Modernity and its futures 

Introduction

By Stuart Hall, David Held and Gregor McLennan

Modernity and its futures is the fourth and last book in the Open University series, understanding modern societies, which seeks to examine the emergence and characteristic institutional forms of modernity. Through interpretive analysis and guided reading, the series as a whole adopts a dual focus which aims, on one hand, to explore the central, substantive feature of social reproduction and transformation in the modern epoch and, on the other, strives to highlight the nature of the theories and categories that social scientists draw upon in order to make sense of those processes. The series is concerned to examine both the concept of ‘modernity’ as well as modernity—the institutional nexus.

In many respects, the present volume continues the storyline set in train by its companion volumes. Substantively, it follows the fourfold analytical divisions of modern society into its political, economic, social and cultural dimensions. Whereas the first book, formation of modernity, investigated how modern political and economic forms first emerged, and the second and third volumes explored their consolidation in some detail, this book asks about their durability and prospects. As we approach the twenty-first century, the volume tries to assess, among other things, the meaning and implications of the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe; shifts in the dynamics and organization of the global capitalist economic order; the changing forms of contemporary culture and identity formation; the growing interconnectedness between states and societies; and challenges to that quintessentially modern political institution, the nation-state. At the same time, modernity and its future is concerned with the changing role of social science and the nature of modern ‘knowledge’, which we have depended on in the past to make sense of these changes and which, if these shifts are taken far enough, could undercut some of the underlying intellectual assumptions of leading forms of human enquiry. These latter issues will be elaborated later in this introduction.

For the moment, it should be emphasized that in none of the chapters which follow is it simply asserted that we have left modernity behind and are moving rapidly into a new ‘post-modern’ world. A great deal of careful conceptual work, argument and evidence is needed before this scenario can be affirmed or denied with any confidence. The signs of contemporary change point in different, often contradictory, directions and it is difficult to make sense of them while we are still living with them. Also, much depends on the specific features of the particular institutional dimension being examined. Accordingly, each chapter in this volume attempts to lay some common basis for discussion about the direction and extent of recent social and intellectual change before addressing the question of modernity’s future. For this reason, one of the main tasks of the chapters is to introduce debates: debates about the likely directions, central dimensions and proper naming of these change; debates about whether the future of modernity will sustain the Enlightenment promise of greater understanding and mastery of nature, the progress of reason in human affairs, and a steady, sustainable development in the standard and quality of life for the world’s populations; debates about whether there is any meaningful future for specific classical social theories (such as liberalism or Marxism); and debates about the very role and possibility of social science today.

A resume of some earlier reflections

I, the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century; the industrialism in the nineteenth century; the modernism in the twentieth century, those descript modernity as which became a progressively global phenomenon and progressivism.

2, modernity has had a long and complex historical evolution. These processes were the political, the economic, the social, and the cultural.

3, modernity developed at the intersection of national and international conditions and processes. The West forged its identity and interest in relation to endogenous developments of unequal exchange (material and culture) with ‘the Rest’—the frequently excluded, conquered, colonized and exploited ‘other’.

4, modernity can be characterized by a cluster of institutions, such as the nation-state, international system of states, the Capitalist economic order based on private property and the dominance of secular, materialist, individualist cultural values and etcetera.

5, Power is a constitutive dimension of all modern social relations; and social struggles are ‘inscribed’ into the organization of society as well as the structures and policies of the state. In a sense of modernism, the major pattern of power system in state, could be divided as liberal democracy, socialism (as subtype of state socialism and social democracy)  

6, globalization, a process reaching back to the earliest stages of modernity, continues to shape and reshape politics, economics and culture, at an accelerated pace and scale.

The structure of the volume as fellow:

Chapter one: Liberalism, Marxism and Democracy

(By David Held)

Chapter two: A global socity?

(by Anthony McGrew)

Chapter three: Environmental challenges

By Steven Yearley

Chapter four: post-industrialism and post-fordism

By John Allen

Chapter five: social pluralism and post-modernity

By Kenneth Tompson

Chapter six: the question of cultural identity

By Stuart Hall

Chapter seven: the enlightenment project revisited

By Gregor McLennan