Formations of modernity by Stuart Hall

Introduction by Stuart Hall

Formations of modernity, as the title suggests, is concerned with the process of formation which led to the emergence of modern societies, and which stamped them with their distinctive character. The book addresses a number of questions which have proved to be of fundamental importance throughout the history of the social science. When, how and why did modern societies first emerge? Why did they assume the forms and structures which they did? What were the key processes which shaped their development? Traditionally, modern societies have been identified with the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century. Formations breaks with this tradition, tracing modern societies back to their origins in the rapid and extensive social and economic development which followed the decline of feudalism in western Europe. It sees modern societies now as a global phenomenon and the modern world as the unexpected outcome of, not one, but a series of major historical transitions.

The six chapters which comprise this volume not only map this historical process of formation, but attempt to provide an explanatory framework for this development. The commonsense term ‘modern’—meaning recent, up-to-date – is useful in locating these societies chronologically, but it lacks a theoretical or analytic rationale. This book, however, analyses the passage to modernity in terms of a theoretical model based on the interaction of a number of ‘deeply structured processes of change taking place over long periods’, as David Held put it in Chapter 2. The book does not collapse these into a single process (e.g. ‘modernization’), but treats them as different processes, working according to different historical time-scale, whose interaction led to variable and contingent outcomes. As Hold observes, ‘the stress is on processes, factors and causal patterns … there is no mono-causal explanation – no single phenomenon or set of phenomena – which fully explains [their] rise … it is in a combination of factors that the beginnings of an explanation … can be found’. We return to the implications of this multi-causal approach later in this introduction.

The four major social processes which the book indentifies are: the political, the economic, the social and the cultural. They form the basis of the four central chapters in this volume, and organize the narrative or ‘story-line’ of the other books in the series. In the next two volumes, political and economic form of modernity and social and cultural forms of modernity, these processes provide the framework for an analysis of what developed industrial societies look like and how they work. In the final volume in the series, modernity and its futures, they provide the basis for indentifying the emergent social forces and contradictory processes which are radically re-shaping modern societies today.

‘Formations of Modernity’ is divided into six chapters. In chapter 1, ‘the enlightenment and the birth of social science’, Peter Hamilton examines the explosion of intellectual energy in eighteenth-century Western Europe which became known as ‘the Enlightenment’. This movement gave definition to the very idea of ‘modernity’ and is often described as the original matrix of the modern social sciences. Of course, in one sense, the study of society was not new. Writers had been making observations about social life for millennia. But the idea of ‘the social’ as a separate and distinct form of reality, which could be analyzed in entirely ‘this-worldly’, material terms and laid out for rational investigation and explanation, is a distinctly modern idea which only finally crystallized in the discourses of the Enlightenment. The ‘birth of the social’ as an object of knowledge made possible for the first time the systematic analysis and the practices of investigation we call ’the social sciences’.

Chapter 1 examines the historical and geographical con text of the European Enlightenment, and the vision of intellectual emancipation which seized its principal figures—the philosophy—including such major precursors of modern social theory as Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the luminaries of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson. It discusses the Enlightenment critique of traditional authority and examines some of its leading ideas—progress, science, reason, and nature. These gave shape to the ‘promise’ of the Enlightenment—the prospect which it opened up of an unending era of material progress and prosperity, the abolition of prejudice and superstition and the mastery of the forces nature based on expansion of human knowledge and understanding. The chapter takes the story forward, through the Romantic movement and the French Revolution to those major theorists of nineteenth-century social science—Saint-Simon and Comte. It looks forward to that later moment, at the end of the nineteen-century, when the social sciences were once again reorganized.

This second moment in the development of the social sciences—between 1890 and 1920—was the time of what are now known as the ‘founding figures’ of sociology: Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and Tonnies, thereafter the social sciences became more compartmentalized into their separate disciplines, more specialized and empirical, more ‘scientific’ (positivistic) and more closely engaged with application to the ‘real world’ through social engineering. Nevertheless, these classical figures of modern sociology also undertook a major examination of the formation of the modern world and its ‘laws of development’, not unlike that which the Enlightenment philosophy had inaugurated. These Enlightenment concerns continue to underpin the social sciences today. Indeed, in recent years, there has been a remarkable revival in historical sociology, which is concerned with these questions of long-term transformation and development; and, interestingly, they are being pursued in a more interdisciplinary way, drawing together the researches of sociologists, economic and social historians, political theorists and philosophers. It is as if these profound, questions about the origin and destiny of the modern world are surfacing again at the very moment when modernity itself—its promise and its vicissitudes—is being put in question. This book draws on much of that new work in historical sociology and reflects these emerging concerns and debates.

The second chapter ‘the development of the modern state’ opens by examining the formation of modern state. David Held sees the modern state emerging at the intersection of the national and international systems. He traces the state’s development through a variety of historical forms—from the classical European empires, the divided authority of the feudal state (Papacy and Holy Roman Empire 960—1804), the estates system and the absolutisms of the early modern period, to the emergence of the forms of political authority, secular power, legitimacy and sovereignty characteristic of the modern nation-state. The chapter considers the roles of warfare, militarism and capitalism in underpinning the supremacy of this nation-state form. It discusses the system of nation-state as the foundation of the modern international order. Into this story are woven the changing conceptions of politics elaborated in western political philosophy by writers such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx and Weber. The chapter looks forward to the emergence of liberal democracy as the privileged twentieth-century state form of modern societies in the West.

In chapter 3, ‘The emergence of the economy’, Vivienne Brown examines the formation of a distinct sphere of economic life, governed by new economic relations, and regulated and represented by new economic ideas.

(in this chapter) it provides a re-reading of Adam Smith’s classic work, which became such a landmark text of the modern age, and sets its ideas in their proper historical and moral contexts.

In chapter 4, ‘Changing social structures: class and gender’, Harriet Bradley takes the story forwards from the agrarian and commercial revolutions of the eighteenth century to the upheavals of the Industrial revolution of the nineteenth. She also shifts the focus from economic processes to the changing social relations and new type of social structure characteristic of industrial capitalist society. (and finally)

The chapter points forward to how these class and gender structures evolved and were complicated by questions of race and ethnicity in the twentieth century.

In chapter 5, ‘The cultural formations of modern society’, Robert Bocock looks at the increasing importance given to the analysis of culture, meaning, language and the symbolic structures of social life in contemporary social theory—what the anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, indentified as ‘the study of the life of signs at the heart of social life’. The chapter then turns to a discussion of three key cultural themes in the transition to modernity. First, the shift from a religious to a secular world-view. Second, the role which religion play in the formation of the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Third, the growing awareness among western philosophers and social theorists of the costs of modern culture—what Freud called civilization’s ‘discontents’.

This final theme points forward to recent critiques of the ‘promise’ of the Enlightenment.

In chapter 6, finally, ‘The West and Rest: discourse and power’, Stuart Hall places the early Europe-centred—and Euro-centric—account of the evolution of modern societies and modernity in the West, in a wider global context. The gradual integration of Western Europe, its take-off into sustained economic growth, the emergence of the system of powerful nation-states, and other features of the formation of modern societies is often told as a purely internal story—as if Europe provided all the conditions, materials and dynamic necessary for its own development from within itself. This view is challenged at several places in this book and chapter 6 reminds us, once again, that the process also had external and global conditions of existence.

Chapter 6 argues that the integration of Western Europe also involved the construction of a new sense of cultural identity