularly relevant with respect to multicultural encounters where there can be significant questions of power at stake in cases when one cultural form as opposed to another is privileged in the act of translation. For instance, secularization, which can be understood as a process of cultural translation, is now a major challenge for multicultural societies to address in terms of democratic politics (Gutmann, 2003). As Habermas, has argued: ‘Secularization that does not vanquish reveals itself in the mode of translation’ (Habermas, 2001: 29).


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The upshot of this is that cultural translations cannot be discussed without considering some of the negative aspects that may arise from cultural difference; that is, the dislocations of culture, mutations and even pathologies than can result when cultures meet each other. Whether we are talking about secularization, vernacularization, the ‘invention of tradition’, or multiculturalism, cultural translations can have a destructive or unsettling moment built into them, producing reifications, racisms, misunderstandings, symbolic violence or misrecognition. It is the nature of cultural translation that they destroy stable reference points and constitute new locations; producing costs as well as benefits for those who live in their margins. This is to address the question of ‘failures’ of translation; whether failures will result in self-conscious critical awareness, in acts of resistance or empowerment (cf. Clifford, 1997: 182–3). How to achieve reciprocity, which will have different cultural meanings, understanding and justice is what is at issue. With regard to the question of European identity, Paul Ricoeur has argued ‘translation constitutes a model which is suited to the specific problem that the construction of Europe poses’ (Ricoeur, 1996: 5). Like Gadamer, he invokes the von Humboldtian idea of translation as a medium in which one views one’s own culture as foreign. Culture is the capacity to view oneself from the eyes of the other. In sum, three generic kinds of cultural translation can be identified, that is different ways culture can be translated: translation of the culture of the other, universalizing translations, and translations of the past. Translations of self and other. Translations of this kind can be a simple matter of the translation of one culture into another; they may take the form of an adaptation or a partial, or indeed, whole-scale borrowing. Such forms of translation generally assume a degree of sameness in the cultural presuppositions of the form of life of the given culture. With the advancement of civilizations and the encounter of cultures that are very different, a new mode of translation invariably emerges and is based on a shared system of exchange. In this case the direction of the translation is into a third culture, which serves as a mode of universal reference. Examples of this, what is often called, syncretism, vary from a lingua franca to a common system of exchange to universalistic religions. In this case the integrity of the local culture

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is not necessarily in question and can even be protected since the native culture does not have to translate itself into the categories of another (see Assmann, 1997; Macintyre, 1988). Translations of the local and the global. In these translations the local culture is translated into an overarching universalizing culture, which in turn undermines the autonomy of the local culture. Examples of this tendency towards universalization range from money and cartography to nationalizing projects, to the universalistic culture of modernity such as science and law. While this can lead to ‘hegemonic’ projects of westernization and uni-linear, or top-down, globalization, the reverse can also occur, with the translation of the global into the local. This localization of the global takes many forms, ranging from vernacularization to hybridization and indiginization. Translations of the past and present. Since the present is defined by its relation with the past, this often takes the form of a translation of the past into the present. Such translations may take the form of an ‘invention’ of the past which will entail the construction of an imaginary past, be it a shared past or the past of another culture; they also take the form of a logic of renunciation by which the past is translated into a new symbolic codification. The nature of the translation—whether it is nostalgic or revolutionary—will depend on the understanding of the present. The past can be translated into the shared present time of a given culture or into a globalized present. The nature of translation thus entails a relation to otherness, to the universal, and to an origin which are all experienced in terms of a cultural logic of distance or loss. Translation arises in the first instance because of the fact of cultural difference and plurality, but never overcomes the fact of difference. As Gadamer has argued, translation can never overcome the fundamental gulf between languages. (Gadamer, 1975). In sum, cultural translations have existed since the beginning of civilization, but have become increasingly intensified with the rise of modernity, which has brought about a culture of translatibility in which all of culture has become translatable. Modernity as a form of translation comes into play when culture becomes the condition of translation and when there are only translations. In this cultural form, translation is more than a medium of communication; it is itself a form of communication and expresses the condition of culture as communicatibility.


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Modernity and cultural translations Rather than define modernity as a singular or as a multiple condition it can be defined as a condition of translatability. In this view, modernity is a condition that can exist within cultures as a cognitive form or structure in which the various parts of a culture are translated not just into a universal language—as may have been the case in an earlier modernity—but into each other. The multiple forms of modernity are nothing more than the diverse expressions of this orientation towards universal communicatability. ‘Modernities’ do not simply exist as coherent or stable units, but are in a constant process of change. This is due to the nature of the particular forms of interaction, selection, combination, adaptation and processing of cultural codes, resources, imaginaries etc. While the capacity for translation has always existed, at least since the advent of writing; it is only with modernity than translation or translatability, has itself become the dominant cultural form. Prior to modernity, translation served the function of communication and was not the basis of a given culture. The tendency to multiplicity within modernity was always present, but is only becoming fully apparent today when the logic of translation has extended beyond the simply belief that everything can be translated into a universal global culture to the recognition that every culture can translate itself and others. In my view this represents an advance over some of the current notions of multiple modernity, such as conceptions of ‘global modernity’, ‘hybrid modernity’, ‘entangled modernity’, ‘alternative modernities’.1 By pluralizing modernity into multiple modernities, the concept is in danger of being emptied of its specificity and, taken to an extreme, it comes indistinguishable from nations; restricting it to a singular form, on the other hand, runs the risk of failing to address the diversity of societal models and civilizational contexts. The argument of this paper is that modernity should be defined neither in the singular nor in the plural as such; it is a condition that arises as a result of universal translatability and expresses itself in the belief that every culture can translate itself and others. Modernity is

1 See for example Gaonkar (2001), Taylor (1999), Eisenstadt (2000b, 2003a), Pieterse (2004), Dirlik (2003), Therborn (2003), Featherstone et al. (1995).

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specifically defined by a mode of cultural translation in which culture is itself a mode of translation. Modernity might be seen as a condition in which the form of culture is one of translation. The encounter of self and other, local with the global, past and present takes multiple forms, determined largely by the forms of cultural translation influenced by civilizational patterns and historical interactions and conflicts. This suggests an isomorphic view of modernity; that is, an approach that stresses common features amongst diverse fields. It needs to be said that the suggestion of uniformity in it is neither an homogenizing nor a harmonious one: it is a social isomorphism of structurations, mechanisms, translations and processes rather than a condition that is simply either heterogeneous or homogeneous. In other words, it is a uniformity only in socio-cognitive structures, forms of consciousness, legitimation processes and certain kinds of practices and rationalities; in sum, particular modes of translation. Modernity entails common ways of doing things, certain universalistic values such as democracy; but uniformity does not extend beyond these levels since the global is appropriated, or translated, differently by the local. This is an attempt to explain how modernity emerges in different places, at different times, and in different societal forms without recourse to either an inexplicable notion of heterogeneity or an over-deterministic notion of homogenization. The multiple crystallizations of modernity cannot be explained monocausally by reference to a homogenizing and linear evolutionary process of modernization to which all societies adapt. It is neither a question of convergences nor of divergences, but one of the diffusion of a culture of translation by different societies by social actors. The argument, then, is that modernity derives from the fact that social actors all over the world are increasingly defining themselves by reference to global culture. But in doing so, they are not all saying the same things; and—to make this more complicated—global culture is not constant but evolving, since translations are never static, for people continuously reinterpret their situation in light of their ongoing encounter with others. The proposal I am making, then, is to see globalization—as a process that intensifies connections, enhances possibilities for cultural translations and deepens the consciousness of globality—as the principal motor of modernity. Integral to the project of modernity is a culture of translation. What we are witnessing today is the completion of the transformative project of modernity whose origins go back to the ‘axial age’ (Eisenstadt,


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1986b). If modernity arises in the encounter of the particular with the universal, the local with the global, it can be found in many historical contexts. The European Renaissance, Enlightenment, the social movements of the nineteenth century were all expressions of this movement, which today has spread across the globe in a process of continuous social transformation. The forms, inter-relations and dynamics of modernity are varied and uneven, but underlying them is the most basic impetus towards self-transformation, the belief that human agency can radically transform the present in the image of an imagined future. This view of modernity as a break from the past seems to accord with the major philosophical and cultural understandings of modernity as a dynamic process that has made change itself the defining feature of modernity (Habermas, 1987; Heller, 1999). Modernity is thus a particular kind of time-consciousness which defines the present in its relation to the past which must be continuously re-translated; it is not a historical epoch than can be periodized. Modernity unfolds in different ways, according to different paces, modes of translation and can take multiple societal forms. Viewed in this light, there is a possible solution to the perplexing question of whether modernity had an independent origin in the non-Western world; for example whether there a tradition of civil society and the public specific to Muslim societies. While historical instances can be found of tendencies towards modernity, the inescapable conclusion is that although modernity in Muslim societies evolved in the encounter with the West—whether through colonization or cultural diffusion—it is possible nevertheless to speak of independent societal forms of modernity; that is, diverse local responses to globality.2 This is also true of debates about human rights and other discourses of rights in the rest of the world. Universalistic notions of rights and particularistic cultural traditions are today mutually elucidated in each others discourses (Cowan et al., 2001).3 Globalization can be defined simply as the intensification of modernity across the entire world which is becoming a mosaic of cultural translations. Global modernity is the emergent form of modernity

2 See the growing literature on civil society in non-western societies and especially in Isalmic societies, Eickelman and Salvatore (2002), Hann and Dunn (1996), Kamali (2001), Chambers and Kymlicka (2002), Hoexter et al. (2002). 3 We also have every reason to be sketpical of false notions of relativism (see Cook, 1999).

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today and is nothing more than the fact of intensified interconnections resulting from accelerated social transformation, new possibilities for cultural translation and diminishing boundaries between the different parts of the world. Global modernity can be examined by reference to such processes of cultural translation such as crossfertilization and societal interpenetration, dynamics of differentiation and integration, producing convergent or divergent patterns. Its diverse forms are varied and shaped by what ever responses localization generates. This connection of the local and global has been much discussed by authors such as Appadurai (1996), Hannerz (1996), Friedman (1994), Robertson (1992) and Tomlinson (2000) and does not need to be repeated here other than to stress that globalization, which entails agency, is articulated in local contexts, leading different kinds and degrees of indigenization, creolization, vernacularization, hybridization, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Viewed in this way, modernity is globally inclined but is neither universal nor western. Modernity is not universalistic; it does not rest on a universal moral or cultural foundation; as a tendentially global dynamic and consciousness, it is as much an agent of localization/particularization as universalism. Yet, on the other hand, it intensifies the longing for universalistic ideas and frameworks, while making their realization difficult, if not impossible. Global modernity does not yet exist as what Niklas Luhmann has called a ‘world society,’ but only as a set of diverse trends (Luhmann, 1990). However, what we can say is that global modernity is the primary form of modernity today, for modernity is no longer defined by reference to premodern civilizations or traditions untouched by any dimension of modernity. Modernity has had an impact on virtually every part of the world, including indigenous societies, which have been transformed by the impact of world culture and have to reinterpret their own culture in this light. The self-transformative impetus of modernity—in capitalism, in science, in state formation and democratization, in technology, in communications, in collective identities and cultural patterns—has been multilinear and uneven, but it has had its impact on almost every corner of the world and has led to a modernity that is no longer specific to any nation, society or culture. The advent of a now more fully globalized modernity has in fact allowed many parts of the world, societies and groups to reconstruct themselves in the image of modernity. In sum, I am arguing that what is often called ‘multiple’ moder-


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nities is best seen as referring to modes of cultural translation. It is also not the case that modernity is converging into a unitary, homogenous form; rather modernity denotes an isomorphic condition of common aspirations, learning mechanisms, visions of the world, modes of communication. As such modernity can arise anywhere in the world; it is not a specific tradition or societal form but a mode of processing, or translating, culture. Modernity is particular way of transmitting culture that transforms that which it takes over; it is not a culture of its own and therefore can take root anywhere at any time; this is because every translation is a transformation of both the object and the subject. The essence of modernity is a capacity to transform culture in a continuous process of translation. This will now be considered with respect to Europe and its modernity which, I argue, was characterized a culture of translatability that was embedded in its civilizational form. European modernity as cultural translation On the basis of the preceding remarks the thesis can be advanced that European modernity can be theorized in terms of a model of cultural translation. Of course, this is not unique to Europe, for all civilizations have entailed cultural translations of different kinds, such as those mentioned earlier. The argument made here is that what is particularly characteristic of Europe was the creation of a culture of translatability and that Europe and its modernity is ultimately nothing more than this condition of living in translation. Europe is better defined in terms of its mode of cultural transmission than in a particular cultural heritage, origin or content. But what is Europe? To speak of Europe is to refer to a civilizational constellation of different but interrelating civilizations. As a constellation, the term ‘Europe’ refers to a juxaposed rather than a fixed or integrated cluster of changing elements, which do not have a common foundation or underlying meaning.4 Europe is a term that is best used to refer to the relation amonst things that are different and all that constitutes its reality is precisely the mode of relating to otherness, a relation that includes a relation to its own 4 The term ‘concellation’ is used here in the way Adorno adapted it from Benjamin’s usage.

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history. The European civilizational constellation is a constellation in this sense of a structure or gestalt that is apparent only in multiple links. As a result of centuries of cultural translations, the civilizations of Europe are overlapping and interpenetrating. Viewed in this way, we can arrive at a more differentiated view of modernity, which cannot be equated exclusively with the Occidental Christian civilization, which is merely one civilizational form and one that itself has been greatly shaped by Eurasian influences. One of the most striking features of European civilization is the fact that its three major historical reference civilizational points—Athens, Rome and Jerusalem—were not particularly European in the western sense of the term ‘European’. Classical antiquity and origins of Christianity were Mediterranean (with a strong North African dimension) and even more, they were also Eurasian.5 It was not until the separation of the Roman and Byzantine Christianity from 1054 that the equation of the former with Europe, understood as the Occident, became established. This Occidentalization of Europe, should not allow us to neglect the fact that Europe is not essentially western. Fernand Braudel showed how much Europe was embedded in the wider Mediterranean world—which included north Africa and the western regions of Asia—until the sixteenth century (Braudel, 1972). According to Rémi Brague, in an important study, this European culture was in fact more Roman than Christian and its central feature was it capacity to transform otherness. ‘The Romans have done little more than transmit’, he argues (Brague, 2002: 32). Roman culture was based on innovation, commencement, a search for the new. To say that the European are Romans is the contrary of identifying Europe with a great ancestor, he argues; it is to recognize that fundamentally Europe has invented nothing, but simply has learned how to transmit the cultures of others. Thus what distinguishes Europe is its mode of relating to itself, which is one of distance, Brague claims. Europe constantly has to confront a consciousness of having borrowed everything from sources that can never be regained. Brague associates with Rome a form of cultural translation in which something new is always created in the act of interpretation.6 Where 5 Neither the Greeks nor the Romans considered themselves Europeans as such. On the history of the idea of Europe, see Delanty (1995a). 6 Curiously, Wachtel has made this claim too about Russian civilization (Wachtel, 2001: 64).


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Brague sees this culture as emanating from the Roman heritage, I see it as having a wider resonance in the European civilization constellation and having an earlier origin in Hellenization. This may be the answer to the problem of how it is that the roots of Europe are not Occidental: Europe is better defined in terms of its mode of cultural transmission than in a particular historical origin or content. The point to be emphasized, then, is that modernity was given a particularly strong foundation in certain cognitive dimensions of European civilization, in particular in those forms that allowed the Europeans to take over, transform and make their own of the culture of others. It was this capacity to invent and transform culture that allowed Europe to orient itself more fully than other civilizations to world culture, even to the point of equating itself with world culture. In Europe translations became a primary cultural form, rather than a medium for the communication of a content. The history of Europe can be seen in terms of a series of translations of culture, beginning with the translation of the non-European, a category which frequently included what in later times would be European, translations of the past—ranging from renaissances, reformations and revolutions—and translations into universal systems of meaning, such as science and law. These translations were constitutive of a culture that was transformative; they did not involve simply transference of meaning from system of reference to another but involved negation, rejection, repudiation. European cultural translations did not occur within a neutral medium or lead to authoritative translations. Some of the major translations were the basis of revolutions or disputes over the nature of authority and others lead to major transformations in European self-understanding. The translation of the Other was often as likely to be a translation of the self. It is thus possible to suggest that modernity inherited this heritage and made it the basis of a new culture. The Enlightenment, for instance, was in many respects possible only by a relation to otherness. The extreme interpretation, and in my view now discredited interpretation, is that the Enlightenment was based on an orientalization of the East, which was the necessary Other for the European ‘We’ to be defined and a strategy of colonial domination. While there is little doubt that the western heritage was used to legitimate imperialism and that in many cases it entailed a fantastification of the nonWestern Other, a more differentiated analysis is needed. The category of Otherness in Enlightenment

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thought can equally well be seen as an expression of the distance that many Europeans were to their own culture, which they could view only through the eyes of the Other. This Other was indeed very often the Orient, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, but in this case and in many others it was a critical mirror by which the decadence of Old Europe could be portrayed. In many other cases the attempt for genuine understanding of the ancient cultures of Asian cannot be underestimated, not least because much of the Enlightenment culture was formed in precolonial contexts, such as eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Germany (Clarke, 1997; Halbfass, 1988). It was the capacity for distance that gave a crucial cultural foundation for the critical and reflexive dimensions of modernity to develop. European cultural modernity thus came to be very strongly associated with the critique of tradition and scientific reason. This was as likely to be used against Europe and as much as against the non-European. It is important to note that the capacity for cultural dialogue, transcendence and critique is not something exclusively western European and is present in many other traditions and is especially integral to the wider European civilizational constellation, which includes Jewish, Byzantine and Islamic traditions as well as in the wider world. Cultural translations have been central to these traditions but it is undoubtedly the case that their modes of translation did not lead directly to a culture of translatability as such. The Judaism has been based on a preservation of the old; the Islamic tradition has been based on a strong belief in the veracity of the translation. The Byzantine tradition did not survive the passage to modernity, save that which has survived within the Orthodox churches. But to draw the conclusion that the western European tradition was the basis of the culture of modernity would be wrong. That culture itself would have been inconceivable without its encounter with those other civilizations within the wider European constellation. As a culture of translations, Europe engendered a culture that could never be completed and which could never be entirely possessed by Europeans. If this analysis is correct it leads to the crucial point that European modernity can be identified by a mode of cultural translation rather than by reference to a particular cultural content (such as Christianity) or to allegedly universal norms (such as human rights or democracy) or territory or forms of statehood. Because of the different civilizations that make up the mosaic of Europe and the fact these were embroiled in each other through centuries of translations, Europe


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must be seen as a constellation consisting of links rather than stable entities or enduring traditions. In emphasizing the role of translations in this, I have attempted to draw attention to roots of modernity in the European civilizational constellation. Conclusion: The idea of a post-Western Europe A perspective on European transformation based on the theory of multiple modernities and cultural translations offers a new view of the current situation. It highlights the deeper civilizational context of modernity and its major social transformations. In concluding this paper, I would like to remark in a speculative manner on the reshaping of Europe in a post-Western direction. Especially in light of the on-going enlargement of the European Union and more extensive relations with Russia and the ‘Islamic crescent’ of Eurasia as well as with north African countries, the likely prospect of Turkey’s eventual membership of the EU, Europe can no longer be defined exclusively by reference to the West. The wider global context, too, makes the very notion of the West increasingly questionable, in particular with growing differences between Europe and the USA. A now increasingly more confident European Union—with ever stronger ties between France and Germany—no longer sees itself as the eastern frontier of the USA. As the Cold War becomes a fading memory for many people—in the way the Second World War has already lost its capacity to define the European social imaginary— new cultural models and imaginaries will arise. Given the role of war in the shaping of modernity and in particular in codifications of European identity, we can expect that the outcome of the war in Iraq will have implications for European identity. The skeptics will of course say that the EU does not need such an identity because it is merely an inter-governmental organization and that there can be no European transnational culture however desirable it might be (Seidentop, 2000). What such perspectives neglect is that the logic of Europeanization extends beyond the institutionbuilding projects of the EU. Moreover, national societies have themselves been transformed by the many dimensions of globalization as well as by the EU. Already there has been a major reworking of borders and frontiers within the existing framework of the EU (Dingsdale, 2002; Zielonka, 2002). As a result of the enlargement

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process and the wider processes of globalization, it now appears that the eastern frontier of the EU is becoming, like borders elsewhere, more and more porous. This represents a major shift in the identity of Europe, which has historically been based on a relatively closed eastern frontier (Delanty, 1996a; Whittaker, 2000). A significant factor in this is a move towards more positive attitudes of Islam, which has often been regarded as the Other of Europe (Delanty, 1995a). The global institutionalization of modernity—the world-wide impact of modernity—has meant that the civilizations of Europe have all been transformed by the enhanced momentum of globalization and are losing their distinctiveness. But more importantly, within the European context, the major social transformations of the past decade or so have led to new encounters between the European civilizations. As a result of the end of communism and the subsequent democratization and formation of market economies in post-communist space, the expansion in information and communication technologies, the enlargement of the European Union and other developments, European modernity has entered a new phase and which cannot be understood simply as a project of westernization. It is unlikely that in the increasingly global world that it will make sense to speak of a new European civilization, but there are many indications of cosmopolitan currents that are constitutive of a new modernity. The current transformation of modernity in Europe is taking place under conditions of globality, but is also shaped by increasing intersocietal, cross-cultural fertilization and civilizational interpenetration. In my view, of particular importance are new relations between Europe and Asia. In consideration of the fact that two European civilizations have contained within them a major Asian component and the fact that due to multiculturalism and transnational migration today Asia is integral to western Europe, it can be suggested that we are witnessing a de-occidentalization of Europe. If it is correct that the cultural translations that have been constitutive of the European civilization made possible a form of translation, decisive for modernity, that consisted of the capacity to view one’s own culture as other, then it follows that cosmopolitan pluralism is integral to European modernity.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CENTER-PERIPHERY, CREOLIZATION AND COSMOPOLITANISM Ulf Hannerz The idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary cultural world—indeed to explain the history of modernity— is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs. Eisenstadt (2000b: 2)

Shmuel Eisenstadt is a sociologist who has engaged in a continuous long conversation with anthropologists, and who has always maintained an analytical concern with “society” as well as “culture.”1 As a sociologist, he has been more inclined toward a bird’s-eye view and a long-term view of human life, while anthropologists, at least as ethnographers, may often be more inclined toward the concrete minutiae of the local here and now. Yet at least some of us also have a macro-anthropological inclination, concerned with the big picture, “the best way to understand the contemporary cultural world,” And Eisenstadt’s sense of that world as shaped by diversity and flux, and the narrative of multiple modernities he suggests, we may then find quite congenial. On the whole, the latter may be the story whose narration—throughout my career as an anthropologist—I have contributed to. In what follows, as a contribution to that interdisciplinary conversation, I will review and reflect on some of the conceptualizations which have been central to my endeavors over the last quartercentury or so (in fact, about the period that I have known Shmuel Eisenstadt) as I have grappled with sociocultural aspects of what,

1

The conversation with anthropologists began, one might note, when Eisenstadt was a postdoctoral scholar at the London School of Economics, in 1947–48 (Eisenstadt 2003a: 1–2).

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more or less during that period, has been labeled “globalization:” center-periphery relationships, creolization, and cosmopolitanism. These are notions which have been under some debate in the human sciences, across several disciplines—anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and others—and taking stock of where the debate stands, or at any rate recording my own understandings of it, may be an appropriate offering to my respected friend. Shmuel Eisenstadt has consistently incorporated center-periphery structures as important elements in his view of civilizations; while “creolization” may not have been part of his own analytical vocabulary, it seems to match his interest in cultural creativity; and cosmopolitanism as a cultural orientation shows up briefly here and there in his writings, more recently following his identifying it as a source of ambivalence in the contemporary world. Besides, a recent sociological commentator on cosmopolitans has argued that they typically “imagine the world from the vantage point of frequent travellers, easily entering and exiting polities and social relations around the world” (Calhoun 2002: 89). Perhaps that, too, might make it a topic of some personal interest to a scholar who also tends to figure as a frequent flier in the folklore of the global academic community.2 Center and periphery: the spatial asymmetries of culture It seems right to begin with concepts of center and periphery, as they are fundamental in the discussion of creolization and cosmopolitanism and their history, in a way, intermeshes with Eisenstadt’s biography, in that one of his mentors, Edward Shils, is responsible for introducing the center-periphery pair of concepts into the vocabulary of academic social science. Eisenstadt (1987: 65–74) himself has written about center-periphery relations in small European states— and perhaps it is to some degree because I am from one of these states that I am acutely aware of such relationships. I will begin with a recapitulation of history.3 The spatial organization of inequalities in the world has been an enduring theme in

2 I cannot refrain from noting here, too, that it was Shmuel Eisenstadt who at one time, noting my travel habits, persuaded me that I should get an airline bonus card. 3 I draw here partially on Hannerz (2001).

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scholarship, and concepts of center and periphery have been in the scholarly vocabulary for a considerable time. Perhaps by now, however, the sense of their origins may be fading away, and our assumptions about these terms may not be entirely obvious or shared. Principal sources may be half-forgotten by some of us and only vaguely known to others, although still contributing to the intellectual load of the terms we use. Let us note, then, that there has actually been a cluster of related conceptual pairs—center and periphery— but also core and periphery, metropolis and satellite, metropolis and province. And if we remember who inserted what pair into the relatively recent past of social thought, and the contexts of their appearance, we realize that they have not been simply synonyms. Shils’ paper “Center and Periphery” appeared in 1961, but there was a close affinity between it and a number of his other publications around that time.4 The overall conception of society and culture in Shils’ perspective was consensualist; but was not, he asserted in a later comment, merely a facile expression of the mood of an era. In his view, the importance of consensus to social life had been underestimated (Shils 1975: xi). Thus he concentrated on notions such as “tradition,” “ritual,” “deference,” and “charisma.” Notably, in his “Center and Periphery” paper, these two terms were used in a metaphorical sense—centrality had “nothing to do with geometry and little with geography. The center was identified with what was ultimate, irreducible, and sacred in the realm of symbols, values and beliefs; it was also identified in the realm of action with those roles and institutions which embodied such cultural understandings and were most actively engaged in propagating them. Yet in “Metropolis and Province in Intellectual Life,” published in the same year, the facts of uneven spatial organization which are now usually linked to concepts of center and periphery become clear, and are set in what we would now describe as a transnational context. Drawing on his study of the situation of intellectuals in India, Shils argued that in their minds, people have varyingly extensive maps of the world significant to them, and that a major feature of such maps would be their portrayal of one’s qualitative proximity to or distance from the metropolis (Shils 1972: 356). 4

Mostly these are available in more recently published volumes of Shils’ collected writings, especially Shils 1972 and 1975. As these may be more conveniently accessible than the originals, I will use them in citations here.

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In the former of these two papers, then, the center is a locus of excellence, of grace; the periphery defers to it. In the latter, the metropolis is a center of vitality, a seat of creativity. The province, on the other hand, Shils notes, is frequently taken to be in itself “rude, unimaginative, awkward, unpolished, rough, petty, and narrow” (1972: 357). Cultural salvation lies in involvement with the metropolis. The choice seems to be one between impoverished autonomy and enriching dependence. If Shils was a theorist of consensus and cultural authority, the metropolis/satellite and core/periphery pairs, as introduced into the debates of the 1960s and 1970s, pointed in an entirely different direction, resonating with another political mood. “Metropolis” and “satellite” were the terms used by the economist Andre Gunder Frank (e.g. 1967), engaging with the growth of largely Latin American dependency theory. And then in the 1970s, introducing world-system theory, Immanuel Wallerstein (e.g. 1974) contrasted “core” with “periphery.” Both Frank and Wallerstein were primarily concerned with political economy, and with the expanding control and exploitation of the material resources of the “periphery” or “satellite” on the part of the “core” or “metropolis.” Seemingly, the points of view represented by Shils, on the one hand, and by these two writers on the other, were not often brought into direct confrontation. Over the years, however, they may have come to interact and blend with one another—sometimes in imprecise, half-understood ways. By now, if center-periphery concepts are more passingly referred to, or criticized, in scholarly argument, it may not even be entirely clear which of the varieties is involved; if not some opaque and perhaps unlikely combination of them.5 Clearly there is a field of tension here between studies focusing on distributions of material assets and the exercise of power on the one hand and studies of culture on the other; between views suggesting consensus and views emphasizing conflict; and between views treating the social organization of meaning and meaningful forms somewhat in isolation and other views which insist on setting it in

5

One might note that a recent encyclopedia of anthropology links center-periphery concepts only with socio-economic structures and world system theory, and makes no reference to the Shilsian tendency (Barnard and Spencer 1996: 597).


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the context of political and economic structures. Probably all would accept, however, that centers and peripheries imply each other. We are dealing with relational phenomena: there is no center without periphery, no periphery unless there is a center. And the particular way the center is a center is also reflected in the way the periphery is a periphery. If, however, our conception of center-periphery relationships is that they are relationships of inequality existing in geographical space, such relationships can be defined at very different levels of specificity. At present the extreme macroview may be that of a center North and a peripheral South. Much of the cultural and political debate over center-periphery relationships, involving notions such as Orientalism, Occidentalism and Eurocentrism, remains mostly at such levels of identification. Alternatively identifications may indeed be made at the national level: the United States or France are seen rather more as centers than Sweden, Romania, or Burkina Faso. And in other instances, centers are yet more specifically placed. “World cities,” such as New York, London or Paris, may be seen as generalized, multi-purpose centers, combining various kinds of power and drawing the attention of the periphery for many different reasons. The contemporary global structure of center-periphery relationships, however, can be understood as more internally differentiated. Cities or regions may be centers in particular ways to particular people, dispersed in a transnational periphery—Rome to the Catholic world; San Francisco to gay people not only from elsewhere in the United States, but also from other continents; Silicon Valley to people in the information technology business. As we see, attachments of very diverse kinds are involved. The contemporary proliferation of centerperiphery relationships of transnational reach is undoubtedly related to a greater ease of transportation and communication, making centers easy to get to, and easy to stay in touch with. As the participants, practitioners, adherents, activists and employees of more subcultures, life styles, ideologies, disciplines, occupations, or corporations use new means to extend their circles beyond local or national habitats, new far-away centers are discovered, or even made. There seems to be much to suggest that concepts of center and periphery can be very useful in the continued mapping of the global sociocultural landscape. It is striking, then, that we now rather frequently hear voices criticizing center-periphery concepts, or proposing the decline of center-periphery structures. It is said that the world

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economy is becoming increasingly decentered. Human life, it is also argued, is increasingly deterritorialized. People move quickly between places, are rooted in none of them, and have relationships that belong to no place in particular. As would-be centers and would-be peripheries are closely in touch, by way of electronic media or jumbo jets, the “cultural lag” that previously divided them is no longer there. Even if they are sometimes closer to futuristics than to the really existing world, there may be something to such arguments. Asymmetries may indeed only be relative, culture flows are not entirely one-way, the world is crisscrossed by more symmetrical relationships as well, and there are many centers, and many kinds of centers, rather than only one. Centers also rise and decline. At times, however, both the concepts criticized and the alternatives to them need to be elaborated more precisely. Indeed we must be sensitive to the ambiguity of our terms, and to the actual range of variations out there. But centerperiphery conceptualizations now deserve to be scrutinized and developed, rather than merely rejected. It is notable that the end of centers and peripheries appears often proclaimed by commentators whose own vantage point is at the center—in this case not a privileged position. It is in the nature of their asymmetrical relationship that center and periphery take different views of it, and may even be differently aware of it. A periphery has to attend to its center. The center for its part may at times be preoccupied with its internal affairs, hardly even noticing that the periphery looks in over its shoulder, and may not have a clear grasp of the more widely dispersed consequences of its actions. The periphery tends to have a more developed, more detailed, sometimes more imaginative and sometimes more knowledgeable idea of the center than vice versa. (This is obviously a spatialized aspect of the general tendency that the subordinate knows more about the dominant than the other way around.) I can see a danger that the notion of center-periphery relationships, which is now sometimes rejected, is a straw man, oversimplified and assembled from out-of-date materials. Perhaps what is needed now, is a more subtle understanding of the complexities and ambiguities of perspectives toward center-periphery relationships, particularly from the periphery. Emotions may be attached to such linkages. Center-periphery relationships generally do not leave people cold, passionless, neutral. In the consensualist view, centers generate warm, deferential attitudes


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at the peripheries. In the conflict perspective, in contrast, center and periphery are primarily defined by political and economic structures—and we may then see their cultural concomitants at the periphery in the responses to control, coercion and constraint. Along such lines, the many forms of cultural resistance have been a major theme in the portrayal of center-periphery relationships. The periphery may defend itself symbolically against intrusions through a celebration of the self and its local and traditional roots, but there may also be a denigration of the other, an uncomplimentary representation of the center. (The remaining superpower may at times be described in some circles as “the great Satan,” but it seems to remain a center nevertheless.) Yet the responses of the periphery to the center are not always clear-cut. For one thing, claims to center-periphery consensus now increasingly meet with skepticism. With Gramsci as a source of theoretical inspiration, observers may interpret deference in the more complicated terms of hegemony. It is likewise possible, however, that people at the periphery may genuinely be of two minds about a center. If ambivalence is a prevalent quality of social life, as Neil Smelser (1998) has argued, perhaps this is even as common a response to a center as any more one-sidedly favorable or unfavorable stance. It may be a place one loves to hate and hates to love. One may feel that good things come from there, and at the same time resent its influence, or what may seem to be its narcissism. All views of the center, however, and all messy feelings toward it, are not necessarily to be found in any single inhabitant of the periphery. They may rather be complicatedly distributed among its population. We must avoid any tendency toward homogenizing peripheral people and social life, for indeed we can see that center-periphery relationships can also be the foci of intense debates and conflicts. One person’s center may be his neighbor’s anti-center. Such variations may be a major factor structuring local life at the periphery. Creolization: the confluence of cultural currents Some of my own insights into, and preoccupation with, centerperiphery relations, to repeat, may have to do with my roots in a small nation in Europe. But they also draw on my experience doing research during the 1970s and early 1980s, in central Nigeria, in a

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town built in the colonial era around a new railroad junction. I had actually intended to do a study focusing on local social organization, but then the field experience itself gradually drew my attention in another direction. Some of my new acquaintances in the town would pull my sleeve and suggest that they and I ought to get into an import-export business together; they had lots of ideas about desirable goods to import from overseas (but fewer ideas, it seemed, about what to export). Or that they would propose that I take a promising young nephew of theirs along when I would return to Europe, to put him into my university where he would get a good education and from which he could come back to Nigeria as a rich and powerful man—what had quickly become known in West African English as a “beento.” Obviously these were people whose horizons did not coincide with local town limits. Rather, their imagined worlds were in large part overseas, constructed from ideas about credentialed knowledge as well as material opulence.6 Most strikingly, moreover, there was in my field that young urban culture which was quite basically and dramatically a result of the intricate and shifting blending of West African, European and by now North American cultures as well. From within Nigeria, and from just about every corner of it, people of a great many ethnic groups had arrived in the town, to find their places in its life. Even as they brought some parts of their traditions along, however, there were also the meanings and messages from further away. Music emanating from the loudspeakers of the small record stores switched back and forth between American televangelist gospel, Afro-American soul music, Caribbean reggae and Nigerian popular music genres such as highlife and juju. And since Nigeria had oil and was at least for some time a quite prosperous country, over the rusting zinc roofs of the one-storey or two-storey houses, one could now see new television antennae being installed. Here I could see the growth of global interconnectedness; but as I became more inclined to focus my attention on this, I also became more critical of the two ways of telling the story about it which were more routinely available in Europe and North America at the time. One was still the early version of modernization theory; the other

6 The formulation about imagined worlds, I need hardly point out, draws inspiration from Appadurai (1991).


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was the critique of “cultural imperialism.” While their political and ideological inclinations differed, both offered scenarios of cultural homogenization. Yet what I saw seemed to be rather more of a creation of new culture, even perhaps another civilization, born in the cultural encounters of global connections. This was neither a simple persistence of West African traditions nor the wholesale acceptance of ideas and cultural forms imported from overseas. It was not just a matter of cultural loss, as a necessary consequence of homogenization. Nor did it seem to me that I could easily fit what I saw into the still dominant overall anthropological conceptual format of a global cultural mosaic, with neatly bounded and essentially static units— what has lately also been described as “the cookie-cutter view of cultures.” Reacting both to the assumption of a cultural mosaic and to the scenario of global homogenization, I borrowed the concept of “creolization” from the sociolinguistics of the period, as a rootmetaphor referring to a process whereby new culture is born on a significant scale, in the confluence of two or more cultural currents historically separate from one another.7 What I liked about the metaphor, in relation to my Nigerian experience, was not only its suggestion that mixing and mingling can be creative, but also that a creole culture, like a creole language, can become an elaborate, comprehensive phenomenon which with time acquires its own historical depth, and also that it points toward a more open cultural organization—I saw an internally diverse cultural continuum, stretching out along a transnational structure of center-periphery relationships from European or American metropoles to West African “bush,” characterized by inequality in power, prestige and material resource terms, where different individuals and groups could engage with partly different ensembles of culture, but nonetheless be in communication with one another through their overlaps. It was a center-periphery perspective which to a degree combined Shils and Wallerstein, culture and power, but which also had some other facets. Above all, it focused on the creative potential of cultural mixture. In this latter emphasis, it quickly became clear, the creole metaphor shared an intellectual space which, in the final decades of the twentieth century, would become quite crowded.

7 My use of notions of creolization is most fully elaborated in Hannerz (1987, 1996: 65ff.).

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Hybridity, collage, mélange, hotchpotch, synergy, bricolage, masticate, mineralization, syncretism, transculturation, third cultures; some of these terms were perhaps used only in passing as summary images, others made stronger and more durable claims to analytical status.8 Some were new and others retrieved from the past, others again had more identifiable regional or thematic strongholds. At present, hybridity seems to have become the more favored general term. What this entire vocabulary suggests, again, is a critique of essentialist assumptions of cultural purity and timelessness, as well as of scenarios of homogenization. If that critique has now won wide acceptance on the academic scene (as well as in the arts, not least due to the influence of writers like Salman Rushdie). Meanwhile, the central metaphors have themselves come under scrutiny. Some would be unhappy with the biologistic flavor of “hybridity;” and if the rhetorical trick often seemed to be to turn past prejudices about the social and cultural worth of impure forms upside down, it was perhaps not always certain that the trick would succeed. As far as terms of Creole and creolization have been concerned, it has evidently been one complication that their particular historical roots lie in the New World societies of plantations and slavery, and that some of the meanings and associations out of that past, with its extensions into the present, are not carried into the more generalized sociolinguistics from which I (and others) have drawn the term into cultural analysis. The argument that sometimes arises over that is of a kind which is recurrent when terms originating in some particular cultural tradition are made to travel and become generalized—“caste,” “taboo.” I see the point that their meanings may be impoverished and even corrupted when borrowed for a wider usage, and still feel that social and cultural imagination in the world would also be poorer if such travel were restricted. More often, perhaps, it has been proposed that creolization or hybridity concepts merely push essentialism one step back, implying that what comes together are the same old kind of presumably pure and timeless entities. That may seem at first sight like a good argument, but I do not think it necessarily is. In linguistics, there are many English-based Creole languages, but probably hardly anybody

8

I discuss some of them in Hannerz (1997).


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would claim that English is historically a very pure, bounded language. There may be creolizations all the way down, or at least a medley through history of more creolizing and relatively more integrated, homogenized forms following upon each other. It is not that some cultures, or people, are forever mixed, and others equally forever pure. Creolization is rather a process characteristic of periods when major cultural currents which have previously been more separate come to engage more intensely with one another, with a potential for new outcomes. We may all be moving in and out of more noticeably creolizing phases; and as we try to understand this we should be concerned, for one thing, with periodization. What I thought I could see in creolist sociolinguistics (although not so many others seem to have taken much note of this) was probably above all a stronger sociology than I found in “syncretism,” “hybridity” or other terms of blending. Once again, it was an attempt to combine social and cultural analysis. That sociology, of course, at least makes my notion of creolization more specific than some of those other terms, not simply a fancier way of saying that something is mixed. And the notion of the open cultural continuum organized by center-periphery linkages has a major part in this. The understanding of creolization here, however, also contributes to a certain renewal in the understanding of center-periphery relationships. Anthropologists have recently had little inclination to accept the assumption of passive reception at the periphery. They are far more likely to see an active periphery, involved in the management of diffusion from the center: the periphery accepts this, rejects that, modifies one thing, and synthesizes something else with items from its own local cultural inventory. Creolization involves all of that. Furthermore, anthropologists generally like to draw attention to the multicentricity of culture—and not least, to instances of cultural counterflow, to diffusion from periphery to center. In the latter case, one might perhaps still suggest some rather unexciting caution. At times, the enthusiasm over discoveries of counterflow could lead us to deny or disregard even quite basic asymmetries of cultural diffusion. One should try to be constantly aware of the danger of Eurocentric culture history, but some net asymmetries seem to me undeniable during recent centuries, involving for one thing much of whatever is shared among modernities. This complex of asymmetries has in itself created some of the conditions for those later cultural counterflows and crossflows in space which we now find so intriguing.

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Nonetheless, a significant part of what has happened in world center-periphery relationships in recent times seems to involve the ways in which the periphery helps make the center what it is. As a center comes to be recognized, it may draw to itself the most committed of the periphery, as immigrants, tourists, participants, contributors, observers, commentators. And thus the periphery not only adds to the center’s external reputation; it may contribute directly to the richness of its internal life. As the center is in the periphery, so to a degree the periphery may establish its presence in the center. That presence of the periphery at the center, furthermore, may suggest another, at least complementary, view of why the center is a center. Especially perhaps in the classic view of the center as a place commanding deference, it is a place which is in itself the ultimate source of good things. Perhaps in an early stage, the center really functions that way, with meanings and meaningful forms flowing mostly outward. Yet center-periphery interaction may shift over time. If we grant that the periphery is an active recipient, doing new things with whatever is more or less insistently offered by the center, these new emerging things—syntheses, creole forms—may turn out to be less alien, more accessible, more attractive to the center than what has been there before them. Thus in the next stage, a counterflow is more likely to occur. The relationship may yet be asymmetrical in the balance, and the counterflow is perhaps still in some way controlled from the center. Yet when “world music” is heard in the center’s cultural market places, and when “the Empire strikes back” in literature, we again sense that the center is where peripheries meet. It then becomes something more like a cultural switchboard; a ludic, liminal space, rather than a place toward which deference is the proper attitude. It is rather more in this light we now see world cities such as New York, London or Paris. We may seem to have come quite far from Edward Shils here; but Shmuel Eisenstadt, who has conducted seminars about liminality with Victor Turner (the originator of the concept) no doubt sees the point. And then these center-periphery structures can change. I am now somewhat amused that only fifteen years ago or so, in a fairly early phase of my attempts to understand the global cultural flow chart, I could write that “Japan, on the whole, has at least so far kept a rather lower cultural profile in the world . . . Most of what it exports does not seem to be identifiably marked by Japaneseness” (Hannerz 1992: 219–220). That may have been more or less true at the time,


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but since then Japanese popular culture has certainly had a major global impact. Shmuel Eisenstadt sometimes describes Japan as “God’s gift to comparative sociology,” in its capacity to offer early and continuous evidence that modernity can appear in other than Occidental forms. Perhaps it is beginning to take up a similarly important place in the study of transnational cultural process. It is true that the Japanese have also invented the entire intellectual field of Nihonjinron to theorize forms of national uniqueness, but since the country ended—was forced to end—its isolation from world markets and world culture in the mid-nineteenth century, it has been remarkably preoccupied with its handling of the influx of culture from elsewhere. I can hardly fail to consider as evidence of the capacity of that metaphor to travel that a group of Japanese and Japan-based scholars have recently referred to “the age of creolization in the Pacific” as they describe post-World War II cultural processes in “the JapanAmerica borderlands” (Matsuda 2001). But then another analyst of the emergent place of Japanese popular culture in the world can persuasively argue that this, to a degree, by now also involves “recentering globalization” (Iwabuchi 2002). We can indeed see multiple modernities in motion here. Cosmopolitanism reconsidered: culture and politics Now I turn to my third key concept. My own engagement with the notion of cosmopolitanism began with a departmental colloquium at an American university in the mid-1980s, where I had sketched some of my interests in the cultural aspects of globalization, and one of my local colleagues asked if I had given any thought to cosmopolitanism.9 Essentially, my answer had to be “no,” but the question stuck in my mind as one I ought to do something about. An opportunity later presented itself with a conference in Seoul, where I presented a paper titled “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.” Later on, the paper appeared in the journal Theory, Culture and Society, in a special issue on “global culture.” That issue was also published as a book, which has thus been the publication reference for my paper (Hannerz 1990). Riding on a wave of growing interest in the

9

As it later turned out, my colleague had (Rabinow 1986: 258).

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sociocultural aspects of globalization, that book eventually did extremely well in the marketplace, and thus probably a great many more people may have read that essay of mine than some other of my writings which I consider more central, and actually more weighty. Occasional later commentators may even have come to assume that it summarizes my understanding of what globalization in culture is about, which it surely does not.10 In any case, as the title indeed suggests, it was an essay on cosmopolitanism in culture—more specifically, on the cosmopolitan as a type in the management of meaning in an interconnected but culturally diverse world.11 I tried first of all to show that in an increasingly mobile world, not all mobility need entail much of what I thought of as the core of cosmopolitanism: an intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, and an ability to make one’s way into other cultures. Much tourism, I argued, does not really entail any more generalized openness. Drawing eclectically, and rather lightheartedly, on an essay on travel by Paul Theroux, the novel The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, an International Herald Tribune feature story on Nigerian market-women trading between Lagos and London, and reflections on exile by Edward Said, I found that going abroad and encountering otherness might involve rejection or narrow, controlled selection, rather than openness. The tourist often seeks out quite particular qualities of a distant place (such as sunshine) rather than embracing it as a whole; in other ways, the place should perhaps be as much like home as possible. The exile, having a foreign haven more or less forced on him, might prefer to encapsulate himself as much as possible with others, possibly also from home, and in similar straits. The business traveler may find it convenient and comforting if all the hotels in major chains stretching across the world look and feel much the same. What I thought was characteristic of the cosmopolitan management of meaning was a certain combination of surrender and mastery.

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For an example, see Tsing (2000). Although “locals” are also in the title of the essay, they did not really have a prominent place in the argument. Presumably their handling of meaning would be more of the kind ethnographers have usually described—or merely assumed. The title was also inspired by the pioneering study of cosmopolitans and locals in an American town authored by another modern-classical sociologist, Robert K. Merton, to whose memory a recent set of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s collected writings is dedicated (Eisenstadt 2003a). 11


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Cosmopolitans, ideally, would seek to immerse themselves in other cultures, participating in them, accepting them as wholes. Yet in not only embracing these cultures but also displaying their skills in handling them, there is also a sense of mastery, not infrequently with a streak of narcissism. Moreover, the surrender to otherness of cosmopolitans is usually situational. Cosmopolitanism is protean. There is no real commitment to any particular other culture, I suggested, as one always knows where the exit is.12 In my essay I then went on to suggest a certain affinity between cosmopolitanism, as I understood it, and the conception of intellectuals developed particularly by the Hungarian writer George Konrad and the American sociologist Alvin Gouldner—especially relating to the latter’s notion of “cultures of critical discourse.” The latter could be described as an overall orientation to structures of meaning which would be reflexive, problematizing, concerned with metacommunication, and generally expansive, pushing on and on in its analysis. It seemed to me that people who are habituated to working actively with such explorations of orders of meaning—hoping eventually to master them—might also be inclined toward cosmopolitanism. After this essay, I did not pay much active attention to ideas of cosmopolitanism for some time. As I would soon realize, however, others did—as the 1990s went on, the interest in them was animated by a new series of conditions and experiences.13 Before identifying these, however, we should remind ourselves of the multifacetedness of the notion of cosmopolitanism. Indeed the term carries a heavy historical load of meanings and associations, accumulated in many periods and places. Yet two main kinds of referents can be readily identified: one cultural and experiential, the other political. The former involves a recognition of human diversity, even an appreciation of it, and skill in handling it—this was what I had attempted to deal with in my earlier essay. The latter has to do with community, society and citizenship at a more or less global level. What stimulated the renewed interest in cosmopolitanism in the 1990s was, most obviously and generally, the accelerating growth of

12 Apart from those citations which are in the original text, as some readers have noted my references to “surrender” and “proteanism”, I might add here that they were inspired by Wolff (1974) and Lifton (1968) respectively. 13 For some of these developments in the study of cosmopolitanism see e.g. Cheah and Robbins 1998, Beck 2000, Vertovec and Cohen 2002 and Stevenson 2003.

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many kinds of global interconnectedness, and the increasing consciousness of this fact. Importantly, too, the Cold War, with its great divide running through humanity, came to an end, and this appeared to allow new possibilities in organizing power as well as responsibility. Furthermore, if the term “globalization” had to a remarkable extent been appropriated to refer to the deregulation of markets and the triumphant march of capitalism, “cosmopolitanism” suggested that human beings could relate to the world not only as consumers, or members of a labor force, but also as citizens. This could mean that cosmopolitan ideas could indeed offer a critique of at least certain qualities of global capitalism, and involve a search for ways of constraining it. With time, it also turned out that the passage of the Cold War order had not everywhere gone altogether smoothly. New wars and other conflagrations such as those of the Balkans had involved atrocities which contributed to placing “human rights” prominently on a cosmopolitan agenda. Environmental changes were also seen as matters requiring active handling at a level beyond the nation-state, as they could not be contained within its boundaries. “Risk” became a key word here; it could cover more gradually evolving dangers as well as the threat of disasters of an apparently more sudden nature. And as much as ever, the politics of cosmopolitanism could also stand opposed to nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia, adversary responses to global interconnectedness which could be reactions to the influx of migrant labor forces as well as refugees, but sometimes also to other social and cultural traffic across borders. Eisenstadt (e.g. 2003a: 556) notes here, as one characteristic of present times, a “continuous oscillation” between cosmopolitanism and particularistic tendencies. Toward the end of the twentieth century and continuing into the early years of the new millennium, many of these developments were obviously more toward the political side of cosmopolitanism, in thought as well as practice; but not all. In any case, while cosmopolitanism is a very old topic in social thought, it could now make a remarkable comeback across a range of scholarly pursuits, from political philosophers by way of social theorists to ethnographers, from law to cultural studies. It is also clear that as a keyword in recent debate, it has not stood alone, but has belonged in a wider field of arguments revolving at the same time around such other


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keywords as multiculturalism, identity politics, diaspora, transnationalism, and civil society; even political correctness. I am coming back now myself to a more active engagement with ideas of cosmopolitanism for various reasons.14 One is because of a curiosity about the current distribution of cosmopolitan orientations in the world. In my first paper on the topic, I obviously came rather close to what may have been the more or less classic notion: cosmopolitanism has tended to be a privilege associated with other privileges. Perhaps that has meant that in the twentieth century it has shifted from the aristocracy to the professions, but it still involves education, the freedom to travel, and a certain material security. Calhoun (2002), in the essay I cited early in this chapter, is also among those who basically shares in such assumptions. During the 1990s, with the renewed interest in cosmopolitanism, there was, however, increasing questioning of that somewhat exclusive notion of its locus in society. A recurrent reference has been James Clifford’s (1992: 108) notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms,” generated through displacement and transplantation, often through violent histories of economic, political and cultural interaction. As Clifford was more generally concerned with the part of travel in constituting the contemporary world, he offered little discussion of cosmopolitanism as such, but he effectively made the point that for a long time this has not been a world divided between “haves” who move and “have-nots” who stay put. Along such lines, a number of ethnographers have recently found cosmopolitans where they have not been noted before—and not even always among frequent travelers. Huon Wardle (2000), drawing on field materials from working-class urban Jamaica, notes the enduring harshness of Caribbean living conditions and the historical and continued openness of the region to influences from the outside world, and he notes the mobility and the transnational networks in which ordinary Jamaicans are engaged. But proceeding beyond material circumstances and practical adaptations, Wardle finds a cosmopolitan philosophy and a shared community esthetic emerging in sociality, out of the uncertainty and flux of life: recognizable for example in playfulness and in narratives of adventure.

14

For a first statement, see Hannerz (forthcoming).

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When James Ferguson (1999) finds cosmopolitans in the classic anthropological territory of urban Zambian Copper Belt, we are among people who have traveled little outside their own country. But Ferguson identifies a distinct cleavage of cultural styles between cosmopolitans and localists, where the cosmopolitan style is one of accomplished, cultivated performance capacity, a matter of seeking worldliness and at the same time distancing oneself from more parochial ties and traditions. But there are “high” and “low” varieties of cosmopolitanism here. Not a few of the more conspicuous Copper Belt cosmopolitans are hoodlums and prostitutes. And the latter group raises the issue of gender. The classic notion of cosmopolitanism may have had a bias toward identifying it with men, but Nava (2002) makes the point that groups with reason to be dissatisfied with their positions and experiences in the established local order of things may seek alternatives elsewhere, and may therefore be open to other cultures and their expressions; furthermore, women have often been in such situation. While Nava’s research has focused on early twentiethcentury women in Britain, Kelsky’s (2001) study of “Japanese women, western dreams” also offers an instance of such cosmopolitanism. And then, as one final instance of the ethnographic discovery of cosmopolitans in other places, we have Charles Piot (1999: 23) staying with the Kabre, cereal cultivators in the heart of the West African savanna (in Togo), and arguing that they are “as cosmopolitan as the metropole itself, if by cosmopolitanism we mean that people partake in a social life characterized by flux, uncertainty, encounters with difference, and the experience of processes of transculturation.” For one thing, Piot notes, the Kabre inhabit the world together with invisible spirits and ancestors who communicate through non-verbal signs requiring complicated interpretation—a great deal of ambiguity and uncertainty is already in place. On the one hand, if in some of these ethnographic explorations there are discoveries of people who have in some sense been cosmopolitans all the time, only not previously recognized as such, it may mostly have to do with the career of the concept, and a current inclination on the part of scholars to test its boundaries. There may also be a risk, however, that in the drive toward finding cosmopolitanism in more places, understandings of it can at times become quite attenuated, or almost unrecognizable. There may be some virtue, after all, in not straying too far from the ordinary dictionary definitions. In any case, perhaps it is time to make more distinctions,


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and speak of cosmopolitanisms in the plural. So the Kabre, the Japanese women, the Copper Belt street sophisticates, and the Jamaican proletarian city dwellers are thus all to be covered by the same label—but does “cosmopolitanism” actually mean the same thing in all these instances? I would hypothesize, for one thing, that one may find that some people are cosmopolitans mostly in a more instrumental sense, having cultivated a skill in dealing with diversity in their habitats, while the actual appreciation of cultural diversity for its own sake, as a consummatory value, need not have quite the same distribution. On the other hand, it also seems likely enough that the real social distribution of the qualities we identify as cosmopolitan has changed in the recent era, so that more people outside more or less elite groupings are also sharing in them. Again, although mobility does not equal cosmopolitanism, when a great many people are on the move in one way or other, at least the possibility of a growth of cosmopolitanism may be present; even if for some it is only a reluctant cosmopolitanism, an increased ability to make one’s way through newness and uncertainty, as well as perhaps a certain faith in that ability. For others, again, that instrumental cosmopolitanism may be something acquired as a skill not because they have been mobile themselves, but because at some point they find themselves sharing their old habitats with newcomers and strangers. Moreover, meanings—and the forms which carry them—may travel even when people do not; and consumer goods and not least media consumption habits have recently had the potential of greatly changing people’s imagined worlds. I could see that in my Nigerian town, and I am fairly sure the street cosmopolitans of urban Zambia are people whose horizons are also extended in more or less the same way. But, to put it very briefly, that may raise a quite fundamental question about where cosmopolitanism, as exposure to and involvement with another culture, is now. What counts as cosmopolitanism can often not be disentangled from center-periphery relations. Probably it is still widely taken for granted (again, as an integral part of that classic conception of the phenomenon) that cosmopolitanism belongs to the center of the world—the affluent Occident, Europe and North America. Its inhabitants have long had the means to travel and familiarize themselves with those people who are the locals elsewhere. Now that people from the periphery travel in large numbers to the center, however, or have it prominently displayed in their imagined

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worlds, they may be more directly and deeply involved with cultural alterities than those inhabitants of the center who, even as they travel, may more easily encapsulate themselves in their own kinds of institutions and comforts—perhaps more “expatriates” than cosmopolitans. So that assumption about where the cosmopolitans are may need to be reconsidered. The Indian culture critic Ashis Nandy (1998: 146) raises the issue bluntly: “Europe and North America have increasingly lost their cosmopolitanism, paradoxically because of a concept of cosmopolitanism that considers Western culture to be by definition universal and therefore automatically cosmopolitan. Believe it or not, there is a cost of dominance, and that cost can sometimes be heavy.” Shifting understandings of the loci of cosmopolitanism may again be a part of the history of multiple modernities. I am also drawn toward scrutinizing ideas and practices of cosmopolitanism again, however, precisely because of that two-facedness of the concept: cultural and political. What is actually the relationship between the two clusters of meaning sharing a space in the dictionary? Are we dealing here with an arbitrary lexical cohabitation, an (originally at least) characteristically western confusion? In my original essay, I concentrated entirely on the cultural dimension of cosmopolitanism. Now I wonder if there is at least some sort of elective affinity between the two. Political philosophers, who have recently been contrasting cosmopolitanism with patriotism (or nationalism), have mostly concluded that the former may be noble, but is also “thin”—there is a symbolic, experiential deficit which makes it difficult to mobilize people around it.15 Is that really always so? Again, consider those two faces. In its cultural dimension, cosmopolitanism tends to show a happy face, enjoying new people, new intellectual and esthetic experiences, new skills, a new sense of security. Political cosmopolitanism is often a cosmopolitanism with a worried face, trying to come to grips with very large problems. But perhaps the one can at times be a resource for the other. If these two senses of cosmopolitanism must not simply be conflated, the intertwining of the two may yet proceed along different lines and take many shapes. Why should there not be as much scope for variation and complexity here as there has been in the case of nationalism? It may be time for the political philosophers of cosmopolitanism to let more ethnographers in. 15 See in particular the volume of essays by Martha Nussbaum and others (Cohen 1996).


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And then perhaps as another reason for engaging now with cosmopolitanism, there is one more recent turn in human history. I noted in my first attempt at understanding cosmopolitanism that the cosmopolitan, engaging with another culture, typically knows where the exit is. Something that can be called “home” is available. If the combination “rootless cosmopolitans” has been recurrent, more cosmopolitans may actually have been rooted somewhere, and making their excursions from there. In a somewhat similar vein, it seems to me, the well-known scholar-journalist Michael Ignatieff, identifying himself as a cosmopolitan, writes in his Blood and Belonging (1994: 9), on late twentieth-century nationalist conflicts, that “cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation state for granted.” A decade or so later, that is worth thinking about again, whether—after 2001—any nation state, not even the strongest, may seem quite so entirely secure. After the end of the Cold War, a politics of cosmopolitanism seemed for a period perhaps not only desirable, even necessary, but more than ever before possible too. It may now have to survive in times of widespread, diffuse fear; when even a term like “civilizations” becomes part of battle-cries. In such times, it is good to have scholars like Shmuel Eisenstadt, with a respect for pluralism and a sense of being at home in the world.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

EUROPE’S MULTIPLE MODERNITY Erik Allardt It is remarkable how definitions of the concept civilization are usually missing in sociological textbooks and readers on societal development. The word appears only rarely in indexes of the content of such books. When it does appear, it is mostly in texts aiming to describe very general overall patterns of the development of the human world, as for instance in the works of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. These two scholars are also among the most diligent in using the word “civilization,” as can be ascertained from a number of texts on the fundamental developments in human societies. In the trendsetting two-volume reader on the “Theories of Society” (Parsons et al. 1962) Spengler and Toynbee were among the contributors who, in addition to Alfred Weber and Pitirim Sorokin, spoke about civilizations. Toynbee’s article was headed “The Disintegration of Civilizations” (pp. 1355–1364), whereas Spengler’s contribution was entitled “On the Style-Patterns of Culture” (pp. 1343–1355). Spengler referred to civilizations, but it is revealing that he, like most authors focusing on the overall development, spoke about culture and cultural change. In many texts civilization virtually stands for general descriptions of the style-patterns of culture. In the sociology that developed and unfolded after the Second World War civilization was a rarely used concept. It has been regenerated by S.N. Eisenstadt who, however, as a leading theoretician of societal change and modernization, rarely used the word civilization in his earlier works (see e.g. Eisenstadt, 1963, 1966). For descriptions of large and total social configurations, concepts such as empires, total societies, historical orders etc. were utilized. It is during the last decades of the twentieth century that Eisenstadt (for instance 1986c, 1987, 2000a) started to refer to civilizations in a systematic way. By civilization he refers to configurations that integrate the social, political and cultural traits of societies or regions. It is assumed that civilizations are societal configurations that have an exceptional

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historical durability, and that have created a high degree of consensus about some basic values and cultural programs. The most typical civilizations are the so-called historical Axial Age Civilizations, a concept that emphasizes the integration of the religious and mundane orders, as was the case in ancient Israel, in European Christianity, ancient Greece and China, the Islamist world, Hinduism etc. However, a search for a uniform and generally applicable definition of the civilization concept in the texts of Eisenstadt would be in vain. In fact, a consistent and unequivocal civilization concept cannot be found in his texts. This view is not here presented as criticism. On the contrary, the lack of an unequivocal definition of the civilization concept is, so to say, in the very nature of large-scale social phenomena. They contain so many dimensions, slightly differing qualities and, in particular, ever-changing but nevertheless related attributes, that a definition presented once and for all would be grossly misleading. This is a methodological predicament which has been observed only diffusely in the textbooks of social science methods. As judging from leading scholarly texts, the fruitful way to proceed in the presentations of many general sociological concepts appears to be descriptions made as accurately as possible but without the ambition to give a final, all-time, precisely valid and completely covering definition. A seminal way to advance is to make the conceptual descriptions continuously more telling and precise in future presentations. At any rate, Eisenstadt proceeds in a very fruitful way when he avoids dogmatic and seemingly universally valid definitions. The avoidance of universally valid definitions is related to the traditional distinction between nominal and real definitions. Nominal definitions are agreements on the meaning and use of words, whereas real definitions are empirical statements about the nature of the real world. Accurate real definitions are of utmost importance in sociology, but there is a lack of analyses about when and how real definitions should be used. As empirical descriptions, real definitions cannot be assumed to remain constant and unchangeable, but there are no rules governing how much they can change until a new wording is invented. At any rate, fruitful use of real definitions is a sign of creativity in sociology.

europe’s multiple modernity

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The concept of multiple modernities Modernity is another concept which is not nominally defined but which contains propositional statements about the real social world. There are variations in the notions of modernity but they have a common core. Usually it is assumed that modernity consists of institutional forms such as the democratic nation-state, a market economy, research-oriented universities and epistemological assumptions that achieved knowledge can be questioned. As Eisenstadt (2000, 1–29) emphasizes, such modernity originated in the Western world. In the framework of multiple modernities, social forms have ceased to be taken for granted. Reflexivity about one’s own social and cultural conceptions has been a central trait of modernity. These modern views emerged in the West but were not automatically taken up and adopted in other societies across the world. The various sites of modernity—the economic institutions, the political arena, institutions for socialization and education, etc.—were combined in very different fashions in different societies. Variability in the modernization process has, according to Eisenstadt, been enormous. This variability is what he tellingly describes as multiple modernities. In Far Eastern, Middle Eastern and African societies, the basic model of modernity has been the territorial state and the developmental patterns of the nation-state. Both the elites and their opposing forces in those societies adopted many of the central features of Western modernity. However, they did it by selectively accepting and rejecting different features to their own advantage. Thus, the selection of Western features of modernity entailed a continuous selection, reinterpretation and reformulation of Western ideas. As Eisenstadt says, the development did not give rise to just one civilization. On the global scale, the new habits of questioning social forms and conceiving the social world has produced a plethora of cultural agendas. The term “multiple modernities” has been a crucial and ingenious addition to the discussion of what modernity entails. It is clear from Eisenstadt’s texts that there are on the global scale multiple modernities. What is more uncertain is whether it is reasonable to assume that in the European and North American countries has existed and exists a distinct and uniform European modernity. On at least three counts it seems inaccurate to assume a common and uniform modernity. First, there are contradictions and strains in the mentality and

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value climates in the European and North American culture which makes it very doubtful to assume a common conception of modernity. Second, there is in the Western world a continuous and rapid rise of new social and political movements questioning the basic assumptions of modernity. Third, especially in the studies of the former Communist and Socialist countries it has been shown that they became “modernized” in distinctly different ways. These doubts about a common European and Western modernity are discussed at a later point in this chapter. The polarity between instrumental rationalism and communal romanticism There are some definite contradictions and strains included in what has been conceived as the European civilization. Very often, however, the notions of a European civilization tend to emphasize its non-contradictory features. According to scholarly tradition emanating from Max Weber, the characteristic European specificity has been the tendency towards an overall rationalization of social life. Eisenstadt, whose interest focuses on analyzing civilizations, is more comprehensive in his descriptions. He points out that there are several crucial traits in European civilization. Of special importance are the following four: (1) a high degree of multiplicity in the attempts to solve tensions between cosmic, cultural, and social orders; (2) a high level of commitment by different groups and strata to those orders; (3) a high degree of pluralism in commitment to the different orders; and (4) a definition of the individual as an autonomous and responsible unit as regards access to these orders (Eisenstadt 1987, 47–49). Yet in a broad sense they all amount to a tendency to an overall rationality in social life. The tendency to multiplicity emphasized in all four points is hardly possible without a central striving for pluralism. Nevertheless, it must be asked whether rationality and the tendencies to rationalism have been overemphasized in both Max Weber’s and Eisenstadt’s conceptions of the uniqueness in the European civilization. There is in Western sociology a distinction that has appeared in many forms but that definitely records two entirely different cultural styles as typical for the European and Western civilization. There is a strong opposition between two crucial tendencies, a striving for a primordial social integration, on one hand, and the attempt


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to build a derived integration by rational means, on the other. This contrariness is expressed in many of the traditional dichotomies of the definitely Western attempts to sociological theory-building. As wellknown examples we have the distinctions between Emile Durkheim’s mechanic and organic solidarity, Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and C.H. Cooley’s primary and secondary groups (Osterberg 1988, 93–100). These dichotomies were sometimes presented by their authors as alternatives to each other, but basically they have an obvious common core. As an additional case, one may mention Ernest Gellner’s fascinating description of the tensions between a communalcultural-romantic vision and its counterpart, an atomic-universalist-individualist vision, typical of the tensions in the old Habsburg empire (Gellner 1998). In Gellner’s posthumous book and in its foreword by Steven Lukes (1998, xiii–xix) it is also described how the same polarity has been important in European philosophy. As representatives of the rationalistic vision, we have Descartes, Hume, Kant, Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell. In the field of fiction, this visionary pole is exemplified by Robinson Crusoe. This vision is, as Lukes emphasizes, “variously identified with empiricism, rationalism and positivism, and with Gesellschaft, with economic markets and political liberalism, and bloodless cosmopolitanism.” There is also, however, another vision, “the organic counter-picture, first lived and practiced unreflectively, then articulated by Herder and by countless ‘romantic organicists’, ‘nationalist populists’, and ‘romantic rightists’, stressing totality, system, correctedness, particularism, cultural specificity, favoring Gemeinschaft, roots, ‘closed cozy’ communities, Blut und Boden. Gellner’s analysis is focused on the Habsburg lands, particularly Poland and Austria, but it seems fair to say that the polarity of the two visions has been important all over Europe. At any rate, it is reasonable to call into question the notion of European modernity in terms of a rationalistic vision. Indeed, the strain between rationalism and romanticism was central to European society and culture in the twentieth century. On the basis of Eisenstadt’s analyses it is easy to accept the notion of multiple modernities. There is indeed on the global scale a multiplicity of cultural and culturally-based political programs. Because of the multifarious expressions of the confrontational attitudes against Western modernization it is not easy to find and formulate their joint elements. Moreover, in Eisenstadt’s presentations the basically common ground in the various civilizations seems to be the cultivation

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and enhancement of their own cultural traditions. This is, however, the basic element also in the tendencies to communal and romantic integration existing in all European societies. It can of course be maintained that, notwithstanding the European examples of communal and Gemeinschaft-emphasizing tendencies, the basic and unique orientation in European civilization is, nevertheless, the tendency to a rationalization of the world. Yet there are strong grounds for arguing that the most successful European cultural, governmental and societal solutions are hardly outcomes of purely rationalistic strivings. The lasting and satisfaction-producing solutions usually represent a combination of rationalistic and communal-romantic tendencies. There are indeed a number of almost classic research findings, indicating how in the world of work the integration of instrumental, rationalistic and expressive, communal orientations are likely to produce the best and lasting results both in terms of the interests of the management and of the workers (Etzioni 1961, 89–126; Turk 1963, 28–37; Merton 1957, 199–207). The findings showing the fruitfulness of the societal and cultural combination of expressive and instrumental attitudes cannot be taken simply as reflecting the fact that the tendency to emphasize rationalistic, instrumental solutions is nevertheless the most desirable and best element in social and human policies. It appears that the very opposition between purely rationalistic solutions, and solutions based on a combination and fusion of instrumental and expressive sentiments, is a very crucial opposition and contrast in today’s European societies. In fact, the opposition between purely rationalistic attitudes and the mixture of rationalism and romanticism is one of special importance in European politics. It is a distinction with crucial consequences both for more mundane political choices and for the basic option—for or against democracy. The relationship between a democratic stance and the dimension of instrumentalism to expressivism was explored in a systematic fashion by Ulf Himmelstrand (1960) in a treatise which at the time did not receive all the attention it actually deserved. To describe his point of departure very briefly, Himmelstrand basically related two categories of phenomena. One was the disposition to democratic behavior, measured both by attitudes and actual political participation in political decision-making, and the other was the dimension going from a preference for purely emotional, expressive political reactions to a preference for calculative, rationalistic political standpoints. This


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last mentioned dimensional measure Himmelstrand called the L-scale, standing, as he termed it, for the degree of affective loading in verbal attitudes. Without going into his lengthy methodological discussions, Himmelstrand’s main findings can be summarized by saying that the number of individuals with democratic attitudes was significantly highest among those who—in combining instrumental and expressive orientations—achieved middle scores on the L-scale. In contrast, the strongly expressive individuals were the least democratic, and the strongly instrumental individuals were clearly less democratic than those who were both instrumental and expressive. It may be argued that Himmelstrand’s measures simply deal with attitudes, and that it is simple-minded to draw general conclusions from attitudinal studies. I have not myself studied attitudinal measures of rationalistic instrumentalism and romantic expressivism, but coming from a country which clearly in the past experienced both Nazi and Communist threats and strivings but which nevertheless succeeded to avoid domination by those political movements, I refer to visions based on both my own both research and national experience. Among people with either Nazi or Communist leanings there was an overrepresentation of two extreme psychological types, on one hand more or less instrumental calculators, and on the other hand affective believers. People who avoided these extreme political stances usually succeeded in combining instrumental and expressive viewpoints: in their political reactions they were very much in the middle on the dimension from instrumentalism to strong affective loading. In my studies of Finnish Communists in the decades after the Second World War, there was an overrepresentation of two types, people strongly socialized into beliefs in systematic Communist planning and, on the other hand, uprooted, affectively reacting people (Allardt 1971, 488–497). The studies mentioned above on political attitudes and behavior point to a type of modernity which cannot be characterized as a tendency to an overall rationalization of social life. Indeed modem human beings may not be doomed to live in a Weberian iron cage of blind rationality. The new mixture of European modernity was tellingly expressed by Ernest Gellner in the following passage: The real intellectual problems that modem society faces, consist, in very large part, of the relationship between the two styles, between universalism-atomism, which helps explain the success of the new science and thereby itself acquires a certain authority, further reinforced

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erik allardt by the superiority of the market form of production over centralized and socially oriented ways of running the economy, and, on the other hand, by the yearning for ‘meaning’, social coherence, the fusion of value and fact, the absorption of the individual in a supportive and loving community, which in turn blends into the natural background. These are the terms of reference for our problems. Anyone who simply proposes one of them and ignores or dismisses the other, has little to tell us. That might have been possible once, but it is not so longer (Gellner 1998, 190).

Another philosopher that has explicitly expressed Gellner’s wish for the blend of rationalism and emotional social coherence in today’s world is Charles Taylor. He has systematically focused on the strains and interconnections between the enlightenment emphasizing rationality and romanticism centered on affective solidarities in social life. In terms of concrete social analysis, this is markedly contained in his presentation of “the Politics of Recognition” (Taylor, 1994). The world has to be rationally planned, but this must include the recognition of multiculturalism and the great variety of cultural specificities. Thus, the importance and social value of the blend of rationality and affective social coherence has been expressed with different formulations by, for instance, Ulf Himmelstrand, Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor. They emphasize a different world than Max Weber and most of those who have developed theses about the nature of European modernity. They have rendered scientific descriptions of the modem society, but they also advocate an ideal consisting of a blend of rationalism and romanticism. This blend is not a completely uniform entity and it can hardly be exactly described because its specific content varies from discipline to discipline. Yet it has a common element in its fusion of rationalism and romanticism. This is an attitudinal complex or a belief system which seems to have become particularly strengthened during the later decades of the twentieth century. In this sense, it is indeed a new type of modernity distinguishable from the modernity developed and advocated in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The new type of modernity emphasizing the blend of rationality and romanticism is not unanimously accepted as the great guide of modem life, but that blend has definitely assumed a special importance during the latter decades of the twentieth century. At least it seems permissible and telling to speak about a European multiple modernity. Scholars who follow, to a greater or lesser degree, Eisenstadt’s tradition of research on modernity have pointed out variations in Euro-


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pean modernities. A rich and illuminative analysis about the nature of modernity in Communist regimes has been presented by Johann Arnason (2000, 61–90). His main point is that the Communist ideology and policies advocated forms of modernity but in a manner deviating from what was the case in Western Europe. According to Arnason, the Communist version was in many senses a failed modernity with a dysfunctional, self-destructive potential. Arnason’s description is rich and informative, but has a different point of departure than the view advocated in this paper. Here, the basic characteristic of Communist modernity is not that it was a failed version in the sense of the conventional meaning of the term of modernity, but that the central feature of Communist modernity was that it did not succeed in developing an understanding of both the rationalistic and romantic underpinnings of modernity. That is not to say that the Communist modernity conformed to Max Weber’s dominating view about modernity as truly rationalistic endeavor. Weber conceived the tendency to the overall rationalization of social life as a threat to mankind, as a danger of putting all humans in an iron-cage, whereas Communism contained a basically positive belief in overall rationalization. Postmodern society as a deviation from conventional modernity Most descriptions of European societies rely heavily on the formations that were developed in European civilization during the process of industrialization. These formations were strongly enforced by the outcome of the Second World War. This was especially true for political life and for the unchangeable nature of the European political party system during the first decades after the Second World War. In Western Europe there was a development of what has been labeled “the frozen party system.” As S.M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan emphasized in a basic book of political sociology, “the party system of the 1960’s reflect with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920’s” (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, 50–57). At the time, continuity and immutability in European politics was taken as a matter of fact. The political alternatives were the same as those that had already developed in the 1920s. In the 1970s, however, the European political landscape began to change, and changes were increasingly observable in the 1980s and 1990s. The changes were captured in the term “postmodernity,” and there was a wealth of observations of new political movements

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and aspirations. One crucial phenomenon was the weakening importance of traditional class conflicts. In scholarly, conceptual presentations of the new developments, the institutional aspect of modernization in particular was played down and relativized. A telling example is the concept “reflexivity,” in the way the term has been used for instance by Ulrich Beck. For him, reflexive modernization refers to “a type of society beyond ‘simple modernity’ in which there is an acknowledgment of the impossibility of knowing the unintended consequences produced by modernization . . .” (Beck 1998, ch. 7, Nash 2000, 278–279). Similarly, Goran Therborn presents a definition in which “while empirically traceable the proposed concept of modernity does not contain any concrete institutional references, but leaves the latter as causes, effects and contingencies for investigation” (Machonin 2000, 150). The emphasis on reflexive modernity, in the sense of Beck, Nash, Therbom and Machonin, comes very close to what was included in the phrase “the postmodern turn in sociology,” as it was developed by Zygmunt Bauman (2000). It implies a view of society in which social institutions and structures are ongoing processes. Postmodern sociology declares an interest in the study of how social phenomena and social categories are constantly constructed, and socially defined and interpreted. Thus the concept of reflexive modernization—as well as the phrase “the postmodern turn of sociology”—implies a vision which was already emphasized in the preceding section of this paper. Modernity is no longer simply a tendency to overall rationalization and to the creation of rational and systematic institutional mechanisms. Modernity implies a constant flow of interpretations of what is considered important and valuable in social life. Cultural and moral issues are emphasized, while established bureaucratic structures are increasingly questioned. The terms “postmodern” and “postindustrial” are sometimes regarded as just journalistic descriptions designated to appear mostly in popular magazines. Yet they describe truly fundamental societal changes. A new—or at least a rejuvenated concept in social analysis— is agency. One leading precursor in introducing the concept of agency was Alain Touraine (1984). His approach has been christened The New Social Movement Theory (Nash 2000, 130–133). Revealing analyses of crucial tendencies in present-day advanced societies have been presented by his students, the Danish scholar Peter Gundelach and the Italian Alberto Melucci. Gundelach emphasizes grassroots movements


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arising almost anywhere in contemporary societies. Increasingly, people are only weakly bound to social classes and similar, structurally defined social categories. In trying to cope with new threats and adverse circumstances, they tend to form highly voluntary organizations at the grassroots level. In doing so, they are strongly focused on the cultural definitions of their predicaments (Gundelach 1984). Melucci emphasizes that there are numerous collective identities and movements in present-day societies, often formed at the local level on the basis of everyday experiences. Many current disputes and debates are struggles over identities and have a definite cultural content (Melucci 1996). Kate Nash (2000, 133–143) in her presentation of contemporary political sociology, underscores that the New Social Movement Theory in the spirit of Touraine is focused on the social conditions of selfdetermination and the cultural orientations of actors. Political conflicts are increasingly conflicts over interpretations and definitions of cultural identities although Touraine avoids speaking of “cultural politics.” The emphasis on cultural interpretations and constant redefinitions of cultural identities is especially pronounced in the studies by Melucci. New social movements, he maintains, are not principally concentrated on the production of material resources or their distribution. What is emphasized is the access to information and the use of symbolic resources. The important contestations are in cultural realm. Conflicts are increasingly struggles over identity. Melucci’s point is exemplified by the women’s movement. It has been more explicitly directed towards a change in social definitions of the sexes and analyses of the nature of gendered inequality, than in attempts to offer concrete suggestions for a change in the distribution of wealth and economic goods. At any rate, the New Social Movement Theory strongly stresses the emergence of social forms and cultural goals which clearly go beyond the limits of those existing in present societal formations. The goals of the new social movements cannot be defined in terms of the material interests of the dominant strata of the industrial society, nor can they be defined as a striving for overall rationalization. Social coherence and meaning are considered increasingly important, but in the struggles for an establishment and recognition of supportive social formations, the new social movements also emphasize new public institutions and spaces for systematic and rationally formulated articulations. There is indeed a striving for combinations of

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instrumentalism and emotionally supportive social solutions. At any rate, it seems evident that new forms of modernity emerged towards the end of the twentieth century. Variations in modernity in countries abandoning socialism The post-socialist countries represent an interesting type in the study of European modernization. The transition from Communism in the former European Communist and/or socialist countries has also been analyzed as a case of modernization, as shown in the informative book “Structural Change and Modernization in Post-Socialist Countries (Adamski, Machonin and Zapf 2002). Johann Arnason’s (2000, 61–90) paper on “Communism and Modernity,” with a definite focus on the USSR, has already been referred to. Such points of departure are in many senses natural and at least expected. As already noted, some of the most obvious features of traditional European modernity were the emphasis on liberal democracy and market economy. Nevertheless, the post-socialist countries are problematic and doubtful cases in studies of modernization. One obvious reason for such an uncertainty is that before their regime transformation, the socialist countries had already set out on clearly different paths towards modernization. Another problematic feature is that the regime change in its initial phases was met with inertia, and encountered problems that were very difficult to overcome. On the other hand, in the initial phase of the institutional changes some post-socialist countries had already approached solutions and new social forms that seemed to be on their way in Western Europe as well. It seems fair to say that a number of the analyses of the post-socialist regime changes unconsciously emphasized ideals and structures that were clearly declining in the Western democracies too. Probably, some of the new tendencies were even more readily realized in the regime-changing post-socialist countries than in stable Western democracies. At any rate, the modernization processes in post-socialist countries had many qualities—but being simple was not one of them. It is not the intention here to present a comprehensive analysis of modernization developments in the post-socialist countries, but rather to briefly show some snapshots supporting the view of multiple European modernities. It is well-known that under Communist rule there were considerable differences in the standard of living in the Central European


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countries. According to most reports, East Germany was in terms of the material standard of living the most advantaged of the Communist bloc countries. Mortality statistics, for instance, were clearly lower than in other Central European socialist countries. Many specific statistical data can be added. According to most statistical measures, the material level of living conditions were better in both East Germany and Czechoslovakia than in Poland. At any rate, there were obvious verifiable differences between the countries. On the issue of human rights, though, the picture was different. Many reports on modernization and political development lump all post-socialist countries together, assuming that in terms of civil and political rights they were basically similar. This assumption is based on questionable grounds. Admittedly, my own experiences are based on mainly academic contacts. In terms of personal experience as an official of the Finnish Science Council, I visited all the Central European socialist countries. However I dare say that, like most Scandinavians, I held Hungary and Poland to be considerably more free and open in their political climate than East Germany and Czechoslovakia. External tokens of this were seen in Poland and Hungary, not only in the existence of small private businesses and in the position of the Catholic Church, but also in a more permissive attitude toward modem social research. There were of course oscillations in the strength of Communist rule. In all post-socialist Central European societies there had been uprisings and attempts at revolutions, but at least during the two last socialist decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, Poland and Hungary differed clearly from the other socialist states. As Janina Frentzel-Zagorska (1991, 95) wrote, “Poland and Hungary are the two Eastern European countries in which collapses of the communist system did not happen overnight (as in Czechoslovakia and East Germany) or by a violent revolution (as in Romania).” At any rate, it is obvious that the degree of freedom of thought were far from similar in all Communist countries. It is worth noting that one of the first politically successful modern grass roots movements was the Solidarity movement, which emerged in Socialist Poland ruled by the Communist Party. It has been shown that the young workers supporting Solidarity were not motivated by an attachment to the values of a liberal economy. Rather, the supporters seemed to be strongly affected by negative ideological sentiments aimed primarily against the Communist Party monopoly

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of power at the grassroots level (Adamski, Zaborowski and PelczynskaNalecz 2002, 155–169). An important part of the picture is that the strength of the movement did not last long, and that it soon became the victim of a new grassroots process. Solidarity was the first successful grassroots movement in the socialist countries, but a significant feature of the 1989 revolution was the absence, in all the countries involved, of an organized revolutionary movement with an explicit and systematic ideology. The revolution began at the grassroots, and it was over almost at the same time it started. During the 1990s there was a vast output of studies of democracy and democratization in Central Europe. The basic query often concerned the extent to which the Central European countries copied or renewed Western European models of democracy and representative institutions. Many studies and conclusions speak about a partial success. In an issue of the International Political Science Review on elections and parliaments in East Central Europe in the early 1990s, Janos Simon (1997, 361–379) emphasized how the Central European countries succeeded in both partly copying the Western models and in returning to their own historical traditions. Despite dominantly positive conclusions about the tendencies to democratic developments in the post-socialist societies, it is obvious that the democratization process in the 1990s abounded in problems. There were a great number of analyses pointing to a lack of stable national parties representing the interests of crucial groups in the social structure (Rychard 1992, 167–179), to an inflated number of political parties (Simon 1997, 372–377), and to a lack of crystallization in the party system (Adamski 1997, 69–823; Holmes 1998, 232–248). It was emphasized that a reasonable degree of correspondence between the actual political attitudes of the citizens and the support for different parties was lacking. A telling description was presented by two Dutch sociologists, Gijsberts and Nieuwbeerts; they showed that while the members of the different classes differed in their views about income inequality and social security, those differences were not reflected in their voting behavior. People in the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe had been unable to translate their political preferences into party preferences. There are of course also other aspects and facets of democracy than party politics. However, as Jean Blondel (1998, 157) once remarked in a discussion about the challenges facing liberal democracies in the twenty-first century, it is difficult to imagine how democ-


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racy could exist without parties. Yet as a number of political scientists from different countries maintain, at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, party systems are facing many threats that could weaken their role as guardians of democracy. This is, however, as much a West European phenomenon as something characteristic of postsocialist Central Europe. According to Peter Mair (1998, 161–174), the political parties became more distant from society, on the one hand, and more strongly linked to the government and the state, on the other. They suffered from a clear decline in their appeal to and their distinctiveness for the citizens. A telling, although by no means unique, example is provided by the Scandinavian countries. Some decades ago there were often references to the Nordic model implying, among other things, a consistent search for consensus and a playing down of ideological differences. The Scandinavian five-party model has been eroding since the 1970s. New parties such as the Greens and populist parties on the radical right have emerged. Novel issues, such as those related to ecology, to the power of peripheral regions, the European Union, and to cleavages of gender and sex, lie basically outside the traditional political divisions. In the parliamentary elections, the new developments have resulted in higher voting volatility, decreases in voting participation among the youngest voters in particular, and in an obvious decline of class voting (Allardt 2000, 129–141). In fact, many of the facets emphasized as post-modernity are observable. The West European societies are, in fact, as far from the traditional West European model as are the post-socialist central European countries. Many of the traits observable in the elections and political life of the Central European post-socialist countries— often pointed out as doubtful from the point of view of democracy— seem to have emerged also in the West European countries. It is significant for the traditional conception of European modernity that the fall of the Communist regimes in the socialist countries of Central Europe and their consecutive development has been considered as a case of modernization. It is true that some institutional changes during this great European transformation strongly support such a notion. There was a clear transfer to both political democracy and market economy. On the other hand, a closer look at what happened in Europe during the final decades of the twentieth century also provides reasons to further scrutinize the modernization concept. It is apparent that the processes of modernization differed among the various post-socialist societies. Those countries that were economically

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most successful were not the ones that had more political freedom. Modernization seems to be more of a multidimensional process than was traditionally assumed. More important still is that some of the features resulting from the regime change in the post-socialist lands also have tended to emerge in Western Europe, and that the former socialist countries in East Central Europe on some counts may have developed faster in a new direction than the traditional European democracies have. At least for the time being, final conclusions about political developments in Western and in East Central Europe are too related to political opinions in order to be accepted as scholarly findings. Nevertheless, it seems permissible to conclude that multiple modernities are characteristic of today’s European societies. A concluding note: Divergent modernities To speak about modernity is a risky business, as there is a wide range of different definitions. In a lucid presentation of the key ideas in sociology, Peter Kivisto (1998, 119–152) shows that practically all founding fathers and recent leading theoreticians have had something to say about modernity, usually in terms of their own terminology. Here the point of departure was Max Weber’s view of European modernity as a tendency to an overall rationalization of social life, and in particular its continuation in S.N. Eisenstadt’s more comprehensive and research-based conception of European modernity, with its emphasis on multiplicity and pluralism. Institutionally, the core of European modernity has meant an accentuation of the democratic nation-state, the market economy, research-oriented universities and the importance of questioning achieved knowledge. In its emphasis on universality and reflexivity Eisenstadt’s view has some affinity with the conceptions of Anthony Giddens who especially emphasized the basic social processes of modernization. According to Giddens (1990, 19–27) modernization has entailed what he has called “distanciation” from the ties to particular locales, and a weakening of the embedment of social ties to specific locales and primary groups. Here we have followed Eisenstadt, at least partly, in the assumptions that research, reflexivity and the questioning of knowledge are crucial in modernization. However, regarding the points made by Giddens, this paper advocates a different view. In recent decades there has emerged an increased depreciation of the ideas about increased distanciation


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and disembedment. There is now an accumulation of research findings pointing to the social importance of ties to localities, solidarity groups and physically conceivable social units. It is evident that this new return to an embedment of social ties can create increasing conflicts because of the highly increased migratory movements in the world today. People no longer live in isolated communities and by a local culture dominated locales (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, 209–213). However, despite the highly increased mixtures of people from different social and cultural backgrounds and the consequent grave risks for conflicts, there also exists the clearly increased wish and urge to recognize different cultures and to understand people from different backgrounds. It is clear that such strivings fail in many cases; yet nevertheless, the new modernity is composed of attempts to understand people from different cultures. In fact, it is a strong movement and even a dominant trend observable in practically all European universities and student bodies. There is indeed a new research-based and thought-out modernity emphasizing the importance of recognizing and accepting cultural differences. It is also evident that the new European modernity mentioned above and described in this paper is based on a combination of rationality and romanticism. This mixture of accepting and analyzing localities and particular solidarities is very different from the blind acceptance and rationalization of one’s own cultural and racial symbolism and value orientations. A basic option available to Europe today is to choose between belief in an overall rationalization on the one hand, and belief in the importance of combining rationality and recognizing particular cultural orientations, on the other. The latter option stands for a new European modernity.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CIVILIZATIONAL RESOURCES FOR DIALOGIC ENGAGEMENT? Donald N. Levine The notion of dialogue stands in contrast to two other formats of open communication. It avoids both the uninhibited expression of mutual antagonisms and the assumption that under conditions of ideal conversation, the concerned arties will ultimately arrive at identical position. Instead, dialogue signifies a type of discourse in which parties take turns listening respectfully and responding genuinely to one another’s expressions. It implies, in the words of that prophet of dialogue Martin Buber, “the acceptance for otherness” (Buber 1992, 65). The possibility of this openness is precluded by the claim that diverse civilizations are marked by core symbolic complexes that are doomed to clash. That claim rests on three truths. As social scientists have affirmed ever since William Graham Sumner (1906) provided the language, all human groups manifest ethnocentrism. This designates a syndrome marked by an exaggerated view of their own virtues; a pejorative view of others; a relation of order, law, and industry among members of the in-group; and a relation of predation against out-groups. Related to these elements is a tendency to exaggerate the dissimilarities between in-groups and out-groups. The universality of this pattern can be linked in part to the ways in which it satisfies at once two of the most powerful human needs: the need for attachment and the need for differentiation.1 Second, as systematic studies on the matter have shown, the more complex and technologically advanced a society, the stronger is likely to be its level of ethnocentrism (LeVine and Campbell 1972). Third, ethnocentric beliefs become fortified when intertwined with imperatives that stem from strong cultural mandates. Certain of these

1 These needs, as recent social neuroscience has demonstrated, are hard-wired in the human species (Smith and Stevens 2002).

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mandates derive from the work of elites who have produced transcendent ideals for reconstructing worldly relations, ideals that were elaborated in what have been called the Axial civilizations (Eisenstadt 2003a, I, chs. 1, 7). The great civilizations, consequently, have often defended and extended their domain through glorified ethnocentric processes involving conquest, conversion, and assimilation of those outside the pale. In Greco-Roman civilization, for example, Hellenes came to disparage outsiders who were ignorant of Greek language and civilization, thereby uncivil and rude. Calling them barbarians (barbaroi) disposed the Greeks to conquer, enslave, and colonize others who were deemed culturally inferior. This conceit continued in Roman times, as Roman citizens justified their extensive conquests of alien peoples (barbari) in ways that coerced them into adopting the Latin language and their religious beliefs. In the case of European civilization this pattern found its denouement in the missione civilatrice whereby Italian airplanes rained poisoned gas on shoeless Abyssinian peasants armed with spears, and Nazi armies attempted to expand their notion of a superior German culture throughout Europe. The Greek/barbarian paradigm can be found in all other major civilizations. Among those I shall consider here, it appears as Hindu/mleccha, nihongo/gaijin, Christian/pagan, mu’min/kafir, and Chosen People (am segulah)/gentiles ( goyyim). In what follows I shall relate each of those dichotomies to certain core values in each civilization, suggesting how these values have been used to justify disparagement if not aggression against others. However, since each civilization has evolved patently contradictory sub-traditions, they all contain elements that promote hospitability toward strangers, tolerate diversity, and cultivate understanding and compassion, and so promote a more inclusive orientation. Beyond that, I shall show that in the course of the past century, three of these civilizations—India, Japan, and Western Christianity—gave rise to developments in which traditional symbols were invoked in ways that heighten levels of openness and inclusiveness dramatically. These developments represent resources for dialogical engagement that could inspire ways of reducing clashes among contemporary civilizations. To adumbrate the modern transformational pattern I want to identify, let me begin with a prototype of the process, which appeared in Greco-Roman civilization. The concept of physis (nature) formed

civilizational resources for dialogic engagement?

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one of the central notions of the Greco-Roman worldview, nature not in the post-Newtonian sense of an inherent force which directs the world but as signifying the essential quality of something in a universe of substances. Hellenic philosophers moved from questions about the nature of inorganic and organic bodies to a concept of nature that could be taken as a foundation for ethics. The texts of Plato and Aristotle afforded a basis for superseding conventional notions of morality with a search for what is good by nature as distinguished from what is good merely by tradition or convention (Levine 1995). At the same time, however, the notion of nature provided a basis for dividing people into superior and inferior categories on the basis of naturally given characteristics. This distinction was used to reinforce the Greek/barbarian dichotomy, in that all barbarians were held to be slaves physei (by nature). Aristotle quotes a line of the poets, “It is fitting that Hellenes should rule over barbarians,” commenting that this was “as if they thought that barbarian and slave are by nature the same thing” (Politics, Book 1, ch. 2, trans. altered). In the minds of other Hellenic thinkers, however, the notion of nature was employed to overcome such political oppositions by envisioning a single polis of the entire world. Diogenes the Cynic thus proclaimed the doctrine of a world state (cosmopolis) in which all humans would be citizens. This became a central doctrine of the Stoics, based on the assumption that all humans possess by nature an identical divine spark (apospasma). Accordingly, Stoicism undermined distinctions based on race, class, and even gender. These ideas were amplified by Romans like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, who enlarged the doctrine of humanitarian cosmopolitanism. These doctrines drew on the core Greco-Roman idealization of nature in ways that articulated the notion of a universal human nature, as a means for transcending the pejorative attitude toward outsiders that proponents of the civilized/barbarian dichotomy had fostered. In the civilization of India, the idea of purity (suddha) figured as one central symbolic theme. This was one of several categories (varna) used to divide people into cosmogonic human types. These varnas categorize people in a single ranked moral order, which has counterparts in the realms of body and mind as well. Thus, a person who is pure morally can be presumed also to be pure biologically— cool, refined, and stable—and mentally—dispassionate, truthful, and

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enlightened (Marriott 2003). The Brahmins were the social grouping ( jati ) that manifested the quality of purity most fully.2 Commitment to this ideal of purity had well-known consequences of an exclusionary character, both internally and externally. Within Hindu society, one varna category designated a set of jatis who came to be known as the Untouchables, those whose impurities were so great that others would seek to avoid contact with them. Considered irredeemably impure, they were excluded from such goods as rights to own land and opportunities to perform certain rituals. In addition, Hindu doctrine considered those outside their religious traditions to be impure as well. Groups who did not respect the Vedic rituals and the ban on killing certain animals were called Mleccha or outsider, a term that generally connoted impure. Mleccha and Untouchables were often thought of as being in a similar or identical status category. Hostility toward Muslims thus was grounded to some extent ideologically on their being impure. On the other hand, the enormous heterogeneity of Indian culture together with the absence of political pressures to impose religion and an egalitarian strain in Hindu culture all accounted for the proverbial syncretistic cast of Indian culture as well as the conspicuous absence of wars of religion. Evolving from such background a position of radical egalitarianism and inclusiveness, Mohandas Gandhi devoted himself to overcoming those established polarizing animosities. He strove to secure equal rights for the Untouchables, even renaming them as Harijan, children of God. He also worked continuously for unity between Hindus and Muslims, aspiring to promote the notion of Indian nationals living together in a civic society. He strove valiantly to prevent the creation of a separate Islamic state following India’s Independence, but in vain. Identifying with the traditional Indian notions of mleccha and impurity, a Muslim League under Muhammed Ali Jinnah established a “Nation of the Pure,” Pakistan.3

2 They were obliged to provide literary instruction, priestly duties, and certain magical services, and to support themselves from gifts, not by earning a salary. Although Brahmanic status rested on birth, to become a fully accredited Brahman a man had to study the Vedic texts, learn certain ritual practices, and acquire a holy belt. 3 In an effort to win over Muslims who were averse to his model of barefoot, mendicant, vegetarian asceticism, Gandhi subdued his satyagrahi persona. He also sided with Muslims who were being murdered by Hindus. Fearing widespread civil


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Although Gandhi failed to prevent the Islamic split-off and the ensuing massacre of millions, he created a Way for Hindus to transcend tenacious animosities stemming from deeply held cultural convictions by drawing on other aspects of Indian tradition. He did so by turning to classical symbols and fusing the varna category of ahimsa (nonviolence), an ideal particularly emphasized in the Jain tradition, with the Brahmanic devotion to truth (satyagraha). He categorically ruled out the use of violence on the ground that it inhibited the search for truth—satyagraha “excludes the use of violence because man is not capable of knowing the absolute truth and, therefore, not competent to punish” (2001, 3). In Gandhi’s teachings, the use of satyagraha to overcome injustice required considerable training and confidence. Training included regular meditation and ceaseless renunciation of selfish wishes and impure thoughts. To transform the mind of an opponent, a satyagrahi needed this mental purity. Around the time of Gandhi’s transfiguration of Indian notions, a comparable breakthrough was taking place in Japan, with efforts to reorient the heirs of the culture of Japanese warriors. For Japanese civilization, the core symbol to be considered here is makoto. Usually mistranslated as ‘sincerity,’ makoto signifies a disposition to discharge one’s social obligations with utter fidelity, suppressing personal utilitarian goals. Considered the highest virtue of the Japanese hero, makoto connotes the value of calm action in whatever circumstances.4 Although the focus of makoto has varied in different periods of history, a constant theme has been the disposition to act in a self-effacing manner on behalf of the well-being of others. As Eisenstadt (1996b) has made clear, the ultimate ideal of Japanese civilization lies not in some transcendent value to which worldly actions are held accountable, but to the authority figures of this world, on whose behalf makoto actions are dedicated. Since the Middle Ages, the samurai were expected to display this conduct most consistently. The pleats of their traditional garb, the skirt-like pants known as hakama, allude to what are understood as the components of makoto: loyalty, honor,

war between Hindus and Muslims, he finally encouraged the Congress Party to accept partition. For this alleged betrayal, he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist soon after India became independent. 4 Success is not the criterion here. Ivan Morris (1975) suggests that the value of makoto action may be enhanced by failure. Other aspects of makoto are described in Gleason 1995.

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respect, affection, and sincerity (shin). The samurai ethos diffused through Japanese society; economic entrepreneurs recast the notion of samurai makoto in ways that favored Japan’s economic modernization (Bellah 1957). It also was utilized by political modernizers following the Meiji Reformation, who directed it into passionate allegiance to the emperor as symbol of the Japanese state. That symbolism, however, also turned Japan in externally destructive directions. It fostered frequent violent combats among trained martial artists. It also eventuated in the imperialistic ambitions that led Japan to embark on brutal conquests under Emperor Hirohito. Yet those same samurai ideals served to transform Japan’s traditional martial arts in an opposite direction. This began with the work of educator Jigoro Kano, who reconfigured the traditional teaching of lethal unarmed combat, ju-jitsu, into a practice of judo utilized only to develop character. It eventuated in the teachings of Morihei Ueshiba, who reoriented martial arts training away from competitive struggle of any sort toward practices designed to produce an attitude of respect for all living beings and to serve as “a bridge to peace and harmony for all humankind” (Ueshiba 1984, 120). Ueshiba failed to persuade Japanese militarists to desist from launching war against the United States, just as Gandhi failed to prevent the partition of India. Nevertheless, as Gandhi’s teachings in South Africa and India inspired subsequent political leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela to relate to their political opponents in a respectful, nonviolent manner, Ueshiba’s teachings, through the practice he created, aikido, have inspired millions worldwide to embrace a Way that would enhance inter-civilizational dialogue. Christianity was founded on an ideal of universal love. Funneled through the Greek word agape, the teachings of Jesus propounded the virtue of unselfish and benevolent concern for the welfare of others. The universalistic cast of this teaching received classic formulation in the words of the proselytizing convert Paul, himself influenced by Stoic doctrines, who announced: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond or free, male or female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). In society after society, these teachings have promoted restraints on violence and generosity of spirit. On the other hand, Christianity holds the record for the number of people from other cultures slain on behalf of a religious emblem, including millions of native Americans, Africans, and aboriginal Australians, not to mention, from among its own members, huge numbers of heretics and “witches.” Western Christianity created a


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tenacious pattern of anti-Semitism that, acknowledged in the recent statements of Pope John Paul II, played a nontrivial role in destroying the civilization of Continental European Jewry. Although Christian figures from time to time espoused a turn to the ethos of Jesus and early Christianity, almost none of them grappled conspicuously with the challenge of using the foundational statements of Christianity to oppose the waves of persecution launched against the Jewish people in their midst. None of them, that is, until pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Inspired by the social activism of the Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem, which he assisted during a postdoctoral year at the Union Theological Seminary in the early 1930s, Bonhoeffer returned to Nazi Germany to join Martin Niemoeller in his work with the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), the center of Protestant resistance to the Nazis. He directed one of the underground seminaries of the Confessing Church in 1935. After the Nazis closed down the seminaries, he went on to engage in underground assistance to helping Jews escape and was associated with the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. The theological and ethical statements that he worked out in the course of this resistance became a benchmark for a new brand of Christians. In justifying courageous pastoral intervention against Nazi oppression, he worked out a justification of political activism in an immoral world, based on a notion of “venture of responsibility”: “It is better to do evil than to be evil,” he decided. His theological creativity has been described as forging a kind of “religionless interpretation of biblical concepts in a world come of age” (Bonhoeffer 1963, 5). Bonhoeffer thereby paved the way for the more inclusive kind of rapprochement that many German Christians have displayed since the War, and has been described as a key theologian for leading future generations of Christians. For Islam, the core symbolic notion is, evidently, Islam, i.e., submission. This signifies a posture of humble acceptance of and outward conformity with the law of God. The term is derived from Arabic 'aslama, to surrender or resign oneself, in turn derived from Syriac 'aslem, to make peace. Islamic tradition focuses on a complex of laws found in the Koran and promulgated by Muslim clergy, laws which cover everything from family relations and civil accords to criminal codes. Among the notions to which Muslims owe submission, nothing is more motivating than the injunction to pursue jihad. And nothing illustrates the capacity of civilization to promote different directions

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better than the different meanings this term has acquired in Islamic civilization. On the one hand, jihad refers to aggression against Unbelievers through the legal, compulsory, collective effort to expand territories ruled by Muslims. Most scholars argue that despite ambiguities about the term in the Koran, this has been the principal line of interpretation of the doctrine in Islamic tradition. Thus, jihad was invoked to instigate the conquest, beyond the Arabian peninsula, of the region from Afghanistan to Spain within a century of Mohammed’s death, and later to spur Muslim invasions of such territories as India, Anatolia, Balkans, Ethiopia, Sudan, and West Africa. More recently, it has been dramatically revived in modern Islamic fundamentalism by influential figures such as Sayyid Outb, who argues that the only way for Muslims to achieve religious purity is to establish an Islamic state through jihad. On the other hand, jihad has been interpreted as a struggle for personal moral improvement, in the sense of living more closely in accord with Islamic Law. Thus, in language that parallels Ueshiba’s formulation that in his form of martial art, there are no enemies and that the greatest victory is the victory over oneself, the 11thcentury theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali maintained that the soul is an enemy which struggles with one and which must be fought, and that this jihad against the soul constitutes the “greater jihad”. In this sense of the term, it extends beyond overcoming baser instincts to a struggle for social justice. So understood, it could be viewed as an injunction to live peaceably with everyone, and to cooperate with people of all faiths in a quest for social reform. This position has been embraced by virtually all Sufi theologians. It accords with the absence in Islam of any particularistic ethnic emphasis, apart from the status of Arabic as a sacred language (Eisenstadt 1992b, 41). In fact, in many contemporary societies until recently, including Ethiopia and India, the norm was for public displays of solidarity between Muslims and other religious groups. Although some progressive Muslims wish seriously to promote and extend the latter definition of jihad, no charismatic figure, such as a Gandhi or a Bonhoeffer, has arisen to challenge authoritatively the contemporary drift toward an escalation of the other view.5 In the 5

This view was propounded with particular virulence by heirs to the 13C jihad revivalist Ibn Taymiyya and his 18C disciple, Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab Najdi, from whom the fundamentalist Wahabi sect derives.


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past dozen years, Muslims appealing to the symbol of jihad have launched a worldwide campaign involving assassinations, vandalism, and terrorist acts—against Christians in Indonesia and Yemen, Jews in Israel, Hindus in Kashmir, and traditional religionists in Sudan; and against Buddhists through demolition of their world-prized mountain sculptures in Afghanistan. This trend has been exacerbated by another tenet of Islamic faith, the notion that the requirement to act in accordance with God’s decrees as a condition of salvation— possible but difficult to fulfill—may be short-circuited when fulfilling the religious obligation of jihad, thereby enhancing one’s chances of being sent to heaven at the Last Judgment or, if one dies a martyr, going directly to heaven. For Jewish civilization, a core symbolic notion is brit, or covenant. This has reference to biblical accounts of the covenants made between God and the Jewish people, whereby God would provide certain benefits for the people of Israel in exchange for their loyalty to Him and obedience to his moral directives. Accordingly, a central distinguishing feature of Jewish civilization, in Eisenstadt’s insightful account, consists of the semicontractual relationship with the Higher Power, in contrast to the absolute status of the transcendental symbols in the other Axial Age civilizations. Over time, as related in the Bible, the content of God’s promissory note changed. With Abraham, it had to do with the Eretz, the Land, of Israel. With David, it had to do with legitimizing the political authority of a lineage. But the heart of the divine covenant for Jewish civilization lies in the central chapters of the Book of Exodus, where God promises to consider the Jews a Chosen People, in exchange for their adherence to the numerous commandments enumerated therein. The quality of being Chosen set up a constant invidious comparison with other peoples, referred to in what later became a pejorative Yiddish term, the goyyim. This dichotomy never led to conquest or aggression, although when a 6th Century South Arabian king Dhu Nuwaas converted to Judaism, he began to persecute Christians (thereby provoking the Ethiopian Christian emperor at Aksum to send troops across the Red Sea to overthrow him). However, the conceit of chosenness produced at times an arrogant attitude toward outsiders that wounded their narcissism. (One account relates that Mohammed’s turn against Jews was based on their rejection of his appeal for support at the beginning of his mission.) On the other hand, the evident meaning of chosenness, as the

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covenant is spelled out in Exodus 19–24, signifies the adherence of Jews to a system of maxims that enjoin ethical behavior toward a wide range of people. Prominent among those maxims is the commandment to take care of strangers. Whatever narrow, cultic or particularistic grounds for the Covenant are entailed in the covenant with Abraham, or later with King David, are far overshadowed in the history of Judaism by moral imperatives. And this history of Judaism is itself an essential part of the core symbolism. The central text of Jewish Civilization takes the form of a historical narrative, not a straight listing of absolute commands or mythic portrayals. The course of its history moves steadily away from the primordial cultic observance and toward a universalistic ethical dimension. This shift is itself a subject of attention in the sacred text itself, as when God rebukes those who simply following old ritual prescriptions for fasting, just bowing their heads, and spreading sackcloth and ashes under them: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free?” (Isaiah 58:6). Even so, the particularistic aspects were never completely transcended; People and Land were perpetually celebrated. And when the time for the Great Return arrived, there were those who sacralized it in terms of the earliest covenant. More recently, this notion inspired a drive to reclaim territory by building settlements on a vulnerable, contested area, which became a provocation to others who also had claims to sharing this piece of the earth’s surface. This appeal to the earliest covenant has been defended in some fundamentalist Christian groups more avidly than by most Jews. My thesis is plain. The major source of civilizational clashes in the coming generation lies in the actions of those Muslims who insist on the aggressive side of jihad. One way these symbols can be recast is through the emergence of a charismatic leader or group who, steeped in traditional symbolism, will connect Islam with its deepest roots in ways that point to new, inclusionary imperatives. Although Jews can by no means be seen as an equally disruptive source, some extremists appear to play a part in keeping the harshest jihadists going. That stems from those who occupy the West Bank settlements, not as a tactical move, but out of deepest conviction. As militant jihadists draw on deeply rooted Islamic beliefs to inspire their terrorist attacks, so, in a less overtly destructive way, do some


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of the ardent West Bank settlers draw on archaic biblical symbols to justify their occupation. My argument thus points to the need for creative, charismatic Muslims and Jews to forge prophetic formulations that draw on the resources for overcoming particularistic antagonisms, resources that each tradition contains in abundance. Within the Islamic tradition, for example, the potential for turning jihad in a nonviolent, inclusionary direction was demonstrated by Badshah (Khan Abd al Ghaffar) Khan (1890–1988), a Pathan (Pushtun) Muslim from Afghanistan. Khan defined Islam as a faith in the ability of every human being to respond to spiritual laws and the power of muhabat (love) to transform human affairs. So oriented, Khan raised a ‘nonviolent’ army of some 100,000 Pathan warriors and worked closely with Gandhi to use nonviolent techniques to promote social justice and independence (Easwaran 1999). Indeed, some three dozen years after Gandhi’s death, Khan asserted that “the world needs Gandhi’s message of love and peace more today than it ever did before” (7). In this same vein, statements against Islamic terrorism have been issued by contemporary Islamic spokesmen such as Abdal-Hakim Murad, who finds the taking of innocent civilian lives unimaginable in Sunni Islam, and Hamza Yusuf, a popular American Muslim speaker, who has declared that the “real jihad” for Muslims is to rid Islam of the terrorist element. As in Islam, the potential for overriding such exclusionary claims lies near to hand in Judaism. A substantial portion of the world Jewish community has long considered the moral covenant of Exodus to supersede the territorial part of the covenant with Abraham, just as archaic prescriptions for ritual sacrifice were authoritatively superseded by prophetic ethics. More recently, the Talmudic tradition has been drawn on by Aaron Lichtenstein, in The Seven Laws of Noah (1981), to argue that observance of the Noachide laws sufficed to include non-Jews in the divinely approved community. Figures such as Joseph Abilea have eloquently endorsed a nonviolent, universalist position, as have participants in such groups as Oz ve-Shalom, the Jewish Peace movement. To make these new openings does not require a purist ex nihilo. The charismatic innovators needed could come from perfectly conventional backgrounds, as did the exemplars whom I described above. Gandhi began as an elitist who shared the white South Africans’

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disdain for blacks. Ueshiba served proudly in the Japanese army in 1904 and trained officers of the Japanese military academy until 1941. Niemoeller, a submarine commander in World War I, supported the National Socialists until they came to power in 1933. Bonhoeffer began as a conventional German who refused to perform the marriage ceremony of a relative to a Jewish woman around 1930. What all of them shared was a deep grounding in their respective traditions, which earned them credibility, and then a powerful impulse to break out of their elitist/ethnocentric molds in response to the ethical demands of the current world situation. In a brief essay composed just after World War I, “What Is To Be Done?” Martin Buber confronted the dilemma of our time in the voice of unknown comrades: ‘Some say civilization must be preserved through “subduing.” There is no civilization to preserve. And there is no longer a subduing! But what may ascend out of the flood will be decided by whether you throw yourselves into it as seeds of true community. No longer through exclusion but only inclusion can the kingdom be established.’ . . . Silently the world waits for the spirit. (1957, 111)

Table 1. Exclusionary and inclusionary concepts of selected civilizations Civilization Core idea

Benign consequences

Exclusionary framework

Expanded Inclus. concept

Creative agents

Greco-Rom nature

rational ethics

civil/barbar

cosmopolitanism

Stoics

Indian

purity

Brahmanic leader

pure/impure

satyagraha

Gandhi

Japanese

makoto

social order modernization

nihon/gaijin

aikido

Ueshiba

Western Christian

agape

domestic pacification

believer/ pagan

Confessing Church

Niemoeller & Bonhoeffer

Islamic

submission

pacification

ummah/kuffar

“greater jihad”

???

Jewish

covenant

moral law

chosen/gentile

universalism

???

PART FIVE

CHALLENGES OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

FRENCH AND GERMAN JUDAISMS FACING MODERNITY Rolland Goetschell The emancipation During the nineteenth century, both France and Germany were transformed from semi-feudal societies to industrial powers. Both countries possessed a Jewish population which comprised a not insignificant part of society. Before the Revolution, from forty to fifty thousand Jews resided in France and by 1914 their numbers had grown to a population of close to a 190,000 thousand; while in Germany during the years 1842–1844, the Jewish population was 400,000 thousand and by 1910 it had reached 615,021. It is certain that this difference in population numbers played a not insignificant role in the emancipation process. However, the more significant factor was the difference in the conditions that led to the emancipation in each country. In France, events unraveled quite quickly. The following is a synopsis of key events that led to Jewish emancipation. In the eighteenth century, Louis XVI abolished the right of physical toll with the decree of January 17, 1784 and subsequently the ideas of regeneration and emancipation spread—as is shown in the report of the Grégoire “Essays on the physical, moral, and political regeneration of the Jews” (1788). The French Revolution then accelerated the movement. On January 28, 1790, the emancipation of the Portuguese and Spanish Jews, and the Jews of Avignon, was approved. The following year, on September 27, 1791, seven days before its dissolution, the National Assembly granted emancipation to the Ashkenazi Jews and the Jews of Paris. Then, as is known, in the Assimilationist Will Napoleon convened first the Assembly of the Jewish Notables in 1806, then the Sanhedrin (March 3–17, 1807) which published “Doctrinal Decisions.” However, Napoleon returned to discriminatory policy with his “Infamous Decree” of March 17, 1808, which remained in force for ten years. After the fall of Napoleon, Louis XVIII, in 1818, did not extend the “Infamous Decree” against the Charter of

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1814. Under Louis Philippe, emancipation was completed with the granting of a budget for the Jewish cult in 1831 and the abolition of the oath more judaico in 1846. Ultimately, it took about sixty years for the Jews of France to obtain their full emancipation—equality of rights with their Christian fellow-countrymen.1 Unlike the battle for Jewish emancipation in France, in Germany the process was a long march. Under the influence of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, emancipation began in 1808 with equality for Jews who resided to the east of the Rhine—except for certain economic limitations, for a period of ten years. The Jews were granted full equality in the Hanseatic cities incorporated in France and especially in the realm of Westphalia, where there was the unique case of the Great Duchy of Frankfurt, in which the Jews obtained equality by paying annual installments. In Prussia, which was at that time among the most economically advanced countries, Baron Karl von Stein created the law on government reform which granted Jews the right to vote and to appear at elections for all the citizens. His successor, Karl August von Hardenberg, through implementation of the law of 1812, granted the Jews both citizenship and a plenitude of other civil laws. Exceptions related to the corps of officers, public administration offices, and the judiciary. After Napoleon’s defeat and the victory of the Holy Alliance, they quickly reverted to the former state. Although the Congress of Vienna (1815) decided to preserve the rights granted to the Jews of the German states during the Napoleonic period, the new government interpreted the treaty in the most restrictive sense and returned to the status quo ante. Indeed, the German Federal Act of June 8, 1815 stipulated—in Article 16 of the Federal Act of the Germanic Confederacy of 1815, incorporated into the General Act of the Congress of Vienna—that: The belonging to different parties of the Christian religion shall not cause any difference in the enjoyment of civil and political rights in the states and regions of the German confederation. The Federal Assembly will deliberate on a procedure as uniform as possible by which a civil betterment of those who profess the Jewish faith can be brought about in Germany and how especially the enjoyment of civil rights can be secured to them, they assuming, correspondingly all civil

1

Feuerwerker, 1976.

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duties in the confederate states. Until then, however, those who profess the Jewish faith shall retain those rights, which they have already been granted by the several confederation states.

At the last minute, the formula “in the confederate states” was revised to read “in the individual confederated states.” Thus, individual states were obliged to reaffirm via their own sovereign institutions. This meant that the individual states were allowed to question the emancipation granted to the Jews, which had been decreed by a foreign power. The Revolution of 1848, in which the Jews took an active part, and the National Assembly of 1848–1849, were a result of the latter act of congress. The Constitution of March 28, 1848, in part VI §144–148, granted civil, political and religious equality. In May, once again, after the Revolution, the Jews were disappointed and emancipation was postponed to the Greek Calends. During the forty years that elapsed from the Congress of Vienna to the Revolution of 1848, the promises of Article 16 of the Federal Act were not honored.2 Under Bismarck’s rule, the Jews’ situation started to change. When Germany crushed Austria in Sadowa on July 3, 1866, the road became clear for the reorganization of Germany. With the exception of the states of the South—Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Bade, and HesseDarmstadt—a Confederacy of Germany of the North was formed, dominated by Prussia. Politically, the time was marked in the Reichstag and the Prussian Chamber of Representatives with the emergence of the national liberals. Bismarck was ready to grant them a measure of liberal reform compatible with his foreign policy. Thus, the emancipation of the Jews came as part of a package of liberal reforms included in the reshaping of laws intended for the institution of the Reich to be implemented. The Act of Reichstag of the Germanic Union of the North in July 3, 1869 specified: “All remaining limitations of civilian and political rights derived from the difference in religious creed are hereby abolished. In particular, eligibility for participation in municipality and state representation and for the high rise of public office shall be independent of religious creed.” Although the Jews were not mentioned, a debate between Edouard Lasker and a conservative representative opposed to the law proves that the

2

Straus, 1966, pp. 107–138.

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Jewish problem was in the mind of members of the Parliament of the Confederation of the North. Emancipation was achieved only after the war of 1870 when the three German states of Southern Germany—Bade, Wurtemberg and Bavaria—joined the second Reich. German Jewry’s struggle for emancipation took 55 years: that is, a little over half a century was needed for German Jews to obtain what the French Jews had obtained in 1791.3 Entry to civil society In France, the entry of Jews into civil society was effected in a relatively smooth transition. In the arts and letters, names such as Rachel and Jacques Offenbach are obvious examples. Jews were quickly integrated in the universities, for example Salomon Munck, Derenbourgs, Adolphe Franck and Emile Durkheim.4 Similarly, in the political arena Jews quickly rose to key-positions; this is reflected in the significant number of Jews in the Third Republic—in which 171 Jews held such positions as prefets, councilors of state, generals, magistrates, representatives, and senators.5 In this matter, it may be noted that the Quai d’Orsay and the Army resisted more than other institutions the promoting of Jews to high-ranking positions of influence and/or authority. In the industrial and banking sectors, we need only draw on the case of Rothschild or Pereire6 to confirm the growing opportunities for Jews to join civil society and assume key influential positions. We now turn to the case of Germany. How different was German Jews entry into civil society? During the forty years between the Congress of Vienna and Revolution of 1848, the promises of Article 16 of the Federal Act were not honored. During that period remarkable social and economic progress was nevertheless achieved. In place of the existing social order, comprised of a scant elite of royal bankers, businessmen and a few doctors at the top, and a mass of beggars at the bottom, Jews began to enter the professional markets and business world. Rich property owners, manufacturers for the domes-

3 4 5 6

Hamburger, 1969, pp. 3–66. On the Wissenschatt de Judentume in France see: P. Simon-Nahum, 1998. Birnbaum, 1992. Benbassa, 1997.


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tic and foreign markets now began making their appearance. The Jewish banks were based in Frankfort, Karlsruhe, Mainz and other places. Jews also participated in the construction of the railways. The numbers of Jewish doctors increased considerably and Jewish writers and journalists made their first appearance. Nevertheless, unlike in France, the public service sector remained closed to Jews, consequentially, Jews had no access to such positions as judges, schoolteachers, and professors.7 The Prussian monarchy eventually forged strong ties with Germany, that were significant in constructing the German nation-state. In creating a significant European state in 1871, Bismarck fulfilled the expectations of the liberal middle class by implementing Herrenreform. Revitalizing the monarchy and the army became an important part of the political structure by which imperial Germany distinguished itself from Western Europe. Preserving the monarchy’s military character was connected to the idea that the state (Staatsragende Schucht) could claim for itself, without having to justify itself by means of the social order. The pact between the monarchy and the noble landowners remained intact, although the ties weakened from the late eighteenth century onward and during the later period of reform. Consequentially, Jews were forbidden to enter the reserve officers’ corps (without exception, confirming the rule in Bavaria in 1885). Both as a community and as individuals, Jews never crossed that border in civil society as long as the monarchy lasted.8 Intellectual Revolution and Reformation Emancipation also presents an intellectual aspect that was embodied, first and foremost, in Wissenschaft of Judentum, and then in Reformation. With Wissenschaft of Judentum, one can say that Judaism committed itself to modernity. In 1823, the movement’s program was published in the form of a speech by Emmanuel Wolf in Zeichrift fuer die Wissenschaft of Judentum, which bears the exact title Ûeber of Begriff einer Wissenschaft of Judentum (“On the concept of a Science of Judaism”). In that text, Wolf defines this concept and his understanding of Judaism:

7 8

Ricarz, 1975, pp. 69–77. Angress, 1972, pp. 19–42.

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rolland goetschell When it is a question of the science of Judaism, it is obvious that the term Judaism is taken in its acceptance in its broadest sense, as the quintessence of the set of circumstances, specific characteristics and performances of the Jews in touch with the religion, the philosophy, the history, the law and the literature generally, the social life and human affairs and not just in the restricted sense of simple religion of the Jews. [. . .] Judaism, such as represented here, as a whole (als ein Ganzes) rests on an appropriate internal principle and is contained on one hand in an impressive literature, but also in a particular life and a texture of a numerous class of human being that is capable and requires in itself and for itself (an und fûr sich) a scientific treatment. Until now it was never presented scientifically in all its parts, from a completely independent point of view. If the total content of the Judaism owed, in itself and for itself to be the object of scientific investigation and if Wissenschaft of Judentum must be formed, one can understand that there is a question here of all methods. The contents of this special science are then systematic development and presentation of its object in all its parts, in itself and for itself and not just for external ends. Let us apply this to the Wissenschaft of Judentum: 1. Wissenschaft of Judentum understands Judaism in its fullest scope 2. It unfolds Judaism according to its concept and makes a systematic statement of it where the particular is returned permanently with the fundamental principle of everything. 3. It treats its object in and for its own sake, the appropriate interest, and not for any special purpose, or definite intention.

This brings Wolf to the following two-dimensional definition of his objective: 1. Knowledge of Judaism in the historic and literary documentation. 2. A statistical study of Judaism in connection with all the contemporary Jews of all the countries of the world. Beyond the Hegelian or Fichtean echoes of this founding text, Wolf ’s speech, Léopold Zunz’s papers, and the speech of Edouard Gans in the same spirit, mark the passage of Judaism to modernity.9 After Wissenschaft of Judentum, and partially spurred by its modernity, a fundamental modification of the traditional community began in Germany, with the appearance of reforms. Introduced in 1810, at the Temple of Israel Jacobsohn in Seesen, which contained an organ and a belltower, reforms were aesthetic and introduced the use of organs and sermons in German. In 1818, the Temple of Hamburg was built in

9

See the special number of the review PARDES, no. 19/20, 1994.


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the same style as that of Seesen and launched another important innovation—a new prayer-book. In its text, the movement’s universalism is apparent in, for example, the abolition of everything concerning the Jewish origin of the Sabbath rest and all allusions to animal sacrifices. Another example of the shift to universalism is the change from the phrase “the request of the messiah who will return Israel to Palestine” to the phrase “with the demand to bring redemption to Israel and to all humanity.”10 These changes did not fail to arouse harsh reactions from the orthodox Jews of Hamburg, in the form of a collection of responsa entitled Eleh Dibrey ha-Berit. The strongest opponent of the reformation was Moses Sofer, known as Hatam Sofer (1769–1839), who organized the orthodox world under his aegis and led the fight under the slogan Hadash asûr min-ha-Torah (Any innovation is forbidden by the Torah) with the intention that any novelty, no matter how minor, was forbidden.11 The Reform Movement, under the leadership of Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim, summoned a rabbinical assembly in Brunswick in 1844, then in Frankfurt in 1845, and in Breslau in 1846. A subsequent reaction was led by Zacharias Frankel (1801–1875), who supported more moderate reforms. Frankel spoke at the Congress of Frankfurt concerning the use of Hebrew, in the name of his conception of a positive historical Judaism ( positive— historisches Judentum): in his eyes, Judaism was the “great historic truth.” That is, Judaism is the truth, but the truth which gives itself to the people in and through the history of the people. The term positive originates in the legal distinction between positive law and natural law; Frankel underlines, against the radical reformers, the halachic character of Judaism.12 This discussion regarding trends in Judaism would not be complete without noting the appearance of neo-orthodoxy. This stream developed from the work of Samson Raphaël Hirsch (1808–1888). The conception of neo-orthodox originates from the situation in Hungary during the late eighteenth century, when the status of orthodox communities was recognized by the government in 1871 (after the Congress of Hungarian Judaism 1868–1869) as separate entities.

10 11 12

See Phillipson, 1967 and W.G. Plaut, 1963. See Katz, 1967, pp. 118–149. See Goetschel, 1994, pp. 107–132.

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In a memorandum sent to the authorities, representatives of orthodox Jews of Prussia asked “to allow the Jews to leave their local community organizations for reasons of conscience.” In 1873, the Prussian Landtag debated a law that would allow every man to leave his church; the intention of the law being to allow the existence of “those that had no religion.” According to Edouard Lasker’s proposition, an amendment to this law was ratified, stating that a Jew is allowed to leave his local community for religious reasons, without leaving Judaism. Objections on behalf of the reform movement against the amendment were not accepted and in July 1876, the Law of Secession (Austritgesetz) was passed, creating a legal basis to elaborate a specific organization for the neo-orthodoxy. The “Separatist” movement (Austritsgemeinde), with the exception of Adass Yechouroun of Frankfurt, was joined by small groups of orthodox Jews, primarily drawn from Berlin, Koenigsberg, Wiesbaden, Cologne, and Giessen. By and large, however, most of the orthodox remained in their original communities. In 1885 Hirsch established Freie Vereinigung fur die Interesse den orthodoxen Judaism.13 Likewise, those who created the other trends in Judaism established their own rabbinical seminary. Returning to the case of France, the question arises why French Judaism did not undergo a reformation similar or parallel to that in Germany? Radical programs for reform certainly existed in France, but their conception stemmed from secular individuals, who had little influence. Albeit in France the Judaism that existed did include many characteristics that in other countries would have been considered as stemming from non-orthodox tendencies. Nevertheless, rabbinical authorities in France tried above all to maintain the community’s unity. In 1856, Salomon Ulmann convened a rabbinical conference in Paris suggesting acceptable reforms, for example: use of the organ was allowed but not desirable, French could not be substituted for Hebrew in prayer, the number of piyutim must be reduced, women and children should be allowed in the synagogue, and other minor reforms.14 The major reason underlying these reforms was that the dominant stream of thought in French Judaism—Franco-Judaism— was close to the historico-positive Judaism of Germany. French

13 14

Breuer, 1992. Cohen-Albert, 1982, pp. 121–141.


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Judaism was regrouped into a single coherent theoretical formulation which reflected the essence of Judaism and the essence of France during the Third Republic. The theorist who framed the basis of the above idea was the Orientalist James Darmsteter who said “Since the emancipation, there is no more history of the Jews of France; there is only a history of French Judaism, as there is a history of Calvinism or Lutheranism—nothing else and nothing more.” The Jew could adopt France because France had risen to the superior level of humanity that Judaism tried hard to promote. The ideology of revolutionary France was in fact the ideology of Judaism; since the Prophets, Judaism rested on two great principles: divine unity and messianism. Each had a relation with the modern world that emerged in 1789. Divine unity, the biblical concept of monotheism meant “the unity of the law in the world;” however, messianism implied faith in the “earthly triumph of justice in humanity,” faith in progress and in social improvement which constituted the driving spring of the Revolution. It was that ideology that, consciously or unconsciously, asserted itself in French Judaism. The price to be paid for French Judaism was religious indifference, reflected in the following two quotations: “I have not enough religion to change it” (attributed to Mrs. Strauss, Geneviève Halèvi) and “what our ancestors knew how to maintain in spite of their pursuits in centuries of intolerance and inhumanity, we shall not let them remove by our coreligionists in an era of freedom and emancipation” (a remark by Adolphe Crémieux). However, after the affair of Damascus (1840) and later the Mortara affair (1858), the Jews of France stood in unity with the creation of the Alliance Israelite Universale in 1860. The Alliance was founded by J. Carville, I. Cohen, N. Levin, the secretary of A. Cremieux, A. Astruc, and the poet E. Manudans. The founders met at Charles Netter’s house to devise the alliance and in June 1860 they published a manifesto which contained the following three points: 1. Working everywhere for the emancipation and moral progress of Jews. 2. Helping Jews suffering from anti-Semitism. 3. Encouraging publications promoting these objectives. The manifesto attracted Jews of all social backgrounds—from Count Camondo, to Adolphe Franck by way of Joseph Reinach and Zadoc

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Kahn. L’Alliance established a real internal bond in the Jewish community. It contributed to the formation, in a modern ideological form, of a tradition of Jewish solidarity that influenced in particular the communities around the Mediterranean.15 The last years of the nineteenth century If the beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of hope, the second half was marked by disillusion. In France, anti-Judaism developed in 1880. In 1886, Drumont’s La France Juive appeared, and his newspaper La Libre Parole was launched in 1892. The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) and the wave of anti-Jewish terror that accompanied it called into question the principles of Franco-Judaism, even though retrospectively, the Affair was considered a childish crisis of the Third Republic.16 In Germany, the minister Adolf Stoecker, Chaplain of the Court, founded in 1878 the party of Christian-Socialist Employees that positioned anti-Jewish sentiments at the center of its program. In 1879, Wilhem Marr created the Anti-Semitic League that was intended to reduce the influence of the Jewish race in German public life. In particular, though, the pamphlets by the great historian Heinrich von Treitschke and their after-effects, moved the Jewish world and aroused responses in others, such as Lazarus, Hermann Cohen and Graetz.17 To defend themselves, the Jews tried to set up a central community structure and gain recognition from the authorities. At the end of the Wilhelmian era the Jews were refused. In a letter written on August 8, 1901, Studt reveals the real motivation for the refusal: “To add to the real power which the Jewish citizens have in disproportion achieved through money and property, the weight of a Jewish political organization would set up a dam against the assimilation of the Jews with the rest of the population and would harden the differences which it is in the obvious interest of the state to level.”18

15 16 17 18

Israël, 1968. Marrus, 1971. Leyer, 1966, pp. 137–170. Lamberti, p. 11.


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With the outbreak of war in 1914, the French community, then 190,000 strong, found in the “union sacrée” the realization of its patriotic faith and its expectations from the Rights of Man in France. Foreign Jews volunteered en masse. For the Jews of France, it was necessary to overcome the enemy both as an invader and as a source of anti-Semitism. Evidence for their patriotic zeal was provided by 7,500 deaths.19 In Germany, the war was welcomed by the Jews with the same enthusiasm as the rest of the nation. After the Emperor’s proclamation on August 4, 1914 concerning Bûrgfrieden, many forms of anti-Jewish discrimination—particularly in the service of the state— disappeared. Jews were names as officers, storekeepers, and scholars. Moreover, Jewish academics were invited to support the war effort and occupied posts of responsibility in the governmental agencies and offices, in particular in Kriegsgesselschaften. However, this was a short period. In autumn, the anti-Semitic press resumed its attacks, accusing the Jews of running away from military obligations and benefiting from the situation. The result of this indefatigable campaign was the “Judenzählung” of October 11, 1916, in which all German officers were requested to calculate how many Jews subject to military duty were serving at that time in every unit of the German army. It was the ultimate anti-Jewish act carried out by the German military caste before the collapse of 1918.20 Conclusion To conclude this comparison between France and Germany one can ask the following questions: 1. Was emancipation imposed from the outside by armies of occupation and foreign ideologies or did it develop internally? The answer is clear: in France, emancipation was a product of the French Revolution. However, in Germany, the first emancipation was the direct or indirect result of the occupation by Napoleon. 2. Was it a prolonged or a fast process? In France, it was a fast process. In contrast, in Germany it was a development that extended over a long period. 19 20

Landau, 1992 pp. 305–320. Andress, 1978, pp. 117–135.

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3. Did political emancipation precede and facilitate, or follow economic and social incorporation? In France, political emancipation preceded and facilitated economic and social incorporation. Regarding Germany, the opposite is true. 4. Was emancipation a part of the new nationalist assertion, or part of the liberal political movements with which the Jews were affiliated? In Germany, it was clearly the support of liberal political movements that assured the emancipation of the Jews, while the conservatives and nationalists took all possible steps to prevent it.21 In France, emancipation was a result of the activity of individuals more than of movements. 5. Once obtained, did emancipation proved itself long-lasting or were there episodes of restoration that tried to question its results? In France, Napoleon’s “décret infâme” in 1807, was a minor influence. In Germany, the decisions of the Congress of Vienna delayed the emancipation of German Jews. In both cases, modernity did not mean the disappearance of the two communities, but rather adaptation to the appropriate conditions of social, economic, and political life in the two countries.

21

B. Rürup, 1976, pp. 59–68.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

FROM EAST EUROPEANS TO EUROPEANS Piotr Sztompka The first of May, 2004 marks both an end and new beginning to an era in European history. The enlargement of the European Union signals the beginning of a new phase in the history of Western Europe, and, for the new members from Eastern Europe, the end of a long period of exclusion and separation. Commentaries on this epochal event usually focus on ‘hard’ institutional factors such as political rearrangements, legal coordination and economic readjustments, etc. In this work, I would like to focus more on the ‘soft’ cultural and human factors; what I consider to be the intangibles and imponderables of a new, emerging Europe as I am convinced that culture really matters in social life. When sociologists speak of culture, they have in mind a much wider category than that used in the vernacular; Sociologists talk about what Emile Durkheim, the French ‘father’ of the discipline, called “societal facts”. These facts are supra-individual phenomena that do not derive from individual mental states but emerge from the collective consciousness. They are shared by the majority of people and exert external pressures and constraints on each member of society. They include social values and norms, beliefs and convictions, symbolic meanings, half-conscious “habits of the heart”—to borrow a phrase from yet another of sociology’s founding fathers, Alexis de Tocqueville. Culture, to a great extent, determines what people, as members of collectivities, think and do; it shapes their actual social practices, their ways of life. The various components of a culture—whether axiological, cognitive, or symbolic—all come together to form the self-definitions that people construct of themselves, i.e. their collective identities. This topic will be my narrower focus. I will examine how accession to the European Union can affect the collective identities of peoples from the former communist countries. I will look at how this process may help erase the current somewhat peculiar and crippled EastEuropean identity and clear the way for a fully-fledged and proud

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European identity. I also claim that the revolutions of 1989 will not be completed until such transformations of identity come to a successful conclusion. Being invited to enter the ‘European house’ does not necessarily mean automatically ‘feeling at home’ or that newcomers will necessarily be treated as ‘one of us’ by the current tenants. This metaphor is useful for grasping the opposition of hard institutional arrangements and soft cultural orientations. “House” means the architecture; “home” means solidarity, loyalties, attachments, trust. To reside in the house does not necessarily mean to consider it one’s home. Rudiments of the theory of identity Human society is the product of a dynamic process in which society continually reconstructs itself. Society is constantly ‘becoming’; it is never simply ‘being’. It is a process rather than a substance (Sztompka 1991). This process is driven by societal agency which refers to the potential of a society to effectively transform itself. A crucial component of societal agency is collective identity, which is at the same time both a pre-requisite for the future collective social practices as well as the outcome of those social practices, accumulated marks of past experiences. Collective identity must be distinguished both from personal identity and mass identity. Personal identity is the individual’s concept, self defined in terms of belonging to a specific social group or organisation, one’s status or societal role, etc. Thus, I consider myself: a Pole, a Krakowian, a Catholic, an academic, a male. Mass identity, on the other hand, is the sum of specific individual identities found in a particular collectivity. As such it is an artifact: a statistical average devoid of ontological ‘hard’ reality. It tells us only that there are a certain number of individuals with a particular type of personal identity. In contrast, collective identity can only be produced by the exchange of meanings through, for example, public debate, artistic expression, conversation, argument and the media; what is sometimes referred to as the “meaning industry”. It emerges in interpersonal interactions as a record of common social experiences. It is created not so much as a result of individual biography, but rather in the course of societal history. In a way, collective identity can be seen as sedimentary rock built up of layers of social practices and traditions.

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Collective identity—like all other components of societal agency— emerges as the combined product of two categories of determinants. On the one hand, the individual endowment of the actors: their motivations, beliefs, convictions, competencess, and on the other hand the cultural, political, legal, economic and geo-political institutional structures in which the social actors are involved. Emergence of identity only becomes real when both of these two interacting determinants are ascribed a specific meaning through interpersonal discourse in the public space. This meaning specifies both what we want to achieve and what we realistically can achieve, given our personal limitations, and received, inherited institutional environment. The Durkheimian, societal, quality of collective identity has three characteristics: first, it is shared by the whole of society, second it is external with respect to each individual (not personally devised, or freely chosen) and third, it is constraining, normatively binding and determines the way individuals feel about themselves and about society. Closer analysis reveals that there are two divergent aspects of collective identity: the forging of bonds and the defining of boundaries (Eisenstadt 2003b: 75–134). Collective identity means belonging to one group and differing from another. Thus the first, affirmative aspect of collective identity is the definition of ‘WE’: who we are, whom we resemble, whom we share with, whom we trust, whom we are loyal to and with whom we feel solidarity. This sense of ‘we’ is apparent through the presence of moral bonds, such as trust, loyalty, solidarity, reciprocity and empathy among its members. The foundations for such bonds can be found at four different levels. First, there are the primordial commonalities of territory, landscape, environment (e.g. village vs. city, mountains vs. seaside, desert vs. agricultural lands). Second, there are historical commonalities of past experiences, traditions, collective memories, emblematic heroes, common ancestors—whether real or mythical. Third, there are cultural commonalities of language, religion, customs, ways of life, life style, currency. Fourth, there are ideological commonalities of Weltanschauung, positive visions of a special mission, calling, a role in the wider world, or negative visions of a particular oppression, exploitation, dependence, pain and suffering. At this last level the typical forms of ideological articulation are positive or negative auto-stereotypes: idealisation of self, aggrandizement, superiority complex, or the opposite—selfflagellation, self-victimisation, inferiority complex, sacrifice.

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The second, negative aspect of collective identity is the definition of ‘THEM’: the ‘others’, whom we differ from, whom we oppose, who threaten us, and against whom we must defend ourselves. This definition of ‘them’ or the ‘others’ is formulated on a scale of ‘otherness’. Sometimes others are perceived as different in the sense of being special, a new experience, something exotic with a particular kind of worth. We call this a positive tolerance. However, the ‘others’ may also be perceived as strange, a necessary and unavoidable burden that has to be endured. This is still tolerance but with a different, negative overtone, hence referred to as a negative tolerance. Further along the scale, the ‘others’ are seen as ‘alien’: unacceptable, repulsive, to be avoided and rejected. This would be referred to as intolerance. The most destructive concept of otherness is when ‘others’ are perceived as the ‘enemy’: as threatening embodiments of evil, polluting poison, illegitimate encroachments on our well-being, something to be defended against, and ultimately to be destroyed, even exterminated. With ‘others’ we tend not to forge bonds but are more likely to construct boundaries. Sometimes these boundaries are quite tangible such as, for instance, barbed-wire fences, check-points, walls—the Berlin Wall and the recently erected wall dividing the Israeli settlements from Palestinian territories, etc. However, less obvious, more symbolic and even virtual boundaries can also separate us from the supposedly polluting influence of ‘others’. Examples include, separate seating on buses for racial minorities, restricted places of entertainment under the conditions of apartheid, the Star of David on the arms of persecuted Jews, or in a much less significant area— remote corners for smokers at airports. From the perspective of a given society, boundaries most often face outwards, that is, borders ward off outsiders: tribes, ethnic groups, nations, civilizations. But people also erect internal boundaries within their own society, keeping other races, ethnicities, immigrants and refugees at a distance. Images of ‘others’ are also articulated by means of stereotypes. Racial, national and ethnic prejudices give rise to practices of segregation, discrimination or persecution. It has been shown that negative stereotypes initiate vicious circles involving isolation, hostility, conflict and wars. On the other hand, positive stereotypes strengthen moral bonds and, thus, initiate behaviour patterns that encourage contact and enhance relationships that lead to mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence. They act as self-fulfilling prophecies affirmed


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by the putative truth of their effects. Stereotypes also enter cycles of dialectic reciprocity: the more we are disliked the more we dislike, and vice-versa, the more we are liked, the more we like. The crucial factor in shaping our auto-stereotypes and the stereotypes of the ‘others’ is the way we are treated or, better, perceive to be treated by the others. This famous mechanism described by Charles H. Cooley for individual cases as “the looking-glass self ”, operates also on a collective scale in shaping collective identities. Given the theoretical framework in this section, we will now move to consider two historical illustrations of collective identity: the European and East-European identity. The European identity Not only was Europe one of the first areas to develop a continental-wide, strong feeling of unity, but also perhaps the only continent to produce an identity of this kind. Francis Bacon already referred to “nos Europai”, “we the Europeans” in 1623. This kind of continent-related collective reference does not seem to occur in the other continents. Admittedly, it could be argued that it currently occurs in America. However, it seems to me that in the case of the US it resembles more the traditional forms of nationalism (loyalty to the ‘New Nation’ of immigrants), or ‘constitutional patriotism’ (the strong allegiance to the Constitution of the US, the anthem and the flag), than the identity with the whole North American continent. European exceptionalism in this regard is emphasised by the contemporary commentator, Anthony Pagden: “Europeans are, I suspect, unusual in sharing in this way a sense that it might be possible to belong to something larger than the family, the tribe, the community, or the nation yet smaller and more culturally specific than ‘humanity’” (Pagden 2002: 53). The foundation of the European identity is built on paradoxes. To begin with the primordial level, Europe is merely a vulnerable peninsula of the huge Asian or Eurasian continent; its Eastern borders tentatively holding back the vast steppes of the Orient. As the British historian Norman Davies puts it in his monumental history of Europe: “All there was, for five million years, was a long, sinuous peninsula with no name, set like the figurehead of a ship on the prow of the world’s largest land mass” (Davies 1997: xvii). The

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Eastern limits of Europe have always been contentious, which is best demonstrated by its historically changing definitions, with the gradual expansion of the idea of Europe apparently now brought to a halt at the Ural mountains. The unity or homogeneity of the continent is also problematic, in view of the tremendous diversity of landscape, climate, environment, as well as of states and other political units. Paradoxically this diversity has often been treated as a common, unifying feature of Europe, as its unique value, or richness, as illustrated by Bertold Brecht’s proud proclamation: “We Europeans cross borders as often as others change their shoes”. The more obvious foundation of the European identity is its common history. As is widely recognised, Europe has its origins in three great traditions. The first pillar of Europe is ancient Greece, with its tradition of art, philosophy, science, cultivation of the body and first delineation of democracy. The second pillar is ancient Rome, with its tradition of law and a legal culture, as well as an efficient administration of the state. There is no doubt that the third pillar, in spite of all the reservations raised by the fanatics of ‘political correctness’, is Judaism and Christianity with their concept of human dignity and their idea of freedom, liberation, emancipation, as well as of linear progress. But even in the domain of history we discover a paradox. For although Europe’s history has been characterised by numerous dividing and disruptive conflicts, struggles and wars, the memory of such calamities accompanied by the dream of peaceful order and stability, have become strong unifying factors. As we know, the political project of a European Community, and later of a European Union is legitimised precisely by the effort to escape from a conflict-permeated and war-ridden past. But perhaps the most important foundation of the European identity is cultural. As Vaclav Havel once put it: ‘Europe is a domain of our common thoughts, values and ideals’. Many other authors and politicians have emphasised a common pool of values. For example Norman Davies mentions “religious tolerance, human rights, democratic government, the rule of law, the scientific tradition, social modernization, cultural pluralism, a free market economy and the supreme Christian virtues such as compassion, charity, and respect for the individual” (Davies 1997: 26) as values Europeans share. The most comprehensive ‘official’ list, however, is to be found in Article 2 of the project of the European Constitution, in which values such as human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law, human


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rights, pluralism, tolerance, justice and solidarity have been mentioned. Significantly, such an apology for common values corresponds with the recognition of Europe’s rich diversity of languages, lifestyles and customs, which are to be preserved in everyday life. Rather more problematic is the fourth foundation of unity, the Euro-Centric ideology claiming that Europe is the cradle of the expanding West (including the US). According to this ideology, the West is considered synonymous with the most dynamic, developed and progressive civilization. It assumes, somewhat in line with Spencerian social evolutionism, that there is only one scenario for social development and only one road leading to modernity and beyond, which all societies have to follow, as if we were all riding one giant escalator, with the more privileged people at the top, and the less fortunate down at the ‘backward’ bottom. By implication Europe was said to be entrusted with the civilizing mission of pulling up the laggards, realised by its domination across many continents. The geopolitical consequence of such a theory has been European imperial expansion and colonialism. In 1800, thirty-five percent of the land was controlled by European powers. This rose to sixty-seven percent in 1878, and finally, to eighty-four percent, in 1914. Such an absolutization of European path to modernity is presently challenged by the notion of “multiple modernities”, put forward by scholars such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, Bjorn Wittrock, Johann Arnason and others. In spite of all these commonalities Europe has always raised numerous boundaries, both internal and external. Internal dividing lines have separated its core from the peripheries. There have been various types of divisions, such as: barbaricum versus civilization; the North (as defined by Voltaire to include Scandinavia, Baltic countries, Poland) versus the Mediterranean South, the cradle of Europe; Western Christendom (Catholic, Protestant) versus Byzantine culture and Orthodox religion; the economic backyard or under developed areas versus the developed, highly industrialized and urbanized countries; urbanized areas versus rural areas; the former centres of empires or imperial states (Britain, France, the Netherlands) versus small states; communist countries versus the ‘free Europe’, or in different terms, Western versus Eastern Europe; EU countries versus others; recently acceded countries versus the rest within the EU, and potentially, the ‘two-speed’ future development of the EU, with the core countries versus the rest.

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The external boundaries of Europe have also always created resistance to other areas of the world, to other continents and civilizations. The earliest fault line separated it from the Orient. As Edward Said puts it: “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies . . . its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (Said 1979: 1). A more recent fault line is the opposition toward Islam prophetically described by Samuel Huntington as: “the war of civilizations”. The most recent boundary emerging after the collapse of communism is the one erected against the US (as the opposition against American hegemony in a no longer bipolar, globalising world). It raises the spectre of age-old anti-American sentiments, expressed for example already in 1900 in the statement describing Americans as: “Clients of Europe which have become its rivals” (d’Appolonia 2002: 177). The East-European identity I claim that specific historical circumstances in the Eastern part of Europe have led to the emergence of a particular type of collective identity, which I label as the East-European identity. After a period of considerable economic and political success and influence under the Byzantine and Ottoman empires in the southern flanks of the region (the Balkans, Hungary), and under strong monarchies in the northern part (Poland, Lithuania, the Czech lands), which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century, the region lost its importance faced with the birth and expansion of modern capitalism in Western Europe. Ever since, it has retained its pervasive peripheral status vis-a-vis Western Europe. There are many reasons for this: Firstly, the geographical shape of the European peninsula made the Eastern part into a kind of residual area for Europe without any obvious geographical boundary from Asia. Secondly, the region has been economically underdeveloped and has fallen into backwardness also regarding its civilization and technology. This underdevelopment resulted in a relatively large proportion of rural settlements with relatively rare and small urban centres, and a rural population. The region was often conquered and politically dominated by Western powers (e.g. in the case of Poland’s partitions throughout the whole nineteenth century, or the Nazi occupation in the twentieth century).


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After World War II it became politically isolated from the West, and lost its sovereignty as it was incorporated into the communist bloc. (The complicity of Western powers in such a division, often referred in Eastern Europe as the “Yalta treason”, led to the erection of an additional barrier of distrust, and suspicion as to the West’s political intentions.) For a considerable time—as if to support suspicion—it was excluded and kept outside of the emerging European Community or European Union. Even with the present expansion of the EU toward the East, there are still a number of Eastern European countries, which will remain outside of the politically united Europe, at least for the time being. These were the historical factors that were breeding Western stereotypes of Eastern Europe, which in turn were reflected in the autostereotypes of the East Europeans. Already in the eighteenth century “Europeans as they traveled beyond Germany into Catholic Poland, Orthodox Russia, and the still Ottoman Balkan peninsula, felt themselves to have suddenly entered an alien and archaic world of vast distances, enserfed peasantries, and brutal petty officials—a world that corresponded all too easily to their received notions of oriental despotism” (Pocock 2002: 66–67). As a result two cultural syndromes were born. One with deep historical roots, which I will call the early East-European syndrome, and another of much more recent origin, which is variously called the “satellite mentality”, the “bloc culture”, or the “Homo Sovieticus”. The early East-European syndrome was marked by several characteristics: first, by insecurity and unclear self-definition, wavering between “being European” and “being other than European”; second, by an inferiority complex toward the West, compensated by an superiority complex toward societies further East; third, by an idealization of the West with its political freedoms and economic affluence, resulting in negative stereotypes of societies further East; fourth, by xenophobia and strong defensive attitudes toward neighboring countries; and finally this syndrome was influenced and maintained by various Slavic solidarity movements and myths, such as pan-Slavism and folklore depicting Slavic suffering and heroism. The opportunity to escape from this early East-European identity has for a long time been reserved for cosmopolitan elites or emigrants. The aristocratic circles close to the royal courts had intensive international contacts via diplomacy, regional markets and fairs, festivities, common leisure patterns, similar lifestyles and the use of

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Latin (and then French) as a common language. The intellectual and academic elites surrounding the universities took part in regular international exchanges, traveled widely, and participated in the crossEuropean exhibitions and demonstrations of art, science, philosophy and high culture. Finally, there was a large diaspora of East Europeans in the West, the immigrant communities in Western countries, who kept in touch with home and mediated in the influence of Western ideas, ways of life and values, contributing greatly to what sociologists call “the demonstration effect” of Western superiority. The later variety of the East-European syndrome—“the satellite mentality”, or “bloc culture” (“Homo Sovieticus”)—developed as a result of the last political and military division of Europe after World War II. One of the effects of the communist takeover was the imposition of a cultural premise radically opposed to the West, and hence isolating Eastern Europe mentally and culturally from the rest of Europe. The ‘wall in their heads’ was erected—to use the phrase from one of the first report on 1989 revolutions by Andrew Nagorski, “Newsweek” correspondent for Eastern Europe at that time—perhaps even more solid than the Berlin Wall itself. It was created in two different ways: firstly, through direct indoctrination, anti-Western propaganda, and the socialising impact of non-Western institutions, such as autocratic politics, a centrally planned economy, and a controlled and restricted circulation of thought and cultural expression; and secondly, as an adaptive reaction to this institutional framework and to dire living-conditions, which in reality had little to do with the declared communist ideology. Some examples of such adaptations include: “parasitic innovativeness” (e.g. talent for finding loopholes and beating the system), the evasion of laws, claimant attitudes toward the state, opportunism, nepotism, favoritism and clientelism, camouflage and double moral standards. It was this subjectively constructed amalgamation of the “Homo Sovieticus” syndrome combined with an idealised image of the West that contributed to the emergence of the crippled, inferior, deficient and defensive identity of ‘incomplete Europeans’. This, in turn, was enhanced by the patronising, mistrusting and condescending attitudes of Westerners. These attitudes were not only customary in political contacts and economic exchanges, but also at a most crucial level of everyday life starting from extended visa procedures, thorough and humiliating security and customs checks at border points, the demand of extra financial guarantees at hotels or shops, discrimina-


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tory practices at employment agencies, etc. Being treated as secondrate persons always contributes to the development of a deficient self-identity. Allow me an aside: lecturing often at Western universities, both in Europe and in the US, I have always been aware of a certain guardedness among my students and an initial suspicion of ‘that professor from Eastern Europe’ and it takes a lecture or two to convince them that I am not a polar bear that drinks vodka. The slow ‘return to Europe’ at the level of a collective identity started already with the birth of a democratic opposition and various forms of contestation against the existing communist regime. The slow erosion of the communist bloc culminated in the ‘revolutions of 1989’, which brought about the collapse of communism. The main aim of the revolution was to escape from the grip of Asia and move toward Western Europe, and to finally realise old pro-Western aspirations and ambitions (Sztompka 1996). This aim is best expressed by the concept of “rectifying revolutions” proposed by Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1990). The immediate result of the revolution was twofold: it changed the boundaries, both the tangible and the symbolic borders separating Eastern Europe from Western Europe, and it changed the content of the value-system with which the people had identified. The main symbolic boundary disappeared already with the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The metaphor of the Iron Curtain lost its physical representation, and hence any validity in social consciousness. The free flow of persons, goods, cultural products, and massmedia began soon after. The next step was the incorporation into Western institutions and supranational structures: World Bank, IMF, OECD, NATO. But, the final confirmation of a European status came with the accession of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltic States to the European Union. A likely prospect for the future is the elimination of the last symbolic signs of difference: border checkpoints and a separate currency. These changes will hopefully take place with the incorporation of Eastern Europe into the Schengen area and Euroland. However, while old boundaries were being brought down, new boundaries emerged or became strengthened. First of all, a stronger dividing line appeared from the East, separating East and Central Europe from the former Soviet republics. Borders were sealed off, and visas introduced. At a symbolic level old resentments were dug out, dormant historical enmities reawakened and the memories of

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Soviet domination and oppression brought to the forefront of public debates. A new boundary also appeared between the traditionally most pro-Western, and most developed countries of Eastern Europe— Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia—and those lagging behind. The most visible indication of this division was the invitation of only some, selected countries to join the EU, with the accession of others indefinitely delayed. There is also the disturbing prospect of yet another boundary arising in the ‘two-speed’ European Union, one between the old members and the newcomers. This would mean a re-emergence of the division between the core and peripheries in a new guise, but this time within the confines of the Union. And finally, by entering Europe, former socialist countries automatically inherit all of Europe’s external boundaries. These include the more traditional ones such as the boundaries separating Europe from the Orient and, in particular, opposing the Islam, but also the relatively new boundary set up against the US and its hegemony. The latter has generated loyalty conflicts, as for many East-European societies it is the US which was the traditional ally and idealised hero, the symbol of freedom, democracy and prosperity. It has also been a dream land for massive waves of emigrants, which, in the case of Polish immigrants, reached numbers of more than four million. Their personal contacts with their home country, their families, and local communities,—through letters, mutual visits, homecomings after retirement, but also through flows of money and investments—have created a kind of bridge with America, over and above Western Europe. Of course, there are enclaves of Polish emigrants in many countries of Western Europe as well, but they are usually better assimilated to their recipient countries, cutting their links with a homeland more easily. Moreover, as they are also widely dispersed among the various European countries, they do not exert the same measure of influence, as the relatively badly assimilated masses of my compatriots in America, who still have strong imaginary links with their mother country. Immediately after the revolutions of 1989 and subsequent collapse of the communist system, the rules, values, norms and expectations of the new regime were shaped by two different forces: first by the rejection of the “Homo Sovieticus”, as a backlash against the old way of life, complete at the ideological level, but meeting with some resistance and inertia at the level of common practices, and second by the uncritical embracing of a highly idealized and in many ways


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anachronistic image of Western culture, economics and politics. The West was perceived as a kingdom of freedom and prosperity, and its dominant rules were modeled after a vision of nineteenth-century capitalism, of free markets, rampant individualism, ruthless competition, robber barons, and ‘rags to riches’ kind of careers. In some countries, notably Poland—due to the large diaspora of Polish emigrants and strong cultural contacts with America—this simplistic image of the West was enhanced by the special influence of the United States, with the result that ‘Western ways’ have often become synonymous with ‘American Creed’. The predominance of a neoliberalist ideology in the years immediately after the revolution was a result of this way of thinking. In effect the divergence between the East and the West has become polarized in the social consciousness of East-Europeans and has been defined in dualistic terms. Thus the value system of the “Homo Sovieticus”, which was deeply embedded in the mentality of communist society and somewhat resistant to change, was perceived to be in direct opposition to Western culture (Sztompka 1993). This conflict may be best described using the following nine oppositions: – collectivism as opposed to individualism; – the emphasis on security as opposed to taking risks; – acceptance of status stability as opposed to personal career and success; – expectation of conformity as opposed to the imperative of innovativeness; – seeking state protection and raising claims against the state as opposed to self-reliance; – blaming the system for personal failures as opposed to self-blame; – privatization of life, rejection of a public sphere as opposed to public participation; – demand for egalitarian distribution of wealth and income as opposed to meritocracy; – dogmatism and intolerance (in thought) as opposed to the recognition of pluralism and tolerance. The ideal types of the opposite systems, one with attached negative connotations, and another with positive associations, were taken as realities. The enthusiasm for new values and the radical rejection of old values led to the exaggerated hopes for the future, which were expected to bring freedom and affluence almost immediately. But

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the dismantling of the old system turned out to be quite arduous and protracted job. As the famous “three clocks” hypothesis by Ralf Dahrendorf was postulating, the “Clock of politics” was running fast, the “clock of economics” much slower, but the “clock of civil society” runs in the rhythm of generations (Dahrendorf 1990). It is not easy to radically rebuild institutions. But it is even less easy to eradicate old “habits of the heart”, mental frames and attitudes. Certain measure of axiological disorientation, normative chaos, or what Emile Durkheim would label as anomie, became characteristic for the period immediately after the revolutions of 1989. At the same time, very soon, a bit anachronistic quality of the picture of values ascribed to the West became unraveled, adding to the disorientation and producing “cultural trauma” (Alexander et al. 2004). In the same way that “real socialism” differed from the ideal type of communism, “real capitalism” proved to be different from the ideal type of capitalism. The anachronistic quality of these oppositions to the West derives from the fact that after 1989 Eastern Europe was confronted with a Western Europe that had already been transformed by more than a century of its own development. Paradoxically the West came closer in many ways to socialist or communitarian values, and further from Max Weber’s “spirit of capitalism”, than the people in former communist countries were aware of. The emphasis on collectivism has long been visible in certain countries of Latin Europe, (e.g. France, Italy, Belgium and Greece), while other values and adaptations to political conditions typical of communist societies, such as egalitarian distribution, the mistrust of politics and the public sphere, and the raising of social claims against the state, have become characteristic of several Western countries, as manifested by the principles of social democracy, or the welfare state, as well as the problems of democratic governance and disillusionment with politics. Thus the image of the West held by the people in post-communist societies was, to a considerable extent, already obsolete. But one of the fundamental truths discovered by sociologists is that people act on beliefs, images and convictions—and not necessarily on realities. As the American social psychologist, William Isaac Thomas, has put it: “If people believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences”. But the content of the value systems changes not only due to changing imaginations, but also due to some more tangible factors, namely institutional pressure. Once the democratic and market system


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is in place, the contents of value-systems change inadvertently under the impact of newly established institutions. These institutions exert a strong socializing (or should one say re-socialising) influence, slowly eliminating the old communist patterns that had lost their practical usefulness and ideological validity when confronted with democratic politics, a capitalist market economy and a free and pluralistic culture. As a result the “Homo Sovieticus” syndrome is slowly disappearing and a new cultural syndrome has emerged, especially among the younger generation, which is a replica of the idealized West-European image built around such values as individualism, risk-taking, personal success, self-reliance, self-blame, public concern, meritocracy, pluralism and tolerance. This condition is enhanced by trans-European institutions, such as the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice, becoming salient and significant actors in the politics of each post-communist society. In effect, at least for the time being we have become more capitalist than the capitalists, and more Western than the West. The pendulum has swung to another extreme. Some balance is needed. A better visibility and first-hand experience of West-European life styles, values, concerns, beliefs—whether direct or mediated—(the earlier-mentioned “demonstration effect”) exerts such a moderating influence. Already under the communist regime there was an inevitable flow of texts and images (and consequently, of creeds, styles, fashions, etc.) via TV, film, Internet, the press, and this flow of information has only become greater. No wall can hold back communication in our globalizing world. Presently, this process has been strengthened by increased personal contact, travel and tourism. It leads to the eradication of negative stereotypes and stops the vicious circle of hate and suspicion, clearing the way for an atmosphere of solidarity and mutual trust. One may also notice on the positive side the erosion of the naive idealization of the West, and a growing critical recognition of some weaknesses of Western democracy, such as its ungovernability, non-viability of the welfare state, the degrading effects of rampant consumerism, etc. In this way Eastern Europeans are no longer only ardent fans of the West, but have become equal partners in all-European debates dealing with the future shape of European institutions and ways of life.

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piotr sztompka The new landscape of identities

The collapse of the communist bloc has had a double effect on the collective identities of East-European societies. The first effect we focused on in this work was the slow fading away of the EastEuropean identity and the incorporation of East-European societies into a wider continental European identity. But, we also saw that at the same time new boundaries had emerged and a growing diversity was now visible within the former Soviet bloc. In this second development we witness the reappearance and reaffirmation of old, temporarily latent national, ethnic, religious and cultural differences and identities, which unfortunately in some cases, like in the Balkans, or post-Soviet republics, have tragically led to destructive wars. Although they might at first sight appear so, both tendencies are not necessarily contradictory. In this late modern period, identity has become multidimensional, multilayered, differentiated. It is produced as a personal construction built of multiple repertoires of options. People ‘craft themselves’, rather then receiving themselves readymade. Transnational, continental, or even global identities appear as new additional options, but do not necessarily eliminate other identities or orientations linked to, region, nation, ethics, religion, occupation, gender, sexual preference, life styles, consumer communities, fashion-communities, leisure-communities, etc. Multiple identities imply the enrichment of bonds, social networks and opportunities for experience and expression. The best way to ensure the development of a balanced and ‘trouble-free’ identity is to break up the age-old unity of national (tribal, ethnic) identities and citizenship (Miller 2000). Since the birth of the nation-state, as a hyphenated notion, both these identities have been unconditionally united. Attachment to the nation was considered synonymous with loyalty and allegiance to the state, and vice versa. This need not be the case. Citizenship, defined as the set of rights and obligations making one a competent member of a political community (Everson and Preuss 1995: 12), may be detached from nationhood, as the set of allegiances to the heritage, language and customs of ethnic community. One’s identity should no longer be tainted with exclusion, but rather become inclusive. The emergence of what David Held calls “cosmopolitan citizenship” (Held 1995) is imminent, expedited by both institutional and ideological factors. The institutional factor is the globalisation of politics and the various


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forms of political integration across the borders of states, of which the EU is certainly the most salient case. The ideological factor is the birth and dissemination of the idea of human rights, creating moral bonds and obligations not only with members of one’s own tribe, ethnic group or nation, but with all human beings on the planet. Nationalism, when detached from citizenship, and ethnic belonging, when separated from state membership, need not be divisive, breading hatred, conflicts and wars. These ‘national’ qualifications may become an important addition to a transnational citizenship, giving it the special quality of local attachment and loyalty. Thus with their incorporation into the European Union, the societies of Eastern Europe join in the ongoing project of creating a single European-wide citizenship. They will help shape a citizenship that befits the plurality of peaceful, cooperative and solidary European nations; a citizenship that belongs to one Europe of many homelands and to one ‘European house’ of many tenants making it their ‘home’. Let me end on a personal note. I do not find anything self-contradictory in my being a sociologist, a Catholic, a Krakowian, a Pole, and becoming —together with my compatriots—a full fledged European. I am simply freely participating in the “concentric order of allegiances, from the family to the nation, from the nation to Europe, from Europe to the world” (Ariane D’Appolonia: 174). My being a Pole does not stand in the way of transnational loyalties and solidarities, whether it be belonging to a cosmopolitan community of scholars, or an ecumenical community of Christendom, or even to the economic, juridical and political community of the European Union. But by the same token my transnational loyalties do not stand in the way of local and particularistic attachments: to a Polish heritage and tradition, to Polish national heroes, to my flag, my anthem and my national holidays, to a local cuisine and to folk customs, and even to the Polish landscape. These multiple identities give me the feeling of personal richness and a more complete, more full self-realisation. Unity and distinction may be two sides of the same human fate, its perennial and irrevocable duality.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

IS HINDU-MUSLIM CLEAVAGE THE PARADIGMATIC CASE FOR CONFLICTS IN SOUTH ASIA? Stanley J. Tambiah India no doubt is the most populous and territorially largest country, and the dominant presence in South Asia. But of course it is not the only country in the region. The question therefore arises for scholars as to how we are to weigh and compare the multiple ethnonationalist conflicts and political violence in the region. For many scholars writing on political conflict in India, the Hindu-Muslim divide has been the major point of reference and preoccupation. The “subaltern” school of historians seem to highlight the divide in two divergent ways. For example, Gyanendra Pandey in his book The Constitution of Communalism in Colonial North India powerfully argued that the British employed the Hindu-Muslim “communal” divide as the master narrative to explain all riots and public disturbances in which Hindus, and Muslims (and others) were involved, and moreover to characterize quite a few incidents in which no trace of “communalism” can be found in the historical record.1 Commenting on the characterization of political developments in India before and after independence, Pandey has remarked that the nationalist discourse has tended to celebrate the Independence struggle, and to reduce the Hindu-Muslim strife to being a minor phenomenon in the main anti-colonial struggle for Independence from British rule. The Partition was “for the majority of people living in what are now the divided territories of northern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the event of the twentieth century, and differenceinspired strife between Hindus and Muslims persists in India today.”2

1 2

Pandey, 1990. See Tambiah, 1996, pp. 23, 313–22 for a summary of Pandey’s submissions.

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The Hindu-Muslim divide has been most definitely since 1947 a continuous cleavage that has been kept on the boil on account of the Kashmir dispute. It is well known that the contemporary ideologues of Hindu nationalism have viewed the approximately 120 million Muslims residing in India as the enemy within, and the Muslims living in Pakistan as the enemy without, and that they orchestrated the demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992 in affirmation of an alleged Hindu cultural unity and identity. At another level and context, that of academic commentary, some of the prominent recent texts that focus on Hindu Nationalism—for example, works authored by Jaffrelot, Hansen, Van der Veer, Lise McKean3—entail discussion of the Hindu-Muslim divide. Or if others focus on political violence and riots, they also foreground HinduMuslim clashes as the primary episodes to consider—e.g., Sudhir Kakar’s The Colors of Violence deals exclusively with Hindu-Muslim antagonism in Hyderabad city, and so do large parts of Paul Brass’s Theft of an Idol, especially the violence that occurred in Kanpur city in 1990. Much of Asghar Ali Engineer’s writings also concentrate on HinduMuslim confrontations.4 The most recent in this genre is Ashutosh Varshney’s attempt to provide a causal analysis of the variance in Hindu-Muslim riots in three pairs of cities.5 Scholars concerned with ethnic/ethno-nationalist conflicts in South Asia as a region have yet adequately to deal with some comparative issues both temporal and spatial. First, with regard to Hindu-Muslim antagonism, how far back in time have they occurred? Marc Gaborieau has asserted that there is a long literary legacy ranging from AlBeruni in the 11th century to Jinnah in the twentieth expressing sentiments of opposition and difference between Hindus and Muslims.6 Others have referred to a long “cultural memory” and remembrance, how continuous and consistent it is not clear, of clashes between

3 Jaffrelot. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. op. cit.; Thomas Bloom Hansen. The Saffron Wave: Hindu Nationalism and Democracy in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. McKean, 1966. 4 For example, Engineer, 1991. 5 Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, op. cit. The cities are Aligarh and Calicut, Hyderabad and Lucknow, and Ahmedabad and Surat. 6 Gaborieau, 1985.

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Hindus and Muslims. Such characterizations seem to have an affinity with the “primordialist” thesis. The term “primordial” is defined in the dictionary as “existing from the beginning”, “first formed”, and more loosely used in social science literature to denote long established pre-modern ties of “kinship”, “tribalism” and “racial identity”. Sudhir Kakar in Colors of Violence seems to view the Hindu-Muslim enmity as primordial in this sense. There are certain historical viewpoints which see occurrences of Hindu-Muslim “communalism” in pre-British times as predating the “communal divide” coined or exploited by the British.7 Coming to later times, aside from the violence engendered by the Partition and the memories and traumas that ensued, it is significant that, as Varshney has indicated, there are a number of Indian cities which during the period of 1950–1995 (and of course thereafter) have experienced intermittent riot episodes between Hindus and Muslims. Such long term frequency of conflicts in India between Hindus and Muslims is not matched in any other part of South Asia between any two ethnic groups. However, an historian may rightly point out that contextual and motivating issues and circumstances of HinduMuslim conflicts in India may have been different in individual occurrences, and therefore cannot be lumped together. Whatever the long history of intermittent and episodic HinduMuslim urban riots in India, there is no doubt that the years stretching from 1980 to 2002 have experienced Hindu-Muslim violence in frequency and scale unmatched since the Partition of 1947.8 The worst occurrences have been in the quite recent past, notably in the wake of the demolition of the Babri mosque, typified by the horrendous violence unleashed against Muslims in Bombay in December 1992 and January 1993, and in Ahmedabad in 2002.9 This intensification

7

Bayly, 1985, pp. 177–203. The principal Hindu-Muslim riots, which were marked by anti-Muslim bias by the Police, and by the killings and destruction of property, occurred in urban locations such as Moradabad (1980), Biharsharif (1981), Meerut (1982 and 1987) and Delhi (1987). “Commissions of enquiry submitted reports which remained unpublished and were not laid before the legislative assemblies”. Jaffrelot (op. cit. 1996, p. 333). 9 For the Bombay riots see Hansen (op. cit., 2001) and Tambiah, (op. cit., 1996, Chapter 9). For the Ahmedabad riots, see India Today, March-April issues, 2002. 8

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is primarily related to an interrelated complex of developments such as the following. “The Ayodhya dispute” is shorthand for the complicated, confused controversy surrounding the sometimes violent attempts by Hindu nationalists to destroy the mosque called the babri Masjid in Ayodhya, if possible, and to build a Hindu temple devoted to the god Ram (Rama, one of the avatars of Vishnu) in its place. If this was not possible, it was felt, the next best move would be to build a temple to Ram at an adjoining site. In 1984, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the militant wing of the Hindu organizations, began its campaign to have the mosque opened for regular worship by Hindus. The Ayodhya issue, which itself served as a condensed symbol of many criticisms and grievances on the part of the Hindu nationalists against the governments in power, in particular the Congress (I) regime, became the prime electoral issue for the political party of the Hindu nationalists, the BJP, whose leader, L.K. Advani, leapt into prominence as the political challenger of successive prime ministers, notably V.P. Singh, the leader of the Janata Dal Party in 1990, and later Narashima Rao of the Congress (I). Focusing on the Ayodhya issue enormously helped the BJP to achieve electoral success. From a mere two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984, the BJP’s tally rose to 85 in 1989, and two years later it had expanded to become the main opposition, with 120 seats. In 1991, the building of the Ram temple was the main issue, which like an immense umbrella encompassed many others, such as alleged favoritism toward Muslims and the corresponding plight of the Hindu majority, as instanced by the Shah Bano case (1980) and the Rajiv Gandhi government’s decision to allow Muslims to follow their own “personal laws”; the recommendation by the Mandal Commission of affirmative action in favor of the backward classes, which highercaste Hindus found threatening; the violence in the Punjab and the threatened secession by the Sikhs; the violence likewise in Kashmir, exacerbating Hindu-Muslim animosities; the need for a uniform civil code for all Indian citizens; the alleged “pseudo-secularism” of the nation-state fathered by Nehru and perpetuated by Congress (I); the rejuvenation of the nation by making Hindu culture a bulwark against Western secularism, consumerism, and sexual eroticism; the continued corruption of the Congress (I) regime and the train of scandals it had spawned. All these grievances were grist for the rhetoric, propaganda, and slogans purveyed on the road to Ayodhya. This com-


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bative rhetoric came to a climax in December 1992, when the Babri mosque was demolished. In answer to the question as to the degree to which the HinduMuslim cleavage and conflict should be taken as the paradigmatic long durée case for understanding other ethnic conflicts in the South Asian region, I would submit the following counter examples: The Hindu-Sikh political violence that came to a boil in North India in the 1980s was a new eruption. In Leveling Crowds10 I have cited Harjot Oberoi as demonstrating that the militant Tat Khalsa in its latest form was one among other Sikh traditions, such as the Sanatan, which in the past had associational and ritual links with Hinduism. Bhindranwale’s fundamentalist militancy aimed against Hindu hegemony as he saw it and his advocacy of Khalistan came to a head only in recent times. In any event, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi (and elsewhere) after the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi were singular, and on the Sikh side organized violence by radical secret fraternities had subsided by the mid-1990s.11 Let me briefly allude to a few other ethno-nationalist conflicts whose origins are recent. In Pakistan the Muhajir-Sindhi conflicts and the Pathan-Bihari clashes in which Muslims were pitted against one another were engendered by issues relating to migration, demographic proportions, control of urban space and electoral competition, etc. These violent clashes peaked in the 1980s. Again, Bal Thackeray’s mobilization of the Shiv Sena on behalf of the advancement of the interests of the Maharashtrian sons of the soil was launched originally in the 1960s against South Indian migrants’ entry into clerical occupations. And later his Shiv Sena joined the Hindu nationalist cause and was vigorously and violently involved in the Bombay riots of 1992 and 199312 which were targeted against Muslims, who first came in numbers from the Deccan and North India in the late 19th century, to central Bombay to work in the cotton mills as weavers and spinners, and lived there in both ethnically mixed and separate neighborhoods. This residential pattern changed as a result of the

10

Tambiah, 1996, op. cit. Oberoi, 1994. See for example Juergensmeyer, 2001. Chapter 5, “Sword of Sikhism”, pp. 84–92. 12 Relevant discussions are, among others, Jaffrelot (op. cit.), Hansen (op. cit.). 11

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1992–93 riots when Muslims fled to and became concentrated in their own majority areas like Nagpada.13 However, there is a sense in which in the mobilization of Shiv Sena, Thackeray was tapping into the military traditions in the Deccan, principally the mythologized glory of Shivaji (1627–1680) who founded the Maratha Kingom, and staged raids against the Mughal Empire. This legacy of the Maratha past “serves today as an important mythical reservoir for virtually all political forces seeking justification in the region’s history”.14 Thackeray fused this Maratha militant regional nationalism with the wider Hindutva RSS-BJP style nationalism at the time of the Aydohya campaign and the subsequent politics of the Maharashtra State. The question is whether the Bombay style Maratha chauvinism is some kind of deeply entrenched animosity focused on Muslims, past and present, or whether it is a generalized xenophobic resentment against all immigrant outsiders who are perceived as threatening Maratha interests and identity: as exemplified by campaigns at different times in the later part of the 20th century, against South Indians, against Muslims, and against Gujaratis. Let me now turn to Sri Lanka, and comment on whether the alleged entrenched Hindu-Muslim cleavage in India and the periodic political violence that it has generated, bears resemblance to recent Sinhalese-Tamil conflicts in Sri Lanka. I have in my writings on Sri Lanka15 submitted that while there is a long tradition of chronicles composed by literati-monks which may be read as asserting a Sinhala Buddhist identity and hegemony over the island, and in tandem antiTamil sentiments, there is also the countervailing evidence in Sinhalese history of streams of migration into the island of a variety of South Indian peoples who together with their religious and cultural practices were beneficiaries of tolerant assimilation and incorporation. The recognition of these processes of Sinhalization and Buddhicization of these peoples should serve as an antidote to the strident Buddhist

13

See Hansen (1999, op. cit., Chapter 6, p. 160ff.). Hansen (op. cit., p. 25). He gives a summary of various twentieth century works on Maratha history. 15 Tambiah, 1992, especially Chapter 13, in which I discuss “Sinhalese Identity and the Legacy of the Past”, and cite a number of sources, and the submissions by an array of scholars on historical memories and processes. 14


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nationalism of recent decades propagetad by certain right-wing elements, who initiated a series of anti-Tamil riots, which in turn produced a violent Tamil resistance and counter-assaults. In any case, many other commentators have also made the judgment that the post-1983 occurrences of Sinhala-Tamil riots, as indeed the earlier 1915 Sinhala-Muslim riots,16 have had their genesis in late 19th century British colonial times, and subsequently more relevantly in the dynamics of post-independence nation-state making in a plural society dominated and driven by majoritarian democratic electoral politics, which subordinate and marginalize minority concerns and voices. It is hoped that the current peace negotiations between the Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim groups will produce a peace settlement according to a federal arrangement. There is a long line of writings, that taking a broadly civilizational approach has opposed the West as a whole to Islam as a whole. To mention a few examples, this contrast goes back to Baron de Montesquieu in his L’Esprit des Lois (Geneva, 1748), and in the last quarter of the 20th century, to Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), and in the 21st century, to M.J. Akbar’s The Shade of Swords, Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity (London: Routledge, 2002); to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), and Gilles Kepel’s Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), and to Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).17 In South Asian history, although India was greatly affected by Islamic penetrations and conquests, as well as enriching cultural infusions and exchanges which reached their climax in the time of the Moghul Empire, there is no correspondingly long literary tradition of contrasting antithetically Muslim and Hindu polities and religious systems. But, especially with the post-1947 Partition enmities between India and Pakistan and the recent upsurge of “Hindu nationalism”, and

16

See Tambiah, 1996 (op. cit., Chapter 3, “The 1915 Sinhala Buddhist-Muslim Riots in Ceylon”, pp. 36–81). 17 See for a review of relevant literature, Clifford Geertz, 2003.

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the heightening of animosities over the control of Jammu and Kashmir, and the devastating riots, following the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, in major Indian cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, there has appeared in certain circles a strand of politically charged rhetoric that alleges a long-term struggle on the subcontinent between the Crescent and the Saffron Robe, a “jihad and a counterjihad”, that would match for persistence and violence the antagonism between the Cross and the Crescent. I submit that while the Hindu-Muslim cleavage on the subcontinent cannot be equated with the longer term Christianity versus Islam cleavage in the West, it has, however, a longer period of discontinuous persistence than the other ethno-nationalist clashes in South Asia I have referred to. Also presently in India there is a rising level of rejection of Muslims as rightful citizens of India among certain segments of the public that was not expressed in such exclusionary terms before. There is also an accompanying strand of militant anxiety regarding the alleged conversion of Hindus to Islam and Christianity. The traumatic event for Hindu nationalists was the conversion to Islam of a thousand members of Schedule Caste status in 1981 at Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu in South India, and the counter-movement to reconvert them to Hinduism, and to uplift their social conditions. “Hinduism under siege” became a rallying cry. Propagandized by activists of militant Hinduism, exemplified by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and on the other side, by militant Muslims, the Hindu-Muslim cleavage in the subcontinent is being assimilated to the grand theme of the “clash of civilizations”, and to the outbreaks of so-called “global terrorism”.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA: THE ‘ONLY GAME IN TOWN’? Luis Roniger Only two decades ago, most Iberoamerican countries embraced democracy and neoliberalism enthusiastically. After suffering long periods of authoritarianism, political and civil unrest, military takeovers and state repression, these societies emerged as most fervent supporters of the democratic credo, in the changed global environment of the post-Cold War. There is nothing surprising in such enthusiastic adoption of representative democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s. Resulting from the global immersion of the region and its self-representation and reflexivity, these societies have been discursively and institutionally biased toward the modern. Since independence in the early nineteenth century, local elites adopted the institutional frameworks of modern constitutionalism, while projecting onto society the visions and future-oriented projects of Illuminism, Liberalism, Positivism and capitalism, challenged by alternative visions, some of which—such as Anarchism or Communism—were too rooted in Western sources and ideas.1 In the late twentieth century, after the traumatic experiences of political polarization and repression, the political and social elites in these societies turned once again to the forefront of universal ideas to pick up those models that would lead their countries into global integration and sustainable growth. The credibility of the external models was buttressed through:

1 Reasons of space preclude developing fully the claim that this is part of a longterm trend of global insertion and connection, which shaped a forward-looking stress on progress and development; and, which generated its own countervailing forces, again related to trends and ideas at the forefront of Western multiple modernities. On this see the contributions in Roniger and Waisman 2002, especially the works by Whitehead, Eisenstadt and Roniger.

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– their appeal to the bright and ambitious; – their academic and public prestige, especially in the centers of power and – learning in the West; – their promise of inclusion; – the weak resistance of étatism and nationalism, no longer seen as hegemonic; – and last, but most importantly, the trend away from collective concerns due to the legacy of human-right violations, at least in countries such as those of the Southern Cone. In this framework, representative democracy was heralded as the harbinger of a new age, to differ from previous waves of democratization, as it resulted from the growing role of social movements and civil society, which were instrumental in both dismantling dictatorial rule and replacing earlier strong étatist trends. Political liberalization was to be combined with policies of structural adjustment, transformation and liberalization in the economic realm, buttressed by the supposed retreat of the states from their former control of the economic domain. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, both representative democracy and the new macro-economic policies were discredited. And while in the global arena the West wrangled with forces spearheaded by religious radicalism and terrorism, adding to the lack of a regulated global order, in Iberoamerica the heralded triumph of democracy and ‘neo-liberalism’ led way to parallel dynamics of erosion of institutional trust and disenchantment. This revealed the resilience of old-new forms of politics, along with various innovative experiences to cope with the malfunctions. These policies have generated an anti‘global’ protest, especially through their impact on indigenous and rural communities and property relations. In some cases, the reforms have effectively undermined rural property. Thus, in addition to the trend sparked in Porto Alegre, there is also the vein stemming from Chiapas, which adds the element of grievances stemming from the heart of the indigenous and peasant populations. For others, these policies have been perceived as threatening rural lifestyles. Whatever the specific case, neoliberalism has been identified with the state, and this has enabled movements such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas or the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil to target the state nationally and internationally, globalizing on a symbolic and organizational

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level their claims over land and, at the same time, over the recognition of cultural identity. These movements of protest reject, or at least express a sense of uneasiness with, policies which reinforce exclusion, huge socioeconomic gaps and marginalization. The open protest is but the tip of an iceberg of large sectors wrangling to understand the failure to meet the dreams heralded by recent market openings. Precisely because of these struggles and in spite of what analysts define as ‘politics of anti-politics’, expressed in calls to get rid of politicians (Caetano, Moulián and Yankelevich 2002), politics remains a central arena and state institutions are still the locus of political articulation and public life. In the last generation authoritarianism has receded throughout Iberoamerica. Democratic hopes and expectations spread to the entire region in the quarter-century since the Ecuadorian and Dominican elections of 1978 (Alcántara 2003). And yet, while democracy has become the “only game in town,” we should still ask in what forms and through which dynamics has it been installed in these societies? In this regard, the trends are contradictory and deserve analysis. They involve some innovative experiences institutionalizing democratic controls at the local scene, but also various forms of neo-populism and neo-clientelism. In this chapter I would like to reflect on the significance of these contemporary trends in one of the regions in which, contrastingly to the Islamic or Chinese societies, the confrontation with Western modernity took the form of countervailing currents derived from within the hegemonic ideas and institutions themselves, that is, in terms of the latter’s own malfunctions and disillusions. Thus, this confrontation turned to be, in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s terms, a clash of multiple modernities, mutually implicated and challenging one another in terms of their unfulfilled visions and global iconic standing. Disenchantment and loss of public trust The most conspicuous element we can identify in the process of routinization of democratic institutions at this stage is the decrease in public trust, which public opinion surveys reflect.2 From the surveys 2

Even if aware of the limitations of public opinion polls, we should recognize they are highly instructive of trends and changes, especially when taken across relatively long time periods and following consistent criteria of data collection.

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by Latinobarómetro for the year 2002 (published in 2003), for example, it appears that even though most of the citizens interviewed supported democracy, preferring it over other forms of government, the rates of support decreased since 1996 in 13 out of 17 countries covered by the survey, with 5 nations showing a very low percentage, in the range of 37 to 45 percent. In this range of the scale in 2002 were Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Paraguay and Guatemala. In 11 out of 17 countries the level of dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the functioning of the democratic system crossed the line of the 50 percent of those surveyed between 1996 and 2002. The parallel trend is that the level of support for authoritarianism has increased in 8 countries between the years 1996 and 2002. This is accompanied by a persistent increase in the popular demand for hard-line policies against criminals. Marginal elements were also traced, even in countries in which the population was strongly in favor of democracy after long periods of authoritarian and military governments, such as the Southern Cone countries. These figures indicate a significant lack of confidence in the democratic system, despite its formal acceptance. Paraguay and Argentina have been extreme cases, with over 90 percent of dissatisfaction in 2002. Mexico was another case of great discontent with democracy: over 80 percent, in a country which started a process of transference of government after a decades-long period of single-party rule, corporatism and clientelist politics. In Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, the disenchantment with the system was around the 60 to 80 percent of the representative samples. Citizens express very low levels of public trust towards politicians and the ‘ruling class’ (Latinobarometro 2003). What are the implications of such public disenchantment? It may be assessed as an expression of failing democratic consolidation. But it may also reflect a trend found elsewhere in mature democracies, which by definition are pluralistic and open to criticism and civilian control. In order to evaluate the significance of these trends, it may be useful to take two parallel lines of analysis: one comparative and the other longitudinal across time. Taking the comparative lead, it is necessary to keep in mind that in the postwar democracies of the so called “trilateral” countries— the USA, Europe and Japan—there has been a constant concern with the ‘crises of democracy,’ at least since the 1970s. Diverse indi-


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cators reflected a deep disappointment with representative democracy, as it was shown already in the germinal report of Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki (1975). The more recent work on the deterioration of public trust by Susan Pharr and Robert Putnam (2000) indicates that this is more than an ephemeral trend in these democracies. Coming back to Iberoamerica, this lead may suggest that the critical attitude of the population may be related to the fact that these democracies managed to become established. Indeed, at least in terms of the formal criteria advanced by Robert Dahl or Adam Przeworski, the longevity of democracies in the region stands out. And, yet, their citizens express low levels of public trust towards politicians and the ruling class. So, perhaps public distrust may not necessarily be a sign of institutional immaturity (See also Uslaner 2003). While we can contextualize the current disappointment being expressed toward democracy, by taking into account the high expectations in the 1980s and 1990s, we should assess whether representative democracy can be sustainable in such a context of widespread disenchantment and loss of confidence in institutions, if these come together with a failure of democratic culture to reach down to the entire society and with a cynical approach toward the supposedly public commitment of political elites? I would like to suggest that is precisely now, when representative democracy turned to be the only game in town—at least in the West—when in some countries coups d’état are launched in the name of democracy and to deepen democracy, and when various forces aim to criticize it in terms of its own rationality and unfulfilled vision, that we should approach analytically this crucial dimension of institutional fragility. Institutional fragility and democratic persistence As emphasized by Eisenstadt, every democracy is fragile (Eisenstadt 1998, 1999b; see also Bobbio 1987). The Iberoamerican systems were especially fragile during the Cold War, when they collapsed under mounting mass mobilizations, guerrilla and paramilitary groups, and military takeovers. It is well known that these trends destabilized civilian rule in the 1960s and 1970s. We should also recognize that such fragility has been reenacted after the restoration of democracy in the current

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wave of democratization and in spite of an internationally propitious framework. To mention just three cases, at the start of the twentyfirst century the Argentinean political system was about to sink, under erosion in the midst of economic disarray; Venezuela entered into a process of acute polarization and economic crisis, losing its political stability; and in Colombia the high rates of violence were a blemish which over-determined the problematic operation of democracy. In the analytical framework of the 1960s and 1970s, we tended to think of fragility as leading to a breakdown. But in the context of the 1990s and 2000s, we should address the concomitant crystallization of both institutional fragility and the persistence of democracy. Paradigmatic is the case of Colombia, a country ridden by violence and pressures derived from the presence of guerrillas, paramilitary forces, drug traffickers, state repression and criminal and social violence. According to local observers, the patterns and traditions of violence have been ‘recorded by fire’ in the flesh and memory of generations of Colombians, becoming one of the most persistent traits encoded in Colombian collective identity and habits. And yet, the political system has stood by democracy and great parts of its elites have shown a strong political will, trying to elaborate institutional mechanisms designated to improve the democratic capabilities of the polity and public administration. Similarly, in the Southern Cone, Brazil and Guatemala, representative democracy corresponds with an endemic institutional fragility in countries pulling out of previous authoritarian rule in the 1980s. In these cases it is precisely under democracy that people have raised questions and expressed their doubts concerning the representative character of their political system. It is also under democracy that criminal and social violence—and in the case of Guatemala also state violence in the 1980s—increased, following closely the liberalization of the public sphere. No wonder that many citizens wondered whether the institutional channels were functioning effectively, and whether they were wide enough, limited, or perhaps too wide in connection to their early expectations. The solution, of course, is neither a return to past authoritarian rule nor the curtailment of civil rights and free public spheres. However, there is no doubt that due to the conditions generated under democracy, considerable sectors of the population expect the security forces to act severely against sectors thought to be threatening the social order, be they criminals or marginal individuals. While


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this demand for harsh measures follows its own logic within the context of social deterioration and economic decline, it constitutes a problem for the newly established democracies as far as civil and political rights are concerned, even if the current systems have professed to condemn the use of repression as carried out by the previous de facto governments. Pooling these cases together, violence emerges as a central concern in terms of combined institutional fragility and viability. Whether related to the political system as in Colombia, where violence crystallized very early on fuelled by party identities, or in countries such as Brazil, where social and criminal violence mounted in relative disconnection from the political system, violence generates a process of amalgamation of identities. Violence cuts off the ties of shared identity between strangers, while replacing them with the illusion of finding security and stability through the construction of an image of the other as an enemy. This process of reconstruction of collective identities predicates exclusion and the adjournment of dialogue (Bowman 2001, Feitlowitz 1998, Touraine 2002). In Iberoamerica such seclusion takes place primarily along class lines and secondarily along ethnic identities. It may trigger a dynamics of “ghettoization” of identities, to use Ralf Dahrendorf ’s term (2003) or of spatial segregation as typical of the mega-cities but also found in rural areas, especially in countries of continental dimensions and long-standing regional seclusion such as Colombia (Rojas de Ferro 1998). As violence persists, it has crucial implications for the institutional vitality of democracy. When segregation occurs and a restrictive sense of collective identity is forged, individuals cling to distrust and exclusion towards the members of other classes, social groups or ethnicities. This is even more pronounced if occurring together with a deterioration of traditional norms and forms of reciprocity and its replacement by high residential mobility, the weakening of ties of locality and connections, the perception of authoritative figures as arbitrary and unexpected, and the perception of the public sphere with suspicion and lack of confidence.3

3

In the last decade, parallel processes have contributed to a fragmentary point of view, among them a decline of old political commitments and the weakening of trade unions (Clark, Lipset and Rempel 1993; Birle 1999).

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Personal security is a public good. The issue of protecting the public goods—maintaining their quality, or at least, compensating for their faults—is transformed into a central problem that affects the political and social agenda of democracy (Roniger 2002). In some of the metropolitan areas of Iberoamerica, such as Caracas or the Greater Buenos Aires area, the issue of public security has reached alarming aspects. Although evident for decades, the growing social gaps have deepened the problem, especially as parts of the middle class and the lower-middle class suffered downward mobility. As resulting from the loss of governance, loss of sociability, loss of normative rule-abiding, growing violence, mendacity and the expansion of the informal sector, some of these cities have become battlefields of crime and survival (Rotker 2002). The line between victims of structural marginality and victimizers is often blurred under such conditions (Mockus and Corzo 2003). Within a context of social complexity, images of uncertainty and despair are generated under these conditions. Supposedly, the more complex society is, the higher the levels of uncertainty and risk, as pointed out by Ulrich Beck (1992) and Zigmunt Bauman (2000) among others. Iberoamerican societies are highly stratified and individuals are sharply separated by class lines and life chances. This, combined with raising expectations of participation, turns sociability into a problematic area through which the willingness of citizens to see themselves as part of society is assessed. This exacerbates a general trend by which, whenever the codes of sociability are disrespected, every interaction carries the risk of turning into violence. Consequently, urban space has fractured and become ‘privatized’, with social groups refraining from entering the neighborhoods of other sectors and classes. Urban deterioration has followed and distrust has become generalized in some of these cities (Espinosa 2003: 1–2). Under these conditions, there is a rising demand for harshly punitive short-term measures rather than structural long-term solutions, as if personal security could be secured through harsher terms of retaliation against criminals. Respect for human rights seems particularly problematic in this framework of such highly divided and fractured settings. Due to such pressures and expectations, democracies have not yet found the way of combining the demand for personal and public security with respect for human rights (Roniger and Sznajder 1999).


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The ‘solution’ becomes a problem when the ethics of impunity is projected into the ranks-and-file of the public security forces. In cases such as sectors of the Argentinean and Mexican police, this leads to abuses, extortion of bribes and extra-legal payments, wrong use of their power and an “easy trigger” tendency, violating civil rights as much as the application of the law. The methods of action used by the forces of order under civil governments have contributed to their generalized distrust among large sectors of the population of these countries, the same sectors which on a declarative level support harsher punishments to build-up a sense of personal security. It is often claimed that the control of product quality can be entrusted to market self-regulation, but such a proposition is harder to sustain in the domain of the control of violence and the promotion of institutional guarantees for personal security. There, the operative balance of institutions has an immediate effect on the image of institutional capability, with consequences on the capacity of attraction of investments and the maintenance of a ‘powerful’ population in the country. In the first plane, we find that none of the Iberoamerican countries with the exception of Chile have made it into the 20 top ranks of the “Global Competitiveness Reports” published by the World Economic Forum. In addition, the lack of institutional guarantees has another, perhaps no less crucial impact: it leads influential sectors to opt out, leaving the country of origin. Since the nineteenth century, two basic forms of escape have crystallized. One is the exile of political oppositions, magnified in the twentieth century by the mass phenomenon of refugees. The second form is the escape of professionals, intellectuals and individuals from all social classes, driven by their lack of confidence in the future of their country of origin. Under democracy, about 500,000 individuals have departed from Iberoamerica yearly, trying to settle down in other countries. Between the years 2000 and 2003 a million and a half people have emigrated from Ecuador. Almost 2 millions have left Brazil, and about 600,000 have left Peru. From Argentina as much as 160,000 individuals migrated annually in this period. From Colombia approximately 1,360,000 people left between 1996 and 2001. Even if it is close to impossible to discern which category corresponds with all the millions of habitants who have left Iberoamerican countries and live abroad at a certain point in time, most likely this phenomenon reflects the loss of vitality of those nations which, instead of being a focus of

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attraction, are becoming, at least in the short and intermediate term, centers of expulsion of part of their own population. The fundamental problem strikes roots in institutional fragility, which brings us to rethink the basic boundaries and the operative dilemmas of democracy, analyzing them beyond the formal plane. The key issue in this connection is whether democratic institutions can thrive by becoming the vectors of a sense of a community and polity committed to collective life and public goods, rather than entering into a spiral of recurrent fear, suspicion and violence. Institutional performance and public goods This sense of belonging, which affects institutions and participation, has been increasingly affected by the new modes of articulation between the political-administrative sphere and the markets of goods and services, particularly the ones considered to be public services. Individuals evaluate institutions by their performance, i.e. by their actions, efficacy, style, and more than anything else by their concrete product. The quality of the air we breathe and the state of personal security in the public realm are examples of generalized goods that we cherish and that affect our perception of institutional efficacy. Due to their generalized character, once existing they cannot be denied to those entitled to them, or otherwise; once deteriorated, no one can escape from their corroding effects, independently of the contributions individuals have made towards financing their production, as indicated by Albert Hirschman decades ago (1970: 101). These are complemented by other goods acceded through the markets or consumed in the private sphere, which require public intervention in the form of regulation or the setting of non-market criteria for their differential provision to various groups or individuals. Examples can be found in areas such as education, healthcare quality, electricity and water consumption. Ever since the crisis of the developmentalist capitalist model related to the protectionist and/or populist state, the Latin-American countries have endorsed to different degrees neo-liberal capitalist models. Although we are used to thinking that the shift was enacted due to the international demonstration effect of the policies of Thatcher and Reagan and the pressures exerted by those organizations connected to the so-called Washington consensus, we should keep in mind that


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in Iberoamerica this was preceded by the implementation of the Plan Ladrillo in 1975 by the government of General Pinochet in Chile (Fontaine Aldunte 1988; Delano and Traslavina 1989).4 Whatever the details of this transformation, we must realize that a profound change has taken place in the collective imagination regarding the role of the state and its relations with the markets. First, the state is perceived as part of the problem of lack of development and not as a part of the solution to the problem. While, in fact, states continue to perform many roles, by the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the present one, the idea of the withdrawal of the state and the self-regulation of the markets prevails in the social imagination. The change initiated over the past few decades heralded the possibility of depolitization of the economic realm, even though the new view is no less ideological than the former, since it prioritizes the realm of economics almost as a matter faith, i.e. as part of the projection of some worldview that I would define as “market fundamentalism.” This is how, differently from the past in some countries and in others as a possibility for the near future, particular issues could be addressed as discrete problems without being immediately politicized, as was the case in the past. The negative side of this trend is that economic decisions can be secluded so as to be treated by experts, and are not perceived as tending to be open to public debate. This can imply, as mentioned above, the political difficulty of delineating alternatives and debating them publicly. According to Martin Hoppenhayn of the CEPAL, The good thing is not letting any specific problem to spread . . . [But] a relationship between politics and economy is created, in which the economy is so powerful, so structural and so rooted, that it is not merely an ideology transmitted by discourse, but it has been incorporated in daily behaviors. It is an ‘incarnated ideology’. Therefore,

4 Experiences cannot be reproduced, even in countries with similar institutional dynamics. The local anchoring of change is crucial. In Chile the change of policy was adopted by a highly authoritarian and repressive government. In spite of the social price demanded, Pinochet’s government was able to overcome the crisis of the early 1980s and managed to transfer its institutional model during the transition to democracy. In Argentina, in a formal democratic framework, many of the changes were introduced by presidential decree, against a background of disarticulation of the opposition and the widespread fears of the population about the perils of hyperinflation, as experienced in the late 1980s.

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luis roniger politics and politicians or at least some of them have to make a tremendous effort in order to stop the tendency to make politics merely instrumental and technocratic. This is an effort that in some way is meant to fail, but on the other hand it must be done in order to generate a certain resistance against the total technocratization. (Hoppenhayn 2000)

This has had various consequences for the provision of public services and goods. There are consequences related to state responsibility and others, which are related to the changing relationship of the population with the political system and with the public spheres. In a certain way, whatever occurs in one of these realms affects the others. The idea that the state left behind the central role which it played in the era of protectionism, affects in the first place the state’s responsibility to guarantee the quality of public goods and intervene in cases of market failure. These aspects are articulated in the public sphere, through expressed confidence in the institutional channels and guaranties for the regulation of services and markets, the possibility of access to public education and healthcare, or the provision of security, running water and pollution control as public goods. In many cases, consumers have been unable to appeal to institutional channels when they encountered widespread problems in their reliance on market mechanisms. For example, in Argentina in the 1990s there were numerous incidents of gastric problems and hospitalization, the consequence of consuming unhealthy products. In countries with normative codes and appropriated institutional channels of appeal, like the USA or Western Europe, such incidents would generate a judicial prosecution and a demand for monetary compensation. In Iberoamerica, at the most, those involved lamented the case, and in other cases neither that would happen, it just ended with a generous smile. The institutional frameworks often failed to sustain the bond of trust between costumer and vendor, that once disavowed, could be taken to superior instances for adjudication. If such effective protection of consumers existed, the affected party could opt to bring the claim into relief, which beyond the specific merits of the case, would have wider implications in terms of fiduciary trust. That is, the effect of repairing the damage if the case warranted it and, what is even more important for the public sphere, an ethics of market responsibility sustained whenever consumers realize their expectations of market fairness have not been deceived. Whenever this is not possible, expectations of impunity are con-


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solidated. In important essays, the late Argentinean sociologist Carlos Nino and the Colombian analyst John Sudarsky have analyzed the devastating consequences of this for the public confidence in both markets and institutions supposedly charged with regulating such cases of malfunction of mercantile and associative transactions (Nino 1992, Sudarsky 1988). The problem is not confined to the national borders, but rather has international implications as well. States cannot ignore their duty to guarantee the control of quality of products and services used by their population without running the risk of losing credibility and the capacity of their firms to enter markets abroad. The impact of the change is even more conspicuous in the privatized companies and their provision of what were formerly conceived as public services. Privatization was destined to confront the fiscal problems and the external debt, and to gather funds for the public companies, halting the pressure exerted by the debt and thus obtain their refinancing (Ramamurti 1992, Glade 1995: 96–98). Referring to the case of Argentina, Oscar Oszlak observed that In the first period, the privatizations had a very high support. The right climate was created, there were talks about all types of corruption in the public companies, from people who took bribes for any repair to the entire system of purchase and supply of the companies. Supported by things that indeed happened, the campaign that was initiated in those years had an enormous public consent. Nowadays the surveys show a high level of dissatisfaction among the customers of the services, due to the high tariffs, problems in the scope of services. Surveys show more than 50 percent of dissatisfaction with the results of privatization (Oszlak 2000).

Once they were carried out, the gap between the expectations of public benefit and the opaque and sometimes little effective way in which many privatizations were done created public discontent. Every process of privatization touches upon accountability, regulation and policy results. The urgency and mode by which privatizations were sometimes carried out implied some serious faults in the subsequent regulation of the functioning and provision of the privatized services. Outstanding in this respect were the early privatizations in Argentina, done irrespective of procedures and creating what many saw as conditions for corruption and scandals that reached top government officials, their associates and families. This also affected the issue of equality and access to services and goods related

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to the so called “third-generation rights,” e.g., healthcare and education. Peter Knapp and his associates, among others, have indicated the importance of these realms, stating that there is a level of inequality beyond which the ideals of basic equal opportunities, social equality and inclusive community are transformed into a vacuous claim (Knapp et al. 1996: 202; see also Chalmers et al. 1997 and Kliksberg 2000). Dealing with these aspects of institutional performance and malfunctioning turns crucial for public trust, as it is central to the public perception of an effective functioning of institutions and the formation of a view of the political and administrative leadership that is committed to the collective well-being of the population in an effective manner. Politics and representation Turning to the political realm we need to focus on representation and representation, democracy’s sine qua non. No matter what definition we follow—whether Dahl’s concept of polyarchy, Lord Dahrendorf ’s “pacific regulation of socio-economic conflicts,” or Adam Przeworski’s definition of representative democracy as “the system in which political parties lose elections”—the core of democracy refers to its systemic and normative regulation of competition for power. Its inner logic is built upon a shared commitment not to stop the ever-renewed competition following short-term political triumphs over adversaries. As such, the comparative advantage of the democratic political system vis-à-vis its late alternatives (namely, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism) has been its built-in flexibility for incorporating new demands and interests by groups and political movements. One of the most basic conditions for such perpetuation is the existence of channels of open representation. Studies concerning representation emphasize the aspect of formal structure of the electoral systems, expecting representation by political parties to express social pluralism. They also conceive that the parliamentary organs are those charged with holding a serious and informed debate over the actual and future alternatives, as part of policy formation process. According to these views, power-holders are supposed to take decisions in a calibrated way, being fully informed and able to assess information rationally, combining discrete interests


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with the common well-being. To what extent do Iberoamerican systems function according to design and model expectations? Elections seem to function well in the region. Manuel Alcántara (2003) mentions that out of the nearly 100 electoral acts conducted since 1978, only in four cases there were indications of impropriety. And yet disenchantment with the politicians is rife, both in settings where clientelism remains widespread and in those settings less prone to be pervaded by it. The problem is reflected in the discredit of traditional party politics and the rise of ballot absenteeism and nonconfidence votes. Even in Colombia, where, compared to other countries in Iberoamerica, party identification was very strong and volatility in the behavior of politicians was smaller than say Brazil, in the 1990s one could perceive a slight increase in electoral absenteeism and non-confidence vote, reflecting the public’s apathy towards its representative institutions. Democracy cannot survive without ensuring institutional channels of representation and participation, whether through political parties or alternative channels. To put it differently, the expression of different interests must be articulated normatively, since otherwise democracy will be drained. The question is how to implement those norms— predicated constitutionally and legally—without reducing the flexibility of the democratic system of renewing itself by incorporating new demands and interests. In every democracy, the pluralism at the basis of representation is in tension with the constitutional elements that express certain common vision of common goals and interests, well beyond the mere discrete interests of particular social sectors. This is why even those individuals and groups that may gain in the short-term from policies benefiting their particular interests, can be unsatisfied with the overall performance of the system. Two parallel aspects are crucial for evaluating the systemic capabilities of democracy. First, there is the general obligation to abide by the normative framework of democracy; and second, the combination between the balance of interests and the sense of confidence and will to live in that society, especially in an era of open frontiers and global horizons. The weakest point of democracy in the region seems to be the relationship between governance and public accountability (O’Donnell 1994, 1998; Alcántara 2003). Historically, these democracies maintained a gap between the formal and rhetorical level and the practical level of operation of politics and governance. Ever since their

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initiation as independent states, it is possible to note such gaps between those principles aimed to generate systemic legitimacy—for example, the division of powers, parliamentary representation, constitutionalism, and the entrenched legalism—and the mechanisms aimed to ensure the aggregation of interests and the elaboration of consensus, mechanisms such as presidential executivism, authoritarianism and clientelism. In accountability I would like to stress its element of inner motivation to keep a public mission rather than merely the administrative review of conduct or the rhetoric of the public good. The essential thing in this respect is to generate and generalize a personal motivation towards the public well-being. This view does not imply the search for a communitarian vision and neither the subordination to an authoritarian will, but the building of public goodwill. Without governance, there is a sense of widespread loss of public trust and disillusion. Under such conditions, public commitment cannot be generated and the personal interests become prioritized to public concerns, without being balanced by a certain vision—of course, pluralistic—of collectivity. The combination of representation with governance and public commitment in terms of some shared vision of the public good is important. In the past few years Venezuela seems to have lost that shared vision and has witnessed political crises and urban and economic deterioration as a result. Contrastingly, after being exhausted by violence, Colombia seems to have reached the point of recovery, on the basis of initiatives made by its most dynamic elites, which have a profound vision of a democratic public co-existence, as shown in the last three administrations of the capital city of Bogotá, a trend that will probably continue under the new mayor, elected in October 2003. Neo-clientelism and neo-populism In this connection one of the most striking developments of recent years in Iberoamerica is the emergence of old-new forms of populism and clientelism. Regarding ‘neo-clientelism’ I shall be brief, as I discuss it elsewhere (Roniger 2002). Historian Richard Graham characterized clientelism as an action-set built upon the principle of “take there, give here,” enabling clients and patrons to benefit from each other’s support as they play in parallel at different levels of


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political, social and administrative articulation (Graham 1997). Clientelism involves asymmetric but mutually beneficial relationships of power and exchange—a non-universalistic quid pro quo between individuals or groups of unequal standing. It implies mediated and selective access to resources and markets from which others are normally excluded. Perhaps it is not surprising that, under the changing macroeconomic policies and the reality of poverty in which 200 out of the 516 millions of habitants of the region exist, clientelism has reappeared, despite the predictions of modernization theories, which forecasted its decline. What is striking is the transformation of its forms, which become intertwined with civil society and the new discourses of democratic participation and representation. As the new social movements revolutionalize politics, establishing alternative discursive arenas, challenging dominant practices and achieving at the very least a measure of symbolic power, new constituencies committed to the ideal of rights emerge (Alvarez et al. 1998). This in itself does not eliminate reliance on clientelism, yet it reshapes the terms in which relationships are expressed, as well as the tactics employed by those using them, from ‘favors’ in a patrimonial sense to public services that clienteles demand as their own right. To quote from an analysis of this phenomenon in the Brazilian urban landscape by Robert Gay, in Brazil and probably in other settings as well, clientelism seems increasingly to be a means for pursuing the delivery of collective as opposed to individual goods. This means that political clienteles are less likely to assume the form of loose clusters of independently negotiated dyads than organizations, communities or even whole regions that fashion relationships or reach understandings with politicians, public officials and administrations. In other words, contemporary clientelism exhibits both hierarchical and relational elements and elements of collective organization and identity (Gay 1998: 14).

Despite their differences, in most cases of clientelism one can trace, in one way or another, such networks are related to the problem hereby discussed, of disjuncture between principles and practice in the political level, clientelism being only one of the major modes of managing access to power by building networks of supporters and followings. Another major trend since the 1980s is the re-emergence of populism, which challenges representative democracy from within, in major parts and sectors of these societies, and prompts rethinking the

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workings of the mechanisms of representation in these democracies. In both the more traditional societies (e.g. Bolivia) and in the more mobilized polities (e.g. Chile), leaders have emerged, who—relying symbolically on a popular or even anti-establishment message—have launched promises of immediate solutions to veteran and unsolved problems. Some of them, like Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela, are rather personalistic and have forwarded an anti-neoliberal program and rhetoric. Others, such as the mayor of Las Condes and 1999 presidential candidate of the UDI, Joaquín Lavín, have based their support on rightist agendas, while still relying on a strong popular basis and rhetoric. Another example of an anti-neoliberal populist was president Alan García of Peru, while presidents Carlos Menem (Argentina), Alberto Fujimori (Peru) and Fernando Collor de Mello (Brazil) were supporters of the globalizing model of economic development. Indeed, Michael Conniff—editor of two major books on populism in Iberoamerica, one in the 1970s and the other in the 1990s—evaluates that, with the exception of Hugo Chávez, the wave of populist leaders of the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by their exposure to the international arena, their mastering of ‘global talk’ and their ability to pose themselves as the embodiment of the new global trends, including the use of political marketing as part of their strategy of being in touch with the ‘people.’5 What is involved in this new wave of populism, which is increasingly identified in the literature as “neo-populism?” What does it tell about the workings of these polities, which have enthusiastically endorsed the combined models of democracy and free market and yet are ridden with a generalized sense of disenchantment? A most evident trait of most contemporary instances of neopopulism is its leader-people nexus, with the leader claiming to be the true voice of the democratic sovereign and locus of legitimacy: the ‘people.’ This is reflected in the attempt to launch an antiestablishment alternative from within the political center. Reflecting the widespread distrust of traditional politicians, many of the populist leaders portray themselves as expressing the will to get rid of the 5 I shall stress that many statesmen in Iberoamerica are not populist. Alfonsín in Argentina and Sarney in Brazil, who supported the old vision of the protectionist state, while launching the process of redemocratization in the 1980s, did not lead a populist strategy. And neither were later presidents as Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil, Jorge Battle in Uruguay, Frei or Ricardo Lagos in Chile, whose policies embraced many of the principles of the so called neo-liberal model.


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old forms of elitist and uncommitted politics. Rather than merely supporting the idea of retreat of the state, they reconstruct the latter within the terms of a promise of reform promulgated by the executive leader, well above the formalities of representative democracy. Another major characteristic is the attempt to recreate a modernist certainty in an era of uncertainties. Whereas in the global arena post-modernism legitimizes the presence of multiple perspectives (asserting that truth assertions are fundamentally “victories in argument” rather than an accurate representation of reality) and multiculturalism breaks the homogenous cultural program of the nation-state,6 neo-populism holds the promise of recreation of a certainty, reflected in rhetoric and speech that at times is as totalistic as decades ago— even if far from totalitarian—and sometimes even embedded in religious truth. Often, there is an attempt to recreate the collective identity of the nation. The vision of the neo-populist leaders is that they defend the integrity and spirit of the people. Whereas in the past, the enemy was the US and its internal supporters, nowadays the terms shift mostly to the internal arena, but the vision is at times as Manichean as in the past. Probably the most outspoken in this has been Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, who portrayed himself as the “avenger of people”, leading a Bolivarian Revolution against the ‘partitocratic oligarchy’ entrenched in the institutions. Resulting from this is a re-foundational republican aspiration, which found its way into the reformed Constitution of 1999. There is much in these phenomena which resembles the populism of the 1940s and 1950s and yet many other features are new, which possibly justify their identification as part of neo-populism. In common with the old forms of populism in the region, the current forms evince the following components: – the leader-masses bond, rooted not only in cognitive-rational elements but in emotive bond, buttressed by a certain style of addressing the masses, directed to the most popular sectors in the population;

6 In the last decade Iberoamerica has moved strongly in this direction, albeit not without conflicts. Yet, the shift is strongly reflected constitutionally and culturally in many countries, from Peru to Brazil and from Bolivia to Guatemala, both in terms of ethnic and linguistic diversity and to a lesser extent in terms of gender. See Alvarez et al. 1998; Braig 1999.

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– a permanent call to plebiscitary-like decisions. There is a symbolic empowerment of popular sectors through these calls to ‘the people’ instead of citizenship, thus obviating horizontal and vertical accountability; – the correlate appropriation of voice by the leader, reinforcing what O’Donnell defined as ‘delegative democracy;’ – an emphasis on executive power overriding the division of powers, and often leading to ‘legislation by decree;’ – consequently, a “politics of anti-politics”: the weakening of some of the basic institutions of representative democracy or their manipulation; this reflects and buttresses a more general trend, in which political parties cease to be the promoters and mediators of utopia, in the terms of Manuel Alcantara Sáenz; – the reliance on multi-class support and concomitantly the tendency to detachment from coherent, clear-cut ideologies (this does not mean ideologization is lacking); – last but not least, it addresses those social forces beaten harshly by the new macro-economic policies of structural adjustment and privatization, and projects promises of existential solutions, even when in practice most of them do not disengage from the systemic adherence to free market policies. These basic components are problematized by other features, which are new when compared to the old forms of populism: – they are attuned to the global spin of criticism of the political class. Once the system failed to sustain its previous standards of étatist patronage, this triggered the erosion of trust in the political class, even where representative democracy seemed to have been stabilized, as in the case of one of the most enduring democracies of the subcontinent, Venezuela, which lived through a long period of multiparty and bi-party democratic stability (1958–73 and 1973–93 respectively); – the new leaders have had global exposure and are keen to adopt ‘global talk’ about civil society, democracy, free markets, and global integration; – whereas the old populism suggested a program of economic independence, shaped by the old model of autarkic capitalism analyzed by Carlos Waisman, most neo-populist projects abide by the logic of integration into global and regional markets; – they play in a changed political scenario in which franchise has


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possibly reached its maximum scope, in contrast with the old populist leaders, which rode into power through the enlargement of political and civil rights; they use the most modern techniques of mass media and political marketing for recreating the imagined bond between the leader and the people. In parallel, they refrain from some of the old forms of corporatist organization of mobilized support; yet, they rely on all sorts of networks stemming from civil society. As opposed to the old scholarly interpretation of Gino Germani and others of populism striving among a disorganized mass population, the new forms of populism seem to rely both on associations and NGOs, as well as on a myriad of brokers, patron-brokers and activists, who organize and mediate between local populations, the populist leaders and the public administration; that is, they do not adopt the old authoritarian modes of control and consequently can find themselves removed from power through popular mobilizations and coups d’état aimed at renewing democracy as in Ecuador in 1997 and 2000, or through impeachment, as in the case of Brazil in 1992; most of them seem to acknowledge the limits of their power and do not attempt—save very rarely—to opt out of the democratic game. They rather claim to be working to “democratize democracy,” which makes sense to many witnessing the huge socioeconomic gaps maintained under democracy.

There are significant variations, not only regarding the stance toward neo-liberal economy, as discussed above, but also in political terms. In relatively high institutionalized polities, the styles described are geared to the creation of what I would call a certain third tier of democratic resonance, as identified and expressed by the leader. A typical case is that of Joaquín Lavín, leading a populism coming from one of the forces that supported Pinochet and who, while personalizing politics, launched policies to mobilize the young, popular, and women populations, through a combination of old and new, that strongly recalls Gianfranco Fini’s political bases of support in Italy. In less institutionalized polities such as Ecuador or Bolivia, the logics of neo-populism become entrenched in the perception of participatory, cum-direct democracy as the ‘true’ democracy. In these societies, substantial sectors recognize an aboriginal ascendance and relate to images of autochthonous models of leadership and communal

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accountability, which differ from the Western models. Accordingly, there are widespread unfulfilled expectations of a more responsive form of doing politics, which under the proper circumstances can derive into street demonstrations and occupations of public space, interpreted as the expression of direct popular democracy. This mounting pressure and popular mobilization has been rather effective in recent years in bringing leaders on the country-wide scene to opt out from power. Thus, in Ecuador mass mobilization led to coups d’état and the removal of presidents Bucaram and Mahuad in 1997 and 2000 respectively. In Bolivia the continuous public presence and protest by Indians in September–October 2003 contributed to bringing down a national president who despite his rhetoric of participation led a program of privatizations and closer economic ties with the US and Chile. The tensions inherent in this logic of doing politics are obvious. First there is a constant threat to the institutionalization of representative democracy in its minimalist version. Second it reflects the persistence of unfulfilled countervailing visions of democracy. Third, there is the projection anew of the old organicist ideas of the ‘people’ as sovereign and the republican commitment to their entitlement to social justice, which stands in contradiction with the logics of the free market, equally endorsed and often burdened by political corruption. That is, some visions of communitarian and participatory democracy can be expected to persist, buttressed by recurrent outbursts of occupation of public space, which the combination of populist rhetoric and ineffective polices recreate into the center of the public sphere. Participatory democratic practices The G-7 societies have been able to maintain high levels of voluntary participation in local politics and organizations out of civil society. Sydney Tarrow has traced some of the characteristics of this profound transformation: It brings activists further into the realms of tolerated and prescribed politics and makes possible relations of working trust with public officials. It has produced hybrid forms of behavior that cross the boundaries of the polity and link grass-root activists to public interest groups, parties, and public officials. On the one hand, these new forms of activism


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are unlikely to sustain high levels of confidence in government, and they may discourage public trust by demonstrating the inadequacy of governmental performance. On the other hand, they do not create enduring negative subcultures. Their variable form and shifting organizations, their tendency to produce rapid and rapidly liquidated coalitions, and their focus on issues of short- and medium-term issues rather than fully fledged ideologies do not produce enduring membership commitments or deeply held loyalties outside the polity (Tarrow 2000: 289).

Various macro-sociological factors have led to a deep change in that direction: the erosion of the centralizing models of the authoritarian and communist countries, the diffusion of the participatory model of civil society in the tradition identified by De Tocqueville in the USA and the erosion of the idea of the nation-state in its homogenizing and dominative character. All these have contributed to generating the conditions for the legitimacy of a new participatory pluralism. In this new format, citizens are conceived as able to disagree democratically, to develop public will and to acquire skills that once were limited to the traditional political and administrative elites. In this pattern, typical of the affluent societies of the West, citizens have freefloating resources that can be invested in the public arena, through organizational impetus and associational networks for example. Both from the perspective of republicanism and in procedural terms, this trend is expected to reinforce democracy. From a republican perspective, the political community perceives itself as autogovernable, which in complex and pluralistic societies forces negotiations over public programs and shared normative frameworks. From the perspective of procedural democracy, participation is fundamental too, facilitating the structuring of deliberative models, be they those of Jürgen Habermas, built upon rational and legal procedures of deliberation and formation of public opinion, or on a model like that of John Dewey, for social cooperation and the practical establishment of reflexive and autonomous initiatives, in the tradition of civil society. In Iberoamerica many sectors lack such free-floating resources. The existential realities of widespread poverty, unemployment or partial employment, urban and rural violence reinforce the logics of exclusion. We witness in these societies a double process of dualization, first between stronger and weaker socio-economic groups that somehow function as civil societies at different levels—through social and

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political articulation and through protest. The second process of dualization separates the above groups, which somehow relate to the state, and those marginal groups that live outside organized society, beyond the formal economy and outside the control of the state, be it positively or negatively phrased (Sznajder and Roniger 2003). In this kind of democracy it is typical for large sectors to be sidelined, with little autonomous access to goods and services, and lack a capacity to fully participate in the public spheres due to their marginal placement at the margins of society, economy, and politics. In parallel, other sectors continue to have a mediated access to markets of goods and services and to use the clientelist networks to connect to the political system and the public administration. And yet, there is a long tradition of parallel attempts to generate such participatory social and political capital, mostly futile in the past and recently crowned with success. Practices such as the electoral control in Mexico or the model of participatory budgeting— in Brazilian cities such as Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte—are exemplary. In Brazil, following the reform of the Constitution, there has been a process of institutional innovation based upon a tripartite structure that involved public administrators together with professionals and local delegates representing civil society, in the process of provision of public services, tying the translation of macro policies to the daily practice of making decisions over the nature of services, their costs and the quality of their provision. In Brazil, one could witness in the impoverished and dry hinterland of Ceará, one of the poorest settings of the Northeast, a new willingness to contribute resources to public projects, in addition to the funds delivered from the federal and state levels, as a result of these changes in the articulation of local participation in decision-making (fieldwork, March–April 2002). According to researchers of Iberoamerica, the recent experiences suggest an alternative to the elitist theories of democracy. According to the elitist theories, democracy will exist wherever there will be a fair political game of recurring competition for power, structured through electoral decisions. The origins of such minimalist definition— focusing on the selection of political leadership and the election of government—can be traced to the inter-war period in Europe, when wide mass mobilizations disrupted the political systems of the first wave of democratization. Something similar occurred at the end of Cold War, when violence on the right and the left disarticulated


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many of the democratic systems of the Third World, through the wave of protests, manifestations and mass mobilizations, which led to the crystallization of guerrilla warfare, para-military and state violence. The legacy of such collective experience had its political impact in the form of the wide acceptance of theories that, like Dahl’s, looked for the minimal parameters of operation and survival of democracy. In contrast, authors such as Boaventura de Santos, Leonardo Avitzer, Adriana Delgado and, beyond the American continent, Chantall Mouffe as well, have suggested that these experiences should prompt a wider view of the relations between democracy and the formation of a public space in which citizens participate as equals and public decisions are taken through the open discussion of political projects. This alternative approach puts emphasis on practices taking shape in the public sphere, where rulers and citizens meet and have a mutual influence on each other. It suggests viewing democracy as a series of social practices, which can be deepened through citizenship participation: practices such as the electoral control in Mexico, the committees of communal action in Colombia and the participatory budgeting and tripartite commissions of health and education in Brazil. In the latter, clear-cut and transparent criteria for budget transference are determined in advance, aimed at reducing the misuse of public monies, combined with criteria of subsidiarity that contemplate the differential needs of the various regions, provinces and states. This pattern is particularly important for the federal countries of the region. Through steady participation and deliberation, these avenues of citizen involvement emerge as a major means for intensifying democracy, especially in those societies in which there are strong pressures for participation and, on the other hand, exclusion, remnants of elitism and widespread public distrust, especially among the popular classes. By invigorating democratic practices at the local level, the destabilizing potential of limited democracy and the anarchic disarticulation of the public sphere could be defused. These initiatives could overturn the tendency of erosion of public confidence in representative democracy while taking advantage of the capacity of democracy— over alternative political systems—to address pluralism, dynamically incorporate new demands and reinforce the constitution of free public spheres. In the context of Iberoamerica these initiatives may perhaps also reduce the populist and clientelistic trends, still in existence.

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Even though the work of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt has raised our awareness to the crystallization of not one but multiple models of modernity, research still tends intuitively to look for the ideal institutional format which will be the definitive solution for the problems of democracy. Related to this intuitive tendency, political marketing has become fashionable, orienting the use of media strategies as political weapons for identifying preferences, orienting public opinion and capturing votes. And yet, even if one recognizes their importance, the emphasis on the ways we do politics cannot obviate dealing with differences in the workings of public institutions. In order to invigorate democracy, political marketing and media strategies are insufficient guidelines. The search after the ideal model has led many to think, for example, that some democracies are successful due to their electoral format, which seems to be better than others, or that the issue of optimal representation can be formally resolved by an intelligent use of the mass media or a referendum. We should keep in mind that the problem of development of representative democracy cannot be dissociated from the nourishing of shared ideas regarding the public good, elaborated democratically in various ways in different societies, and from the generation of social capital, vital for institutional transformations. Accordingly, this work has analyzed some innovative experiences for Iberoamerica, aiming at the institutionalization of democratic controls in the local scene, but also the phenomena of neo-clientelism and neo-populism. These two trends seem almost contradictory and yet both indicate the need to address current problems in the current workings of representative democracy and in the connection between the public agenda and the markets. Beyond its concrete focus, this analysis has made a claim on the importance of rethinking the public realm in the widest possible terms, that is, as a focus for the forging of collective identity, the recreation of sociability and the building of a shared sense of future. In practical terms, for democracies overloaded with poverty, unemployment and exclusion, this means that work has to be done to improve public performance and efficacy, to promote and safeguard public goods and, in parallel, to intensify the equation of growth, redistribution and inclusion instead of the inverse equation of stag-


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nation (recession or decline), widening socioeconomic gaps and exclusion. The latter is crucial in societies such as those of Iberoamerica, overload with pressures derived from their huge socioeconomic gaps combined with raising expectations of democratic voice and participation, which are often manipulated by populist rhetoric and clientelistic intercession.

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE EUROPEAN IDENTITY Alberto Martinelli The problem of a distinctive European identity is both an interesting research question and a politically relevant issue. It is a complex and controversial research question for two main reasons: first, Europe has traditionally been an open and multiple world, with several cultural identities, which has constantly put into question its common beliefs and unifying ties, a kind of great social laboratory where unity and multiplicity have interacted in continuous tension; as a result, some scholars consider it more appropriate to speak of European identities, in the plural. Second, the culture of Europe has become to a large extent the culture of modernity and various basic components of the European identity have been globally diffused, making it difficult, according to some other scholars, to identify what is today specifically European. As far as the first argument is concerned, I will argue that the variety of cultural codes and paths toward and through modernity of the European peoples does not exclude the existence of a genetic core of specific values and attitudes, which have been distinctive European traits since ancient times, but with the advent of modernity crystallized into a specific cultural and institutional setting, fostering bold institutional innovations. As far the second argument is concerned, I maintain that recognizing that modernity has become a common global condition (Wittrock, 2000) and that a set of modern technological, economic and political institutions of Western European origin have become diffused across the globe, does not imply the view that modernization, once activated, moves inescapably toward establishing a certain type of mental outlook (scientific rationalism, pragmatic instrumentalism, secularism), or that certain types of institutional order (popular government, bureaucratic administration, market-driven industrial economy) exist irrespective of the culture and politics of a given place; rather, what we are witnessing is the growth of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt,

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2000b) or varieties of modernity, through the continuous interpretation, reinterpretation and transformation of the modern project. European identity is also a key political issue. There is widespread criticism that the European Union is today a limited project, since the economic integration of Europe has not been transformed by a parallel cultural integration into a true political union. It is argued that a deficit of cultural integration exists because the communitarian process is based on economic rationality rather than on a feeling of common belonging and that a shift from interest politics to identity politics is needed. Actually, the current construction of the European Union—as a process of building a loosely coupled, open system through a set of supra-national, supra-state normative institutions— is made possible by a common historical heritage and by shared cultural attitudes. The formation of a united Europe developed from the desire to put an end to centuries-long “European civil wars” and from the recognition of common economic interests for the peoples of Europe, and grew through the development of a unified European market where persons, capitals, goods and services can move freely; but the cultural dimension has also been, and remains, present in the process of European integration, and a common European identity is not opposed to, but linked with, common interests. Shared values and cultural attitudes, however, should be better specified and strengthened in order to define a clear and distinct European identity. The drafting of the European constitution aims at meeting such a need. In the debates that took place during its drafting. the questions were raised whether the building of the European Union—particularly with the admission of former Eastern European communist countries—requires the definition and the affirmation of a distinctive European identity, whether such an identity exists, which are its specific features, and how it can be fostered. In the first draft of the European Constitution, specific reference was made to the tradition of the Enlightenment, but no analogous reference was made either to Christianity or to Greek and Roman antiquity. Subsequently the preference was to eliminate any reference to cultural traditions—although well entrenched in the historical experience of the European peoples—both in order to avoid ideological quarrels and to emphasize the open, multicultural nature of the new Europe. But the question of the specific features of a distinctive European identity is of the utmost importance and a key issue of debate in the European public space.

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In this chapter I aim to contribute to this debate by arguing that: a) there are both several different identities of the European peoples and a European common identity—which can be defined, first of all, as a set of common cultural roots (Greek and Roman antiquity, the Christian religion) and, at deeper level, as a genetic core of specific cultural attitudes, which are organized around the dialectic relationship between rationality and individualism/subjectivity); b) these cultural roots have been distinctive European traits since ancient times, but crystallized into a specific cultural and institutional setting with the advent of modernity, fostering bold institutional innovations through a process of historical learning (science and technology, market-led industrial capitalism, representative democracy, nation-state citizenship); c) the European project is still a modern project; in fact, it is an expression of radical modernity, given modernity’s particular conception of time which defines the modern age as an epoch oriented toward the future, conceived as being novel and better than the present and the past, and given the fact that the modern project is still far from being accomplished (Habermas, 1985); d) a European common identity has not only a common memory to build on, but must be constructed on the future as well; it is the realization of an open-ended project rather than the expression in the passive conservation of past values; and it is actively fostered day-by-day through institutional building (the European Parliament, the euro); e) the European project was founded on the decision to put an end to European civil wars and on the perception of common economic interests, but is made possible by the legacy of specific cultural values and social norms (individual rights, freedom of science, welfare, inter-culturalism); f ) the European project can be defined as the achievement of unity through diversity, denying the old belief that what is different is potentially hostile, and renouncing the construction of a specific identity based on the opposition “us versus them.” A European identity of this kind is not exclusive and may be weaker than traditional national identities, but is more apt to contribute to a democratic form of global governance, in terms of mutual understanding, peaceful relations and multi-layered cooperation.

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alberto martinelli One or many European identities?

Apparently, there is no single European identity, but rather many different European identities—which developed in the history of the European peoples and were formally recognized and fostered in the process of nation building of the European nation-states—together with an array of other sub-national and trans-national ethnic and cultural identities. The multiplicity of cultures which characterized its history has been the source of deep cleavages, violent conflicts, idiosyncratic controversies, and even of many errors and crimes, but it has also proved to be highly capable of assimilation and integration, as well as of creating extraordinary opportunities for scientific and technical development, economic growth and social and cultural innovation. European civilization was characterized by a very high degree of multiplicity and cross-cutting of cultural orientations and structural settings but, at the same time, by a high degree of commitment by centers and periphery alike to common ideals and goals (the most important of which were the tension between the transcendental and the mundane orders and the definition of the individual as an autonomous and responsible entity) (Eisenstadt, 1987). Europe has traditionally been an open and multiple world which has constantly put in question its common beliefs and unifying ties, a kind of great social laboratory where unity and multiplicity have interacted in a continuous tension. As Johannes Weiss states, “the culture of Europe . . . cannot be regarded as a unified culture, as homogeneous, but at best as a kind of ‘stabilized tension’ between deep, indeed antinomian contrasts” (Mongardini 2001, p. 17). The recognition of this European specificity allows us to avoid two opposite and equally unsatisfactory responses to the question whether a European identity exists: on the one hand, the claim to be able to define precisely a pattern of stable and well established cultural elements which are typical only of the European peoples and distinguish them from the rest of the world; on the other, the denial of any common cultural feature and the definition of a European identity only in negative terms—as a permanent conflict and a confused crucible of ethnic, national and local cultures. The identity of Europe is actually made possible by a common cultural heritage which cuts across—in various ways and to varying degrees—the several European ethnos, but can develop only through


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the growth of a European demos, which is defined in terms of shared rights and obligations and which is capable of consolidating the ties of citizenship within freely chosen democratic institutions. The attempt to identify what European identity is today can only take place through the critical reappraisal of the great historical processes which resulted in the formation of modern Europe; through the analysis of the dialectic between change and persistence, and of the alternation of Europe’s openings toward other cultural worlds and closures within its own geographic and ethnic borders; through the study of the sequence of struggles, at first between supra-national entities such as the Pope and the Emperor and national and regional political entities such as the city-republics and the emerging sovereign states, and, later, among the various nation-states for the economic and political hegemony of the continent; through the appraisal of the great cleavages between centre and periphery, state and church, land and cities, bourgeois and workers, in the path toward and through modernity, as they are portrayed in Rokkan’s ‘geo-political map of Europe’ (Rokkan, 1970, 1973). From this kind of historical appraisal it clearly emerges that contemporary Europe is a Europe of difference and diversity and that a primary feature of European identity is the extraordinary complexity of its historical-cultural heritage, where great diversities co-exist in forms which are both conflicting and cooperative, without losing their specificities. The great political wager of the new Europe is that the plurality of different cultures—which for centuries fostered a semipermanent state of local or generalized wars—can now be reconsidered as a common good and a basic resource for the development of a free and prosperous community, harmoniously diversified inside and peacefully open to the outside world. Key features of European identity are the constant dialectic among different and often conflicting Weltanschauungen and the development of a critical mind—that continuously puts into question temporarily hegemonic beliefs and conceptions and that forms the basis of European scientific thought. Recognizing this specific character of the European mind does not however imply denying the existence of some constitutive elements of the European culture, a kind of genetic cultural code which, although constantly modified and very differently declined in historical contingencies and geo-political particularisms, identifies a “European specific.”

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These basic elements can be found in varying degrees and forms in the different parts of a Europe “of varying geometrical order,” which sometimes goes beyond the geographical borders of Europe and at other times stops at the boundary of so-called “Western Europe” which more or less coincides with what was Charlemagne’s empire. These basic elements are of an institutional nature but they are rooted in—and at the same time foster—closely related values, norms, attitudes and languages, which can be identified in the constant tension between subjectivity/individualism and rationalism as both opposing and complementary principles. Let us briefly review these core common cultural and institutional roots of the European peoples. The core cultural and institutional roots Rationalism and individualism/subjectivity as both opposing and complementary principles characterize European history, from Greek philosophy and Roman law to the Judaic and Christian religious traditions, but they crystallize into a specific cultural and institutional setting with the advent of modernity. They express the tension between individual liberty and social organization. As core cultural roots, they contribute to the development of the specific modern attitude which consists in the absence of limits. “European identity is that of a civilisation that has constantly exceeded limits—internal and external— that has freed itself from the bonds, thus creating its own distinctive mark” (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b, p. 134). The portrait of Ulysses in Dante’s Inferno is the appropriate metaphor here. The un-limitedness that defines modernity—and European identity as its place of origin— is primarily evident in the infinite quest for knowledge. A similar view was expressed by Jaspers in the heated discussion about the foundations for the reconstruction of Europe, at the end of the Second World War. He identifies three factors constituting the essence of Europe: liberty, history and science—three factors that know no limit. The first factor, the longing for freedom, is universal but only in Europe has it has developed with full awareness. It means victory over despotism, a sense of justice transformed into concrete institutions, and it fosters among Europeans a constant state of restlessness and ferment. From liberty stems the second factor, the need to understand historical time. True liberty is for Jaspers mostly


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the quest for political freedom within the community, i.e. the development of the individual together with the social world around him. The third factor, science, is also related to liberty insofar as it is defined as the constant effort to arrive at the heart of everything that can be penetrated; knowledge and the love for knowledge makes human beings free, giving them not only the external freedom achieved through the knowledge of nature, but also—and foremost—internal freedom. The quest for knowledge is a distinctive European trait since ancient times, but it is with modernity that it acquires a new impulse because it is freed from the subordination of knowledge to a given religious truth or to a single political end. The incessant quest for knowledge is the product of the critical mind, which has its roots in the Greek philosophical ethos and develops with the Enlightenment’s permanent critique of our historical era. The development of science is linked together with the driving force of capitalism and the massive development of technology, both related in their turn to the belief in continuous progress. European modernity is the age of “Prometheus unleashed,” which corresponds to the absence of ethical and religious limits to the technical dominion of nature. Capitalism is a mode of production based on technical instrumentality and on the maximization of economic rationality for successful competition in the market. European rationalism has manifested itself in a variety of different forms, from Romanesque architecture to Renaissance painting, from the philosophy of Descartes to the music of Bach, from the democratic man of the Enlightenment to the homo economicus of capitalism. It can be defined lato sensu as the capacity of the human mind to know, control and transform nature (according to a conception of the world as an environment that can be molded to the fulfilling of human needs and wants) and as the confidence of human beings in rationally pursuing their own ends and, in the final analysis, being the masters of their own destiny. In its confidence in the power of reason to control and transform nature, European rationalism is the breeding ground of scientific and geographical discoveries and technological and entrepreneurial innovations; it is related to the perception of an absence of limits (as mentioned earlier), to that particular “restlessness” of the European people, as it is portrayed in paradigmatic figures of European literature from Dante’s Ulysses to Goethe’s Faust, and it is exemplified

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in many events of European history—from transcontinental sea voyages to colonial adventures, to the “spirit of the frontier” which is a distinctive trait of the American variant of the European culture. At the same time, reason is conceived as a system of shared rules which makes social coexistence possible. Kant does not write the apology of reason, but enquiries into its limits. The rational mind is strong only if it is conscious of its own limits, does not pretend to know the truth, opens the way to an endless search. In this sense, reason is by definition anti-totalitarian and directly related to individual freedom. Rationalism is closely linked, complementary with, and opposed to, the other core cultural traits of European identity, namely individualism and subjectivity. Individualism has found many different expressions in the time and space of Europe—from Evangelic personalism to the individualism of the free citizens in the late medieval independent republics, from the individual economic actor in the market to the individual rights of the free citizen in modern liberal democracies, and to the reflexive subjectivity of contemporary Europeans. Individualism, like rationalism, has developed in the cultural heritage of European history, but emerged fully only with the advent of modernity. As Polanyi, Gauchet and Baker (among others) have pointed out, the rise of individualism was not only a symptom of the dissolution of the primacy of the community in its traditional religious meaning but also a necessary condition for the discovery of society in strictly secular terms. Not until the ideological primacy of individual interests and passions was postulated could constraints upon those interests be discovered in the operation of an autonomous social and political order subject to its own laws. Individualism is at the root of the principles of liberty and equality which were affirmed by Ius naturalismus (which holds that all human beings are equal insofar as they are endowed with reason), by English political thought and by French and German philosophy of the Enlightenment; they were recognized in the prerogatives of the English Parliament after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and solemnly proclaimed in the American Constitution of 1776 and in the Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789. These principles affirm the inviolable individual rights to life, freedom and the full accomplishment of his/her potentialities. Liberty expresses itself both as negative freedom, i.e. as protection of human rights from the abuses of power, and as positive freedom, i.e. as the


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citizen’s right to participate in the formation of the common will. Equality was first of all defined as equality of the rights and duties of citizenship and citizens’ equality before the law, but it soon became equality of opportunities and life chances as well, thus opening the way to the conceptions of progressive liberalism, social democracy and welfare policies which became integral parts of the political culture of Europe in the twentieth century. To be European means striving to realize both principles of equality and freedom; the struggle over the balance between equality and freedom is a leitmotiv in the history of European political thought (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b). Individualism and subjectivity are of course not identical. There is a tendency to use the former term among scholars who prefer positive accounts of modernity (the societal)—where the individualistic understanding of the self is put alongside the growth of scientific consciousness, the development of a secular outlook, the doctrine of progress, the contractualist understanding of society as a basic characters of modernity; whereas the latter concept is preferred by the supporters of the alternative view of modernity (the cultural), which is critical of middle-class pragmatic calculations, soulless pursuit of money and lack of moral passion, and is on the contrary concerned with the care of the self, spontaneous expression, and authentic experience. In fact, political and economic individualism and aesthetic and moral subjectivity are dimensions of the same principle and this principle is dialectically related to the principle of rationality. They are not at the roots of two alternative types of modernity (the supportive and the critical, the societal and the cultural), but are elements of the same cultural and institutional syndrome. The world of the capitalist entrepreneur is a world of incessant change and deadening routine which provides the proper context for the aesthetics of the self as well. Imagination and reason are not enemies, but rather allies in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist. Both wish to explore and experience everything, without limits. The dialectic relationship between the principle of rationality (with its institutional forms such as market-driven industrial economies, bureaucratically administered states, functionally organized metropolitan cities) and the principle of subjectivity/individualism also manifests itself in the double matrix of change and routine in which the modern self lives. Each of those unforgettable figures of modernity—Marx’s “revolutionary,” Baudelaire’s “dandy,” Nietzsche’s “superman,” Weber’s

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“social scientist,” Simmel’s “stranger,” Musil’s “man without qualities,” and Benjamin’s “flaneur”—is caught and carried in the intoxicating rush of an epochal change and yet finds itself fixed and formulated by a disciplinary system of social roles and functions (Gaonkar, 2001, p. 3). The list (to which I would add Schumpeter’s “entrepreneur”) is strictly European, further proof that the culture of modernity is closely linked with European identity (including the peoples of the “Europe outside Europe”), although to-day it is no longer confined to the West. Rationalism, individualism/subjectivity, the incessant quest for knowledge, innovation and discovery, the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject, the refusal of limits, the principles of liberty and equality of rights and opportunities, represent the core elements of a European identity, nurtured in European historical heritage— first of all in the legacy of Christianity and Greek-Roman antiquity—but fully developed in the civilization of modernity which crystallized first in Western Europe and then expanded to other parts of Europe, to the Americas and throughout the world, giving rise to continuously changing cultural and institutional patterns which constituted different responses to the challenges and possibilities inherent in the core characteristics of the distinct civilization premises of modernity (Eisenstadt, 2001b, Martinelli, 1998, 2003). These cultural values and attitudes fostered and were fostered by a relatively open and autonomous social structure characterized by (1) a multiplicity of centers, (2) a high degree of permeation of the peripheries by the centers and of impingement of the peripheries on the centers, (3) a relatively small degree of overlapping of the boundaries of class, ethnic, religious and political entities and their continuous restructuring, (4) a comparatively high degree of autonomy of groups and strata and their access to the centers of society, (5) a multiplicity of cultural, economic and professional elites, (6) a relatively high degree of social mobility, and (7) a legal system relatively independent from politics and religion, highly autonomous cities (Eisenstadt, 1987). In the civilization of modernity, the values, attitudes and interpretations of the world which crystallized in a distinct cultural program, combined with the development of a set of new institutional formations which were both European-born and spread all over the world, and assumed a variety of forms: the capitalist market and


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firm, the nation-state and the democratic polity, the university and the research academy. Let us briefly look at these above elements: first, European science and technology, i.e. a particular approach to the knowledge of physical and human reality capable of transforming nature for the fulfillment of human wants. The depth of Indian and Chinese religion and philosophy, the richness of Muslim scientific and religious thought, and the advanced astronomic knowledge of Mesopotamia and pre-Colombian America are a few examples which demonstrate that Western knowledge is not exceptional. What is distinctive and specific in European culture is a greater capacity to unite abstract theory and empirical research and, even more importantly, to link together scientific discovery, invention and technological innovation under the constant pressure of either war or commercial competition, as well as a greater ability to design institutions particularly suited to the formation and diffusion of knowledge—from the Italian and French medieval universities to the seventeenth-century British scientific academies, from the nineteenth-century German research universities to the great research laboratories of the present. European modernity was not simply a package of technological and organizational developments; it was intimately linked to a political revolution, and to an equally important transformation of the nature of scholarly and scientific practices and institutions (Wittrock, 2000). Europe has invented and perfected an understanding of science, which has become a global example and role model. The main characteristics of this understanding of science, as it has developed since the Renaissance, are, as Rudolph argues, the recognition of mathematics as the measure of exactness in science, the unity of freedom of scientific enquiry and scientific criticism, and the dependence of empirical knowledge on conceptual reflection (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b). The second element is market-driven industrial capitalism. The governing principle of capitalism is the constant search for the rational maximization of individual utility in order to successfully compete in the market. The efficient combination of the factors of production in the industrial firm and the exchange of goods and services in the self-regulating market slowly expanding all over the world are the two basic institutions of capitalist development. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century (a most powerful process of innovation, capital accumulation and market expansion) developed thanks to agricultural surpluses, long-distance trade surpluses and the

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availability of iron and coal; however, the industrial revolution was first and foremost related to the specific linkage with the scientific and technological revolutions of modernity. Trades and markets flourished in the early empires and in many non-European parts of the world as well, but the particular combination of the industrial revolution with a self-regulating market was a European specificity which gave capitalist growth an unprecedented strength and dynamic. The third basic element of the European heritage—the nationstate—is more controversially related to the values of rationalism and individualism than to scientific curiosity, the technical domination of nature, or the capitalist market and industry. The nation-state is the institutional embodiment of political authority in modern society, an impersonal and sovereign political entity with supreme jurisdiction over a clearly delimited territory and population, claiming a monopoly of coercive power, and enjoying legitimacy as a result of its citizens’ support. It is a particular institution which is the result of the encounter between a sovereign, autonomous, centralized political organization, and a community (simultaneously real and imagined) grounded on ties of blood, language, shared tradition, and collective memory. Since the late Middle Ages, Europe, at least in its Western part, came to be increasingly made up of societies of peasants, lords recognizing the authority of a king, city merchants and artisans, all united by a commonality of blood, language and religious beliefs (Mendras, 1997). The nation-state, characterized by the unity of a people, a territory and a distinctive culture—slowly took shape in opposition to the multi-ethnic empires and to the supra-national church, and developed historically through the growth of a civil bureaucracy, an army and diplomacy, and through the formation of a nation as an imagined community (Anderson, 1991), resulting from the action of nationalist elites in the modernization process (Gellner, 1983) and capable of evoking primordial ethno-symbolic roots (Smith, 1991). It is a typical European construction, which has been exported to the other parts of the world. The relation of the nation-state to the culture of individualism and rationalism is both ambivalent and complex. One of the two components, the nation, has long been rooted in primordial ties, making appeal to emotions, and emphasizing collective goals. The other component, the state, is a rationally organized construction which develops through the development of law and an efficient bureaucracy. The degree of congruence with the values of individualism and


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rationalism increases with the advent of representative democracy that democratizes the nation-state. Representative democracy, i.e. a political system made of elected officials who represent the interest and opinions of citizens in a context characterized by the rule of law, which is based on the consensus of citizens and is developed in order to protect their basic rights, is a fourth element of European identity. The Greek polis, the Roman republic and the free cities of medieval Italy and Germany, are all antecedents of this European specificity. The various forms of parliaments, majority rule in government and the protection of minority rights, free and periodical elections, the separation of powers, the free press, are all institutional innovations which were born and developed in the culture of Europe and of that “Europe outside Europe” which is the United States of America (the “first new nation” constructed by European immigrants) in the course of the three major democratic revolutions, the English, the French and the American. Today, the nation-state is undergoing the double pressure of the growing global interconnectedness of social relations from above and of the reaffirmation of regional and local identities and claims of autonomy from below. But it is still the basic political organization and the key actor in international relations, as well as a more or less successful export of European culture all over the world, judging from the growing number of independent states. The “list” of distinctive elements of the European identity is not complete without an appraisal of the role of Christianity both at the cultural and at the institutional level. The Christian religion is a transcendent monotheism that postulates the direct relation of every creature with its Creator. It fostered great collective movements and gave birth to one of the oldest and most durable institutions of human history, the Roman Catholic Church. The two aspects, the subjective one—which originates from the individualism of the message of the Evangel and periodically re-emerges in mysticism and asceticism—and the collective/institutional aspect—which expresses itself in the church hierarchical organization, in liturgical rites and ceremonies—have often been dialectically opposed, as in the centuries-long conflicts between Rome and Byzantium and the church, in the fights against the heretical movements, and in the religious wars of the Reformation. The relation of the Christian religion to individualism/subjectivity and to rationalism is ambivalent. On one hand, Christianity together

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with Roman law has contributed to the development of European individualism. And, as Weber argued, the great rational prophecies of the Old Testament, the rational life plan of the religious orders, and the theory of predestination, all contributed to the growth of the rational mind. On the other hand, Christianity had from the start a strong communitarian element—which is apparent in several ways, as in the early Christian communities, the transformation of the hermits into the religious orders from Saint Benedict onwards, and in the mediation between the believer and God provided by religious rites and the clergy. This communitarian spirit acts as a complement and an antidote to the subjective dimension of the faith. Christianity has deeply influenced European institutions and mentality, sometimes as a source of inspiration, sometimes as an opponent: our highest values and associated norms, such as human dignity and its inviolability, the rights of the person, individual conscience and responsibility, cannot be extrapolated from—yet have developed their specific form through—Judeo-Christian theology and religion. The distinction between the temporal power and the sacred, achieved through centuries-long struggles, is a well-grounded principle of modern democracy. On the other hand, the notion of the absence of limits and the belief in man as the master of his own destiny—which are distinctive aspects of the modern mind—have found strong opposition in the “anti-modernist” stance of the Catholic church. Although Christianity was not born in Europe but in the East, its borders came more and more to coincide with those of Europe until the spread from Europe to the rest of the world through colonial expansion from the fifteenth century on. Through the evangelization of the barbaric peoples of the north and the east and the centuries-long confrontation with Arab and Turkish Islam, the Christian religion tends to coincide with European identity. This holds in spite of the fact that, as Adriansee remarks, the religious factor in the cultural identity of Europe is not a simple undifferentiated unity (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b). Religions other than Christianity, first of all Islam, played in fact an important role; there has been great religious diversity within Christianity itself, with the many heretical movements, the schism between the Orthodox Constantinople and the Catholic Rome, and the Protestant Reformation. These different cultural and institutional elements do not form a coherent system; they have actually conflicted with each other as in


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the case of market and democracy, religious beliefs and scientific research, nationalism and peace. Neither have they produced only desirable effects or positive outcomes. But they have contributed to the definition of the identity of Europe and can orient the formation of the European Union and its future path in the international community, provided that the principles are living principles which orient human action and that the institutions can undergo necessary changes. The political identity of Europe is grounded on these common cultural and institutional roots, but should be oriented to the future and be built around the European project. A few basic qualifications A few basic qualifications are needed in order to avoid misunderstanding and to respond to possible objections to this synthetic picture of the core characteristics of the European identity. First, the core elements which I have identified are not necessarily all-pervasive in contemporary Europe: what is needed in order to define them as core elements is that they have been relevant in the making of European identity. The case of Christian religion is paradigmatic. Many facts exist in contemporary Europe which show the continuing importance and influence of religion. A sizeable percentage of Europeans affirm that they belong to one of the Christian churches and sects; despite the constitutional separation of state and church, church institutions and leaders enjoy considerable influence in the political and cultural life of the European Union member countries; close links exist between Christianity and non-religious ethics; the great creations of European culture in architecture, fine art, music, literature, and also philosophy and science, are not conceivable without the presence, benevolent or critical, of religious doctrine and authority. In spite of all the above, however, there is some truth in Adriansee’s argument that “in the cultural identity of Europe the religious factor is predominantly a matter of memory. Religion is what Europe has been” (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b, pp. 31–32). But, even if this is the case, we should not forget that in any definition of identity, individual or collective, what one has been is very much part of what one is and will be. Second, these core values and institutions are not necessarily “positive” or unambiguous. As I remarked earlier, European history has

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been at the source of deep cleavages, violent conflicts, idiosyncratic controversies, as well as many errors and crimes. Both the values of rationalism and individualism and the institutions of the market and the nation-state have given rise to numerous contradictions, violations and deformations, as is shown by the deep contradictions between capital and wage labor, economic growth and environmental conservation, colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and the quest for freedom, not to speak of wars, mass murders and genocide. Indeed, for almost every core element of the European culture we have polar positions: the Christian faith of universal love has inspired some of the most intolerant attitudes and bloodiest religious wars ever; in the heart of twentieth-century Europe, democracy has collapsed into devastating totalitarianism; the free market continuously reproduces monopoly and oligopoly; the quest for political independence has degenerated into aggressive nationalism. Some critics think that it is impossible to isolate substantive values or concrete cultural contents that would unambiguously characterize European culture since, as Jaspers remarks, for every position Europe has also developed the exact opposite (Benda, 1947). In other words, it is impossible to discover any value that Europe has promoted without at the same time promoting the opposite value: faith/ reason, tolerance/religious war, democracy/totalitarianism, etc. But this is not a convincing objection: we certainly do not cease to consider ancient Athens as the cradle of democracy because of the fact that it also experienced tyranny, the opposite of democracy. Some critics also argue that we cannot consider values and institutions which had negative effects—producing violent conflicts, suffering and crimes—as constitutive elements of a European identity. But they forget that in this way a process of learning from past errors has taken place. What is important for contemporary European identity is precisely that this history has been the object of reflexive reassertion through a process of historical learning. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the national wars of the twentieth century were culturally rooted in contradictory values, which were shared by the vast majority of Europeans; but, they were later perceived as lessons of the past from which unity could take shape, given the premise that it is in fact true that European integration was born of the desire to put an end to the centuries-long European civil wars. The new European identity is the product of a learning process from painful past errors and crimes.


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As Therborn argues, “The conception of history that underlies the efforts to establish an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe is not couched in terms of some ‘manifest destiny’ of Europe, or in terms of Europeans as a chosen people . . . rather, it is the view of history’s disciples and not of its masters.” Europe “is a process of historical learning and a focus of institutionalisation . . . This construction has its cultural prerequisites, but the cultural underpinning of the new European set of normative institutions is not a deep and ancient culture of Europeans, rather it is a collection of Western European lessons from recent European modernity: nationalism and any other ‘ism’ is dangerous and must be regulated” (Therborn, pp. 73, 85). I agree; however, I would not confine the process of historical learning to lessons from recent European modernity, rather I would extend it to the whole European history (an example of this attitude is John Paul II asking pardon for crimes committed by the Catholic Church and his reiterated demands for religious peace and ecumenical dialogue). In this respect, I share Cacciari’s view that, rather than a celebration of European culture and identity, the European Union can be seen as “a silent maturation of the coming of Europe into the serene evening of its stormy history” (Cacciari, 1994). Third, the core elements of the European identity are not exclusive in today’s world; but the reason for this non-exclusiveness does not lie in the fact these elements were shared from their origins with other peoples, but because they have been successfully “exported” and assimilated in other parts of the world. The civilization of modernity was born in Europe and then spread all over the world. This fact induces some scholars to think that in its spreading world-wide, Europe loses its specific character; in other words that European identity, being intrinsically de-territorialized, can no longer define the specificity of a single part of the world. According to D’Andrea, “the Europeanization of the world is also the beginning of Europe as an entity in itself ” (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b, p. 141). This is certainly true for the West, or what I call “Europe outside Europe.” European identity is not easily distinguishable from the identity of the West, i.e. the part of the world that has assimilated all fundamental traits of the European spirit. In fact, some of these traits, such as individualism and economic and scientific rationality, appear now to be even more distinctive of the North-Americans’ identity rather than the Europeans’. Without entering into a comparative cultural analysis of the societal models at the two borders

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of the Atlantic, significant differences do exist—which have to do with the ways in which common cultural roots have been transformed in the various paths toward and through modernity (Martinelli, 2003). Specific institutions (like the “social market-economy” or the welfare state) and shared values (not only individualism, but also solidarity) are specific features of the European version of a common Western identity and can provide specific European responses to the challenges of globalization—which are not limited to meeting the functional demands of global competition, but take into account key questions like environmentally sustainable development, social cohesion, and universal human rights. Differences, however, are much greater for the non-Western parts of the world. One can argue, as D’Andrea himself admits, that the Europeanization of the world does not imply that all the characteristics of European identity—all the dimensions of social life comprising the paradigms of modernity—are destined to be equally successful the planet over. Technology, science and capitalism are the dimensions of European identity that are most widespread in the world, because they are those that have more fully taken the form of cognitive and practical machinery that are indifferent to ends and capable of surpassing in efficiency any other rival instrument. “Modern individualism has proved itself to be a lot more difficult to export . . . because of the resistance in many parts of the world to the surpassing of holistic or traditional views of the individual-society relationship in favour of the culture of human rights and the democratic process” (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b). I am not fully convinced by this argument. On one hand, I think that any transition to modernity requires a process of creative adaptation and does not imply the inexorable establishment of a certain type of mental outlook (scientific rationalism, pragmatic instrumentalism, secularism). And, in fact, traditional culture and modern technology have to some extent co-existed in twentieth-century Japan and the market economy is linked together with the political authoritarian state in contemporary China. On the other hand, it is arguable that “the products of the European spirit” can work elsewhere even when the “spirit” needed to set them in motion is completely absent. But if this is the case, if Europe had managed to export the products of its spirit rather than its actual spirit, there would be a European specificity (I think, first of all, of the critical mind, democratic representation and the rule of law) which is worthwhile to affirm as a distinct


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European contribution in a peaceful process of cultural cross-fertilization with other cultures in the world. An open European identity as part of the European project of unity through diversity So far, I have argued that the peoples of the European Union countries have common cultural roots, and both values and institutions that have ancient origins have crystallized in the process of European modernization, yet spreading later to the other parts of the world. This common cultural heritage contributes to European political integration, but it cannot (and does not need to) produce a distinctive, coherent identity which legitimizes the specificity of Europe as a single political entity in the way national cultures legitimized the formation of European nation-states, because the political building of the European Union cannot follow the path of national building and cannot be grounded on the opposition “us versus them”. Identity and otherness are of course closely related; at least to some extent, I identify with somebody because we both feel different from somebody else. As Fontana (1994) argues, in the course of their history Europeans—and more precisely those groups which were culturally hegemonic—defined a “distorted identity” through the deforming glasses through which they looked at the “other” (the barbarian, the heretic, the savage). But the lessons of history—religious fundamentalism and bigotry, ideological dogmatism, nationalistic aggressiveness—teach us that this negative and arrogant way of defining an identity—an identity against somebody else—and its use to build a political entity, is no longer advisable in the world today. Besides, in the “Europe of nations” it would be hardly feasible. European identity must deny the old belief that what is different is potentially hostile. For this reason European political identity cannot become a rigid and closed set of beliefs and attitudes but must be built around a project; it cannot be deduced from its origin, but rather from its future. The notion of absence of limits—which I discussed above as typical of modern European identity (Cerutti & Rudolph, 2001b)— provides the basis for conceiving Europe’s present political identity as a project in the making and in terms of its consequences. The legitimacy of the process of European integration cannot be deduced from a separate cultural identity, rather it is linked to the

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existence of a shared political plan and to the possibility that the foreseeable results on a planetary scale of such a plan are morally and politically defensible as viable responses to global problems. The accomplishment of this project implies a political subject of regional dimensions, a set of communitarian institutions which guarantee democratic accountability and a certain degree of homogeneity in the living conditions of the people, a common cultural heritage and shared values, and multiculturalism of complementary cultures. The model of the European Union should be a specific and novel one, both institutionally and culturally. It should be a multicultural entity with a core of shared values (democratic institutions, basic human rights, civic responsibilities, peaceful coexistence with all people on earth, free competition) that are at the foundations of common institutions, together with the respect for different cultures, languages and heritages. And it should be a supra-national union where decisions are taken both by a body representing the governments of the member countries and regions (a reformed Council of heads of states and governments) and a body representing the peoples of the member countries and regions (a reformed Commission, whose members should be elected by the European Parliament, with a stronger President elected by the European people). According to this model, unity should be achieved through diversity. Already in ancient Greek philosophy we find the notion of harmony stemming from contradictory elements. If one postulates unity at the beginning, it follows a tendency toward the continual coming back to the lost original model; if, on the contrary, one postulates diversity at the beginning, unity is seen as the continuous effort stemming from conflict and competition, never predetermined. As Eliot argued, European culture must be differentiated and plural, united in its diversity (1948). Unity should induce the redefinition of identities, both those of the European peoples and those of immigrants from other parts of the world, rather than impose their abolition. And citizens should share multiple identities—the city, the regional, the national, and the supranational. However, the recognition of multiple cultural identities within a single state can be a destabilizing factor for national unity, since it alters the delicate balance between ethnos and demos. For this reason, although European political unification should be built around the notions of unity stemming from diversity and of


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multiple citizenship, in the process we should also foster those elements of traditional nationhood that are compatible with the multicultural supranational model. Let us consider for this purpose the basic components of nationhood as defined by scholars of ethnicity and nationhood (A. Smith, 1991, Tullio-Altan, 1995): ethnos, logos, topos, ethos, and epos. We cannot rely on ethnos (that is, on ancestral ethnic origins), since it fosters closure, exclusion and discrimination, and runs against the core values of the EU. We cannot rely too much on logos either; if language is taken as the basis of logos, European citizens cannot be forced to speak a single language, since multilingualism is considered a basic requisite for the respect of different cultural identities. Topos, the symbolic transfiguration of the space where Europeans live, can help to some extent. There are, in fact, distinctive common characters in European cities, buildings, squares, and public and private spaces, but this goes together with such a great variety of natural and human landscapes that it can be hardly considered a strong identifying element. We are then left with ethos and epos. We can certainly invest more in ethos (the basic core values, vision of the world, and practical knowledge that define the new European identity and outline the basic rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship), and in epos (the great figures and events that testify as to the common European heritage in arts, science, and culture). Both ethos and epos should be basic components of educational programs for the next generations and should orient the activities of the media and various manifestations of public discourse, in order to create a real European public space grounded in a shared political culture, which could orient people’s choices on matters of common concern. Moreover, the process of union building will be helped by an increasingly interconnected economy (favored by the euro), a homogeneous European social fabric and the growth of a European public space. The strengthening of a common culture, I want to stress again, should not be seen as a means for excluding others, but rather as a necessary basis for the dialogue among civilizations. If this project fails, it will provide support for the theory that nation-states continue to be built only upon either a homogeneous culture or a hegemonic culture capable of integrating immigrants into a melting pot. If the project succeeds, the European Union can become a model for other regions of the world to form large supra-

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national and multicultural unions, and thus can contribute significantly to democratic global governance. Our pride as Europeans can be based not on the arrogant memory of a great past, but on the commitment to a project in the making which aims at universal peace, individual freedom and social justice.

PART SIX

EPILOGUE: MODERNITY AS PROGRAM

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

BASIC MECHANISMS OF MORAL EVOLUTION— IN DURKHEIM’S AND WEBER’S FOOTSTEPS Raymond Boudon Moral evolution: an obsolete idea? The evolution of norms, values and institutions is a classical issue of sociology from Durkheim to Parsons, Hayek to Eisenstadt. The thesis which I will try to defend here is that in developing some basic intuitions of Durkheim and Weber, to the point at which professional historians of sociology would possibly protest, some basic mechanisms making social evolution more intelligible can be identified. It seems to me the two classical sociologists have sketched a theory of evolution which overcomes the objections rightly raised by Popper (1957) against historicism. None of them introduce the idea that there would be such things as laws of historical development. As Pareto has written, when an idea is discredited, this situation tends to generate the view that the contrary idea is true. This figure is clearly illustrated by the case of evolutionism. From the moment at which the evolutionary theories appeared as discredited, the idea that the notions of evolution and progress are obsolete tended to acquire the status of an evident truth. Postmodern thinkers tend to adhere to what I might call an absolute or integral version of relativism, which sees the notion of progress as a mere illusion. Weber and Durkheim refused the idea that there would be laws of history. But they would also have vehemently refused the idea that the notions of progress and evolution would be empty ones. To “postmodern” philosophers and sociologists the notion of progress would have been irreversibly discredited, as the notions of truth, objectivity and generally the notions describing values; postmodern sociology would have shown that such notions cover up mere illusions. This view is evidently self-contradictory. Postmodern sociologists claim to have produced a progress by describing progress as an illusion and stating that this illusion is irreversibly condemned. Postmodernist

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philosophers and sociologists claim that, until they “deconstructed” the notions of progress, truth, etc. mankind lived in illusion. LévyBruhl’s evolutionary theory, which opposed a conjectural “primitive mentality” to a modern positivist mentality, or the views on social evolution proposed by Victorian anthropologists appear prudent and sophisticated when compared with the views developed by the “deconstructionist” and “constructivist” schools. Obviously, “constructivists” and “deconstructionists” have not convinced all social scientists. Still, most contemporary social scientists treat the particular evolutions they observe and analyze as contingent. Thus, a number of writings deal with the changes in sexual norms from “modernity” to “postmodernity,” but few attempts have been made to explain why these changes give the strong feeling of being irreversible and why they probably are. By contrast, Weber saw that the “disenchantment” of the world was irreversible, and tried to explain why. While he explains evolutionary phenomena, most contemporary sociologists describe phenomena of social change, for the notion of evolution is commonly considered today as obsolete. Now, irreversibility is the feature that makes evolution distinct from change. The evolutionary theory which I propose to draw from some central intuitions presented by Durkheim and Weber provides an alternative to postmodern relativism and avoids the objections which have been raised against current evolutionary theories. Thus, Hayek’s (1973–1979) theory pays much attention to innovations with an adaptive function and too little attention to ideas which have the status of absolute innovations; to some extent, he has also neglected the role of contingency in political and social life. A crucial Durkheimian intuition I would like to begin with an essential intuition proposed by Durkheim (1960 [1893], p. 146). In his Division of Social Labor he writes: “. . . individualism, free-thinking appeared not in our days, nor in 1789, nor in the Reformation time, nor with scholastics, nor with the decline of Greek and Roman polytheism or of oriental theocracies. It is a phenomenon which begins nowhere, but which develops continuously through the course of history” [“l’individualisme, la libre pensée ne datent ni de nos jours, ni de 1789, ni de la réforme, ni de la scolastique, ni de la chute du polythéisme gréco-romain ou des théocraties

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orientales. C’est un phénomène qui ne commence nulle part, mais qui se développe, sans s’arrêter tout au long de l’histoire”]. The rhetorical tone of the passage, stressed by the sequence of “nor” which brings us to the dawn of history, was certainly meant in Durkheim’s mind to stress the importance he attached to the idea that “individualism begins nowhere”. While many comments on The Division of Social Labor insist on Durkheim’s thesis that “individualism develops continuously through the course of history”, most comments disregard the first part of the sentence, which states that “individualism begins nowhere.” In contradiction to this passage, current comments on the Division of Labor maintain that Durkheim would have regarded individualism as a consequence of the growth of the division of labor and would have seen it as beginning with the Protestant Reformation. The same comments see individualism as a particular doctrine which would have the status of a philosophical viewpoint among many others. The text which I have just quoted totally contradicts this current interpretation. It is true that in Durkheim’s mind the increasing complexity in the division of labor—because it favored an increasing diversification of social roles and qualifications—contributed to reinforcing individualism; more precisely, that it has given birth to institutions making easier the expression of individualistic values. It is true that Protestantism bears an indirect testimony in favor of the development of individualism during the Renaissance as it stresses the believer’s freedom and responsibility in interpreting the Holy Scriptures. Protestantism expresses, on a theological register, the fact that the development of the division of labor has increased the sense of their singularity in the mind of individuals. These statements, which handbooks and comments insist upon, are effectively present in Durkheim’s Division of Social Labor. But they constitute only one part of his theory. Durkheim makes as clear as possible, as I have said, that, to him, if individualism grows continuously through history, it should also be recognized that it begins nowhere. My guess is that the reason why few commentators pay attention to this part of Durkheim’s sentence lies in the fact that it appears to them as contradicting the evolutionary theory developed in the Division of Social Labor. How could individualism possibly have begun nowhere, but be present in all societies and increase continuously? The meaning of this formula seems to me very clear though, and in no way contradictory to Durkheim’s evolutionary theory. It indicates

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that individuals as such have always represented the reference point— if not unique, at least fundamental—from which the relevance and legitimacy of norms and generally of institutions in the broadest sense of this latter notion can be appreciated, as well as the tacit norms which regulate small informal groups, as the norms which take the form of official collective decisions legally enforced, or as all the intermediary cases. The formula indicates that in all societies, archaic as well as modern institutions are perceived by individuals as more or less legitimate, more or less acceptable. As to the criteria according to which they are judged as more or less acceptable or legitimate, they are the same in all societies; people appreciate or reject them depending on whether they have the feeling that they respect their dignity and vital interests. The notion of individualism should obviously not be confused with the notion of atomism. It does not assume that societies would be made of a mere juxtaposition of individuals, but rather that, in any given society, people tend to consider an institution, a norm or a value X as good, or an institution, a norm or a value Y better than Z if and only if they have the impression that X is good or that Y is better than Z for all individuals in the society and notably for themselves. This remark leads to the statement that in the same way as individualism should not be confused with atomism, it does not entail egoism. As individualism grants an equal dignity to any individual, it assumes that a particular individual will tend to consider an institution as good or bad depending on whether he/she has the impression that any other individual would also have a tendency to judge it so. We can check immediately that it is difficult to state or even to believe that an institution is good or bad if one does not have the impression that other people would also tend to judge so. This does not mean that there are no conflicts between opinions. The believers in phlogiston and their adversaries believed that their stance was grounded on solid reasons. The two groups believed that their reasons were objectively valid and hence shared by others. As conflicts of opinion in science, conflicts of opinion on moral, legal or political issues also oppose adversaries who hold different views; but they all believe that their reasons are grounded. An individual cannot consider some statement as true or some institution as good if he doesn’t feel that other people would also find the statement true or the institution good.


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Briefly, I propose to read the half sentence “individualism begins nowhere” as indicating that, once an institution is proposed to or imposed on a collectivity, a member of the collectivity will tend to consider it as acceptable or not, good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate, etc. depending on whether he/she has the impression that it tends to be good for each of them, and notably for her/him. That actual institutions in all societies tend to be evaluated, judged good or bad, legitimate or not, on the basis of this ideal principle does not mean, of course, that individuals are entitled or permitted to express this evaluation nor that they are in all cases explicitly conscious of it; nor, as we just saw, that there are no conflicts of opinion. The only objection which can be opposed to this interpretation of Durkheim’s thesis that individualism begins nowhere is the conjecture of historicism according to which individuals would have become conscious of their singularity only in modern societies—a controversial idea which Durkheim’s formula directly contradicts. This controversial idea rests upon the doubtful metaphor which sees individuals as the product of the social environment they are embedded in. It derives from a rough confusion between categories. The social context determines the parameters individuals have to take into account when they behave or act in such and such a fashion; it does not determine their actions or behavior properly, even less the fact that they would or not be aware of their dignity and vital interests. The fact that some societies are more coercive than others is beyond doubt; as is the fact that individuals are more respected in some societies than others; or the fact that the conception people have of their rights or of their dignity varies from one society to another. But the fact that there are no societies where people would not have the feeling of their dignity and of their vital interests and of the dignity and vital interests of the people close to them is equally clear. It seems advisable— as Durkheim proposes to do according to the quoted sentence from the Division of Labor—to take all these facts into account, the fact that individualism begins nowhere, as well as the fact that it is more developed in some societies than in others, rather than to oppose the former to the latter, as historicism and culturalism wrongly propose. The two statements that “individualism begins nowhere” and that it “grows through history” are contradictory exclusively if one sees self-interest as historically determined. Against this metaphysical view, Durkheim maintains that self-interest is a constituent of any human being in any time and social context and also that depending on

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the parameters characterizing each society, human beings may be able to feel and express that self-interest more or less clearly and satisfy it more or less adequately. Notably, under the influence of positivism, Marxism, and structuralism, the essential distinction between the notion of cause and the notion of parameter has been deleted. The distinction is fundamental and simple. In order to go from street A to street B, I have to cross either street C or street D. This fact is a constraint I must accept: a parameter I have to take into account but which does not determine my decision of going from A to B, nor my choice of crossing, say, street C rather than D. When the notions of cause and parameter are confused with one another, individuals are naturalized, that is, their behavior is analyzed as the effect of outside forces, while it derives from decisions under constraints. Though Marxism and structuralism are now rightly widely considered as obsolete, some of their principles are still active in many minds. Durkheim’s intuition empirically confirmed Many studies provide an empirical confirmation of Durkheim’s statement according to which in all societies, traditional as well as modern, individuals have a sense of their dignity and vital interests. Popkin’s (1979) Rational Peasant seems to me particularly illuminating in this respect. Against a received idea defended by many anthropologists, he has shown in a convincing fashion that in the village societies of South-East Asia or Africa the rule of unanimity is a widely accepted constitutional rule, because it is perceived as the rule most likely to generate a respect for the dignity and vital interests of all. Against this interpretation, anthropologists have contended that the diffusion of the unanimity rule would reflect the fact that individuals in archaic societies have no sense of their singularity and would see themselves as mere parts of the collectivity. The interpretation reveals the importance of the metaphysical representation according to which the sense people have of their self-interest would be a dependant variable: it would be present in some societies, absent in others. To Popkin, the rule was devised and accepted because any other decision rule would entail serious threats to the society’s economically weakest members. Village societies of Africa or SouthEast Asia, he explains, are small-scale societies, based on a subsistence


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economic system, with few exchanges being conducted with the outside environment. In such societies, the weakest members would be considerably threatened if collective decisions were taken, say, on the basis of the majority rule. Consequently, such a constitutional rule would not be considered as legitimate. Popkin’s interpretation, differing from the current interpretation of most anthropologists, recognizes the obvious fact that the unanimity rule maximizes the power of each individual, as shown by the fact that it has another name: the veto right. Moreover, Popkin’s interpretation accounts for the fact that in the village societies with the unanimity rule as a basic constitutional rule, decisions generally take a long time and occur in a climate of confrontation and institutionalized conflict. On the whole, this type of study shows convincingly that the sense of all for their individuality and singularity is characteristic of societies where solidarity is mechanical, to use Durkheim’s vocabulary, as of societies with organic solidarity. Individualism meets more favorable conditions in the latter, i.e. modern societies; but it characterizes the former as well. Possibly without being aware of Durkheim’s statement according to which individualism would begin nowhere, Simmel (1990) considers as evident the fact that the individualistic virus was already present at the dawn of history. It explains the abolition, in antique Germany, of the Wergeld, a judiciary practice which indexed the sanction on the social rank of the victim. Once abolished, any human life had in principle the same value. Once the abolition of the Wergeld was introduced, it became irreversible because it represented a step forward in the establishment of individualism. To Simmel as to Durkheim, individualism begins nowhere, but it leads the selection of ideas and institutions and explains that some of them are irreversibly adopted. Such studies illustrate the powerfulness of the social sciences. Once they follow a scientific ethos and care about scrupulously examining data, they display their capacity of eradicating the ethnocentric representations of ordinary sociology. Durkheim, Simmel and nowadays Popkin show that the view—according to which individualism (in the sense that Durkheim takes the concept) would be exclusively characteristic of modern societies—is the product of an ethnocentric illusion. Popkin’s powerful study shows that ethnocentrism can be strong even among professional anthropologists; many of who seem to believe that, since the people they observe behave differently from

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the way they behave themselves, they should be different. The imagery of the fusional community where individuals would have no consciousness of their own self and would exist exclusively, so to say, through the group, is treated by many anthropologists as going without saying, while it is a mere ethnocentric illusion. Equally ethnocentric is the representation that people would have been in the past submitted to collective representations and values they would have passively accepted, while in modern and postmodern societies, they would pick up the representations and values they please. Ethnocentrism can be historical as well as geographic, vertical as well as horizontal, as it were. Unfortunately, studies like Popkin’s are too rare. A lasting ethnocentric tendency leads on the contrary to the current view that individualism is a cultural distinctive feature of modern western society. Like Durkheim—and Adam Smith before him—the economist of Indian origin Amartya Sen has stated that the first value for any individual, Indian or European, is to be able to consider himself with respect. The a-historical character of individualism It is important to note immediately that the basic principle of individualism (organizing society in order to respect as much as possible the vital interests and the dignity of each) has been permanently thwarted by all kinds of “historical forces,” to use Weber’s phrase. Durkheim aims to stress, evidently not that the dignity of individuals has always been respected in reality, but that they have always had the sense of their dignity and of their vital interests; that this feeling is the ground on which the history of institutions and even history shortly unfolds; more precisely, that the dignity of individuals and the respect of their vital interests is the ultimate criterion of the legitimacy of any norm or institution, whatever its level, microscopic, societal or intermediary. Thus, the Greek devised institutions which have been justly praised and imitated because they aimed at being respectful of the dignity of citizens. But they considered slavery as legitimate, for they were convinced of its functional interest for society as a whole. Aristotle did not conceive of a society without slaves. Montesquieu held slavery as being “against nature” (contre la nature), but thought that if slavery was abolished in the Antilles, the price of sugar would rise too much.


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This mixture of axiological and instrumental rationality lasted until slavery was abolished in the sites where, as in the Southern United States, it played an important economic role. Today, slavery has been abolished almost everywhere, but it has reappeared under the effect of “historical forces” (e.g. child prostitution in South-East Asia). But these modern forms of slavery are condemned and clandestine, for a negative value is irreversibly associated to this institution; today, nobody would dare legitimate slavery. This simple example stresses an important point: institutions are reversible, while the value granted to institutions can be irreversible. Slavery reappeared in our contemporary world, but not the idea that slavery would be a good institution. Against Huntington’s (1996) view, individualism is consequently not a value which would be characteristic of Western modern society and which would have appeared in the fourteenth century. What appeared in the fourteenth century were institutions which made easier the expression of individualism; not individualism itself. Huntington’s view is unacceptable; equally unacceptable is the view of these anthropologists who prefer individuals to be self-conscious exclusively in a Gesellschaft, but not in a Gemeinschaft. This can be checked by an analogy. Should the libido sciendi be considered as characteristic of Western societies and as having appeared at the end of the eighteenth century in consideration of the fact that modern sciences are institutionalized in Europe at that time? Such a contention would generally be considered as absurd. The Victorian anthropologists themselves, as well as the positivist sociologists who held the Comtian law of the three states as an ultimate truth, treated the “primitive” as animated by a libido sciendi. According to Comte, in the theological Age, men tried to explain the world by making it the product of God’s will; in the metaphysical Age as the product of abstract entities, as Nature; in the positive Age, of mechanisms to be discovered by science. But in all three ages, men displayed a libido sciendi. It would be absurd to contend that the latter was born with the positive Age. It is equally absurd to consider that individualism was born in the fourteenth century in the exclusive context of Western societies; that individuals started having a value in their own eyes only from that moment; and that this value would be characteristic of the “Western civilisation.” By stating that individualism begins nowhere, Durkheim contradicts a priori the latent historicism that characterizes many sectors

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of the contemporary social sciences. It borrows the idea, though, from a long philosophical tradition. As Weber has noted, Aristotle, Pascal and most philosophers have stated—each in his own terms— that at all periods, individuals have followed the goal described in Deuteronomy of “having a long life and happiness on earth”, that individuals have always evaluated institutions in the light of this goal. Durkheim elaborates on this idea when he states that individualism is a permanent feature of human history. Durkheim also made clear that, under the effect of structural features (such as the growth of the division of labor) or of contingent events, institutions developed which made easier the expression of individualism. Contingent factors, as Luther’s conflict with Rome, themselves owed their influence to structural factors. Luther’s Reformation became influential because it appeared at a time when individuals had a growing sense of their individuality as a consequence of the increased division of labor. But individualism itself is ahistorical: the sense for self-interest is present in all societies. I may perhaps note incidentally that I find confirmation for the interpretation I propose of Durkheim’s statement according to which “individualism begins nowhere” in the fact that he was always strongly impressed by Kant’s philosophy. Stating that individualism begins nowhere amounts to stating that the effects of institutions on the vital interests of individuals represent the only reference point which can possibly be used in evaluating them. If I am correct when I stress the influence of Kant on Durkheim, individualism, in the sense from which Durkheim takes the notion, would be comparable to a Kantian a priori category: it would represent the frame within which institutions would be evaluated. It should moreover be noted that, by introducing this neo-Kantian category, Durkheim proposes an a priori more acceptable than the a priori on which Kant had proposed to ground moral evaluations. Durkheim’s a priori is clearly less mysterious than that of Kant. An objection can be opposed to this a priori in that it presupposes the existence of a “human nature”, a notion which many sociologists consider unacceptable. But is this a serious objection? The idea according to which the social sciences would have discredited this notion irreversibly has the status of a received idea; that an idea is broadly accepted does not show obviously that it is valid, though. Wilson (1993) has shown on the contrary that it could be used to explain a number of moral facts observed by historians, sociologists,


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anthropologists and psychologists. But it should immediately be made clear that the notion of “human nature” can be accepted only if it is reduced to a number of undetermined principles as the principle of individualism in Durkheim’s sense. More precisely, sociologists belonging to the tradition which can be qualified as liberal have one point in common: for Weber, as for Durkheim, people are similar in all cultures, but they are embedded in various social and historical contexts. People everywhere are selfconscious, self-interested; they have objectives, intentions, projects; notably, they evaluate rationally the institutions in the context in which they live. But they make use of their autonomy in the framework of the context in which they are embedded. The features of this context constitute, as I proposed to call them before, the parameters to which their feelings and actions are submitted, but which in no way determine these feelings and actions. In this respect, a wide gap separates Weber and Durkheim from many sociologists. To Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, the culturalists or the structuralists of all obedience, human behavior should be analyzed as determined by the socio-historical context in which they are embedded. To Durkheim and Weber, their behavior must be seen by contrast as reflecting their autonomy, given that the latter is bounded by the parameters defining the context. Both sociologists have strongly insisted on the existence of a long-time trend toward the extension of individual autonomy. To a great extent, both took their inspiration from Kant. This is not only true of Durkheim, but also of Weber. The two knew the importance Kant had granted to the notion of autonomy. Both saw that recognizing the existence of a socially bounded autonomy is a condition to be met if sociology is to be scientific— to describe reality as it is. By contrast, positivism, structuralism and culturalism see the autonomy of individuals as an obstacle. As to the main reason why the social sciences have a hard time becoming genuine sciences, sciences as scientific as the natural sciences: they have the impression that mechanics is the model of science. For this reason, they try to picture individuals as determined by the social structure and try to explain human behavior as the effect of forces. By contrast, Weber and Durkheim define science by the old notion of the adequation between things as they are and the way the intellect sees things, the adequatio rei et intellectu. Concerning individualism, Weber developed intuitions close to Durkheim’s: in different words and in another style, Weber (1999

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[1920–1921]) sketched some ideas that converge with those of Durkheim. The similarity, it seems to me, is striking. In his Essays in the Sociology of Religion, Weber comments on a passage of St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians in which Paul reprimands Peter. In the passage, Peter suddenly takes his leave from a group of Gentiles because he sees Jews coming to them. In this anecdote, Weber writes, he sees a crucial episode in the history of Western civilization. “It signals the birth moment of the idea of citizenship in the West” [Die Geburtsstunde des Bürgertums im Okzident]. Peter did not dare remain in the company of the Gentiles when the Jews appeared, while Paul would have expected that, by remaining seated, he would have meant that, beyond their differences, all men are equally worth; that they are consequently all entitled to sit at the same table; that a legitimate political order must recognize this equal dignity; briefly, that individuals should be regarded as persons and that a necessary condition for them to be treated as persons is that they are treated as citizens. The realization of this idea, says Weber, was considered from this moment as a basic objective; this objective was bound to lead the history of the West for centuries. Where does the strength of this idea come from? From the fact that the crucial innovation represented by the notion of citizenship that underlies the idea of commensality, the idea that all should sit at the same table, appears immediately as giving an expression to the idea of the intrinsic value of any individual, with the corollary that good institutions are institutions that would be approved by all. “Individualism begins nowhere”, Durkheim has written. “But it develops constantly throughout history.” In the Letter to the Galatians, individualism appears, writes Weber, as responsible for a crucial innovation which was to inspire the history of the West for centuries, beyond doubt because it is an answer to a latent universal demand. Weber proposes in other words a programmatist view of social evolution, if I may use this disgraceful neologism: a view that sees evolution led by “programs”: a familiar concept in Eisenstadt’s evolutionary theory. Weber invites us to consider the history of political institutions, the history of religions or the history of morals, as guided by a diffuse program aiming at defining institutions, rules, etc. which would most efficiently respect the dignity and vital interests of all. The invention of the notion of person is a crucial step in the realization of this program. As early as the first century, Weber writes, this program was advanced in a spectacular fashion thanks to the cre-


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ation of the notion of citizenship (the word is not used by Paul, but the notion underlies the anecdote reported by Weber). In order to make clearer the interpretation I propose of Durkheim’s and Weber’s intuitions, one can insist, as Weber often does, on the analogy between the history of morals and of political philosophy and the history of science (Boudon, 2000, Ch. 5). Science is born from a vague program which can be defined as describing the real world as it is. The value of this program cannot be demonstrated, for ultimate values cannot be demonstrated acceptable or not, legitimate or not: an obvious statement well stressed by Weber’s famous conference on Science as Vocation. I will leave aside here the undesirable comments, such as those of Leo Strauss (1953) and of his numerous followers who saw in this statement the expression on Weber’s part of a relativistic stance, while Weber simply meant that any theory starts from principles which cannot be demonstrated if not by other principles which would have to be demonstrated, and thus ad infinitum. Once this program is proposed (if one can say so, since, as individualism, the program begins nowhere), it has inspired and still inspires a constant flow of speculations and researches. In this conference, Weber states clearly that, not only science but the other districts of thought, is governed by a process of rationalization: “Scientific progress is beyond doubt the most important fraction of this intellectualization process to which we are submitted since millenaries” [Der wissenschaftliche Fortschritt ist ein Bruchteil, und zwar der wichtigste Bruchteil, jenes Intellektualisierungsprozesses, dem wir seit Jahrtausenden unterliegen] (Weber, 1995 [1919], p. 18). Similar to the history of science, the history of morals and of political philosophy is that of the realization of a program, whose objective is to conceive institutions able to respect as far as possible the dignity and vital interests of individuals. As the validity of the program science, the validity of such a program cannot be more demonstrated. And this program is as fuzzy as the program of science; the notion that science should describe the world as it is is unclear; as unclear as the notion of the dignity of the person. The validity of the two programs cannot be demonstrated and they are equally vague. In fact, they are even necessarily vague, one might add, since they are defined by a regulatory idea which requires that their meaning is made more precise. They are never completed; they guide human action in several of its dimensions. An indirect proof of the fuzzy character of the program described by the notion of science can be

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read in the fact that, while many works in the philosophy of science have been devoted to identifying the demarcation criteria between science and non-science, they were never found. The Vienna circle tried to make verifiability the criterion of science. Popper rejected it and proposed falsifiability instead. That criterion was accepted until many objections were raised against it. Finally, a commonly accepted view today is that there are no general criteria that would make it possible to distinguish science from non-science. The success of Christianity and later, in an entirely different conjecture, of socialism is due to the fact that the two movements may be viewed held as major steps in the realization of the program described by Weber and Durkheim. As Simmel (1984 [1892], 1990) has rightly noted, the two movements, as different as they are in many respects, have one point in common: they owe their influence to the fact that they have been perceived as advancing the individualistic program. In other words, they are thought to stress the respect owed to each individual independently of his or her competence and merits. In order to avoid possible misinterpretations, it should be noted that Simmel clearly evokes the socialist movement in the state where it was in his own time, when it had not yet gained power anywhere. It can be noted in the context of the Simmel’s association between Christianity and socialism, that regular religions have a crucial advantage over secular ones. Given the symbolic character of their doctrine, the former are immunized against criticism, while the latter are not, since they claim to be “scientific.” This explains why Christianity seems today to be in better health than socialism. Before sociologists, philosophers were well aware that programs can be proposed that include their own definition among their objectives. Thus, Hegel saw that many ideas can become clear only once they are realized; he was also well aware that ideas can be fought by social forces and that, nevertheless, they could survive in human minds. However, as Popper (1945) rightly states, Hegel did not escape the fallacy of historicism. With Max Weber, this undesirable feature is eradicated. To him, some ideas appear irreversible because they are the product of a rational selection; but historical forces can always have the consequence that they are not really inscribed in the real world. I will come back to this essential point in Weber’s intuition in a moment. If the elaboration I propose of Durkheim’s and Weber’s intuitions


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is accepted, one should see in the moral and political evolution of the Western world the realization of a diffuse program defined by the leading idea to which Durkheim has associated the notion of individualism. Its objective is to define norms and institutions aiming at satisfying the dignity and moral interests of individuals. Again, it should be made clear that these interests are by nature undefined and depend on the state of societies. In the case of modern societies, the deployment of this program is particularly remarkable. “We have,” writes Durkheim (1960 [1893], 147), “for the dignity of the person a cult which, as every cult, has already its superstitions” [Nous avons pour la dignité de la personne un culte qui comme tout culte a déjà ses superstitions]. As this sentence obviously shows, the cult for the “human rights” did not start in our time. Durkheim’s statement could very well have been attributed to Weber. The notion of the dignity of the person, Weber claims, is present throughout the history of the West. But this idea is more or less active and of course defined in various ways; fuzziness is a characteristic of the notion of the dignity of the person as it is of individualism. And the fact that it is more or less present and defined in various ways depends not only on structural factors, but also on contingencies and innovations. These factors affect both the more or less intense awareness that people have of this notion and its very realization. Consequently, there is no guarantee that regressions will not appear. “Historical forces” are able to generate and have effectively generated such regressions. The diffuse realization of political, juridical and scientific ideas Like any program, the program defined by the notion of the dignity of the person is governed by a process that Weber called “diffuse rationalization” (Durchrationalisierung). It is an essential process. It explains that certain ideas become irreversibly accepted by public opinion. As Durkheim states, it explains that individualism “develops constantly throughout history.” Weber makes wide use of the notion of rationalization, as shown by Sukale (2002), but never defines it in an explicit fashion. I have devoted a small book to the question of rationality and rationalization (Boudon 2003). I will content myself with saying here that the notion of rationalization describes on the one hand the process through

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which, given a program or a project, better means are sought to promote it; this dimension of the process mobilizes the instrumental type of rationality. Thus, legal notions such as habeas corpus or the principle of the freedom of opinion are associated with legal instruments that are crucial as far as the enforcement of individual rights is concerned. In the same fashion, the abolition of the above mentioned Wergeld represents a crucial instrument in the realization of the individualistic program. On the other hand, the notion of rationalization designates the process through which a program’s nature is made more precise, and theories are developed which forward its realization: this dimension of rationality can be called cognitive. Cognitive rationality is at work in a particularly clear fashion in science. It guides the production of scientific theories. The activity described by this notion aims at devising better explanations of the phenomena the scientist is interested in; at realizing the goals of the program science: explain better; explain more; explain in a more coherent fashion, etc. Science’s advances depend on external conditions and on structural data; but they are also produced by an endogenous process of diffuse rationalization, in the cognitive sense of the word. This rationalization process characterizes, according to Weber, the history of law and legislation, as well as the history of morals or of political philosophy and even of religion too (Boudon 2000, Ch. 5; Sukale 2002). All these activities are animated by the objective of finding better rules and better explanations for the phenomena under their jurisdiction—rules and explanations which aim at being more effective, simpler, more reciprocally coherent, and at more clearly arousing a feeling of legitimacy or of validity in the public. Arguably, the idea that rationalization is at work in all areas of human thought is one of the most important ideas developed by Max Weber. Its importance is not always underlined, probably because it contradicts the common view according to which the progress of science would be endogenous, while law, politics or religion would be essentially affected by exogenous factors, either contingent or structural. This contrast between the way that science progressed on the one hand, and law, morals or political theory on the other, also reflects the received idea according to which a wide gap would separate is and should, norms and facts, values and facts. I have tried to show elsewhere that this gap is less wide as it seems, as Weber clearly saw (Boudon, 2003).


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The similarities between the rationalization processes at work in the history of science, morals, law and religion do not mean of course that there are no differences between these activities. Science rests upon the principle that all its statements and notions can be criticized, while religion considers some of its statements and notions as immunized against criticism. The latter accepts to explain visible phenomena by the action of supernatural forces; the former does not. But, beyond these obvious differences, the procedures of verification, falsification, generalization, simplification, etc., characteristic of scientific thinking are also characteristic of moral, political or legal thinking. This crucial idea inspires the most path-breaking studies of Weber and Durkheim in the sociology of morals, law, religion and magic (Boudon 1999, 2000, 2001). Legislation tends in the same fashion to create systems of norms as efficient and as compatible with one another as possible; as adapted as possible to the demands of the public as the legislator sees them; as likely as possible to be considered legitimate by public opinion. Rules perceived as illegitimate are obviously a source of social tensions and conflicts. Taking this implicit requirement of legitimacy into account is essential, since it at once disqualifies so-called juridical positivism. The endemic tension between natural right and positivism, that Goyard-Fabre (2002) has shown to characterize the philosophy of law from Ancient Greece to the present time, shows that it is impossible to understand the evolution of law if one does not see that a new norm can only be accepted by the public if it arouses a feeling of legitimacy. On the other hand, such feelings of legitimacy or illegitimacy can only appear on the occasion of concrete laws. The political theories inspiring the construction of institutions are equally subjected to the same process of rationalization. Thus, Montesquieu’s principle of the separation of political powers drafts a type of political organization aimed at guaranteeing the rights of citizens. It has been accepted with difficulty. Its history has not yet come to an end and will likely never do so. The French constitution of 1958, out of fear for the power of the judges, granted them an autorité (“authority”) rather than a pouvoir (“power”). But, in spite of this resistance, the validity of the idea according to which a good political system should include several powers independent from one another appears to have been widely accepted. Like scientific ideas, it has been rationally selected. It has been retained in the course of this selection process because it has the consequence that it gives

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birth to a more efficient form of political power; that it reduces the probability of a violent solution of social tensions and conflicts; that it offers citizens a greater guarantee that their rights will be respected by the public authority; that consequently citizens will accept the latter more easily. At the same time, social evolution has the consequence that working out the principle of the separation of powers constantly meets new questions, challenges and obstacles. Thus, the growing power of the media in communication societies has inspired new institutions as the mediators attached to newspapers, TV or radio stations. In spite of this permanent adaptation of the principle to new situations, the principle itself has been irreversibly selected; the idea according to which each power should be balanced by a counterpower is considered as solid as the most solid ideas produced by natural sciences. The reason of this selection lies in the fact that the principle generates definitely positive outcomes. Simple and well-known as it is, this example shows that the processes by which ideas are selected in the field of political, legal or moral theory are not different in nature from the processes by which ideas are selected in the natural sciences. It is essential to note on this chapter of the rationalization processes that they obviously do not generate automatically happy outcomes. They can also produce undesirable effects. Many contemporary societies are accordingly afflicted by what has been called in the case of France a symptom of legislative inflation. As soon as a group has a nuisance power, it can be tempted to use power to impose hastily devised legislative changes that are likely to produce negative effects. In the short term the new law restores social peace, but in the long term it produces negative effects. The origin of the irreversibility of ideas The origin of the irreversibility of a new idea lies in the fact that when competing ideas are presented on the market of ideas, the best one tends to be selected preferably to the others. This process is easily observed in the history of science. Torricelli and Pascal proposed a theory to explain the phenomenon that mercury rises in an empty tube, a phenomenon which would later give birth to the invention of the barometer, by making it the effect of the weight of atmosphere.


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Their theory was irreversibly selected against the competing Aristotelian theory (“nature abhors a vacuum”) for precise reasons: because the weight of the atmosphere is an empirical notion, while the horror vacui naturae is a metaphysical one; and also, because Torricelli’s and Pascal’s theory predicts correctly the height to which mercury raises in a tube under various conditions, while the Aristotelian theory has nothing to say on this point. The same kind of process can be observed as far as not only scientific but axiological ideas too are considered. The principle of the separation of political powers has been irreversibly selected against the principle—defended for instance by Beccaria and Bodin—according to which political power should be concentrated in order to be effective. As a result of this selection process, totalitarian or even authoritarian regimes are currently considered illegitimate. The irreversibility of the basic principles defining democratic regimes explains that the communists decided to call the regimes they grounded after World War II “people’s democracy”. Though the Marxist tradition had since long condemned democracy as serving the interests of the bourgeois, the communists clearly saw that the idea that democracy is preferable to other types of regimes had been irreversibly selected. For that reason, they decided to call the totalitarian regimes they grounded in such a way as to imply they were democracies born at a higher level of perfection: they were more than “democracies; they were “people’s democracies.” Weber’s intuition that moral, political and juridical ideas, like scientific ideas, are subject to a process of diffuse rational selection, could easily be illustrated by a host of other examples. The fact that irreversible ideas are easily found in the domains of law and of political philosophy derives in part from the fact that axiological rationality and instrumental rationality, as Weber has also stated, though distinct from one another, are currently mixed with one another in practice. In simpler terms, a system of reasons leading to the belief that “X is good, legitimate, fair, etc.” includes in most cases factual statements beside normative statements. Now, factual statements can be confronted against data, for instance when they state that some means are better, given that some objective has to be reached. Thus, the prohibition of alcohol consumption in the USA showed that coercion could be a counterproductive method of social control. For this reason, other methods of control have been devised in order to attempt to limit the effect of the consumption

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of drugs on public health. In such a case, instrumentally rational statements are introduced in a system of reasons including also axiological ones. In still simpler terms, law and politics have technical aspects. Now, technology is a type of activity where the notion of progress can be defined in entirely unambiguous terms, as Weber clearly stated. It can be noted that these remarks refute the idea according to which should could not be derived from is. We can very well draw a should conclusion from a system of reasons in which all reasons are of the is type, while only one is of the should type can be drawn; in other words, we can often draw a normative conclusion from reasons all of which except one are factually grounded. So, though popular, Hume’s theorem according to which ought cannot be derived from is, or the notion made popular by Moore (1903) of the naturalistic fallacy is a wrong one. Ought is not separated from is by an unbridgeable gap. A common impression is that the evolution of ideas is rational as far as knowledge is concerned and contingent as far as morals, political theory or law are concerned. But this impression is grounded on the fact that political, moral or legal discussions are held on the public stage, and develop in a context of sound and fury, while scientific discussions take place in the confined atmosphere of scientific colloquia or of laboratories. Behind this apparent contrast however, all ideas are indistinctly affected, as Weber has stated, by a process of diffuse rationalization. Another similarity can be identified between the processes at work when the objective is to determine that “X is true” and when it is to determine that “Y is fair ”, that “Z is legitimate”, etc. This similarity is the following: there are no general criteria on the basis of which it would be possible to decide that a theory is true, but only particular criteria, variable from one case to another, on the basis of which it is possible to decide that a theory is better than another one. Those who look for general criteria of truth, writes Kant in a crucial but rarely mentioned passage of the Critique of Pure Reason, evoke the story told by ancient writers of the idiot who tried to milk a male goat while his equally dumb companion held a bucket under the belly of the animal. One can even go further than Kant on this point. Against Popper’s falsification theory, there are no more general criteria of falsity than of truth. For one reason among others: because falsification theory


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is contradicted by the so-called Duhem-Quine thesis according to which, when a successful theory is contradicted by some fact, as the scientist does not know which part of the theory is wrong, he will normally assume that it is true, but that some minor point has to be revised. So, a theory cannot be said to be false as soon as it appears to be contradicted by some data. In the same way, there are no general criteria on the basis of which it would be possible to declare that a theory is true. But there exist in many cases well-defined criteria on the basis of which a theory can definitely be preferred to another and lead to the (provisional) conclusion that the former is true, while the latter is false. To come back to my earlier example: we consider Torricelli’s theory as true and its Aristotelian competitor as false on the basis of criteria which are well-defined and precise, but which cannot be extended to all other comparisons between theories. Going a further long step beyond Kant, the same analysis could be conducted on other evaluative adjectives. As there are no general criteria on the basis of which the statements “X is true” or “X is false” could be held as valid, there are no general criteria on the basis of which the statements “Y is fair, legitimate, good, useful, etc” or “Y is unfair, illegitimate, bad, useless, etc.” could be held as valid. But in many cases it is possible to assert on the basis of well-defined criteria that “Y is fairer, more legitimate, better, more useful than Z”. Other criteria would be used to confront other pairs of theories, as U and V (Boudon, 2003). These considerations explain that the process of diffuse rationalization which is the origin of the fact that irreversible ideas appear in the field of science, is also found in other fields—in the history of law, of political theory, religion or of morals. Weber did not give the reasons for the importance of his notion of rationalization. But he was well aware of its importance and, above all, was positive—against the common representation—that diffuse rationalization is at work in all areas of human thinking. The irreversibility of moral ideas revealed by contemporary empirical research The rationalization process I have just cited appears as being at work in contemporary societies. One can check it in many surveys, notably in the famous inquiry on world values conducted by Inglehart et al. (1998).

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By comparing the younger respondents to the older, it is readily checked that the younger tend to have a rationalized conception of moral values in the sense that they tend more frequently than the older to consider exclusively as valid those moral rules that cannot be considered taboos. They tend to consider that the ultimate ground of moral rules is a value which they regard as basic—respect for other people; that any rule which does not give the impression of being rationally grounded should be considered with skepticism; that authority is legitimate and hence acceptable exclusively when it is rational; that charismatic and traditional authority should be regarded with skepticism; that a rule grounded on tradition but giving the impression of not being rationally grounded is of weak validity—it is perceived as a taboo. In the same fashion, the younger tend to have a more rational view of religious beliefs. They tend to reject the elements of religious doctrine which cannot be easily given a symbolic interpretation; when they believe in God, they believe much less frequently than the older in a personal God. They believe less frequently than the older in a life after death. On the whole, they tend to develop an immanentist view of religion. In terms of political values, they would like to see the political personal as more respectful of citizens’ wishes; they want new rights to be defined—rights that protect minorities and respect the right of all to freely define their identity; they push toward the development of an opinion democracy beside representational party democracy; they believe less often than the older, all things being equal, that political problems have easy solutions. For this reason, they reject extremist political programs more often than the older do. These various data are illustrative of what I called, after Weber, a rationalization process. A more detailed presentation of this interpretation of Inglehart’s data is presented in Boudon (2002). The same process of diffuse rationalization is present more generally in many trends characterizing modern societies. Reciprocally, the basic intuitions sketched by Weber and Durkheim and which I propose to develop here are crucial tools for the understanding of modern societies. Thus, “the decrease of social control” (la diminution du contrôle social) evoked by Durkheim appears as a permanent objective of criminal policy: misbehavior must be punished, but in ways as compatible as possible with the dignity of individuals. Contemporary moral sensi-


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bility cares about the dignity of criminals to such an extent that it has welcomed the idea that prevention should be substituted for repression. The utopia “prevention instead of repression” has been so popular in Western societies in the ultimate decades of the twentieth century that the notion of dissuasion itself seems to have disappeared altogether, probably because—since it includes the notion of threat— was perceived as being as unpalatable as repression itself. This preference for prevention generated unwanted effects, and played a role in the increase of delinquency. This example offers the opportunity of stressing the fact that rationalization should not be equated with progress: it can produce unwanted effects alongside desirable ones. On the whole, modern morality tends to be restricted to a single leading principle with all its possible consequences: that the forms of behavior which can exclusively be forbidden are those entailing a negative impact on others; conversely, if it can be demonstrated that a given piece of behavior is not a nuisance to others, it should be allowed. One tends to consider as a taboo the prohibition of any form of behavior entailing an undetrimental effect on other people. It is generally considered that holding opinions that some people consider shocking cannot be forbidden, since such a prohibition would be contradictory with the notion of the freedom of opinion, which is itself a corollary of the principle of respecting the dignity of all. This rationalization process explains that trash literature is sometimes promoted to the status of an important literary event (see e.g. the cases of Michel Houellebecq or Catherine Millet in France). The seriousness of this literature makes it entirely distinct from the erotic tradition: it has attracted a great deal of attention thanks, not to its literary quality—it displays a minimal power of seduction—but to its ideological meaning: it stresses individuals’ rights to choose their sexual practices with an entire freedom provided only they cause no undesired nuisance to others. The extension of rights in modern societies The same phenomenon of diffuse rationalization explains that rights tend to become more numerous. T.H. Marshall (1964) had already identified this process, which is still at work. New rights are constantly identified which have the property—curious if not monstrous from a legal and juridical viewpoint—that they are not enforced by

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any laws or regulations. As an example, see the French droit au logement (literally: the right to a home). For some decades, this notion has been part of the common language, while this so-called right is not legally enforced. Some lawyers have proposed to call rights of the third generation as the right to peace or the right to right, i.e. those rights which have little chance of being ever legally enforced since it would imply the abolition of force in national and international processes. This stammering character of the development of new rights is unavoidable. It confirms the characteristics of any program in the sense where I use this concept here. The notion of the dignity of the person is fuzzy; hence its content is unstable, and hyperbolic interpretations of the notion are consequently unavoidable. See for instance, particularly in the USA, the hyperbolic views developed by the feminist movement or by the movements struggling for the defense of minorities’ rights. Utopias are a normal component of the rationalization processes through which new rights are identified and defined. But it should also be noted that, at the same time, these utopias and hyperbolic interpretations are exposed to a process of rational selection. Obviously, this selection process does not result from a discussion between experts; it results rather from a confrontation between actors; including public opinion, social movements, intellectuals and lawmakers. That such rational selection processes develop currently in a context of conflict should not occult their underlying rationality. Unfortunately, such an occultation is typical of the so-called sociological theories of conflict and domination. The inflationary extension of rights which can currently be observed is a symptom of the development of the program defined by the notion of the respect of the person, as are many other features characteristic of contemporary societies—the development of the right of interference with the sovereignty of other nations (in French: droit d’ingérence), or the creation of international penal tribunals. Episodes like Pinochet’s arrest in the UK or the indictment of Milosevic by an international court of justice are easily explained by the rationalization processes I have described. Their importance lies in the fact that they illustrate the case where the rights of individuals are perceived as having a priority with regard to the principle of national sovereignty. The constant attempt at devising means of social control intended to minimize cases of misbehavior and at the same time to express the utmost respect for the person of the criminal, is another example of the action of these rationalization processes.


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The identification and analysis of the dynamics, thanks to which a necessarily fuzzy program gives birth to various interpretations which are submitted to a process of rational selection performed by various collective actors is, it seems to me, one of the major theoretical findings of the social sciences. They have made obsolete the static Kantian notion of the dignity of man. Kant’s formalism forbade him to give the question of the content of this notion the crucial importance which it has. Rationalization does not mean standardization An important caveat should be introduced at this point: one should not draw from the evolutionary theory I have developed on the basis of some intuitions of Durkheim and Weber idea that the various “cultures” should be deemed to become progressively more standardized. For instance, the idea that an organization of political power in the style of Montesquieu is better than an organization in the style of Bodin is irreversibly established. It derives from the process of rational selection that governs the choice of ideas. But it should also be noted that in most cases there are many ways of realizing the same idea. Thus, the organization of the separation of powers is not the same in France and in the UK. The judiciary power is not organized in the same way in France and in Germany. In France, prosecutors’ decisions have a jurisdictional character and an administrative character in Germany. They are taken by magistrates in France and by civil servants in Germany. The conception of right is inquisitorial in the UK and accusatory in France or Germany. In the former case, the State is supposed to have the function of arbitrating conflicts between parties and to determine what is right or not, fair or not, on the occasion of these conflicts; and in the latter case, as having the function of prosecuting offences. On the other hand, many norms derive from customs. There is no other ground than custom to the fact that politeness is expressed in one way here, and in another way elsewhere. This derives from the fact that the relation between a symbol and its meaning can be arbitrary; whence a same meaning can be translated in various ways. Technical objects themselves show that, while technical advances produce irreversible constraints, they also leave a wide margin of

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freedom to the people who conceive of them. In today’s market, one cannot propose an over-noisy or energy-greedy airplane, or a fountain pen that tends to leak; but, once these constraints are taken into account, there are many ways of conceiving a plane or a fountain pen. The same could be said of all the domains where Weber’s “diffuse rationalization” process is at work. Finally, some competing ideas cannot be ranked against one another for basic reasons. The case of religions illustrates this point. All religious explanations of the world have the common feature that some of their components are held as immune against criticism. All religions have their theologians, though theology is more developed in some religions than in others. Even in the case where theology is very developed, the identity of a religion is protected against criticism by the immunization of some points of the doctrine. For this reason, religions are deemed to coexist. Rationalization processes can only make this coexistence more peaceful. On this point, it must be added that, under the effect of these rationalization processes, the principle of the freedom of opinion has become more firmly established. Consequently, atheism tends currently to be treated as one possible worldviews among others. On the other hand, the dominant religion of the Western world has finally accepted that it cannot consider itself as better than others; that what matters is, in Durkheim’s words, that individuals recognize the existence of the sphere of the sacred. I have submitted in Boudon (2000) that Durkheim’s notion of le sacré can be translated in our modern vocabulary by the notion of values. Durkheim himself could not use this word since, in his time, it was not currently taken in this sense. Beside its economic meaning, it meant “courage”. The modern sense is due to Nietzsche and became current only after World War I. These various reasons explain that, beyond the rationalization processes common to various societies, they keep up a strong identity and singularity. The existence of rationalization processes does not necessarily imply that societies are deemed to become standardized. Conversely, the persistence of various “cultures” does not imply that rationalization processes are not at work in most of them, or that there are no universal values. A permanent debate opposes those who believe in the existence of universal values and of processes transcending the singularity of societies, to those who insist on the singularity of societies and of cultures. The philosophers of law have always hesitated between a natural theory and a positivist theory of


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law. Many anthropologists see the world as composed of a juxtaposition of singular cultures. Once it is realized that institutions should be interpreted as deriving from the realization of a “program,” those dilemmas disappear. Among the norms enforced in a given society, some express their singularity, others are the outcome of processes of diffuse rationalization. Finally, the evolutionary theory I propose to draw from Durkheim’s and Weber’s intuitions is open in the sense that it does not claim that evolution would tend toward some end. Evolution results from the realization of programs led by a rationalization process. The cases of ethics, law or political theory are not in principle different from the case of science. Like the evolution of science, the evolution of these other dimensions of thought is doomed to never reach an end. Advantages of a programmatist theory of social evolution It seems to me that the programmatist theory I propose to derive from sketchy intuitions by Durkheim and Weber has a certain number of distinctive features when compared to others. It insists on the importance of ideas in social evolution; on the importance of innovations; on the unpredictable character of many ideas; on the role of contingencies; on the fact that new ideas can reflect the realization of a “program;” that for instance the notions of citizenship, person, rightto, belong to a widely undefined program which they contributed to deploy progressively; it insists on the fact that ideas tend to be rationally selected; that a selected idea can be realized in an indefinite number of fashions; on the fact that many norms are unaffected by these rationalization processes, because they are connected with some values in an arbitrary fashion (as in the case of customs); on the fact that evolutionary processes cannot be always interpreted as adaptation processes, but are often generated by innovations with no adaptation function properly; that the notion of rationalization combines the cognitive and the instrumental dimensions of rationality. These various features characterize the theory of social evolution proposed by Eisenstadt (2002b). Eisenstadt uses the notion of program explicitly and abundantly. He shows well how collective identities are generated by programs made up of a mixture of singular and universal features, resulting from the interplay between rationalization and singularities.

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The well-tempered evolutionism which I propose to derive from the intuitions of Durkheim and Weber and which I identify in Eisenstadt’s work must be distinguished from another evolutionary theory—that of Hayek. Hayek’s evolutionary theory is certainly one of the most interesting modern theories of social evolution. But, probably because it is essentially inspired by Hayek’s reflections on the history of economics, it appears incomplete to the sociologist’s eye. The process he qualifies as group selection is but one of the selection processes at work in social evolution. Hayek evokes here notably the ineluctable victory of liberalism on socialism (Nadeau 2003). Now, the selection of ideas by such and such group is another essential mechanism beside group selection. An example of such a process can be drawn from Weber: monotheistic cults born in the Middle-East were preferred by Roman civil servants and military personal to the traditional Roman polytheistic religion. This selection process had immense consequences. Among them, the fact that notions as person or of universal citizenship were proposed on the market of ideas. As Hayek pointedly stresses, unanticipated consequences of intentional actions are an essential component of social evolution; but equally essential is the idea that the selection of ideas results from individual choices and the individual choices from reasons. Thus, the Roman military personal had strong reasons of preferring the monotheistic cults to the Roman polytheistic religion. As stated by Nadeau (2003), Hayek’s version of methodological individualism is synthetical, it insists on the non-intentional effects of individual actions. But methodological individualism has also an analytical side, it insists on the logic of individual actions, and notably of these essential actions that lead to the endorsement or rejection of an idea. The addition of such actions creates a collective belief. Moreover, it is indispensable to insist on the fact that, though in many cases competing ideas can be ranked with respect with one another and can give birth to a rational selection process, it is not true of all ideas. This distinction contributes to explain why all societies include universal and singular features. The fundamental notions I have introduced here ( program, rationalization, rational selection) can be used in various circumstances. I have evoked in the above examples very general programs: the programs underlying the history of morals, science or political theory. These notions can also be applied to narrower subjects. In everyday political life, programs are developed which begin with slogans,


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for the content of these programs is often reduced to a leading more or less vague idea that has to be made more precise in the course of action, for instance, decrease the consumption of tobacco and reducing the rate of unemployment. These narrower programs are also subjected to the rationalization process evoked by Weber. A question remains—according to Durkheim, “individualism begins nowhere”—while it seems that, to Weber, the disenchantment of the world and the central role given to the notion of citizenship are features characteristic of Western culture. In fact, the two authors can be seen as very close to one another on this question. The demand for the respect of the dignity of all is universal, even though it is currently thwarted by historical forces. Historical contingencies have led to this demand being satisfied earlier and more constantly in Europe than in other parts of the world. But it can be easily seen that this demand is present today in all societies. The veils worn by the young Iranian women from the bourgeoisie are becoming more elegant and more personal; a satirical press emerges in Iran; jokes are circulating; as in the communist countries during the Cold War, they are directed against the political authorities—such as, never queue up at a taxi station close to a mullah, since no taxi would stop. Other jokes, on the mode of black humor, indicate a preference for certain features of Western culture: the 9/11 attack against New York could not have possibly been carried out by Iranians, for they would have landed the aircrafts in Hawaii. Finally, the previous remarks confirm the idea, evoked above and rightly presented as evident by a well-recognized historian of liberalism, Bellamy (2002), that Durkheim and Weber belong to the liberal intellectual tradition. Both consider autonomy as an essential category. As stated by Bellamy, they owe their originality within this tradition notably to the fact that they were conscious that the realization of the liberal program is exposed to all kinds of risks and difficulties. It is important to stress this point at a time when Weber and Durkheim are seen by certain sociologists as the putative fathers, respectively, of relativism and holism.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND THE CONSTRUCTIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE FORCES OF MODERNITY Shmuel N. Eisenstadt Introduction The confrontation between pluralistic and totalitarian tendencies is inherent in the constitution and dynamics of modernity and is closely related to that between the constructive and destructive tendencies thereof. In this concluding chapter I would like to explore the relations between these tendencies and one central dimension of constitution of social order in general—especially of the institutional orders of modernity—namely the constitution of (modern) collective identities. I shall first briefly discuss the roots of modern destructive tendencies as they are related to the constitution of collective identities in general, and then proceed to an analysis of the modern scene. The destructive potentialities of the constitution of collectivities I. Genocide—the extermination of one group of people by another, be it through war or deliberate policy or intergroup violence—constitutes a very widespread, potentially universal aspect of human society and history, a basic manifestation of the destructive potential of human behavior—but its concrete manifestation, intensity and impact vary greatly between different societies. The general tendency to destructive intergroup behavior is rooted in the very core characteristics of the constitution of collective boundaries and identity—a basic component of human societies, of human social interaction. Collectivities, collective identities and boundaries— be they “ethnic,” “national,” religious, civilizational or under whatever name they are designated—are not, as has been often assumed in relevant literature, epiphenomenal or secondary to power and economic forces and relations constituting “imagined” communities which

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in modern times developed in response to the expansion of capitalism, industrialism and imperialism; nor are they continual semi-natural, primordial and ontologically independent entities, existing as it were almost in eternity. The constitution of collective identities and boundaries—a construction which has been going on in all human societies throughout human history—constitutes, like the exercise and regulation of power, the production and distribution of economic resources and the structuring of economic relations with which it is indeed continually interwoven, and a basic component of social life, of the construction of human societies. The central core of this analytical component is the cultural, “symbolic” and social—organizational or institutional—constitution of boundaries of collectivities, and of trust and solidarity among the members of such collectivities. The construction of boundaries of collectivities constitutes an aspect or component of the more general human tendency towards the construction of symbolic and organizational boundaries of social interaction. This general tendency is rooted in the openness of the human biological program; in the concomitant development of basic indeterminacies in the structuring of any continual interaction between human beings and in the consciousness among them of such indeterminacies.1 The most crucial of those indeterminacies in any continual social interaction are: first, those among actors, whether individuals or collectivities; second, among actors and their goals; third, between actors and their goals on the one hand, and the resources at their disposal, including the activities of other actors, on the other hand. It is the first indeterminacy—that in the relations among actors interacting in any situation, also in continual interrelation with the others—that is of special interest from the point of view of our analysis. This indeterminacy is manifest in the fact that the range of actors who are, as it were, admitted to any such situation of continual interaction is not specified either by genetic programming or by some general rules or tendencies of the human mind; and that neither the boundaries of such interaction, nor the criteria determining who is entitled to participate, are automatically given by either of those

1 Mayer, 1976; Wilson, 1980; Portman, 1944; Gehlen, 1971; Plessner, 1966, Diederichs, Plessner, and Augen, 1982.

collective identity and modernity

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determinants, and hence they necessarily constitute a focus of continuous change and of at least potential struggle. The existence of some degree of such indeterminacy in patterns of behavior and interaction is true of many other species, although in a more limited way than among humans. But human beings are also conscious of that indeterminacy and of the openness of their own biological program. Such consciousness is closely related to the consciousness, manifest in the construction of burial places, of death and of human finitude, and it generates among human beings a core existential anxiety and a closely related fear of chaos. This anxiety is exacerbated by the human capacity for imagination, so brilliantly analyzed by J.P. Sartre, i.e., by the ability to conceive of various possibilities beyond what is given here and now,2 and in the closely related universal predisposition to play.3 All these lead human beings to problematize the givens of their own existence and to undertake a quest for the construction of meaningful order as an integral part of their self-interpretations and self-awareness, and of their selfreflexivity. Such anxiety and fear of chaos and the quest for the constitution of a meaningful order through which that chaos can seemingly be overcome, generate among human beings the strong predisposition to construct a realm of the sacred, in which direct contact with the roots of cosmic or social order is established, and which serves as a focal point for the construction of symbolic and institutional boundaries inherent in the constitution of such an order. It is such construction of the realm of the sacred that constitutes the core of human charismatic activity. Such activity, oriented towards the construction of a meaningful order, entails not only constructive but also destructive tendencies or potentialities. Such destructive potentialities are rooted in the fact that the constitution of such an order cannot do away with either the indeterminacies inherent in any pattern of continual human interaction, with the awareness or consciousness thereof—however dim—or with the core existential anxiety. Indeed, the very construction of such an order generates a strong awareness of its arbitrariness and a strong ambivalence towards it in general and towards any concrete social and cultural order in

2 3

Sartre, 1972. Huizinga, 1970; Caillois, 1961; Brunner, Jully and Silva, 1979.

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particular. The construction of such an order often gives rise to a dim, yet deep, awareness that any concrete answer to the problem of potential chaos imposes limitations on the range of possibilities open to human beings, giving rise in turn to a yearning to break through any such restrictions and actualize some different possibilities.4 Hence the fervor attendant on many charismatic activities may also generate fear of the sacred and hence opposition to it, and contain a strong predisposition to sacrilege, manifest for instance in the close relation between the consciousness of death and search for the sacred to be found in many sacrificial rituals; and it may breed opposition to any more attenuated and formalized forms of this order.5 Needless to say, the awareness of the openness of human biological programs, the fear of chaos and the concomitant search for a meaningful vision rooted in the realm of the sacred are not equally developed among different people, and are not structured or defined in the same mode within different societies and cultures. Nor are they necessarily central to most daily activities of most people. But the general propensity to such awareness and reflexivity and to the quest for the construction of a meaningful order is inherent in the human situation and is of far-reaching importance in the constitution of social life. II. The constitution of collective identities and boundaries provides one of the most important manifestations of the search for constitution of such an order and of charismatic human activity. The central focus of the construction of collective identities is a combination of the definition of any collectivity’s distinctiveness with the specification of criteria for membership in it; and of the attributes of similarity of the members of these collectivities. Or, in D.M. Schneider’s terms,6 it is the combination of “identity” and membership in different collectivities; defining the attributes of similarity of members of a collectivity with the specification of the range of “codes” available to those participating in such collectivities—delineating in this way the relations to other “collectivities,” to various “others”—that constitutes the central focus of the construction of collective identities.

4 5 6

Bateson, 1972; Taylor, 1985; Van der Lieuw, 1957, pp. 324–353. Bateson 1972; Taylor 1985; Eisenstadt, 1995b, pp. 167–201; 228–89; 378–380. Schneider and Smith, 1973.


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The construction of collectivities and collective identities entails the specification of the distinct attributes of such collectivities as related to basic cosmological and ontological conceptions and visions— i.e. to a specific cultural program—and the concretization thereof in specific location in space and time.7 The construction of collective identity or consciousness is also related to the distinction, recognized long ago by Durkheim, between the sacred and the profane, and to the different combinations of these two dimensions of social order. The attributes of similarity of members of a collectivity are manifest in the formation of the human types and patterns of behavior which seem to be appropriate for such members—be it the English gentleman; the “good bourgeois,” or, to follow Norbert Elias,8 the civilized person; the good Confucian; and the like. The construction of “similarity” of the members of any collectivity entails the emphasis on their contrast with strangeness, on the differences distinguishing them from the other or others. It is that emphasis on the similarity of members of a collectivity which provides Durkheim’s9 pre-contractual elements of social life, the bases of mechanical solidarity, and of solidarity and trust. Defining the “other” or “others”—and the relations to such others— poses the problem of crossing the boundaries of how a stranger can become a member; of how a member can become an outsider or a stranger. Religious conversion and excommunication represent obvious illustrations of the crossing of boundaries. III. The construction of collective identities is influenced or shaped, as is that of most arenas of social activity, by distinct codes, schemata or themes, rooted in ontological or cosmological premises and conceptions of social order to be found in all societies. The major codes or themata which shape the construction of collective identity are those of primordiality, civility, and sacredness (sacrality) or transcendence— each of which delineates distinct patterns of specification of the boundaries of collectivities, of the range of codes or patterns of behavior, as well as the allocation of resources and regulation of power. The theme or code of primordiality10 focuses on such components 7 8 9 10

Eisenstadt, 1995, pp. 167–201, 378–380. Elias, 1982. Durkheim, 1933. Shils, 1975, pp. 111–126; Geertz, 1973, pp. 255–310.

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as gender and generation, kinship, territory, language, race, and the like for constructing and reinforcing the boundary between inside and outside. This boundary, though constructed, is perceived as naturally given. The second theme—that of civility or civic consciousness, the civic code—is constructed on the basis of familiarity with implicit and explicit rules of conduct, traditions, and social routines that define and demarcate the boundary of the collectivity.11 These rules are regarded as the core of the community’s collective identity. The third theme—the sacral or transcendent—links the constituted boundary between “us and them” not to natural conditions, but to a particular relation of the collective, subject to the realm of the sacred and the sublime, be it defined as God or Reason, Progress or Rationality.12 This code, just as the first two, can be found in all including preliterate and above all “archaic” societies—in which it was usually embedded or interwoven in the two other types of codes—but the purest illustrations of such distinct sacred codes are the Axial-Age religions which will be discussed later on.13 These three themes are of course ideal types. Within each there may develop many variations. Thus, to give only two illustrations, within the general framework of primordial orientation there may develop different emphases on territory, culture, language, or other components of primordiality, and on different conceptions of collective time. Similarly, the differences between, to follow Weber’s nomenclature, this-worldly and other-worldly Axial religious ontological conceptions and orientations, have been extensively analyzed.14 The construction of collective identities entails the concretization of themes and the specification of their different contents; and of different combinations thereof, and the designation of different institutional arenas as the bearers of such codes—as for instance the emphasis on primordiality in “local” or “ethnic” collectivities; on civil rules in the political collectivity or in broad religious ones. The different combinations of such codes or themes and the specification of the institutional arenas in which they are implemented vary greatly between different societies and social settings—and it is the specific

11 12 13 14

Durkheim, 1933. Tenbruck, 1989. Eisenstadt, 1983; Eisenstadt, 1987a. Eisenstadt, 1983.


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ways in which such themes are defined, combined and institutionalized that constitute the distinct characteristics of different collectivities. Whatever the concrete specification and combination of such themes in any collectivity, the construction of collective identity entails some—highly variable—combination of most—usually all of—such codes or themes, and continual tension between them. IV. The construction of collective identities is effected by various social actors and situations, especially by various “influentials” and elites in interaction with broader social sectors. The core of this interaction is the activation of the predisposition to and search for some such order, which is inherent, even if not fully articulated, among all, or at least most, people. Such predispositions or propensities are activated by different “influentials” and actors who attempt to attain hegemony in various settings. Of special importance are those actors— like for instance the different promulgators of the visions of the Great Axial Civilizations or the bearers of the modern Great Revolutions, or of different conceptions of modern statehood and nationality— who attempt to promulgate distinct visions of collective identity, and/ or distinct cultural programs. In so far as such activists find resonance among wider sectors of the population, they are able to institutionalize the distinct symbols and boundaries promulgated by them, and crystallize different concrete collective identities and boundaries. Such actors often compete with each other, as was the case, for instance, of the competition between different religions in late antiquity.15 The competition between such activists is not purely “symbolic” and the construction and promulgation of collective identities is not a purely “symbolic” exercise—it is manifest not only in the “symbolic” depiction of the boundaries of the collectivity, but also in the institutionalization thereof. The institutionalization of boundaries of collectivities takes place through the interweaving of the promulgation of such models of cosmic and social order and of the visions of distinctiveness of any collectivity, and of the attributes of similarity of its members, appropriate to the members of these collectivities, with the control of the production and distribution of resources, with the regulation of power and access to such resources.

15

Brown, 1978, 1982, 1992; Burkert, 1987.

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V. The construction of collective identities and boundaries—like that of any continual social interaction, of any social order—bears within itself both constructive and destructive possibilities. The constructive dimension of such construction lies in the fact that it is that construction which generates trust, without which no continuous human interaction can be assured and creativity take place (Eisenstadt, 1995), but at the same time by its very nature such a construction entails exclusiveness and exacerbates the ambivalence toward social order. The destructive potentialities inherent in the construction of collective identities are also inherent in the very structure of the situations in which the charismatic dimensions of human activity and interaction are promulgated. The promulgation in such situations of the models of cosmic and social order attempts to imbue the given order with charismatic dimension, to bring it into closer, often direct, relation with the sacred, and concomitantly to “convince” the members of a given society that the institutional order in general, and the concrete order of their society in particular, are the “correct” ones. The symbols and images portrayed in these models extol the given order—the purity of the world inside the boundaries, and the danger of the world outside—or the need to remain within the boundaries despite the continuous attraction of the world outside, reinforcing, as it were, the existing ideologies or hegemonies.16 Yet paradoxically, at the same time there develops in such situations an awareness of the arbitrariness of any social order and of the limitations on human activities which it imposes, as well as a growing awareness of the possibility of constructing new themes and models. Hence in such situations there tends also to develop a potentially strong ambivalence to any social order and especially to the given concrete social order, enhancing the attraction of stepping outside the boundaries thereof, as well as the anxiety about doing so.17 Such ambivalences and the consciousness of the arbitrariness of social order and of its fragility are intensified by the fact that the promulgation of such models is connected with the exercise and legitimation of power.18 Consequently there may develop in such situations

16 17 18

Eisenstadt, 1995b, pp. 306–27. Eisenstadt, 1995, pp. 167–201. Burkert, 1983, 1998; Vernant, 1991; Rappaport, 1999; Bloch, 1992.


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strong tendencies to sacrilege, transgression, violence and aggression— manifest among others in the close relation between the consciousness of death and search for the sacred which is apparent in many sacrificial rituals and in the concomitant tendencies for the exclusion of others, making them the foci or targets of such ambivalence, depicting them not only as strange but also as evil. It is also in such situations that the continual reconstitution of the concrete specifications of the major themes of collective identity became most visible. One of the most interesting aspects of the processes of reconstruction of collective identities is the continual reconstruction of primordiality. Contrary to some of the recent studies on nationalism and ethnicity which assume that the primordial components of collective identity are almost naturally and continually given, and on the whole unchanging; in fact those components have been continually reconstituted in different historical contexts and under the impact of inter-societal forces. Although primordiality is always presented by its promulgators as “primordial,” as naturally given, yet in fact it is also continually reconstructed under the impact of such forces—and in close relation to the promulgation and continual reconstruction of other—civil or sacred, above all universalistic— codes or orientations. The construction of collective identities and boundaries in modern societies: The cultural and political program of modernity VI. The constitution of collectivities and collective boundaries continuously interwoven with struggles for power and economic resources has been going on throughout human history, but their concrete manifestations varied greatly between different societies and institutions. In all societies, the distinctive ways in which collective boundaries are constituted and in which destructive potentialities or tendencies developed were closely related to the combination inherent in them of the specific cultural program that was promulgated and the internal contradiction and tension in these programs, and the specific historical experience of these societies. It would be beyond the promise of this paper to present a systematic analysis of such variations19 and

19

Eisenstadt, 2002b.

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we shall focus here on the distinctive characteristics of the constitution of collectivities and of their destructive potentialities as they developed in modern societies. With the emergence of modernity, of modern civilization, there emerged—in close relation to the distinct cultural program of modernity and to the specific historical context of the development of the institutional contours of modernity—a new pattern of constitution of collective identities. That constitution was characterized by some very specific characteristics, which have greatly influenced the entire modern historical, social science and general discourse about collective identity, especially of nationalism and ethnicity—often presenting them as if they were the natural attributes or forms of collective identities, but which have to be analyzed in the broader comparative and analytical framework. The cultural and political program of modernity as it developed first in the West, in Western and Central Europe, entailed distinct ideological as well as institutional premises. It entailed a very distinct shift in the conception of human agency, of its autonomy, and of its place in the flow of time; one of the major characteristics thereof was the loss of the markers of certainty and continual attempts and contestation about their reinstatement. Accordingly, this program also entailed a very distinctive mode of construction of the boundaries of collectivities and collective identities. In some, even if certainly not total, contrast to the situation in the Axial Civilizations, collective identities were not taken as given or preordained by some transcendental vision and authority, or by perennial customs. At the same time the most distinct characteristic of the construction of modern collectivities, very much in line with the general core characteristics of modernity, was that such construction was continually problematized in reflexive ways, and constituted a focus of continual struggles and contestations. Those continual contestations were borne by distinct social actors— be they political activists, politically active intellectuals, and distinct social movements, above all national or nationalistic ones—oriented to the constitution of such new collectivities. Indeed, one of the most distinctive characteristics of the continual process of reconstruction of modern collective identities was the centrality in this process of special social and political activists, and above all organizations bearing distinct visions of collective identities and ideologies, and mobilizing wide sectors of the population. The best illustrations of the latter are


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of course distinct social movements, especially the national or nationalistic ones, as well as the closely related promulgation of distinct ideologies, above all national and also modern ethnic ones, of collective identity. It was these activists and movements that were the bearers of contestations and struggles, often couched in highly ideological terms, around the far-reaching transformation in comparison with the preceding Axial periods, of the codes of collective identity and of the relation between them.20 The development of new, mainly secular definitions—couched in highly ideological and absolutized terms—of each component of collective identity were among the most important of such transformations of the themes of collective identity which were both attendant on the development of modernity and first emerged in Europe. The key transformations of the components were the civil, primordial and universalistic and transcendental “sacred” ones; the growing importance of the civil and procedural components thereof; of a continual tension among these components; and a very strong emphasis, in the construction and institutionalization of the collective identities, on territorial boundaries. Concomitantly there developed intensive tendencies toward the establishment of a very strong connection between the construction of the political order and that of the major “encompassing” collectivities, a connection that later became epitomized in the model of the modern nation-state. The crystallization of the modern nationstate and its institutionalization entailed an emphasis on congruence between the cultural and political identities of the territorial population; strong tendencies to attribute to the newly constructed collectivities and centers charismatic characteristics; the promulgation, by the center, of strong symbolic and affective commitments of members of society to the center and the collectivity; and a close relationship between the center and the more primordial dimensions of human existence as well as social life, as well as the civil and sacred ones. In most modern societies—with the partial exception as we shall see of Japan—such relationships did not entail denial of the validity of the broader, civilizational orientations. Rather there developed strong tendencies for the new national collectivities to become

20

Eisenstadt, 1999a, 1999b.

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also the repositories and regulators of these broader orientations— but at the same time there developed in them continual oscillation and tension between the national and the broader universalistic ones. The central characteristic of the model of the modern, especially the nation-state, was the strong emphasis on cultural-political homogeneity of the population within the territorial boundaries. A central focus of such homogeneity, closely related to the basic premises of the cultural program of modernity was the image of the “civilized man” as analyzed by Norbert Elias and, albeit in a rather highly exaggerated way, by Michel Foucault, and more systematically by John Meyer, Ron Jepperson and others, and as presented above all both in the great works of modern literature, especially in the great novels, as well as in the more “popular” literature which thrived in this period, in all of which the mission civilisatrice of modernity, of the modern period, were promulgated.21 A very central component in the construction of collective identities was the self-perception of a society as “modern,” as bearer of the distinct cultural and political program—and its relations from this point of view to other societies—be it those societies which claim to be, or are seen as,—bearers of this program, and various “others.” Concomitantly, the images and attributes of such homogeneities and modernity have been promulgated as John Meyer, Ron Jepperson and others have shown through a series of very strong socializing agencies, such as schools, often the army, the major media and the like—all of them emphasizing very strongly the idea or ideal of a politically and culturally homogeneous entity.22 A central aspect of such homogeneity was the conception of citizenship that entailed a direct relation of members of the collectivity to the state, unmediated by membership in any other collectivities, and the tendency to relegate the identities of other collectivities—religious, ethnic, regional and the like—to the private spheres as against the unitary public sphere which was seen as constituting the major arena in which the relations of citizens to the state and to the national collectivity were played out. The centers of these states become the regulators of the

21 Meyer and Jepperson, 2000, pp. 100–120; Meyer, Boli and Thomas, 1987, pp. 12–38; Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez, 1997, pp. 144–182. 22 Meyer and Jepperson, 2000; Meyer, Boli and Thomas, 1987, pp. 12–38; Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez, 1997.


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relations between the central identity and the various secondary, primordial or “sacred” universalistic identities—religious, ethnic, regional and the like. The distinctive visions of the new modern collectivities—above all indeed, of the nation-state—concomitantly entailed the promulgation of distinctive collective memories in which the universal, often “sacred” components rooted in the universalistic components of the cultural program of modernity and the particularistic national ones emphasizing their territorial, historical and cultural specifities came together— albeit in different ways in different societies, but constituting in all of them one of the major and continual foci of tensions and contestations.23 These different orientations of the “overall” collectivities were often symbolized or defined in distinctive gender terms—where the state, with its civic components, as well as with the organization of political force was often portrayed in masculine terms, and the nation, with strong primordial, nurturing and vitalistic components, in feminine ones. Both these gendered symbols were usually brought together under the canopy of the overarching nation state, yet at the same time constituting a focus of continual tensions and of distinct, potentially competing identities. Yet despite the strong tendency to conflate, in the ideal model of the nation-state, within “state” and “nation” there developed strong tensions between the “state” with its emphasis on territoriality and the seeming potentially universalistic notions of citizenship, on the one hand; and “nation”—with its more “closed” definitions of membership with strong primordial components, on the other hand. Thus paradoxically, a central aspect of the constitution of modern collective identities, closely related to the tension between “citizenship” and “membership” of a primordial community, between state and nation, was also the construction of a growing tendency to a sharper delineation of the boundaries, of different ethnic, regional and even religious communities, transforming the relative porousness of former semi-ethnic territorial, linguistic or kin boundaries into more formalized ones and with strong political orientations. Although in principle such different primordial communities were to be brought

23 Meyer and Jepperson, 2000; Meyer, Boli and Thomas 1987, pp. 12–38; Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez 1997.

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together under the overall canopy of the nation state, in fact there developed a potential for the continual development of a multiplicity of such distinct collectivities with strong potential political orientations, which needless to say varied greatly between different societies. VII. In many ways, the model of the nation-state, closely related to some of the basic ontological premises of the cultural program of modernity, has become hegemonic in the modern international systems and frameworks that developed in conjunction with the crystallization of modern order.24 But despite its hegemonic standing, the model of the nation-state was never as homogeneous, internally within any single society or across different societies. Even in Europe, a great variety of nation-states developed. One of the most important aspects of that variety was the relative importance in them of the different codes or themes of collective identity, i.e. of the primordial and civil and sacral (religious or secular ones) and the different combinations thereof. The second aspect of that variety was the extent to which there developed totalistic as against multifaceted visions of those basic collective identities— i.e. the extent to which the basic codes and the ways in which primordial-national, civil and universalistic orientations were interwoven in them, and especially the extent to which—in the historical experience of those societies—none of these dimensions is totally absolutized or set up by their respective carriers against the other dimensions or, contrariwise, the extent to which rather multifaceted patterns of collective identity developed instead. Such different modes of construction of modern collective identities were promulgated in modern societies by many political activists and intellectuals, and particularly the major social movements. It was indeed one of the most distinct characteristics of the modern scene that the construction of collective boundaries and consciousness could also become a focus of distinct social movements—the national or nationalistic ones. In many modern societies, such as the UK, France, and Sweden, the crystallization of new national collectivities and identities of different types of nation-states took place. Without the national movements playing an important role, the potentiality of

24 Meyer and Jepperson, 2000; Meyer, Boli and Thomas, 1987, pp. 12–38; Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez 1997.


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such movements existed in all modern societies. In some—in Central and Eastern Europe, some Asian and African, and to some extent Latin-American societies—they played a crucial role in the development of nation-states. VIII. It was within the framework of the basic characteristics of the constitution of modern collectivities and the political realm and, above all, the tensions between the pluralistic multifaceted and absolutizing totalizing visions that there crystallized the specific modes of the destructive potentialities inherent in the modern cultural program. These destructive potentialities became most fully manifest in the ideologization and sanctification of violence, terror and wars which became first apparent in the French Revolution and later in the Romantic movement and in the combination of such ideologization with the construction and institutionalization of the nation-states; with the fact that the nation-states became the most important agent— and arena—of constitution of citizenship and of collective identity; with the crystallization of the modern European state system and of European expansion beyond Europe especially under the aegis of imperialism and of colonialism, which were very often legitimized in terms of some of the components of the cultural programs of modernity—all of which became reinforced by technologies of war and communication. These destructive forces, the “traumas” of modernity which undermined the great promises thereof, emerged clearly during and after the First World War in the Armenian genocide, became even more visible in the Second World War, above all in the Holocaust, all of them shaking the naive belief in the inevitability of progress and of the conflation of modernity with progress. Lately they have reemerged in a most frightening way on the contemporary scene, in the new “ethnic” conflicts in many of the former republics of Soviet Russia, in Sri Lanka, in Kosovo, and in a most terrible way in Cambodia and in African countries, such as Rwanda.25 IX. The extent to which such destructive tendencies developed in modern societies was greatly influenced by the mode of constitution of modern collective identities to which we have referred above—

25

Eisenstadt, 1996a.

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above all to the mode in which the different themes of collective identity—the primordial, civic and sacred—were interwoven. In all modern European societies there developed a continual tension or confrontation between the primordial components of such identity, reconstructed in such modern terms as nationalism and ethnicity, and the modern, as well as more traditional religious, universalistic and civil components, as well as among the latter ones. The mode of interweaving of these different components of collective identity which varied greatly among different European societies greatly influenced the tension between pluralistic and totalistic tendencies of the cultural and political program of modernity and the extent to which the destructive potentialities developed in these societies. It was insofar as the primordial components were relatively peacefully interwoven in the construction of their respective collective identities with the civil and universalistic ones in multifaceted ways— that the kernels of modern barbarism and the exclusivist tendencies inherent in them were minimized. In England, Holland, Switzerland and in the Scandinavian countries, the crystallization of modern collective identity was characterized by a relatively close interweaving— even if never bereft of tensions—of the primordial and religious components with the civil and universalistic ones, without the former being denied, allowing a relatively wide scope for pluralistic arrangements. Concomitantly, in these countries there developed also relatively weak confrontations between the secular orientations of the Enlightenment—which often contained strong deistic orientations— and the strong religious orientations of various Protestant sects. As against situations in these societies, in those societies (as was the case in Central Europe, above all in Germany and in most countries of Southern and Central Europe) in which the construction of the collective identities of the modern nation-state was connected with continual confrontations between the primordial and the civil and universalistic, and as well as between “traditional” religious and modern universalistic components, there developed a stronger tendency to crisis and the breakdown of the different types of constitutional arrangement. In the more authoritarian regimes, such primordial components were promulgated in “traditional” authoritarian terms— in the more totalitarian fascist or national-socialist movements, in strong racist ones—while the absolutized universalistic orientations were promulgated by various “leftist” Jacobin movements.


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France—especially modern Republican France from the Third Republic on, but with strong roots in the preceding periods—constitutes a very important, arguably the most important, illustration of the problems arising out of continual confrontations between Jacobin and traditional components in the legitimation of modern regimes— even within the framework of relatively continuous polity and collective identity and boundaries. The case of France illustrates that under such conditions, pluralistic tendencies and arrangements do not develop easily, giving rise to the turbulence resulting from the institutionalization of a continual constitutional democratic regime.26 The construction of different modes of collective identity has been connected in Europe—and beyond Europe—with specific institutional conditions; among them the most important have been the flexibility of the centers, the mutual openness of elites, and their relations to broader social strata. There developed in Europe, and later in other societies, a close elective affinity between the absolutizing types of collective identity and various types of absolutist regimes and rigid centers, and between the multifaceted pattern of collective identity in which the primordial, civil, and sacred components were continually interwoven with the development of relatively open and flexible centers and of mutual openings between various strata. It was the concomitant development of relatively strong but flexible and open centers, multifaceted modes of collective identity, and autonomous access of major strata to the center that was of crucial importance in the development of a distinct type of civil society—a society that was to a large extent autonomous from the state but at the same time autonomous in the state, had autonomous access to the state and participated in formulating the rules of the political game; and it was such conditions that made possible the minimization of the tendencies to barbarism and exclusion. X. It was insofar as such multifaceted modes of construction of collective identities and of strong but flexible centers faltered that the two major forms of absolutizing tendencies, bearing within themselves the kernels of barbarism, of destruction, of drastic exclusion, demonization and annihilation of others—the Communist and the

26

Eisenstadt, 1999a.

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extreme fascist, especially the National Socialist movements and regimes—triumphed. Within each of these movements and the regimes instituted by them there developed strong tendencies to exclusivism and barbarism. But contrary to the claim for a total equivalence of the barbaric tendencies of these two types of regimes, and despite many similarities between them, there was a crucial difference between them. This difference, as Leszek Kolakowski and Martin Mallia have shown in their comments on Besançon,27 was rooted in the attitudes of those respective movements and regimes to the universalistic and the concomitant potentially—even if only potentially—inclusivist components of the modern cultural and political program. The socialist and communist movements were fully set within the framework of the cultural program of modernity, above all of the Enlightenment and of the Revolutions, and their criticism of the modern capitalist bourgeois society was made in terms of noncompleteness of the modern program—entailing the potentiality of continual inclusion—even if these potentialities were strongly counteracted by the barbaric exclusivist practices of these regimes rooted in their absolutizing tendencies. Hence within the Communist movements and regimes with all their destructive annihilating forces there could develop tendencies of resistance with least the potential to challenge those regimes’ barbaric and exclusivist practices. The extreme fascist or national-socialist regimes, aimed above all at the reconstruction of the boundaries of modern collectivities, negated the universalistic components of the cultural program of modernity and promulgated ideologies and praxis of total exclusion, total barbarization without possibilities of challenge from within to the total demonization of the excluded. It is indeed when these two absolutizing tendencies come together—as in Cambodia—that they give rise to some of the most gruesome aspects of modern barbarism.28 In the modern program, all these destructive potentialities and forces are inherent potentialities, most fully manifest in the ideologization of violence, terror and wars; and the total ideological exclusivity and demonization of the excluded are not outbursts of an old

27 28

L. Kolakowski, 1990. Ben Kiernan, 1999, 17:93–128.


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“traditional” force—but outcomes of modern reconstruction, of seemingly “traditional” forces in a modern way. Thus, to paraphrase Leszek Kolakowski’s (1990) felicitous and sanguine expression, modernity is indeed “on endless trial.”29

29

L. Kolakowski, 1990.

APPENDIX

THE TRAIL OF A SCHOLAR A succint curriculum vitae Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt was born in September 10, 1923, Warsaw, Poland. He immigrated at a young age to Palestine/Israel, married Shulamit and has three children. He started his higher education in 1940, in the Departments of History, Jewish History and Sociology of Culture, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He got his Master degree in 1944 and his PhD in 1947, under the tuition of Martin Buber. He was on post-doctoral studies at the London School of Economics during 1947–48. He started teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1944, in 1959, was appointed Rose Isaacs Professor of Sociology. He was the Chairperson of the Department of Sociology from 1951 to 1969, serving as well as the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences from 1966 to 1968. Since 1983, he is Professor Emeritus. The list of S.N. Eisenstadt’s appointments as visiting professor shows his international renown. He was invited—for diverse periods) in the London School of Economics (1958), the Universities of Oslo (1958), Chicago (1960), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1962–3), Chicago (1966, 1971, 1989–1995), Harvard (1968–9; 1975–81), Michigan (1970), Zurich (1975), Australian National University (1977), Manchester (1978), Vienna (1980), Bern (1980, 1985), Stanford (1984, 1986–90), of Washington (Seattle, 1986, 1996, 1998), Alberta (Edmonton, 1989), Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris, 1989), Justus Liebig (Giesen, 1990), Montesquieux (Bordeaux, 1996), Heidelberg (1997), Erfurt (1998, 1999, 2000), Konstanz (1999), Hong Kong (2000). He was also a Fullbright Professor (1986), a guest of the Russell Sage Foundation, New York (1988), a guest scholar of the Wilson Center for International Exchange (Washington, 1996, 1998), and a visiting researcher at the US Institute of Peace (Washington DC, 2002). In addition, he also was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1955–56), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar (1973) and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Uppsala (1993–96).

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From 1960 to 1964, he was Chairperson of the Chairman, Israel Council of Community Relations, from 1969 to 1971, of the Israeli Sociological Association, and from 1995 to 1999, of the Academic Advisory Council, Ben Zvi Institute. S.N. Eisenstadt received honoris causa doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki, Harvard, Hebrew Union College, Tel-Aviv, Duke, Budapest (Central European University), and was made Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, the Open University of Tel-Aviv and the Israeli Sociological Society. Moreover, S.N. Eisenstadt is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Honorary Foreign Member, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Foreign Member, American Philosophical Society, Foreign Associate, National Academy of Sciences (USA), a Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. S.N. Eisenstadt also received a list of distinguished awards and prizes: the McIver Award of the American Sociological Association (1964), the Kaplun Prize in Social Sciences (1969), the Rothshild Prize in Social Sciences (1970), the Israel Prize in Social Sciences (1973), the International Balzan Prize (1988), the Max Planck Research Award (1994), the 21st Century Award for Achievement from the International Biographical Center, Cambridge (2000), the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (2001), the Humboldt Research Award (2002), and the Ambassador of Cultural Dialogue Award of the Polish Asia Pacific Council in Warsaw. 1988 was declared by the Chinese Sociological Society, the Eisenstadt Year, and in 2003 he was declared “Living legend” by the Worldwide Honours List of the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge; in 2003. S.N. Eisenstadt’s list of books includes: The Absorption of Immigrants, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Glencoe, Il: Free Press, 1954. From Generation to Generation, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Glencoe, Il: Free Press, 1956. With new introduction 1970 (also German, Italian and Portuguese translations). Third edition: Transaction, New Brunswick, 2003. Essays on Sociological Aspects of Political and Economic Development. The Hague: Mouton Press, 1961. The Political Systems of Empires. New York: Free Press, 1963, 1969. Also Spanish and Chinese translations. New edition with new introduction, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993. Essays on Comparative Institutions. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965. Modernization, Protest and Change. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966 (Also Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese translations).

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Israeli Society. New York: Basic Books, 1967 (Also Hebrew, German and Portuguese translations). The Sociology of Modernization ( Japanese). Tokyo: Mizuzu Shobo, 1967. Modernizacao e Mudanca Social. Introduction and translation by Jose Clovis Machada, Belo Horizonte, 1968. Ensayos sobre el cambio y la Modernizacion. Madrid, 1970. Social Differentiation and Stratification. Glenview: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1971 (Also Hebrew and Japanese translations). Tradition, Change and Modernity. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976. (Also German and Italian translations). Revolution and the Transformation of Societies. New York: Free Press, 1978. (Also Hebrew, Portuguese, Russian and German translations). The Transformation of Israeli Society —An Essay in Interpretation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1985. [a] Hebrew: 1989. “The Transformation of Israeli Society.” Jerusalem: Magnes. [b] German: 1987. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992: German paperback with new Introduction. Comparative Sociology of Civilizations (in Japanese). Tokyo: Mariaisha. Translated by Junichi Umezu and others, 1991. A Dinamica das Civilizacoes. Tradicao e Modernidada. Lisbon: Edicoes Cosmos 1991. De Transformatie van de Israelische Maatschappij. The Willem Drees Lecture, The Hague: Sdu Uitgeverij Koninginnergracht, 1994. European Civilization in a Comparative Perspective. Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987 (Also Japanese and French translations). with A. Shachar Society, Culture and Urbanization. Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1987. Jewish Civilization. The Jewish Historical Experience in a Comparative Perspective. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992 (Also Italian and enlarged Hebrew translations). Power, Trust and Meaning: Essays on Sociological Theory and Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Japanese Civilization—A Comparative View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (also Italian translation). (Forthcoming Japanese and Chinese translations). Fundamentalismo e Modernidade. Portugal: Celta Editore (Portuguese), 1997. Les Antinomies de la Modernite—les Composantes jacobines de la Modernite et du Fondamentalisme. Paris: L’Arche (French), 1997. [a] Die Antinomien der Moderne: Die Jakobinischen Grundzuge der Moderne und des Fundamentalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag (German), 1997. Modernita, Modernizzazione e Oltre. Rome: Armando Editore (Italian), 1997. Os Regimes Democraticos: Fragilidade, Continuidade e Transformabilidade. Oeiras: Celta Editore (Portuguese), 1998. Paradoxes of Democracy, Fragility, Continuity and Change. Washington: The Woodrow Wilson Press and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1999 (Also Italian and Arabic translations). [a] 2002. Paradossi Della Democrazia —Versus Democrazie Illiberali, Bologna: Societa Editrice il Mulino (Italian). [b] 2003. Paradoxes of Democracy: Fragility, Continuity, and Change. Cairo, Egypt: El Ahram Press (Arabic). [c] 2004. Hebrew translation to be published by the Israel Democracy Institute. Die Vielfalt der Moderne. Velbruck Wissenschaft, 2000. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolutions. Cambridge University Press, 2000. (Hebrew translation to be published in 2004.) Democracy and Its Tortuosity: Paradoxes in Modern Democracy. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publications (Hebrew), 2002.

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Le Retour des Juifs dans l’Histoire. Paris and Brussels: Editions Complexe (French). Fundamentalism and Modernity, Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publications (Hebrew), 2002. Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience in a Comparative Perspective and Its Manifestations in Israeli Society. The Ben-Gurion Heritage Center: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Hebrew), 2003. S.N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations & Multiple Modernities—2 volumes collection of essays. Brill: Leiden-Boston, 2003. Explorations in Jewish Historical Experience: The Civilizational Dimension. Brill: Leiden/Boston. Changes in Israeli Society. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publications (Hebrew), 2004. Modernity and Modernization: Collection of Essays. (in Italian), Rubettino, Italy, 2004. Modernity and Modernization. (in Chinese), SDX Joint Publishing Company, China, 2004. Political Theory in the Search of the Political. Soveria Mannelli, Italy (Italian).

S.N. Eisenstadt has also edited the following: The Protestant Ethic and Modernization. New York: Basic Books, 1968. (The introduction translated also into Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and Japanese.) Political Sociology. New York: Basic Books, 1971. with S.R. Graubard Intellectuals and Tradition. New York: Humanities Press, 1973. Post-Traditional Societies. New York, 1974. with Y. Azmon Socialism and Tradition. New York: Humanities Press, 1975 (Also German translation). with R. Lemerchand Political Clientelism, Patronage and Development. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981. Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. New York: State University of New York Press, 1986. Patterns of Modernity Volumes I and II. London: Frances Pinter, 1987. Kulturen der Achsenzeit —Griechenland, Israel, Mesopotamien, Teil l. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987. Kulturen der Achsenzeit Teil 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987. Kulturen der Achsenzeit —Buddhismus, Islam, Altagypten, Westliche Kultur Teil 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992. with L. Roniger and A. Seligman Centre-Formation—Protest Movements and Class Structure in Europe and the U.S. London: Frances Pinter, 1987. with M. Abitbol and N. Chazan The Early State in African Perspective: Culture, Power and Division of Labor. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988. with I. Silber Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present. Greenwich, Ct.: JAI Press Inc., 1988. with E. Ben-Ari Japanese Models of Conflict Resolution. London: Kegan Paul International, 1990. Martin Buber on Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Democracy and Modernity, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1992. With S. Hidehiro (eds.) Japan in a Comparative Perspective. International Symposium l2. Kyoto, Japan: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 1998. with Wolfgang Schluchter and Bjorn Wittrock, Public Spheres and Collective Identities. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.): Transaction Publishers, 2002 S.N. Eisenstadt, M. Hoexter M. and N. Levtzion (eds.). The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies. Albany: State University of New York, 2002.

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With D. Sachsenmaier, J. Riedel (eds.) Reflections on Multiple Modernities—European, Chinese and Other Interpretations. Brill: Leiden/Boston. “Introduction: The Context of Multiple Modernities Paradigm.”

The list of monographs includes: Absorption of immigrants in Israel (with special reference to Oriental Jews). Multilit, Jerusalem— the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Department of Oriental Jews an the Hebrew University, 1951. “Bureaucracy and bureaucratization”. Current Sociology, 1958. Consideraciones de un sociologo sobre Cambio y Transformacion para el Desarrollo. Venezuela, 1967. (with D. Weintraub and N. Toren) Analysis of processes of role change. Jerusalem, 1967. Traditional patrimonialism and modern neo-patrimonialism. Sage Publications, 1977.

A SCHOLARLY PORTRAIT MULTIPLE OPENINGS FOR SOCIOLOGICAL DISCOURSE Donald N. Levine Over the past decade or so, critics have raised questions about the central unit of analysis in the discipline of sociology. They have done so by questioning the viability of using the notion of society, in particular the nationally-circumscribed society, as such a foundational unit. Some have even concluded that the age of sociology is over: since its essential heuristic unit, the national society, is now obsolete, it is now time to discard the discipline of sociology altogether. Thus, in his widely discussed ISA presidential letter no. 5 (1997), Immanuel Wallerstein decried the persistence of sociological investigation of national societies on grounds that only an interdisciplinary and evolutionary framework made sense for the social sciences. Nico Stehr has emphatically rejected the continuing identification of modern society with the nation-state as an obsolescent ideological and epistemological residue of the 19th-century origins of social science discourse (2001, 9–11). Martin Albrow (1997) urges us to abandon terms like “modernity” altogether, arguing that while it was appropriate to use the term Modern to designate the epoch of the past few centuries, that epoch has now ended and we have entered a new one, which he calls The Global Age. Alain Touraine has for two decades been promoting the idea of a “sociology without society,” by which he refers largely to the national society. At meetings of the World Congress of Sociology in July 2002, one of the hot ideas in circulation concerned the obsolescence of the nation-state as a central unit for sociological analysis, and the theme of “sociology without society” was being taken up as a banner behind which to secure a putative emancipation from all previous sociology. Long before the rise of these objections to using the trope of society qua nation as an authoritative notion for sociological inquiry, however, the sociological tradition included four strands of work that transcend this analytic focus. These include the Simmelian notion of

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interaction among parties at any level; the Weberian idea of ‘society’ as merely an object of orientation constructed by actors; the Parsonian conception of the system of modern societies; and the multidisciplinary perspective of civilizational analysis. What makes this reminder particularly salient for the present volume is that each of the four strands in question bears an important relation to a significant phase of the career of the scholar and colleague whom we honor here. Supranational perspectives in sociology Simmel’s peculiar notion of society Among those who provided the intellectual capital that launched the enterprise of modern sociology, Georg Simmel stood out in many ways. For present purposes, we should consider his insistence that the term society should not refer to a phenomenal entity. He used the term, rather, in the same way that he used comparable cultural categories—to designate a universe of forms of a certain sort. In this case, the forms in question consisted of forms of social interaction, things that themselves connote no phenomenal entity but are abstractions from concrete phenomena in which, like tetrahedral pyramids and spherical basketballs, form and content are essentially conjoined. For Simmel, then, societal forms referred to the patterns embodied in types of interaction: conflict as found within and among schools, churches, and labor unions; or domination as found in schools, churches, and labor unions. In this view, “society” designated the universe of all such forms of social interaction. Now, not only was Simmel’s sociological attention not restricted to national societies, but the elements of his interactional forms could be individuals or any kind of collectivity. Thus, his essay on conflict represented diverse properties of conflictual interaction by making reference to conflict between business firms, religious groups, athletic teams, and national armies, just as readily as between friends or individual family members. As in so many other respects then, Simmel was here doubly ahead of his time. He not only avoided the pitfall of confining all sociological analyses to the domain of a nationally bounded society, but offered a ready way of identifying and analyzing international and supranational forms. Thus, one sociologist has analyzed the protests

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against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Melbourne, and Prague as themselves constitutive of new forms of global association, in a mode quite resonant with a basic theme of Simmel’s argument. Weber’s constructivist view Although Max Weber frequently referred to nations and was himself a passionate German nationalist, he never considered the “nation” or “society” as a central unit for analysis. If anything, one could argue that the category of social stratum (Stand ) was far more salient for him. Such awesome cultural transformations as ascendance of world religions, the rationalization of legal codes, and the utilization of new military technologies would not have been possible, whatever the intensity of the needs that they satisfied, had it not been for the availability of duly qualified and interested social strata. Beyond that, even when Weber used the term “society” (Gesellschaft), he considered it shorthand for an aggregation of individual actions. The reality of social life was that it was constituted by individual actors oriented meaningfully to one another. Weber’s primary disciplinary commitments, to jurisprudence and economics, focused on the liability of individuals, on the one hand, and on the performance of actions designed to satisfy personal wants, on the other. These commitments had brought him into conflict with holistic notions from the social sciences that were becoming increasingly popular in his time.1 The concept of society as an organism constituted the focal point of Weber’s objections to such notions. This metaphor, he wrote, can be “highly dangerous . . . if its cognitive value is overestimated and its concepts illegitimately ‘reified’” (1968, 15). Supraindividual concepts generally amount to a cloak for confusion of thought and action; sometimes subserve specious and fraudulent procedures, and always obstruct the proper formulation of problems (1949, 110). 1 Influenced by Herder’s and Hegel’s notions of Volksgeist and Zeitgeist, a number of academic enterprises were striving to overcome individualistic perspectives and, “instead of individual action, were making social forces and collective movements the truly decisive and effective factors” in human life. These included collective psychology (Völkerpsychologie), positivistic sociology, cultural history, milieu theory, moral statistics, historical political economy, ethnology, animal sociology, comparative legal studies, and sociology—disciplines that since the 1860s had emerged as sciences of the supraindividual, as collectivist social theories (Dahme 1993, 40; Levine 2004).

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On the other hand, Weber did signal a disposition to use the term “society” in certain circumscribed ways. It could serve as a rough generalization of certain kinds of conduct. “When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, . . . or to similar collectivities, what is meant is, on the contrary, only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons.” What is more, he argued, “these concepts of collective entities . . . have a meaning in the minds of individual persons,” such that they “orient their action to them” (1968, 14, emph. mine). The persons in question include not only professionals such as judges and bureaucrats but ordinary, private individuals as well. Weber’s position on this issue could thus be glossed as providing a foundation for what has come to be thought of as a “constructivist” view of concepts like the nation. Parsons and the supranational social system Where Simmel transcended the national society perspective by identifying forms of social interaction that could be manifested at any level, from microscopic through international, and Weber did so by repudiating the assumption that ‘society’ referred to any sort of concrete phenomenon–other than a symbolic construct in the minds of actors, Parsons did so by subordinating the notion of society to a more encompassing idea, that of the social system. Initially, Parsons defined the social system as a plurality of individuals interacting in an environmentally contextualized situation, motivated to optimize gratifications and related through a system of shared symbols; he viewed ‘society.’ then, as a type of social system that meets all the essentials of long term persistence from within its own resources (1951, 5–6, 19). As he developed the concept, he came to use it with increasing flexibility, to refer to systemic phenomena at all levels, from microscopic to macroscopic. And although some of his analyses of societies were directed at national entities like Germany or the United States (1993; in press), in his innovative work of the 1960s on the comparative analysis of societies, he concluded by subordinating nations as units under what he called an overarching “system of modern societies.” As early as 1971, then, Parsons had illuminated the way to analyzing the global community in the terms of his far-reaching systems theory.

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Civilizational analysis as a supranational perspective Throughout the 20th century, finally, a small number of sociologists (and anthropologists) joined the efforts of world historians like Burckhardt and Spengler to represent social and cultural formations of enormous scope. These included Emile Durkheim, Alfred Weber, Pitirim Sorokin, Alfred Kroeber, and Robert Redfield. Such scholars often worked as lone giants, mastering huge bodies of material and producing formulations of stunning sweep and depth. Although he did not employ the notion of civilization as such, Max Weber, in his Comparative Studies of the World Religions, pursued a comparable program. Combining both research programs, Benjamin Nelson called for a “depth-historical” sociology in which civilizational analysis stood at the core. In this vein Nelson revitalized the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, founded in 1961 by Arnold Toynbee, Rushton Coulborn, and Sorokin, by bringing it to the United States a decade later and promoting its agenda vigorously. Although the ISCSC functioned as a necessarily interdisciplinary enterprise of broad scope, scholars like anthropologist Roger Wescott and sociologists Vytautas Kavolis and Matthew Melko were core figures alongside Nelson. Eisenstadt and the supranational perspectives Although the work of S. N. Eisenstadt has certainly dealt with national societies at many points, from his earliest work on the adjustment of immigrants in Israel to some of his later modernization studies, it may be of interest to observe that his intellectual biography connects in nontrivial ways to each of the four supranational perspectives just described. In the course of his career, Eisenstadt displayed strong affinities with perspectives deriving from Simmel, Weber, Parsons, and proponents of civilizational studies. The Simmelian moment in Eisenstadt’s work Although Eisenstadt rarely made reference to Simmel or Simmelian perspectives as such, his sociological career was launched by early studies with Martin Buber, one of Simmel’s most distinguished students. Indeed, it was from Simmel that Buber derived his notion of human interaction as the core characteristic of sociality. Prior to

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studying with Simmel, Buber had been a proponent of Nietzschean individualism. Influenced by Simmel to change toward an interactional perspective, he broadened the latter to constitute the framework of his paradigm of human dialogue (Mendes-Flohr 1989). It was this central notion in Simmel-Buber of intellectual interaction as reflecting degrees of openness to other positions that formed a guiding principle in Eisenstadt’s approach to perspectival differences, a principle that animates his important work (with M. Curelaru) on The Form of Sociology —Paradigms and Crises (1976). Eisenstadt as a follower of Weber Following his work with Buber and others at Hebrew University, Eisenstadt went to the London School of Economics, where his encounter with Weber implanted a lifelong devotion. This expressed itself in publications on Weber himself and in a rich harvest of publications in the Weberian spirit. To some extent these manifested the constructivist side of Weber’s approach, in that Eisenstadt never lost sight of the importance of subjective dispositions in action. One fruitful extension of the notion of society as a symbolic construct was his later work, with Bernhard Giesen, on the varieties of symbolism with which national communities define themselves. In addition, Eisenstadt took up Weber’s project of a sustained exploration of comparative macrosocial phenomena in a multidimensional mode. In this effort, subjective dispositions were conjoined with questions of resource allocation and social position to produce explanatory accounts of enormous depth. His many contributions here include a Weberian kind of formulation in the treatment of social transformations. He broke new ground by pointing to the double contingency of factors making for social change, one of which had to do with whether or not a qualified Stand was available to innovate in ways that a situation indicated. Parsons and the study of evolution and modernization Early on, Eisenstadt had shown himself a revealed himself as one of the few sociologists who was able to make fruitful use of the theoretical constructs of Talcott Parsons in empirical research. Thus, in From Generation to Generation (1956) Eisenstadt employed the Parsonian variable of particularism and universalism to make the first plausible explanation of why some societies have age-homogeneous groups

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and others do not. Following that, in his first magisterial synthesis, The Political Systems of Empires (1963), he drew broadly on “structuralfunctional elements of Parsonian theory.” In the early 1960s, Eisenstadt spent time at Harvard, where he took part with Parsons, Robert Bellah, and others in a famous seminar that brought a more refined version of evolutionism back into social science discourse. This work led not only to the important paper “Social Change, Differentiation, and Evolution” (1964) but also to an intensified engagement with problems of modernization (1973). Civilization as an alternative unit of scholarly analysis As Parsons broadened his perspective into conceptualizing a global system of modern societies, Eisenstadt’s development took another, more Weberian form, by deepening his investigations in the comparative study of civilizations. This agenda has occupied virtually all his attention since the early 1980s. Like the earlier giants of civilizational studies, he proceeded largely as a lone scholar drawing mainly on his own fresh engagement with substantive materials. Weber figures as virtually the only predecessor or colleague worthy of sustained attention. The yield of this exceptionally productive period includes dozens of originative essays, recently published in two volumes (2003), Jewish Civilization, and one of the most extraordinary achievements of twentieth-century scholarship, Japanese Civilization (1996). The theme of multiple modernities Sensitized by his depth-historical forays into the universe of what he came to call Axial Civilizations and their contemporary manifestations in Europe, India, China, and Japan, Eisenstadt has in the past dozen years returned to the problematic of modernization theory with a renewed revisionist impulse. This impulse has expressed itself most robustly under the rubric of “multiple modernities” (2003). The alternate perspective Eisenstadt proposes has much to recommend it. It opens up a productive way of looking at the contemporary world distinct from the convergent modernization perspective, however modified. Eisenstadt’s perspective embodies both a new interpretation of modernity which emphasizes deliberate intervention toward actualizing some transcendent ideal in the world, and a studied

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sensitivity to the differences among cultural ideals that inform the global modernization process. It would be in keeping with Eisenstadt’s more general approach to theoretical work, however, to refrain from rejecting the convergent modernization perspective out of hand and instead to consider it as a plausible alternative point of view. This mode of response expresses his longstanding commitment to what he has called theoretical “openness,” and which stems ultimately from his Buberian emphasis on dialogue. Just as presenting alternatives to the nationstate perspective need not result in an outright rejection of sociological work that adheres to it, so the classic modernization perspective can be retained in the expectation that it may illuminate significant phenomena that the Multiple Modernities framework fails to embrace. For there is a serious danger that in rejecting the modernization perspective, one joins the stampede against Parsons that has beset Western sociology since the 1970s. The Parsonian perspective does highlight phenomena not given due attention in the Multiple Modernities perspective. For one thing, insofar as the latter considers generic modernity, it may place undue emphasis on collective agency. For another, it fails to deal systematically with the increasingly salient processes that connect peoples of the world into common global networks. Above all, its critique of classical modernization theory tout court neglects those multiple dimensions of modernization in favor of the streamlined notion of modernity formulated by development economists of the 1950s. It thereby discourages ongoing investigation of the extensive array of institutions and processes that have come to be associated with worldwide modernization, processes that are themselves associated with cultural ideals of worldwide significance. It would be hard to gainsay, as essential markers of the modern world, the association of international commerce based on currency and credit (Adam Smith); the inexorable erosion of aristocratic privileges (Tocqueville); the growth of new inequalities based on capitalist systems of production (Tocqueville, Marx); and the extension of the principle of functional specialization into all sectors of society (Spencer, Durkheim). It would be equally hard to gainsay the importance of scientific revolutions (Comte) and the extension of paradigms of scientific reasoning into the public sphere (Dewey); or the increasing distance between objectified culture and the cultivation of human subjects (Simmel) and the gap between the rationalization of routine activities and the cultivation of the powers of rational minds (Mannheim). The worldwide advance of bureaucratic regulation

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appears unstoppable (Weber). The need for increased discipline of impulsivity to accommodate modern forms of complex organization seems unmistakable (Freud, Weber, Elias). And there seems to be scant refutation of the progressive adoption and implementation of safeguards for the rights of groups and individuals, however halting and tortuous this progress be (Durkheim). What is more, each of these structural changes has its counterpart in some inspiring cultural ideal. These include the ideals of diminished hunger and poverty, generalized trust, social equality, mobility, rational inquiry, professionalism, impersonal norms, selfdiscipline, and human rights. Together, these and related ideals can be taken to constitute what could well be called “the civilization of modernity.” Accordingly, like it or not, the world is faced with a plethora of phenomena plausibly associated with a universal pattern of modernization. In Eisenstadt’s hands, this generic pattern seems to be construed in terms of the repercussions of a single dimension—that which honors the creative drive to impose a transcending vision of the world onto mundane realities. That notion gives us new insights into what ideologists of Jacobinism, Marxism, fascism, and religious fundamentalism have been about. And yet it ignores a vast number of phenomena that can be just as plausibly construed as essential to our common-sense understanding of the term modernity. Finally, it leaves little room for integrating what Eisenstadt himself acknowledges to be an essential constituent of the modern world: the many kinds of protests and revolts against these phenomena that can only be construed as “anti-modern” or, in a term that Mannheim espoused, traditionalist. The Multiple Modernities perspective would consider every serious effort to mobilize resources on behalf of reconstructing the world in accord with a transcendent ideal to be quintessentially modern, however much it might fly in the face of the ideals enumerated above. And, in implying that each civilization projects a unific vision for world transformation, it downplays what Eisenstadt himself has been in the forefront of identifying —the immense internal pluralization that takes places willy-nilly in every society of the modern world. In sum: standing on Eisenstadt’s shoulders, we can glimpse the value of keeping the perspectives of both multiple modernities and convergent modernities in play. For this, among many other gifts too numerous to mention, we remain profoundly in his debt.

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INDEX OF PERSONS Abilea, Joseph 511 Abu-Lughod, J.L. 292–296 Adamski, W. 494 Adrian (patriarch of Moscow) 355 Adriansee 594–595 Advani, L.K. 548 Agursky, M. 359 n40 Albrow, Martin 662 Alcántara Sáenz, Manuel 567, 572 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 10 Alexei Mikhailovich (tsar of Russia) 354 Alfonsín, Raúl 570 n5 Allardt, Erik 21 Alli, Lord Waheed 226 Apparao, Gurujada 19, 396–397, 400–411 Aquinas, Thomas 297 n13, 316, 320–324 Aristides, Aelius 128 Aristotle 16, 224, 297 n13, 312, 320–324, 503, 612, 614, 625 Arjomand, Saïd 16, 296, 297 n13 Arnason, Johann P. 7, 85, 105–108, 110, 312, 491, 494 Aron, Raymond 358 n37 Asad, Talal 448 Assisi, Francis of 302 Assmann, Jan 77, 79, 114, 445 Atatürk, Kemal 258 Augustus, Octavianus (Roman emperor) 130, 136–137 Aurelius, Marcus 126–127, 503 Avitzer, Leonardo 577 Bacon, Francis 531 Bacon, Roger 290 Baker, Keith 85–86 Balsham, Hugh of 314 Batailles, R. 178 Bauman, Zygmunt 232, 492, 560 Beard, M. 136 Beck, Ulrich 492, 560 Bellah, Robert 668 Bellamy, R.P. 633 Ben-Gurion, David 420 Ben-Rafael, Eliezer xiii–xiv, 17 Bendix, Reinhard 97 n7

Benhabib, Selya 446 Benjamin, Walter 445–446 Bentley, Jerry 101 Berkemer, Georg 399 al-Beruni 546 Besançon 652 Bhabha, Homi 446, 448 Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh 549 Bismarck, Otto Edward Leopold von 517, 519 Bloch, Marc 97 Blondel, Jean 496–497 Bodin, Jean 629 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 507, 512 Boris Godunov (tsar of Russia) 352 Borkenau, Franz 97, 99 Boudon, Raymond 24–25, 626, 630 Boukovski 216 n3 Bousetta, Hassan 196 Bowersock, G.W. 298 Brague, Rémi 456–457 Brandt, Willy 256, 258 Brass, Paul 546 Braudel, Fernand 3, 293, 295, 456 Brecht, Bertold 532 Brubaker, Roger 201 Buber, Martin xiii, xvi–xvii, 501, 512, 657, 666–667 Buccanna, Burra 398 Buckland, W.W. 133–134 Budick, S. 445 Burckhardt, J. 58 n3, 666 Bussy, Charles de 401 Cacciari, M. 597 Caillois, R. 178 Calhoun, C. 477 Carens, J.H. 202 Castoriadis, Cornelius 31, 64–65 Catherine II (the Great, empress of Russia) 362 n45 Cato, Marcus Porcius, the Younger 127 Chávez, Hugo 570–571 Cicero 126–127, 132–133, 135 Clastres, Pierre 66, 68 Clifford, James 447, 477 Cohn, Norman 291–292, 305

708

index of persons

Colley, L. 365 Collor de Mello, Fernando 570 Comte, Auguste 613, 615, 669 Confino, Michael 17 Conniff, Michael 570 Constantine (Roman emperor) 140, 341 Cook, M. 311 Cooley, Charles H. 487, 531 Coulborn, Rushton 666 Crates 135 Crémieux, Adolphe 523 Crozier, M. 557 Dahl, Robert 557, 566, 577 Dahrendorf, Ralf 13, 540, 559, 566 D’Andrea, ? 597–598 Darmsteter, James 523 Darwin, Charles 275 Das, Venkata Rama 401 Davies, Norman 531–532 Delanty, Gerard 20 Delgado, Adriana 577 Denkha Shah 399 Derenbourg, Joseph 518 Descartes, René 41, 223, 239 Deutsch, Karl 52 Dewey, John 172 n1, 575, 669 Dhu Nuwaas 509 Diogenes of Sinope (the Cynic) 503 Dittakavi, Narayanakavi 398 n10 Douglas, Mary 178 Dreyfus, Alfred 369 n1 Dumont, Louis 85–86, 210–211 Durkheim, Emile 2–3, 10, 25, 65–67, 126, 157, 171–172 n1, 178, 232, 487, 518, 527, 540, 605–610, 611–615, 618–619, 621, 626–627, 630–631, 633, 639, 666, 669–670 Dworkin, R. 307–308 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. ix, xi–xxiii, 3, 6, 25, 63, 71, 83, 103, 120, 122, 125, 132, 141, 174–175, 184, 191–192, 200, 205, 223–224, 227–228, 245, 252, 258, 287–288, 292, 295–297, 309–312, 332, 334, 338, 344, 409, 411, 415, 443, 461–462, 472–473, 476, 481, 483–488, 490, 498, 505, 509, 555, 557–578, 606–610, 616, 631, 657–661, 666–670 Eliade, Mircea 66

Elias, Norbert 2, 27, 41, 639, 670 Eliot, T.S. 183, 600 Engelstein, Laura 348 Engineer, Ashgar Ali 546 Entzinger, Han 12 Epictetus 503 Erasmus, Desiderius 41, 223 Eusebius 361 Faubion, James D. 32 Fedor I (tsar of Russia) 352 Ferguson, James 146, 478 Filaret (patriarch of Moscow) 355 n27 Fini, Gianfranco 573 Finley, M.I. 129 Florovsky, Georges 340 Fontana, J. 599 Fortuyn, Pim 197 Fotopoulous, T. 213 Foucault, Michel 41, 646 Fowler, Warde 137 Franck, Adolphe 518 Frank, Andre Gunder 464 Frankel, Zacharias 521 Freeze, Gregory 357, 358 Frentzel-Zagorska, Janina 495 Freud, Anna 178 Freud, Sigmund 2, 670 Fromm, Erich 10, 176 Fronto 127 Fujimori, Alberto 570 Fukuyama, Francis 306, 415 Fuller, Steve 446 Gaborieau, Marc 546 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 80, 445, 447–448, 450 Gajapati, Ananda (king of Vizianagaram) 401, 403, 410–411 Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma) 504–506, 511 Gans, Edouard 520 Gans, Herbert 201 Gaon, Saadia 367 García, Alan 570 Gauchet, Marcel 64–76, 78, 80, 86 Gaudiosi, Monica 314 Gay, Robert 569 Gellius, Aulus 127 Gellner, Ernest 224, 311, 365, 487, 489–490 George I (king of Greece) 343 n5 Germani, Gino 573 al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid 508

index of persons Gibb, H.A.R. 315, 321 Giddens, A. 175 n14, 498 Giesen, Bernhard 13, 667 Gijsbert, M. 496 Glazer, Nathan 200–201 Goetschell, Rolland 22 Gouldner, Alvin 475 Goyard-Fabre, S. 621 Graham, Richard 568 Gramsci, Antonio 143–144, 467 Greeley, A. 205 Gregory I (the Great, pope) 345–346 Gregory VII (pope) 346 Grégoire, Henri 515 Gundelach, Peter 492–493 Guzman, Dominic 302 Habermas, Jürgen 202, 228, 448, 537, 575 Hall, Stuart 446 Handelman, Don 400 n16 Hannerz, Ulf 20, 473–474 Hardenberg, Karl August von 516 Harris, W.V. 130 Hartz, L. 44 Havel, Vaclav 532 Hayek, F. von 606, 632 Heesterman, Jan 80, 410 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 96, 102 n13, 108, 143, 275, 618, 664 n1 Heidegger, Martin 93, 97 Heilbron, Johan 85–86, 446 Held, David 542 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 487, 664 n1 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 16, 383 Herzl, Theodor 420 Hill, Christopher 292 Himmelstrand, Ulf 488–490 Hintze, Otto 96 Hirsch, Samson Raphaël 521–522 Hirschman, Albert 562 Hobsbawm, E. 365 Hodgson, Marshall 60–61, 101, 311–313 Homans, George 290–291 Hoppenhayn, Martin 563–564 Horowitz, D. 417 Huff, T.E. 313, 323 n5 Hughes, E.C. 197 Hülegü (Mongol Emperor) 323 Hume, David 142, 228, 624 Huntington, Samuel 26–27, 150, 185, 415, 534, 557, 613

709

Ibn Khaldun 311 Ibn Moshkuya 322 Ibn Taymiyya 321, 323–325, 508 n5 Ignatieff, Michael 481 Inglehart, R. 625–626 Inkeles, Alex 33 Innocent III (Pope) 302 Iser, W. 445 Israël, Gérard 299 Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Zeev) 420 James, William 187 Jaspers, Karl 7, 71–72, 97, 102–103, 105–106, 108, 110, 112, 120, 122, 296, 586, 596 Jepperson, Ron 646 Jinnah, Muhammed Ali 504, 546 Joas, Hans 85 John Paul II (Pope) 507, 597 Julian (Roman emperor) 140 Justinian (Roman emperor) 132, 341–344 Kakar, Sudhir 546–547 Kano, Jigoro 506 Kant, Immanuel 96, 142, 175, 228, 588, 614–615, 624–625, 629 Karpovich, Michael 342 n4, 352–353, 354 n25, 355 n28 Katz, E. 383 Kavolis, Vytautas 666 Kazhdan, Alexander 345 Keane, John 146 Kelsky, K. 478 Kennedy, John F. 301n 18 Khan, Badshah (Khan Abd al Ghaffar) 511 Kivisto, Peter 498 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii O. 354 n25, 355 n28 Kluckhohn, Clyde 1 Knapp, Peter 566 Kocka, Jürgen 9 Kolakowski, Leszek 652–653 Konrad, George 475 Koselleck, Reinhart 84–85, 87, 122 Kries, von ? 276 Kroeber, Alfred 666 Krsna-kavi, Kakaraparti 412 Lane, George 313 Lang, R.D. 175 n14 Lasker, Edouard 517–518, 522 Lavín, Joaquín 570, 573

710

index of persons

Le Roy Ladurie, E. 290 n6, 299 n15 Lea, H.C. 307 Lefort, Claude 34, 64–65 Leibowicz, J. 379 Lerner, Dan 33 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 66, 366 Levine, Donald N. 21 Levy, S. 383 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 606, 615 Lichtenstein, Aaron 511 Liebman, C.S. 383 Lijphart, A. 200 Linder, D.M. 137 Lipset, S.M. 491 Lissak, M. 417 Livy 127, 133, 137 Longinus, Gaius Cassius 133 Louis XVI (king of France) 515 Louis XVIII (king of France) 515 Louis Philippe (king of France) 516 Luhmann, Niklas 454 Lukacs, G. 172 Lukes, Steven 487 Luther, Martin 288, 291, 614

Mikhail Romanov (tsar of Russia) 354, 355 n27 Miles, Robert 198 Mill, John Stuart 228, 273 n28 Miller, Perry 177 n20, n21 Milosevic, S. 628 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de 149 Mitzman, A. 176 n17 Mohammad II (Khwàrazm Shà) 317 Momigliano, A. 135 Mommsen, Wilhelm 1 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 41, 223 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de 458, 612, 621, 629 Moore, G.E. 624 Morris, Ivan 505 Mouffe, Chantall 577 Moynihan, Daniel 200–201 Munck, Salomon 518 Müntzer, Thomas 291 Murad, Abdal-Hakim 511 Musil, Robert 404

Machonin, P. 494 Macintyre, Alisdair 445 Mackenzie, Colonel ? 398 McNeill, William 101 Magidor, Menachem xi Maimonides, Moses 299 Mair, Peter 497 Makdisi, George 314–315 Mallia, Martin 652 Manent, Pierre 85–86 Mannheim, Karl 669–670 Marcus Aurelius 126–127 Marr, Wilhelm 524 Marshall, T.H. 627 Martinelli, Alberto 24 Marx, Karl 1–2, 143, 157, 171–172, 288, 669 Maurer, Georg von 361 n42 Mauss, Marcel 3, 67 Meerson, Michael A. 350–351 Meinecke, Friedrich 96 Melko, Matthew 666 Melucci, Alberto 492–493 Mendelssohn, Moses 142 Menem, Carlos 570 Merton, Robert K. 474 n11 Merton, Walter de 314 Meyendorff, John 351 Meyer, John 646

Nadeau, R. 632 Nagorski, Andrew 536 Nandy, Ashis 480 Napoleon Bonaparte 515, 526 Narayana Rao, Velcheru 396, 402, 404 Nash, Kate 493 al-Nàsir li-Din Allàh 316–319 Nava, M. 478 Nelli, R. 299 n16 Nelson, Benjamin 297 n13, 666 Nicholas XI (tsar of Russia) 363 Niemoeller, Martin 507, 512 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 171, 176, 630 Nieuwbeerts, P. 496 Nikon (patriarch of Moscow) 354, 358, 362 Nino, Carlos 565 North, J. 136 Oberoi, Harjot 549 O’Donnell, G. 572 Offenbach, Rachel and Jacques 518 Oommen, T.K. 9–10 Oron, A. 383 Oszlak, Oscar 565 Otto I (king of Greece) 343 n5, 361 n42

index of persons Pagden, Anthony 531 Panaetius 135 Pandey, Gyanendra 545 Papadakis, Aristeides 25, 354, 361 n42 Parekh, B. 202 Pareto, Vilfredo 605 Parsons, Talcott 84, 91, 97, 104, 171, 232, 483, 665, 667–669 Pascal, Blaise 622 Pascal, Pierre 354 n26, 358, 614 Paul (Apostle) 283–284, 506 Peda Vijaya Rama Raja (king of Vizianagaram) 399 Peter I (the Great, tsar of Russia) 349, 355, 358–361 Pharr, Susan 557 Pinochet, U.A. 628 Piot, Charles 478 Pipes, Richard 341 n3, 347 Plato 133, 322, 503 Plutarch 127 Polanyi, Karl 86 Polybius 130 Popkin, S. 162, 610–611 Popper, Karl 224, 605, 618, 624 Posidonius 136 Price, S. 136 Prokopovich, Feofan 355–356 Przeworski, Adam 557, 566 Putman, Robert 557 Quigley, Carroll 3 Qutb, Sayyid 508 Radbruch, Gustav 276 Rajasekhara 403 Ram, U. 440 n21 Ramet, Pedro 340 Randeria, Shalini xiv–xxiii Ranger, T. 365 Rani, Riva 402 Ranke, Leopold von 96 Ratosh, Y. 387 Rawls, John 175 Redfield, Robert 666 Rickert, Heinrich 276 Ricoeur, Paul 449 Rieff, Philip 175 n14 Robinson, Francis 324 Rokkan, Stein 491, 585 Roniger, Luis 23 Rudolph, E. 591 Runciman, W.G. 8

711

Sa'di of Shiraz 314 Sahlins, P. 365 Said, Edward 474, 534 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de 288 n2, 290 Santarama 397 Santos, Boaventura de 577 Sarney, José 570 n5 Sartre, J.P. 176 n17, 336, 637 Saussure, Ferdinand de 178 Scheid, J. 137 Schlesinger, Arthur 225 Schluchter Wolfgang 15, 103 Schmitt, Carl 187 Schnapper, Dominique 12, 386 Schneider, D.M. 638 Schwartz, Benjamin 80, 103, 106 Seidman, S. 174 n8 Sen, Amartya 612 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 135 Shafer, B.C. 365 Shapiro, Y. 439 Shils, Edward xvi, 462–464, 472 Shulman, David 19, 400 n16 Siebeck, Paul 266–267 Silvan, E. 330 Simmel, Georg 156–157, 162, 611, 618, 663–667, 669 Simon, Janos 496 Smelser, Neil 467 Smith, Adam 142, 612, 669 Smith, Anthony 366 Smooha, Sammy 19 Sofer, Hatam (Moses) 521 Sohravardi–Shaykh 'Omar 318 Sombart, W. 44 Sorokin, Pitirim 290, 483, 666 Souvarine, Boris 359 n40 Spencer, Herbert 669 Spengler, Oswald 97, 483, 666 Spohn, Willfried 287 n1 Stalin, Iosif 358 Stammler, Rudolf 270 Stehr, Nico 662 Stein, Karl von 516 Sternberger, Dolf 228 Sternhell, Z. 439 n20 Stoecker, Adolf 524 Strauss, Geneviève Halevi 523 Strauss, Leo 617 Studt 524 Subramanyam, Sanjay 101 Sudarsky, John 565 Sukale, M. 619

712

index of persons

Summer, William Graham 501 Suranna, Pingali 403 Syme, R. 130 Szeftel, Marc 353, 362 Sztompka, Piotr xii–xiii, 23 Tacitus 130, 133 Tadmor, Hayim xi–xii Tambiah, Stanley J. 23, 549 Tarrow, Sydney 574–575 Taylor, Charles 490 Taylor, P. 4 Tekish (Khwàrazm Shà) 317 Tenbruck, Friedrich H. 275 Thackeray, Bal 549–550 Therborn, Goran 492, 597 Theroux, Paul 474 Thomas, William Isaac 540 Tikhon (patriarch of Moscow) 357 Tiryakian, Edward A. 15, 39, 177 n20 Tocqueville, Alexis de 86, 143, 216, 227, 527, 575, 669 Todorov, T. 210 Togril III (Seljuk Sultan) 317 Tönnies, Ferdinand 487 Torricelli, Evangelista 622, 625 Toulmin, Stephen 41 Touraine, Alain 13, 492–493, 662 Toynbee, Arnold 3, 97, 99, 345, 360–361, 483, 666 Treitschke, Heinrich von 524 Troeltsh, Ernst 330 Turner, Victor 472 Tusi, Nasir al-Din 313, 316, 319–323 Tyler, Anne 474 Ueshiba, Morihei 506, 508, 512 Ulmann, Salomon 522 Varma, Madhava 398 Varshney, Ashutosh 546–547 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 79 Vivekananda, Swami 406

Voegelin, Eric 103 Voltaire 96, 288 Wagner, Peter 41, 85 Wahhab Najdi, Mohammed Ibn Abdul 508 n5 Waisman, Carlos 572 Waldo, Peter 301 Wallerstein, Immanuel 293, 464, 662 Walsh, James 289–290 Walzer, M. 175 Wardle, Huon 477 Watanuki, J. 557 Weber, Alfred 103, 122, 483, 666 Weber, Max xvi–xvii, 10, 15, 25, 31–32, 35, 41, 43, 45, 65, 76, 97, 122, 132, 134–135, 157, 171, 176–178, 206, 232, 261–285, 287–288, 293, 295, 304, 309–310, 486, 490–491, 498, 540, 594, 605–606, 612, 615–621, 623–626, 631–633, 640, 664–668, 670 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 86 Weil, Eric 209 Weingrod, A. 381 Weiss, Johannes 584 Werblowsky, Zvi 11 Wescott, Roger 666 Wilkomirski, Benjamin 254 Wilson, J. 614–615 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann 446 Wittrock, Björn 8, 295–296, 297 n13, 305, 312–313 Wokler, Robert 88, 96 n4 Wolf, Emmanuel 519–520 Wortman, Richard 363 Yavorksy, Stefan 355 Yossef, Ovadia 381–382 Yusuf, Hamza 511 Zapf, W. 494 Zhivov, Viktor 362 n44 Zunz, Léopold 520

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Abbasid Caliphate 117–316 absence, of limits 586–588, 594, 599 absenteeism, electoral 567 absolute relativism 605 absolutizing tendencies, in modern collective identities 650–652 The Absorption of Immigrants (Eisenstadt) 200 abstractions, of modernity 171 accountability 69 public, in Latin America 567 acculturation 5 Achaemenid Empire (Iran) 111, 116–117 activists influential 641, 644–645 political 36 affirmative action 226 Africa, nation states in 159 agency concept of 492 societal 528 agentiality 120 Agrarian Conditions in Antiquity (Weber) 261 agriculture, basis of civilizations 149–150 Agudat Israel 376–377 aid, Western, received by Israel 419–420 Akhlàq-e Nàseri (Tusi) 322–323 Albigensian Crusade 302–303 Albigensians see Catharism Algeria, citizenship in 209 alienation 1–2, 172 Alliance Israelite Universale 523–524 alternative modernities 93, 173–174, 589 alternatives to multiculturalism 201–204 to Westernization 442 ambivalence in social life 467 to social order 642 Americas modernity in 44–45 see also Canada; Latin America; United States

Anabaptists 291 Ancient Judaism (Weber) 262 animals, rights of 213 anthropology ethnocentrism in 611–612 methods, used in sociology xvi, xviii–xix, 290, 461, 471 theories of pollution and taboo 178 anti-Americanism 534 anti-globalization movements 144 in Latin America 554–555 anti-Hellenism, in Bulgaria 348 n15 anti-Judaism 283 n54 anti-modernism 173, 242, 670 of Roman Catholic church 594 anti-Semitism in Bulgaria 348 n15 in France 524–525 in Germany 524–525 modern 368–369 Western 418 in Christianity 506–507 anti-Westernism 324–325, 440 in Communist Eastern Europe 536 antinomies, of modernity 40 antiquity capitalism of 261 n1 Weber’s analysis of 283 anxieties of autonomy and self-control 178 existential 637 ontological 175n 14 apartheid 194 n1 Arab-Israeli conflict 385, 388, 439–440, 510–511 Arabs, in Israel 385–386, 424–425 archetypal figures 13–14, 250, 258 Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 263–264, 268, 269 n17 Argentina neo-liberalism in 563 n4 privatizations in 565–566 Aristotilianism, political 320–321 Armenians, Turkish genocide of 258 asceticism in Middle Ages 301 in modernity 175–176, 179

714

index of subjects

Asia culture of, Weber’s analysis of 274–275 South Buddhism in 122 Islam in 551 modernity in 157–158 assimilation 5 civic 12, 202 Assyria 70 astronomy 313 asymmetries, in center-periphery relationships 471 atomism 608 Attic Nights (Aulus Gellius) 127 authenticity, search for 217, 221 authoritarian regimes see totalitarian regimes autocephaly, in Eastern Orthodox Church 350 autocratic regimes, political processes in 36 autonomy 64–65, 615, 633 of elites 310–311 human behavior reflecting 615 of man 33, 40–41 problems generated by 68 and self-control, anxieties of 178 of universities in Europe 320 axial age 6–8, 80, 102–103, 174 chronology of 58–59 civilizations 11, 292 n8, 484, 668 Chinese 81, 115, 118, 121–122 Jewish 509 non-axial 113, 121–122 research into 63, 102–104 concept of 105–107, 111–112, 484 cultural crystallization in 104, 107 debates on 57–58 extensions of 296 Gauchet’s analysis of 66, 70–76 and history global 119–123, 312 origins of 107–109 legacies of 11, 61–62, 75, 173 political order in 118 imperial 104, 110–112, 116–119 reflexivity in 106, 112, 118–119 religion in 104, 109–110, 640 self-definitions in 62 state formation in 80 theories of 175

transcendental and mundane order in 106, 112, 116, 174–175 transformations in 59–60, 71–72, 75, 78, 80, 103–107, 112–119, 125 continuities with pre-axial civilizations 108–110 imperial political orders 104, 110–112, 116–119 monotheistic innovations 61, 73, 81 political 104, 296 n11 axiological ideas, selection of 623 Ayodhya dispute (India) 547–549 Bacchanalian Conspiracy (Rome, 186 BCE) 127 Balkan states, church and state in 343 barbarians, dichotomy with Greeks 503 barbarism, and modernity 11, 55, 92, 172, 179, 652 behavior see human behavior Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 336 Belgium democracy in 432 pillarization in 194 beliefs collective 632 and human behavior 540 Berlin Wall 537 Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer & Moynihan) 200–201 Bilhaniyam (Apparao) 402 binary thinking, in modernity 176–179 BJP political party (India) 548 Blood and Belonging (Ignatieff ) 481 Bolivia, neo-populism in 573–574 borders European 532 between East and Central 537–538 between East and West 537 of states 416–417 boundaries of collectivities 37, 529, 635, 641, 644–645 construction of 530, 635, 640 crossing of 639 in social reality 249–250 societal, in Israel 417 bourgeois societies 87 bourgeoisie revolution 161

index of subjects Brahmins absence of, in Vizianagaram 400 compared to Levites 279 purity of 504 Brazil, democracy in 558, 573, 576–577 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 406–407 brides, sold in marriage, in India 402–403 Brides for Sale see Kanyasulkam (Brides for Sale, Apparao) bronze age, crisis of 78–79 Buddhism in Japan 185–186 Mahayana 109, 121–122 in South Asia 122 Buddhist nationalism, in Sri Lanka 551 Bulgaria anti-Hellenism and anti-Semitism in 348 n15 Eastern Orthodox Church in 348 n13 bureaucratic organizations 357 Byzantine Empire 117, 340–345 Byzantine heritage, of Russia 360 ‘caesaropapism’ 344–345 caliphates Abbasid 117, 316 and monarchy 316–317 theories of 315, 318, 321 Calvinism 175, 288 Canaanites 387–388 Canada, attitudes towards immigration 197 capitalism 587 of antiquity 261 n1 criticism of, role of civil society 144–145 development of 293 in Europe 540, 591–592 rationality of 153 transition from Communism to 494–497 caste model, of Jewish religious identity 367–368, 370–371, 389 caste system, in India 15, 278, 504 Catharism 15–16, 299 n16, 300–301, 304 and Protestantism 304–305 Catholicism 291 in France 336

715

heterodox challenges to 301–303 repression of heresy 302–304 use of Latin in 351 see also Roman Catholic Church cause, notion of 610 Center and Periphery (Shils) 463 centers and periphery relationships 20, 35, 462–467, 472 in anthropology 471 and cosmopolitanism 479–480 in Europe 590 of societies charismatization of 35 toleration of pluralism by 4–6 themes of protest incorporated in 35–36 Central European University (Budapest) xvii–xviii certainty, recreation of 571 Chandogya Upanisad 406–407 change political 86–87, 230 of regime, post-socialist 494 social 667 structural 669–670 in value-systems 540–541 see also transformations charismatic activities 637–638 charismatic innovators 511–512 charismatization, of centers of societies 35 Chile neo-liberalism in 563 n4 neo-populism in 573 Chinese civilization axial 81, 115, 118, 121–122 contacts with Eurasia 60 contacts with Islamic civilization 313 cultural dominance over Japan 185–186 Han Empire 111 pre-axial 79–80, 110 Western views of 160 ‘Chosen People’ Jewish people as 368, 509–510 Christianity 109, 122 and Communism 618 communitarianism in 594 early 283–284 in Europe 331, 333, 335, 593–595 fundamentalism in 291 n7 individualism in 618

716

index of subjects

and resignation and humility doctrines 347 in Roman Empire 125–126, 139–140 universal love ideal in 506 Weber’s analysis of 15 Western 74 anti-Semitism in 506–507 and Western civilization 3, 61, 65–66 see also Anabaptists; Calvinism; Catholicism; Eastern Orthodox Church; Protestantism; Roman Catholic Church chronology of axial age 58–59 of books of the Old Testament 279–280 church and state see religions and politics cities in India, Hindu-Muslim riots in 547 in Latin America, security problems in 560 in Middle Ages 294 modern life in 156 Western 295 world 465, 472 citizens equality of 90, 207, 210–211, 215–217, 225, 244, 431–432, 588–589, 616 in Israel 431–432 sovereignty of 208 citizenship 616–617, 633, 646 classic 206–207, 218, 220 cosmopolitan 542 in democracies 207–208, 210 and equal rights 209–210, 217 in France 207–208, 212, 218, 386 multiple 601 and nationality 162, 197–198, 209, 212–213, 219, 542–543 and rationality 210–211 societies based on 219 transnational 543 universality of 212, 237 utopian dimensions of 12, 211–212 violations of 95 city states 77 civic assimilation 12, 202 civic religion, in United States 227

civil society concept of 9, 141, 145–147, 235 modern 141–143 normative dimensions of 142, 146 and criticism anti-dictatorial 143–144 of capitalism 144–145 emergence of 651 in France, Jews in 518 in Germany Jews in 518–520 Weimar Republic 147 in Japan 46 and market 146, 152 relationships with polity and society 88 and self-organization 142, 144 semantic revival of 143–144 and the state 142–143 and voluntary associations 142, 574–575 civility theme, in collective identities 640 civilizational integration, of Near East 61 civilizations 3, 149–151, 158, 483–484, 501 axial 11, 292 n8, 484, 668 research into 63, 102–104 Chinese 60, 79–81, 110–111, 115, 118, 121–122, 160, 185–186, 313 clashes between 150, 166, 186, 502, 510, 512, 534, 551–552 comparative analysis of ix, xv, 1–3, 287 n1, 292 n8, 294, 296–297, 309, 310, 666, 668 historical 57–63, 121–122, 312 and cultures 1–2 European 9, 290–292, 456–457, 486, 502, 532, 584 exclusionary versus inclusionary concepts in 502–512 Indian 62, 79–80, 108, 115–116, 118 Iranian 62, 111, 116–118, 313–314, 316 Islamic 117, 311–313, 315–321, 324–325, 453 Jewish 509 of modernity 6, 31, 287–289, 297–298, 305–306, 670 and modes of production 149–150

index of subjects non-axial 113, 121–122 non-Western 186 pluralism of 3–5 post-axial 118, 296 pre-axial 58, 78–79, 108–110 regional basis of 150 and religions 3, 149 Roman 8–9, 456, 502 Western 3, 61, 65–66, 150, 290, 314, 415 see also intercivilizational relations civilized man, images of 38–39, 646 civilizing mission of colonialism 159, 533 of globalization 163 civilizing process 2, 27, 142 clan ties 295 classes conflicts between 154–155, 492 politics of 156 clietelism, neo, in Latin America 568–569, 578 co-evolution 139 codes of collective identities 639–641, 645, 648 cultural 257–258, 336–337 cognitive rationality 620–621 Cold War 161–162 collective beliefs 632 collective guilt 256, 257–258 collective identities 245–246, 366–367, 527, 528–531 codes of 639–641, 645, 648 construction of 22, 25–26, 248–249, 631, 636, 638–643, 650–651 and cultural translations 447 in modernity 25–26, 37–38, 88, 542, 635, 644–653 reconstruction of 14, 559, 571, 643 symbolic representations of 14, 247–258 collective memories 253–254, 647 collective trauma 256 collectivism modern 154–155 in Western Europe 540 collectivities 635–636 boundaries of 37, 529, 636, 641, 644–645 membership of 639 national 645–646

717

Colombia, democracy in 558, 567–568 colonial revolution 161 colonialism civilizing mission of 159, 533 and globalization 10, 159–161 in New World 160 source of modernity 157 values and institutions produced by 160–161 The Colors of Violence (Kakar) 546–547 The Comet (Apparao) 408 common good idea of 322–323 multiple interpretations of 34, 223 communality 245–246 communication 21, 235, 448, 541 Communism 651–652 and Christianity 618 in Eastern Europe 535–536 transition to capitalism and democracy 494–497 and modernity 152–153, 161–162, 491, 652 people’s democracies in 623 Communism and Modernity (Arnason) 494 communitarianism 167, 594 communities 12–13, 157, 167, 199 comparative analysis of civilizations ix, xv, 1–3, 60, 62, 121, 287 n1, 292 n8, 294, 296–297, 309–310, 666, 668 of cultures 258 of institutions xvi of societies 665 comparative sociology 126, 138 of religions 272–273 Comparative Studies of World Religions (Weber) see Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Weber) comparisons 273 compensation theories, of ethnic and religious revival in modernity 206, 217 complex societies, studies of xvi, xviii concepts construction of 271, 273 exclusionary versus inclusionary, in civilizations 502–512 spatial, civilizations as 158 supraindividual 664 conflicts 11–12 between Arabs and Israelis 385, 388, 439–440, 510–511

718

index of subjects

between civilizations 150, 166, 186, 502, 510, 512, 534, 551–552 between classes 154–155, 492 between communities 167 ethnic 56, 187, 649 ethno-nationalist 546–552 between Hindus and Muslims 23, 545–552 between Hindus and Sikhs 549 international 55 in Israeli society 391–392 and pluralism 13, 225 political 493 religious 11, 187 between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka 550–551 Confucianism 108, 115 conquest 69–70, 129–130 consensus, in social life 463 conservatism, of Roman elite 131 consociational democracy 432 Constantinople, Patriarchate of 352 The Constitution of Communalism in colonial North India (Pandey) 545 constitutional patriotism 228, 531 constitutional theory 322 in Islamic civilization 317–318, 321 constitutions European 532–533, 582 Greek 361 n42 in Israel 375, 387 n15, 431 constructivist views 665 consumer protection 564 contestations, role in development 114 conversion of Constantine to Christianity 140, 341 of Jews to other faiths 390 n16 to Islam, in India 552 to Judaism 390 n17, n18 converts 334 cores see centers coronation rituals, in Russia 363 cosmocentric views, of the universe 151 cosmologies 106–107, 118–119 cosmopolitan citizenship 542 cosmopolitanism 462, 473–481 humanitarian 503 Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture (Hannerz) 473–474 counter-culture 292 counterflows, from peripheries to centers 471–472 courtesans, in India 407

covenants with God 177 notion in Judaism 509–511 creativity xxiii, 67 in metropolis 20, 463–464 creolization 462, 467–473 Crete, Minoan, divine kingship in 78 criminal policies, and social control 626–627 critical sociology 39 criticism of America 177 n21 anti-dictatorial, in Eastern Europe 143–144 of capitalism 144–145 of modernity 173 see also anti-modernism of modernization theories 669 of multiple modernities notion 669 of structural analysis 92, 95 Critique and Crisis (Koselleck) 87 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 624 crusades 302–303 cultural codes of Judeo-Christian tradition 257–258 of religion, in Europe 336–337 cultural crystallization in axial age 104, 107 in Middle Ages 296 and modernity 83 periods of 93, 113, 119, 121–123 cultural dialogue 458 cultural homogenization 338, 450, 469, 630 see also global culture cultural ideals 670 cultural identities 493 cultural imperialism 469 cultural orientations 59 cultural pluralism 186, 337 cultural plurality 186–187 cultural policies 214 cultural programs of modernity 21, 31–34, 295, 644 tensions in 39–43, 49 cultural reality 268–269 cultural relativism 166, 309 n1 cultural rights 220, 238–239 demands for 240–242 cultural roots, of European identity 586–595 cultural translations and collective identities 447 and intercultural differences 449

index of subjects and modernity 20, 444, 447, 450–455 in Europe 444–445, 455–460 theories of 444–450 cultural trauma 94–95, 540 cultures 449, 527 and civilizations 1–2 comparative analysis of 258 counter 292 of critical discourse 475 European 480 global 20, 338, 444, 450–452, 472–473 and religion 336–337 Roman 127–129 and society 59, 463 third 449 customs, norms derived from 629 Daedalus ( journal) 103, 106 Daoism 115, 122 de-civilizing processes 27 de-historicisation 243 de-modernization, and de-secularization 329 de-ontologization, of the political 411 de-politization, of economics 563–564 de-socialization 233–234 de-Westernization 228, 460 death 253 debates on axial age 57–58 Fischer-Rachfahl 261 on headscarfs in France 241–242 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (France, 1789) 207, 237–238 defense mechanisms, theories of 178 definitions 484 self, in axial age 62 delegative democracy 572 democracies xxiii, 191, 578 citizenship in 207–208, 210 consociational 432 delegative 572 disenchantment with 556–557, 567 Durkheim on 65 and equality of citizens 211, 213 ethnicity in 12, 206, 208, 217–221, 432, 435 in Europe 488–489, 494–498, 593 foundation myths of 251 fragility of 557–558, 562

719

inherent tensions of 12, 208, 216–219, 221 irreversibility of idea of 623 in Islamic world 16 in Israel 430–433 in Latin America 23–24, 553–558, 567–568, 574, 576–579 liberal 172, 432 and participation 567, 575–577 and particularism 4, 207, 217–221 and pluralism 13, 220–221, 223 political legitimacy in 207 and political parties 496–497 refusal of limits in 212–217 and representation 566–568, 593 in socialist states 162 theories of 576–577 utopian dimensions of 216–217 Weber on 176–177 Democratic Revolution 91 demography, of Israel 422–425 Denmark, attitudes towards immigration 197 destruction of social order 13 of social spheres 233–234 destructive potentialities of construction of collective identities 25–26, 642–643, 650–651 of construction of realm of sacred 637 of modernity 55–56, 635, 649–653 development 413–414 of capitalism 293 economic of Eastern Europe 534 of Israel 426–428 paths of 113–119 social 2 Weber’s concept of 275–276 dialogue 21, 501 cultural 458 human, paradigm of 667 intercivilizational 312 diarchy, in Russia 353–355, 361 Diaspora Jewish in the West 419 and Zionism 373–374, 386–387 Polish, in the West 538–539 dichotomies between Greeks and barbarians 503 between Jews and goyyim 509

720

index of subjects

between modernity and tradition 151, 157, 166 between Orient and Occident 156–160, 458, 534 in Western sociological theories 486–487 dictatus papae (Gregory VII) 346 differentiation social 152 structural 52–54, 152–154 diffuse rationalization 625–627 diffusion, of world religions 109–110 dignity of criminals 627 of man 619, 628–629, 633 violations of 94–95 sense of 609 discourses cultures of critical 475 of modernity 47, 56, 90 transformations in 84–85, 88 public 91 of social sciences 87–88, 96–97 discrepant cosmopolitanisms 477 disenchantment 274–275, 277–278 with democratic system 556–557, 567 processes of 43, 633 displacement syndromes 164 diversity in Europe 532, 585 of nation-states 648 unity achieved through 600 in world society 169 see also pluralism divine kingship 76–79, 251 in Vizianagaram 410–412 The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim) 171 n1 Division of Social Labor (Durkheim) 606–607 divisions in Europe 533, 537–538 social 171 doctrines of Eastern Orthodox Church 347–349 of humanitarian cosmopolitanism 503 of world state 503 Dominicans 302, 319 Dreyfus affair 369, 524 dual sovereignty, in Islamic civilization 316–317

dualist transcendental visions 299–301 dualistic-agential path of development 116–118 duality in Latin American societies 575–576 of reality 154 Duhem-Quine thesis 625 East see Orient Eastern Europe civil society in 143–144 Communism in 535–536 transition to capitalism and democracy 494–497 early syndrome 535–536 identities in 527–528, 534–543 origins of Zionism in 439 relations with United States 538 with Western Europe 23, 534, 536–537, 539–541 religion and politics in 17, 339–363 satellite mentality in 536 Eastern Orthodox Church 17 Greek Orthodox Church 347–348, 361 n42 internal organization of 349–351 Russian Orthodox Church 352–363 ecclesiastical reform, by Peter I 355–356, 358–361 economic analysis, of cultural reality 268–269 economic development of Eastern Europe 534 of Israel 426–428 economic ethics, of world religions 272–273 economic history 270, 293 economic integration, of European Union 601 economic reasoning, shifts in 89 economic systems, disappearance of 234–235 economics de-politization of 563–564 political 464–465 Economy and Society (Grundriß der Sozialökonomik, Weber) 262–267, 270, 272, 277 Ecuador, neo-populism in 573–574 Ecumenical Councils, in Eastern Orthodox Church 349 ecumenical renaissance 296, 313

index of subjects education, in Israel 425–426 Egypt, ancient 76–77 elections, in Latin America 567 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim) 66–67 elites autonomy of 310–311 in Colombia 558 in Eastern Europe 535–536 in Islamic civilization 324 in Israel 373–375, 381, 422, 433 in Japan 51 in Latin America 553–554 in modern societies 51–52 as religious forces 391 in Roman Empire 126–128, 131, 137 in South Asia 157 and transcendent ideals 502 elitist theories, of democracy 576–577 emancipation of Jews in France 515–516, 525–526 in Germany 516–518, 525–526 of man 32–33 emigration from Latin America 561–562 from Poland 538–539 of Jews from Russia 384 emotion and rationality 40 see also romanticism emperors, in Byzantine empire 341, 343 empires, political systems of see imperial political orders empirical observations 247 Encyclopédistes 142 England see United Kingdom Enlightenment historiography 267, 288 n2 Jewish 371 n3 and otherness 457–458 Epic of Gilgamesh 70 equality of citizens 90, 207, 209–211, 215–217, 225, 244, 588–589, 616 in Israel 431–432 in democracies 211, 213 and freedom 589 esotericism, in Kalinga region 397–398 Essays on the Physical, Moral, and Political Regeneration of the Jews (Grégoire) 515

721

Essays in the Sociology of Religion (Weber) 263, 265–267, 272, 616 Estonia, Western modernity in 442 ethics Confucian 108 economic 272–273 Greek 503 of law 279 modern 177–178 rationality in 40, 620, 626 religious 274, 279 n45, 281, 310 Ethics (Aristotle) 322 Ethics (Tusi) 321 ethnic conflicts 56, 187, 649 ethnic identities see ethnicity ethnic nationalism conflicts of 546–552 in Estonia 442 in India 546 in Israel 435–436, 439–440 ethnic revival, theories of 205–206, 211, 217 ethnicity administrators 214 in democracies 12, 206, 208, 217–219, 432, 435 and geography 188 in Israel 380 in modern societies 205–206, 208, 214–215, 218 ethnicization, of public policy 12–13 ethno-religions 328 ethno-transcendence 117 ethnocentrism 21, 501–502 in social sciences 611–612 ethnography, of cosmopolitanism 477–478 Eurasia, contacts of Chinese civilization with 60 Eurocentrism in comparative civilizational analysis 63 in global history 96–97, 293 ideology of 533 in philosophy of history 102 n13 Europe borders of 532, 537–538 capitalism in 540, 591–592 citizenship in 543 democracy in 488–489, 494–498, 593 diversity 532, 585 divisions in 533, 537–538 hegemony of 293–294

722

index of subjects

heterodoxy versus orthodoxy in 297–298, 302, 304 history of 457, 532, 585–586, 597 individualism in 586, 588–590 modernity in xx, 21, 85, 87, 90–93, 157, 158, 443, 485–486, 498–499, 597 confrontation with other civilizations 50–51 and cultural translations 444–445, 455–460 and European identity 581, 583, 586–588, 590–595 multiple 487–488, 490 rationalism versus romanticism 486–491 religious 332, 334–338 movements of protest in 292, 336 multiculturalism in 196 nation-state in 592–593 non-Western origins of 456 and the Orient 159, 458 political philosophy in 141, 320 politics in 491 post-modernity in 21, 491–494 post-Westerness of 459–460 rationalism in 586–588 religions in 16–17, 594 Christianity 331, 333, 335, 593–595 Islam 17, 337–338 revolutions 85, 537 science and technology in 591 secularization in 331 self-understanding in 142 social structure of 590 universities 314–315, 320, 591 see also Eastern Europe; Western Europe European civilization 9, 290–292, 456, 584 ethnocentrism in 502 internal contradictions of 486 origins of 456, 532 Roman heritage of 456–457 European Constitution 532–533, 582 European culture 480 European identities xxi, 459–460, 527–528, 531–534, 581–602 collective 23, 256, 449 core elements of 586–597 Eastern 534–543 and European modernity 581, 583, 586–588, 590–595

formation of 24, 228 political 599–601 and Western identities 597–598 European Union 582–583, 596–597 divisions in 538 economic integration of 601 enlargement of 459–460, 527, 537 Israeli (associate) membership of 422 legitimation of 532 political integration of 599–602 European values 532–533, 583–596 differences between East and West 539–540 Europeanization, of the world 597–599 evolution of ideas 624 irreversibility of 606 of law 621 selection processes in 632 social 605, 616, 631–633, 668 theories of 139, 275, 605–606, 616, 631–633 exclusion concepts of, versus inclusionary concepts, in civilizations 502–512 of outsiders 248–249 rituals 278, 282 exclusivism 652 exile, in Judaism 370 existential anxiety 637 existential self-examination 175 existentialism 14 n175, 252 expansion, of modernity 48–51 expectations, horizons of 87 experiments 273 n28 external institutionalization 193–194 extremism in Israel 379 political 489 failing heroism 252 failures, of cultural translations 449 falsification, of theories 247, 624–625 families and civil society 146 in Israeli society 423 in modern societies 167–168 fascism 651–652 feminism, radical 231 First World 161–162 Fischer-Rachfahl debate 261 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (United States) 307

index of subjects The Form of Sociology —Paradigms and Crises (Eisenstadt) 667 foundation myths 250–251 fragmentation, of societies 12–13, 240 France anti-Semitism in 524–525 attitudes towards immigration 192–193, 196–197, 214–215 citizenship in 207–208, 212, 218, 386 collective guilt in 256 headscarf debates in 241–242 Jews in 22, 207–209, 369, 515, 518 emancipation of 515–516, 525–526 and modernization 522–524, 526 Occitan-speaking Southern 15, 298–299 pluralistic versus totalitarian tendencies in 651 religion in 335–336 and nationalism 385–386 separation of powers in 629 Franciscans 15, 302, 319 Frankfurt, Grand Duchy of 516 ‘Frankfurt School’ 2, 39 freedom and equality 589 escapes from 176–177 as European value 586 limits of xxiii, 226–227 and security 215–217 French revolution 84–85, 92, 210, 515 From Generation to Generation (Eisenstadt) 667 fundamentalism 93, 166, 224, 228, 306 Christian 291 n7 Islamic 508 Jewish 510–511 market 563 Futuwwa orders 317–319 gender bias, in cosmopolitanism 478 gendered symbols, of nation-states 647 genocide 635 geography, and ethnicity 188 Germany anti-Semitism in 524–525 attitudes towards immigration 197, 240 East, Communist regime in 495

723

Jews in 22, 515, 518–520 emancipation of 516–518, 525–526 and modernization 519–522, 526 Law of return in 424 n11 post-war 255–256 Reformation in 335 separation of powers in 629 Weimar, civil society in 147 Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Comparative Studies of World Religions, Weber) 262–263, 265–267, 271–273, 276–277, 666 ghetto existence, of Jews 15 Gilgamesh epic 70 global age 662 global culture 20, 338, 444, 450–452, 472–473 global history 100–102, 305, 312 axial age in 119–123 critical 98 Eurocentrism in 96–97, 293 multi-regional framework of 60–61 globality 158 globalization xxi, 10, 162–163, 332, 452, 476 and colonialism 10, 159–161 and communitarianism 167 history of 159, 163 and homogenization 163–164, 168–169, 185, 338, 441–442 and hybridization 167–169 and modernity 20, 156, 162, 453–454 and modernization 161 and pluralization 164–165, 169, 184, 188 studies of, in social sciences 99–100 and traditionalization 165–167 God, covenants with 177, 509–511 Gold (Apparao) 408 governance, in Latin America 567 goyyim, dichotomy with Jews 509 grassroots movements 492–493, 495–496 Great Ape Project 213 Great Revolutions 34 Great Traditions, clashes between 166–167 Greece, religion and politics in 343 n5 Greek civilization axial 117–118

724

index of subjects

philosophical-political path of development 114, 118 contacts with other civilizations 312, 314 dichotomy between Greeks and barbarians 503 ethnocentrism in 502 legacy of 62 Greek Orthodox Church 347–348, 361 n42 Greek philosophy 74, 111, 502, 600 influences on Islamic political thought 316, 320–324 Grundriß der Sozialökonomik (Economy and Society, Weber) 262–267, 270, 272, 277 Guatemala, democracy in 558 guilt, collective 256, 257–258 Han Empire 111 Harijan (children of God) 504 Hassidism 376 n8 headscarf debates (France) 241–242 Heaven, Mandate of 47, 79–80, 115 Hebrew language 371–372, 373 n6, 377 hegemonic traditions 166 hegemonization, of nationalities 155–156 hegemony, European 293–294 heresy 15–16 repression of 302–308 heritages Byzantine 360 Roman 456–457 hermeneutical tradition, in philosophy 445 heroism 13–14 failing 252 self-sacrificing 257 triumphant 250–251, 257 heterodoxy 291, 310, 318–319 in South India 398 versus orthodoxy in Islamic civilization 311–312 in medieval Europe 297–298, 302, 304 heterogeneity 224–225, 504 hierarchical order, in early states 69 Hindu nationalism 546, 548, 552 Hindu-Muslim conflicts, in India 23, 545–552 Hindu-Sikh conflicts, in India 549 Hinduism 122, 504–505

historical sociology 63–64, 84–85, 605 historicism 605, 609, 613–614 historiography 267, 288 n2 history American 177 n20 and axial age 107–109, 119–123, 312 and civilizational analysis 57–63, 121–122, 312 economic 270, 293 of Europe 457, 532, 585–586, 597 global 100–102, 305, 312 critical 98 Eurocentrism in 96–97, 293 multi-regional framework of 60–61 of globalization 159, 163 Marxist 154–155 of modernity 6–11, 57–63 origins of 67, 89, 106, 107–109, 120 philosophy of 64, 102 n13 of political thought 121 and reflexivity 102, 120, 596–597 religious 261–262, 267, 271–274, 276–277 scholarly discipline of 87, 89, 96, 99, 100–101 of science 617–618, 622–623 Hittite Empire, divine kingship in 77–78 Holocaust 55 Holy Synod (Russian Orthodox) 355–357, 360 ‘Homo Sovieticus’ syndrome 536, 538–539, 541 homocentric views, of the universe 151 homogeneity desirability of 183–184, 646 versus pluralism 1, 4–6, 11, 14, 17, 26–27, 289 in nation-states 187, 191–192, 224, 646–648 homogenization cultural 450, 469, 630 and globalization 163–164, 168–169, 185, 338, 441–442 and modernity 166–167 horizons of expectations 87 human action, consciousness about 106 human behavior and beliefs 540 indeterminacies in 636–637 interpretations of 88, 610, 615

index of subjects human beings see man human civilization 150 human condition, refusal of limits to 215–216 human interaction 663, 666–667 indeterminacies of 636–637 rationality in 208 human nature 503, 614–615 human rights 90, 160, 207, 209, 237, 543, 588–589 appeals to 238, 242 in Communist Eastern Europe 495 in Israel 431 and security demands 560 violations of 308 humanitarian cosmopolitanism 503 humility ideals, in Eastern Orthodox Church 347 Hungary Communist regime in 495 neo-orthodox Judaism in 521–522 hybridization 470 and cultural translations 448 and globalization 167–169 hypermodernity 244 Iberoamerica see Latin America ideals cultural 670 of humility 347 of poverty 301–302 samurai 505–506 of submission 507 of transcendence 502 of universal love 506 ideas of common good 322–323 new, irreversibility of 622–625 of purity 503–505 of social contract 191 identities 245–247 American 26–27, 531, 597 collective codes of 639–641, 645, 648 concept of 245–246, 366–367, 527–531 construction of 22, 25–26, 248–249, 631, 636, 638–643, 650–651 and cultural translations 447 in modernity 25–26, 37–38, 88, 542, 635, 644–653 reconstruction of 14, 559, 571, 643

725

symbolic representations of 14, 247–258 cultural 493 ethnic see ethnicity European xxi, 459–460, 527–528, 531–534, 581–602 collective 23, 256, 449 core elements of 586–597 Eastern 534–543 and European modernity 581, 583, 586–587, 590–595 formation of 24, 228 political 599–601 and Western identities 597–598 and immigration 192, 200–201 individual 528 and languages 187 mass 528 multiple 542–543, 600 national and immigration 192 Jewish 367, 370–376 politics of 4, 156 re-codification of 448 reactive 338 and religion 187 religious 217 Jewish 367–369, 376–384 in Roman Empire 136 ideologies of Eurocentrism 533 of pluralism 11, 183, 225–226 secular, in Roman Empire 127 studies of 224 of violence 55 imagined worlds 468, 479 imams, in Muslim immigrant communities 199 immigrant communities identification with country of origin 199 self-determination of 195 immigration attitudes of nation-states towards 12, 192–204, 214–215, 240 and identities 192, 200–201 in Israel 373–374, 384, 423–424, 431 imperial political orders xvi, xviii–xix in axial age 104, 110–112, 116–119 modern 119 post-axial 118, 296 imperialism, cultural 469

726

index of subjects

indeterminacies, of human interaction 636–637 India Ayodhya dispute in 547–549 caste system in 15, 278, 504 civilization of 62, 79–80, 108, 115–116, 118 heterodoxy in 398 heterogeneity in 504 Hindu-Muslim conflicts in 23, 545–552 Hindu-Sikh conflicts in 549 intellectuals in 463 Maurya Empire 111 modernity in 19, 49, 396–398, 400, 409–412 Muslims in 504, 546, 548 nationalism in 545 partition of 504–505 political philosophy in 315 purity idea in 503–505 reform movements in 403, 407–408 relations with Near East 60 Western views of 160 individual identities 528 individual rights see human rights individualism 25, 86, 238, 614 beginning of 72, 606–609, 613–614, 633 and citizenship 616–617 in European history 586, 588–590 irreversibility of 611 in Israeli society 436 methodological 632 in modernity 154, 157, 217, 598, 612–613, 619 individualization 59 of religion 203, 327–328, 332, 334–335, 383 industrial revolution 591–592 innovations 606 Inquisition 303–305, 307 institutional fragility, of democracies 557–558, 562 institutional orders, modern 54 institutionalization of boundaries of collectivities 641 of immigrant and minority cultures 193–194, 196–200 of modernity 43, 52–53 of pluralism 12 institutions of colonialism 160–161 comparative analysis of xvi

European 591–596 evaluation of 614 imported from one civilization into another 314–315 and individualism 612, 619 of modernity 31, 90–95 performance of 562, 566 religious 330 reversibility of 613 in societies, role of 230 transformations of, in axial age 104 of Western civilization 415 instrumental rationality 620, 624 integration civilizational, of Near East 61 of Israel in Middle East 418–419 and pluralism 225 policies 240 political and economic, in European Union 599–602 intellectuals 59, 475 inter-ethnic relations 208 intercivilizational relations 50–51, 60, 297 n13, 312–314, 323, 415, 458, 460 intercultural differences 257, 448–449 interests, self 86, 231, 609–610 internal institutionalization 193 international conflicts 55 International Institute of Sociology (IIS) xiv International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCS) 666 International Sociological Association (ISA) xii international systems, emergence of 48–50 intolerance 530 invented traditions 16, 325 Iranian civilization 313–314 Achaemenid Empire 111, 117 axial, dualistic-agential path of development 116, 118 political order in 316 Sassanian Empire 116–117 and Zoroastrian religion 62 Ireland 416 n4 irrationality, in modern societies 153–154, 162, 206, 210, 216–217 irreversibility of breaches of promissory notes 94 of evolution 606 of individualism 611

index of subjects of new ideas 622–625 of separation of powers principle 622 see also reversibility Islam 109 conversion to 552 in Europe 17, 337–338 in India 23 jihad in 507–511 medieval 296, 297 n13, 311 and modernity 242 non-violence in 511 political 324–325 religion and politics in 131 in South Asia 551 submission ideal in 507 Islamic civilization contacts with other civilizations 312–313 modernity in 453 orthodoxy versus heterodoxy in 311–312 political order in 16, 117, 316–320, 321, 324–325 state and society in 315 Islamic law 311 Islamic movement 233 Islamic royalism 316, 319–320 Islamicate civilization see Islamic civilization Israel ancient 79, 114, 117–118 Arabs in 385–386, 424–425 borders of state of 416–417 citizenship in 219 conflicts in 391–392 with Palestinians 385, 388, 439–440, 510–511 constitution in 375, 387 n15, 431 democracy in 430–433 demography of 422–425 economy 426–428 education in 425–426 elites in 373–375, 381, 422, 433 ethnic nationalism in 435–436, 439–440 ethnicity in 380 extremist groups in 379 families in 423 heterogeneity of 225 human rights in 431 immigration in 373–374, 384, 423–424, 431 integration into Middle East 418–419

727

Jews in 436, 440 Mizrahim 380–382 secular 377–378, 382–383, 435 ultra-orthodox 377–378, 424 Land of, in Jewish identities 369, 379 law in 431, 432–433 Law of Return 370 n2, 431 middle-classes in 375 military in 428–429, 431 nation-building in 234, 374 national-religious identity in 378–380 non-Western population in 424–425, 438–439 occupation of West-Bank and Gaza 433 relations with United States 420 religion in and nationalism 375–376, 382–386, 388–392 and politics 18, 432, 434–435 research and development in 425 societal boundaries in 417 sociology in xiii–xiv Western modernity of 19–20, 413, 416–442 Jacobin tendencies, of modernity 305–306 Jamaica, cosmopolitanism in 477 Japan collective guilt in 258 elites in 51 makoto (sincerity) ideal in 505–506 modernity in 45–47, 54, 185–186, 472–473 Japanese Civilization (Eisenstadt) 668 Jesus movement, in ancient Judaism 282–284 Jewish civilization 509 Jewish Civilization (Eisenstadt) 668 Jewish Diaspora 373–374, 386–387, 419 Jewish Enlightenment 371 n3 Jewish fundamentalism 510–511 Jewish monotheism 81 Jewish national identities 367, 370–380 Jewish nationalism 18, 366, 370, 375, 388–391, 435–436 Jewish religious identities 367–369, 376–384 Jews as ‘Chosen People’ 368, 509–510

728

index of subjects

conversion to other faiths 390 n16 in France 22, 207–209, 304, 515, 518 emancipation of 515–516, 525–526 and modernization 522–524, 526 in Germany 22, 515, 518–519 emancipation of 516–518, 525–526 and modernization 519–522, 526 in Israel 436, 440 Mizrahim 380–382 secular 377–378, 382–383, 435 self-isolation of 278, 281, 283–284 Sephardic 382 in United States 420 Yemenite 380–381 jihad 507–511 Journal of Development (Ketab-e tawsa"eh, Iran) 309 Judaism 367–368 ancient, Weber’s analysis of 15, 261–264, 277–284 conversion to 390 n17, n18 covenant (brit) notion in 509–511 liberal 383–384, 390 n18 modernization in 376–377, 519–524, 526 in Occitan France 299 orthodoxy in 376–378, 383–384, 390, 424, 434, 521–522 and post-Zionism 388 territorialization of 370 and Zionism 366, 383–384, 390–391 Judeo-Christian tradition, cultural codes of 257–258 juridical positivism 621 jurists, Roman 134–135 Kabre (Togo), cosmopolitanism of 478 Kalinga region (India) 397, 409 Kanyasulkam (Brides for sale, Apparao) 19, 396–398, 401–411 Kashmir dispute, Hindu-Muslim divide in 23 kingship divine 76–79, 251 in Vizianagaram (Andhra Pradesh, India) 410–412 see also monarchy

knowledge institutions for diffusion of, in Europe 591 quest for 587 languages Hebrew 371–372, 373 n6, 377 and identity 187 interest in 87–88 local, use in Eastern Orthodox Church 351 Occitan 298 n14 Telugu 402 Latin, use in Catholic Church 351 Latin America authoritarianism in 555–556 de-politization of economics 563–564 democracy in 23–24, 553–558, 567–568, 574, 576–579 dualization of societies in 575–576 elections in 567 elites in 553–554 emigration from 561–562 neo-clietelism in 568–569, 578 neo-liberalism in 554, 562–563 neo-populism in 569–574, 578 new social movements 569 politics in 554–555, 563–564 privatization in 565–566 public spheres in 564 security issues in 555–561 states in, perceptions of 563–564 violence in 558–560 law ethics of 279 Islamic 311 Israeli 431–433 in modern societies 210, 627–629 natural 238, 321 philosophy of 630–631 rationality in 620–622 Roman 127, 132–133 and Roman religion 133–140 Law of Return in Germany 424 n11 in Israel 370 n2, 431 Laws (Plato) 133 legal order, universal application of 91 legal pluralism 194–195 legitimacy political citizenship as source of 207, 218

index of subjects in Roman Empire 129–130 requirements of law 621 Letter to the Galatians (Paul) 616 Leveling Crowds (Tambiah) 549 Levites 279–281 liberal democracy 172, 432 pluralism as a condition of 13, 223 liberal Judaism 383–384, 390 n18 liberal market economy 90 liberal sociology 175, 615 liberalism 633 and modernity 171–172, 175 neo, in Latin America 554, 562–563 libido sciendi 613 life social 463, 467, 664 rationalization of 231, 486, 489, 491, 498 styles 156, 164 liminality 249–250 limits absence of, in modernity 586, 587–588, 594, 599 of freedom xxiii, 226–227 of pluralism 226–228 of political body 212–213 of rationality 210, 231, 588 refusal of, in democracy 212–217 linguistic analysis, interest in 87–88 Little Traditions 166–167 liturgy reform of, in Russian Orthodox Church 354 n26 vernacular, in Eastern Orthodox Church 351 local languages, use in Eastern Orthodox Church 351 localism, resurrection of 167 localization, of the global 450, 454 locals 474 n11 Location of Culture (Bhabha) 446 London, as heterogeneous liberal community 225 love, universal, ideal in Christianity 506 madrasas 320 Maharaja’s College (Vizianagaram) 401 Mahayana Buddhism 109, 121–122 makoto (sincerity) ideal, in Japan 505–506

729

man autonomy of 33, 40–41 civilized, image of 38–39, 646 control of nature 41, 150–151, 216, 239 dignity of 619, 628–629, 633 violations of 94–95 emancipation of 32–33 rational pursuit of self-interest 231 reflexivity of 120 ‘Mandate of Heaven’ 47, 79–80, 115 Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Musil) 404 market economy, liberal 90 market fundamentalism 563 marketing, political 578 markets and civil society 146, 152 for symbolic goods 330 marriages in India, girls sold in 402–403 in Israel, religious influences on 434 martial arts training, in Japan 506 Marxism 610 and history 154–155 as a secular religion 358 n37 and sociology 231 views of modernity 154–155, 173 mass communication 235 mass identity 528 mass mobilization and elitist theories of democracy 576–577 and neo-populism 574 Maurya Empire 111 Meiji Restoration ( Japan) 45, 506 memories, collective 253–254, 647 Merton College 314 Mesopotamia 76, 77 meta-narratives of modernity 39 methodological individualism 632 methodologies of social sciences 276–277 anthropological xvi, xviii–xix, 290, 461, 471 metropolis, as center of creative vitality 20, 463–464 Metropolis and Province in Intellectual Life (Shils) 463 metropolitans, of Russian Orthodox Church 352 Middle Ages 288–292 asceticism in 301 formation of modernity in 295–297

730

index of subjects

Islam in 296, 297 n13, 311 multiple modernities in 294 transcendental visions in 298–300 Middle East Israel’s integration into 418–419 see also Near East middle-classes, in Israel 375 military organisation institutionalized in axial age 104 in Israel 428–429, 431 minorities cultures of, institutionalization of 193–194, 196–200 rights of 239–240, 432 Mithraism 128 Mizrahim 380–382 Mleccha (outsiders) 504 mobility, and cosmopolitanism 474, 479–480 modern societies diffuse rationalization in 626 elites in 51–52 equality of citizens in 90, 207, 209–211, 215–217, 225, 244, 588–589, 616 ethnicity and religion in 205–206, 208, 214–215, 218 families in 167–168 irrationality in 153–154, 162, 206, 210, 216–217 and nation-states 662, 665 politics in 35–36, 38 and racism 211 rights in 627–629 totalitarianism versus pluralism in 31 modernity 6, 171 absence of limits in 586–588, 594, 599 alternative 93, 173–174, 589 antimonies of 40 asceticism in 175–176, 179 and barbarism 11, 55, 92, 172, 179, 652 binary thinking in 176–179 civilization of 6, 31, 287–289, 297–298, 305–306, 670 collective identities in 25–26, 37–38, 88, 542, 635, 644–653 and Communism 152–153, 161–162, 491, 652 concept of 6–7, 157–158, 395, 413, 444, 485, 498 Weber’s 32, 43, 288, 293, 498

cultural program of 25, 31–34, 295, 644 tensions in 39–43, 49 and cultural translations 20, 444, 447, 450–455 destructive potentialities of 55–56, 635, 649–653 discourses of 47, 56, 90 transformations in 84–85, 88 end of 662 see also post-modernity ethics in 177–178 expansion of 48–51 formation of 83–90, 95, 104–105 in Middle Ages 295–297 and globalization 20, 156, 162, 453–454 history of 6–11, 57–63 and homogenization 166–167 individualism in 154, 157, 217, 612–613, 619 inherent tensions of 14, 26, 39, 157, 172–174 institutionalization of 43, 52–53 institutions of 31, 90–95 and Islam 242, 453 Jacobin tendencies of 305–306 life-styles of 156 non-Western 453 origins of 7, 32, 157–158, 485 and pluralism 11–14, 26, 223–224, 227, 670 political order in 34–37, 65, 119, 230, 309 in post-socialist states 494–498 and rationality 153–154, 162, 172 n1, 173–174 n8, 491 reflexivity in 32–33, 485, 492 and religions 14–16, 18, 208, 295, 328–334 salvation in 177, 179 and secularization 331–332 structural analysis of 92, 95 taboos in 627 and tradition dichotomy 151, 157, 166 universalism of 171 values of 21, 309 views of liberal 171–172, 175 Marxist 154–155, 173 violence in 94 see also European modernity; multiple modernities; Western modernity

index of subjects modernization 9–10, 33, 151, 413 and globalization 161 in Judaism 376–377, 519–524, 526 and structural differentiation 52–54, 152–154 theories 52, 98, 99–100, 468, 668–669 universal patterns of 670 and Westernization 184–185, 439, 441 modes of production, and civilizations 149–150 monarchy and caliphate 316–317 and prophecy 321 see also kingship monastic retreatism 252 money, social importance of 156 Mongol Empire 313 monistic conceptualizations, of modernity 157 monotheism 188 in axial age 61, 73, 81 Jewish 81 rejection of 300 moral philosophy 85, 115 moral reasoning, in social sciences 89 morality, and rationality 40, 620, 626 Morocco, Islamic law in 195 Moscow, Patriarchate of 352–353, 355, 357–358 mother-tongue teaching, in institutionalized multiculturalism 198 movements anti-globalization 144 grassroots 492–493, 495–496 heterodox 291 Islamic 233 national 38, 240, 648–649 New Age 179 orthodox 291 n7 of protest 44 in Europe 292, 336 in Japan 46 in Latin America 554–555 reform in India 403, 407–408 in Judaism 519–524 religious, new 206, 218, 329 social 34, 37–38, 645, 648 new 155, 492–494, 569 women’s 493 working class 155

731

multiculturalism 4, 214, 219–220, 571 alternatives to 201–204 and fragmentation of societies 13, 240 institutionalized 193–200 in Israel 384 limits of 196–201 and secularization 448 multiple citizenship 601 multiple globality 158 multiple identities 542–543, 600 multiple modernities ix, 18, 26, 485, 581, 668–669 clash of 555 and communication 21 emergence of 43–44, 47–48, 50–51 in Europe 487–488, 490 in Middle Ages 294 and nationalism 365 notion of xx, 6, 11, 151, 157, 185, 443, 451, 487, 533, 670 religious 332–333, 338 role of translations in 20 mundane order and transcendental order 10, 34, 93 in axial age 106, 112, 116, 125, 174–175 in Roman Empire 125–126, 129 Muscovy 361 religion and politics in 342–343, 352–353 Muslims, in India 504, 546, 548 mutation syndromes 167 mysticism 216 myths foundation 250–251 of Vizianagaram 399–400 of revolutionary birth of the people 251 Narbonne, Jewish community in 299 narratives of modernity 39 nation-building in Israel 234, 374 by Palestinians 234 nation-states 90, 191 in Africa 159 decline of 239 diversity of 648 in Europe 592–593 homogeneity versus pluralism in 187, 191–192, 224, 646–648 and immigration, attitudes towards 12, 192–204, 214–215, 240

732

index of subjects

and modern societies 662, 665 in modernity 162, 228, 365, 645–647 particularism of 209–210, 219 national collectivities 645–646 national identities and immigration 192 Jewish 367, 370–380 national movements 38, 240, 648–649 national religions 386, 389 National Socialism 93, 224, 507 nationalism 224, 365, 367 Buddhist 551 ethnic 435–436, 439–440, 442, 546 conflicts of 546–552 Hindu 546, 548, 552 Indian 545 Jewish 18, 366, 370, 375, 388–391, 435–436 and religion 18, 365–366 in Arab world 385 in France 385–386 in Israel 375–376, 382–386, 388–392 in United Kingdom 386 and Zionism 370 nationalities and citizenship 162, 197–198, 209, 212–213, 219, 542–543 and Eastern Orthodox Church 350 hegemonization of 155–156 values associated with 228 natural law 238, 321 nature in Greco-Roman civilization 502–503 human control of 41, 150–151, 216, 239 Roman interpretations of 127 On the Nature of the Gods (De Natura Deorum, Cicero) 126, 135 Nazism see National Socialism Near East 60–61, 70, 79, 114, 160 see also Middle East neo-clientelism, in Latin America 568–569, 578 neo-evolutionary theory 139 neo-liberalism, in Latin America 554, 562–563 neo-orthodox Judaism 521–522 neo-populism, in Latin America 570–574, 578 neo-Zionism 440 n21

Netherlands attitudes towards immigration 197 emergence as nation-state 365–366 institutionalized multiculturalism in 196, 198 pillarization in 194, 199–200 networks 100 neuroscience, social 501 n1 neutral attitudes, towards immigration 192–193, 196 New Age movements 179 new social movements in Latin America 569 theory 492–494 New World, colonialism in 160 Nigeria, city life in 468 ‘noble savage’ theme 2 nominal definitions 484 non-axial civilizations 113, 121–122 non-social principles 239–240 non-violence in Islam 511 promoted by Gandhi 505 non-Western civilizations 186 non-Western modernity 453 non-Western origins, of Europe 456 non-Western population, in Israel 424–425, 438–439 norms, derived from customs 629 Northern Europe, multiculturalism in 196 Norway, collective guilt in 256 Occitan language 298 n14 Occitan pluralism 15–16, 299–305 de Officiis (Cicero) 127 Old Testament, creations of 262, 274, 278–281 ontological anxiety 175 n14 ontological conceptions, multiplicity of 32–33 Open Society (Popper) 224 openness, of politics in modern societies 36 organizations, bureaucratic 357 Orient, Occident dichotomy 159–160, 458, 534 The Origin and Goal of History (Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Jaspers) 102, 105 origins of European civilization 456, 532 of historical thinking 67, 87, 89, 106–109, 120

index of subjects of individualism 72, 606–609, 613–614, 633 of modernity 7, 32, 157–158, 485 of the people in democracies 251 questions of 250 of Zionism 439 The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Eisenstadt) 292 n8 Origins of the West (Eisenstadt) 287–288 orthodoxy 291 n7 Jewish 376–378, 383–384, 390, 424, 434 in Germany 521–522 versus heterodoxy in Europe 297–298, 302, 304 in Islamic civilization 311–312 otherness 530, 639 acceptance of 501 encounters with 474 in Enlightenment 457–458 surrender to 475 translations of 449–450 Ottoman Empire, legal pluralism in 194–195 outsiders, exclusion of 248–249 Over-procurator (Russian Orthodox) 356 Oz ve-Shalom 511 Pakistan 504 ethno-nationalist conflicts in 549–550 Palestinians conflict with Israel 385, 388, 439–440, 510–511 nation-building by 234 papacy lack of, in Eastern Orthodox Church 350–351 and secular power 346 paradigm of human dialogue 667 structural-functional, in sociology xviii Paradoxes of Democracy (Eisenstadt) 191 parameters 610 parfaits (Catharism) 300–301 pariahs 15, 278, 282, 504 parody, modern 407–409 participation and democracy 567, 575–577 equal rights to 90, 207, 209 quest for 36 voluntary 574–575

733

particularism and cosmopolitanism 476 and democracy 4, 207, 217–221 of nation-states 209–210, 219 transcendence of 207, 217–218 versus universalism 443, 453–454 past, translations of 450 Patriarchate of Constantinople 352 of Moscow 352–353, 355, 357–358 Patriot Act (United States) 307 patriotism, constitutional 228, 531 Pauline mission 283 pauperism, voluntary 301–302 people’s democracies 623 performative dimension, of representations of identity 248 peripheries 20–21 and center relationships 20, 35, 462–467, 472 in anthropology 471 and cosmopolitanism 479–480 in Europe 590 transnational 465 perpetrators 14, 253, 255–257 Persia see Iranian civilization Persian Letters (Montesquieu) 458 personal identities 528 phenomenology, historical 83, 121–122 philosophical-political path of development 114, 118 philosophy Greek 74, 111, 502, 600 influences on Islamic political thought 316, 320–324 in Han Empire 111 of history 64, 102 n13 of law 630–631 moral 85, 115 political 93, 121, 617–618 cosmopolitanism in 480 European 320–322, 324 Indian 315 Islamic 315, 320–324 and religion 74 translation theories in 445–446 pilgrims 334 pillarization, of societies 194, 199–200, 226–227 pioneer-generation, in Israel 373–374 pluralism 184 of civilizations 3–5 conflicts resulting from 13, 225

734

index of subjects

cultural 186, 337 and democracy 13, 220–221, 223 and globalization 164–165, 169, 184, 188 ideology of 11, 183, 225–226 institutionalization of 12 and integration 225 legal 194–195 limits of 226–228 and modernity 11–14, 26, 223–224, 229, 670 Occitan 15–16, 299–305 participatory 575 and religions 188–189, 337 toleration of 4–6 versus homogeneity 1, 4–6, 11, 14, 17, 26–27, 289 in nation-states 187, 191–192, 224, 646–648 versus totalitarianism ix, 31, 41–42, 223, 635, 650–651 pluralistic societies, dominant values in 227–228 pluralistic-semantic path of development 116, 118 plurality 183, 189 cultural 186–187 in nation states 225 of tradition 166 pluriform societies 192 poets, Telugu 411–412 Poland collective guilt in 256 communist regime in 495–496 emigration to the West 538–539 policies criminal 626–627 cultural 214 integration 240 multicultural 196–197, 214–215 public, ethnicization of 12–13 Sharia-based 321, 325 polis, concept of 141 political activists, in modern societies 36 political affiliations, of sociologists 232 political attitudes 489, 496 political body, limits of 212–213 political change 86–87, 230 political conflicts 493 political economy, and center-periphery theories 464–465 political identities, European 599–601

political integration, of European Union 599–602 political legitimacy citizenship as source of 207, 218 in Roman Empire 129–130 political marketing 578 political order in axial age 118 imperial 104, 110–112, 116–119 conceptions of 90 imperial xvi, xviii–xix in Iranian civilization 316 Islamic 16, 117, 316–321, 324–325 in modernity 34–37, 65, 91, 119, 230, 309 post-axial, imperial 118, 296 in pre-axial civilizations 110 political parties and democracy 496–497 in India 548 political philosophy 93, 121, 617–618 cosmopolitanism in 480 European 320–322, 324 Greek, influences on Islamic political thought 316, 320–324 Indian 315 Islamic 315, 320–324 political rights 212–213 political systems of empires xvi, xviii–xix separation of powers principle in 621–623, 629 Political Systems of Empires (Eisenstadt) xviii–xix, 668 political values, and rationality 626 political visions, of society 238, 243–244 politics class 156 of cosmopolitanism 476, 480–481 in Europe 491 of identity 4, 156 in Japan 46 in Latin America 554–555, 563–564 in modern societies 35–36, 38 and religion 114, 116–117 in Europe Eastern 17, 339–363 Western 345–346 in Islamic civilization 16, 117, 131, 316–321, 324–325 in Israel 18, 432, 434–435

index of subjects in Roman Empire 126, 131, 137 in Russia 348–349, 352–363 and religions, in early states 68–70, 71, 76 in South India 411 theories of, rationality in 620–622 of translation 446 Politics (Aristotle) 16, 297 n13, 322, 324 polity, relationships with civil society and society 88 pollution, anthropological theories of 178 pontifices, role of 133–134 populism, neo, in Latin America 569–573, 578 positivism, juridical 621 post-axial civilizations, imperial political orders in 118, 296 post-Marxism 231 post-modern sociology 492, 605–606 post-modernity 243–244, 329, 571 in Europe 21, 491–494 and pluralism 226 Western 414 post-social principles 239–240 post-social societies 234–236, 242 transformations in 243–244 post-socialist states modernity in 494–498 regimes of 538–539 post-Westerness, of Europe 459–460 post-Zionism 387–388 poverty, ideal of 301–302 power and cultural translations 448 royal and priestly 76, 79–80 separation principle of 621–623, 629 transfer of, in Roman Empire 130–131 pre-axial civilizations 58, 78–79, 108–110 pre-modern images 224 pre-modern societies 154 prevention, of crime 627 primitive religions 66–68 primordiality themes, in collective identities 639–640, 643, 650 private spheres in post-social societies 236–237, 239 and public spheres 202–203 privatization in Latin America 565–566

735

of religion 203, 327–328, 332, 334–335, 383 production modes, and civilizations 149–150 profane abstention of 252 and sacred 252, 639 programmatist theories 25 of evolution 631–633 programs 631 cultural, of modernity 21, 31–34, 39–43, 49, 295, 644 progress post-modern notions of 605–606 and rationality 627 proletarian revolution 161 promissory notes, breaches of 94–95 prophecy and monarchy 321 role in Judaism 280 prophetic books, of the Old Testament 279 protest and modernity 670 movements 44 in Europe 292, 336 in Japan 46 in Latin America 554–555 themes of, incorporated in centers 35–36 The Protestant Ethic (Weber) 261–262 n1 Protestant states, model for Peter I’s ecclesiastical reform 360–361 Protestantism and Catharism 304–305 and individualism 607 Weber’s analysis of 272–274 Prussia, Jews in 516 psychotherapy 175 n14 public discourses 91 public goods 560, 564 public policy, ethnicization of 12–13 public spheres 90–91 extension of 235 formation of, and democracy 577 in Islamic civilization 311 in Latin America 564 and private spheres 202–203 unitary 646 public trust, in Latin America 555–557, 564–565 Puritan settlers, in America 177 Puritanism 274 n30, 293 purity 368

736

index of subjects

in Indian civilization 503–505 Pusapati dynasty 398–399 racism, theories of 211 Rational Peasant (Popkin) 610 rationality appeals to 239, 242 and citizenship 210–211 cognitive 620–621 Communist understanding of 491 diffuse 625–627 in ethics 40, 620, 626 religious 274, 281, 310 in European history 586–588 and evolution of ideas 624 in Greek philosophy 74 in human relations 208 instrumental 620, 624 limits of 210, 231, 588 and modernity 153–154, 162, 172 n1, 173–174 n8, 491 and progress 627 and religion 281, 284–285, 621, 626, 630 Christianity 594 ethics 274, 281, 310 in selection processes 628–629, 631 in social life 231, 486, 489, 491, 498 sovereignty of 41–42 totalizing visions of 41–42, 223–224, 237 and utopian visions 628 and values 626 versus romanticism 40, 486–491, 499 versus subjectivity/individualism 589 Weber’s analysis of 2, 41, 206, 491, 619–623, 625 see also irrationality reactive identities 338 real definitions 484 realism, modern 409 reality cultural 268–269 duality of 154 social 249–250 reason see rationality redemption, in Judaism 370–371, 378, 389–390 reflexivity in axial age 106, 112, 118–119 and history 102, 120, 596–597

of man 120 in modernity 32–33, 485, 492 self 120 reform 166 ecclesiastical, by Peter I 355–356, 358–361 of Judaism in France 522–524 in Germany 519–522 movements, in India 403, 407–408 Reformation 346, 614 in Germany 335 medieval background of 288, 291 regimes changes in, post-socialist 494 Communist 495–496 totalitarian 36, 143–144, 155, 161–162, 292, 345, 555–556 regions, basis of civilizations 150 reification 172 rejections of modernity 176–177 of monotheism 300 The Relations between Sociological Theory and Anthropological Research (Eisenstadt) xviii relativism absolute 605 cultural 166, 309 n1 religions in axial age 104, 109–110, 640 and civilizations 3, 149 and culture 336–337 ethno 328 in Europe 16–17, 594 Christianity 331, 333, 335, 593–595 Islam 17, 337–338 fundamentalists’ use of 224 Gauchet’s analysis of 65–69, 74 history of 261–262, 267, 271–274, 276–277 and identities 187 individualization of 203, 327–328, 332, 334–335, 383 and modernity 14–16, 18, 208, 295, 328–334 monotheistic 188 in axial age 61, 73, 81 rejection of 300 national 386, 389 and nationalism 18, 365–366 in Arab world 385 in France 385–386

index of subjects in Israel 375–376, 382–386, 388–392 in United Kingdom 386 peaceful coexistence of 630 and philosophy 74 and pluralism 188–189, 337 and politics 114, 116–117 in early states 68–71, 76 in Eastern Europe 17, 339–363 in Islamic civilization 16, 117, 131, 316–321, 324–325 in Israel 18, 432, 434–435 in Roman Empire 126, 131, 137 in Russia 348–349, 352–363 in Western Europe 345–346 primitive 66–68 and rationality 281, 284–285, 594, 621, 626, 630 in Christianity 594 ethics 274, 281, 310 in Roman Empire 126–129, 632 Christianity 125–126, 139–140 and Roman law 133–140 secular 358 n37 and society, in axial age 72–73, 80 sociology of 261, 263–285, 327–328, 331–333 Weber’s analysis of 261–262, 263–285, 295, 310 world 104, 109–110, 262 economic ethics of 272–273 jamborees of 186, 188 religiosity, new 383 religious conflicts 11, 187 religious ethics 279 n45 rationality in 274, 281, 310 religious identities 217 Jewish 367–369, 376–384 religious institutions 330 religious movements, new 206, 218, 329 Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions (Weber) 176 religious revival in democracies 218–219 theories of 205–206, 211 Replies to Critics (Weber) 261 representations and democracy 566–568, 593 of liminality 250 symbolic, of collective identities 14, 247–258 Republic (Plato) 133, 322

737

research and development, in Israel 425 into axial age civilizations 63, 102–104 into global history 101–102 into inter-ethnic relations 208 into pre-axial age civilizations 58 residence-based citizenship 212–213 resignation doctrine, in Eastern Orthodox Church 347–349 retreatism, monastic 252 retrospective individualization 59 reversibility of institutions 613 see also irreversibility revival ethnic and religious 205–206, 211, 217, 218–219 semantic, of civil society 143–144 revolutionary birth of the people, myths of 251 revolutions 86–87 bourgeoisie 161 colonial 161 Democratic 91 European 85 Eastern (1989) 537 French 84–85, 92, 210, 515 Great 34 industrial 591–592 of modernity 105 proletarian 161 righteousness 177, 179 rights of animals 213 cultural 220, 238–239 demands for 240–242 human 90, 160, 207, 209, 237, 543, 588–589 appeals to 238, 242 in Communist Eastern Europe 495 in Israel 431 and security demands 560 violations of 308 of minorities 239–240, 432 in modern societies 627–629 political 212–213 social 213–214, 238 rituals coronation, in Russia 363 of exclusion 278, 282 of expelling perpetrators 255–256 of failing heroism 252

738

index of subjects

in Roman Empire 137–138 sacrificial 643 of triumphant heroism 251, 257 Roman Catholic church 291, 593 anti-modernism of 594 and state power in Western Europe 345–346 see also Catholicism Roman civilization 8–9, 456, 502 Roman Empire 111, 117 and conquest 129–130 culture in 127–129 dissent in 127–128, 137–138 identities in 136 religion in 126–129, 632 Christianity 125–126, 139–140 and Roman law 133–140 secular ideology in 127 transfer of power in 130–131 see also Byzantine Empire Roman law 127, 132–133 and Roman religion 133–140 The Roman Revolution (Syme) 130 romanticism 173–174 n8, 179, 252 versus rationalism 40, 486–491, 499 royalism, Islamic 316, 319–320 rulers autonomy of elites from 310–311 sacred 69, 76–77, 79–80, 363 secular in Eastern Europe 342–343 in Western Europe 346 Russia Byzantine heritage of 360 Jews in, emigration to Israel 384 religion and politics in 348–349, 352–363 see also Muscovy Russia’s Byzantine Heritage (Toynbee) 360 sacred codes of collective identities 640 power and states 76 see also politics and religion and profane 252, 639 realm of, construction of 637–638 rulership 69, 76–80, 363 sphere of 630 sacredness see transcendence sacrifice rituals of 643 self 257

sacrilege 638 salvation 277–278 in modernity 177, 179 personal 128 samurai ideals, in Japan 505–506 SAP see Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) Sassanian Empire (Iran) 116–117 satellite mentality, in Eastern Europe 536 satellites, and metropolis 464 satyagraha (truth) 505 Scandinavia, political parties in 497 Scenarios of power (Wortman) 363 science cognitive rationality in 620–621 in Europe 591 history of 617–618, 622–623 see also social sciences Science as Vocation (conference, Weber) 617 Second World, modernity of 161 sects heterodox 304 in Islam 311 secular ideology, in Roman Empire 127 secular Jews, in Israel 377–378, 382–383, 435 secular religion 358 n37 secular rulers, in Europe 342–343, 346 secularization 327–329 in Europe 331 and multiculturalism 448 in Russia 362 theories of 331–332 security and freedom 215–217 issues in Latin America 558–561 security forces, impunity of 561 segregation, spatial, in Latin America 559 selection processes of axiological ideas 623 in evolution 632 rational 628–629, 631 self-control, and autonomy, anxieties of 178 self-definitions, in axial age 62 self-determination, for immigrant communities 195 self-examination, existential 175 self-interest 86, 609–610 rational pursuit of 231

index of subjects self-isolation, of Jews 278, 281, 283–284 self-organization, and civil society 142, 144 self-projections, in civilizational analysis 57, 60 self-reflexivity 120 self-sacrificing hero 257 self-understanding, European 142 Seljuk Sultans 317 semiotics 178 separation of powers principle 621–623, 629 Sephardic Jews 382 September 11 events, United States’ reaction to 306–308 The Seven Laws of Noah (Lichtenstein) 511 Shang kingdom (China) 79 Sharia-based policies 321, 325 Shas party 381–382 Shiv Shena 549 Silk Route 104 Sinhalese-Tamil conflicts, in Sri Lanka 550–551 slavery, views of 612–613 social action, civil society as a type of 145 social activism 311 social change 667 Social Change, Differentiation and Evolution (Eisenstadt) 668 social closure 10 theory of 178 social contract, idea of 191 social control, decrease of 626–627 social development 2 social differentiation 152 social divisions 171 social evolution 605, 616, 631–633, 668 social life 664 ambivalence in 467 consensus in 463 rationalization of 231, 486, 489, 491, 498 social movements 34, 37–38, 645, 648 new 155, 492–494, 569 social neuroscience 501 n1 social order ambivalence towards 642 destruction of 13 dimensions of 639 and work 142

739

social reality, boundaries in 249–250 social rights 213–214, 238 social sciences 85, 285, 664 ahistorical form of 98 discourses of 87–88, 96–97 ethnocentrism in 611–612 historicism in 605, 609, 613–614 and history 89 methodologies of 276–277 anthropological xvi, xviii–xix, 290, 461, 471 moral reasoning in 89 notion of human nature in 614–615 studies of globalization 99–100 translation theories in 446 see also sociology social spheres civil society as a type of 145–146 destruction of 233–234 social strata 664 social structures, of Europe 590 social systems 665 social transformation 14, 164 social visions, of societies 230, 237–238, 243–244 socialism see Communism socialization 230 disappearance of 233–234 societal agency 528 societies based on citizenship 219 boundaries of, in Israel 417 bourgeois 87 centers of charismatization of 35 toleration of pluralism by 4–6 civil society and polity in 88 comparative analysis of 665 complex, studies of xvi, xviii concept of 85–86, 88, 663–665 in sociology 230–233, 662–663 and culture 59, 463 fragmentation of 12–13, 240 institutions in, role of 230 pillarization of 194, 199–200, 226–227 pluralistic 227–228 pluriform 192 post-modern 243 post-social 234–236, 242 transformations in 243–244 pre-modern 154 and religion, in axial age 72–73, 80

740

index of subjects

and states conflation of 45 in Islamic civilization 315 totalitarian 224 visions of political 238, 243–244 social 230, 237–238, 243–244 see also modern societies socio-cultural order 67–68 socio-economic analysis, of cultural reality 268–269 sociologists 232 sociology 243, 669–670 and anthropology xvi, xviii–xix, 290, 461, 471 civilizational analysis in 666 comparative 126, 138 concept of society in 230–233, 662–663 critical 39 historical 63–64, 84–85, 605 and historiography 267 Israeli xiii–xiv liberal 175, 615 Marxist 231 post-modern 492, 605–606 real definitions in 484 of religion 261, 263–285, 327–328, 331–333 structural-functional paradigm in xviii supranational perspectives in 662–668 systems theory in 665 of translation 446 Weber on 267–268, 270–271 Western 486–487 World Congress of 662 solidarity 611 sources of 227–228 Solidarity movement (Poland) 495–496 South Africa, apartheid in 194 n1 South Asia Buddhism in 122 Islam in 551 modernity in 157–158 Souvenirs (de Tocqueville) 86 sovereignty of citizens 208 crisis of, in Near East 79 dual, in Islamic civilization 316–317 of rationality 41–42

spatial concepts, civilizations as 158 spatial segregation, in Latin America 559 sports welfare state 214 Sri Lanka, Sinhalese-Tamil conflicts in 550–551 state bureaucracies 357 state intervention, in welfare states 214–215 states borders of 416–417 and church see religions and politics city 77 and civil society 142–143 and conquest 69–70 developed 413–414 early 68–71, 75–77 formation of 80 perceptions of, in Latin America 563–564 post-socialist, modernity in 494–498 Protestant, model for Peter I’s ecclesiastical reform 360–361 and religion see politics and religion and sacred power 76 socialist see Communism and society conflation of 45 in Islamic civilization 315 territorial 77 transformation in axial age 71–72 see also nation-states; welfare states stereotypes 530–531, 535 Stoicism 135–136, 252, 503 Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) 163 structural analysis 92, 95, 610 structural change 669–670 Structural Change and Modernization in Post-socialist Countries (Adamski, Machonin and Zapf ) 494 structural deficits, of welfare states 215 structural differentiation, and modernization 52–54, 152–154 structural transformation 389 structural-functional paradigm, in sociology xviii structures, social, of Europe 590 subjectivity 589 submission ideal, in Islam 507 superiority, of civilizations 150 supraindividual concepts 664 supranational perspectives, in sociology 662–668

index of subjects survival theories, of ethnic and religious revival in modernity 205–206, 217 Sweden, dominant values in 227 Switzerland, heterogeneity of 225 symbolic goods, market for 330 symbolic representations of collective identities 14, 247–258 of liminality 250 symbols gendered, of nation-states 647 of Jewish tradition 372, 382–383, 390 symphonia, principle of 341, 344 systems political of empires xvi, xviii–xix separation of powers principle in 621–623, 629 theories of 464, 665 of values 540–541 taboos anthropological theories of 178 in modernity 627 Tantric Yoga 397 The Task of the Translator (Benjamin) 445–446 technology and differentiation 152 in Europe 591 teleology, in axial age concept 112–113 television 235 Telugu civilization literature in 402 modernity in 396 Telugu poets 411–412 territorial states 77 territorialization, of Judaism 370 terrorism 242, 306–308 Theft of an Idol (Brass) 546 theories anthropological, of pollution and taboo 178 of axial age 175 of caliphate 315, 318, 321 constitutional 317–318, 321–322 of cultural translations 444–450 of defense mechanisms 178 of democracy 576–577 of dependency 464 of ethnic and religious revival 205–206, 211, 217

741

of European modernity 443 of evolution 139, 275, 605–606, 616, 631–633 falsification of 247, 624–625 of modernization 52, 98–100, 468, 668–669 of new social movements 492–494 of politics, rationality in 620–622 programmatist 25, 631–633 of racism 211 of secularization 331–332 of social closure 178 of systems 464, 665 truth of 624–625 Theories of Society (Parsons) 483 third cultures 449 Third World 161 The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries (Walsh) 289–290 Thomism 320–321 ‘three clocks’ hypothesis 540 threshold of modernity 32 see also origins of modernity Time of Troubles (Russia, 1598–1613) 354 tolerance 226, 530 totalitarian regimes of Byzantium 345 in Eastern Europe, criticism of 143–144 in Latin America 555–556 in Middle Ages 292 political processes in 36 in socialist states 155, 161–162 totalitarian societies 224 totalitarianism, versus pluralism ix, 31, 41–42, 223, 635, 650–651 totalizing visions, of rationality 41–42, 223–224, 237 tourism 474 Towards a General Democracy: Direct, Economic, Ecological, and Social Democracy (Fotopoulous) 213 trade routes in axial age 104 in Middle Ages 294–296 Tradition and Translation (Macintyre) 445 traditions and globalization 165–167 Great, clashes between 166–167 hegemonic 166 invented 16, 325 Jewish, symbols of 372, 382–383, 390

742

index of subjects

Judeo-Christian, cultural code of 257–258 Little 166–167 versus modernity dichotomy 151, 157, 166 transcendence 72–73 in Axial age 80 conceptions of 279 ethno 117 flights from 177–178 ideals of 502 of particularism, in democratic societies 207, 217–218 theme in collective identities 640 and utopia, in democratic societies 216 transcendental interpretative development path 114, 118 transcendental order and mundane order 10, 34, 93 in axial age 106, 112, 116, 125, 174–175 in Roman Empire 125–126, 129 transcendental visions dualist 299–301 in Middle Ages 298–300 multiplicity of 32–33 transformations in axial age 59–60, 71–72, 75, 78, 80, 103–107, 112–119, 125 continuities with pre-axial civilizations 108–110 imperial political orders 104, 110–112, 116–119 monotheistic innovations 61, 73, 81 political 104, 296 n11 in modernity discursive 84–85, 88 political 230 in post-social societies 243–244 social 14, 164 structural 389 world-historical 312 see also change translations cultural 20, 444–460 role in multiple modernities 20, 447 theories of 445–448 transnational citizenship 543 transnational diasporas 4 transnational peripheries 465 transnationalism 200

trauma collective 256 cultural 94–95, 540 of modernity 649 travel, and cosmopolitanism 474, 477–480 triumphant heroism 250–251, 257 trust generated through constructing collective identities 642 public, in Latin America 555–557, 564–565 truth search for, in Hinduism 505 theories of 624–625 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 445 tsars, of Russia 353, 356, 361–363 Turkey, collective guilt in 258 unanimity rule, in village societies 610–611 unifying orientations, versus pluralistic orientations towards newcomers in societies 5–6 United Kingdom attitudes towards immigration in 198 dominant values in 227 Jews in 368–369 nationalism and religion in 386 separation of powers in 629 United States attitudes towards immigration 193 civic religion in 227 criticism of 177 n21 democracy in 432 heterogeneity of 224–225 history of 177 n20 identities in 26–27, 531, 597 inter-ethnic relations in 208 modern society in 233 Peace Corps 301 n18 Puritan settlers in 177 relations with Eastern Europe 538 with Israel 420 social sciences in 98 war on terrorism 306–308 unity, achieved through diversity 600 universal human nature 503 universal love, ideal in Christianity 506 universal patterns, of modernization 670

index of subjects universal translatability, modernity as condition of 444, 451–452 universal values 630 universal-inclusive path of development 115, 118 universalism of modernity 171 versus particularism 443, 453–454 universality 70 of citizenship 212, 237 of social development 2 universe, views of 151 universities, European 314–315, 320, 591 untouchables see pariahs Upanisads 406–407 urbanization in Middle Ages 294–295 source of modernity 158 Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History, Jaspers) 102, 105 utopian dimensions of citizenship 12, 211–212, 216 of civil society concept 146 of democracy 216–217 utopian visions 35–36, 371, 628 values 630 colonialism’s introduction of 160–161 dominant, in pluralistic societies 227–228 European 532–533, 583–596 differences between East and West 539–540 in Israeli society 437 of modernity 21, 309 and rationality 626 systems of, change in 540–541 tolerance 226 universal 630 world, surveys of 625–626 Zionism’s appropriation of 372 Vedic religion 115–116, 122 Venezuela, democracy in 568, 571–572 verzuiling see pillarization victims 14, 253–254, 257 Viddha-salabhanjika (Rajasekhara) 403 Vienna, Congress of (1815) 516–517, 526 village societies, unanimity rule in 610–611

743

violations, of human dignity 94–95 violence 177 n20 ideologies of 55 in Latin America 558–560 in modernity 94 see also barbarism in post-social societies 235 ruled out by Gandhi 505 Vishwa Hindu Parishad 548 visions of conquest 69–70 of societies political 238, 243–244 social 230, 237–238, 243–244 totalizing, of rationality 41–42, 223–224, 237 transcendental dualist 299–301 in Middle Ages 298–300 multiplicity of 32–33 utopian 35–36, 371, 628 Vizianagaram (Andhra Pradesh, India) 395–401 cultural output in 409, 411–412 kingship in 410–412 voluntary associations, and civil society 142, 574–575 voluntary pauperism 301–302 Waldensians 15, 301–302, 304 War of Independence (Israel, 1948) 431 warfare, institutionalized in axial age 104 We are all Multiculturalists now (Glazer) 201 Weimar Germany, civil society in 147 welfare states multicultural policies in 196–197, 214–215 social rights in 213–214 structural deficit of 215 in Western Europe 540 Wergeld practices (Germany), abolition of 611, 620 West diasporas in 419, 538–539 dichotomy with East (Orient) 159–160, 458, 534 West-Bank and Gaza, Israeli occupation of 433 Western Christianity 74 anti-Semitism in 506–507 and Western civilization 3, 61, 65–66

744

index of subjects

Western cities 295 Western civilization and Christianity 3, 61, 65–66 contacts with other civilizations 314 medieval 290 superiority of 150 uniqueness of 415 Western Europe democracy in 497–498 relations with Eastern Europe 23, 534, 536–537, 539–541 religion and politics in 345–346 Western modernity xx–xxi, 25, 44–45, 158, 414–416, 440–441 confrontations with 555 in Estonia 442 and European modernity 597–598 heterodox versus orthodox orientations in 298 influences on other modernities 54, 97–100, 485, 597–599 inherent tensions of 174–175 of Israel 19–20, 413, 416–442 see also European modernity Western post-modernity 414 Western sociology 486–487 Westernization alternatives to 442 in Israel 438–441 and modernization 184–185, 439, 441 What is to be done? (Buber) 512 Who are We? (Huntington) 26–27 Wissenschaft of Judentum 519–520 women cosmopolitanism of 478 discrimination of, in Israeli society 434 headscarfs worn by 241–242

women’s movement 493 work, and social order 142 working class movements 155 world, Europeanization of 597–599 world cities 465, 472 World Congress of Sociology 662 world history see global history world religions in axial age 104, 109–110 economic ethics of 272–273 jamborees of 186, 188 Weber’s analysis of 262, 310 world society 169, 454 world state, doctrine of 503 world values, surveys of 625–626 world-system analysis 293–295, 464 worlds, imagined 468, 479 Yemenite Jews 380–381 Yiddish 372, 377 Yoga, Tantric 397 Zambia, cosmopolitanism in 478 Zhou dynasty (China) 79–80, 110, 115 Zionism 369–376, 389–390, 418, 439–440 and Diaspora Jewry 373–374, 386–387 East European origins of 439 and Judaism 366, 383–384, 390–391 national-religious wing of 378 and nationalism 370 neo 440 n21 post 387–388 Zoroastrianism 58–59 and Iranian civilization 62

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