The Labyrinth of Modernity: Horizons, Pathways and Mutations 1786608669, 9781786608666

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The Labyrinth of Modernity

Series Editors: Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle, Saulius Geniusas, John W. M. Krummel, and Jeremy C. A. Smith This groundbreaking series aims to investigate social imaginaries from theoretical, comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Its objective is to foster challenging research on the burgeoning but heterogeneous field of social imaginaries on the one hand, and the related field of the creative imagination on the other. The series seeks to publish rigorous and innovative research that reflects the international, multiregional, and interdisciplinary scope across these fields. Titles in the Series Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion Edited by Suzi Adams Productive Imagination Edited by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination Edited by Saulius Geniusas Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions Edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith The Labyrinth of Modernity: Horizons, Pathways, and Mutations By Johann P. Arnason

The Labyrinth of Modernity Horizons, Pathways, and Mutations

Johann P. Arnason

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by Johann P. Arnason All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-78660-866-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78660-867-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78660-868-0 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii 1 Introduction

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2

Modernity: One, Many, and Divided

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3

Life Orders and Articulations Perspectives on Capitalism  17 Domains of the Political  29 Meaning and Modernity  47

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4

Contexts and Phases of Modernity Periodizing Modernity  78 Lost, Found, and Faraway Modernities  87

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5

The Road to St. Petersburg Aspects of the Short Twentieth Century  96 Communism in Context  99 The Leninist Syndrome and Its Sources  104

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6

The Soviet Model The Formation of an Alternative Modernity  118 Totalitarianism in Context  128 Change and Crisis  138

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7

East Asian Complications The Civilizational Background  141 Politics and Religion  153 Transformations of the Soviet Model  157

141

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vi

Contents

After Maoism  166 The Question of Chinese Democracy  172 8

Concluding Reflections: Global Modernities in World Context Civilizational Perspectives  184 Historical Landmarks and Conceptual Signposts  188

180

References201 Index211 About the Author 221

Acknowledgements

This book has been in the making for a long time, and with long intervals. Its main ideas owe most to the writings of and discussions with two deceased thinkers, Cornelius Castoriadis and Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt. They came from very different backgrounds; there was no contact between them, and their approaches are at first sight far apart, but underlying affinities can be detected and have proved important for the line of thought pursued here. The book has benefited from close collaboration with the Centre for Global Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, including a recent stay there by me as visiting professor. Thanks are due to the director of the Centre, Marek Hrubec, and to other members, for their interest in my projects and for clarifying discussions. Another significant source is my involvement in the work of the Department of Historical Sociology at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague; courses taught there and conversations with colleagues have helped to build up the argument developed in the following pages. Collaboration with the journal Social Imaginaries has been of great value for my projects, including this book. Thanks are due to Suzi Adams for suggesting that it should be included in a series organized by the editorial collective of the journal; and to the Rowman & Littlefield editors Sarah Campbell, Frankie Mace, Rebecca Anastasi, and Scarlet Furness for the patience they had shown during the writing process. Finally, I am indebted to my wife, Maria, for a long and loyal companionship, as essential to this project as it has been to my earlier work.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Some clarifications are in order, concerning both the genre and the content of the present work. This is a book-length essay, not a scholarly monograph, and its mode of argument is a selective combination of theory and history. The book does not propose a general or comprehensive theory of modernity; as will be seen, the perspective adopted here is conducive to basic doubt about such projects. Nor does it aim at a balanced comparative history; that would, in any case, be impossible within the limits of this short text. It should also be emphasized that the concept of modernity is not defined in normative terms. There is no project of modernity, no clearly defined core structure, and no basic principles that would explain and enable changes of institutional patterns. This does not mean that we must rest content with an enumeration of historical details. There is an identifiable core complex of orientations and dimensions, but it is best understood as a problematic, open to divergent interpretations with more or less emphatic normative claims. To borrow Borges’s description of the imaginary planet Tlön, modernity is a labyrinth constructed by men and destined to be deciphered by men; but it may be added that the decipherings are destined to proliferate, without a logical or consensual end in sight. To put it another way, the underlying concept of modernity refers to a historical configuration of the social imaginary; its rival normative versions – modernisms in a broad sense – are part and parcel of the historical field. An analysis that abstains from systematic theorizing will still need a conceptual framework. The approach taken here relies on a version of what Gianfranco Poggi called the ‘trinitarian orthodoxy’ – the division of social life into three main domains. This is, however, a distinctly flexible orthodoxy; a tripartite model is widely accepted, but prominent theorists have defined it in different ways. The version used here distinguishes between 1

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Chapter 1

economic, political, and cultural spheres. Specific aspects and implications will be clarified in due course. It is not being suggested that the tripartite model provides an exhaustive account of differentiation in modern societies. Other approaches, with complementary results, are legitimate and represented in contemporary scholarship. But as I will try to show, the distinction between the three spheres is particularly well suited to spell out the defining features of modernity as a new civilization and to link this idea to a model of differentiation that goes beyond the functionalist frame of reference. That line of argument is also a way to link the civilizational conception of modernity to the much more widely discussed notion of multiple modernities, through an analysis of the scope for variation within each domain and within their overall configuration; conversely, the empirically observable multiplication of modern sociocultural patterns can be brought into a common focus by comparing economic, political, and cultural features. The latter approach, the move from plurality to unity, is more familiar, but far from uncontested, and the following discussion will begin with a defence of its presuppositions, before moving to a closer examination of the overarching civilizational pattern and finally to more concrete case-oriented interpretations. The return to multiple, more precisely alternative versions of modernity is also a turn to history and, in particular, to a chapter of twentieth-century history, whose impact and significance are not reflected in any corresponding theoretical body of work. It goes without saying that this book makes no independent contribution to the history of Communism. But it does try to advance theoretical reflection on this massive and complex experience. Access to a wealth of new sources during the past three decades, described by scholars in the field as ‘the archival revolution’, has vastly enriched our knowledge about the history of the erstwhile and still mutating Communist regimes, but conceptual mapping of the field lags far behind that breakthrough. The questions to be dealt with involve basic issues of historical sociology; the view that Communist regimes represent both distinctive varieties of modernity and key episodes in the unfolding of global modernity is not unexampled in earlier debates but certainly needs further elaboration. Historians may be unenthusiastic about social theory entering this area (for a markedly hostile and mostly misguided example, see Plaggenborg 2015), but that should not deter us from trying. Another reason for focusing on this theme has to do with perspectives on the twentieth century. The myths of an American century and a unipolar world order die hard; attempts to revive them are still being made, and the waning interest (outside specialist circles) in the Soviet side of post-war settlements and transformations helps to maintain a narrative one-sidedly favourable to the apparent victors of 1989. Unbalanced reactions to the rise of China, shifting from the belief in democratization and Westernization



Introduction 3

guaranteed by economic development to the currently more common fear of a recharged Communism, are not least due to lacking awareness of the complex history behind present trends. As will be argued here, contemporary China is neither a straightforward continuation of the Communist trajectory nor can it be understood without reference to that prehistory. It is not improbable that future historians might consider the Chinese encounter with the Soviet model as the most significant effect of the October Revolution. In the Chinese context, the model was exaggerated, adapted and then in part abandoned, but it provided the basis for a reunification of the Chinese empire, which, in the long run, seems likely to have a greater impact on world history than the Communist rebuilding of Russian power. The characterization of China – as well as post-Communist Russia – as a ‘civilizational state’ (Coker 2019), seeking legitimacy through the invocation of a civilizational heritage to be defended against the West, differs positively from the mainstream demonization but is nevertheless open to two objections. It oversimplifies the ideological profile of both regimes; the civilizational theme is only one part of a more complex and markedly eclectic pattern (the latter term applies even more strongly to Russia than to China). More importantly, the emphasis on ideological uses of the concept of civilization overshadows its analytical potential, particularly relevant to the two cases in question and conducive to views very different from those implicit in the label just quoted. The interpretation to be defended here will stress the connection of Russian and Chinese experiences to the civilization of modernity, its problems, and its paradoxes. This fundamental point does not alter the fact that both cases involved intercivilizational encounters of a momentous kind; in view of that background, a certain element of validity in the claims to civilizational identity must be admitted. The notion of an unbroken or at least restorable civilizational continuity is untenable, but the role of a civilizational legacy in the patterning of modernity deserves a closer look. This entails different approaches to the two major examples and not just because Russian Communism has run its course, while its Chinese mutation is still in progress. One of the many paradoxes of Chinese Communism is that its modernizing trajectory has continuously raised new questions about its traditional roots, precedents, and enduring frames of reference. The Chinese experience represents an exceptionally intricate combination of anti-traditional turns, underlying continuities and reactivations of traditional sources; this constellation is more complex than the Russian one and requires a more extensive discussion of the historical context. There is no doubt that the reception of the Soviet model was a major watershed in Chinese history, but it is also true that the borrowed ideas and practices entered a much older and vastly more alien cultural world than the one where they had originated, as well as a new geopolitical environment, and both these sea changes affected their further destinies.

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Chapter 1

Finally, there is a more conjunctural reason for insisting on the need for further reflection on the history of Communism. To judge from several symptoms, Santayana’s much-quoted dictum about those who do not remember history being forced to repeat it is not wholly irrelevant to this matter. The revival of social criticism after the conformist wave of the 1990s has been accompanied by some less-than-convincing offshoots: rediscoveries of Lenin, idealizations of Bolshevism, and attempts to construct a new myth of the twentieth century by labelling it the century of the working class. Such exercises are at best blind alleys and at worst recipes for disaster. In brief, the discussion begins with some basic aspects of the modern constellation, on the whole more directly discernible in Europe than elsewhere, and then moves on to consider lessons to be drawn from the modern – more specifically twentieth-century – mutations of the two great Eurasian empires. This double focus determines the geographical orbit of the book. Although written with Eurasian perspectives in mind, it does not touch upon the distinct but overlapping Islamic and Indian worlds, both very important for the debate on multiple modernities, but beyond the scope of the present approach. More generally speaking, it is not concerned with the regions that some authors subsume under the notion of a global South (in my opinion not a useful concept). The book concludes with a brief comment on global modernity and on the reasons for reconsidering its long-term trajectory in light of the Communist experience. The latter has thrown light on aspects often neglected by overenthusiastic theorists of globalization. Globalizing processes are an important and highly visible component of the modern constellation, but they do not justify interpretations that elevate this aspect above all others. Notions of a global civilization on the road to uniformity, a world system or – least convincing – a borderless world are untenable. As various critics have shown, globalizing dynamics are accompanied by processes of regionalization as well as differentiating trends on civilizational and national levels. It is nevertheless a valid point that successive and distinctive configurations of global modernity are an integral part of the field envisaged by analysts of multiple modernities, and the interaction of this part with the others is a major strand of history from early modernity onwards. Present troubles are often ascribed to a crisis of globalization, but they are, to a large extent, a matter of enduring interconnections with other processes becoming more evident. Great power rivalry has long been a major factor, and the uncertain shift towards geopolitical re-stratification, now under way, is giving it a new twist. Popular predictions envisage a bipolar Sino-American hegemony, or a new Chinese unipolarism replacing the American one; at least as likely is a quadripartite constellation of unequal powers, where China and the United States would form the upper layer, and Russia and India the lower, but with some flexibility



Introduction 5

of alliances. Whether the European Union can become a force to be reckoned with at that level is an open question and obviously of some importance for the future of modern civilization, but the least that can be said about the present situation is that such an outcome does not seem likely.

Chapter 2

Modernity: One, Many, and Divided

The idea of multiple modernities grew out of S. N. Eisenstadt’s long-lasting critical engagement with modernization theory and appealed to other scholars interested in the diversity of modern cultures and societies. It thus became a focus of debate and, in due course, attracted criticisms that must be answered if the original insight is to be defended. Four such objections seem particularly significant. The most basic one targets the uncertain common denominator, implied but not clarified by the emphasis on multiplicity within a modern condition. In fact, Eisenstadt had adumbrated a response to this line of argument, but inconclusive formulations and lack of detail made it less conducive to discussion than was the analysis of plural configurations. His conception of modernity as a new type of civilization lends itself to further elaboration and thus to a clearer understanding of multiple modernities as different versions of a shared but adaptable framework. From this point of view, the reference to varieties of modernity would seem more adequate and a better guide to the intertwining of unity and diversity. Interpretations along these lines will link up with earlier debates, as well as with comparative studies of paths and patterns. A second objection concerns the encounters and interconnections between different cases and has been summed up in the notion of entangled modernities. Those who stress multiplicity are then criticized for neglecting mutual involvement and cross-determination. There is obviously no a priori reason why the acknowledgement of diversity should exclude perspectives on interrelations. With regard to Eisenstadt’s work, it is easy to show that he did not ignore this side of the modern constellation; suffice it to cite his general view of European expansion interacting with resistance, imitation, and reinvention of European models in other parts of the world, as well as his specific description of the Americas after European conquest as the ‘first multiple modernities’. 6



Modernity: One, Many, and Divided 7

But the latter example is also a reminder of ongoing historical entanglements that go beyond the initial cultural imprint stressed by Eisenstadt. American modernities developed through multiple transatlantic contacts and dynamics, irreducible to the original impact of the two European reformations. On the other hand, the reference to an underlying civilizational pattern, suggested earlier, indicates a level of entanglement prior to all others: the embedment in a field of shared but variously interpreted and disputed cultural orientations. The third criticism to be considered is the claim that arguments about multiple modernities lend themselves to ideological use. The diverse cultural and institutional profiles of modern societies can either be invoked to celebrate the West’s supposed Christian roots and commitment to human rights (as in the clash-of-civilizations model) or to justify oppressive regimes on the grounds of historical legacy and cultural authenticity. Rhetoric in this vein is not unfamiliar but is often vague and rarely related to the historicalsociological debate on multiple modernities. There is, however, a potential basis for such ways of thinking. If divergent patterns of modernity are explained as outcomes of unilateral framing by intact civilizations, it becomes easier to conflate them with separate cultural worlds; the common ground is then reduced to infrastructural and organizational aspects, whereas basic and self-contained continuity prevails on the levels of institutions and collective identities. We can then speak of Western Christian, Orthodox, Islamic, Indian, or Chinese modernity, and views on their interrelations may range from one extreme to another: exclusive virtues will be claimed on behalf of a particular civilization, others will advocate a relativist model of coexistence, and intermediate positions invoke an uncertainly defined dialogue of civilizations. Huntington’s version of civilizational theory is not as fixated on conflict as critics have claimed (cultural clashes do not necessarily translate into violent collisions), but it does rely on the imagery of civilizational resurgence after temporary eclipse. Eisenstadt’s analyses have occasionally been misread in this spirit, but his civilizational conception of modernity, however incomplete, is incompatible with the notion of intact premodern traditions continuing to shape the course of development. An unprecedented capacity to undermine and problematize older civilizations is integral to the modern innovation, but at the same time the scope for variation and the conflicting trends (Eisenstadt refers to antinomies) inherent in the new constellation open up possibilities of interaction with historical legacies. The destabilization and fragmentation of premodern civilizations does not exclude their partial – more or less extensive and durable – involvement in modernizing processes. Thus understood, multiple modernities are neither new embodiments of enduring models nor purely internal variants of a radically novel pattern; they are changing combinations of background factors and transformative forces, and the latter add up to an encompassing field that does not allow for closed worlds.

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Chapter 2

Finally, the idea of multiple modernities is challenged by an approach that stresses global unity. On this view, the modern world was a global configuration from the outset, and the apparent specificity of its various parts should be qualified in light of the overall context. The most elaborate and influential version of the globalist paradigm is world system theory, focused on the emergence of an international capitalist economy from the sixteenth century onwards. Its scope extends even to civilizational issues, but the description of the world system as a civilization (Wallerstein 1988) refers to the impact of a fundamentally economic logic on forms of life and thought, and is thus in line with Marxian notions of the superstructure. By contrast, the idea of civilization to be defended here has to do with patterns of meaning, instituted in economic, political, and cultural spheres; these different dimensions are to be analysed from a non-reductionist point of view, without prior assumptions about their relative weight and primacy. This line of argument also implies a critique of the more general globalist stance. The global aspect of modernity as a civilization is indisputable, and will be discussed at some length, but the shift to cultural and institutional levels enables us to begin with the question of multiple globalizing processes. The point is, in other words, that the new civilization gains global reach in various and divergent dimensions, through successive historical phases, and in changing geopolitical contexts. To conclude, a grasp of modernity as a new civilization is a necessary precondition for proper understanding of its multiple forms. But before moving on to further steps, it seems appropriate to clarify a few questions regarding the concept of civilization used here. It refers to civilizations in the plural (modernity among them, with distinctive features setting it apart), and its history reflects broader trends of sociological discourse. An active interest in civilizations and their comparative study emerged in classical sociology, declined during the consolidation of sociology in a structural-functionalist spirit, but reappeared in the context of multifaceted criticism directed against that approach in the later decades of the twentieth century. The best way to situate the plural concept of civilization is to see it as a complement and corrective to the concept of society. A strong and exclusivist version of the latter, commonly traced back to the Durkheimian school and identified most closely with the work of Talcott Parsons, was problematized and rejected by several major sociological theorists in the 1970s and 1980s. Their main objections were aimed at the overemphasis on normative integration and the resultant image of society as a self-contained whole; arguments against systemic conceptions of society (or, alternatively, attempts to construct a more flexible and multi-perspectivist idea of system) were part of the same discourse. A further aspect of the criticized paradigm was the tendency to reduce culture to a basis of norms and thus to a programming instance within the societal field. The whole critique was then summed up in the charge that the dominant concept



Modernity: One, Many, and Divided 9

of society drew on an idealized vision of the nation state and that its influence on the social sciences reflected the role of this tacit model in real history. It seems significant that the most articulate classical conception of civilizations was formulated by Durkheim and Mauss (1971), with explicit reference to limits of their key concept of society and the need for a more diverse typology of social-historical formations. In that context, they introduced the notion of civilization as a label for large-scale and long-term units, groupings of societies characterized – and set apart from other such clusters – by mutual affinities, diffusions, and exchanges. For Durkheim and Mauss, the societies that enter into the making of civilizations were primarily political units, even describable as nations (in a vague and now abandoned sense of that word). A more adaptable version might allow for different power centres (not necessarily states) and varying forms of collective identity; the civilizational frameworks that extend across such component parts can then be understood as cultural orientations with institutional impact. And there is another side to the cultural factor. As Durkheim noted (1995, 437), each civilization has its own system of basic concepts, serving to articulate the relationship between society and the world. The emphasis on specific concepts did not prevent him from admitting universal implications; he singled out the concept of totality as invariably the most basic one and interpreted it as a way of world making through the self-projection of society. The latter part of this thesis is no longer defended by anybody, and the former – the grasp of the world as a totality – must be reformulated in more nuanced terms. It is not obvious that an explicit notion of the world as a whole is a cultural universal (Brague 2004). What remains is the problematic of world articulation through a set of concepts, although we may now – as will be more extensively argued later – have to shift Durkheim’s focus on concepts to less clearly demarcated bearers of meaning. The civilizational perspective adumbrated by Durkheim and Mauss was, in all essentials, reactivated by those who raised the same kind of questions in the 1970s, but with a stronger accent on cultural aspects. Eisenstadt’s definition of the civilizational dimension (inherent in human societies but more manifest in some historical cases than in others) as the ‘combination of ontological or cosmological visions . . . with the definition, construction and regulation of the major arenas of social life and interaction’ (Eisenstadt 2003, 34) sums up this shift. Since this formulation is, broadly speaking, the background to arguments developed later, it seems useful to spell out some basic implications. The combination is to be understood as an intertwining, not as a unilateral determination or programming of one side by the other. On the cultural side, the visions or articulations of the world transcend the given self-organization of society and open up a space for self-transformative capacity; this potential is activated through rival interpretations. On the social

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Chapter 2

side, the reference to arenas – rather than subsystems or rule-governed orders of life – suggests conflicts; hence the exercise and contested distribution of power, and the power factor affects the field of interpretations. The following analysis of modernity as a civilization takes off from Eisenstadt but will not build directly on his texts. Rather, the argument will focus on substantive issues and conceptual linkages between them, and the first step will be to link up with the problematic of social imaginaries, to which Eisenstadt once alluded (2003, 45) in a positive way, without taking the matter any further. His reference to Castoriadis shows that he had in mind the specific notion of imaginary significations and its role in the rethinking of sociocultural theory. This is also a major source for the present project, with the added implication that when it comes to defining the core meanings of civilizational patterns, the scope of imaginary significations must be extended beyond the limits of Castoriadis’s account. Clarifying this crucial presupposition is a necessary but in a sense paradoxical task: we need conceptual markers for a field that by definition transcends conceptual borders. Some basic points may suffice to background the following analysis. At the most elementary level, we are dealing with the creative imagination as an active factor in the self-structuration and selftransformation of cultures and societies. Further discussion of that topic is beyond the scope of this book; here, it can merely be noted as a philosophical assumption underlying the historical and sociological arguments. In that context, imaginary significations appear as reservoirs of sense making, irreducible to definite meaning, or to sets of such meanings; they remain open to rival interpretations and marked by fundamental ambiguities. Their multiple articulations open the way to institutionalization in different spheres of social life. All these considerations will be important for our approach to the horizon of meaning most central to modernity as a civilization: the imaginary signification of autonomy. As foreshadowed earlier, this conception of autonomy entails both a reference and a modifying twist to Castoriadis’s view of that subject. For him, imaginary significations are the vehicles of social-historical creativity; autonomy is defined as a breakthrough that results in a more conscious and self-reflexive relationship of society to its own significations and institutions. More specifically, a modern turn to autonomy appears as the mainspring of democracy and a counterweight to the heteronomous dynamic of a capitalist economy geared to the unquestioned goal of accumulation. This meaning of autonomy will not be eliminated by stronger emphasis on the imaginary aspect, but a shift to broader horizons and less demarcated significations will enable a more complex understanding of the modern transformation, beginning with a nuanced approach to the troubled cohabitation of capitalism and democracy. Conversely, the revised concept of autonomy can be



Modernity: One, Many, and Divided 11

justified only through application to the social and historical fields to be analysed a little later. Briefly, the frame of reference highlights three fundamental points. Imaginary significations – or social imaginaries – are not only generative and sustaining contexts of institutions; they also constitute meaningful relations between human subjects and the world, thus transcending the social realm. But the anthropological ‘ways of worldmaking’ are mediated through social-historical forms, and, in the present context, distinctions on the latter level will be of particular importance. They depend on more basic institutional categories, more widely applicable than Castoriadis’s emphasis on changing self-divisions of the social-historical would suggest. Finally, the vision of autonomy that emerges as central to modern innovations reflects these perspectives on the social imaginary; it unfolds in multiple dimensions of the human condition, acquires specific meanings in different institutional spheres, and, upon closer examination of the whole spectrum, reveals ambiguities and paradoxes. Consequently, it cannot be understood as a normative idea or project. But it has a history of attempted translations into such projects, partial and mutually contested. The upgraded but ambiguous autonomy that defines the modern age is neither a wholly new capacity nor the conscious version of a previously latent one. Intimations and explorations of autonomy, in various fields and guises, are found in all civilizations. The modern innovation is, rather, an unprecedented and many-sided opening of new dimensions for autonomous activity, cooperative as well as conflictual, and spanning the spectrum of mastery, transformation, and creation. New horizons of autonomy include the projection of growing knowledge into power over nature, visions of alternative social orders and efforts to translate them into practice, as well as conceptions of self-interpreting and self-determining subjectivity. These aspects of the modern imaginary are cultural orientations expressed in collective as well as individual contexts. The line of argument to be developed here is therefore very different from Louis Dumont’s view of individualism – more precisely: the notion of the individual as a self-contained being prior to society – as a defining feature of modernity. By the same token, Dumont’s reference to the supposedly holistic character of premodern civilizations is not an adequate way of demarcating them from modern patterns. Seen from the collective angle, there is also a holistic side to the modern horizons of autonomy. The contrast between collectivistic and individualistic interpretations of the new field is a key diversifying factor in modern history. The emphasis on autonomy as both collective and individual leads to another difference from Dumont. For him, individualism implies both liberty and equality, but there is no pre-established harmony between these two visions, and practical definitions of their relationship vary across the spectrum of modern societies. From the aforementioned viewpoint, the connection

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Chapter 2

between autonomy and equality is double-edged. The relationship is, in other words, both closer and more problematic than Dumont would have it. On the one hand, an enlarged horizon of general human autonomy entails a tendency to think of human actors in equal terms. On the other hand, this association is vague enough to allow for a variety of interpretations, some more restrictive than others. Closer analysis can start with Pierre Rosanvallon’s distinction (to some extent inspired by Dumont) between three levels of equality. The most elementary one is the equality of fellow humans (semblables), defined with reference to a common nature or to shared capacities. A second level posits mutually independent individuals, capable of exchanges on equal footing; this perspective became important for the theorizing of markets in modern economic thought. Finally, the equality of citizens, entitled to participation in a political community, links the individual to collective life (on democracy as a regime of social equality, see Rosanvallon 2013). Rosanvallon’s line of argument invites some additional remarks. It should be noted that modern variations on the theme of equality include attempts to synthesize these three levels. Marx’s ‘free association of the producers’ is a case in point: it rests on the anthropological image of humans as producers but moves from there to propose a reconstructed social bond between free and equal individuals; however, it does so in a way that elides important aspects of Rosanvallon’s second and third level. The notion of association is meant to absorb the issues that classical political economy had linked to the market, and to bypass the political dimension. The result is thus a vision of modern society without markets and states, appealing enough to reappear as a radical option at critical junctures, but too markedly utopian to translate into an enduring strategy. At the other end of the political spectrum, the idea of human rights has been conceived as a bridge from shared dignity to ground rules of society. Its ideological success led some authors to identify it with a civilizational pattern (Jaroslav Krejčí, for example, referred interchangeably to a Euro-Atlantic civilization and a civilization of human rights). But the very triumph of the idea underlines two accompanying problems: the persistent, in all probability insuperable, disagreement on foundations of human rights, and the failure to mount an effective critique of structural inequality (Moyn 2018). Rosanvallon’s tripartite division can also be modified in light of the focus on collective autonomy. The images of collective actors that grew out of modern transformations (more particularly revolutions) were conceived as figures of autonomy, and therefore also – to a varying degree – of equality. The revolutionary mission of the working class, expected to take the class dynamics of history to its ultimate and most autonomous level, was to culminate in the abolition of class domination and establish a regime of universal social equality. Historical results of this highly influential project



Modernity: One, Many, and Divided 13

were double-edged. On the one hand, the totalizing vision of social equality led to neglect of the political dimension and obscured the question of citizenship; on the other hand, mobilization along the class lines indicated by the radical vision did in fact contribute to the progress of modern democracy. Another key case is the formation of national identity. As various analysts of nationalism have emphasized, an imaginary ‘horizontal membership’ – with strong implications of equality – is one of the key features that distinguish modern nationhood from its ethnic forerunners. The consequences were no less ambiguous than those of the class imaginary. Membership in a national community could serve to justify claims to political participation, and thus to equal citizenship, but it also gave rise to ideological constructs that turned national belonging against democratic politics and individual dignity.

Chapter 3

Life Orders and Articulations

For a closer look at the dimensions, interpretations, and practical implications of autonomy, we must move to analyse different spheres of sociocultural life, each of them also marked by specific imaginary fields and horizons. The classic model for such an approach is Max Weber’s discussion of ‘life orders’ (Weber, 1991), but a slight twist to his terminology seems appropriate: the ‘life orders’ are also world orders in the sense that they entail distinctive perspectives on and articulations of the world. But the following reflections will not deal directly with Weber’s open-ended list of orders. Rather, a tripartite division of economic, political, and cultural spheres will be adopted, without any suggestion that this constitutes an exhaustive map of the social world or a framework for a systematic theory of modernity. But ambitions of that kind are, in any case, alien to the present work, which follows the idea of social theory as a comparative interpretation of history. That said, the aforementioned division links up with a strong trend in sociological analysis. Tripartite schemes have clearly prevailed over the quadripartite one formulated by Talcott Parsons, and several theorists have proposed conceptual distinctions akin to the one applied here. Ernest Gellner’s model of ‘plough, sword and book’ (Gellner 1992) is a familiar example, and Anthony Giddens (1990) as well as Peter Wagner (1993) has argued for divisions along similar lines. Wagner’s conception of the spheres as ‘problématiques’ deserves special mention and fits the present line of argument. Each of the orders in question generates a distinctive and enduring set of interpretive conflicts. The argument to be developed on the basis of all these considerations will unfold on two levels: as a general interpretive framework and as a specific key to modern constellations and transformations. Clarification of the general assumptions must begin with basic concepts: those of wealth, power, and meaning. They relate to economic, political, and 14



Life Orders and Articulations 15

cultural spheres; none of them exhausts its respective domain, but each is central to a broader context and its dynamics. As will be seen, all three involve cross-domain connections. To put it another way, wealth, power, and meaning become resources for each other and can take specific forms within other spheres than their primary ones. But the conceptual exposition (not to be mistaken for an evolutionary scheme) has to start from elementary distinctions and move towards more complex forms. The model to be developed here has some affinities with Michael Mann’s typology of social power, but key differences should be noted. On the one hand, Mann’s reduction of all relevant factors to aspects and sources of power is rejected; the separate categories of wealth and meaning are needed to highlight the distinctive patterns of the economic and cultural spheres, and they prove particularly relevant when it comes to modern conditions, where both the accumulation of capital and the proliferation of rival ideologies affect events to an unprecedented degree. On the other hand, Mann’s separation of political and military power is not accepted. It seems more useful to distinguish between two opposite types of power constellations, in a way applicable to intra-societal as well as geopolitical patterns. On one side, centres of political power (most obviously but not exclusively states) impose rules on a field of actors more or less capable of resistance; on the other, a breakdown of such structures leads to a more or less general outbreak of violence, but even there, political aims and strategies are brought to bear. The definition of wealth should first locate it at the most basic level: the production of useful objects by human actors engaging with the natural environment. More complex connotations emerge when the concomitant development of human needs and abilities is taken into account; both needs and abilities have been proposed as authentic indicators of wealth. But there is a further step to take. The institution of money, seen as a ‘symbol of general wealth’ (Marx), is inadequately understood when reduced to a medium for exchanging utilities. As a general symbol, it also embodies perspectives of unlimited expansion, with regard to needs as well as possibilities, and thus transcends concrete projects on both sides. With a slight modification of Simmel’s formulation, we might characterize money as the generalized means that becomes an absolute goal. This symbolic surplus is the properly imaginary dimension of wealth and a link to culturally defined configurations of meaning, varying across epochs and formations. The ultimate cultural connection is the sacral origin of money, noted by Durkheim and others. In later phases, the link to sovereign political power is more visible, but the imagined horizon beyond given contents preserves an affinity with sacral significations and can serve to re-establish a more emphatic nexus. Such implications will be explored in relation to modern capitalism.

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The clarification of the concept of wealth has thus brought both power and meaning into play. A closer approach to the problematic of power on its own ground can follow similar lines and build up a model that moves from elementary to complex aspects while drawing on varying definitions (power has often been singled out as a prime example of essentially contested concepts). The most basic trait singled out by theorists of power is the ability to ‘make a difference’, intervene in the state of things or the course of events. Exercising power in that sense always involves both cooperation and division of labour, with more or less unequal authority to decide, and the search for a definition has most frequently focused on interaction. The classic example is Max Weber’s reference to power as the ability of an actor to decide the action of another, if need be against resistance. Later variations on this theme, such as Giddens’s ‘dialectic of control’, stressed the irreducibility of power even on the weaker side. But this more consistently interactionist view was only a step towards a broader relational conception, based on the embedding of all interactions in more complex constellations of actors, interconnections, and unfolding processes. Norbert Elias’s concept of figurations is the most seminal attempt to theorize this perspective. At that level, the question of cultural frameworks arises. The exercise of power in ramified and open-ended contexts calls for meaningful frames of reference, and this aspect is not reducible to modes of legitimation. In more fundamental terms, the very orientations of action require a shared source of meaning. Cultural definitions of power are therefore more basic than patterns of legitimation, and the former set the terms for the latter. Both wealth and power are, as we have seen, connected to meaning and, most significantly, at their most complex levels. It remains to clarify the problematic of meaning in a way commensurable to the two other basic concepts. Meaning is notoriously difficult to define, most obviously because it is presupposed by any statement. Attempts to circumscribe it, notably by phenomenological thinkers, seem to end with a twofold focus: the intended reference to a specific content and the implicit openness to a horizon of indications beyond it. This duality is what enables the imaginary constitution of meaning. To put it another way, imaginary significations enter into the making of perceptions and frame all articulations beyond that level. The role of the imagination, although first briefly glimpsed by the philosophy of consciousness, was more thoroughly explored in the context of a social ontology that can also be read as an interpretation of culture (Castoriadis 1987). The imaginary significations that matter most in the broader sense become effective in a social field structured by institutions. A general concept of ideology, not to be conflated with notions of ‘false consciousness’, is best defined in terms of such significations embodied in the institutional patterns of a society and therefore in its power structures as well as in its ways of defining, appropriating, and distributing wealth. The ideological aspect can be more or



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less explicit. But the socially instituted and instituting constellations of meaning – the social imaginaries, to use a term now increasingly accepted – also involve articulations of world perspectives, overarching horizons that enable human societies to define their identity, situate themselves in space and time, and demarcate the human domain within a broader vision of reality. If we can speak of respective primary affinities between wealth, power, and meaning on the one hand, economic, political, and cultural spheres on the other, a further twist must be added. Specific expressions of all three basic categories emerge within each sphere, but this is a question of historical trends and contexts, rather than a systemic or evolutionary logic. As will be seen, this pattern is particularly important in the modern context, but some preliminary considerations may be useful. With regard to meaning, the above analysis suggests a distinction between the articulations that constitute the cultural sphere proper (the domain of religious, philosophical, and aesthetic modes of interpretation), and the more implicit cultural orientations that co-constitute forms of wealth and power. In stateless societies, power is not reducible to the visible inequalities of age and gender. A fundamental expression of power is the subordination to an immutable order grounded in a mythical past, but the political character of this regime is overshadowed (not eliminated) by its religious self-definition; at the same time, the political power attributed to religion sets limits to its articulations of meaning (Gauchet 1999). The emergence and development of the state lead to a differentiation of political and religious power, but the institutional patterns of their coexistence vary from case to case and epoch to epoch. Some civilizations established centres with ultimate authority over both kinds of power, while others maintained a more radical separation (China and India are opposite and exemplary cases). In societies dominated by one or another of these configurations, the autonomization of economic power is a more marginal phenomenon, mainly linked to particular flourishing of commerce. Another major change came with the transition to modernity. As Marx and Dumont underlined, it was the commodification of landed property that enabled the social and cultural construction of wealth as a comprehensive category and, by the same token, the unprecedented upgrading of economic power as a separate factor. The modern transformation also involves a significant turn in the history of ideological power, linked to the opening of alternative perspectives and the rivalry of different projects. PERSPECTIVES ON CAPITALISM Max Weber referred to capitalism as the most fateful power in modern life. That was written in the aftermath of World War I  but reflects a situation

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where the upheavals due to capitalist development were still more visible to European observers than the geopolitical mutations brought about by European expansion and in turn conducive to new levels of rivalry between European powers. Weber lived to see the first major explosion of these trends from 1914 to 1918 but not long enough to move beyond tentative conclusions from that experience. With a century’s wisdom of hindsight, it is tempting to argue that geopolitical dynamics have proved more fateful than anything else, not least because the widely announced end of history (equated with the final triumph of capitalism) turned out to mean a return of geopolitics. The view to be defended here is that both capitalism and geopolitics can be ana­ lysed from a civilizational perspective; as will be seen, that calls for bringing in some further factors. But we must begin with the conceptual issues that can still best be clarified in light of Weber’s arguments, though not without drawing on other authors (including, in particular, both Marx and Sombart). Within the limits of this chapter, the discussion will only deal with aspects and issues that serve to link the problematic of capitalism to the notion of multiple modernities. Weber’s definition of modern capitalism in the introduction (Vorbemerkung) to his collected essays on world religions is the obvious starting point (Weber, 1988). To distinguish this formation from earlier versions of capitalism, he emphasizes what he calls the ‘rational organization of free labour’. Both components of the description deserve closer comment. The reference to rational organization should no doubt be understood in the processual terms indicated elsewhere in the same text by the concept of rationalization. Efforts to rationalize the labour process involve the sustained application of knowledge, and the permanent upgrading of productive capacity by these means is the key feature of industrialization as a long-term process. If the ongoing dynamic is interpreted along these lines, the periodization of successive industrial revolutions becomes less important. Industrialization, thus understood, is an integral part of capitalist development. It is a key factor in the transformations that affect capitalist institutions and practices, as well as a major outlet for the imaginary projections that accompany innovations. But the experience of industrialization, amplified by a broader vision of history, also became the cornerstone of the most significant anti-capitalist project: the Marxist claim that the development and demands of the productive forces called for a radical change of social organization. Later offshoots and adaptations of this idea, more directly attuned to political interests, have been sidelined by the mutations of capitalism. The incoherences and excesses of the proposed alternatives have even lent added legitimacy to the established but inherently crisis-prone order. Marx’s most speculative variation on the theme of technological progress and its social implications is nevertheless proving relevant, even if in a sense different from what he envisaged. In the



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unfinished Grundrisse (Marx 1993), arguably his most important work, he anticipated a thoroughgoing scientization of production, leading to a situation where the appropriation of surplus labour no longer appears as a rational pursuit of wealth. Whether a social revolution – or what kind of it – would then still be needed seems an open question. In any case, the culminating point of industrialization is equated with the moment of transition to a post-capitalist order. The perspective of a leap towards massively increased involvement of science in production is currently much debated, especially with regard to artificial intelligence, but the resulting redundancy of labour is seen as a critical challenge, rather than as a promise of change. This is in keeping with a general inclination to re-read Marx as an analyst of capitalism’s intrinsic problems, with less interest in his vision of an alternative. Another aspect of Weber’s definition is the reference to free labour, obviously synonymous with wage labour. In that respect, Weber’s understanding of capitalism converges with Marx; the latter certainly did not overlook the liberating effect of wage labour replacing more coercive regimes. But the inclusion of this point in the model of capitalism raises problems that Marx suppressed for conceptual reasons and Weber did not perceive. The best guide to theorizing them is Karl Polanyi’s concept of ‘fictitious commodities’, that is, economic factors on which the commodity form is imposed in spite of structural incompatibilities, specific to each case. Polanyi applied this model to labour, land, and money. Marx went too far in treating labour power as a commodity among others, thus obscuring – on the conceptual level – the fundamental tension between the commodity form and the active subjectivity of labour. This shortcut was needed to back up his generalized labour theory of value. For the same reason, he tried to analyse money as the outcome of generalized commodity production, instead of acknowledging it as an institutional presupposition. Polanyi’s approach helps to grasp the other side of the process: the problems arising from the involvement and the changing roles of money in the capitalist dynamic that it makes possible. And if state intervention and regulation are, as Weber knew, an essential precondition for the establishment and maintenance of market structures, the constitutive overstretch of the latter – noted by Polanyi – adds a further source of tensions to those inherent in the symbiotic rivalry of state and market. The state confronts the problems generated and periodically exacerbated by the presence of fictitious commodities. The idea of overextended commodification has some implications for further reading of Weber. To grasp the logic and the possible extensions of this approach, it is important to note that Weber’s general concept of capitalism applies to premodern trends and formations (as best shown by Swedberg 2000). In the introduction quoted earlier, Weber begins by distinguishing the capitalist orientation from a more archaic and historically widespread trait:

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the desire for wealth, auri sacra fames, which he describes as a phenomenon current in all cultures and among all human groups. This broad reach suggests that Weber’s point is not so much about individuals as about an anthropological disposition, by implication open to different cultural articulations. Moreover, the Latin formulation refers to gold, obviously in its capacity as a symbolic embodiment of wealth, and the institution of money has a long history of functioning on that basis. As Weber sees it, the properly capitalist orientation of economic action begins with the sustained pursuit of profit, be it by commercial, military, or political means; but the economic rationality of this turn can also be understood as a rationalization of the underlying quest for wealth. The auri sacra fames thus appears as an anthropological infrastructure of capitalism. The significance of this genealogy becomes clearer if we add a point that was neither spelled out by Weber nor developed by later interpreters of his work. Modern capitalism represents a transformative move beyond the limits binding on its historical precursors (the key innovations are, as we have seen, the breakthrough to permanent technological progress and the generalization of wage labour). But the other side of the long-term dynamic is the radicalization of an older legacy. The expansion of market patterns and processes across traditional dividing lines is not only a basic change to the frameworks of economic life, and its problematic aspects are not reducible to the fictional expansion noted by Polanyi. The shift gives rise to a self-understanding of capitalism as market economy pure and simple, and to more emphatic ideological constructs, typically bypassing the question of the market as a power constellation and relying on imagery derived from earlier phases to idealize the structures of advanced capitalism. At its most extreme, this trend turns into a set of preconceptions, best described as market fundamentalism, characterized by a priori advocacy of principles and solutions in that spirit. Such attitudes become a source of ideological power, intervening in both the economic and the political spheres; at that point, the discussion draws closer to issues of elective affinities, replacements, or counterpoints to religion in modern culture, to be considered from other angles below. There is yet another side to the radicalizing impact of modern capitalism on its elementary components. Weber saw more clearly than Marx that the effort to amass wealth beyond a given universe of needs was a recurrent phenomenon in premodern societies, but he was less interested than Marx in accumulation without limit as a defining characteristic of economies dominated by capitalism. It seems plausible to interpret this inbuilt goal of production as a transmuted and dynamized form of the drive for wealth. The infinite horizon of accumulation, imposed across the fields of economic life, implies the promise of absolute wealth (Deutschmann 2001). Two aspects of



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this imaginary signification should be distinguished. It presupposes a monetary expression; the symbol of general wealth thus becomes an embodiment of absolute wealth. But this symbolic representation is also an indication of the widening range of possibilities open to human desires and activities. These ambiguous implications lend themselves to an interplay of affirmation and critique. In Marx’s early writings, money is deciphered as an alienated expression of human powers; his later analysis of capitalism credits this new economic regime with a revolutionary advance of human development but envisages a further stage that will abolish the alienated form of wealth. This vision of authentic wealth – and of the affluent society for which it becomes a founding value – was central to Marx’s social and political thought, but less so to later constructions of Marxism, although some extreme cases can be noted (e.g., Trotsky’s (2005) speculations about a future humanity whose average abilities will equal the greatest creative artists of the past, with further summits of perfection visible beyond that level). But apart from the historical circumstances that shaped the fate of ideas, the original Marxian project was undermined by internal weaknesses. It took a harmonious or at least harmonizable relationship between the unfolding needs for granted; there was no awareness of the potential discord between the different contexts of human development, later theorized by Max Weber as life orders. Moreover, Marx failed to grasp the capacity of the capitalist economy to harness the growth of needs and abilities to the expanding logic of accumulation. He did (in posthumously published texts) note the ‘subsumption’ of cognitive progress under the imperatives of capital, but this insight was not properly integrated into his overall frame of reference. The notion of a promise built into capitalist accumulation and development suggests closer approaches to an issue that has proved difficult to clarify: the question of a spirit of capitalism, understood as a meaningful orientation, inherent in or constitutive of the economic sphere. Debates on this subject have been hampered by one-sided views inherited from a classic case study. Max Weber’s work on the Protestant ethic tended to identify the spirit of capitalism with a specific religious attitude clearly demarcated in space and time, and to limit its role to early support for the breakthrough of an economic regime that later developed a self-contained dynamic. The unending controversy about the ‘Weber thesis’ seems to have gravitated towards a change of terms: causal links between capitalism and the radical version of Protestantism are hard to prove and, in any case, less important than the Protestant impact on the political and cultural context in which capitalism develops. That conclusion highlights the multidimensional texture of modernity, which is analysed later in this book. But the search for a spirit of capitalism, closer to economic action and imagination, has moved beyond the Weberian theme in other ways.

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Revived interest in the classics has drawn attention to alternative conceptions. As has been shown (Swedberg 2007), Tocqueville’s account of American democracy includes reflections on the spirit of American capitalism, described in terms not unrelated to the role of religion in American society but primarily rooted in the political and cultural ethos of an egalitarian settler society. More importantly, note has been taken of Sombart’s distinction between two spirits of capitalism, the romantic one expressed in mixtures of innovation and adventurous enterprise, and the rational one expressed in organization and calculation (Sombart, 1991). This approach was temporarily overshadowed by the Weberian one. Sombart’s interpretation is relevant not only in the sense that he did identify different cultural sources of capitalist development, but also on the more general grounds that he pluralized the very notion of a spirit of capitalism. If we admit the possibility of multiple versions, it is not difficult to expand the list. The motivating and orienting role of nationalism as a driving force of capitalist development, especially in East Asia, has not gone unnoticed. Another example is the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, analysed by Boltanski and Chiapello (2018) as a product of the late twentieth century and a result of adaptation to the culture of protest movements. This particular case has to do with an aesthetic critique of capitalism, its emphasis on autonomy and creativity, and its integration into capitalist strategies of innovation. But the point lends itself to generalization. The spirit and the critique of capitalism intertwine in complex ways, and this connection applies to major historical currents. Visions of a socialist alternative drew on internal transformations of capitalism, notably the moves towards more organized production (inseparable from an emphasis on rationalizing control) and projected visible trends beyond the established order, most emphatically through notions of comprehensive planning. This component of the socialist tradition was attracted to state-centred extensions of the organizing capacities already evident in capitalist practices. But that is not the whole story. The record of socialist ideas and movements was marked by tensions between statist projects and expectations of broadly based collective action, as well as divergences on the question of continuity or discontinuity with capitalism. The two issues were interconnected, but not mutually reducible. Marx’s most adventurous speculations, mentioned earlier, suggest a future industrial society dispensing with states and markets, and the ‘free association of the producers’ that will replace them implies a permanently institutionalized level of collective action. But these long-term goals presuppose a final and lasting achievement of capitalism: the reduction of labour to supervision of machinery. The text in question remained unknown to the main thinkers and strategists of socialist movements, and their dominant visions developed along very different lines.



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Historians of socialism have stressed the reinforcement of its statist trends by World War I and the accompanying organizational measures, but this was not a straightforward shift. The global conflict also reactivated hopes of a radical break with a capitalist regime seen as the source of war. For the most momentous version of this newfound activist perspective, the Leninist rupture, a war-induced collapse enabled a rapid escalation of revolutionary action, to the point of creating a new order on the ruins of the old one. According to the Leninist scenario, the transition was to be guided by a vanguard imagined in ways suggestive of a superstate, but without explicit acknowledgement of that affinity, and linked to starkly exaggerated notions of controlled mass mobilization. When the unintended consequences of a deluded takeover had to be rationalized, Lenin’s responses – improvised but more attuned to reality than later Marxist-Leninist discourse – re-emphasized the need to follow capitalist models, from the German war economy to Taylorist methods of management. The classical Marxist view, long accepted even by those who saw the need to revise other aspects of the Marxian legacy, was that a growing tension – contradiction, in orthodox terms – between the structural logic of capitalism and the developmental dynamics of industrialization would translate into an increasingly central social conflict and thus pave the way for radical social change; whether that change would take a revolutionary or reformist form was a more open question. This perspective has proved untenable. Capitalism, in the sense of the integral social-historical phenomenon described before, has not generated forces that would – as a result of learning and maturing processes – assume the task of transformation into a post-capitalist society. But the line of argument taken here does not support the idea of a systemic logic enabling capitalism to absorb, outflank, or disable its opponents. Rather, the sources of capitalist resilience should be sought in broader historical constellations. Adaptive, innovative, and transformative capacities of the capitalist economy interact with other components of modernity, beginning with the political context. The conception of capitalism summarized earlier, opposed to economic reductionism but emphasizing the modern autonomization of the economic sphere, has implications for the mapping of its history and developmental range. It is incompatible with a simple contrast of embedding and disembedding; to the extent that Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the ‘great transformation’ has favoured such views, it is misleading (which is not to deny that Polanyi’s work contains valuable insights). In the modern context, the economic sphere is always shaped and ongoingly transformed in connection with a broader context, without ever losing its distinctive and autonomous dynamic; in that sense, it is always already embedded but to a varying extent disembedded. The question of social controls over the market is only one aspect. This point applies to early phases no less than later ones. The expansion of commercial

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networks from the sixteenth century onwards, important for later developments, was closely linked to conquest and inter-imperial competition. Economic change in the European centres, involving the advances in organization, discipline, and specialization that some historians call the ‘industrious revolution’, also belongs to the history of modern capitalism in the Weberian sense (it is part and parcel of the ‘rationalization of free labour’), and it unfolds in a political and cultural context. This early modern phase gave way to the Industrial Revolution. The latter certainly merits the label of a ‘great transformation’, but as such, it is notoriously resistant to monocausal explanations. Scholarly controversies are as lively as ever and will no doubt continue (for the present state of the debate, see especially). But it can now be taken for granted that the Industrial Revolution had a global as well as domestic and a British as well as a European background; disputes concern the interconnections and the relative weight of these aspects. The importance of colonial possessions and resources, both American and Indian, is a particularly thorny issue. It is equally undisputed that the Industrial Revolution was a major factor in the autonomization and dynamization of the economic sphere. But its spread was not the straightforward march of progress that many observers mistook it for. Practical and ideological responses, patterns of industrialization as well as projects of alternative development, varied across the global arena and depended on local contexts. The periodization of later capitalist development is often framed in terms of technological or organizational changes: as a sequence of industrial revolutions, or as a succession of shifts from deregulated to organized capitalism and back. There is, obviously, a prima facie case for such divisions; however, they call for complementary accounts with stronger emphasis on historical contexts. The culminating phase of modern imperialism, roughly speaking the quarter of a century before World War I, is a prime example. Although the interpretation of imperialism as structurally necessitated by a certain stage of the capitalist economy is no longer a matter for serious debate, there are good reasons to explore connections between the two levels. The progress of capitalist development placed new resources at the disposal of imperialist powers, and the imperialist partition of the planet opened up new possibilities for capitalist expansion. More direct causal connections are identifiable, but not uniform. In a recent landmark work, A. G. Hopkins (2018) compares the impact of economic interests and imperatives on the imperialist strategies of Western powers, and notes significant differences. Another case in point is the much discussed neoliberal turn, described by some observers as a failure and by others as ever resurgent, but most frequently identified with the triumph of a deregulated capitalist economy over alternatives, countervailing forces and ideological opponents. Marcel Gauchet (2017, 487–743) argues convincingly that this perceived empowering of the



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economy and its prophets can be understood only as a part of broader sociocultural change. Other aspects of the epochal shifts are a new phase – and a novel type – of technological progress, an increasing juridification of social relations in all spheres, and a renewed emphasis on human rights. Gauchet refers to a mercantile-juridical-technicist nexus, established as the dominant model of rationality and autonomy. Finally, the question of differences between basic structures and overall patterns of capitalism is particularly relevant to the problematic of multiple modernities. It can be summed up in the label ‘varieties of capitalism’, which has been used by scholars in the field, but with changing foci somewhat dependent on historical conjunctures and never with simultaneous reference to the five thematic complexes to be noted here. The first aspect to consider is internal to the core of modern capitalist economies. Commercial, industrial, and financial components are omnipresent, but the emphasis can vary to such an extent that we may distinguish different types of capitalism. Commercial capitalism is, as both Marx and Weber emphasized, prominent among premodern forms, but its early modern expansion, linked to continuously progressing division of labour, gave rise to what some scholars call a Smithian economy, with reference to Adam Smith’s exceptionally influential theorizing of the subject. That work was a major contributor to the formation of a market imaginary, disproportionately prominent in both scholarly and popular understandings of capitalism. It helped to de-problematize the ‘fictitious commodities’ mentioned earlier, obscuring their difference from other things subsumed under the logic of the market. In particular, it has been conducive to reductionist notions of money, conceiving it as primarily a medium of exchange. It can even be argued that the market imaginary left its mark on Marx’s analysis of capitalism despite the intention of re-centring enquiry and critique on the dimension of production. The attempt to extract a foundational theory of value from the ground rules of generalized commodity production, before moving on to the more complex structures of the capitalist mode of production, led to problems that neither Marx nor his later disciples could solve. As for influence on broader socio-economic patterns, it can be detected on two levels: commercial activities and networks are more important in some capitalist economies than others, but the impact of the market imaginary on policies and general attitudes to economic life also varies from case to case. As defined here, the industrial element of capitalism is to be understood in a broad sense: it concerns production and the ongoing efforts to rationalize it, including technological innovation. Michael Mann’s objection to dogmatic assumptions about the primacy of production is valid (Mann 1986, 24), but it is certainly the case that efforts to give it a proper place in economic thought have been an uphill battle. Arguments for an economics of the firm,

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as distinct from the economics of the market, are an established part of the disciplinary discourse, but hardly with the weight they deserve. Another major attempt to bring this dimension into focus was Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship and innovation, still not fully integrated into a complex theory of capitalism. These correctives, although primarily aimed at the elementary structures of capitalism, have some bearing on the question of its varieties; some patterns and cultures of capitalism are more productivist or entrepreneurial than others. Financial capital is a force with an uneven historical record, important earlier phases, notoriously ascendant in the two decades between the apparent triumph of 1989 and the reckoning of 2008, and still central to the workings of a globalized capitalist economy. ‘Financial globalization is an inherent characteristic of capitalism already in its beginnings, and so are the imbalances generated by the financial cycles’ (Aglietta 2019, 10; this work dates the beginnings of European capitalism to the thirteenth century, and the concept of globalization refers to financial networks between European commercial centres and across the borders of warring states). But the specific problematic of this field was obscured by the dominant tendency to treat financial markets as no more than another frontier of the ‘market economy’; this illusion prevailed despite forceful objections from some mainstream economists (such as Bhagwati 1998). The financialization of capitalism thus came to be seen as the ultimate proof of a structural autonomy and self-regulatory capacity expressed in the interplay of market forces. The financial crisis demolished such beliefs and redrew attention to interconnections with other domains of social life, most visibly with the political one. In more systematic terms, a social theory of capitalism, and especially one that adopts the civilizational perspective outlined here, will insist on several reasons to treat financial capital as precisely the opposite of its ideological image: as a particularly revealing link between the economic sphere and broader sociocultural contexts. At the most elementary level, this has to do with the political background to the institution of money. To quote the opening statement of Robert Skidelsky’s comprehensive critique of mainstream economics: ‘Macroeconomics is about money and government, and their relationship’ (Skidelsky 2018, 1; the kind of macroeconomics that the author has in mind was, as he argues, founded by Keynes, and its concern with money and government is related to their role in coping with uncertainty in social life). A consistent interpretation of money as an institution abandons the attempt to derive it from a pre-monetary theory of value; Marx shared that error with the classical economists whom he proposed to criticize and the neoclassical ones who wanted to consign him to oblivion. In a more historical perspective, the role of financial instruments and institutions in processes of state formation is a major theme for comparative



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studies of long-term trajectories and their divergences; a particular case in that field is the place of financial capital in the history of Euro-American imperialism, much more variable than simplistic but influential theories have suggested. Finally, the recent experience of state interventions in response to the financial crisis has shown how such situations bring to light the varying capacities and predispositions of states, their interrelations with social forces, and the broader geopolitical context in which they operate (Tooze 2018). Other approaches to the varieties of capitalism shift the focus to patterns situated in space and time. An emphatically empirical and microanalytical approach, influential around the turn of the century, focused on variations of organizational structures; the main themes were internal arrangements and external relations of capitalist enterprises (e.g., Hall and Soskice 2001). The results threw light on details and ramifications of capitalist development, but since broader frameworks are presupposed by the microunits, rather than built up from them, this line of analysis is less suited to clarify the institutional context. That is the preferred theme of two schools of thought, both of French origin. The economics of conventions (Eymard-Duvernay 2006) favours an interactionist paradigm; conventions emerge from the interplay of social actors in the context of rules always already given but open to dispute and revision, limited rationality, and uncertain future. The theory of regulation, more directly focused on capitalist development and accumulation without limits as its modus operandi, takes a more structuralist line on the dynamics and inbuilt conflicts of institutions (Boyer and Saillard 2002). In both cases, the macrosocial context is brought into the picture. The fourth possible thematic focus, emerging rather than established, has to do with ‘cultures of capitalism’. A popular discussion of this subject (Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 1993) compared the impact of value systems in different national cultures on economic action; a more systematic perspective might link up with the pluralist conception of the spirit of capitalism, outlined earlier. Different cultures of capitalism would then be distinguished by their emphasis on particular versions of that spirit, or ways of combining them. That line of analysis necessarily leads to connections beyond the economic sphere, political as well as cultural. The role of nationalism is an obvious topic to explore; Liah Greenfeld’s work on this subject (2003) overstates the case for nationalist motives behind economic growth, and more balanced comparative studies would clarify its varying interrelations with other sources. A first glance at the field suggests that Japan would stand out as a particularly striking case of nationalism as a driving force of capitalist development. At the other end of the spectrum, and more recently, the question of globalist beliefs and their influence on economic action merits a closer look (for one thing, the notion of a borderless world bestows a certain legitimacy on tax havens). Another contrast might be drawn between economic cultures

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sustained by a strong belief in progress and those where the awareness of uncertainty has gained ground; the latter theme has been theorized in diverse ways by twentieth-century economic thinkers, and it is also relevant for the historical sociology of economic cultures. A fifth approach posited a dichotomy of rival capitalisms, conceived as ideal types and therefore allowing for intermediate versions, but real enough to translate the contrast into a historical conflict. Michel Albert (1992) distinguished an Anglo-Saxon market-dominated capitalism from a ‘Rhenan’ one, exemplified by Germany and France, where state involvement, corporatist elements, and collectivist orientations were much stronger. Despite the geographical label, Japan was obviously to be included in the latter category. Later in the decade, the author retracted his views and claimed that the AngloSaxon version had won. That conclusion was much less credible after 2008, but the sequel to the financial crisis also cast doubt on European claims to represent a more viable alternative. During the following decade, the vision of capitalist polarization resurfaced in a different guise. Present variations on this theme stress the contrast between a capitalism of private enterprise, most visibly represented by the United States, and a resurgent state capitalism supposedly developing in China and attractive to various other non-European countries. But the description of Sino-American rivalry as a ‘clash of capitalisms’ (Milanovic 2020) is open to two objections. As will be argued in a later chapter, the concept of state capitalism is an oversimplification of the transformative process underway in China. Secondly, the geopolitical aspect of the emerging conflict should not be underestimated. To put it somewhat tautologically, all historical experience confirms that great powers pursue power as well as wealth, and there is no a priori rule about the relationship between the two goals. The sixth and last thematic complex is best defined in terms of imaginary alternatives to capitalism. Here the reference to the imaginary is crucial, but for a double-edged reason. The formations in question – based on the Soviet model, with more or less significant variations – imagined themselves as alternatives to capitalism; they failed to sustain that claim in practice. However, a closer look at the pretensions shows that they presupposed the cultural horizon and the historical example of capitalism. Accumulation of wealth, more centrally coordinated and more systematically linked to the accumulation of power than in the orthodox capitalist pattern, was the operative goal. Ideological grounds underpinned the promise that a focus on industrial development will, in the long run, enhance the satisfaction of human needs, but this prospect is meant to outbid the expansion of needs and consumption that had become an integral part of capitalist economic life. As will be shown in a later chapter, the ambiguous reference to capitalism – as an adversary to be defeated, a rival to be outdone on its own ground, and a model more



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fundamentally followed than could be openly admitted – was a central and highly visible part of a broader counter-project to Euro-Atlantic modernity. But the underlying connection to the capitalist universe of meaning is close enough for this failed alternative to be also considered as a borderline case among the varieties discussed here. It was not a straightforward continuation of the alternately statist and autogestionary critiques from within an existing capitalist order; as will be shown in a later chapter, the implementation of an anti-capitalist project in circumstances utterly different from those envisaged by the ideological ancestors was bound to change both goals and means. Troubled coexistence with stronger capitalist powers called for policies never anticipated in visions of a revolution that was supposed to overcome capitalism at its most advanced. In this situation, the architects of a new order had to pursue a two-pronged course, selectively adapting to capitalist models as well as to long-term rivalry with them. DOMAINS OF THE POLITICAL In the political sphere, there is no unifying force or formative centre comparable to capitalism in economic life. Max Weber tended to portray bureaucracy as both a complement and a counterpole to capitalism (as he saw it, the growth of bureaucracy was fuelled both by factors internal to capitalist organization and by the strengthening of state power). This emphasis reflected observable trends of the times. Later authors, also responding to historical experience, became more interested in the variously interpreted relationship between capitalism and democracy. Bureaucracy and democracy are aspects of modern statehood, and the plurality of states implies geopolitics, including empire building and warfare. It is therefore an obvious choice to begin with the problematic of the modern state. But given the general emphasis on the imaginary of autonomy, a focus on the state may seem inappropriate. A very influential ideological current, drawing one-sidedly on Weber’s analyses, has portrayed the modern bureaucratic state as a threat to individual freedom. Liberal interpreters of the geopolitical and civilizational disasters unfolding in the twentieth century (beginning with Mises 1919) have attributed them to the hypertrophic growth of states addicted to warfare, capable of reorganizing societies for that purpose and in that spirit, and of generating ideological support for their strategies. If modern statehood is nevertheless to be analysed as an arena of autonomy (in the fundamentally ambiguous sense outlined earlier), the argument can start with a paradoxical but instructive point. It was the landmark contribution of Norbert Elias to bring state formation as a long-term process into historical and sociological focus; he saw this macrosocial trend – especially its

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European version – as a paradigm case of dynamics transcending individual actions and particular causes. The process imposes its own logic, not least when it comes to what Norbert Elias called the modern functional democratization of the state originally built up around monarchic structures. But this view allows for significant initiatives by multiple actors, and for extensions as well as innovative redefinitions of their scope. State building, with changing forms and degrees of intentionality, is an integral part of state formation. This latter aspect suggests a first approach to the role and meaning of autonomy in the political sphere. In the European context analysed by Elias, the initial phase of the modern epoch, to be discussed in more historical terms in the following chapter, was characterized by massive geopolitical enlargement, on the Eurasian as well as the Atlantic side, and by the formation of trade networks widely seen by historians as a harbinger of modern capitalism. These changes gave rise to new constraints and interdependences, but also to new spaces and resources of action. Modes of political thought and discourse changed in response to the evolving constellations, but also in ways related to broader cultural shifts and background traditions. As Barbara StollbergRilinger (1986) has shown, the prominent role of metaphors is a key aspect of this transformation. In the first phase, inherited metaphors are stretched beyond their previous limits and charged with innovative meanings. Machiavelli, commonly portrayed as a seminal spokesman of modern approaches to affairs of state, drew on the long-established comparison of politics with medicine and the political community with a body, but gave them a twist that made it possible to redefine the tasks and principles of a ruler. A more pathchanging metaphor gained ground from the seventeenth century onwards: the image of the state as a machine emphasized its rational constructability, functioning, and ordering capacities. This became a dominant vision during the absolutist epoch, not to be equated with effective historical trends but not without importance for their long-term impact. This prominence of metaphors testifies to the involvement of the imaginary, and to its formative imprint on rationalizing projects and processes. In this context, autonomy appears in a limited guise: as the autonomy of the ruler, but with implications far beyond his perceptions and interests. This brief sketch of initial conditions suggests a perspective that will lend itself to further distinctions: a tripartite framework of power structures, strategies for the pursuit of power and ways of interpreting power through imaginary significations. Each of these components calls for internal differentiations. But before proceeding along those lines, we need another look at the background. It is, generally and roughly speaking, possible to analyse each of the institutional spheres discussed here with a focus either on its constitutive patterns or on ongoing activities and processes within its domain. Obviously, a balanced approach must integrate the two viewpoints; the



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clarification of defining patterns is incomplete without an interpretive grasp of the transformative actions through which they are in part reproduced and in part changed. Nowhere has the distinction and the question of the relationship between the two sides been as intensively discussed as in the political sphere. The difference between politics as a type of action and the political as a domain of social being has, in recent decades, been most actively debated by French thinkers (Castoriadis, Lefort, and Gauchet are important authors of reference), but the crucial source is the definition of the political (as distinct from politics) introduced into German thought by Carl Schmitt, and the dichotomous terms are now commonly accepted in anglophone scholarship. There is no comparable sharing of terminology or record of discussion in the two other cases. As for the economic sphere, this has something to do with the ideologically overloaded division of labour between sociology and economics. Sociologists in general, and historical sociologists in particular, have tried to conceptualize the economic dimension of social life in ways that would do justice to its autonomous dynamics, its intertwining with other fields and its distinctive types and horizons of human action, as well as to the historical transformations of all these aspects. Mainstream economics was for a long time predominantly concerned with refining methods for the analysis of actions and consequences within a framework taken for granted, and although this approach had a certain influence on sociological thought, it became difficult to find a common language for the two disciplines. More recently, there have been major efforts to reconceptualize the foundations of economics, accompanied by wider acceptance of a multi-paradigmatic conception of the discipline, comparable to a well-established vision of sociology. The implications of this shift for a dialogue between sociology and economics remain to be seen and will not be discussed here. For reasons of another kind, the aforementioned dual perspective is less straightforwardly applicable to the cultural sphere (as will be seen, that has to do with its more encompassing character and with the particular features of that aspect in the modern constellation). At this point, it is the distinction between politics and the political that concerns us, and given the seminal role of Schmitt’s interpretation, we must begin with a critical comment on it. Schmitt singled out the contrast between friend and enemy, not as an exhaustive defining feature or an essence of the political but as its most intensive, revealing, and existentially challenging expression and, therefore, as a key to the understanding of the whole sphere. The decisive objection to this thesis is that it presupposes a factor that it set out to relativize. The most extreme version of the conflictual relationship stressed by Schmitt is the collision between power centres with strong collective identities (whether the latter is limited to a dominant elite or shared by a broader community is a historical question). The crucial case is, in other words, a war between states grounded

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in and at the centre of a political community. Schmitt had, however, proposed to define the political as a broader and more long-term category than the state. Drawing, very selectively, on some of Max Weber’s formulations, he argued that the historical trajectory of the state was a relatively short one, essentially limited to the cultural context of Occidental rationalism and with an end in sight. It has been shown (Breuer 2014) that Weber’s own analyses trace the development of the state back to archaic beginnings; as for the notion of an approaching end, the Schmittian vision is no more plausible than others of the same kind. Predictions of an imminent obsolescence or a ‘withering away’ of the state have proliferated across the political spectrum and are best understood as recurrent but misguided responses to the highly chequered history of the modern state. Neither classes nor nations have absorbed the state, neither markets nor movements hold out a serious promise of replacing it, and Schmitt’s expectations of new political orders based on an enlarged space (Grossraum) were not fulfilled. Consequently, there are good reasons to turn Schmitt’s argument around: to accept the need for a broader definition of the political, but foreground the state, its ramifications, and its rivalry with countervailing but closely related forces. The state-centred view also links up with a point stressed by French analysts of the political: this institutional sphere is the key integrative instance, the formative force that confers a degree of unity on a polycentric and multidimensional field. As I will try to show, this approach leads to closer examination of the three aspects mentioned earlier – structures, strategies, and visions – in four different contexts. If modernity is defined in the chronological terms suggested at the outset, and if the modern state is seen from a processual angle, the obvious starting point is the acceleration and amplification of state-forming processes in Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, pioneeringly analysed by Norbert Elias and further explored by later authors. Dominant trends of this development can be traced but should not be equated with laws; anomalous cases and their interaction with mainstream ones (e.g., the experiences and legacies of the Italian city republics and the Anglo-Dutch moment at the end of the seventeenth century) are a significant part of the story. The core dynamic was the consolidation of monarchic states upgrading their capacities to apply violence and extract resources, strengthening their administrative apparatuses and extending – very gradually, but not insignificantly – their power over inherited composite realms. This process continued from the ‘new monarchies’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through the empowering of secular rulers in the wake of religious wars and to the absolutist regimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The whole sequence is a key chapter in the history of the rational bureaucratic state, which Max Weber and his followers saw as a major expression of Occidental rationalism and sometimes even as the only state properly so named.



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If the political sphere, centred on the state, is the main site of integration and overall institutionalization, the other side of that is a particularist focus. Historically speaking, states emerge and evolve primarily in the context of multistate formations (whether they can be described as state systems depends on the level of regulated interaction). The rivalry of territorially based and more or less identity-endowed power centres is a constitutive aspect of the political; efforts to overcome that condition are also an important part of the story, but will be discussed in another context. This feature was especially pronounced on the early modern European scene, due to competitive expansion, intensified interaction in the European field, and the failure of bids for regional hegemony. In conjunction with the internal development of statehood, this historical environment is important for the understanding of a further phenomenon. The increasing complexity of state structures, together with the growing complications of interstate rivalry, made state power more vulnerable to crises of a new kind. State failures and breakdowns, of different degree and with varying consequences, are a significant aspect of modern political history. The second development to be considered on this level is the diversification and rationalization of state strategies. Here the expanding range of resources – material, organizational, intellectual, and spiritual – was crucial. This opened up new spaces and possibilities for state action. The growth of a capitalist economy with vastly expanding networks and outlets put various power-enhancing devices at the disposal of rulers. They included easier access to credit, noted by Charles Tilly (1992) as a very important factor in European state formation (not given its due in the Eliasian model); at the same time, concern with commercial expansion and rivalry became a part of standard statecraft. At the other end of the spectrum, the state’s role in strengthening confessional identities and institutions was an essential aspect of the post-Reformation settlement. A gradual appropriation of ideas and values brought into play by the Enlightenment (and thus related to the scientific revolution) gave rise to what some authors have called the ‘knowledgeable state’ (Pearton 1982). In his work on the transition from early to advanced modernity, spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, C. A. Bayly (2004, 64–71) described these developments as the rise of an ‘activist patriotic state’. The reference to patriotism brings us to a third aspect of modern statehood and its sociocultural implications. A recent critique of the statist imaginary has given some currency to the notion of ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1999). But historical experience shows that state-centred visions vary widely and sometimes undergo major transformations. One such case, arguably the most momentous one, was the rise of the modern state. If its vision of itself, of its domain of control as well as its broader environment is to be clarified in genealogical

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and processual terms, we must start with the religious context. Historically speaking, the centrality of the political was for a very long time linked to religious interpretations, and this religio-political nexus proved highly resistant to change. It is an undisputed and eminent characteristic of modernity that this nexus has been problematized in an unprecedently radical way, but that is no linear or unequivocal process; whether it has reached a final stage is a disputed question, but it seems reasonably well established that the early modern age saw a notable shift. On the level of defining meanings, the notion of a divine right of monarchs, although not equally important for all the cases in question, marked a more distant – metaphorically speaking: more legal – relationship between the ruler and the source of legitimacy, compared to earlier conceptions of sacred kingship. In the institutional context, the power shift from church to ruler – cuius regio, eius religio – had a similar effect. A third factor may be added: an increasingly active state operating in an increasingly diverse sociocultural environment was, by the same token, less easily adaptable to traditional religious frameworks (if the religious imaginary and its doctrinal expressions developed at the same time, this was not necessarily in harmony with political trends). This overall real and symbolic upgrading of the state was reflected in a new emphasis on its sovereignty. Whether that concept is applicable in the medieval context is a controversial issue that will not be discussed here; in any case, early modern political discourse broke new ground by affirming the exclusive sovereignty of the state, and the claim of the ruler to embody this principle was a core component of the political vision known as absolutism (never fully or consistently translatable into practice). When Bayly described this assertive state as ‘patriotic’, he adopted a term that has been of dubious use in debates on nationalism but can be justified in the given context. The broader problem at issue is the relationship between processes of state formation and nation formation. This is one of the key questions of modern European and global history, and it calls for a more nuanced approach than the widely accepted distinction between nations crystallizing around existing states and states created by national movements (mixtures of the two patterns, as in Germany and Italy, have always been admitted). On the side of states acquiring national identity, the simplest type is a small state with stable borders and strong dynastic continuity, developing an early sense of nationhood; this is the case for regarding Portugal as Europe’s oldest nation state. Composite states with a record of dynastic acquisition and conquest were much more central to European history, but their relations to nation formation and nationalism were not at all uniform. The three great monarchies of the Atlantic seaboard, more instrumental than any other state actors in charting Euro-American roads to modernity, exemplify a range of variations. The composite British monarchy did go some way towards



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developing a British national identity and a corresponding nationalism, but the same process also gave rise to three nations and nationalisms – English, Scottish, and Irish – whose mutual relations are now more problematic than for a long time before. Another chapter in that story was the secession of the North American settler colonies, whose geopolitical weight and institutional autonomy enabled a plausible claim to be part of the composite state, rather than a colony in the common discriminating sense; the thwarting of that aspiration led to a successful revolt, then to two processes of nation formation, in the northern and southern regions of the postcolonial state, and ultimately to a civil war that terminated the southern alternative. The French version of the composite state followed a different course. The consolidation of dynastic unity was followed by a lengthy but continuous formation of national identity, adumbrated under the monarchy and decisively accelerated by revolutionary change. There were countercurrents, but no serious candidate for an alternative nationalism. The Spanish monarchy may be described as an intermediate case between the British and the French. Its Catalan challenge is alive and well, but there never was a plural constellation comparable to the British one. On the other hand, its major geopolitical crisis, during the Napoleonic Wars, resulted  – unlike the British imperial schism – in fragmentation of its colonial domain and the formation of new political units, largely along lines determined by a concatenation of circumstances; national identities of varying strength developed in the aftermath of these events. The other broad category, national movements giving rise to states, also calls for differentiation. As noted earlier, the cases of positive interaction between states and movements, leading to fusion of pre-existing units (as in Germany and Italy), are familiar and important. Given the key role of composite states in European history, some kind of interaction with them is a shared experience of national movements; but even when this connection turns conflictual and new states arise, differences in situations and legacies matter. National movements may be supported by cultural memories of statehood, but the interrelations between remembered past and present activism were always complex and could vary across cases and phases (a striking and much-discussed example is the relationship between the Bohemian kingdom and the Czech national movement). Cultural memories of that kind are never immune to mythologizing, but it goes a good deal further in some cases than others. The greater or lesser temporal distance in question is of some importance; divergent interpretations of lost statehood can have a significant influence of the ideology of movements (in modern Polish history, it has mattered whether the historical Polish-Lithuanian realm was seen as a step towards a Polish nation state or as a regional commonwealth). There have been national movements that achieved statehood without historical precedents; but in such

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cases much depends on the background: the emergence of a nation state may be the culmination of sustained efforts to build a national community in conditions of extensive autonomy (Finland is an outstanding example), or more in the nature of a reaction to sudden crisis. Further twists to the interconnected makings of states and nations emerged during the twentieth-century phase of decolonization. In many cases, anticolonial movements inherited territories with borders drawn by colonial powers and set out to convert them into states. Anti-colonial movements are not ipso facto national, although they inevitably draw on imaginary and ideological sources of that kind. Processes of nation formation after independence have had varying results. In this context, the massive and singular case of India merits special mention. From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the Indian nationalist movement succeeded in establishing a notion of national identity, not strong enough to resist partition, but remarkably capable of adapting to the diversity that became more and more pronounced after independence. A few words should be added about the most salient counterexample to conceptions of the nation as an exclusively European invention. The Japanese experience of modernity will be discussed in other contexts; what concerns us at this point is the early history of nation formation. Eighteenth-century Japan saw the rise of a cultural movement with strong intellectual leadership and growing social appeal, known as kokugaku (national learning). But it developed alongside a peculiar political regime, combining key attributes of a centralized state with those of a multistate system; there was no significant interaction between the two, but the incipient national movement did revive the symbolism of a powerless dynastic centre that in due course, and in a changed geopolitical situation, became a legitimizing reference for builders of a more modern state. Finally, the discussion of national patterns and currents would be incomplete without a mention of the efforts to impose national identities and ideologies on empires. This was a crucial part of the geopolitical constellation that developed in the culminating phase of Euro-American imperialism and resulted in World War I (Berger and Miller 2014). But this point takes us to the question of empires and their role in the formation of political modernity. Empires are not just states writ large, and modern empires are not simply surviving power structures of older origin. In both regards, specific aspects must be noted. The imperial dimension has its own dynamics, but it can be analysed in terms of the same categories as the problematic of the state: structures, strategies, and visions. As the lively debate on empires during the past decades has shown, the historical phenomena in question are too diverse for a general covering definition to be possible. The only viable approach is to identify the ‘family



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resemblances’ of empires, that is a cluster of frequently repeated aspects, and allow for alternative emphases and selections within that framework. Empires overshadow other states in size, but that is a very relative and variable feature; they typically arise from conquest, but the emphasis on expansion varies from case to case. The imperial character is particularly pronounced when a pre-existing or emerging multistate configuration is subsumed under one power centre. This transcending of pluralism is related to another recurrent factor: in paradigmatic cases, and to a lesser extent in minor ones, imperial power involves rule over culturally and ethnically diverse domains. Ideological responses to the demands and problems of this extended reach tend to combine universal themes – often religious ones – with the legitimation of imperial elites defined in ethnic or more adaptable cultural terms. Finally, empires tend to develop centres with strong claims to exclusive authority, often though not invariably to personal autocracy but with varying degrees of effective control. This was, in very rough terms, the imperial complex on which modern innovations were superimposed. Among the distinctive structural features emerging in early modernity and evolving through later phases, the new phenomenon of transoceanic empires stands out as particularly significant. The general category of maritime empires, beginning with Mediterranean antiquity (Kumar 2017), does not do justice to the incomparably more farflung modern realms; they were pioneered by the composite monarchies of the Atlantic seaboard, with the added involvement of two smaller states, Portugal and the Dutch Republic. As an eminent historian of maritime worlds puts it, the Mediterranean is ‘as different in character from the open oceans as mountains are from plains’ (Abulafia 2019, xxv). This new geopolitical constellation had long-term implications. In the first place, it opened up an enlarged space for imperial rivalry, and for the interference of new conflicts in the global arena with the much older but changing patterns of interstate and inter-imperial competition in Europe. The dynamics of such entanglements escalated from the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763, now often described as the first world war, through the Napoleonic Wars ending in 1815 to the more momentous conflict commonly known as World War I. Another aspect was the mutual impact of imperial structures, state building and revolutions, industrial and democratic, whose most significant breakthroughs occurred in the strongest European states. The upshot of all these complications was a high level of imperial vulnerability, resulting in two break-ups of world historical importance: the secession of Britain’s major North American colonies and the dissolution of the Spanish Empire in Latin America. While the former event had much to do with a growing disproportion in strength and prospects, the latter was primarily due to a collapse of metropolitan power in the course of a European upheaval. Another difference was that the British Empire was

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rebuilt, with India replacing North America as a key component, while the Spanish one survived only in residual shape. If transoceanic empires were a major factor in the formation of modernity, the new conditions and imperatives that their presence imposed on land-based empires of older origin were also a part of the story. The very different trajectories of the Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and Chinese empires responding to changing pressures of great power competition illustrate the point. Last but not least, the emergence of Germany as a nation state with imperial features, contested aspirations to a more imperial position, and vast ambitions but limited possibilities in the global arena, was a massively consequential development. To sum up, multiple versions of imperial modernization, decisively influenced but not uniformly determined by the leading powers, became an increasingly central component of world history. As for the spectrum of strategic options available to transoceanic empires, the possibilities of indirect and diversified rule are a familiar theme. Many historians have, with some justification, stressed the record of the British Empire in that field, and even suggested – on more contestable grounds – that it represented a project apart from all other imperial ones (Darwin 2011). Experiences and learning processes along these lines no doubt counted for something in the reconstruction of British imperial power after the transatlantic setback, as well as in its later management of decolonization. A comparative approach suggests that the ability to implement strategies of indirect rule depends on conditions on both sides, in the metropolis and the periphery, but not least on the political culture of the dominant power and the background experience of the composite states that evolved into empires. A striking example of overstretched direct rule was the incorporation of Algeria into France, leading in the end to a particularly traumatic colonial war. But the variations and repercussions of colonial rule are not exhausted by such comparisons. As Hannah Arendt noted (although it is one of her less discussed ideas), the extreme and sometimes genocidal levels of violence associated with colonialism were among the factors paving the way for totalitarian projects whose full force was unleashed in Europe. Strategies are responsive to circumstances but related to visions. Modern imperial visions can be briefly characterized in terms of a four-cornered field: they draw on notions of progress or a civilizing mission, on legitimizing links to traditions of authoritarian rule, on the nationalizing efforts mentioned earlier, and on revolutionary projects. It seems appropriate to describe the Napoleonic empire as a balancing act, an attempt to combine all four. Wilhelmine Germany mixed civilizing traditionalist and nationalist claims, and the revolutionary element was involved to the extent that when Germany went to war, it tried to mobilize revolutionary forces on the other side. A very complex combination of imperial and revolutionary projects will be discussed in later



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chapters. But the alternatives could also diverge and enter into conflict. Chinese imperial modernization in the late nineteenth century was thwarted by irreconcilable disagreements between reformers committed to progress and traditionalists defending the old order. A particularly antinomian situation developed in the Habsburg Empire after the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867. In the Hungarian part, ruling circles determinedly pursued a course of nationalization, whereas their Austrian counterparts mixed dynastic traditionalism with selective reliance on the Enlightenment ideas of progress. The revolutionary connections noted in regard to empires deserve closer examination in their own right. Revolutionary dynamics, and in this context primarily the history of Eurasian revolutions, from France 1789 to China 1949, should be seen as a distinctive component of political modernity. The major revolutions are interconnected through causal and interpretive links; their record adds up to a tradition, a constitutive imaginary with strong mythologizing tendencies and mobilizing potential. There is an obvious case for linking that tradition to the civilizational imaginary of autonomy. Revolutions, especially the paradigmatic modern ones, draw strength from aspirations to expand the realm of human freedom, the domain of self-determining activity (Selbstbetätigung, to use a term from Marx’s early writings), and the most seminal revolutionary ideologies have given voice to strong visions of emancipation. But the other side of the story is equally familiar. Revolutionary processes, their unintended ramifications, and their long-term consequences reveal the paradoxes of autonomy in several particularly striking ways. Such upheavals typically begin with crises of structurally overstretched or geopolitically threatened states, in situations where escalating problems lead to broad mobilization of social forces, and culminate in the reconstruction of states with stronger institutions and a more solid social basis. This view of revolutions was brought into the debate by Theda Skocpol (1979) and has been widely accepted. Its implications become clearer if we link it to more complex understandings of power than those applied in Skocpol’s work. The relational and processual dynamics of power, variously stressed by authors like Elias, Foucault, and Mann limit and derail the autonomy of actors, and the outcomes of intensified power struggles, often marked by unleashed violence, are never logical results of intended projects. This dissonance between action and process is enhanced by the very ambition of revolutionary actors. Their projects aim at radical restructuring of social life but are inevitably based on selective and contestable interpretations of existing patterns; the mirage of a collective actor endowed with universal insight, guaranteed by a logic of history, could only exacerbate the tensions between vision and unfolding events. Finally, experience has shown that the pursuit of autonomy, especially its most emphatic versions, is prone to borrowing more or less adapted meanings rooted in religious traditions of premodern

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origin. Simplistic accounts of this transfer as straightforward ‘secularization’, a migration of intact significations across cultural and historical borders, have come in for convincing criticism; but the indeterminacy and multidimensionality of modern approaches to autonomy are conducive to entanglement with cultural legacies, including their religious aspects. This trend will be discussed at greater length in connection with the rise and record of secular revolution. The inclusion of revolutions in the history and problematic of state formation raises questions about the democratizing turn in that process, and hence – more generally – about the place and role of democracy in political modernity. Not that the two aspects are synonymous. Modern revolutions have in part advanced the cause of democracy, but they have also given rise to political currents and models that draw on the democratic imaginary while obstructing its institutional path. It may be appropriate to explain why this issue is tackled after others, rather than as the very core or defining problem of political activities and transformations in the modern world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber could – as we have seen – describe capitalism as the most fateful modern force; he would have been quick to dismiss any suggestion of claiming that role for democracy. At the end of the century, a joint and final triumph of capitalism and democracy was widely announced by dominant opinion-makers, and the belief in basic harmony between these two modern achievements gained ground. The experience of the past two decades has done much to undermine such optimism. The relationship between capitalism and democracy now seems best described as troubled cohabitation; setbacks and threats to democracy, internal as well as external to its most acclaimed strongholds, are a commonplace theme, and the final stabilization of capitalism is no longer a credible promise. But speculation about a collapse of capitalism is less frequent and less convincing than about the demise of democracy, and that reflects a certain asymmetry. The development of modern democracy has involved an ongoing mixture of intertwining, confrontation, and compromise with the aforementioned other components of the political sphere: state-centred, imperial, and revolutionary. There is no similarly interactive pattern to the history of modern capitalism. A further contrast is that although both capitalism and democracy are composite phenomena, their internal structures and tensions must be analysed in different terms. As we have seen, Castoriadis equated democracy with the institutional expression of autonomy, whereas the capitalist imaginary represented a new type of heteronomy. Here it has been argued that the modern capitalist transformation of the economic sphere is also grounded in the imaginary signification of autonomy, but this is not to deny that democracy is more closely related to and more expressive of autonomy, nor that – inasmuch



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as the political sphere constitutes a more encompassing and unifying order than the economic one – the democratic redefinition of statehood is the most significant impact of autonomy on power. For that very reason, it seems most rewarding to explore the problematic of democracy through its transformative but neither instantaneous nor uncontested effects on the political. One of the necessary corrections to Castoriadis’s approach is a further clarification of the point that institutionalization entails differentiation. The most convincing analysis of the internal differentiation of democracy has been developed by Marcel Gauchet. His description of modern democracy as a ‘mixed regime’ implies a comparison with the ‘mixed constitution’ of classical antiquity; for the ancients, democracy was, admittedly, one of the ingredients to be mixed, but to the extent that the mixture was to be adopted by the polis or the res publica, it was also a form of self-government. According to Gauchet (2007a, 21), the trajectory of modern democracy is shaped by the interconnected but not ipso facto coordinated development of three structuring factors, each of which evolves in circuitous and discontinuous ways, responds to historical circumstances and remains open to interpretive conflicts. The rule of law (Rechtsstaat) has a long prehistory; its consolidation goes hand in hand with broader shifts towards democracy, and its alignment with the recognition of human rights as fundamental principles of legislation is a landmark. A second component is the political community, for Gauchet more or less identical with the nation state, even if that pattern is in some cases imposed on more complex formations and results in long-term adaptive problems; the openness of the nation state to extensions of citizen’s rights, in regard to both groups previously not included and into new domains of life, is a crucial precondition of the democratizing process. Finally, our understanding of the democratic transformation would be incomplete without proper allowance for a specific ‘regime of historicity’ (to borrow a term from Hartog 2015). Projects of autonomy must extend to the meaning of and power over social time, and the particular orientation that corresponds to political autonomy is a vision of the future as a horizon of transformative human action, individual and collective. This attitude is backed up by new notions of history as a ‘collective singular’, a frame of reference lending itself to varying conceptions of progress, emancipation, or human self-creation. In this regard, Gauchet draws on Koselleck’s analyses of changing historical consciousness. The analysis of modern democracy as a changing combination of three structuring principles is complemented and qualified by two further lines of argument. On the one hand, each of the three components can develop in onesided and disproportionate ways at the expense of the others. In the contemporary context, this is – as Gauchet sees it – primarily a matter of overblown interpretations and hopes invested in human rights; such views are often associated with notions of a ‘democracy without demos’, vaguely defined

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and without plausible connections to political community or collective action. Other unilateral developments have figured prominently in recent history. Gauchet refers to a ‘return of the political’ in connection with the reassertion of the nation state as a power centre with geopolitical imperatives, mobilizing capacities, and integrative ideological themes; this was the process that culminated in World War I. As for the vision of history that accompanies and inspires modern democracy, its separate development is more a matter of ideological elaboration than of direct political effects. The perspective of future transformations can be converted into doctrines of predictable progress, in the most extreme versions guaranteed by laws analogous to those of nature, and optimizable on the basis of scientific insight into these laws. The ideologizing and mythologizing conceptions of progress point us towards the other set of qualifications to Gauchet’s tripartite model. If the recurrent problems of modern democracy are, to a certain extent, due to divergences and disproportions between its constituent parts, complications of a different kind arise from another source. The notion of an overarching and definitive unity is of sacral origin, but it was perpetuated through traditional modes of social thought and transmitted to the modern world. Gauchet draws on Durkheim’s analysis of the religious constitution of society but gives a significant twist to it. Durkheim had argued that the role of religious beliefs and practices, most clearly revealed in their elementary forms, was to ensure the integration, identity, and self-consciousness of human societies; he stressed the idealizing character of the societal self-image thus produced and sustained, but added that society functioned through idealizing models (norms and values, as they became known in the later sociological tradition). Gauchet accepts the idea of religion as a key factor in the making of social institutions, but his view of the implications focuses on the concealment or containment of division rather than the construction of self-contained unity. For him, division – in more senses than one – is central to social life. Societies exist in and relate to a surrounding world, and no interpretive or practical settlement can impose a final unity on this difference. Societies are divided from themselves, in the sense that their instituting capacities are never fully absorbed by their instituted patterns. This opens up a space for alternative and conflicting interpretations, which in turn influence the rivalry of social forces. All these aspects are sidelined or suppressed by the inherited sacral image of unity, and an adequate understanding of democracy ultimately depends on taking them fully into account. Gauchet’s argument about the persistence of sacral patterns is not limited to the secular religions that became one of the central historical forces of the twentieth century. As he sees it, a latently sacral phantasm of unity was already at work in the nineteenth-century visions of harmonious progress; before that, Hegel’s philosophy was an exemplary effort to rethink the human



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journey towards and through Christianity in such a way that modern heirs to this record could claim both shared historical roots and a common vision of the future. The loss of faith in this uniquely ambitious synthesis led to new departures in thought, with momentous consequences for later intellectual and political history. But in the short run, Gauchet notes a shift – under way after 1830, taking a critical turn in 1848 and progressing in uneven fashion during the second half of the century – from liberal conservatism to a conservative liberalism with more radical offshoots. In this context, he refers to progress, science, and the people as the idols of liberalism. They combine to support a scenario of coherent and benign change, ultimately compatible with an inherited basic framework of social life. An overintegrated image of society, rooted in a sacral imaginary and theorized by influential currents in the emerging social sciences (though problematized by thinkers with a delayed impact, such as Max Weber), remained latently active in the political context. At a later stage, after a crisis that culminated in a global conflict (World War I) and disrupted political orders and cultures, the sacral connection reasserted itself in a more virulent but also more actively disguised form: in the guise of totalitarian politics. The most salient development of that kind will be discussed in a later chapter. If Gauchet’s approach has the advantage of allowing for uneven development and internal tensions of democracy, it also invites further reflection along lines less advanced in his work. The breakthrough and the vicissitudes of democracy should be analysed in terms of interaction with the aforementioned components of the political sphere. The ‘return of the political’ (2007b, 161–208), most clearly manifested in the growing strength and mobilizing capacities of the nation state, led to wars and revolutions, boosted statist currents within the socialist tradition, and became a practical as well as an ideological basis for totalitarian projects. This does not mean that the whole twentieth-century sequence of wars, breakdowns, and dictatorships can be explained as the logical outcome of a statist dynamic. The interaction with other forces and processes was crucial, and the global dominance of Euro-American imperialism was a key part of that story. On this point, Gauchet’s argument is very unconvincing: he refers to imperialism as an infantile disease of globalization (2007b, 209). Apart from the implicit suggestion that there is something like a normal or mature form of globalization, against which defective ones can be measured (a notion very hard to reconcile with experience), this description reflects a very unhistorical view of modern imperialism, further emphasized by the claim that it involves the resuscitation of archaic ‘monsters’ (2007b, 209). It is true that archaizing aspects enter the making of the imperial formations in question, but then the task is to clarify the interconnections with distinctively modern factors. Ongoing controversies about Nazi Germany have highlighted the complexity of this issue.

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This discussion has, for reasons inherent in the theme itself, brought the internal variety of the political into clearer focus than the analysis of capitalism could do for the economic sphere. The multiple components of political modernity and the range of possible relations between them are major sources of diversity in overall patterns. That viewpoint can be taken further on the basis of a passing reference in Gauchet’s work, suggestive of broader horizons but not consistently integrated into the historical analysis of democracy. At the beginning of his magnum opus on the rise and trajectory of modern democracy (2007a, 9–10), he refers to the ‘unique revolution’ of autonomy, extending ‘between 1500 and 1900, across the multiple revolutions of modernity – the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, the scientific revolution, the political revolutions in England and France, the industrial revolution’. The broader historical complex thus indicated is very unequally thematized in Gauchet’s work. We may begin with the question of the order in which he lists the four revolutions. His formulation clearly suggests that he thinks of it as chronological, but it is easily translatable into a long-term outline, analogous – but far from identical – to the Parsonian conception of modernity as a system of unfolding revolutions. The religious revolution began with the irrevocable split of Western Christendom, which was at the same time an opening for political innovations across confessional boundaries. A shared definition of the religio-political nexus was replaced by parallel shifts towards the political; the resultant developments interacted with different mixtures of factors in several European regions, but the overall outcome was an irreversible rebalancing of religion and politics. The first and the third revolution on the list were thus intertwined from the outset, and that connection becomes even closer with the successive re-entries of the sacral imaginary into political orders and projects, culminating in the totalitarian challenge. On this point, Gauchet’s own analysis is exhaustive and leads to clear conclusions. He has much less to say on the scientific revolution; it is not discussed as an ongoing component of the long-term process that centres on the ups and downs of modern democracy. The main reference to the role of science in modern political transformations is to be found in the discussion of liberal dominance in the second half of the nineteenth century. Alongside the notions of people and progress, science became one of the idols of a complacent but fragile liberalism. Gauchet quotes Zola to the effect that a religion of science should be seen as a necessary outcome of humanity’s march towards knowledge and adds that this religion imitates both the form and the function of traditional ones: it seeks to clarify the question of the human situation in the world and to assume the social role of overall orientation. It was, in other words, adapted to the vision of continuity in change that characterized this epoch. But the picture is incomplete. The liberal canonization of science faced competition



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from the radical currents that wanted to claim higher scientific status for revolutionary projects; within that part of the political spectrum, the cult of science was contested by those who opted for spontaneous mass action and imaginative rupture with the established order (Sorel’s critique of Marxism is the prime example). In the longer run, it was the scientistic version of the revolutionary imaginary that won out, but with paradoxical results. The Leninist turn, completed and taken to extremes through the postrevolutionary construction of Marxism-Leninism, followed the scientistic line, but in a way that gave new meaning to the religion of science. Claims to possess a comprehensive and detailed scientific world view, going far beyond the programmatic suggestions of the liberals cited by Gauchet, served both to sustain and to disguise the pretensions of a secular religion. The imaginary construct of a total framework, guaranteeing the growth of knowledge about the universe and conferring meaning on its development, conformed to patterns of religious origin; so did the aspiration to power derived from these presuppositions. But this religious component was masked by adaptation to the language of science, borrowing of suitable bits and pieces from the existing sciences, and concessions to the demands of organized scientific enquiry, indispensable for the competitive pursuit of power. This interplay of sacral implications and scientistic appearances is not given its due in Gauchet’s analysis of Stalinism. A closer examination would underline the differences between this version of totalitarianism and the Fascist ones; specific features of the Soviet model will be discussed in a later chapter. But the reminder of scientistic inputs into the record of modern democracy and its kindred adversaries can be taken one step further. As noted earlier, Gauchet rightly rejects the reduction of neoliberalism to an economistic ideology. But the connection between ideology and economics goes beyond the selective use of economic models and arguments. In both posttotalitarian and long-standing democratic regimes, the neoliberal wave drew on an image of economics as the only exact science of human affairs, capable of teaching lessons to other disciplines and no longer troubled by a contest of multiple paradigms. It can hardly be denied that this belief shows affinities with Gauchet’s examples of the continuity between religion and science, and even with the more emphatic claims of totalitarian scientism. It took a beating from the financial crisis, and one of the more promising developments in the wake of the latter is the emerging understanding – to some extent aided by rediscoveries – of economics as a multiparadigmatic discipline. These observations bring us to the question of Gauchet’s fourth revolution, the last on the list and the least present in his work. The reference to the Industrial Revolution avoids mention of capitalism; but classical and contemporary authors have repeatedly stressed the revolutionary character of modern capitalism, and there are good reasons to speak of a capitalist

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revolution beginning before the industrial one; some historians would date its beginnings to the city states of the Italian renaissance. As has been seen, the approach adopted here treats the capitalist form of economic life as one of the sociocultural spaces for the modern dynamic of autonomy. But Gauchet’s history of modern democracy has very little to say about capitalism. In earlier writings, he had referred to capitalism as simply the economy of innovation; in the work discussed here, he suggests (2017, 695) that the ‘historical orientation’, the aspiration to invent the future through an improvement of the present, is a more important key to the spirit of capitalism than the religious or quasi-religious sources often credited with that role. Such punctual observations do little to theorize the capitalist phenomenon and nothing to clarify its problematic coexistence with democracy. To conclude this part of the discussion, it seems appropriate to recall the main reasons for regarding that relationship as an important part of the story. At the most elementary level, the overlap of wealth and power – already noted in the context of basic concepts – is a source of enduring structural problems. If democracy is about the conception, structuring, exercise, and limiting of political power, economic power is a permanent complicating factor. It constitutes a resource to be mobilized, but also a countervailing force to be controlled or contained. A further problem is its capacity to infiltrate the political sphere, in various direct and indirect ways. On the level of the social imaginary, it generates alternative visions of power, most strikingly exemplified by the interpretation of democracy as a political market. These general features are compounded by specific aspects of capitalism. Although the idea of growing inequality as a general law of capitalist development has been refuted, recurrent shifts in that direction are well documented and very prominently featured in present debates; they reinforce oligarchic trends in the political community. The capitalist goal of production, the unlimited accumulation of abstract wealth, is doubly challenging to democratic forms of life. Given the unequal access to and control over the means of production, the emphasis on unending maximization favours the growth of inequality; the utopian potential of abstract wealth (in Deutschmann’s terms, ‘the promise of absolute wealth’) is conducive to individualist visions of self-realization and thus to de-politicization. The expansive dynamic and globalizing thrust of capitalism, never lastingly confined within political borders, poses problems for political communities claiming sovereignty and aspiring to collective management of their own affairs. Finally, the structural instability of the capitalist economy, now more convincingly associated with its financial institutions and driving forces than with any maladaptation to technical progress (as in the Marxist tradition), has affected the history of political institutions in general and democratic ones in particular.



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MEANING AND MODERNITY As the aforementioned remarks on economic and political patterns have shown, the structures of those two social spheres depend on meaning-laden presuppositions, connections, and orientations. Analyses of the cultural sphere must deal with more explicit and autonomous articulations of meaning, the tensions and conflicts between them, their impact on the social world, and their relationship to the broader world horizon. György Márkus’s reflections on culture and modernity are a good starting point for discussion of these problems. As he sees it, the two categories are coeval and consubstantial: ‘Cultural modernity is a culture which knows itself as culture and as one among many’ (Márkus 2012, 18). The distinction between the general concept and the singularity of the formation that produces it raises questions that have been answered in different ways. Márkus notes another distinction within the modern concept of culture: it can be taken to refer to all human behaviour, inasmuch as it is not biologically determined, or to the domain of ‘high culture’, genres and works ‘regarded as autonomous, that is, as having a value in themselves’ (2012, 19), and specifically credited with the creation and transmission of essential meanings. Within high culture, there is a further tension between the arts and the sciences; their modern autonomy and separation relegates religion to a less central and less determinable status. At the same time, this opens up a new space for philosophy, whose tasks may be conceived as charting a way between arts and sciences, and reflecting on the perspectives and presuppositions of both. To these multiple tensions, we may add another case that does not figure on the same level in Márkus’s analysis: the problematic relationship between culture and ideology. To grasp that part of the field, we need the broad concept of ideology defined in the preceding chapter, closer to Dumont than to Marx, and referring to complexes of meaning built into and operative within a social order. This accounts for the ideologization of cultural themes, such as – most basically – figures of autonomy, which at the same time lend themselves to reflection and elaboration beyond that context. The modern constellation is characterized by a multiplication of ideologies as well as by a novel and growing emphasis on the critique of ideology, but there is no firm boundary between the two. Ideas developed to pursue a critique of ideology can, as experience has shown, be transformed into a new ideology. Before moving on to more specific interpretations, the view expressed in Márkus’s conceptual distinctions can be expanded through some general remarks on the underlying field of significations. At first sight, the modern trajectory of the cultural sphere, as defined at the beginning of this section, is marked by unprecedented diversity and proliferation of articulated meanings.

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Different domains of social life – not just institutional complexes, but also the interpretive constructs involved in or attached to their development – give rise to correspondingly specific fields of meaning. The conflictual interplay of ideologies adds further complications. Finally, the global dynamic of modernity results in multiple encounters of cultural worlds, far beyond anything known in earlier historical epochs. The very novelty and transformative impact of modernity as a civilization reinforce this trend: older civilizations confronted with challenges to be answered and problems to be solved draw on their own legacies to develop distinctive modes and understandings of change, and although the outcome is a multiplication of modernity, the global field remains an arena of cultural divergence. Closer examination, however, reveals another side to the question of meaning. There is a case for singling out a fundamental problematization of meaning as a defining feature of modernity. Two different but interconnected historical forces point in that direction. On the one hand, the organized growth of knowledge appears as a destroyer of meaning. Three levels of this perceived dynamic may be distinguished, beginning with Max Weber’s classic analysis in Science as a Vocation. The very experience of unending, increasingly impersonal scientific progress, combined with the ongoing translation of knowledge into power (mastery through calculation, as Weber described the logic of this process), discredits traditional notions of knowledge as a search for meaning. A further implication is the shift to what Hans Blumenberg called the ‘Copernican world’, a view of the universe that deprives human existence of cosmic dignity (Blumenberg 1981). And the final extension of that perspective is the vision of cosmic exhaustion through entropy, an ultimate loss of dynamism and developmental capacity; although the idea of irreversible thermodynamic decline is not exempt from the conjectural status of scientific knowledge and not uncontested by minority currents in scientific discourse (Prigogine and Stengers 2018), it has acquired a certain iconic significance as a metaphor of ultimate meaninglessness. On the other hand, the constitution and the validity of meaning can be problematized through emphasis on its subjective sources. The understanding of modernity as a cultural conversion, replacing belief in cosmically or divinely ordained meaning with insight into its human origins, is a variously developed theme of scholarly analyses as well as broader public discourse. The ubiquitous metaphor of disenchantment serves to signal this view. Here too, it is useful to distinguish some key variations, and we can begin with the general relativistic implications. Subjective positing is equated with loss of intrinsic significance, thus pointing the way to more or less thoroughgoing sceptical conclusions. An integral corollary of the subjective turn is the progress of modern individualism, with unfolding consequences for the accepted and the practical meaning of the social bond. Responses to this perceived



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problem were an important part of the sociological tradition; Durkheim’s reaffirmation of the meanings required by solidarity and collective action is a paradigmatic example. But the ultimate expression of relativizing by way of subjectivation is the attempt to turn the subject against itself and question its autonomy from within. It seems justified to speak of a psychoanalytic moment in twentieth-century thought, important enough at the time for critics to regard this current as one of the secular religions (Gellner 1985), now definitely past its peak, but leaving a legacy for rethinking and an obvious starting point for that purpose: the perspective of reconquering autonomy through engagement with the unconscious. But that very idea was, at the high point of psychoanalytic influence, obscured by scientistic analogies tending to put the discovery of the unconscious and the recognition of its power on the same level as major breakthroughs of natural science. The founder of the movement once described his work as a continuation of the attack on human self-importance initiated by Copernicus and Darwin; the reorientation in light of structural linguistics and an idiosyncratic reading of Hegel and Heidegger, undertaken by Jacques Lacan, seems to have ended in another denial of autonomy (Castoriadis 1989a). There is, however, another side to this story. The two relativizing instances, scientific progress and subjective intentions, have also been portrayed as ultimate guarantees of certainty; one of the most seminal philosophical currents of the twentieth century (as the present writer sees it, the most path-breaking of them all), the phenomenological movement, began with successive attempts in this vein. The first goal was the transformation of philosophy into a rigorous science, based on the intuition of essences; when that proved unattainable, the founding thinker – Edmund Husserl – turned to a renewed quest for transcendental subjectivity. In both phases, the fount of certainty was to be a guide to comprehensive and definitive orientation and thus a key to reuniting knowledge and meaning. Later transformations of phenomenology overturned these visions and opened up multiple ways to question the pursuit of certainty. Sustained rethinking of subjectivity, intentionality, knowledge, and the world resulted in a new overall problematic. This was not simply a transition from foundationalism to fallibilism; as a closer look at two thinkers with strong phenomenological affiliations will show, the renewal is conducive to broader reinterpretations of cultural modernity, where the aforementioned two instances can appear as centres of ongoing reflection, interpretive conflicts, and ideological elaboration. Jan Patočka’s pioneering analysis of modernity as a new kind of civilization (earlier than Eisenstadt’s but unfinished, unpublished until much later and unknown to Eisenstadt) singled out two defining value orientations (hypergoods, as Charles Taylor would call them) that did most to make this civilization culturally subversive of older ones: the pursuit of objective

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knowledge and of individual freedom (Patočka 1996). Neither of these two notions was a modern invention, but the emergence of organized science and the unfolding of reflection on subjectivity gave both of them a new and vastly more dynamic meaning than before. Patočka’s thesis should, however, not be equated with the idea of a civilization based on science and individualism; that would have meant a straightforward alignment with liberalism, and his understanding of modernity was too complex for that. The focus on knowledge extends to the problematizing of claims and foundations that accompanies cognitive progress and can give rise to a more comprehensive enquiry into the human condition; visions of freedom vary across a broad range, and Patočka knew Marx well enough to be aware of revolutionary views on free development of the individual as a goal to be achieved through radical social transformation. Patočka did not use the concept of autonomy in this context, but the thrust of his argument is eminently compatible with that term; both knowledge and freedom have such connotations. There is, however, no overarching cultural pattern that would integrate them into a shared universe of meaning; the new civilization lacks the kind of unity that religious frameworks conferred on older ones. This leads to a proliferation of conflicting interpretations, but also to a perceived and periodically enhanced need for a dialogue with cultural legacies from the past. For Patočka, who was a markedly hellenocentric thinker, that meant above all a continuing dialogue with ancient Greek thought, and a particular effort to maintain and renew the idea of ‘care of the soul’, seen as a key theme of Greek philosophy, not exhausted by its later mutations in the European tradition and still relevant to contemporary challenges, not least in view of the misadventures of twentieth-century thought. What he described as a moderate version of modern civilization was a mode of social life compatible with this cultural problematic; the commitment to this vision ensured a fundamental affinity with liberalism and may be understood as Patočka’s version of the open society (although there is no trace of influence by Popper), but it did not prevent him from criticizing the practices of economic and political liberalism. The moderate version was, however, not the only one in the field. Its main rival took off from the same basis but moved in a different direction. If knowledge and freedom are the main orienting values of the new civilization, both are obviously linked to rationality. Patočka knew Weber’s analyses of rationalization, and in later writings, he adopted the concept of rational civilization instead of the 1950s provisional label of supercivilization. But when he wrote the text discussed here, he was also aware of another side to the question of rationality, arguably neglected in his later work. The contextual and partial advances of rationality enabled its imaginary elevation to a comprehensive framework of meaning. Patočka’s text makes no reference



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to the imagination, but when the radical version of modern civilization is defined in terms of reason invoked as a universal source of meaning, we are clearly dealing with an imaginary extension and elaboration of socially operative rationality, and this construct is expected to assume the unifying role that religious traditions played in premodern civilizations. Patočka saw the ‘scientific world-view’ of Marxism-Leninism, the official ideology of Communist regimes, as the most extreme variant of this civilizational radicalism and the most revealing expression of its intrinsic hubris; but the trend was older, represented not least by the revolutionary tradition going back to the eighteenth century, and the structures of Communist states were not reducible to their ideology. This line of interpretation was abandoned in midstream, and many questions were left unanswered (including those relating to the interaction of European modernity with other cultural worlds); but some points should be noted for further reference. Patočka identified cultural poles whose interrelations constitute a problematic, particularly conducive to rival interpretations; he tacitly drew on the imagination to clarify the perspectives and alternatives at issue, and he argued that different perceptions of and responses to the modern field could result in divergent patternings of the whole field. Another phenomenologically inspired analysis of modern civilization is to be found in the work of Charles Taylor. His starting point is a distinction between two modes of subjectivity. The disengaged subject, commonly equated with the Cartesian moment in modern philosophy, detaches itself from the traditional picture of a meaningfully structured world; this attitude is ‘always correlative of an “objectification” ’ and ‘objectifying a given domain involves depriving it of its normative force for us’ (Taylor 1989a, 160). The disengaged subject thus opens the way for scientific pursuit of knowledge, beginning with the early modern mechanization of the world view and continuing with modifications and refinements of that perspective. At the same time, the disengaged subject becomes a self-defining subject, and the long-term result is a ‘growing ideal of a human agent who is able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action’ (1989a, 159). The other main current of modern culture – the expressivist turn, as Taylor calls it – emerged as a response to the problematic of disengagement. It begins with ‘that family of views in the late eighteenth century that represents nature as an inner source’ (1989b, 358). The source in question can, up to a point, be conceived as an access to knowledge, and both aspects of Taylor’s modern dichotomy are therefore to some extent mixtures of the two value orientations distinguished in Patočka’s model: freedom and knowledge. But the dominant thrust of expressivism is elsewhere; its key theme is the quest for self-realization, adaptable to ethical as well as aesthetic visions. Taylor’s construction of the cultural dispute between the disengaged and the expressivist subject is

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explicitly grounded in a generalizing interpretation of specific and complex historical developments, most directly in the eighteenth-century ascendancy of the Enlightenment and the emergence of Romanticism as an alternative trend, partly rooted in unfinished Enlightenment themes (such as the creative imagination) and partly responding to perceived loss of meaning brought about by overambitious reason. His particular account of this constellation rests on a distinction between a supposed mainstream of the Enlightenment, identified with utilitarian and more or less openly materialistic currents, and the Kantian rescue of reason and freedom through transcendental reflection, for which Taylor reserves the notion of the autonomous subject. The internal differentiation of the Enlightenment was more complicated than this picture suggests and would merit further discussion, not least in light of Jonathan Israel’s extensive analysis of the conflicts and divergences between moderate and radical trends (especially Israel 2002 and 2019). But Taylor’s separation of the autonomous subject from a diffuse Enlightenment background fits the logic of his broader interpretation. It enables him to present German idealism as an effort to synthesize two critical responses to the early modern Enlightenment, the Kantian and the Romantic, and – in particular – to read Hegel as a culmination of that project, a key to later efforts in the same vein, and an illustration of the now untenable presuppositions that had to be relied on to reach a semblance of completion. It seems clear that Taylor’s later work has somewhat toned down this focus on the paradigmatic trajectory from Kant and Herder to Hegel. For one thing, he has become less inclined to stress the continuity of the original Romantic moment with later manifestations of the expressivist stance, and even attributed anti-Romantic views to thinkers whom others might link to the romantic legacy (such as Nietzsche). But it is worth noting that the text where he most emphasizes the persistence of Romanticism and the significance of the Hegelian synthesis also contains his most explicit reference to a civilizational conception of modernity. As he puts it in the final chapter of his book on Hegel, modern civilization has developed ‘in an increasingly industrial, technological, rationalized direction. This civilization is in a sense the heir of the Enlightenment’ (Taylor 1975, 539). However, the dominance of this trend, decisively accelerated during the nineteenth century, could not be ensured without limited concessions to its adversary: ‘The romantic strain has been contained, as it were, in modern Western civilization’ (1975, 541). The subordinate component of modernity is reflected in the emphasis on individual consumption and fulfilment. But the ‘modern mixture of private Romanticism and public utilitarianism’ (1975, 542) is, as Taylor sees it, a recipe for perpetual crisis, rather than a sustainable civilizational pattern. Hegel’s all-encompassing idealist monism, most obviously discredited by its claim to provide a philosophy of nature, exemplifies both the vision of reconciliation and the failure of its most systematic articulation;



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the vicissitudes of the Marxian tradition that took off from Hegel reveal the shortcomings of an anthropocentric alternative. Marx’s early writing shifted the expressivist perspective from a world spirit incarnated in nature to human self-creation through social practice, but his later work did not result in a systemic interpretation of modern society, comparable to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. As for the political appropriation and instrumentalization of Marx’s unfinished project, Taylor was writing at a time when ‘really existing socialism’ was no longer a serious ideological challenge to the Western version of modernity, and he saw the Soviet model as an inferior, rather than a rival, variant of industrial civilization. To put this diagnosis of modernity in a more specific historical context, let us return to Sources of the Self. Discussing the Cartesian idea of the disengaged subject, Taylor writes that Descartes effected a ‘transposition . . . in the Augustinian tradition’, giving a ‘radical twist’ to Augustinian inwardness (Taylor 1989a, 140, 143). The term ‘transposition’ suggests comparison with Hans Blumenberg’s concept of reoccupation (Umbesetzung, extensively used in Blumenberg 1985 and to be discussed later), although it seems clear that there was no question of influence. Contrary to Blumenberg, Taylor did not treat his chosen term as a concept to be elucidated; but further comments show that he meant to suggest a possible rectification, though not a revocation. Another sign of his inclination to treat the watershed of cultural modernity as less than a new beginning appears when he sets out to clarify the expressivist turn against the background of retreating Christianity. He twice describes key developments in terms of a ‘slide’; this applies to the shift from a deistic conception of divinely inspired natural order to a secularized belief in nature as a source in its own right (Taylor 1989a, 371), as well as to later and more radical visions of self-expression, tending to ‘dissolve the distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic’ (1989a, 373). The metaphor of a slide does not suggest an unfolding logic of ideas, nor a grounded response to new challenges; rather, the shifts in question are implicitly likened to a loss of bearings. In contrast to Patočka, Taylor continued to develop his interpretation of modernity; but here we need not discuss later and minor revisions in detail. Enough has been said to enable a comparison of the two thinkers, with a view to closer examination of issues posed or foreshadowed by their arguments. They share a conception of cultural modernity as doubly problematic, in the sense of open questions inherent in the relationship to premodern traditions and internal tensions between divergent orientations that translate into conflicting currents with broad consequences. In both cases, this general perspective is connected to the historical polarization of Enlightenment and Romanticism, but in very different ways. For Taylor, this paradigmatic division remains a defining reference for alternative self-understandings of the

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modern subject, even if his conceptual map of that field underwent some changes. But his explicit recognition of the Romantic moment as a watershed is muted by enduring hesitation about generalizing its intentions and aspirations. For Patočka, the impact of the Enlightenment is evident in the pursuit of freedom and knowledge; his line of interpretation retains the Kantian vision of a human exit from self-incurred tutelage, but with qualifications concerning the challenges of a new tutelage, unintended but unavoidable and resistant to inherited ways of thought, and without an overarching idea of reason. But Romanticism is not directly identified as a countercurrent; rather, the focus is on trends and forces claiming affiliation to the Enlightenment but aspiring to solve the problem that made the latter particularly vulnerable to romantic objections: the loss or absence of a meaningfully integrated cultural world. The pretension to provide that kind of framework defines the radical version of modern supercivilization. This may be seen as an implicit and partial acceptance of the Romantic perspective, at least as a challenge. But Romanticism as such appears only in the margin of Patočka’s analysis, in connection with the radicalization of conservative thought and the Fascist outcome of that process; but the comments on this subject are very inconclusive. These differences are linked to a fundamental contrast between Patočka and Taylor, and that point is in turn relevant to the subsequent debate on multiple modernities. Patočka was writing at a time when the presence of alternative modernities, that is, models with global claims and ambitions, overshadowed the more diffuse field of multiple possibilities; he was concerned with two alternatives, aware of problems and predicaments on both sides, but clearly more sharply critical of the radical version. Taylor wrote the texts quoted earlier at a time when an erstwhile alternative was obviously on its way out; his close analysis of divisions and dissonances within modern culture suggests possible derailments, but no roads to the invention of another modernity. The political twist to expressivism, articulated by Marx and instrumentalized – in conjunction with other factors – by his ostensibly orthodox Russian disciples ended in a costly detour towards the goals already set by established Western powers. As for the imbalance between public institutions and private aspirations, noted in the concluding chapter of Taylor’s book on Hegel, it seemed – at the time – conducive to ongoing trouble, but not to a coherent transformative strategy. In due course, Taylor took note of the discussion on multiple modernities but did not link it to his previous analyses of modern cultural disputes. Instead, he proposed a distinction between culture-neutral and culture-conditioned aspects of modernity (Taylor 1989b). The former category was to include the structural and organizational features whose development had been the main theme of modernization theory; the latter related to traditions that continued to influence the profiles and orientations of modern societies, and not least to their impact on ideologies and political cultures.



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The most patent implication was that analysts of multiple modernities should primarily deal with the role of cultural legacies in the patterning of modernity and that this would involve comparative study of non-European cultures, thus correcting the bias caused by one-sided emphasis on the European experience. There are two basic problems with this approach. First, the dichotomy of culture and structure is misleading and tends to obscure the importance of institutions anchored in cultural meanings but also capable of redefining them; moreover, institutions must be understood in processual contexts, with due reference to dynamics of making, rupture, and transformation. As will be seen, East Asian modernity is a particularly rewarding field for analyses in this vein. Second, going beyond Europe is not the only necessary correction to older theories of modernity and modernization. We also need to revise assumptions about the systemic unity of modernizing dynamics in different dimensions, notably the three ones central to the argument of this book. That brings us back to the pluralist and non-functionalist conception of economic, political, and cultural spheres, constituted and transformed by specific orientations and interrelated in a field of tensions. This enhanced autonomization of spheres, ultimately linked to the underlying civilizational upgrading of human autonomy, is – as such – absent from the interpretations developed by Patočka and Taylor, even if they refer to some of its consequences. Here it will be discussed in relation to the question of meaning in modernity, and with particular reference to the cultural sphere, where this problematic is most evident and instructive; this thematic complex must primarily be analysed in a European context, both because the developments at issue have – as far as can be judged from the present state of research and debate – been more pronounced there than elsewhere, and due to the European origins of salient interpretations, especially the work of Max Weber. In the seminal essay on culture and modernity, quoted at the beginning of this section, György Márkus argued that the ‘opposition between reason and imagination is itself the product of cultural modernity, and at the same time, it is what confers on this culture (at least in one of the constitutive meanings of this term) the character making it modern’ (Márkus 2012, 17). This is a valid and important point, as far as it goes, but it calls for a qualification. The categories of reason and imagination represent complementary opposites, but their cultural articulations and destinies are markedly asymmetrical. Reason, in due course redefined and relativized as rationality, has been a permanent theme of philosophical and sociological reflection, ranging from strongly foundationalist projects to cultural relativism. Reason or rationality also figure in attempts to define the specific cultural profile of modernity, often with particular reference to European or Western modernity, but not necessarily in terms now derided as ‘essentialist’; Max Weber’s conception of Occidental rationalism as resulting from a ‘concatenation of circumstances’ is a clear

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counterexample. By contrast, imagination has – although highly visible as a cultural theme – been a more marginal topic of theoretical and especially philosophical reflection. It has appeared as a potentially key domain of the mind in the work of major thinkers (e.g., Kant) but then remained unexplored. The most decisive step towards closer engagement is Castoriadis’s conception of social imaginary significations; it was repeatedly cited in preceding chapters, notably in connection with imaginary components of the three sociocultural spheres. To recall, the main innovative implications of Castoriadis’s approach may be summed up in three points. The problematic of social imaginary significations is grounded in an analysis of meaning and a particular emphasis on meaning-forming horizons that go beyond perception, knowledge, and reasoning. Imaginary significations – in other words, underdetermined complexes of meaning constituted through this movement beyond – enter into the instituting processes of historical societies and at the same time open up a certain space for social change, very differently demarcated in different societies. Finally, the most encompassing and meaning-laden imaginary significations provide a framework for the self-interpretation of societies in the context of broader world horizons. This last aspect will be most important for the following discussion of modern cultural orientations. A fourth point, the link to psychoanalysis and a redefinition of the unconscious in terms of radical imagination, was important for Castoriadis and remains a challenge to those who attempt to rethink that field, but is not relevant to the issues under consideration here. Bringing imaginary significations into the debate on meaning in modernity will help to counter the interpretations that posit a coherent modern world view, capable of overcoming conflicts and tensions diagnosed by thinkers along the lines exemplified by Patočka and Taylor. The strongest version of that thesis is Habermas’s reconstruction of Kantian perspectives in light of the linguistic turn, leading to a distinction between three worlds: nature, society, and the inner world of the mind. This argument then culminates in the idea of a ‘world-projecting spontaneity of reason’ (weltentwerfende Spontaneität der Vernunft) and the claim that an evolutionary process leads to an adequate self-awareness of this reason (Habermas 2019, v.2, 807). The critical and therefore most contestable step in this construction is an implicit hermeneutical addition to the Kantian and linguistic presuppositions: the identification of speech acts with distinctive and definite world perspectives. Against that view, we can point to a much more plural field of modern approaches to the world; they are best understood as imaginary significations, and, as such, they relate to the three sociocultural domains defined in preceding sections of this chapter. This is not a plea for relativism. Imaginings of the world can highlight specific aspects of experience and open up corresponding paths of world disclosure. Their links to the institutionalized and demarcated spheres



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of human activity are to be understood in terms of affinities and mutual reinforcement rather than reducibility. Constitutive meanings within the economic and political spheres have already been discussed; now the focus will, conversely, be on the projection of meanings most directly linked to these domains onto a more general level that makes them part of the cultural sphere. Imaginary significations primarily rooted in the latter will also come into the picture. To begin with images of nature, the perspective that portrays it as a horizon of ever-expanding human domination is undeniably central to the modern imaginary; it is the view described by Weber as the belief that we can master all things through calculation, and by Castoriadis as the imaginary signification of infinitely advancing rational mastery. It resonates with the conception of nature as a realm of laws, exhausted by that definition. The practical prototype of this stance is the ongoing effort to harness nature to human needs and goals, culminating in the pursuit of absolute wealth. Marx credited capitalism with transforming nature into a ‘system of general utility’; the modern pattern of the economic sphere is, on that view, conducive to the radically objectifying attitude. A contrary perspective is of cultural origin, most directly descended from the romantic tradition, where both the notion of nature as an inner source (emphasized by Taylor) and that of a creative cosmic process were articulated. It is the latter that remains more attractive to those who seek an alternative to reductionist interpretations. The most elaborate version proposed in twentieth-century thought is probably Whitehead’s philosophy of process. If we look for traces of political impact on images of nature, the historical record is less straightforward. But European expansion was a major factor in the making of the modern political sphere, and the geographical exploration that developed alongside it was not without effect on speculations about nature. The role of the natural environment in the nationalist imaginary, more specifically the frequent emphasis on territory and landscape, is a case in point; so are the geopolitical reflections that stress the influence of spatial constellations on human societies, or the changing historical significance of earth and sea. There is, in short, a history of attempts to grasp nature as a co-determinant of social and political life, and that entails a more complex understanding than the levellingly objectifying view allows for. Present visions of a global social contract, designed to save the planet from further destruction, may be seen as the culmination of this trend; in the more radical ecological version, the rights-based approach is extended into the natural world. Images of society can also be linked to interpretive projections of the three spheres. The functionalist image of a system with needs fulfilled by its parts or subsystems is visibly derived from the economic sphere, conceived as the

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realm of needs, division of labour and production organized in more or less complex ways. The connection is particularly clear in the case of mainstream Marxism. Admittedly, the development of functional analysis in the social sciences reveals attempts to move beyond this basis by elaborating more complex models of differentiation, but that in turn throws doubt on the concept of system, and the outcome is still a matter of debate. When it comes to the political sphere, the picture is more nuanced. Political perspectives on society can result in two very different models. On the one hand, they may result in power-centred perceptions of social interaction and interdependencies. Influential and fruitful paradigms of sociological analysis, from Norbert Elias to Michael Mann, take their bearings from this basic intuition. If, on the other hand, political life is first and foremost a matter of communication and public deliberation, the broader view of society will reflect that emphasis. Among various interactionist theories thus inspired, Habermas’s paradigm of communicative action is the most systematic and ambitious; not that it affirms a primacy of politics, but it is ‘politicomorph’ in the sense that its underlying image of society reflects a specific preconception of democratic politics. Finally, culturalist images of society come in various terms and versions, and sometimes in connection with the two other types. The notion of programming values as the core of social systems has been particularly influential; less restrictively formulated references to the ‘webs of meaning’ that constitute the texture of social life belong in this category, and so do the conceptions of human societies – or macrosocietal units, such as civilizations – as closed cultural worlds. It can also be argued that an admixture of the culturalist image is a necessary ingredient of approaches that long predominated in the sociological tradition. If the concept of culture is, as the aforementioned quotation from G. Márkus suggests, a distinctively modern way to articulate both unity and plurality, identity and difference, one symptom of its accompanying problematic is its ambiguous relationship to the concept of society. The two are interconnected, but also in mutual tension, to some extent reflected in dissonances between sociology and anthropology, the latter being more attuned to totalizing notions of culture; but the over-integrated and overidealized concept of society that came under sustained criticism in the last decades of the twentieth century also relied on strong cultural components (collective representations in the classical tradition, later values and norms) to make its case. The additional content could then be more interactionist (as in Durkheim’s interpretation of the social bond as a moral one) or more functionalist (as in the later Parsons). In short, a historical hermeneutics of modernity has to reckon with a plurality of perspectives on nature and society. It remains to be clarified whether there are comparably various versions of a third world. If the assumption of



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final demarcation is discarded in regard to the natural and social worlds, and replaced with an interplay of different imaginaries (that expression covers the field of connotations around the central images), this move has consequences for the understanding of a third world. The combinations, conflicts, and alternances of the images summarized earlier raise the question of the context in which they occur; the most obvious and convincing answer is the phenomenological notion of the world as a horizon of horizons. If we add to that another fundamental insight of phenomenology (characteristic of its posttranscendental phase), the idea of being-in-the world as an alternative to traditional notions of closed subjectivity, the result is a more complex framework than the notion of an inner world, whether defined in terms of the mind or human nature. Human being-in-the-world, conceived as a multidimensional pattern with scope for diverging and conflicting interpretations, constitutes a totalizing part of the picture, an integral and at the same time integrating moment in the modern field of meaning. As a general category, it is obviously applicable to premodern cultural worlds; the distinctive modern feature is the higher degree of reflexive awareness and plural articulation. The next step is to relate this perspective to the three sociocultural spheres. As will be seen, they connect to corresponding ways of imagining human being-in-the-world; but in each case, we can distinguish several versions with ramifications into other spheres. Homo economicus is a figure that has been on the scene throughout modern times, in varying strength but sometimes so prominent that it could appear as the most defining feature of the epoch, and recently in a triumphant but soon vulnerable guise. The producer is an elementary but upgradable version of economic man; a stronger meaning is most evident in the Marxian paradigm of production, designed to encompass the human condition and account for the whole spectrum of human activities, up to and including aesthetic creation. An alternative much preferred by critics of Marxism is the rationally choosing consumer, but this figure is ambiguous: it slides easily into the rational pursuer of profit, and the latter can, in turn – when the institution of money is given its due – be identified with a fusion of two significations: the archaic thirst for wealth, noted by Weber as an anthropological background to capitalism, and the mirage of absolute wealth, possible only in a monetarized and dynamic economy. This last-named version enables a critical turn, focused on the utopian and transgressive aspect of capitalism. Finally, twentieth-century developments brought to the fore two figures with a past but never before articulated in comparably forceful terms. The entrepreneur, most influentially theorized by Schumpeter, embodies the roles of creative innovation and coping with risk and uncertainty in economic life; these capacities lend themselves to metaphorical projection into other spheres. The other figure is the planner, prominent and prestigious during the middle decades of the century but discredited more recently, not only for

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economic reasons but also because of a supposed impact on other domains of social life, not least the political one. However, the irony of history might yet result in a rehabilitation of the planner: as a defensive instance against a socially destructive and self-destabilizing economic megamachine. Images of political man range across a broad field. A familiar one is the power seeker, but to grasp the lengths to which this is taken in modern times, some clarifying comments are needed. Visions of exorbitant and unconstrained power were recurrent in premodern history and involved in the making of empires; what sets the modern transmutation of this legacy apart from precedents is the connection to new sources and horizons of power. Scientific and technological progress, together with an overall rationalizing dynamic, enabled expansion and concentration on a scale previously unknown. The pursuit of power on this new basis and without any acknowledged intrinsic limits was what Hannah Arendt described as an abstract activity comparable to the abstract labour analysed by Marx; she ascribed this unending goal, exemplified by the culminating phase of European imperialism, to the bourgeoisie as a collective actor. The inaugural insight into this problematic was to be found in Hobbes’s reflections on the human predicament of seeking ‘power after power’ and the need for an overpowering centre to bring this primal disorder under control; Cecil Rhodes’s expressed desire to colonize the stars after conquering the earth was emblematic of the imperialist stage. But as Arendt saw it, totalitarian movements and regimes took the dynamic of abstract power far beyond bourgeois horizons. This line of analysis has the merit (too little noticed) of highlighting the connections between imperialism and totalitarianism, but the reference to abstraction and to Marx’s use of that concept is more questionable. A critical examination of Marx’s argument shows that the unifying force that he reified as abstract labour was in fact an imaginary signification of value (Castoriadis 1989b), embodied in the institution of money and the generalized commodity production which it enabled; but the take-off of capitalist development is the result of complex and multiple processes, and what Marx saw as abstraction was the subsumption (a concept he also used) of these processes under a common pattern. Analogously, totalitarian regimes combine different sources of social power, but they define the unifying framework in different ways. Another very different vision emerged from the same historical context as Arendt’s. As the discussion of Carl Schmitt’s work has shown (especially Nicoletti 2000), his conception of the friend-enemy distinction as the core of the political sphere is also an interpretation of the human condition; it is the existential weight of this polarizing constellation that sets it above distinctions applicable in other spheres. The historical background is obviously the total mobilization that accompanied the inter-imperial conflict beginning in 1914, and the implicit perspective is the rise of totalitarian regimes that took



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the spirit of 1914 to new extremes. The view most diametrically opposed to Schmitt’s is the idea of the citizen as the paradigmatic political being; it is also central to Arendt’s critical analysis of totalitarianism, which she regarded as a loss of political space and meaning. Her understanding of the Greek polis as a model of political life emphasized the power created through public deliberation and participation in common affairs; this was more fundamental than the confrontation with external enemies and determined the approach to the latter. The life of the citizen transcends the political sphere, inasmuch as it allows the exercise and maturing of key human capabilities, those of judgement and action. On another level, the image of the citizen was theorized in the social sciences, where the category of citizenship served to describe and punctuate the modern progress of participation, including the broader social context as well as the political domain. Paradoxically, this line of thought could, to some extent, invoke the same historical experience as the advocates of more power- and conflict-centred views: significant advances of citizenship were brought about or at least facilitated by stronger national cohesion due to World War I (and again in the wake of the second global conflict). This survey would be incomplete without a mention of yet another twentieth-century innovation: the figure of the professional revolutionary, radicalized far beyond earlier modern adumbrations. To place it among the other alternatives, affinities as well as differences should be noted. The revolutionary seeks power, but this is in order to transform the existing power structures and, in the most exemplary cases with a long-term promise – never honoured – to minimize the role of power in social life. The ethos of revolutionary action, especially in its highly influential Leninist form, was not wholly alien to the Schmittian distinction and may even have been one of its sources: politics became a matter of ‘who defeats whom’. On the other hand, the revolutionary imaginary, although mostly not articulated in the language of citizenship, was in substance akin to that field of meaning. The promised transformations were to enable broader participation in the benefits as well as the organization and understanding of social development. But there was a rub. The most formative episode in the genesis of modern revolutionary visions, the French upheaval beginning in 1789, gave rise to a type of revolutionary action that was to prove tempting and effective – though also, in a longer-term perspective, counterproductive – in other situations. The Jacobins were neither professional revolutionaries in the later accepted sense nor the original totalitarians; but Eisenstadt’s analysis of Jacobinism as a model transferable across the ideological spectrum, up to and including the Islamic radicalism of the late twentieth century, seems convincing. The core meaning of the model is an appeal to radical transformation, to be brought about by a political centre armed with a project and entitled to use violence in

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the name of superior virtue and/or knowledge. This adaptable but identifiable pattern deserves inclusion among the images of political man. Finally, it is appropriate to list a singular, inchoative but suggestive attempt, without adequate reception but without doubt reflective of broader sensibilities. Max Weber’s portrait of the statesman in Politics as a Vocation belongs to a late and abruptly ended phase of rethinking and exploration of new perspectives. Moreover, two obstructive factors interfered with Weber’s reflections: the political, and more specifically German, situation in the aftermath of World War I, and his overstretched concept of charisma. For both these reasons, he could not clearly demarcate his idea of the statesman from the then current notions and myths of leadership, nor fully grasp the dangers inherent in the latter nebula of meanings. But the outlines of a distinctive conception are visible. Weber portrays a political actor who is aware of the finitude and the complexity of the human condition, of the need for both vision and judgement, responsible to a broader political community, and sensitive to the constraints of power as well as the temptations to be avoided when dealing with them. Neither the experiences of the twentieth century nor the portents of the present one have diminished the relevance of these thoughts. It remains to consider the projections grounded in the cultural sphere. The following discussion deals with matters related to high culture, as defined by G. Márkus. Criticisms dismissing this concept as elitist are based on a misunderstanding: it is not about a hierarchy of social groups or classes, but about worlds of meaning. The fields to be briefly dealt with are those of science and art, their anthropological projections and their role in modern world-making. In that context, the less clearly profiled roles of philosophy and religion will also come into view. The question of science in the cultural sphere must take into account the imaginary significations and the corresponding interpretations associated with the idea and practice of scientific enquiry. In this perspective, the first argument to engage with is the one developed by Hans Blumenberg in his work on the legitimacy of the modern age (Blumenberg 1985; I quote the title of the English translation, which conveys the meaning relevant to present purposes, although Blumenberg preferred the German term Neuzeit, not least because key developments preceded the period then most commonly defined as modern). His analysis can be read as a case for a certain primacy of cognitive self-affirmation (Selbstbehauptung) among the revolutions of autonomy mentioned earlier in connection with Marcel Gauchet’s work. The beginnings of the scientific revolution, amplified by interpretive visions and imaginary horizons, appear as an initial and path-breaking radicalization of autonomy, but neither as a teleological nor a deterministic pre-programming of later processes. For Blumenberg, this breakthrough was not just based on the force of the better argument (Habermas 2019, v.1, 41). Arguments mattered, but



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their force was exercised in a broader context. In the first place, the radical turn was taken against the background of late medieval thought. But although Blumenberg’s emphasis on the cognitive moment (and, by implication, on its imaginary context) is convincing, the relationship to the medieval prelude was – as debates on the subject have shown – more complicated than he would have it. The affirmation of human autonomy was not a reaction against a crisis triggered by a quasi-gnostic maximization of the distance between an omnipotent and inscrutable god and the human condition of ultimate uncertainty. Rather, the early modern reorientation was a selective response to multifaceted and inconclusive mutations of the late medieval world. The traditional Christian world view was problematized, but not only through the accentuation of human alienation from divine will and command; there were innovative reflections on subjectivity, of some relevance to the problems posed by later thinkers; and interest in rational enquiry can be traced back to the scholastic tradition (Rexroth 2018). The picture of multiple trends in complex and ambiguous interaction is further reinforced if the social dimensions of the late medieval world are taken into account (Wickham 2017). In short, the connections between modern innovations and medieval antecedents are best described in terms familiar to civilizational analysts: as a matter of qualified and selective continuities within new context and of processes that may entail shifts of emphasis and redefinitions of legacies. In this case, the new context was – here we can agree with Blumenberg – defined by a rehabilitation and upgrading of ‘theoretical curiosity’ (theoretische Neugierde), the drive for a self-perpetuating cognitive progress within human reach, as well as the association of knowledge with mastery over nature. Rational enquiry was empowered by an imaginary horizon. A reflection on cultural images of autonomy must therefore start with this problematic unity of rationality and imagination, allowing for changing combinations, as well as for possibilities of imagination serving to sustain overambitious models of rationality, or rationality invoked to demarcate the realms of imagination. But as will be seen, early modern developments also entailed other changes conducive to advances of autonomy, from European expansion and exploration to rationalizing efforts of states moving beyond traditional modes of sacral legitimacy, and the next step is to consider the interaction of the evolving knowledge-centred and science-oriented image with other sociocultural dimensions, primarily within the tripartite framework presupposed here. That process is multifaceted and multidirectional; it involves new visions and understandings of autonomy generated by the impact of the cultural-scientific image on economic and political dynamics, but also shifts and nuancings resulting from adaptation to those other spheres; these trends interacted with internal mutations and problematizations of the image itself. Here it seems best to start with the last aspect. It should be

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reiterated that we are not dealing with the practices of scientific enquiry, but with science as a cultural, that is culturally interpreted activity. Interpretation draws and leans on practice but goes beyond it in historically changing ways. The initial projection of scientific enquiry as an expression and confirmation of human autonomy, emphasized by Blumenberg, was closely linked to the quest for certainty. This latter aim was part and parcel of the turn to knowledge, more precisely the human acquisition of knowledge, as a source of meaning; that was the demand to be satisfied – or, in terms closer to Blumenberg’s language – the question to be answered in simultaneous rivalry and disagreement with the inherited Christian world view. The rivalry was mimetic to the extent that the Christian tradition prefigured a strong and lasting imperative of meaningful orientation, but the disagreement was radical, inasmuch as the axis of meaning was turned from divine to human agency. This was the epoch-making shift that Blumenberg described as reoccupation (Umbesetzung). It is true that the search for new guarantees of certainty could lead to renewed affirmation of fundamental traditional beliefs (Descartes’s deductions from the cogito are a paradigmatic example), but even so, the relationship between this-worldly and other-worldly sources has been transformed. A whole set of factors leads to an internal disenchantment, a series of interconnected developments that make the cultural image of science more and more problematic in regard to both autonomy and meaning. Most of them were discussed by Max Weber in Science as a Vocation, but not all to the same degree, and later events have added to the picture. There is, first of all, the waning credibility of the quest for certainty. It took a long time for fallibilistic views to be theorized in the philosophy of science, but that perspective sums up a long-term experience, and Weber was well aware of the permanent self-revision that characterizes modern science. Another factor is the growing division of labour, which makes it increasingly difficult to grasp cognitive progress as a meaningful whole. Opaque constraints, together with the provisional status of the results and the unending interplay of revision and accumulation, turn the development of modern science into a self-sustaining process where the autonomy of the individual researcher shrinks to a subordinate position. Organized science becomes comparable to the other megamachines of modernity (a term Weber did not use), capitalism, and bureaucracy. More recent threats of destruction or catastrophic effects of unbalanced intervention have further tarnished the image of autonomy pursued through sheer accumulation of knowledge. The now widely accepted notion of the Anthropocene does not convey a message about human autonomy or sovereignty, but about self-destructive hubris. This does not mean that corrective measures are negligible or unrealistic, but they clearly demand difficult changes to civilizational, socioeconomic, and geopolitical structures.



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If the connection between autonomy and the organized growth of knowledge has proved problematic, the extensions of the cognitivist perspective into other spheres deserve some further comments. The ‘culture of growth’ (Mokyr 2018) that linked the Enlightenment to capitalist development and paved the way for a systematic application of science to production has already been noted. This line of transformation facilitated the conflation of autonomy with rational mastery, and variations on that theme could spread beyond the economic sphere, not least to the political one. Another offshoot of the same origin is the equation of human autonomy with inventive capacity, still occasionally invoked as the ‘ultimate resource’ (Simon 1998) that serves to defuse threats of ecological crisis. It may be recalled in passing that the most futuristic perspective adumbrated in Marx’s critique of capitalism was a combination of invention and mastery: A complete scientific organization of production, automation in later terms, was supposed to enable human control over it from the outside, instead of the direct participation that had in practice meant subordination to machines, and this was expected to change the very meaning of wealth, separating it from the exploitation of human resources and linking it to the development of human abilities. The text where this idea was formulated remained unknown for a long time and did not enter into the making of ideological Marxism; but it may be read as an indication of the more speculative possibilities open to visions of an alternative modernity. Political versions of autonomy perfected through scientific knowledge were most conspicuously formulated within the revolutionary tradition. At a certain point, the mixture of cultural memory and ideological projections derived from modern revolutions became receptive to the idea of scientific guidance, over and above the intellectual input of the radical Enlightenment. This landmark is not identical with Marx’s reorientation of revolutionary theory, although the appeal to turn to basic material preconditions of social life was a prefiguration of later and more streamlined reductionistic views; the turning point was Engels’s distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, which can now – with the wisdom of hindsight – be seen as a way of obscuring the religious dimensions of both. This was the beginning of a process that led to excesses and provoked criticism. The claim to scientific foresight and competence translated into a new hierarchy of revolutionary actors, a separation of the vanguard in possession of doctrinal truth and the masses to be mobilized. Implications and consequences of the most momentous vanguardist turn will be discussed in the next chapter. Instant criticisms of the authoritarian dynamic and the unacknowledged denial of autonomy inherent in this turn came from within the revolutionary movement. (Rosa Luxemburg and Lev Trotsky are the two exemplary cases, but their fate illustrates, albeit in different ways, the attraction and the force of what they were up against.) But the most conclusive criticism of both the authoritarian

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and the scientistic presuppositions was later developed by Castoriadis; his concept of autonomy was primarily developed through a re-examination of revolutionary theory and a new understanding of social-historical creativity as a source of revolutionary transformations. The latter aspect was incompatible with notions of centrally controlled and rationally planned change. What Castoriadis proposed to put in their place was the perspective of a reflective self-transformation, grounded in the ability of societies to question their own institutions and to articulate that capacity through public deliberation. As explained at the beginning of this book, its argument takes off from a more complex and ambiguous concept of autonomy, but links up with Castoriadis through the problematic of imaginary significations, which he discovered in the course of his critical engagement with Marxist revolutionary theory and its underlying conception of history. To conclude this discussion, a brief comment on the aesthetic dimension of the cultural sphere and its interpretive projections is in order. Modern perspectives on artistic creation are of a twofold character: On the one hand, art is extricated from traditional contexts, in the main religious ones, and recognized as an autonomous activity; on the other hand, its new independence enabled both a claim to primacy, an elevation above other domains of human activity, and a metaphorical extension to those other fields, portraying them as in some sense analogous to or modellable on art. The Renaissance is commonly seen as the original context of both trends; Burckhardt’s much quoted reference to the Renaissance state as a work of art exemplifies the metaphorical use. A primacy of art can be affirmed in extreme or more tentative and thoughtprovoking terms. The concept of aesthetic fundamentalism (Breuer 1995) was coined to describe a very specific current in German culture, the Stefan George School, most active in the interwar years. It seems applicable to other phenomena in European cultural life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but the George School is particularly illustrative of a paradoxical turn inevitably taken by such views. The absolutization of art leads to a rapprochement with religion, not in the sense of faith or confession but through implicit sacralization of the aesthetic act of creation. Approximations to the meanings traditionally invested in the sacred, rather than outright identifications, characterize this move; but the result is a question mark over the autonomy achieved by separation from religion. A related but more cautious and reflective shift in that direction can accompany the moderate commitment to a primacy of art. Here it will be useful to return briefly to Taylor’s interpretation of cultural modernity. His own stance is expressed clearly; on behalf of philosophers, he writes: ‘The artist is like the race-car driver, and we are the mechanics in the pit’ (Taylor 1989a, 512). It is a delusion to think that conceptual language can capture the insights of great artworks – especially



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literary ones – in more precise terms. This judgement is grounded in a genealogy of modernist art. That part of Taylor’s grand narrative is summed up as follows: ‘The Romantics made the poet or artist into the paradigm human being. Modernists have only accentuated this. The bringer of epiphanies cannot be denied a central place in human life’ (1989a, 481). The keywords in this statement call for closer interpretation. To begin with, the core of the Romantic ‘upheaval in thought and sensibility’ is identified with ‘the philosophy of nature as a source’ (1989a, 368). More precisely, the sought-after source is a source of meaning, to be expressed in exemplary works. This is what Taylor calls the expressivist turn; the concept of expression is supposed to cover the relationship of the human subject to inner as well as outer nature, and the connection of this double source to the work. The background to this view is, as Taylor terms it in a later work, a constitutive conception of language, first formulated in the late eighteenth century by Herder; it attributes ‘a creative role to expression’ and claims ‘that language introduces new meanings in our world’ (Taylor 2016, 39). Since this is a theme that Taylor wants to develop further and oppose to the more widely accepted reductionist philosophies of language, his account of the original Romantic breakthrough is obviously not unrelated to his decided position in contemporary debates. The expressivist interpretation of Romanticism serves a double purpose: to identify a paradigmatic case of the modern constitution of meaning, but also to grasp both the continuity and the discontinuity between this cultural episode and the more elusive but also more fundamental hints at meaning that Taylor attributes to some versions of modernist art and literature (not to modernism as a whole, which he regards as a heterogeneous cluster of currents). The connecting and at the same time distancing theme is the ‘notion of the work of art as issuing from or realizing an “epiphany” ’ (Taylor 1989a, 419). It is the separation of the epiphanic moment from the no longer tenable expressivist framework that defines Taylor’s preferred version of modernism. Questions might be raised about the adequacy of the expressivist paradigm, not only as to whether it fits the whole Romantic field of thought and sensibility but also in relation to its decline; if the Romantic vision of a meaningladen and integrative union between inner and outer nature disintegrated, that may have had something to do with an overstretch of the very notion of expression. These issues will not be discussed here. It is more important to follow Taylor’s transition to the post-Romantic version of epiphanic art, and his main emphasis is on external factors undermining the expressivist conception. Changing philosophical and scientific images of both inner and outer nature demystified the erstwhile sources of meaning; social, economic, and technological transformations confronted art with a new environment and new possibilities. Among the responses to a changing world, it is the

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maintenance of epiphany in a radically new guise that Taylor singles out. The term cannot be used without invoking its religious connotations, and Taylor speaks about seeking contact with moral and spiritual sources. But the modernist version of epiphany is, as he puts it, interstitial (the terms ‘interspatial’ and ‘intertemporal’ are also used). It is, in other words, not concentrated in a core symbol or overarching idea; it can only be apprehended through contextual horizons, and even so, it remains an intimation of meaning beyond explicit articulation. On this level of indeterminacy, the concept of expression is no longer applicable. Instead, the concept of articulation, increasingly prominent in Taylor’s later work, comes to the fore, and two implications should be noted. Articulation is, more emphatically than expression, associated with adding levels of meaning, and thus with creating something new, but it also involves an unending broadening of horizons and ever-renewed questions about its limits. In a concluding statement, Taylor refers to the ‘epiphanic nature of much of modern art’ as an ‘interweaving of the subjective and the transcendent’ (1989a, 493). Although the concept of transcendence does not figure as a key category in Sources of the Self, this formulation is a convincing finale to the encounter with Romantic and post-Romantic culture, and it helps to clarify Taylor’s place in the phenomenological universe of discourse, fundamental to his thinking even when it is not overtly invoked. The distinctive contribution of phenomenology, notably in its later stages (after the retreat from its original foundationalist ambitions), is a new understanding of transcendence that links elementary dimensions to ultimate horizons. The former aspect is exemplified by Renaud Barbaras’s notion of ‘a transcendence irreducible to objectivity and an existence irreducible to immanence’ (Barbaras 2012, 15). These elementary features are already evident to a phenomenological analysis of perception, and they imply that inwardness – central to Taylor’s explorations of modern culture – is always already, explicitly or not, intertwined with being in the world. The farther horizons are most forcefully expressed in Patočka’s conception of a ‘double transcendence’, formulated as a basic anthropological category in a critique of neo-Marxist thinkers who did not do justice to the complexity of the human condition (Patočka 2006). On this view, the ability to transcend and change social forms of life, in imagination as well as in practice, is – in varying ways – interconnected with the transcending of experiential givenness towards the open horizon of the world; the latter aspect of transcendence can involve the belief in or search for something beyond the world, or at least a reflection on such attitudes. This framework is well suited to integrate Taylor’s reflections on modern art in general and epiphanic art in particular, including its sometimes bewildering encounters with social and political forces.



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The above survey, short and selective as it is, suggests a multipolar and multidirectional field of meaning, constitutive of cultural modernity. Detailed exploration of its ramifications is beyond the scope of this book. But it seems clear that unifying frameworks, whether shared projects or central interpretive conflicts, must be understood as superimpositions on this field. The example that first comes to mind is the idea of progress, so widely shared that it has often been cited as a defining feature of modernity (and its supposed demise as a justification for proclaiming the arrival of postmodernity). But it is also a prime example of shared horizons open to rival interpretations. Alain Touraine identified it as the contested cultural model at stake in the central class conflict of industrial society; we need not accept the notion of industrial society to agree that alternative visions of progress – liberal-bourgeois on the one hand, socialist and working-class based on the other – were a crucial aspect of European social and political struggles in the decades before the onset of a civilizational crisis in 1914. During the short twentieth century, the two main alternative modernities represented distinctive and incompatible models of progress (that description is less applicable to the third alternative, briefly but disastrously ascendant between 1933 and 1945, but as will be seen, it fits into the story at another level). When the global rivalry came to an end with the apparent demise of one side, the response of the other was a claim to have finally reconciled order and progress, setting the latter on a definitive course. The so-called end of history was, on closer examination, a mirage of stabilized and undisputed progress. The question of premodern equivalents or analogies to the idea of progress was long controversial, but the answer now seems to be that neither the notion of cyclical patterns in cosmos and history, somewhat exaggeratedly ascribed to classical antiquity, nor the other-worldly orientation more clearly characteristic of medieval Christianity, exclude partial affinities with the modern idea of progress. Advances in various fields and strengthenings of human abilities were recognized. The novelty of modern conceptions at their strongest is best described in terms of a triple totalization. The idea of progress was expanded to the whole past and the open future; human history, including its reasonable expectations, was thus identified with a cumulative, though not necessarily continuous, dynamic of progress. Secondly, the idea of progress was generalized across the spectrum of sociocultural spheres; unequal development could not be ignored, nor could the fact that advances were easier to document in some domains than in others, but the overall pattern was a comprehensive forward movement. Over and above that, progress meant an ongoing improvement of the human condition. Obviously, this totalizing vision ran into empirical difficulties and generated conceptual problems of its own; the ambiguities, dissonances, and undersides of really existing progress could not be overlooked, nor could the problem of finding a common denominator

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applying across the multiple domains be easily solved, and a balance sheet for changes in the human condition was an elusive promise. Some landmarks and critical points in the process of coping with these difficulties should be noted, and it seems best to begin with another look at Blumenberg’s genealogy of modernity. As we have seen, Blumenberg’s reflections on the early modern pursuit of autonomy through the quest for knowledge suggest that this turn was also an opening to modern ideas of progress. To make this connection is to reject the simple notion of secularization as the translation or transposition of Christian beliefs (in this case salvation) into another language. As Blumenberg sees it, the idea of self-determined and self-affirming progress, exemplified by the growth of knowledge, is a counter-project to medieval Christian conceptions of a divine order encompassing the human condition; but in challenging that tradition, it also enters into a universe of meaning where the legitimacy of the new orientation has to be demonstrated through a contest with the old ones, on a comparably sweeping scale. This was at first anticipated by broadly articulated perspectives of human freedom to know, act, and create, as well as human mastery over nature. To be sustainable, these expectations had to be translated into more concrete terms; at that point, another aspect of Blumenberg’s argument becomes relevant. As he put it, the sacral world of language (Sprachwelt) survives the sacral world of things (Sachwelt). There is, in other words, an enduring tendency to draw on explicitly or implicitly sacral language to express secular assumptions and ambitions. This does not necessarily entail literal borrowings. The concept of mimetic rivalry may be useful in this context: an overtly non-religious or antireligious line of interpretation could be articulated in ways latently imitating or functionally analogous to sacral discourse and symbolism. There was another thinker, also with a phenomenological background, who confronted the same problems as Blumenberg, but from a different angle. Jan Patočka’s unfinished analysis of modernity as a civilization was briefly introduced at the beginning of this chapter; here we can draw on a later text, apparently written at the end of the 1960s (Patočka 2002), which discusses the ‘cult of the human being’ and its crisis. This cult culminates in the nineteenth century, and for Patočka, two phases of thought were decisive: the Hegelian philosophy of Spirit, portraying humanity and its history as the necessary realizers of divine thoughts, and Marx’s radical twist to the anthropological absorption of theology, already achieved by the Young Hegelians. It is Marx’s vision of humanity saving itself from the state of alienation that conclusively justifies the reference to a cult; it represents a rival equivalent to salvation. But a closer look at the background to these developments reveals a longer history. Patočka refers to a ‘crossing of two traditions’: on the one hand Christian theology enriched by speculative philosophy, on the other the



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mechanistic world view of the emerging natural sciences. Theology provides a meaningful perspective, mechanism guarantees the dynamics of realization. Blumenberg would presumably have objected that theology represents a challenge to be matched, rather than a direct source, and in view of the innovative ideas proposed, that seems convincing; he would also have noted that the appeal to a dynamism modelled on natural science presupposes the dynamism of growing knowledge, gaining access to nature. But it still seems justified to speak of an interaction or crossing of two traditions, especially when we take into account that the transformation in question involves a long-term process, with possibilities of growing or decreasing distance from the Christian background. Moving back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, we can easily identify a text that identifies autonomy and progress in maximalist terms, without visibly significant connections to theology. Condorcet’s essay on the progress of the human mind, first published in 1795, expresses a belief in the rational capacities of human beings as guarantees of a future global liberation, equality, and harmony. That was, admittedly, not the only view voiced within the Enlightenment. For example, Adam Ferguson’s work on the history of civil society paints a much more nuanced picture of ambiguities and uncertainties inherent in progress. Needless to recall, Hegel was well aware of these divergences, and his re-metaphysicized vision of progress through reason in history, on a long march towards the modern state, may be read as a reconciling synthesis, obliged to rethink the relationship to Christianity. The multiple legacies of Hegelianism were absorbed into rival currents of nineteenth-century thought. As Gauchet (2007a, 201) puts it, ‘The golden age of liberalism was also the golden age of progress’, more precisely of the belief in and the varying but interconnected views on progress. This dominant cultural orientation is closely linked to a new sense of history; to use Koselleck’s term, history becomes a ‘collective singular’, and it seems appropriate to speak of a social imaginary centred on progress, and although the liberal articulations are particularly salient, they are part of a more complex and variegated pattern. For the purposes of general orientation, we can distinguish two axes of differentiation. On an ideological level, the opposite poles are a strictly liberal conception of progress within and in harmony with an established but improvable order, and a radical one, incorporating a revolutionary perspective into the idea of progress. The liberal alternative can have more or less conservative connotations; as Gauchet shows, ‘It opens itself to the future, consecrates the ability to produce it, while at the same time maintaining it within the orbit of identity with the present and the past’ (Gauchet 2007a, 203). Progress under the sign of continuity is the keyword for this position. The radical conception, at its most emphatic, takes both the industrial and the democratic revolutions on board and announces a future one that will perfect their legacies. This is the

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vision formulated in the Communist Manifesto. But Marx’s thought, there and later, has fundamental affinities with the liberal tradition, not least through his emphasis on the free development of the individual as the highest value. The other dividing line, related to the first, concerns the interconnections of autonomy and progress. On the one hand, the assumption of harmony between the two presupposes a mutual adaptation. Progress as continuity is most easily reconcilable with self-limiting notions of autonomy, summed up in what Peter Wagner (1993) calls restricted liberal modernity, characterized by resistance to the extension of citizenship and – more generally – by a reluctance to confront the transformative implications of processes at work. But there was also a way of broadening this frame of reference: the notion of ‘the people’, conceived as ‘the authentic political subject of history’ and ‘the collective hero of history as progress’ (Gauchet 2007a, 197) cuts across the divide between liberal and radical currents and enhances the opening to the future. On the other hand, aspects of progress can be perceived as contrary to a more or less normatively reinforced notion of autonomy. Problems of this kind range from the destructive side of technological progress and the disconnection of urban and rural life to fear of power accumulated beyond the ability to use it in a responsible fashion. They lend themselves to conservative, liberal, and radical interpretations. But to round off the picture, attempts to shift the idea of progress to a higher level of abstraction and thus to immunize it against criticism should be mentioned; Herbert Spencer’s definition of progress as change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous is an extreme example. Seen against this background, the critique of progress contained in key works of classical sociology becomes more significant. This common problematic has been obscured by conventional distinctions, be it the opposition of Durkheim and Weber as defenders of the liberal-bourgeois order to Marx as its critic, or of Marx and Weber as theorists of capitalism to Durkheim as a pioneering analyst of industrial society. Marx’s enquiry into capitalist development was a critique of the alienating form taken by progress beyond the narrow horizons of fundamentally stagnant pre-capitalist societies. Capital played a civilizing role, but in a way that increased structural inequality, excluded the majority of people from access to and participation in the civilizational achievements, and aggravated the tensions between private ownership and social potential of the productive forces. Weber went beyond Marx in emphasizing the fundamental and inescapable ambiguity of the developments perceived as progress; the threats to individual liberty, the transfer of rationality to structures beyond control by their creators, and the loss of scope for creativity (which he identified with the partly over-individualized and partly but indeterminately impersonal notion of charisma) are familiar themes of his work. Although Durkheim’s foundational book on the division



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of social labour has been understood as a more straightforward theory and defence of progress than anything to be found in the other major classics, closer reading of his work has highlighted a more complex argument. The original account of the division of labour as a progressive trend, in moral as well as technical terms, is accompanied by a long list of pathologies that deform its existing version. Durkheim’s answer to that was to invoke the moral core of the social bond as an ultimate guarantee of reform; the corrections that he proposed were essentially a matter of establishing closer links between the economic activities and the moral centre of advanced societies. But continuing reflection on this task led him on the one hand to place more emphasis on politics and particularly on the possibilities of democracy; his unfinished work on that subject left unsettled questions about the prospects of modern politics. On the other hand, he had to clarify the relationship between morality and religion, the question of religious factors in the constitution of society and the prospects for moral education in a society no longer subject to the traditional kind of religious regulation. This line of thought culminated in his book on the elementary forms of religious life. A path-breaking interpretation of primitive religion and the most seminal work ever written on the sociology of religion is thus rooted in critical reflections on progress. More examples might be added, but the main point is reasonably clear. The later classics of sociology, active between 1890 and 1920, not only advanced beyond Marx in emphasizing the autonomy of religion and politics, thus demolishing the basis-superstructure model (this is now widely accepted), but also redefined and enriched the critique of progress. The image of the decades before 1914 as a time of unperturbed belief in progress has been discredited, but discussions of this topic have somewhat disproportionately stressed Nietzsche’s critique (that also applies to Gauchet 2007b, who portrays Nietzsche as a prophetic critic of the ‘liberal idols’, science, people, and progress). Classical sociology can be seen as a distinctive current of critique (Weber was undoubtedly influenced by Nietzsche, but the extent of that connection has not been fully clarified). But more generally speaking, it remains true that the pre-war critique of progress was neither unified nor conclusive, and European thought was therefore not well prepared for the crisis that erupted in 1914. As for attempts to link up with this aspect of the classical sociological legacy, before and after another war, the most interesting example is the work of Norbert Elias. His magnum opus on the civilizing process, first published on the eve of World War I, may be described as a conditional and de-emphasized restatement of the idea of progress. A long-term transformative process, centred on the gradual consolidation of statehood, is interpreted as a framework for broader changes, including the containment of violence, economic development, and the growth of knowledge. But this version of progress was not guaranteed against breakdown (in fact, the book was

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written with a view to the major breakdown that was happening in Central Europe and having increasingly global repercussions); further, at a later stage, Elias took the view that although it was legitimate to speak of advances in various areas, there was no overall progress (es gibt Fortschritte, aber keinen Fortschritt). Bedřich Loewenstein (2015) has argued that in the wake of 1914, a ‘paradigm of war’ challenged the idea of progress. On this view, the new historical experience of total mobilization for war became a focus of meaning, overshadowing the visions earlier associated with the idea of progress. It seems undeniable that such a paradigm emerged, but it needs to be seen in the context of more diverse responses to the war. Loewenstein’s main source for the ideological currents in question is the work of writers associated with the ‘conservative revolution’ in Weimar Germany (whether there was a movement unified enough to deserve that label is strongly disputed). Over and above that, the paradigm of war fits the outlook of the National Socialist regime. The idea of racial war, underpinned by anti-Semitism and translated into a programme of imperial conquest in Eastern Europe, to be followed in the longer term by a bid for world domination that would involve a conflict with the United States, was to all intents and purposes a total project, leaving no opening to broader horizons. Some recent scholarship on Hitler and his strategy (especially Simms 2019) has stressed the ultimate perspective of war against the Anglo-American powers; but this is not a question of strategic priorities: the conquest of the East was a concrete short-term goal, world domination a much more distant one. And there is no justification for downplaying the fundamental role of anti-Semitism. In any case, the paradigm of war was destroyed by the defeat of Germany in 1945, and a revival seems inconceivable. Among other responses to World War I, the Leninist strategy of turning imperialist war into an international civil one stands out as the most momentous. But although it has points of contact with the paradigm of war, it did not – as the latter – displace the idea of progress. On the contrary, the justification for an all-out class war was a promise of renewed and unprecedented progress. Moreover, the road to this future was supposedly mapped out by a comprehensive ideology with world-view pretensions. The regimes that followed this path will be discussed in later chapters. But first we need a detour through history, complementary to the theoretical background. Before embarking on that path, it will be useful to sum up some implications of the aforementioned reflections on meaning and modernity. The multiple centres, clusters, and horizons of meaning constitute a field of variety unequalled in other spheres and, therefore, a major factor in the multiplication of modernity. Taylor’s distinction (probably provisional) between a structural unity and a cultural diversity of modern societies, quoted before, is not



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convincing; but even if we allow for differentiating processes in the three spheres discussed here, it can be accepted that the cultural one is eminently conducive to such developments. Its diversifying potential is due to internal sources as well as to unprecedently varied encounters with other cultural worlds. The themes and perspectives singled out in this chapter do not exhaust the matter, but they might serve to frame a broad survey of connections and ramifications. Their impact on economic and political cultures; on ideologies and patterns of collective identity; and on visions of past, present, and future certainly merits more extensive comparative enquiry than has hitherto been attempted. Analyses of that scope would exceed the limits of this book. But there is another side to the problematic of meaning and modernity, and it constitutes the background to arguments developed in later chapters. To clarify the underlying issue, we should briefly return to Patočka’s interpretation of the modern ‘supercivilization’ and its internal conflict. Patočka saw the radical current in modern civilization as a recurrent attempt to impose a unifying and meaningful framework on the value orientations that have marked the rise and advance of this new cultural formation. He emphasized the double focus on the striving for freedom and the progress of knowledge, the search for an idea of rationality that would encompass both these goals, and the analogy with unifying patterns of traditional civilizations. This last-named feature represented the paradox of modern radicalism: it was an effort to emulate a traditional achievement on the basis of modern cultural presuppositions. More than half a century later, a return to this problematic will have to revise some basic assumptions. The modern field of meanings is more variegated and centrifugal than the duality of freedom and knowledge could account for, and the exclusive stress on constructions of rationality leaves the role of the imagination in the quest for synthesizing frames of reference untheorized. Patočka’s point about the affinity with traditional visions of unity is valid and would seem eminently compatible with Blumenberg’s concept of Umbesetzung; the interpretive move in question is an insertion of interconnected modern significations into a cultural space left vacant by the disintegration or retreat of traditional ones. But this meaningful connection should not be mistaken for a generally valid explanatory key. The constructions of civilizational unity may be linked to projects of comprehensive change, to visions of progress contained within an orderly framework, or to backward-looking utopias of restored order (traditionalism of that kind is always suffused with modern connotations). Notwithstanding the affinities between these different trends, it is therefore inappropriate to subsume them all under the label of radicalism. On the other hand, there are good reasons to explore the implications of Patočka’s argument for another notion that will figure in the following chapter. The concept of totalitarianism can only be clarified and defended in

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relation to historical contexts, but some preconditions for its use should be foreshadowed. If the simplifications that have discredited it are to be avoided, we must begin with general questions about its place in the modern context. The claim that ‘because pluralism is modern, totalitarianism is also modern’ (Heller 2017, 107) is far too simple. Pluralism as such is not a distinctively modern phenomenon; it is enough to note the patterns of religious pluralism that were institutionalized in various premodern civilizations. It can more plausibly be argued that the modern version of pluralism is unprecedented in its depth and diversity: it involves not just the proliferation of world views, ideologies, and political currents, but of significations with divergent and often opposite effects on articulations of the world and of social life. Responses to this radicalized pluralism also differ and diverge, and even those characterized by strong unifying ambitions are not all of a piece. There is no justification for associating them all with totalitarian intentions. The synthesizing effort that Patočka regarded as the culmination of modern civilizational radicalism was a world view enabling the legitimation of a political project in terms of cosmological laws governing nature and society. This was the official doctrine of Marxism-Leninism; although Patočka stressed its hubristic rationalist pretensions, the underlying imaginary significations are easily identified. The ‘scientific world view’ was not a mere summary of cognitive items borrowed from various sources; the very possibility of a scientific and at the same time normative cosmology, beyond the inescapably fragmentary character of really existing scientific knowledge, had to be imagined; similarly, the notion of a rationally planned road to a new society, going beyond the uncertain indications found in the older Marxian tradition, was a leap of the imagination. But these inventions took place in and through a civilizational crisis and a political upheaval; the totalitarian complex can only be understood as a response to that constellation, reinforced but not preprogrammed by an ideological component.

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Contexts and Phases of Modernity

If multiple modernities are different versions of and responses to the civilizational problematics outlined earlier, they must also be considered in terms of the contexts in which they take shape. The list of such settings can start with nation state: one aspect of the idea of multiple modernities is that it enables us to take the national variations on modern themes more seriously. Such variations can, of course, have repercussions far beyond their original borders. The debate on contrasts and parallels between English and French roads to modernity is an obvious example. Japanese modernity is, whatever we make of its broader significance, a particularly salient national configuration. Beyond national borders, we can at least in some cases speak of regional paths to and patterns of modernity. In the European context, the Nordic region and Central Europe are cases in point. East Asia, very clearly demarcated as a historical region, has also attracted interest because of its modernizing upheavals and processes. But that part of the world is, at the same time, a favourite example for those who stress the role of civilizational legacies and their interaction with the new civilization of modernity. On this level, unity is more contested than on the regional one: some analysts have defended the notion of a Confucian civilization common to East Asian societies but subject to significant variations within political borders. Another view portrays the region as a ‘Sinicized world’ (Vandermeersch 2004), a domain of Chinese civilization, without reducing the latter to its Confucian components. A third interpretation, developed in great detail by Eisenstadt, makes a case for a specific Japanese civilization, fundamentally different from the Chinese one. The notion of alternative modernities, sometimes used interchangeably with multiple modernities, should be reserved for patterns that compete for supremacy in the global arena, and especially for those that aim at replacing a dominant pattern. In that sense, Communism was the twentieth-century 77

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alternative modernity par excellence. Its record will be discussed in later chapters, but when it comes to the East Asian part of that story, it will be necessary to relate the alternative aspirations to all the other aforementioned dimensions. Finally, a separate category of global modernities should be added to the list. It can be defined in the double sense of successive and changing global constellations within which more localized modernizing processes take place, and of different global configurations of modern economic, political, and cultural patterns. Each of these three transformative forces has unfolded in its specific way, not in the closely and hierarchically coordinated fashion envisaged by world systems theory. The final part of the following discussion will deal with these issues. PERIODIZING MODERNITY To sum up, the multiplication of modernity is due to the plurality of basic, recurrent but adaptable components, as well as to the more open-ended variety of historical contexts. There is, however, a third side to the theoretical agenda, hitherto less widely discussed than the aspects noted above: the question of successive modernities. It is important for the contextualization of themes foregrounded in this book and should therefore be clarified before moving on to specifics. The problem at issue is not reducible to the changing global constellations just mentioned. It has to do with periodizations of modernity as such, involving all five contexts of multiplication – national, regional, civilizational, alternative, and global – and formulated in terms of historical epochs, within which significant changes can take place. The main shortcoming of debates on this topic has been a lack of contact between two very different but equally inconclusive frames of reference. On the one hand, there are interpretive models that distinguish between stages of modernity, but clearly with a primary intention of defining its mature version, and sometimes with an explicit focus on recent history. The most widely cited argument of this kind was probably Ulrich Beck’s distinction between a first and a second modernity, which suffered from several major conceptual flaws. It remained unclear whether second modernity was to be understood as a condition already achieved, or as an expected outcome of transformations under way; it was even presented as the promise of a new society without the trouble of revolution. A similar ambiguity surrounded the question of structure and agency in the transition: the shift to second modernity was sometimes characterized as a strictly systemic transformation, but according to other formulations it seemed to require a new type of social actor. Finally, and in the present context most importantly, the emphasis on recent and contemporary



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history results in a vague and overstretched notion of first modernity, applied to an indeterminate period and reminiscent of earlier modernization theory at its most streamlined. A much more conceptually articulated and rigorously argued model of successive modernities was proposed by Peter Wagner (1993). He distinguished between an early and restricted version of liberal modernity, beginning with the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, and a phase of organized modernity, characterized by the interventionist and welfarist states of the twentieth century; these two modernities were separated by a period of crisis, marked by structural problems, new political and social challenges, and acute conflicts. Organized modernity was, on this view, in turn, succeeded by a crisis that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. Wagner’s periodizing scheme then concluded with the hypothesis of an advanced liberal modernity in the making; while this was neither an established fact nor a foregone outcome, and the perspective of an upgraded liberal regime with reaffirmed social and egalitarian qualifications ran counter to the fin-de-siècle neoliberal trends, the pattern outlined by Wagner appeared as a possible and adequate response to the second crisis of modernity. His later writings (2012, 2013) do not contain a comprehensive revision of the 1993 scheme; but he now refers to a ‘destructuring of organized modernity’ (2012, 164), rather than an emerging advanced liberal modernity. This approach to periodization is open to two objections, both historically grounded. In the first place, the model of three phases and two crises is clearly derived from Northern Euro-Atlantic experience and projected onto a larger stage. It becomes the more problematic, the further east we move in the Eurasian macro-region. The particular issue of including totalitarian regimes in the category of organized modernity is not adequately discussed. A closer look at Russian, Chinese, and Japanese modernities raises the question of different civilizational contexts and their impact on the sequence of modern transformations. If we accept the formative involvement of civilizational legacies in the differentiation of modernity, the possibility of divergent periodization must be considered. For one thing, it seems obvious that neither the imperial trajectory of modern Japan (1868–1945) nor its post-war sequel fits the model of liberal modernity, but it is equally counter-intuitive to subsume these two very different historical patterns under a Western-rooted concept of organized modernity. The point can be made in more general terms: questions of periodization should be aligned with the comparative analysis of varying modernities, with a view to defining specific successivities. The second argument has to do with the overall perspective on modernity and the question of its possible or previsible point of arrival. In Wagner’s model, it is the prospect of an advanced liberal modernity that enables us to grasp an earlier liberal framework as restricted; and the understanding of

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organized modernity and its crisis is not uninfluenced by assumptions about an advanced liberal alternative. In short, the periodizing construct presupposes an interpretive frame of reference that is certainly not deterministic, nor teleological in any straightforward sense, but undeniably conducive to visions of maturity or completion. There has, as far as I can judge, been no significant further progress of the debate on successive modernities, and the conceptual scheme used here does not lend itself to ambitious attempts of that kind. Periodization in terms of basic structural features will not be proposed; comparative studies are not advanced enough for that, and it is an open question how far any long-term developmental patterns can be generalized. The above outline of modern cultural and institutional patterns does not suggest any optimal or conclusive synthesis, and their present constellation seems, in any case, more likely to result in a major crisis than in progress towards unity. On the other hand, no kind of history or historically grounded reflection can do without periodization, and some account of successive modernities is therefore in order. The following sketch is a minimalist and provisional conjecture, needed to provide a background to the focus on recent developments in later chapters. It is probably true to say that a majority of historical sociologists interested in the making and unfolding of modernity tend to take the revolutionary changes beginning in the late eighteenth century – economic, political, and intellectual – as a starting point. By contrast, the idea of early modernity as a distinctive period, going back to landmark events with long-term implications traditionally described by German historians as beginnings of the Neuzeit, is now commonly accepted by historians and has become a major focus of scholarship. There are, as I will try to show, good reasons to integrate this longer perspective into the theorizing of modernity. This move should not begin with a shorthand substantive definition of the early modern period (or its subdivisions); rather, the task is to identify key features and clarify their significance for the civilizational imaginary that is central to the present enquiry. Historical research has increasingly highlighted the epoch-making importance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (on bringing the fifteenth century in, see Boucheron 2012, a path-breaking collective effort by French historians). This chronological demarcation of modernity is, admittedly, challenged by two other approaches to European history. One line of periodization stresses the many-sided changes of European society and culture from the twelfth century onwards and traces a long road to modernity, while another makes a case for ‘long Middle Ages’ from the late Roman Empire to the eighteenth century. These alternatives cannot be discussed at length here. Concerning the first view, I will merely indicate agreement with those who have analysed the twelfth-century transformation and its sequel as efflorescence within the civilization of Western Christendom (which obviously



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created preconditions for the more radical ruptures that took place later). As for the second, the most effective criticism is to underline the fundamental novelty of the trends and departures taken to mark the transition to modernity. Early modern innovations will, for present purposes, be discussed in two contexts, European and extra-European; not that they are unrelated, but to grasp the nature of their interconnections, each side must first be briefly characterized. In the European setting, four major developments mark the onset of early modernity. The first has to do with European expansion but calls for a more precise description; it was neither a beginning from zero nor the first phase of a continuous drive to global hegemony. European states and other powers had expanded in several directions during the Middle Ages, with varying motives and mixed results; the fifteenth-century Iberian ventures into the Atlantic were a new move, and they soon led to conquests and contacts that resulted in a transformation of Europe’s global position. Two aspects of this emerging constellations should be distinguished. The Atlantic field of expansion became a multi-continental configuration. In the two Americas, European conquerors destroyed indigenous empires and spread diseases that caused much wider devastation; this was the first breakthrough of overseas colonialism (the problematic of transoceanic empires was noted in the preceding chapter), but also the starting point for sociocultural transformations that diverged in various ways from developments in the European centres. Colonial use of resources in the Americas necessitated the import of unfree labour from Africa; the slave trade thus became an integral part of the early modern constellation and the starkest reminder of the fact that autonomy developed in conjunction with enslavement and exploitation (Lӧwith 1968), but this part of the story is not reducible to colonial domination. It involved European interaction with strong African states, and the final wave of colonialism in Africa came after the abolition of the slave trade. The other main arena was the Eurasian one, made more accessible by the opening of a maritime route to India and then extended all the way to Japan. In this context, European expansion did not, for a long time, go beyond the establishment of commercial footholds and the kind of interstitial empire exemplified by the Portuguese presence in India. European powers had to adjust to a geopolitical environment dominated by states of imperial size and some smaller but vigorous centres. Moreover, a survey of the Eurasian frontier must also cover relations with the Islamic world, marked at this stage by mixed fortunes. The completion of Christian reconquest on the Iberian Peninsula was a major event, with ideological and political resonances that favoured mobilization for further expansion; but visions of a continuing offensive against Islam were quickly disappointed. Stalemate in the Mediterranean, retreat in East Central and Southeastern Europe, and minimal territorial footholds in the Indian Ocean set the scene for a long-lasting coexistence with the Islamic

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world. In brief, the outcome of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century geopolitical shifts was a new global constellation that gave Europe, and particularly the states of its Atlantic seaboard, a broader orbit of power but also opened up a broader range of contacts with other civilizations than before and did not as yet lead to significant gains vis-à-vis the major Eurasian empires. At the same time, these changes enabled the development of commercial networks, linked to European power but reaching beyond its domain; how important they were for the long-term build-up to later economic transformations is a matter of debate, but they certainly belong to the activating preconditions of modern capitalism. Another early modern landmark is the schism of Western Christendom, or more precisely the conflict of two reformations, Protestant and Catholic. It seems clear that there is no comparably momentous division in the history of other religions, especially when the ramifications of divergent aspirations to reform are taken into account. The record of debates on this aspect of the genealogy of modernity is complicated. The most ambitious attempt to trace causal connections between the early modern religious background and the release of transformative social forces, Weber’s analysis of the Protestant ethic, sparked a controversy that went off at multiple tangents and obscured the fact that Weber’s own work had moved beyond this opening venture, towards a more pluralistic perspective that recognizes both the complexity of religious cultures and their intertwinings with other factors. That approach, supported by better understanding of Weber but also open to questions beyond his horizons, now seems well established. Here we cannot enter into detailed discussion, but some crucial links to other landmarks of early modernity should be underlined. The enlarged arena of European expansion magnified the effects of the religious schism. Most importantly, the conquest of the Americas, beginning more tentatively in the North than in the South, provided spaces where the two reformations could realize their aims in conditions different from the original European context; Eisenstadt’s argument to the effect that this meant a stronger civilizational impact is plausible, but has yet to be integrated into a more historically grounded comparison of the two Americas. Another connection between religious rivalry and global reach was the Catholic mission in Asia, which may be seen as part of the effort to gain the upper hand in the contest of two reformations; the effort failed, in particularly striking ways in China and Japan, but it led to significant advances in European knowledge of the countries in question and is, for that reason, important for the early history of Oriental studies (on these origins and their irreducibility to later constructions of Orientalism, see App 2010). The religious schism also interacted with a third aspect of early modernity. Historians have stressed the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century rise of the ‘new monarchies’ in England, France, and Spain; this was a phase of consolidated



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statehood after fragmentation and conflicts. Historical scholarship on these kingdoms has emphasized the limits of their state capacities, but preconditions for later state-building initiatives (as well as critical turns of state formation, including revolutionary processes) were undeniably created; and if transformations of the political sphere are a key part of the civilizational reorientation towards autonomy, this line of development is not the least important. The roads taken by the new monarchies were related to the religious schism, but in two different ways. On a general level, the conflict of the two reformations contributed to the autonomization of state power, culminating in the principle cuius regio, eius religio; this was not a de-sacralizing move, but a shift to a more indirect mode of sacral power. In specific terms, the impact of the schism and the repositioning of the Catholic Church on internal dynamics of the three states – England, France, and Spain – was very different. One more turning trend marks the beginning of early modernity. Achievements and interpretations of the scientific revolution stand out as defining features of an epochal shift. Late medieval impulses and antecedents are now widely acknowledged and can be traced back to developments in scholastic thought (Rexroth 2018); but the importance of the Copernican moment, conventionally named after the scholar whose seminal work was published in 1543, is not in doubt. Although the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric model was not, in itself, an unheard-of innovation, it occurred in a context that ensured long-term transformative consequences. As Hans Blumenberg (1975) has shown, the anthropological implications of the Copernican turn emerged in conjunction with other early modern changes of outlook, including the upgrading of cognitive progress as a human achievement and a road to power, as well as the Protestant separation of the ‘world of nature’ from the ‘world of grace’ (1975, 375). The Copernican revolution became a code word for radically new perspectives on the human situation in the world, and a metaphorical prototype for further breakthroughs, most famously the Kantian revolution in philosophy. A noteworthy aspect of this unfolding reorientation is the ‘action through reaction’ (1975, 416), the reinforcing of the Copernican message through successive encounters with opponents. Taken together, these historical landmarks add up to a constellation novel enough to divide an end from a beginning and broad enough to encompass the sociocultural spheres analysed here as dimensions of human autonomy. But if we follow the main thrust of historical scholarship, early modernity is to be understood as an epoch lasting much longer than the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century transition. The predominant model of periodization takes the story to the latter half of the eighteenth century. For present purposes, we therefore need at least a brief comment on the longue durée of early modernity. Two parts of that trajectory stand out as particularly significant. The first is the Thirty Years’ War, seen as a general crisis of the European order and a

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multidimensional transformative event. It set the seal on the division of Western Christendom and put an end to visions of an imperial hegemony aligned with the Catholic Church. The outcome was a compromise that stabilized the emerging new relationship between political power and religious authority, rebalanced in favour of the former; it also imposed a new pattern of interstate relations (despite recent critical objections, it still seems appropriate to speak of a Westphalian phase of European geopolitics). At the same time, the enormously destructive impact of the war on Germany had long-term consequences for the balance of power and the possibilities of strategic dominance within the European world. The following phase, from the middle of the seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, is best characterized in terms of two historical forces: absolutism and Enlightenment. Objections to the former concept have drawn on empirical evidence of multiple limits to the power of rulers claiming absolute authority; but from a viewpoint grounded in the problematic of social imaginaries, this is not a decisive consideration. The imaginary significations invested in power are integral to its exercise and constitutive of its historical meaning, but not literal blueprints for its functioning. In the case of the European monarchies during the period in question, the aspirations and imaginings that gave rise to the concept of absolutism were operative enough to put their mark on the period, and there is no reason to abandon their conceptual legacy; but this is not to suggest a direct correlation or correspondence between the imaginary and the institutional levels. The structural bases of state formation, especially the fiscal and military capacities, did not necessarily develop in line with the ascribed or pretended authority of rulers. British seventeenth-century revolutions blocked the road to absolutism, but state building in eighteenth-century Britain was more sustained than elsewhere in the region, and this example also shows that the military aspect of state power was not always as closely connected to the internal monopoly of violence as Elias’s work on the civilizing process suggests. British maritime supremacy was a particular but globally decisive case. The other long-term defining aspect of early modernity is the Enlightenment. As is well known, it has often been and still is invoked as the core pattern and path-breaking force of modernity tout court. Those who defend a project of modernity tend to identify it, more or less directly, with a project of the Enlightenment. The line of argument to be developed here excludes such views. Neither modernity nor the Enlightenment can be encapsulated in projects, but the latter is a key part of the processual configuration to be considered and a link between early modernity and the next step of the proposed periodization. The relationship between absolutism and the Enlightenment was complex and ambiguous. To the extent that absolutism and its emphasis on reasons of



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state involved a shift in the balance between sacred and secular power, and in that sense a certain upgrading of human autonomy in a crucial domain, it could be perceived as both a novelty and a challenge to be met with more radical affirmations of autonomy, and this became a major concern of the Enlightenment. Conversely, ideas of the Enlightenment could, up to a point, be adopted by absolutist rulers, and some cases came to be known as examples of enlightened absolutism. The two poles were, to a significant degree, dependent on a common language, including its very important metaphorical component. It is nevertheless true that a longer-term perspective, with a focus on later transformations and ramifications, has lent support to the view of the Enlightenment as a force of resistance and emancipation. But to put that aspect into proper context, and avoid the illusion of a unified project with revolutionary intentions, a closer look at the historical evidence is needed. Three recent reappraisals of the Enlightenment may serve to clarify this point. Two of them are solidly argued, and their results should be taken on board; the third is a good deal more problematic, but some of its points can be put to better use, and its simplifications invite criticism. Jonathan Israel’s massive work on the history of the Enlightenment (especially Israel 2002 and 2019) has transformed this field of enquiry in a way hardly equalled by any other contribution. Most importantly, his distinction between radical and moderate currents, already apparent in the seventeenth century and more pronounced in the eighteenth, seems crucial. Enlightenment radicalism was, as Israel sees it, both philosophical and political; the former drew on the scientific revolution to contest traditional and more specifically religious interpretations of the world, the latter paved the way for democratic thought and practice. They frequently converged, and did so even at an early stage, for example in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, but there was no pre-established harmony between them. In the course of historical change, radical and moderate trends interacted, diverged, and compromised in varying ways, and although moderate thinkers were by definition more inclined to seek a modus vivendi with the established religious and political order, both currents were important for the political upheavals that followed in the late eighteenth century. Israel’s analyses are a powerful confirmation of Weber’s insight into the impact of ideas on history, but also a reminder that conflicts between the ideas in question are a key part of the process, and that the relationship between mutually contested ideas and intertwined processes is complicated. The radical ideas that had a formative impact on revolutionary change cannot be identified with the episodes commonly regarded as culminations of radicalism (Israel’s critique of Jacobinism underlines this point). The second line of interpretation is Joel Mokyr’s analysis of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (Mokyr 2011, 2018). His examination of events and figures is very detailed, but

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for present purposes, three points – all developed with particular reference to English transformations – are particularly relevant. On the most general level, the emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge and its contribution to human empowerment helped to create a ‘culture of growth’, conducive to both economic initiative and technological improvement. This part of the argument reinforces the view (once defended by Sombart, in contrast to Weber) that the spirit of capitalism is a composite force; the notion of an Enlightenmentbased culture of growth adds a further component to those traditionally noted. On a more specific note, Mokyr stresses the role of a ‘practical Enlightenment’, closely linked to craftsmanship and local knowledge, which benefitted from intellectual progress and in turn fed into technological change. Finally, this emphasis on practical transmission relativizes the distinction between the original industrial revolution and the later stages characterized by closer coordination of science and production. It now seems more appropriate to speak of a gradual transition; the broader ramifications of the scientific revolution were always relevant to social and economic development. The lesson from Israel’s and Mokyr’s work is that both the internal diversity of the Enlightenment and its importance for the radical transformations that ushered in a new phase of modernity can be given their due. The third case to be considered calls for a different response. Sebastian Conrad (2012, 1010) stresses the ‘globality of eighteenth-century Enlightenment’ and locates it on two levels: ‘It was a product of, and a response to, global conjunctures; and it was the work of many authors in different parts of the world’. If this turn to global history is to make sense, we must clarify the different meanings and contexts of globality, and Conrad’s two levels do not take us very far. The Enlightenment was a response to multiple conjunctures, more specifically to the whole constellation described above as an opening phase of early modernity, and global horizons are only a part of that picture, not as important as they became later. Historians of the Enlightenment have never denied that there were global connections (for one thing, the interest in China is a commonplace); but there is a background, outlined in a classic essay by Lévi-Strauss (1977), not mentioned in Conrad’s paper. The intercivilizational encounters of early modern Europe – the rediscovery of classical antiquity, the expansion into the Americas, and the first contacts with South and East Asian civilizations – were a significant and enduring stimulus to European reflection on other worlds as well as the new one in the making. But then it should be added that this experience was a distinctively European one. There is, during the period in question, no other example of a cultural world exposed to such a variety of ‘othernesses’, with compounded and longlasting effects on ways of thinking and perceiving. To find a case of comparably varied intercivilizational encounters, we would probably have to go back to early Islamic expansion; and that world-historical process took place



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in a very different global conjuncture, with different effects. We are, in other words, back to the question of European specificity. While it is no doubt true that the Enlightenment was not a self-contained episode in European history (has anybody ever made that claim?), its European trajectory seems particular enough to warrant its inclusion in the periodizing scheme proposed here. And Europe, or more precisely the Euro-Atlantic area, was the only region where the Enlightenment became a major impulse to the revolutionary changes that will appear as a defining feature of the following period. The last statement obviously implies that the general idea of the Enlightenment is applicable to non-European cultures and regions. Enough is known about developments in the Islamic world and in East Asia to suggest a prima facie case for that view. But to give it a more concrete meaning, closer comparative analysis of contrasts and affinities is needed; some thematic points for such enquiries will be noted below. In any case, declaring the Enlightenment to be a global phenomenon is at best premature; and the claim that it was the work of many authors does not take us very far. There is – during the period in question – no basis for the idea of a global intellectual community of the kind that the Enlightenment established within Europe. LOST, FOUND, AND FARAWAY MODERNITIES It remains to consider the question of European and/or extra-European origins of modernity. The view that modernity was invented in Europe and then diffused to the rest of the world is misguided, and no longer defended by anybody; those who go on polemicizing against it are flogging dead horses. Eisenstadt’s comparison of the spread of modernity with the expansion of world religions is not convincing, and does not convey the substantive thrust of his work. But the issue is complex, key cases and areas are still underresearched, and the matter cannot be resolved by sweeping condemnations of ‘Eurocentrism’. The easier part of the critical response is that European modernity did not first crystallize and then spread; it took shape and continued to develop in interaction with the rest of the world. The more controversial problem, particularly relevant in the context of periodization, concerns the multiple origins of modernity. A much-quoted observation by Sanjay Subrahmanyam may serve to bring it into focus; as he put it, we should think of modernity as a conjuncture that simultaneously encompassed many places, rather than as a virus spreading from one place to others. One might retort that it could well be both. A virus can spread so broadly and rapidly that it creates a conjuncture where it becomes difficult to locate a place of origin, and a conjuncture can go more viral in some places than others. The Black Death is perhaps the most striking example of an episode that can be described in

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both terms (and a significant part of the prelude to modernity). But a more theorizable metaphor might be put to better use. Benjamin Nelson (2011) already defended the idea of multiple roads to modernity within Europe, and in light of available scholarship, it can plausibly be extended beyond Europe. More specifically, the larger arena to be considered is, first and foremost, the Eurasian world; that term is used here to refer to a macro-continent conventionally divided into Europe and Asia, not with any allusions to Eurasianist ideologies. A somewhat broader focus is suggested by Marshall Hodgson’s concept of Afro-Eurasia, emphasizing – at a minimum – the fact that the southern coast of the Mediterranean has, throughout a long history, been closely involved in processes transforming European and Asian worlds. Briefly, we can think of the transition to modernity as a matter of multiple trajectories, taking off in different settings but ultimately converging in a global configuration. The European road – or cluster of roads – shaped the outcome to a greater extent than the others, and this was due to a double reason. On the European side, a more effective accumulation of power – political, military, and economic – led to a lasting advantage over other world regions. But the European trajectory, beginning with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century innovations summarized earlier, also gave rise to a civilizational pattern more distinctive, comprehensive, and transformative than any developments occurring elsewhere and therefore posing a challenge to older civilizations forced to redefine themselves in response. The legacy of the non-European traditions was strong enough to be reflected in a long-term multiplication of modernities; the ambiguity of European strength came to light in the particularly selfdestructive civilizational crisis that exploded in 1914. Here it is primarily the question of varying entries to early modernity that concerns us; and as the debate now stands, the main cases in point are the East Asian and the Islamic civilizational areas. In the former domain, Alexander Woodside’s analysis of ‘lost modernities’ is a convenient starting point (Woodside 2006). He argues that modernity has multiple origins, not all linked to industrialization or the growth of capitalism and takes the meritocratic bureaucracy first developed in China and then adopted in Korea and Vietnam as an example. In all three cases, this institutional complex gave rise to models of state building and conceptions of state commitment different from those current in the Western world during the same epochs. Woodside refers to an ‘east Asian symbiosis of social salvation aims with administrative calculation’ (2006, 58). But the experience of the meritocraticbureaucratic regimes also provoked critical reflection on their problems and inherent dysfunctionalities; some of the questions raised by East Asian thinkers in this vein resemble modern Western preoccupations. The reason why it seems appropriate to speak of ‘lost modernities’ is that the whole tradition of indigenous meritocracy was, during crucial phases of modernization,



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overshadowed by external models (colonialist and then Communist in Vietnam, westernizing-nationalist and then Communist in China). More recently, in all the countries concerned, there has – as Woodside shows – been a clear tendency to reconnect with the temporarily forgotten sources and experiences, not least with the critical assessments of bureaucratic statecraft. This comparative study of three East Asian cases calls for some additional comments on another country in the region, not included in Woodside’s discussion, where the idea of a ‘lost modernity’ is less applicable but the case for a distinctive origin of modernity even stronger. Japan was a part of the Chinese cultural universe, but never underwent the ‘mandarinization’ that shaped Korean and Vietnamese models of government, and did not adopt the Chinese examination system. But the political regime built up by the Tokugawa shoguns after 1600 and undisturbed by foreign intruders until 1853 has other claims to be considered a pioneer or precursor of modernity. It combined central control by the military rulers in Edo with the de-centralizing autonomy of fiefdoms; this was a novel and ingenious pattern of state formation, without any parallel in Europe. Within this framework, which ensured lasting internal peace, lower ranks of the samurai military elite were transformed into bureaucrats. During the eighteenth century, intellectual articulations and broader popular manifestations of Japanese nationalism, both closely linked to the sacral imaginary centred on the imperial dynasty, made advances that could be built on in a later and more outward-oriented phase. The Tokugawa legacy thus constituted a solid basis for Japan’s modern transformation after 1868. There was no ‘lost modernity’, but it can be argued that the statecentred and increasingly ultranationalist path taken by imperial Japan led to a one-sided activation of the past, not least at the expense of the pluralism of Tokugawa thought, emphasized by later historians. The question of early modernity in the Islamic world is more controversial and will no doubt incite further debate. Here I can only note a few points. The emergence of three Islamic empires – the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal, from west to east and in chronological order – was in itself a major novelty: a new chapter in the history of state formation, and the first stable multi-imperial order in the Islamic world, fully formed in the sixteenth century. Compared to the European multi-imperial order, rivalry between the three powers was much more limited, and not a significant factor of change. But there were other more innovative trends. Gabriel Martinez-Gros (2012) argues that the new empires broke with the traditional pattern theorized by Ibn Khaldun and widely regarded as an invariant Islamic model. The Khaldunian paradigm focuses on the interrelations of urban centres and tribal peripheries; political and civilizational efflorescences required an urban basis, but urban culture tended to weaken the rulers’ hold on power, and conditions were thus created for tribal conquest and the establishment of new dynastic states, whose

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founders inherited both the resources and the challenges of urban civilization, and were thus condemned to repeat the pattern of rise and decline. According to Martinez-Gros, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century developments brought changes to this fundamentally cyclical pattern. The most central regions of Islamic civilization, devastated by invasions, massacres, and epidemics, were now a much less promising terrain for empire building; among the three new dynasties, the Safavids were the only one to locate their power basis within the traditional centre, and their empire was also the most short-lived. But all three empires were created by tribal and peripheral conquerors, and contrary to the Khaldunian narrative, they relied more on cultural models emerging at the periphery, especially on those flowering in Central Asia in the aftermath of Timur’s conquests. The Timurid reference was important for Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals alike. Marshall Hodgson (1974, v. 3), less impressed with the Khaldunian model (in his view applicable to the arid regions and the middle periods of Islamic history), had emphasized the multicultural character of the statecraft practiced by the three empires. In addition to the earlier appropriation of Persian statecraft by Arab conquerors, Turkic and Mongol components now became integral parts of the imperial imaginary and its institutional shapings. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire drew on Byzantine traditions and practices, whereas the Mughals inherited from the Delhi Sultanates a long record of interaction with the Indian environment. There was no similarly multicultural context of state formation in Europe during the same period. But if the variety of traditions was a potential source of change, more recent scholarship suggests that such possibilities were foreclosed by a combination of internal crises and external pressures. As C. A. Bayly argues, the eighteenth-century history of the Islamic empires was marked by ‘a crisis in the relationship between commerce, landed wealth and patrimonial political authority comparable with that which convulsed Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century’ (Bayly 1989, 18). But the chronological difference was crucial: in the meantime, reinvigorated European powers had gained the upper hand against Islamic ones on several fronts. It was this conjunction, rather than separate and unequal developmental dynamics, that set the scene for later modern relations between the European and the Islamic world. Hodgson also noted the different redefinitions of the religio-political nexus (although he did not use that term), characteristic of the three empires. He characterized the Ottoman Empire as a ‘shari’ah-military alliance’, a bridging of the distance between legal order and military kingship that had been characteristic of post-caliphal Islamic history. The Safavids started their march to power as an ultra-heterodox sect, but later settled for Shi’ism, which thus acquired a more solid territorial basis than before; in the longer run, the Shi’ite regime developed its own version of the distinction between political



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and spiritual authority, but it also proved more adaptable to modern nationalism than the Sunni version of Islam. The most interesting but least sustainable innovation was attempted by Akbar, the effective founder of the Mughal Empire. His religious reorientation, described by Hodgson as consistently universalist, did not break with the Islamic idea of radical monotheism, but accepted other religious traditions as sources of revelation and wisdom; to what extent this was linked to quasi-prophetic pretensions of the ruler himself remains a matter of dispute. In any case, Akbar’s successors retreated to a more self-contained Islam, but with a more absolutist conception of rulership and a more visibly interconfessional culture than the preceding epochs and currents of Islam had allowed for. If we compare these divergent developments to early modern trends in Europe, the most salient contrast is that the rival European redefinitions of the religio-political nexus, corresponding to the Protestant and Catholic reformations, entered into an acute conflict and then settled for a compromise (cuius regio, eius religio) that put an end to religious wars, the Islamic ones were too separate in space to collide or to require a compromise. After the compromise, the European alternatives remained dominant in their respective zones and interacted with multiple other factors in successive phases of state formation. No such sustained processes took place in the Islamic world after the consolidation of the early modern empires. Other arguments relate to the eighteenth century, and primarily to intellectual and religious trends of that period. For the Islamic world, it was a time of crises and setbacks, and responses to them could take the form of religious revivalism as well as of a search for more rational arrangements of communal affairs. Attempts to refine the structure of Islamic law and – especially in the case of the Wahhabis in the Arabian Peninsula – to rediscover the purity of the original monotheist message belong in this context. Bayly’s characterization of them as ‘powerful reappraisals of state and society’ (Bayly 2004, 76) seems appropriate; but when he writes that they ‘represented a response to global change as profound as the rise of nationalism and the centralized state in Europe, and one which may yet outlast them’ (ibid., 77), it is hard to follow his train of thought. It is unclear how ‘profundity’ should in this case be measured, and no indication is given of ways to compare the movements in question with Europe. The formulation is best seen as an example of broader inclinations, shared by many authors, to give the non-European origins of modernity an excessive benefit of doubt. Reinhard Schulze’s idea of an eighteenth-century Islamic Enlightenment (Schulze 1996) has been widely criticized by other scholars as a clear case of that kind. Whether or how far the texts and thinkers in question articulate ideas about human beings making their own order is a matter of debate (and to some extent of philological analysis), but the mere appearance of such notions – in any case known to

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have emerged, more or less radically expressed, in non-European traditions – would not constitute a parallel to the much more complex intellectual universe of the European Enlightenment. These observations may serve to back a provisional conclusion. Concerning modernity in general, the upshot of debates seems to be that basic components of the modern constellation – capitalism, state formation, democracy, nation, to mention only obvious cases – can be found in premodern societies, although some of them are a good deal more ubiquitous than others. It is the combination of these elements, in conjunction with a massive and multidimensional but ambiguous enhancing of human autonomy, and the new meaning thus given to each component, that defines the modern water shed. Analogously, the present state of research suggests that parallels to various aspects of the European breakthrough can be found in non-European contexts, but that the European combination vastly surpassed other cases in regard to transformative capacity and global impact. That claim has no normative implications; they enter the picture only when it comes to more specific issues and choices. And the view suggested here may still need modifying in light of further evidence. If the idea of early modernity, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, can thus be extended – so far without a clearly defined limit – beyond the most accessible and extensively researched European context, the next step is to define the following phase. The most plausible model of periodization is the demarcation of a revolutionary modernity, from the late eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. More precise dates might be 1776 and 1991, marking the beginning of the American Revolution and the downfall of the state created by the Russian one. But a case can also be made for a longer chronology, starting with the global war from 1756 to 1763; it was a key part of the background to the subsequent revolutions, albeit not as directly decisive as the more conventionally labelled World War I. A plausible terminal date would then be 2008, the outbreak of the financial crisis that signalled the structural decomposition and ideological bankruptcy of the post-1991 world order, all the more so since it coincided with the fully visible rise of China. It is not uncommon for historians to work with long and short versions of the same period; for example, the well-known longer nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914, can be set alongside a shorter one beginning in 1815, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the attempt to restore a European interstate order and ending with an abrupt acceleration of great power rivalry, presaging a global conflict, in the 1880s and 1890s. For present purposes, it is the shorter version of revolutionary modernity, 1776 to 1991, that will be taken as a frame of reference. The most salient reason for associating this period with revolution is that it saw the four major political revolutions that had a decisive impact on global



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history: the American, the French, the Russian, and the Chinese, as well as a whole spectrum of more localized revolutions that drew on those paradigmatic experiences while developing original characteristics. Moreover, counterrevolutionary currents evolved into the Fascist projects of an antirevolution, meant to destroy and outperform the original revolutionary forces. That proved, especially with the end of World War II, a fatally misconceived venture, but not without massive unintended effects on the global conjuncture, and not so conclusively defeated that some kind of resurrection would be excluded. In short, the experience and imagination of revolutions, their metamorphoses and proliferating variants, but also their detours and antagonistic imitations during this phase made them a more central focus of modernity’s civilizational problematic than at any other time. They concentrated the quest for autonomy on the political sphere and led to more striking mutations into hubris than elsewhere; but they also exemplified the complications, dilemmas, and autonomies that accompany the conquest and exercise of autonomy. The period ended with upheavals of a new kind, in some ways reminiscent of revolutions as traditionally understood, but aberrant or strongly atypical in other respects. The regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe, achieved through a negotiated transfer of power, are the prime examples. But the term ‘revolutionary’ is not only appropriate because of events and landmarks in the political sphere. It is also frequently used to describe momentous and long-lasting transformations in other spheres, and comparison with such processes – with regard to their temporality, their rationality, and their effects on the human condition – is a permanent task for those who set out to clarify the concept of revolution. The Industrial Revolution, whose take-off date and dividing lines between later periods are disputed among historians, is the key factor that lends revolutionary significance to capitalist development. The accelerating scientific revolution, achieving its greatest breakthrough during this period, is another part of the picture; it feeds ever more directly into the industrial one, thus into the sphere of production, but it also affects military power and in that capacity contributes to the power resources in play within the political domain. Finally, the concept of a democratic revolution can be used to describe a long-term process, including key episodes of the political revolutions but also changes achieved by reformist efforts, and conducive to the democratization of political life in the Durkheimian sense of maintaining both a distance from and a dialogue with the state (the latter also goes through a long-term process of structural change and cumulative empowerment, pronounced enough for some analysts to have diagnosed or envisaged a bureaucratic revolution). The period in question also saw massive changes to the global constellation, so far reaching that it seems appropriate to speak of revolutionary

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change. Between the late eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries, European expansion first reached its high water mark, then – in conjunction with conflicts and tensions developing inside Europe – lapsed into a crisis; after a brief attempt at reassertion and a more global conflict, a backlash put an end to European hegemony. The period can therefore be described in terms of two geopolitical revolutions, the establishment and the breakdown of European hegemony. It is important not to identify European hegemony with colonialism; arguably, the most momentous result of European expansion was the encounter with East Asia, where the Western powers were for some time in a dominant position but colonized only small coastal footholds. The main consequences of the Euro-American encounter with East Asia were the reactions that it provoked in China and Japan. Changes of a revolutionary character – assuming that we apply the label beyond the political context – occurred also in the cultural sphere. During the two centuries discussed here, three significant developments altered the situation of religion. As a result of globalizing processes, the coexistence of world religions became a more visible and challenging problem. In the countries most central to the new global constellation, the relationship between state and religion became a more political issue than it had been before. With the rise of secular religions, massively present in the twentieth century but already emerging in the nineteenth, traditional religions faced a new rival. Transformations of art, markedly frequent during this period, were often described as revolutionary, and their relationship to political revolutions could become a matter of debate. In short, the idea of revolution may be seen as an imaginary signification with a particularly close connection to the political sphere, where its traditional meaning – referring to cyclical change – was redefined in a radical way and became a privileged focus for the problematic of modernity but could also, in the aftermath of this radicalization, serve to interpret and assimilate a variety of processes in other spheres. The year 1991 is a convenient terminal date for the period so defined, but it can also be argued that the phase marked by the historical centrality and broad hermeneutical reach of religion moved towards its end through the anomalous events mentioned earlier. They were, in different ways, linked to the longer modern tradition of revolutions, but they also deviated from it in crucial respects and stood in stark contrasts to each other. The historical and conceptual lessons to be drawn from these experiences are still controversial. To recapitulate, this periodization is provisional, mainly designed to support the analysis developed in the following chapters; also, it is historical, in contrast to the structural approaches criticized at the beginning of this chapter. It traces a sequence of transformations that affect the three domains delineated in the preceding chapter, and in those contexts, the changes involve the unfolding problematic of human autonomy. But this version of



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successive modernities is not a periodization in terms of structural principles or systemic frameworks. Such models presuppose a strong theory of modernity, and the present work makes no such assumptions. The social theory applied here operates within the horizon of interpretive history; the next step is to focus more intensively on the later phase of revolutionary modernity: the short twentieth century and on a particularly momentous strand of its history.

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The periodization of history is as universal and unavoidable as it is contextual and controversial. It seems clear that neither historians nor historical sociologists can do without this fundamental organizing device. But doubts about its justification have accompanied it for a long time, many critics have stressed its conventional character, and it has even been argued that periodizing schemes have more to do with preconceptions or value orientations of their authors than with historical facts. This is not the place for further discussion of periodization in general, but two points against radical relativizing may be noted. It is the case that periodizing divisions derived from seemingly obsolete traditions can return in slightly modified shape. The notion of the Middle Ages has been criticized from various points of view; those who contested its relevance to European history pointed to the long duration of late antiquity as well as early harbingers of modernity, while others dismissed it as too Eurocentric. The new Cambridge World History (Wiesner-Hanks 2015), programmatically conceived in a global perspective, brings the medieval period back under the label of a ‘middle millennium’, lasting from 500 to 1500 CE, and clearly defined in light of global evidence.

ASPECTS OF THE SHORT TWENTIETH CENTURY The second point is directly related to the present discussion. Broad acceptance of a periodizing claim, across interpretive and ideological dividing lines, suggests a plausible foundation in historical experience. There is hardly a more striking example of such consensus than the idea of the short twentieth century. The spectrum of interpretations working with this chronological anchor ranges from Hobsbawm’s ‘age of extremes’ to Baechler’s ‘great 96



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parenthesis’ (Hobsbawm 1994, Baechler 1994); and it seems difficult to deny that the years 1914 and 1991 mark a very distinctive section of modern history. A slightly more precise dating will add the point that both the beginning and the end span more years. As recent scholarship (Gerwarth 2017, Borodziej and Górny 2018) has emphasized, the war that broke out in 1914 did not really end with the armistice of 1918; a violent aftermath lasted for several years, with major conflicts in many places, and left a legacy that could not be contained by the inadequate peace settlements. As for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was the culmination of a decomposing process that had been in uninterrupted progress since the satellite regimes in Eastern Europe began to break down in 1989. The solidly grounded conception of a short twentieth century does not rule out a complementary longer one, extending – as suggested in the preceding chapter – from the 1880s to 2008. It is generally the case that meaningful periodizations can overlap or be combined with alternative ones, depending on the context. Periodization is, in other words, always a multi-contextual exercise. Moreover, a given periodization can, in longer-term retrospect, change meaning while remaining chronologically constant. That has in fact happened to the shorter twentieth century. At first it seemed possible to contrast the epoch-making violence of World War I with the unexpectedly nonviolent end of the Cold War, a conflict that had combined some features of a third global contest with those of an incomplete world order and now seemed about to give way to a lasting international regime of peace. But during the past two decades, the quasi-official Western vision of a post–Cold War world has faded, a new geopolitical constellation is compounded by interpretive confusion, and the threat of global war has reappeared. A not uncommon reaction to this turn is to speak of a new Cold War, but both the protagonists and the situation are so unlike the real case that this boils down to an invocation of imaginary models, surviving after the sea change and obstructing understanding of new realities. The short twentieth century had a prehistory, and some aspects of that phase must be taken into consideration; but the particular perspective to be applied depends on the points of emphasis in the main argument, which should therefore be clarified first. Prominent trends of the period between 1914 and 1991 (with a brief glance beyond the latter date) will be examined through an analysis of Communism and its historical trajectory, but this focus is unavoidably selective. Two aspects will be foregrounded. On the one hand, the discussion deals with Communism as a variant of modern civilization, with the implications of a broader civilizational problematic that came to light through this experience, and with the tensions and paradoxes that brought the Communist version of modernity to a terminal crisis (even though the outcome of that crisis was a good deal more ambiguous than mainstream

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opinion on the non-Communist side has tended to assume). On the other hand, the geopolitical dimension of the Communist phenomenon cannot be bypassed, but here it is primarily its Eurasian impact, and more specifically the East Asian connection, that concerns us (as used here, the idea of Eurasia refers to a macro-continent, transcending the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia). Communism as an international movement is less relevant to our purposes, nor will there be much to say about the episode known as the Cold War, dominated by the confrontation of a Communist bloc with the West. However, this version of the Eurasian perspective will help to underline a basic fact about the period in question: there never was an ‘American century’, and the mirage of an America-centred world order never came anywhere near realization. It is a commonplace that with the intervention in World War I, the United States appeared on the scene as the strongest world power (preconditions for that had already been created in a less spectacular fashion), and that its position was further enhanced in the course of later conflicts and crises, though not without ups and downs. The rise to global power was accompanied by both hesitant and exaggerating visions of tasks and possibilities; the most extreme flight of fancy, not uncontested even at the very centre of apparent triumph, was the end-of-century illusion that both China and Russia were on their way to become junior partners in an American order. As the present situation shows, and a retrospective on recent history will further confirm, this was never remotely probable. The Eurasian angle on twentieth-century developments will also help to defuse a problem that arises in connection with chronological frameworks. The use of dates primarily linked to landmarks in European or Euro-Atlantic history can be questioned on the basis that different criteria apply in other parts of the world (for an interesting discussion of this point in relation to constructions of the nineteenth century, see Osterhammel 2009, 1284–1286). In East Asia, it is particularly easy to find chronologies that cut across the dividing lines proposed here. In modern Chinese history, the period between the beginning of the Opium War in 1840 and the Communist victory in 1949 is clearly distinguished from earlier and later phases but lends itself to contrasting judgements: a prominent Sinologist (Fairbank 1987) described it as a century of revolution, whereas official Chinese statements often refer to a century of humiliation. The Japanese trajectory between 1868 and 1945 is a markedly self-contained chapter of history, running from the foundation of the modern Japanese state, with great power ambitions from the outset to the collapse of the Japanese empire. But here too a relativizing comment is in order: the mixture of continuity and discontinuity between the imperial state and the post-war developmental state is a matter of debate. Examples from other regions could be added, but for present purposes, we can conclude with a balancing argument. While comparative analyses must take note of varying



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periodizing divisions in different regional and historical contexts, there are good reasons to stress the global primacy of certain periodizations, even if they are in the first instance more closely linked to events in some parts of the world than in others. With due regard to East Asian specificities, it remains true that the defining changes of recent times – the ascendancy and annihilation of the Japanese empire, followed by a restructured pursuit of power, and the failed project of nationalist rebuilding in China, followed by the victory and the mutations of Chinese Communism – took place in a geopolitical environment marked by global wars and a global rivalry between different versions of modernity. That is a brief description of the short twentieth century, whose ‘inaugural catastrophe’, climaxing crises and final dénouement were most directly experienced in Europe. COMMUNISM IN CONTEXT With the context thus demarcated, the contours of the focal phenomenon should be outlined. Communism can, in a first approximation, be described as an extreme case among multiple modernities; in view of its total social scope, broad impact, and global aspirations, it represents the clearest example of an alternative modernity. It originated in a violent break with pre-existent patterns and in the wake of an explosion of violence that had affected and discredited the dominant order of the modern world. For the actors and ideas involved in the formation of a new order, the interpretation of the breakdown  – World War I  – as a terminal crisis of a whole social regime was crucial. That brings us to another aspect of Communism. As noted in the preceding chapter, the experience and interpretation of revolutions is central to the problematic of modernity; but the Communist variation on that theme led to a more complete identification of modern and revolutionary perspectives than in any other context. Although the language of modernization was not characteristic of Communist discourse (mainstream modernization theory was invented as an alternative to Communist ideology), the substantive meaning can be summed up along such lines: a revolutionary transformation was supposed to overcome the contradictions and realize the promises inherent in existing modernity. This vision is best understood in terms of an underlying revolutionary imaginary, open to different theoretical and ideological articulations in changing contexts and with indeterminate horizons of possible variation. Three main dimensions of this imaginary may be distinguished. In the first instance, it foreshadowed radical action to bring about the break with the old world and open the way to a new one. In this regard, Communist notions and self-portrayals drew on the legacy of earlier revolutions (the most notorious

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example is the retrospective stylization of the seizure of power in St Petersburg into an upgraded repetition of Paris 1789), but in practice they also proved adaptable to a wide variety of takeover strategies. A second aspect was the extension of revolutionary projects across the spectrum of social practices and ways of relating to the world; this could translate into direct political instrumentalization but was also compatible with more or less flexible concessions to specific criteria and priorities (as reflected, for example, in policies towards different branches of scientific knowledge). Finally, the revolutionary imaginary enables visions of a future humanity, transformed far beyond present limits. Such phantasms, variously centred on moral, aesthetic, or cognitive perfection, appeared in the course of twentieth-century revolutions; imaginings of infinitely expanding human mastery over nature, with wholly benign consequences (a kind of Anthropocene with positive connotations, as we might now call it), became even more pronounced than they had been in nineteenth-century thought, not least in its socialist currents. This brief glance at the global Communist venture already indicates its affinity with the complex notion of autonomy that was identified earlier as the core signification of modern civilization. The ambiguities, paradoxes, and self-defeating ambitions of this particular response to the problematic of modernity will be discussed later. But to foreshadow the questions arising in that context, it should be recalled that Communist regimes became prime reference examples for attempts to define a new figure of power that seemed to embody a particularly extreme negation of autonomy. These efforts resulted in the concept of totalitarianism or totalitarian domination, never precise enough to support a consistent theory and facing further difficulties because it was simultaneously applied to the equally novel but very different phenomenon of Fascism. Political instrumentalization then led to the concept being used to over-assimilate the two types of regime and sideline closer study of contrasts and similarities. That task is still on the agenda, but will not be taken up here. In what sense and with what qualifications the concept of totalitarianism is relevant to the Communist experience, and on which sources such an approach might draw, can only be clarified through closer examination. All the aforementioned aspects of Communism – the links to the imaginary signification of autonomy, the specific twists of the revolutionary imaginary, and the disjunction of intentions and consequences – must be situated in a historical setting that shaped the course of events and the outcome of projects. That setting is best described in terms of two major encounters, both with a longer history but taking a new turn when Communist movements and models entered the picture. The first was the encounter between Europe and Russia. Here the term must be used with caution, because the involvement in European history has been a constitutive feature of Russian history since the flowering of Kiev Rus in the eleventh century. But that aspect has, in the



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course of a millennium, intertwined with others and varied in relative weight. The Russian trajectory has also been determined by a Byzantine legacy, Inner Eurasian influences, and – not least – by the very specific Russian process of state formation that began in the shadow of Mongol conquest in the fourteenth century. In short, Russia has always been both a part of the European constellation and a region apart, sometimes more of the former and sometimes more of the latter. We can therefore speak of new encounters when the European connection suddenly becomes more important. In the phase that concerns us here, three aspects of that development are crucial. The geopolitical one was most directly decisive. The Russian Empire had played a key part in the defeat of Napoleon and the post-1815 European settlement. The latter was, as some historians now emphasize, a more complex matter than longheld notions of a counter-revolutionary alliance would suggest; it was also an attempt to rebuild and regulate interstate relations in a way that would help to avoid or contain wars. This aim intertwined with the conservative strategy of reinforcing the established social and political order against revolutionary threats, and challenges emerging on either side affected the other. Since the revolutions of 1848, often seen as a grand failure, had many-sided indirect consequences, not least through changes in the strategy of ruling elites, they also affected the interstate order. But the geopolitical turning point was the Crimean War of 1853–1856, not a major event if compared with the conflicts ending in 1815 and beginning in 1914 but now recognized as a highly significant one, both because of its symbolic aspects (European powers allying themselves with an Islamic empire against the spearhead of Orthodox Christianity) and in view of the chain reactions sparked by the Russian defeat. On the one hand, this setback prompted Russian authorities to launch overdue reforms, inconclusive and weakened by compromises with conservative elites, but effective enough to trigger ongoing changes on multiple levels of Russian society, which in turn gave rise to new expectations for imperial Russia’s future as well as to reinvigorated revolutionary efforts. On the other hand, the downgrading of Russia’s position within the European constellation of powers was at least a contributing cause of more expansionist strategies on the eastern front, with a double focus on Central and East Asia. The East Asian strategy was thwarted by an adversary closer to the contested field. Japan became the rising power in the region when it defeated China in 1895; this was, by the same token, a barrier to expansionist moves from elsewhere, and a more definitive closure followed when Russia lost the war with Japan in 1905. The result, on the Russian side, was renewed activity on the Western front and a geopolitical entanglement that culminated in World War I. It is now well established that the outbreak of war was the result of multi-imperial rivalry, aggravated by a broader civilizational configuration; attempts to cast Russia in the role of key actor are not convincing, and while there is no doubt

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about Russian imperial aims, the uncertainty of ruling circles about strategies, alliances, and, ultimately, the entry into the war is also noteworthy, and a significant background to the crisis that overwhelmed the regime during the war. The return to full involvement in European power struggles was badly prepared, open to controversy about ways and means, and based on fragile foundations. But as historians have shown, general notions about backwardness cannot explain the breakdown of tsarism under the strain of war; it was a matter of specific infrastructural and institutional weaknesses. Those who after a short interval inherited the disiecta membra of empire also faced the enduring geopolitical problem of combining and balancing strategic orientations on the western and the eastern side. The acceleration of capitalist development in Russia, with direct inputs from more advanced capitalist economies, was a major factor in social change. Over and above that, it affected perceptions and imaginings in diverse ways. Visible economic progress and the massive potential that it revealed fed into European impressions of Russian power, important for decisions by the protagonists of both adversarial blocs in 1914. On the home front, the perceived promise of vast economic modernization did not disappear with the tsarist version of the empire; it is a plausible assumption that this legacy helped to make the notion of socialism in one country credible in the 1920s. In the shorter run, the experience of capitalist dynamics in the Russian context facilitated the reception of ideas that were, in the original European context, first and foremost presented as keys to the understanding of capitalism. This was crucial for the spread of Marxism in Russia; for Russian recipients, the attractivity of its approach to capitalism helped to immunize a less reasoned adaptation to Russian conditions and perspectives against criticism. These considerations bring us to the last aspect of the encounter. Russian appropriations of and responses to European thought have a long history, and the influence of revolutionary ideas marked a new turn of that process; another turning point was reached with the appearance of Marxism, reimagined by its Russian adherents as a more closed and systematic creed than it actually was. The other encounter, with East Asia, was intercivilizational in a stricter sense. It took place in the context of modernity, more precisely through the interaction of its expanding European version and a response that gradually resulted in the – still unfinished – reinvention of key modern ideas and institutions along lines shaped by regional and national backgrounds. Here the civilizational legacies of the region were of particular importance, all the more so because the presence of Western colonialism was  – in contrast to many other non-European regions – very marginal. This lent specific features to the encounter. There was, as noted in the preceding chapter, an early modern prelude of limited contact, but at that stage, the discovery of East Asian cultures was, at least in the case of China, more important for the Europeans



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than any influence in the other direction. We may, however, note two exceptions to this on the Japanese side: the very brief success of Christianity in sixteenth-century Japan, and the more consequential Japanese accumulation of knowledge about the West from the eighteenth century onwards, so significant that according to an authority on the subject (Keene 1970), those interested – admittedly a small minority at the time, though important for later initiatives – probably knew more about Europe than any comparable group in any other non-European culture. The more momentous phase of the encounter began around the middle of the nineteenth century, and in two very different ways, both of which were – as will be seen – to prove important for the much later emergence and development of Communism in the region. In China, this chapter of the story began with military defeat by a Western power (the Opium War), followed by the Taiping rebellion, one of the most massive uprisings in Chinese history, in which a very limited and idiosyncratic borrowing from Christianity played a mobilizing role. It was defeated, but at a cost that weakened the imperial regime for a long time to come; the sequel was a long-drawn-out decline, punctuated by unsuccessful modernizing ventures. The final overthrow of the old order led to a struggle between rivals for the succession; a nationalist regime with modernizing aspirations emerged as the strongest contender but was unable to overcome the fragmentation of Chinese territory and then decisively weakened by Japanese aggression. Behind the Japanese onslaught on China was the other road opened up by the encounter with the West. A very brief episode of coerced change, the opening to foreign trade imposed by an American naval force in 1853, was enough to trigger a radical transformation from within, resulting in the construction of a state embarking on all-round reform and aspiring to great power status. Its superior strength vis-à-vis China was further enhanced by the outcome of World War I, where both states expected gains from limited involvement on the side of the Allies, but the result was a considerable strengthening of Japan’s position vis-à-vis China. Growing antagonism and power imbalance between the two countries led to a war that for Japan became a final (and ultimately failed) bid for regional empire; for China it was a ‘struggle for survival’ (Mitter 2014) and for the Chinese nationalist regime an exhausting challenge that left it badly prepared for facing others. Communism arrived in East Asia in the context of these two initially very different but later intertwined responses to the encounter with the West. Its impact came in two stages, and on both occasions, the first wave was followed by a major shift. In the wake of World War I, the nascent Chinese Communist movement entered a situation shaped by disappointment in regard to Western powers, social movements reacting to domestic and international grievances, and the Russian experience of revolutionary reconstruction of a

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failed imperial state. Successful capitalizing on these factors was soon followed by a massive setback and then by a reorientation long mythologized by sympathetic observers and historians. But the breakthrough to final victory was made possible by American victory over Japan in the Pacific War. There is no controversy about this point; even Mao Zedong admitted that without the destruction of the Japanese empire in 1945, there would have been no Communist victory in 1949. This second Communist moment in East Asia came at a time when the Soviet Union was geopolitically ascendant and intent on creating a bloc of more or less subaltern allies; the Chinese revolution of 1949 was widely perceived as an extension of global Soviet power. But the Sino-Soviet alliance proved brittle, vulnerable to ideological dispute and imperial rivalry, and when open conflict broke out, that also set the scene for changes on the home front of Chinese Communism. The decade from 1961 to 1971 saw a fundamental divergence of roads and division of power within the erstwhile Eurasian Communist bloc. THE LENINIST SYNDROME AND ITS SOURCES Having thus outlined the circumstances and characteristics of Communist projects in power, a brief retrospective on their intellectual ancestry is in order. There is no plausible case to be made for a teleological or deterministic explanation in terms of ideas making history, and the notion of ‘ideocracy’, sometimes used to describe the Soviet model, is misleading; it obscures the reality of power structures, always linked but never reducible to interpretations. But there is no denying the ideological aspect of Communist regimes (one of the noteworthy results of access to archival sources is the removal of any doubt about this), nor the central role of a dogmatized Marxism in that context. The precise nature of the Marxian connection is disputed and can only be clarified with the wisdom of hindsight. The meaning of Soviet Marxism (and its more or less distinctive offshoots in other countries) will become clearer if the source is considered in light of the outcome, before returning to the historical path. Marx’s thought was, indisputably, one of the major sequels to German idealism, closer to that background than other prominent intellectual innovators of the nineteenth century. German idealism, and more specifically the road from Kant to Hegel, was a particularly ambitious effort to theorize autonomy with a view to normative conclusions; in Hegel’s philosophy, centred on the idea of self-positing spirit, this took the form of an ontological ascent to freedom, but at the price of vastly increased distance between the worldmaking spirit and the human subject. Marx’s relationship to Hegel has been much debated, but the view that he transformed the Hegelian itinerary of



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self-embodying spirit into a vision of history as human self-creation remains influential. However, the hermeneutical hypothesis of a transformation is hard to substantiate; there is no work by Marx that would represent a systematic argument of this kind; it is known that at a later stage, he saw the question of Hegel’s significance and legacy as an unsettled one and planned to work on it, but that project was never carried out. His most detailed comments on Hegel are to be found in very early writings; they deal with specific issues (problems posed by Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) and reflect a very inchoate stage of Marx’s own problematic. Later indications are cryptic and unhelpful. In view of all these difficulties, it seems advisable to try another approach. The concept of Umbesetzung, coined by Hans Blumenberg to clarify the relationship between Christianity and early modern adumbrations of the idea of progress, may be applicable to the transition from Hegel to Marx. In general terms, Umbesetzung involves the entry of a new idea into an inherited problematic perceived to be in crisis, thus re-centring a whole universe of discourse, but with the proviso that questions posed within the old framework must still be answered from within the new, and this can lead to continuing use of traditional conceptual tools. For Blumenberg, this constellation was exemplified by the early modern turn from Christian notions of salvation and divine sovereignty to a new emphasis on human autonomy to be achieved through the pursuit and application of knowledge; but the confrontation with questions concerning broader horizons of meaning became a long-term task, necessitating adaptation as well as invention of concepts. If Marx’s relationship to Hegel is to be reconsidered in this light, the starting point will be the crisis of the Hegelian system in the 1830s and 1840s. The uniquely ambitious and comprehensive synthesis developed by Hegel was increasingly seen as overstretched, and new solutions of varying weight and originality were proposed. During his formative phase in the 1840s, Marx drew on multiple sources, including the emerging ideas of socialism as well as political economy, and these influences shaped his version of Umbesetzung: the substitution of self- and world-creating human beings for Hegel’s self-positing spirit. The decisive reason for describing this move as a substitution is that the idea of self-defining and self-expressive human activity is anchored in the production of material livelihood and thus articulated in fundamental contrast to Hegel’s notion of spirit. As the 1844 manuscripts show, the paradigm of production took shape in close connection with Marx’s first approaches to political economy, and its meaning was ambiguous from the outset: it stressed both the primacy of material production and the productive character of human activity in general. But since the latter reference is an extrapolation of the former, the main focus of further analysis was bound to be on the anthropological and social patterns of the economic sphere. Other dimensions of social life seemed more derivative, and Marx coined

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the conceptual distinction between basis and superstructure to underline this asymmetry. His (and Engels’s) later remarks on the need to refine this dichotomous model, although never more than obiter dicta, show that it was a provisional frame of reference, but ideological versions of Marxism turned it into a dogma. The polarizing Umbesetzung, replacing the spiritual road to definitive selfknowledge and self-realization with the productive work of human beings, did not escape the other side of this hermeneutical pattern: the persistence of problems now calling for solutions of a new type. Marx inherited the problem of accounting for inadequate or even self-defeating self-realization, subsumed under the concept of alienation, and for the perspective of overcoming this condition through transformative action made possible by the very process that it was supposed to rectify. Given the conceptual emphasis on economic activities and dynamics, this line of enquiry led to the interminable analysis of capitalist development to which Marx devoted most of his work after 1850. The attempt to theorize capitalism through a critique of the economic categories attuned to its logic was guided by a twofold expectation. Internal contradictions afflicting and destabilizing this mode of production were to be revealed and shown to be rooted in the fundamental phenomenon of alienated labour; but at the same time, the conflict-ridden long-term dynamic of capitalist development was to create preconditions and mobilize actors for revolutionary change. The goal to be realized was a society compatible with free and adequate development of human abilities. Marx did not refer to modernity in the sense now accepted, but his conception of capitalism as a global and total formation was, as we can now see it, a vision of modernity under another name, and his unfinished project can therefore be understood as a utopia of reconciliation that would take the modern world beyond its present dissonant condition. The critical analysis remained incomplete, and in view of present – fairly exhaustive – knowledge of Marx’s published and unpublished writings, it seems clear that he started with presuppositions (encapsulated in the theory of value) that made a synthesizing grasp of historical capitalism impossible. No clear picture of the transition to a post-capitalist society emerged, and the textual evidence suggests a tension between the shift to long-term expectations after 1850 and an enduring temptation to pin hopes on sudden upheavals, exemplified by Marx’s declaration of solidarity with the Paris Commune (about which he later expressed more sceptical views). The future social order was never clearly defined, the strongest statements on that subject were primarily about things to be abolished, rather than alternative institutions, and the provisional measures advocated in the Communist Manifesto, corresponding to a mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary situation, were never upgraded to suit more advanced conditions.



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This assessment of Marx’s work raises questions about its twentiethcentury impact. What happened when the analysis of capitalism  – massive but inconclusive, only partly known but believed to be fully understood – was reimagined as a self-contained system, when a radical revolution broke out in conditions fundamentally different from those envisaged by Marx, and when the open questions about a new order had to be quickly answered under extreme circumstances and with very limited understanding of both facts and problems? One more question may be added: What became of the utopia of reconciled modernity when it was officially adopted by a regime locked in competition with structurally more advanced but ideologically rejected rivals? To stress these historical vicissitudes is not to deny the involvement of Marxian ideas in the Russian revolution of 1917 and its sequel. Marx’s work was one of the sources of Leninism, and the result remains the most striking case of a critique directed at existing modernity becoming involved in the construction of an alternative one. However, it was only one of several formative factors, and it entered the process in an impoverished but illusorily magnified shape. A closer examination of the St Petersburg conjuncture, as we might call it (the decisive chain of events could not have happened anywhere else), must begin with a look back at the metamorphoses undergone by the Marxian tradition before it became an active participant in state formation and social revolution. It is now, thanks to historical research and theoretical debates, possible to reconstruct the main stages of a process best described as the mythologization of Marxism (for a particularly noteworthy contribution, see Stedman Jones 2017). As such, it is an instructive example of the complicated pathways taken by ideas in history. The reference to mythology is not meant to suggest a complete loss of cognitive relevance, but mixtures of myth and knowledge are a very common phenomenon, and in this case, the story starts at a point where the mythic aspect may not be obvious. During the revolutionary years, in and after 1848, the theoretical and political ideas of Marx and Engels had briefly attracted interest in the most radical activist circles, but, after 1850, they lost both touch with events and contact with active forces; Marx retreated into observer’s comments on the unexpected course of history and a long-term study of the economic order that was proving much more resilient and capable of further expansion than previously expected. The situation changed when a gradual revival of popular mobilization promised new opportunities for bringing theory to politics. Marx’s involvement in the founding of the First International in 1864 was a new beginning, and in that connection, his own quest for influence and pressure from his followers led to publication of the first volume of Capital, based on his ongoing research in the fields of economic history and political economy and widely received as a more definitive and systematic statement of the results than it could

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really claim to be. As we now know, Marx had previously undertaken and then abandoned a project of critical enquiry into capitalism (known as the Grundrisse), different from and in some ways more promising than the later approach developed in Capital, and he was already working on themes going beyond the first volume of the latter. Nevertheless, that first instalment was perceived – though often on the basis of hearsay rather than reading – as a solid core of a comprehensive scientific doctrine. Two levels of this mirage may be distinguished. The general idea of theorizing ‘natural laws of the capitalist mode of production’ implied a more straightforward historical determinism than Marx’s earlier writings had tended to support and led both followers and critics to read his work in that light. But the paradox of historical determinism should not be overlooked. In theoretical terms, it could never be satisfactorily reconciled with the autonomy of action that a revolutionary ideology had to assume. But in the intellectually less demanding context of political choices, determinist convictions could go together with activist attitudes. Lenin’s famous reference to Napoleon – ‘on s’engage et puis on voit’ – reflects both a readiness to act in uncertain situations and an ultimate confidence in the laws of history: final victory was in any case assured, and even premature action could provide useful lessons for future strategies. The more specific perspective of inevitably growing class polarization, summed up in the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’, exceeds the frame of analysis otherwise characteristic of the first volume. Apart from the weaknesses of Marx’s theories of value and surplus value, the level of abstraction does not permit predictions of the kind involved in the construction of a long-term road to revolution. The political implications of this ideological extrapolation were ambiguous. It could be taken to support the view – for some time held by the Marxist mainstream – that an anti-capitalist revolution had to wait for the internal conflicts of capitalism to mature and that this could only happen in the most advanced countries where this mode of production was long established. Another possible scenario, theoretically less sound but politically tempting, was the exceptional intensification of the class conflict in an otherwise less advanced country; this became one of the grounds invoked to legitimize the Russian revolution in Marxist terms. If the premature systematization of Marx’s enquiry into capitalism was a first step towards closure and canonizing, a more decisive development occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The writings of Engels, the adoption of a Marxist programme by German Social Democracy, and the dominant position of the latter within the Second International contributed, in different ways, to the establishment of ‘scientific socialism’ as a selfcontained world view, not to be revised in any fundamental ways. This turn to orthodoxy was not uncontested, but the ‘revisionist controversy’ initiated by Eduard Bernstein in the 1890s did not make much headway and was in



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the end overtaken by historical events that brought new questions to the fore. To grasp the significance of the closure thus imposed, we must take note of the broader historical setting. This was a time of vast changes to European societies as well as to global politics and to cultural as well as economic constellations. The institutions and practices of capitalism underwent major transformations, not least in connection with the technological innovations that became known as the second industrial revolution. This coincided with the culminating phase of imperialism, the consolidation of nation states and the attempted nationalization of empires. At the same time, democratizing reforms foreshadowed processes of integration that were to alter all conditions of political activity by Marxist movements. The formation of Marxist orthodoxy left only limited and simplifying ways of understanding these new developments; to use a later term, and with less positive connotations than is now common, this phase in the history of Marxism represented a massive reduction of complexity. But it may also be seen as part of a more general intellectual shortfall: an inadequate response of modern European civilization to the transformative processes that preceded its most fateful crisis. The most seminal reflections on fundamental social and historical questions that emerged during this period were those of classical sociology, but its main representatives – Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel – left unfinished work and did not find continuators of the same calibre. A more far-reaching transformation of Marxism was adumbrated before World War I and came to fruition in its wake. It is an uncontested fact that Lenin believed his understanding of Marx to be in line with the orthodox European, more precisely German version, but repeated and amplified statements of this fact do not answer a more basic hermeneutical question: how did he interpret the Marxian source and his own undoubted agreement with the authoritative reading? Some seventy years ago, Franz Baermann Steiner, an important but neglected thinker, suggested an interesting answer to this question, and it is worth closer examination. His key statement should be quoted in extenso: ‘Marx is Russia’s Descartes. He does not come after, but instead of Descartes, he is the Descartes of human groups instead of individual reason. Instead of, and as an equivalent of ‘Cogito ergo sum’, we now have the teaching of the class struggle; the collective form – the authentic reality – exists inasmuch as it seeks to defend, maintain, or establish a social order’ (Steiner 2009, 384). This comment on the Russian reception of Marxism sums up several points. In the first place, the reference to Marx taking the place of Descartes may be understood as an allusion to the widespread use of Marxist vocabulary around 1900 (this was the time of ‘legal Marxism’, diffused across political divisions and defended by some future adversaries). In this context, Marxism was perceived as a mature result of the Enlightenment, embodying a more authentic continuity with the inherent radicalism

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of its beginning than had the Western ideas previously brought to Russia. But the more precisely defined analogy with Descartes, the claim to ultimate certainty, applies to Lenin’s specific – and soon victorious – position within a broader current. There is no doubt that he believed Marxism to provide that kind of foundation; he invoked it in philosophical as well as political controversies and never conceded that ‘misunderstandings’ were in any way attributable to shortcomings or obscurities of the original doctrine. And Steiner rightly identified the ‘teaching of the class struggle’ as the centrepiece of Lenin’s revelation. The acceptance of what then passed for Marx’s analysis of capitalism was a precondition for everything else, but for Lenin, capitalism was first and foremost a socioeconomic order conducive to the visibilization, simplification, and escalation of class conflict. The shortcut from capital to class was, in turn, conducive to the equation of revolution with civil war, which Lenin defended more consistently than anybody else in the Second International (Getzler 2018). Steiner’s interpretation can be taken a step further. If the class absolutism that Lenin read into Marx was a distant relative of the Cartesian subject, the vision of the vanguard mandated by history and science to lead the class suggests other affinities. It might, if we hazard an even more provocative analogy than Steiner did, be compared to the transcendental turn that proved necessary to move the Cartesian subject beyond the reach of worldly forces and complications. Leninist parties came to claim possession of a codified scientific world view and sovereign competence in all spheres of social life; these pretensions are not altogether unlike the prerogatives of the transcendental subject, and although they changed in the course of eventful time, their origin throws light on later stages. As is well known, Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary party, set out in uncompromising terms in What Is to Be done? at the very beginning of the twentieth century, drew on arguments developed by Kautsky and rooted in Central European Marxism but with a stronger emphasis on Marxism as a synthesis and frontier of scientific knowledge, as well as on the authority of the carriers of this teaching, coming in the first instance from the intelligentsia; even more importantly, this theoretical stance was translated into an organizational model, at first imagined rather than implemented and without clear distinctions between general and specifically Russian prescriptions, but the general thrust of Lenin’s thinking was authoritarian enough to impose unilateral directives on both sides when the test cases came. As the Russian revolution and its aftermath showed, the link between Lenin’s party and the workers’ movement proved more ephemeral than expected in the summer and autumn of 1917, and the alliance with the poor peasantry was never a real possibility. On the other hand, the adversaries who fought to reverse the revolutionary changes were much less equipped to mobilize support, and the



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result was to leave the Bolsheviks in sole power. It proved easy to rationalize this fait accompli and the attached claim to a historical mission in the name of Lenin’s doctrine of the party. And when it came to strategies for a world revolution, there were no scruples about subordinating the whole field to a strictly centralized organization, modelled on (and in fact controlled by) the Bolshevik party as the dictatorial formation it had then become. It is now uncontested that as a ‘general staff of world revolution’, the Communist International was an unmitigated failure. As with other key political texts, What is to be done? must be understood in light of the historical uses to which it was put and the levels of possible meaning disclosed by these practical tests. The text published in 1902 was certainly not a blueprint for making history, but it operated with ideas – more precisely with half-articulated imaginary significations – that were open to further concretization and more conducive to some interpretations than to others. That said, there are some contextual aspects to be noted. If the specific logic of Lenin’s views on class and party was to make the latter both more distant from the empirically real class, in terms of intellectual legitimation and organizational competence, and more entitled to leading involvement in class action at all levels, this position was backed up by a more general vanguardist view of current historical trends. Given the composition of Russian society, revolutionary action by the working class – the necessary vehicle for historical intervention by the party – could only be envisaged on the basis of a broader alliance of classes, in which the industrial workers would play a leading role. At the same time, Lenin expected the Russian situation to force the working class to fight for urgent causes deserted by bourgeois forces (the tasks of a democratic revolution), and this would place it in the vanguard of an international struggle, although that aspect was not as clearly spelled out in 1902 as it came to be later. Finally, Lenin’s pre-war writings show that he was more interested in the revolutionary potential of Asian countries than was generally the case in the Second International. His vanguardism thus had a global dimension. At this point, a return to the civilizational problematic outlined in previous chapters is in order. The vanguardism that centred on the party as an elect order of professional revolutionaries was a figure of autonomy, an imaginary projection of human ability to shape history and build an alternative social order; but like some other figures of autonomy, it also paved the way for usurpations of autonomy by elites legitimizing themselves in the name of higher instances or superior forces, while claiming to exercise power in the interest of universal goals. The subsequent victory of the Bolshevik party was achieved in circumstances that ensured maximum scope for the logic of usurpation, and that trend shaped the imprint of the Leninist vision on the postrevolutionary social imaginary. This was a case of a recurrent phenomenon

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noted by Charles Taylor in connection with the history of political ideas, the transformation of theoretical or ideological projects into more diffuse but more broadly effective patterns of collective representations, but with a difference: in the Soviet constellation, the dominant line of diffusion was a continuous accentuation of the usurping and hierarchizing drive inherent in the original source, accompanied by more limited and always double-edged remembrances of pristine Leninism as a guide to reform. This is not to suggest that these asymmetric mutations of Leninism made up the whole of the Soviet social imaginary; there were, as will be seen, other components. To conclude this part of the analysis, a brief comment on the figure of the leader should be added. The three stages in the transfiguration of Lenin – his rocky rise to unassailable though not uncontroversial party leadership, his institutionalization as supreme leader after the revolution, and his posthumous sacralization – are integral parts of the aforementioned transformation. It has often been pointed out that the record of really existing Bolshevism before 1917 was quite different from Lenin’s 1902 image of the party. He had to confront challenges and cope with rival strategy proposals. But none of the other prominent figures had a comparable faith in a streamlined and fundamentally unrevisable set of dogmas, very selectively but not negligibly connected to historical realities; Lenin’s unwavering claim to authority based on this faith was the driving force of his leadership pursuit, but it did not carry him all the way. The decisive moment was his successful effort to change the party’s policy and impose a more confrontational strategy in the spring and summer of 1917, and that was not a foregone conclusion. His first pronouncements after return from exile showed that he was more out of touch with the Russian situation than those who had led the party in his absence, and it took not only a general deterioration of conditions and polarization of conflicts for him to prevail; a specific and unpredictable concatenation of circumstances was needed to make the seizure of power possible. After that, the road to further transfiguration was open. This case is as clear an example as we can find of a more general issue: the role of exceptional individuals in history. Questions relating to that aspect of the social-historical world can usefully be considered with reference to the modern problematic of autonomy; the civilization that upgrades, diversifies, and problematizes human intervention in multiple domains is, by the same token, particularly sensitized to the phenomenon of outstanding or exorbitant individual actors. To reflect on such experiences is to contextualize and hence to relativize them. But the concept most frequently used for these purposes has arguably been an obstacle to more thoroughgoing contextualization. Max Weber’s notion of charisma was already overstretched in his work and has become even more so in later use; the distinction between its religious and political sources has not done much to clarify the problem. In the context



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of Weber’s sociology of domination, the charismatic type centres on the exceptional ability and/or mission of the individual and is thus both opposed and complementary to the levelling notion of traditional domination, based on legitimation through the unbroken continuity of the past; this dichotomy obscures the varying cultural meanings that enter into patterns of domination. Different traditions define and justify power in correspondingly diverse ways; the perception and acceptance of exceptional individual claims or capacities also depends on cultural contexts. Weber discovered such differences in the course of his comparative studies, but they were not adequately integrated into his basic conceptual scheme. His underlying concept of culture, invoked in the description of civilizations as cultural worlds, was not developed in any systematic way. If the concept of charisma is to be retained (it has been extensively used in analyses of the Soviet model), it would seem appropriate to specify its cultural frameworks. In Lenin’s case, the context of charismatic leadership is – as we have seen – fairly easy to identify: it has to do with hopes put in a doctrine that seemed to illuminate both the workings of advanced societies and the road awaiting less developed ones, with the mobilizing potential of a particularly streamlined version of this teaching and with the promise of a broad but uncompromising alliance against the imperial power that had proved so hard to dislodge. But there is a further side to contextualization. The breakthroughs achieved by exceptional individuals always owe more than a little to historical contingency. Circumstances must evolve and converge in a way that opens up possibilities of decisive action (for a recent discussion of this factor in the Russian events of 1917, see Brenton 2016). But the general pattern is that the contingent reasons for success become overshadowed by imaginary projections of the individual ones. The resulting illusions then acquire a life and a power of their own. In the Russian case, the myth of the leader who returned from exile with a clearly defined revolutionary strategy and pursued it singlemindedly to the moment of victory was incorporated into the official ideology of the postrevolutionary state; but it cannot withstand historical scrutiny. Finally, the social-historical reasserts itself through the institutionalization of the exceptional individual. Following the argument outlined by Durkheim and radicalized by Castoriadis, we can think of individuality as an institution: the individual emerges from the transformative interaction of the social-historical and the psyche. Further reflections may focus on the forms of individuality corresponding to different sociocultural spheres. The institutionalization of leaders commonly described as charismatic is a particular case, with some very specific features in the context of totalitarian regimes. It poses the conceptual problems signalled by the historian who wrote that to comprehend the functioning of the National Socialist regime in Germany, we

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need to think of Hitler as a structure (Broszat 1989); it should be added that the structural aspect is only one half of the story. The other is the complex of imaginary significations that takes shape around the leader. Again, the example of Nazi Germany is instructive. Historians have found the notion of ‘acting in the spirit of the Führer’ useful when it comes to explaining how the rather chaotic mix of institutions was coordinated. The Soviet regime had a longer and more complex story, which will be more closely examined in the next chapter. But to conclude the comments on Lenin, the last phase of the transfigurative process was the institutionalization of a deceased leader as an omniscient and impeccable authority, more thoroughgoing and long-lasting than anything comparable in modern dictatorships. In short, a balanced historical perspective on Lenin and his role does not lend support to the idea of an individual becoming the founding father of a whole sociocultural pattern with universal pretensions. Such constructions are not unknown in scholarship; the most extreme example is Alfred Kroeber’s description of Islamic civilization as born in the head of a single person, the prophet Muhammad (Kroeber 1963; he also suggested that a similar constellation would have emerged if Hitler had won World War II). That was of course a much more complex and protracted process, and so was the formation of the Soviet model, although it happened in a more accelerated phase of global history. Nor was Lenin the inventor of totalitarianism, as argued by Courtois (2017). Totalitarianism was not invented; it emerged through multiple and in part converging processes. But the ideological and political project that crystallized around Lenin can be seen as a crucial link between the twentieth-century crisis of European modernity and the emergence of an alternative pattern. This connection has been underestimated by those who stress above all the Russian roots of Leninism. But as argued earlier, Leninism was a new chapter in the history of Russian intellectual engagement with Europe, marked – in contrast to earlier stages – by the militantly dissenting character of the current chosen as a model (classical Marxism was, as Bauman and Castoriadis have described, a counterculture of capitalist modernity) and by the extreme claims of the added interpretation; the combination of borrowed and original ideas then came to fruition in a situation of a general European breakdown that took a much more catastrophic turn in Russia. These observations do not settle the question of affiliations with the Russian tradition, but it can now be framed in a way that assumes neither unproblematic continuity with revolutionary trends nor a secularizing twist to a religious legacy. Blumenberg’s concept of Umbesetzung, discussed in an earlier chapter, seems applicable to this case. The quasi-Cartesian recasting of Marxism, to use Steiner’s description, was a new departure, meant to achieve a double displacement: obsolete versions of the Russian revolutionary tradition were to be discarded, and the revolution against tsarism was, inevitably, to dethrone



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Orthodox Christianity. The results reflect a complex interplay of questions and answers, of the kind that Blumenberg regards as a defining feature of Umbesetzung. With regard to the revolutionary tradition, the task was to avoid the conclusion drawn by some other Russian thinkers and politicians attracted to Marx’s theory of capitalist development: the relegation of revolutionary expectations to a long-term process. Lenin proposed to maintain the prospect of revolution as an action to be prepared here and now. In a seminal essay, Georg Lukács credited him with realizing the ‘actuality of the revolution’ and reorienting Marxist thought from that point of view (Lukács 1970); a more precise interpretation would situate Lenin’s political project as an attempt to build on new ground without falling short of the benchmarks already set by the Russian revolutionary tradition, even if on a less tenable basis, and to rearticulate the case for the actuality of the revolution in a way that would enable alignment with the international Marxist movement while maintaining a distinctive identity (as events were to show, it was also compatible with the option of a separate international organization, although that had not been a part of the original project). These questions were answered by the aforementioned construction of a multiple vanguardism, together with the idea of a bourgeois revolution deserted by its proper driving forces and waiting to be taken in hand by the proletariat. As for the links to the religious tradition, attempts have been made to explain Leninism as a secularized Messianism, rooted in Orthodoxy (e.g., Sarkisyanz 1955), and the later institutionalized ideology of Marxism-Leninism has been compared to more official Orthodoxy. Others have objected that such claims ignore the violent and destructive break with religion that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power. Here too, the concept of Umbesetzung proves fruitful. The question of the relationship to Orthodox Christianity and its cultural legacy was not uncontroversial in the Bolshevik milieu; after the failed revolution of 1905, disagreements on this subject – among others, including responses to philosophical innovations – prompted Lenin to write Materialism and Empiriocriticism, where both compromises with and borrowings from religious thought were condemned in militant terms. The philosophical content of this work is negligible, but as an ideological programme, it proved highly effective. Lenin’s main claim was that the integral, consistent, and definitively grounded world view of Marxism, destined to replace religion, must be based on a thoroughgoing materialism. In the Russian context, this aspiration to intellectual autarchy and hegemony had a meaning and an impact that Western European efforts to systematize Marxism could not have; they took place in a cultural environment where a pluralism of world views was more established and did not face a cultural-political bloc comparable to the alliance of autocracy and Orthodoxy. The all-encompassing Marxist

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teaching invoked by Lenin did not exist, but it could at least be imagined and pre-legitimized. In this regard, the pronouncement that Lenin’s followers later described as his definition of matter was crucial: its real content was that only materialists consistently recognized the reality of the external world. Lenin thus posited a continuum between common sense, materialism, science, and Marxism, and that presupposition was essential for the later construction of Marxism-Leninism as an official and incontestable world view. At the same time, this supposedly final codification of revolutionary theory had to draw on religious precedents – canonical texts, infallible authorities, ritual prescriptions – to achieve the total ideological reach to which it aspired. At that point it becomes appropriate to speak of a secular religion. Those who stress the closed and dogmatic rationalism of Soviet ideology have doubts about the notion of a secular religion. As Zygmunt Bauman and – in a more sustained way – Stefan Plaggenborg (2006) have argued, the mode of thought most effectively represented by Lenin and later embodied in the Soviet model recalls images of modernity previously articulated but later problematized in Western thought and practice, focused on certain knowledge of objective laws and the application of rational discipline to social life. The affinities are undeniable, although it may be debatable whether their roots should be traced as far back as to the early modern Cartesian-Newtonian notions of rationality (this is Plaggenborg’s thesis), or to what Carl Schmitt called the Vergesetzlichungswahn of the later nineteenth century. Not that Marx was innocent of that tendency, but Lenin took it to extremes. However, considering the whole trajectory from the Russian reception of Marxism to the Soviet institutionalization of Leninism, we are dealing with a more syncretic phenomenon than the derivation from obsolete notions of modernity would suggest. As Steiner’s remarks on the amalgamation of Marx and Descartes indicate, the interaction of Western sources and Russian interpretations gave rise to a new complex of significations; and as argued earlier, the novelty was enhanced by the insertion of this mixture into the double context of Russia’s revolutionary and imperial traditions. Lenin’s dependence on restrictive notions of objective knowledge and scientific rationality is not in doubt, nor is his refusal to engage with contemporary critical developments of Western thought; but his use of borrowed models in a context beyond their original setting had implications that he never fully grasped. This explains the strange and fateful mixture of lucidity and half-articulate illusions that characterized Lenin’s career, but the syncretism just noted has a broader significance concerning the meaning of the Soviet case for the question of multiple modernities.

Chapter 6

The Soviet Model

The approach pursued here is in line with the widely stated case for historicizing Communism and thus rejecting the view that reduces it to an ideological project, imposed by violence and ultimately destroyed by its internal contradictions. By the same token, the interpretations that equate a totalizing project with a total system, doomed to total collapse and leaving behind a total problem (Malia 2008), must be dismissed as ahistorical constructs. Equally unacceptable is the idea of a ‘great parenthesis’ (Baechler 1994), stretching from 1914 to 1991 and encompassing Communism as its most consummate manifestation, but then giving way to more ‘normal’ ways of organizing social life. Such a judgement implies very strong ideological presuppositions and a disregard for historical scholarship on the long-term prehistory of the short twentieth century. Very different but equally misconceived is the interpretation of Communism as a self-contained perpetuation of the Russian Empire, extended to other countries by force or accepted as a model suited to similar purposes. As will be seen, both the imperial dimension and the Russian sources are important, but they must be situated in broader contexts. Finally, and on a more metaphorical level, the frequent references to the Soviet model as an experiment are misleading; this term implies a clarity of aims and a control of circumstances far beyond the facts of the case, and it misrepresents the relationship between action and history. If the historicizing intention is, in the first instance, defined in contrast to unhistorical notions, more positive understandings will invoke varying frames of reference. As has been seen, the present analysis proposes to subsume Communism under the problematic of multiple modernities and to treat it as a central part of that field; the multiple versions of modernity are linked to a shared but complex and ambiguous civilizational orientation; when it comes to more concrete questions, geopolitical factors are a key aspect of the 117

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civilizational context. This approach differs from the view that to historicize means to place sole emphasis on the dynamics of historical processes, rooted in power structures and allowing at best for surface effects of ideology. On the contrary, the argument to be developed here is that the Soviet trajectory and its offshoots in other settings exemplify the formative role of ideas in history, even if they also illustrate the paradoxical turn sometimes taken by the interaction of ideas and power. Beyond these basic assumptions, we must deal with historical constellations, and in regard to Communism, there are two main cases: the Russian and the Chinese one. The analysis must start with the Russian one, both because it came first and because it has (even if long-term consequences are still developing) run its course in a sense not applicable to its Chinese sequel and counterpart. THE FORMATION OF AN ALTERNATIVE MODERNITY Recent historical scholarship has thrown much new light on the events, movements, and revolutions of 1917. This is not the place for more detailed discussion, but if there is a way of summing up the overall picture, it seems to be the observation that the victory of Bolshevism as a cultural and political project was due to an asymmetric and mutually misperceived alliance with multiple social movements that emerged after the February revolution. ‘Without its transforming cultural objectives, Bolshevism makes no sense at all’ (Read 1996, 300). But these far-reaching objectives were neither shared nor understood by the movements; their support for Bolshevism was motivated by demands for solutions to urgent problems and a desire for vaguely defined radicalization. Conversely, the Bolsheviks – and Lenin in particular – were prone to illusions about perpetuating mass mobilization. This constellation was short-lived, and the sequel paved the way for an outcome unanticipated by either side. The cultural-political project could not be translated into a strategy for governance and transformation, but neither was it abandoned in favour of pure Realpolitik. The Bolshevik determination to retain power was absolute, but so was the commitment to their version of a Marxist framework, even when the course of events forced them to revise the initial plans for applying it. As noted earlier, Lenin’s conception of revolution equated it with civil war, but what happened after the seizure of power in Petrograd was both in excess of his expectations and a refutation of their most crucial premise. On the home front, the civil wars – the plural seems appropriate – within the Russian imperial domains proved incomparably more destructive than the Bolsheviks had anticipated; the revolution thus aggravated and deepened



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the collapse that had made it possible in the first place. The downward spiral culminated in a major famine. To sustain a life-and-death struggle in the midst of ongoing collapse, the Bolsheviks had to adopt policies out of tune with their original projects; they had advocated a smashing of the classdominated state apparatus, and that course was in some regards pursued, but contrary to prior inclinations and promises, an army was built up on traditional lines and with substantial involvement of officers from the imperial army. The institution of political commissars, meant to give revolutionary legitimacy to this turn, became in practice a vehicle for redoubled authoritarianism and an incentive to further militarization of society. Far-reaching measures in that vein were proposed, notably by Lev Trotsky, the main architect of both the October power grab and the mobilization for civil war; they were not followed through to completion, but set a signpost towards later developments. The ideological and political framework devised to cope with all these challenges became known as ‘War Communism’, and attempts to portray it as a temporary expedient have never ceased. There is, however, plenty of evidence to show that the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, thought of it as a shortcut to the construction of Communism; but some of them, also including Lenin, came more quickly to second thoughts than others. On the international, that is, primarily European front, the border-crossing civil war envisaged by Lenin failed to materialize. Historical scholarship points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that neither the home-made revolutionary initiatives in Central Europe nor the briefly entertained vision of a westward export of revolution by the Red Army had a chance of success. This setback was not simply a loss of expected support and alliances. It also upset the ideological presuppositions of Bolshevik politics. Classical Marxism had taken it for granted that a proletarian revolution with Communist goals could only take off from an advanced capitalist society and draw on the progress already made on that basis. The radical currents of Russian Marxism had, with some difficulties and dissonances, arrived at a modified perspective that allowed for a revolution beginning where the internal conflicts of a capitalist order took a particularly explosive turn, as they had – on this view – done in Russia, rather than where capitalist development had reached its highest level, and an upgraded version of this prospect, integrating World War I and its impact on Russia, had served to rationalize the October Revolution. But even at this stage, the reliance on revolution spreading to more advanced European countries was the only way to concretize the Bolshevik strategy of transformation. Marxist ideas about a post-capitalist society had never gone beyond rough outlines, backed up by references to movements and developments that would in due course provide more specific contents. That assumption could still be maintained in more roundabout terms when Russian revolutionaries in uncertain possession of power expected a European – and

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eventually global – sequel to their breakthrough; but when the revolution failed to spread and the Russian collapse continued, in significant part due to the Bolsheviks’ own actions, the vision of a post-capitalist future became even more blurred and detached from reality, and the illusions of War Communism did nothing to reinvigorate it. Under the circumstances, the only practical meaning that could be given to it was the strengthening and the expanding reach of the party-state that was being built on the ruins of the Russian imperial one. Most importantly, the isolation of the revolutionary regime and the regression of its social environment led to a radical change of strategic orientations. Instead of constructing a new society on an advanced civilizational basis inherited from the preceding one, the Soviet regime had to improvise ways of coexisting and competing with the enduring capitalist powers, with a view to ultimately proving its superiority, but starting from an incomparably more backward condition. The later Soviet trajectory was lastingly shaped by this mixture of ideological claims and expectations with geopolitical imperatives reinforced through an acute but only partly acknowledged sense of backwardness; no covering formulation can do justice to all successive combinations of these two factors. During the first phase, when the defeat of attempted revolutions outside Russia could still be mistaken for a temporary setback, the search for strategies of survival and re-empowering was tentative and did not exclude notions of catching up with the supposedly most innovative turns of capitalist development. Lenin’s reference to two preconditions of socialism emerging in two different countries is the most striking example: he had in mind the planned war economy in Germany and the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. His perceptions of both phenomena were illusory, more so in the Russian case than in the German, and the idea of imitating German methods of mobilizing the economy in the midst of Russia’s total crisis was pure fantasy. On the other hand, Lenin proposed to explore new ways of gaining grassroots support within Russia, including measures to favour the growth of a co-operative movement. His responses to the unexpected situation were thus as diverse as they were inconclusive, and no coherent project emerges from his writings in the last years before his death. To sum up, the victory of the cultural-political project embodied in Bolshevism and brought to power by a conjunctural coalition of long- and short-term radicalisms produced paradoxical results, as far removed from an ‘experiment’ as can be imagined. The project underwent an instant and irresistible mutation, accompanied on the ideological level by a mixture of illusions and centrifugal second thoughts. The situation changed when both the coexistence with a non-revolutionary international environment and the coming to grips with a not yet revolutionized domestic society were recognized as more long-term tasks. In chronological terms, the transition to this



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phase can be defined by the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, the measures taken in its aftermath (including the tightening of party discipline) and the final disappointment of revolutionary hopes in Germany in 1923. Lenin’s death in 1924 may be seen as the definitive divide. The key characteristic of the new phase was a new set of economic policies, known as the NEP, which gave greater scope to market forces and small-scale entrepreneurial activities. In contrast to earlier toying with the idea of imitating capitalism’s most innovative achievements, the emphasis was now on reintroducing its most elementary mechanisms. But the impact of this shift was limited by two fundamental counter-trends. The apparatus of party-state power, its authoritarian structure, and its political monopoly were consolidated, and that was in the longer run bound to result in a new offensive into the domains where it had relaxed control. The absolutist claims of the power centre were incompatible with lasting self-limitation. In that sense, the attempts of the Right opposition (Bukharin et al.) to transfigure the NEP strategy into a long-term prescription for a modus vivendi with the peasantry were doomed from the outset. Moreover, the ideological framework of the new policies was linked to the assumption that capitalism had grown out of ‘petty commodity production’ and could be regenerated by it. This was not Marx’s view (his account of primitive accumulation tells a different story), but Engels had imputed it to him, and it had been widely accepted in Marxist circles. The space opened up by the concessions was thus simultaneously defined as an arena of permanently threatening class conflict. In this context, it was only a question of time when the party-state would change course, opt for a more rapid pursuit of its efforts to maximize both control and mobilization, and embark on accelerated industrialization. Stalin’s decision to take that road at the end of the 1920s, often described as a second revolution, was thus less abrupt or arbitrary than it may seem at first sight, and the myth of him having adopted the programme of the erstwhile Left opposition is untenable; the command economy, completed through the collectivization of agriculture, was a product of the power dynamics set in motion by the rebuilding of the imperial state under the aegis of the party and was only superficially related to the ideas of the opposition. On the other hand, the institutional setting that logically led to radical change from above also made it possible for a strategically positioned leader to maximize his personal power in the process. Historians now seem to agree that Stalin used the industrializing and collectivizing drive at the end of the 1920s to transform his leadership into dictatorial rule and that the dictatorship became a despotism during the great purge in the second half of the 1930s; these mutations may be seen as more contingent than the structural changes. All these trends and changes were summed up in the mobilizing slogan of socialism in one country. The manifest and latent contents of this idea should

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therefore be more closely examined, with a view to situating the emerging Soviet model in the context of multiple modernities, and ultimately with regard to the unity and diversity of modernity as a civilization. But first we must locate it in the immediate context of Soviet politics. Although Lenin had not referred in so many words to socialism in one country, that notion was a logical continuation of his responses to the predicament of an isolated revolutionary regime left in control of a ruined country. In that regard, the continuity between Lenin and Stalin is undeniable. By combining the advocacy of the newly formulated slogan with the position of general secretary, created as a key stabilizer of party rule, Stalin created preconditions for a regime that would fuse political power with ideological authority in a single sovereign figure; in the end, this personal union went so far that some critics saw it as an extreme form of caesaropapism. But the notion of socialism in one country also appealed to the new ruling stratum of party-state officials, who needed an ideological signal for their tasks and ambitions. Beyond that constituency, it undoubtedly had a certain echo in broader social circles, although it is difficult to identify the ups and downs of that influence. Last but not least, socialism in one country could only make sense in the context of a very large state; it was, in other words, an implicit justification for the reclaiming and rebuilding of the Russian Empire. Apart from this domestic background, socialism in one country was also a way of defining the relationship to the external world in general and the Western patterns of modern society in particular. This aspect is crucial for determining the place of the Soviet model in relation to the field of multiple modernities. It was, as suggested earlier, the most significant example of an alternative modernity, and that category represents the extreme among multiple modernities. The claim to constitute a superior alternative to Western modernity was, in the course of Soviet history, articulated in ideological terms and with some changes of emphasis, but its core meanings can be defined in terms less dependent on official language and corresponding to the division of sociocultural spheres that has been a central theme of the preceding chapters. In the economic sphere, the proclaimed goal was to ensure an unobstructed development of the productive forces and link it to a growing satisfaction of human needs; the capitalist mode of development was thus to be replaced by a more efficient and socially directed form of accumulation. On the political level, a higher form of democracy, cleansed of the deformations that social antagonisms inflicted on its Western version, was to be based on ‘the moral and political unity’ of the people and the party-state, to quote a frequently used phrase. This claim was enshrined in the Soviet constitution of 1936, which included a reference to the Communist Party as the vanguard of the people; it was overlooked by those who described the constitution as democratic in the generally accepted sense, even if they contrasted that



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reading with the very different Soviet reality. In the cultural sphere, the basic principle was the universal authority of a world view capable of regulating all social activity, from scientific progress and artistic creation to everyday morality to political leadership, and thus of overcoming the fragmenting and alienating division of labour supposedly characteristic of Western societies. This aspect of the Soviet model is the most compelling reason to describe it in terms of a secular religion, but that implication was obviously never admitted by official instances. The acknowledged intention of the overall pattern is best described as an attempt to challenge Western modernity in the name of a more unified and controlled model of progress. All three dimensions – economic, political, and cultural – were essential to the institutionalized promise of the regime, but the practical balance was asymmetrical; the centre of gravity was in the political sphere, and its impact on the other two ensured a prevalence of central control over transformative potential. Given the ideological adaptation to and consecration of dictatorial state power that had resulted from the Bolshevik capture of the revolution, as well as the imperatives of interstate competition, the project of transcending capitalism translated into state-controlled accumulation as an end in itself, supported by a dogmatized vision of industrialization that proved hard to correct. Similarly, the unconditionally defended monopoly of power imposed a restrictive regime on the cultural sphere. The claim to provide guidance for progress in all areas of cultural activity became a permanent effort to demarcate and maintain orthodoxy, coupled with an unending struggle against intellectual and artistic innovations rejected as expressions of ‘bourgeois’ ideology. Nevertheless, the promises overshadowed and devalued by the workings of the regime became an integral part of the Soviet social imaginary (in conjunction with other factors, yet to be mentioned). As Stephen Kotkin (1997, 358) puts it, ‘Inside Stalin’s USSR, the appeal of socialism had several layers, including the prospect of a quick leap, not just into modernity but a superior form of modernity, the corresponding attainment of high international status, a broad conception of social welfare, and a sense of social justice that was built into property relations’. These points are made in the context of the ‘Great Break’ launched at the end of the 1920s. And although blanket descriptions of the Soviet regime as utopia in power are thoroughly unconvincing, there is no denying that a utopian imaginary was part and parcel of its institutional machinery, could – up to a point – be reactivated, and was not alien to its most violent episodes. It is commonplace that the Soviet experience ended in a comprehensive failure on all three aforementioned levels, at least if its achievements are measured against the promises of more advanced modernity. That does not dispense from the task of explaining how the unsustainable pretences

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contributed to the real historical dynamics of a regime whose lifespan covered virtually the whole of the short twentieth century, with massive consequences for global history. To clarify at least the first steps of such an analysis, a closer look at the Soviet project of overcoming Western modernity is needed, and the first point to note is the one-sided polarization of one component. The focus of the opposition to Western models was on capitalism. Marxism-Leninism claimed democratic and scientific credentials, more advanced than the Western ones, but capitalism was to be abolished. This anti-capitalist orientation of the Soviet regime is not to be doubted and is deservedly more emphasized in recent scholarship than often before. But it calls for contextualization. In the first place, it must be asked what capitalism meant to the Bolsheviks who set out to destroy it. They assumed that the capitalist economy was the dominant factor in the structure of Western modernity, and that other factors and domains were subordinated to it. The rejection of the whole had to concentrate on its key part. Moreover, the Soviet view of capitalism was shaped by the impoverished version of Marx’s theory that Lenin had prescribed. A vastly oversimplified image of capitalism thus became a metaphor for Western modernity in toto. This misperception was aggravated by another aspect of Lenin’s doctrinal legacy. He had interpreted World War I as an outcome of contradictions inherent in capitalism and as the beginning of its terminal crisis. Historians have noted the culture of violence that grew out of the war and its local sequels; but in the Russian and later Soviet case, there was an additional factor. The short-circuiting of war and capitalism helped to legitimize the counterviolence that was supposed to put an end to the war-prone world order and its systemic disasters. If a problem was defined in terms of class conflicts, and hence – inevitably in the given context – as involving the struggle against capitalism, this provided a potential justification for violence, although it did not ipso facto trigger such measures. The explosions of violence that punctuate the first half of Soviet history should be seen against this background. The blanket ideologization of violence, as inherent in the established order and indispensable for successful action against it, also influenced the perspectives and strategies of rivalry with Western powers and their version of modernity. Military competition cut across the three dimensions mentioned earlier and affected each of them in specific ways. It gave a particular twist to economic development, privileging the sectors most important for military purposes and enhancing a general style of management, described by some authors as a mobilized economy (Sapir 1990). On the political level, it strengthened a tendency to equate participation with permanent authoritarian mobilization. In the cultural sphere, its impact was more nuanced; the imperatives of military modernization led to a certain relaxation of ideological control over the sciences most important in this regard.



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Military competition was the only domain where the Soviet Union could, albeit with growing strain, keep up with more advanced rivals. The claims to economic, political, and cultural superiority were more central to the self-definition and long-term ambitions of the regime but did not translate into direct trials of strength and were never within reach of fulfilment. On the domestic side, tendencies to overall militarization varied in strength during Soviet history. It has been suggested that a stepped-up militarization was a key part of the ‘second revolution’ that began at the end of the 1920s, more important than the usual focus on industrialization and collectivization would suggest (Hagen 1990); there is some evidence of the army leadership that fell victim to Stalin’s purge proposing a more far-reaching militarization than he had in mind (Kotkin 2017). At a later stage, when ideological foundations had eroded and an aging oligarchy was diminishing the authority of the party, observers noted a certain power shift in favour of the army. The ‘stratocracy’ (rule by the army) described by Castoriadis (1981) never materialized, but in retrospect, this would seem to have been one of the possible outcomes of the crisis preceding Gorbachev’s reformist turn. There was another side to the vision of an alternative modernity. The aforementioned complex of significations articulated in three spheres could also animate critiques of the existing state of affairs and demands for reform that would ensure a more adequate pursuit of the proclaimed goals. This periodically surfacing undercurrent must be taken into account when explaining the ultimate fate of the regime. No single factor can account for the collapse that unfolded from 1989 to 1991; more plausibly, a combination of structural causes, internal and global, can be invoked to show that a terminal crisis was in the making, but why it exploded, when and as it did, remains unclear, unless we also take into account that the direct cause of the downfall was the confrontation of an ambitious reform programme with a set of unmanageable and only partly understood problems. Some observers have suggested that the emergence of a reformist project was a highly improbable event and even that Gorbachev was a ‘genetic error within the Soviet system’, but if we regard reform Communism as consubstantial to the official model, that seems misleading. Gorbachev’s policies drew on a potential contained in the underlying claims to be on the road to an alternative modernity, as well as on earlier attempts to activate it, and his sense of urgency reflected the long absence of such initiatives. Even the Westernizing aspect of the reforms was rooted in older half-suppressed sources of the orthodox ideology. In 1925, Stalin had described Bolshevism as a combination of American efficiency and Russian revolutionary passion; and in the 1930s, the industrializing drive relied on Western technical assistance and expertise to a greater extent than was officially acknowledged.

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Reform Communism thus accompanied the trajectory of the Soviet model, in its original homeland as well as in the domain of dependent states established after World War II, from early stages to the end. Its final bid resulted in the dissolution of the regime that it had set out to rejuvenate; if earlier attempts came to grief, there is no monocausal or uniform explanation for their failure. The obstacles had to do with the institutional structures of the model, but also with the geopolitical constraints of the Soviet bloc and its international position, as well as with intrinsic limitations of the projects. In the case of the most significant reform Communist initiative before Gorbachev, the Czechoslovak movement of 1968, it seems clear that the geopolitical factor was decisive. The Soviet centre could not accept radical reforms on the westernmost border of the bloc. We can only speculate about possible outcomes of the Prague Spring if it had been allowed to develop along its own lines; but there is no doubt that domestic conditions had matured to a point where further changes were imminent. It remains to be discussed how the pretensions to an alternative modernity fit into a civilizational framework. The concept of civilization has been applied to the Soviet model, not only by admirers as well as adversaries (Webb and Webb 1936, Sinyavsky 1990) but also by historians of a more analytical bent. Stephen Kotkin (1997, 2) describes Stalinism as ‘the advent of a specifically socialist civilization based on the rejection of capitalism’. Although the case study from which this is quoted is one of the most illuminating books written on the Soviet experience, questions may be raised about all three key terms. The concept of civilization remains rather vague, and Kotkin does not engage with any works on civilizational analysis. The reference to socialism is inconclusive; what was the meaning attributed to socialism, and what was the role of this meaning in the context of the Soviet model as a total social phenomenon? As for the rejection of capitalism, which for Kotkin seems to define socialism ex negativo, its meaning depends on the understanding of capitalism, and as argued previously, the Soviet rejection was not simply a response to a really existing and unproblematically present capitalism. Rather, it relied on an imagined pars pro toto, an a priori oversimplified and conjuncturally conditioned picture of capitalism as a substitute for the Western modernity that was to be replaced by a more advanced version of a shared historical pattern. That observation brings us to the interpretive frame applied in the present work: the conception of modernity as a new civilization, with variations that include the Soviet model. But for that perspective to make sense, we need to establish a connection to the cultural orientation of autonomy. At first sight, the Soviet experience is an unpromising field for that approach. The first step towards bridging the gap is to insist on the fundamental ambivalence – or, more precisely, the multiple ambivalences – of



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autonomy, as defined in a preceding chapter. Specific figures of autonomy serve to reduce that ambivalence. They focus on forces and actors that come to the fore in modern history; we should therefore distinguish between the historical substrata and the interpretive charges added to them. Class and nation, seen by historical sociologists (notably Michael Mann) as the key collective actors of modernity, are such figures; here it is primarily the problematic of class that concerns us, although the national factor and its multiple guises would have to be included in a more comprehensive analysis of Communism. The notion of imagined community has been much used by students of nation formation and nationalism, but if class and nation are seen as figures of autonomy, the former is no less imagined than the latter. But the imaginary dimension that adds strength and scope to class and nation is also the source of new ambiguities. It facilitates the absolutization of ideas and interests grounded in their situation or attributed to them by interpreters with an ideological agenda, and this excess meaning can be turned against autonomy in a broader context, not least in regard to the political and cultural spheres. Class absolutism was a prominent feature of Lenin’s Marxism; it was incorporated into official Soviet ideology, and, in a paradoxical way, it weakened the case of those who attempted a critical Marxist analysis of the Soviet model. It proved difficult to identify the Soviet power elite in class terms, and this appeared as a reason to tone down the criticism and admit at least a partial historical legitimacy (Trotsky is the obvious case in point). National absolutism is a familiar phenomenon and has taken a greater variety of forms than its class-oriented counterpart. It should be noted that autonomy, as defined in the present work, is neither confined to the individual nor to the collective dimension; it presupposes both and is open to both collectivistic and individualistic interpretations. Both sides can take an absolutist turn. The absolutism of the sovereign individual is more prominent in the contemporary world than any collectivist alternative; and this figure of the individual is of course no less imagined than those of class and nation. But further discussion of that theme is beyond the scope of this book. To return to the question of class absolutism and its ramifications, another look at the Leninist imaginary will show that it involves an additional layer of ambiguity. As Lenin saw it, the class mandated by history – the proletariat – could only carry out its mission if it was guided and instructed by a vanguard capable of putting revolutionary strategy on a scientific basis and thus ensuring an adequate and purposeful management of progress. This vision of a vanguard was undoubtedly a derivative of the imaginary field centred on the signification of autonomy but could easily be turned against its original premises and magnified at their expense. It may be useful to consider this constellation in light of Max Weber’s argument about ideas and interests. According

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to Weber, interests were the driving forces of human action, but the interpretive role of ideas channelled the interests in specific directions. The Leninist project was explicitly defined in terms of ideas and interests: the all-powerful ideas of a systematized Marxism were to clarify the objective interests of the working class and advance them against short-term concerns (in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács formulated the concept of objective interest more forcefully than Lenin ever did). The ideas supposed to guarantee the objectivity of interests were based on a fundamentalist interpretation of modern science and an extreme version of modern beliefs in foreseen and managed progress. This construction made it possible to disregard empirically evident interests of the social actors to be mobilized, and even to write them off altogether if circumstances seemed to call for that. Lenin’s famous remark about the working class having disappeared, made towards the end of the civil war, was probably more motivated by growing working-class resistance to Bolshevik rule than by the real shrinking of working-class numbers. As we have seen, the victory of the Bolshevik project involved both a disconnection from the social allies that had brought it to power, hence a dissolution of the briefly plausible constellation of ideas and interests and an uprooting of the imagined objective interests. However, it would be misleading to see the outcome simply as a takeover by a new power elite, pursuing its particular interest in uncontested rule and disguising it as a general one. The Bolsheviks strove to stay in power, but that is only one aspect of the story; more importantly, they were, together with adversaries and disillusioned allies, caught up in a process that – as we have seen – changed both the project and its relationship to the domestic as well as the international environment. This was, in other words, an exemplary case of the dynamics of historical processes transcending and transforming the interaction of ideas and interests. TOTALITARIANISM IN CONTEXT After the end of the civil war, core institutions were there to stay and the long-term direction of postrevolutionary development was structurally foreshadowed, even though – as events were to show – conflicts and upheavals along the way were not excluded. Conceptual labels for the regime that emerged from this situation are varied and disputed; the most recurrent but also the most controversial one describes it as totalitarian, and the following discussion will defend a somewhat qualified version of this concept. Its prima facie incompatibility with notions of autonomy is even more obvious than in the case of Lenin’s vanguardism. However, some analysts of totalitarianism, especially Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet, have emphasized direct and indirect connections between democratic and totalitarian regimes, and their



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arguments may help to clarify the more basic relationship to the civilizational horizon of autonomy. To sum up, their works suggest four different ways of linking the totalitarian phenomenon to a democratic background. The first and most elementary one has to do with an inherent ambiguity of democracy: the sovereignty of the political community, over and above the sovereignty of the state, can be understood in the sense of identity or representation (that point had been made by Carl Schmitt in a different setting). Arguably, a viable balance between the two is needed for a democratic regime to work; with a unilateral emphasis on the identitarian aspect, to such lengths that political power comes to be seen as an expression of the unity of the people, a precondition for totalitarian turns is created. A second source of totalitarian temptations was highlighted in Lefort’s writings: if democracy dissolves the traditional, stable, and visible incarnations of power and institutes a new condition of uncertainty, the troubles and discontents arising from that experience may prompt attempts to re-establish firm anchors; this point of view is especially relevant to the institutionalization of supreme leaders, who represent a kind of re-embodiment of power. On a more specific level, extensively discussed by Gauchet, the crisis of democracy after World War I  created openings for totalitarian projects. Difficulties with recombining democratic rules and institutions in a way that would respond to the new conditions brought about by the war, as well as problems inherent in the very fragile international order established by peace treaties, enabled the presentation of totalitarian visions as answers to the predicament of democracy. Finally, and less directly related to democratic dilemmas, totalitarian regimes drew on imperial legacies. In the period from late nineteenth to early twentieth century, democratic reforms took place in states with imperial reach and were not unrelated to the attempted nationalizing of empires. Totalitarian movements and rulers could take the fusion of nation and empire to extremes, or promise a more effective pursuit of the goals that had not been achieved before 1914 or during the war. Given the very limited scope of democratic development in Russia before the revolution, these considerations may not seem relevant to the case of Bolshevism in power. But as we have seen, the Soviet model had to define itself in relation to Western institutional patterns, including democracy; the result was a mixture of rejection, rivalry, and pretensions to higher levels, and this could include linking up with more widely diffused ideas about ways to solve the difficulties of democracy. More challengingly, the problematic of democracy – in the double sense of inbuilt problems and issues raised by rival interpretations – leads us back to basic questions about autonomy and its ambiguities and paradoxes. As I will try to show, several aspects of the civilizational imaginary focused on autonomy lend themselves to responses implicated in the genealogy of totalitarianism. The multiple spheres of autonomy,

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their divergences and the tensions between them provoke attempts to impose unifying frameworks and move beyond the field of tensions that constitutes the heart of modernity. The experience of autonomous activities absorbed and deflected by historical processes, of structures created by human action becoming constraints on human capacities and initiatives, and of projects revealing unexpected implications inspires demands for more effective conscious control; in certain historical and cultural circumstances, the idea of a comprehensive and scientifically grounded world view can appear as an answer to that need. Autonomy is linked to the exercise of power, at least in the elementary sense of making a difference, and strategies for upgrading that power may link up with the quest for unity and control. None of this is meant to suggest that the trends in question lead straight to totalitarian conclusions, but in conjunction with other historical forces, they can contribute to such outcomes. When stating the reasons for retaining the description of the Soviet model as totalitarian, some basic caveats should be kept in mind. We are referring to a totalitarian regime, not a totalitarian society (the latter expression makes no sense); and the crux of the matter is a totalizing logic, not a total system. Moreover, the logic is grounded in imaginary significations. That said, the totalitarian core can be characterized as a fusion of sociocultural dimensions on two levels. It involves the subsumption of economic, political, and ideological power under one centre; as will be seen, this point is not identical with the well-known view that the Soviet model blocked the distinctively modern functional differentiation of subsystems. The other level is a fusion of power, law and knowledge; this aspect was particularly stressed by Claude Lefort. The party-state defined itself as a supreme power centre, superior to legal norms and in possession of cognitive resources that entitled it to intervention and supervision in all domains of social life. In light of this approach, some common arguments against the concept of totalitarianism can be weighed and found wanting. The two most frequent ones are also the least convincing. It is often claimed that the ‘theory of totalitarianism’ is a relic of the Cold War, a discredited ideological construct unfit for analytical use. But there is no unified or authoritative theory of totalitarianism, and no exclusive association with the Cold War. The concept emerged during the interwar period, as a label for new and surprising forms of power, and was from the outset open to diverse interpretations with equally different political connotations. It is true that the discourse on totalitarianism was later adapted to the ideological strategy of one side in the Cold War, but this is not a valid reason for dismissing the concept. Equally irrelevant is the objection that the reference to totalitarianism implies total control over society and its individual members, which would obviously be an unrealistic assumption. But it would be difficult to find a theorist who has made such claims; portraits



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of totalitarianism as a closed society are, if at all, to be found in literary works. The definition proposed above emphasizes the aspirations of a regime, not the achievements on the ground. It allows for a variety of limiting factors: insufficient mechanisms of control, de facto devolution of power, elementary resistance of social forces, unintended consequences of central interventions, to mention only the most salient examples. A third objection merits more serious consideration. The concept of totalitarianism has been rejected on the grounds that it places the regimes in question beyond history, on a level ultimately to be understood in metaphysical or anthropological terms. There is some justification for this in the case of Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, which emphasizes the nihilistic dynamic of totalitarian regimes (this was linked to her reluctance to apply the concept anywhere beyond Nazi Germany and the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union). By contrast, the definition proposed here stresses the historicity of the phenomenon, and that also means allowing for historical shifts and variations within the core pattern. Totalitarian regimes differ in regard to the ways of institutionalizing and symbolizing their power centre, and especially in their conceptions and practical renderings of the role attributed to a supreme leader. A comparative analysis of such contrasts would have to engage with Fascist regimes, but they are beyond the scope of this book; some differences between China and the Soviet Union will be noted below. The historical perspective also recognizes changes in response to circumstances and downscalings of institutional ambitions; we can legitimately speak of totalitarianism in limited retreat, and that applies to the later history of the Soviet Union. A restructuring of the totalitarian framework, extending over a considerable timespan and with possible alternatives emerging along the way, is also conceivable and seems to be exemplified by developments in China. Some versions of the totalitarian perspective have stressed the radical novelty of the regimes in question, their break with traditions and their efforts to impose all-encompassing patterns on a kind of ground zero. Even scholars who dismiss the notion of totalitarianism often take the view that in the Russian case, the violent destruction of traditional elites and institutions, inspired by a blanket ideological rejection of the previously dominant world view. makes it impossible to explain the new regime in terms of an older legacy. But a comparison with other upheavals, not least the Chinese one, shows that a violent turn against tradition does not exclude latent links to its premises and orientations, nor delayed explicit revivals of such connections. The continuities between tradition and modernity are always selective, more or less formative, and often accompanied by spectacular breaks on other levels. A historical approach of the kind attempted here, incorporating a suitably downsized concept of totalitarianism, must take the question of traditional sources seriously. But that line of analysis has to begin with some very

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specific characteristics of the Russian tradition. It is never a foregone conclusion that a civilizational identity can be attributed to a particular region; there are regions better characterized as civilizational crossroads or composites, and Russia seems to be an exemplary case in point. After an early but important encounter with the Far Northern periphery of an emerging Europe, Russian history was shaped by Byzantine and Inner Eurasian influences (the formation of the Muscovite state in the shadow of Mongol domination was a key episode), then – from the reign of Peter I onwards – by closer contact with and extensive borrowing from the more advanced states of Europe. Rather than positing an ‘Orthodox civilization’, the dominance of Orthodox Christianity should be seen as an attempt to integrate and contain these disparate factors. The limits of that endeavour became evident when the Russian Empire was drawn more closely into the orbit of Europe. It is now accepted by historians that the Russian part in the defeat of Napoleon and the ensuing reconstruction of a European order was more significant than was long assumed. On the domestic front, this enhanced involvement resulted first in a brief bid for radical change (the Decembrist revolt of 1825 is commonly seen as the inaugural act of a revolutionary tradition), and then a massive reaffirmation of Orthodoxy and autocracy as bulwarks of Russian identity. But the European order imposed after 1815 was soon undermined by social and geopolitical developments, and the power most seriously affected by its disintegration was Russia. The defeat suffered in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 provoked major internal reforms, but also a growing disagreement within political and cultural elites, on containing or continuing the changes. Both sides to the dispute contributed to a resurgence of the revolutionary tradition. As will be seen from this summary, the question of a legacy influencing the course of revolutionary change is not a simple one. A paradigm of stateguided and authoritarian development was embodied in historical precedents, notably the Petrine revolution, and imprinted on the social imaginary; this has been emphasized by various authors, perhaps most forcefully by Robert Tucker (1992). But if this model was reactivated by the victorious current within Bolshevism, against other tendencies, that was done in a new historical context that imposed additional demands and options. The strategy of development now had to be implemented in conditions of intensified competition with Western powers, but also against the background of a breakdown of their shared civilizational framework in 1914, and therefore with the prospect of an alternative order, to be constructed in much less favourable conditions than its original advocates had expected. These constraints called for a vastly more accelerated transformation than any historical precedent had even adumbrated. As a result, the recourse to violence, inherent in the statist paradigm, became much more imperative; at the same time, the need for broadly based mobilization had to be answered. The ideological instrument devised to cope



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with this complex situation was the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. As an integrative framework imposed on heterogeneous factors (the Russian background, the geopolitical context and the vision of an alternative modernity defined as an anti-capitalist society), it may be compared to the earlier role of Orthodoxy; analogies and imitations are better explained in terms of parallel functions than as expressions of an enduring Orthodox spirit. For this constellation to take shape, a certain fusion of Russian imperial and revolutionary tradition was necessary. Tibor Szamuely’s pioneering but oversimplified observations on this point (Szamuely 1974) should be rephrased in more processual terms; the fusion was neither complete nor self-contained, nor can it be identified with Lenin’s seizure of power. The portrayal of the vanguard in What Is to Be done?, backed up by references to mainstream Central European Marxist orthodoxy, was already marked by the ambition to match and outperform the tsarist autocracy on its own ground, by a centrally guided mobilization of the society that the imperial rulers could only strive to control, and the imagined party came closer to realization after the conquest of state power than during the struggle against it. It seems clear that an element of mimetic rivalry entered into the revolutionary strategy. But soon after the first definition of Bolshevism and its differentiation from other currents, the revolution of 1905 broke out, and the two wings of the socialist movement drew opposite lessons from it. The Menshevik discovery of possible alliances with liberal forces and the Bolshevik awakening to the revolutionary potential of the peasantry have rightly been singled out as decisive steps towards separation of the incipient parties (Ferretti 2019). In the latter case, this meant a certain rapprochement with a social force that had traditionally been both exploited and feared by the autocracy, and occasionally broken out of control. But Lenin’s grasp of rural society and its problems should not be exaggerated. As the events of 1917 and subsequent years were to show, he could include the rural factor in his strategy and make calculated adjustments to the policies of those who had envisioned the peasantry as a main revolutionary actor; but the phenomenon of a rural revolution alongside the urban one, giving rise to a restructured peasant society with significant revivals of traditional institutions, was beyond his comprehension, and he could only respond with improvised violence. The main road to imperial fulfilment was the reconquest of Russian territories (apart from the north-western periphery) during the civil war. The moving of the capital back to Moscow was a symbolic affirmation of continuity with an older geopolitical legacy, and the official proclamation of socialism in one country was an ideological consecration of that claim: the imperial size of the country made the proposal to go it alone plausible, and the socialist label adapted the empire to revolutionary promises. A convincing alternative to the concept of totalitarianism has, to the best of my knowledge, not been proposed. Stefan Plaggenborg’s interpretation of

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Soviet modernity as an ‘integralist’ one, although in part inspired by the same considerations as the totalitarian models, is meant to be such an alternative; but it is open to objections, and Plaggenborg’s own analysis provides some arguments against it. What he has in mind is the imposition of a total and unambiguous order, based on a monopoly of power and knowledge. The label ‘integralist’ suggests an affinity with the interpretations that have stressed the inability of the Soviet model to allow the level of differentiation supposedly required by modern societies, mostly defined in functionalist terms. But Plaggenborg’s thesis has a more specific thrust. To begin with, his summary of Soviet achievements and weaknesses is worth quoting. He lists various developments, from educational progress to enhanced mobility and from urbanization to the exploration of space, and then adds that the Soviet model could not ‘sustain these modernizing pushes and make them capable of further development’ (Plaggenborg 2006, 48). This is a convincing description; but if the progress made in specific domains did not translate into a viable overall pattern of ongoing modernization, the question of inbuilt obstacles must be raised. Plaggenborg’s answer stresses the role of violence, both as a vehicle of transformation and as a destroyer of social forces and meanings. From this point of view, the Soviet experience represents a culminating point of a more general modern trend, the unleashing of violence in revolutions, civil wars, critical phases of state formation and interstate wars. Violence becomes a dominant mode of communication: ‘violence as communication integrates’, and ‘horizontally and vertically, violence connects all with everybody in all domains’ (2006, 337–38). It seems counter-intuitive to speak of violence as a mode of integration, especially when this is linked to the claim that a society could not take shape under the Soviet regime; a better term for the interconnections in question would be Norbert Elias’s concept of figuration. The comments just quoted apply to the Stalinist phase of Soviet history. Plaggenborg notes the significant differences between Stalinist and postStalinist versions of the regime, but adds that the foundational recourse to violence remained decisive for its long-term destinies. Experiences and memories of extreme violence led to long-term paralysis of social actors; the monopolistic state could not dispense with the possibility of reactivating violence; but the fear of reintroducing that factor into power struggles within the leadership also limited the latter’s capacity of action. But these considerations also affect the retrospective view of the Stalinist era. Violence is always contextual, channelled by institutions and significations, never a world unto itself, ‘where other rules apply and other people live’ (Baberowski 2015, 17), and a focus on violence in itself does not take us far. In the case discussed here, there is no denying the latent omnipresence and paroxystic waves of violence. It is probably true that at the height of the great purge, Stalin could have turned his machinery of terror against any group or individual in Soviet



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society; it is very hard to find a comparable example. Hitler would never have been able to decapitate the German army as Stalin did the Soviet one. Historical research on the purge indicates that Stalin tended to tackle any kind of problem through ‘systematic application of direct violence against specific groups of the population, defined in socio-cultural or ethnic terms’ (O. Khlevnyuk, quoted in Graziosi 2010, 423). But the phenomenon of a supreme leader with that kind of scope for arbitrary action presupposes a historical context. A closer look at the background suggests a perspective somewhat different from Plaggenborg’s. The civil war was not only ‘the big bang of the Bolshevik experiment’ (Plaggenborg 2006, 330) but also a primordial experience of a threatening abyss that had to be avoided. It transformed the whole imperial domain into a ‘playing field saturated by ubiquitous, uncontrolled aggression, which various leaders aspired to capture and direct for their own purposes’ (Engelstein 2018, 591). The Bolshevik response, prefigured by Lenin’s mode of thought and vision of leadership, was a paradoxical mixture of containment and concentration. The monopolization of power by the party-state and the ideological monopolization of violence by the ideology of class struggle brought the disruptive dynamic under control; at the same time, this coercive order enabled not only a permanently legitimized – even if operatively intermittent – use of violence, but also waves of massively violent intervention in political and social life. The two main waves that gave the Soviet model an enduring shape were very different, and brief comments on each of them will highlight the changing relationship between violence, institutions, and ideology in the Soviet setting. As noted earlier, the crash industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture that began at the end of the 1930s were, in a fundamental sense, consistent with the Bolshevik project, imposed through seizure of power and civil war, and its inbuilt vision of modernization. Controversies on economic policy within the leadership were the last outbreak of pluralism inside Bolshevik circles, but in the last instance, notions of gradual industrial build-up and long-term coexistence with the peasant society that had come out of the other revolution of 1917 were less compatible with the Bolshevik imaginary than was the new course imposed by Stalin. This is not to suggest a predetermined sequence of events. Rather, the radical turn of 1928–1929 exemplifies the interaction of a developmental trend, in this case ideologically articulated, with historical contingency. It was, in other words, overdetermined by several situational factors. Stalin’s drive for more dictatorial power and his desire to seal victory over rivals through irreversible changes played a role; so did the exaggerated perception of food supply problems and the war scare that seems to have had a self-reinforcing intoxicating effect. The campaign for the new course involved a high degree

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of political and ideological mobilization; the imaginary of progress through rational mastery was invoked in intensely militant terms, and together with the visible advances in industry and education, this prompted both admirers at the time and later critical historians to speak of a civilization in the making. The objection that Stalinist practice had more to do with barbarism than with civilization is not decisive; a non-normative concept of civilization is compatible with the qualifying point that each such case produces its versions of internal and external barbarism. But the view defended here is that the emerging Soviet model was not so much a new formation as a simultaneously extreme and regressive version of modern civilization, afflicted with both self-obstructing and self-destructive trends. The death toll and the repression during the so-called first five-year plan (1928–1933) were denied by official discourse, and in the international arena, this side of the ‘great turn’ was to a considerable extent overshadowed by the visible successes. There was no ritual staging of violence. In this regard, the second wave – the great purge of 1936–1938 – took another course. Although the show trials were, as we now know, in a sense only the tip of an iceberg, the most visible part of a much more extensive terror, there are good reasons to insist on their particular significance. It may seem misplaced to speak of ritualized violence: there were no public executions, and the supreme leader was never visibly involved in the repression. But the trials were a staging of violence in absentia: as the force looming behind the humiliation and the confessions (more widely seen through than could be said at the time) and beyond the death sentences. On another level, a fictional glimpse was provided by the invariable accusation of planning to kill Stalin. The purge was not simply meant to eliminate potential adversaries of the regime and its leaders, to terrorize the population into total obedience, or to replace incumbent cadres with more subservient ones. Over and above all that, it was an important phase in the formation of a totalitarian power structure. To clarify this aspect, we can draw on Claude Lefort’s distinction between three processes involved in the sociocultural framing of power. He describes them as mise en sens, an insertion of power into broader frameworks of meaning and interpretation; mise en forme, an institutional patterning of power; and mise en scène, the staging and visible representation of power. This line of analysis has received less attention than it deserves; Communist regimes are a particularly relevant field for its application, and the point to be emphasized in the present context is the role of the supreme leader on all three levels. It seems generally agreed that historical research on the regimes classifiable as totalitarian has refuted conjectures about ‘weak dictators’, but the conclusions to be drawn from that do not only highlight the role of individuals in history; the other side, so far less discussed, is the transformation of the individual into an institution.



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In the Soviet model, the attribution of meaning to power was guaranteed by the prescribed and comprehensive world view of Marxism-Leninism. Formal institutionalization centred on the party-state, credited with scientific certainty about ways and means of progress. The less formal but highly consequential institutionalization of the supreme leader was a link between the two levels: in relation to the world view, he was elevated to the level of a fourth and only living classic, thus invested with a doctrinal authority that had no equal or rival; in relation to the party-state, he was formally integrated into its highest instances, but the special status of an ideological guardian enabled him to play the role of a one-man power centre. As for the staging of power, the very limited direct presence of the leader in mass settings has been noted as a characteristic of Stalinism (Baczko 1981), but this was counterbalanced by massive iconic and verbal mediation. In that regard, the great purge was of crucial importance. Although Stalin took care not to be visibly involved in the operation, the trials were doubly conducive to this kind of image building. On the one hand, they served to confirm Stalin’s most preposterous doctrinal innovation, the notion of intensifying class struggle after the revolution, and the applicability of this claim to his intra-party adversaries; on the other hand, they portrayed him as the target of all anti-Soviet activities, thus identifying the survival of the state with his rule. But in the final instance, and in keeping with the archaizing thrust of totalitarian domination, the spectacular murder of fallen leaders and suspected rivals had the character of human sacrifice, contributing to the staging and upgrading of an unprecedently extreme power. The institutionalization of the supreme and – from the mid-1930s onwards – despotic leader must be understood in light of the imaginary significations invested in him. Their overall thrust was markedly ambiguous. On the one hand, Stalin was acclaimed as a universal scientific authority, a master builder of a new society, and a pioneer of human mastery over nature (the post-war ‘Stalin plan for the transformation of nature’, a wildly unrealistic project of – among other things – changing the course of Siberian rivers, was a culminating episode of this aberration). The despot thus became a hubristic icon and a monopolistic model of human autonomy. On the other hand, his exorbitant power could not do without sacral connotations. The status of a last and only living ‘classic of Marxism-Leninism’, hence the only incontestable interpreter of the other classics and the ultimate decider on admissible development of their doctrine, gave him a quasi-papal authority. The comprehensive ritualization of his public appearances and symbolic presence, as well as the close association with the more overtly sacral cult of a dead founder and leader, reinforced the characteristics of a secular religion. These aspects of Stalinism have often been underestimated. Critics of the Soviet model rightly emphasized that official condemnations of the ‘personality cult’ after Stalin’s death used this language to avoid discussion of structural faults;

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but the subsequent focus on the makings and workings of the regime could obscure the symbolic dimension. The cult was real and central, and for that very reason, it could be scapegoated in order to protect other core institutions of the party-state order. CHANGE AND CRISIS Because of the institutional and imaginary aspects listed previously, Stalin’s death marked not only the disappearance of an overpowering leader with no obvious successor. It left an institutional vacuum that could neither be filled nor ignored. The short-term sequel was a rapid change, as clear in its implications as it is impossible to trace in detail. The only conceivable aspirant to Stalin’s vacant place (L. P. Beria) was disposed of, and the other leaders agreed to abandon Stalinist methods of resolving their rivalries. There is, for obvious reasons, no archival evidence of this double pact. But it resulted in a shift from autocratic to oligarchic rule, and a marked downgrading of the sacral pillar of the regime. The massive intensification of the Lenin cult was a compensatory strategy but could not be a substitute for a living despot. This is not the place for an extensive discussion of later changes to the Soviet model. But the general pattern of its development after 1953 – the second half of its lifespan – may be characterized as a series of attempts to achieve progress and realize promises inherent in the ideological claims of the regime, without undermining the oligarchic version of the party-state and without an integrative project. The oligarchic turn had been a rapid and improvised response to the loss of an embodied and omnicompetent centre. It was further consolidated with the overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964 and became both a protection against autocratic reversals and a barrier against radical change. The official self-description corresponding to this settlement was ‘developed socialism’, a shorthand for multiple meanings. It implied a claim to have fulfilled the aim of ‘socialism in one country’ and reached a stage where that could no longer be put in doubt; but it also announced a new social policy that would bring the benefits of this achievement home to broader sections of society. It redefined the time horizon of the regime, emphasizing progress within an existing framework and shifting the goal of a communist society to the indeterminate future; but it also justified the established order as a developmental stage that excluded alternatives. The commitment to social reforms gave rise to a welfare state with particular features (Plaggenborg 2006; his notion of an unwritten and unilaterally defined social contract fits this constellation well), too little noted in comparative analyses of such formations. It remained fundamentally authoritarian and geared to a recognition



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of societal needs, rather than any concession to autonomous forces that might define them in a different way. Other strategies of upgrading and adaptation were pursued, with limited and to some extent counterproductive effects. A stronger emphasis on economic growth, accompanied by periodic reorganizations, was expected to bring success in great power competition, but the prescriptions applied proved too dependent on obsolete models for that to be feasible. More activist policies in what was then known as the Third World, accompanied by an ongoing military build-up, appeared to strengthen the geopolitical position of the Soviet Union; but this short-lived offensive, in fact closely linked to the ‘shadow cold war’ with China, was based on very fragile foundations at both the initiating and the receiving ends. A point worth noting is the impact of these efforts on perceptions of the Soviet Union, which in turn translated into actions with real effects. Western overestimations of Soviet economic prospects accentuated the strategy of containment on all fronts, including the military one. Welfarist policies led sympathetic observers to assume that a reconciliation of regime and society was in the making and would in due course fulfil the promises of the unfinished revolution; such expectations had some influence on European responses to Gorbachev and thus helped to improve the international environment of his new course. Military activism provoked vastly exaggerated assumptions about Soviet expansionism, most markedly in connection with the invasion of Afghanistan, widely perceived as a first move towards a stronger presence in the Middle East, but in fact limited to local aims; this misconception was to leave a lasting mark on American strategy in the region. The label of ‘stagnation’, applied to Soviet history between 1964 and 1985 by protagonists of the following period, reflects the stability of oligarchic rule but obscures the changes that were taking place. However, neither domestic nor foreign policies added up to a sustained project. The new leadership that began to envisage a more radical break in 1985 was at first content to invoke very general notions of openness and innovation. Gorbachev’s announced goal of making the Soviet Union enter the twenty-first century in a manner worthy of a great power is revealing: the reform project was, in the most elementary terms, about civilizing and modernizing the imperial party-state. That perspective could also serve to re-legitimize the latent Westernizing imaginary of the Russian revolutionary tradition, including Bolshevism; but a Westernizing turn could mean different things, also  – and in particular  – because of the transformations then under way in Western politics and societies. As the reformist drive gathered momentum and goals were more clearly defined, the variety of possible paths became increasingly visible; but given the still intact institutional context, the choice of options, not necessarily the most coherent, rested with the party leader and his closest advisers.

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It is beyond the scope of this book to analyse the complex of internal and external, long-term and short-term, structural and contingent factors that led to the downfall of the Soviet regime. This case is a particularly striking testimony to the inadequacy of monocausal or mono-narrativist explanations. But the final concatenation of events occurred in the political sphere. An attempted restructuring of the relationship between party and state provoked further centrifugal trends, especially on the side of individual member states of the union. An abortive coup and a successful counter-coup in 1991 sealed the fate of the Soviet Union as a multinational and ideologically transfigured imperial state. What then followed is better described as a last phase of the decomposing process than as a beginning of a new road to development or a return to the mainstream of modernity. The term ‘market Bolshevism’ (Reddaway and Glinski 2000) seems appropriate. Kotkin (2008) rightly rejects the idea that the chaotic changes of the 1990s represent a dogmatic application of neoliberalism, but this does not mean that they had nothing to do with neoliberalism. A certain, very half-baked interpretation of the latter became one of the decomposing factors. If neoliberalism was, as argued in a preceding chapter, a broader civilizational shift than the common identification with economic policies or views of how ‘the economy’ works would suggest, the other side of the matter is that every particular translation into practice is a mixture, adapting to and compromising with circumstances. There are no dogmatic applications. To sum up, the Soviet model after Stalin has a history, but this is neither an argument against the concept of totalitarianism, nor is it meant to suggest that the end was simply and solely a contingent outcome of events. As we have seen, a historical conception of totalitarianism avoids definitions that make it either total or non-existent and allows for a scaled-down totalitarianism in retreat; that process can, depending on circumstances, be longer or shorter. On the other hand, the Soviet imaginary contained resources for reformist projects, and concatenations of circumstances could also be decisive for the chances and timing of such efforts. The most radical one resulted in the downfall of the regime; this was not a foreordained fate, but the events and problems that prompted Gorbachev and his associates to move beyond original goals led, by the same token, to growing discrepancies between policies and conditions. Hopes of implementing the reformist project within the Eastern European sphere of influence were even more quickly disappointed. The Gorbachev episode changed the international image of the Soviet Union, though not for long, but did not inspire any imitators. It was the Stalinist version of the Soviet model that was transmitted to another empire, where it took on another life and mutated in ways very different from the original. This is the trajectory to be discussed in the following chapter.

Chapter 7

East Asian Complications

The arrival and the breakthrough of Chinese Communism were briefly described in the third chapter and situated within the chronology of the short twentieth century. This chapter will first outline a more long-term perspective that sets China very sharply apart from Russia, with noteworthy implications for their respective revolutionary paths, and then move to closer analysis of key episodes in the Chinese reception and transformation of the Soviet model. THE CIVILIZATIONAL BACKGROUND If Russia could be characterized as a civilizational crossroads, China represents a very different type of formation. It has for a long time been a distinctive and dominant civilizational centre of an exceptionally clearly demarcated region. A historian of Japan has described the significance of China seen from Japan as analogous to what a fusion of classical antiquity, the medieval Catholic Church, and eighteenth-century France would mean for Europe (Jansen 2014).The Korean relationship to China was even closer. China was, in short, a cultural colossus, enduring and unrivalled within a region that has sometimes been described as the Sinicized world or the world of Chinese characters (reflecting the extraordinary cultural charge of Chinese writing). Here I will follow the more common usage and refer to East Asia, defined in terms of a geopolitical triangle: China, Korea, and Japan. A later and more ambiguous addition may be noted: since the tenth-century emergence of Vietnam as a separate political entity, it has – due to the very strong Chinese imprint on its culture and institutions – been closely linked to the East Asian sphere, but geopolitically speaking, the location within a changing Southeast Asian grouping of states has been more important. 141

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The stability of the core triangle is striking and hardly equalled in any other historical region; allowing for internal structural changes and temporary fragmentation, the three polities have been present since the seventh century. Equally singular is the lasting pattern of asymmetric coexistence with very limited political intervention. After a failed conquest in the seventh century, there was no Chinese attempt to impose direct control over Korea, only a military action to stave off Japanese conquest at the end of the sixteenth century. The Chinese empire never tried to conquer the Japanese archipelago (in the thirteenth century, Korea was briefly annexed and Japan twice attacked by Mongol rulers based on conquered Chinese territory, but that is another story). Notwithstanding this political restraint, cultural prestige and radiation, backed up by the sheer size of the imperial domain, ensured China’s primacy in the region. The first hint at questioning it seems to have come from the eighteenth-century Japanese ‘school of national studies’ (kokugaku); its founders ascribed to the Japanese imperial dynasty – and by implication to the community and territory over which it ruled – a more exalted divine status than the changing Chinese dynasties could claim. This incipient cultural challenge was one of the presages to more momentous developments. If the traditional stability and cultural hierarchy of the regional core are remarkable, so is the modern overturning of this order. That was, in brief, brought about by the rise of modern Japan. Its pioneering self-transformation gave it a strong cultural attraction; and in the new context of intensified interstate competition and Western intrusions into the region, this had to be accompanied by political assertion. Several aspects and episodes of the Japanese ascendancy can be distinguished. The Meiji revolution-restoration of 1868 set it on course as a model of gaining strength through social, political, and cultural change. This was particularly inspiring and challenging for those seeking to reform its traditionally superior Chinese neighbour. But soon afterwards, Sino-Japanese relations took a new turn: in the 1894–1895 war sparked by rival ambitions in Korea, China was defeated. The following two decades were marked by an ambivalent mixture of adversarial and receptive attitudes; but Japan remained attractive, even for the increasingly radical generation of Chinese activists during the final twilight of the empire. Another turning point came with World War I; both China and Japan expected gains from a marginal engagement on the side of the Allies. Japanese hopes were fulfilled by acquisition of former German colonial footholds in East Asia and by Western acceptance of the Japanese empire as a rising power; Chinese hopes were disappointed, and this provoked an explosion of protest – known as the May Fourth Movement – that set the scene for a cultural revolution against imperial traditions and for the emergence of rival but interrelated nationalist and Communist strategies of modernization. Finally, Japanese gains from the war paved the way for an all-out bid for control of the region and global assertion as a great power, through war



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with China as well as the Western colonial powers in Asia. This ended with complete defeat and abandonment of imperial aspirations; but apart from the decisive weakening of colonialism, the Japanese collapse had two massive consequences more directly related to our present topic. On the one hand, it is generally accepted that the elimination of Japanese power, on top of the damage it had done to the nationalist regime, opened the way for Communist victory in 1949. On the other hand, the defeat of Japan brought the United States into the region, where it became more deeply involved than in European affairs. The Cold War division of East Asia was more violent than in Europe (there was no European parallel to the Chinese civil war, nor to the globalization of the Korean one); it has proved much more enduring, and there is no trace nor perspective of anything comparable to the process of European integration. From the Chinese point of view, this unsettled regional context has been a major factor of orientation. Throughout the twentieth century and into the present one, reformist or revolutionary attempts to make China modern have included and emphasized efforts to redress the balance and restore Chinese primacy in the region. But various implications of that aim have come to the fore at successive moments. Learning from the upstart Japanese rival (and eventually from the smaller states that had followed the Japanese example) was important at two stages, albeit in different regards: at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the last decades of the twentieth one, when the party-state opted for a compromise with capitalism. The pursuit of power, economic as well as political and military, was crucial, and nationalists and Communists developed alternative strategies for that purpose. In the present phase, the confrontation with the US presence in the region is a primary concern; the geopolitical part of the ‘Chinese dream’ is incompatible with an acceptance of Cold War status quo in East Asia. One of several key differences between present Sino-American tensions and the U.S.-Soviet contest is that in the latter case, there was no region where the respective strategic interests came into a similarly intricate conflict. The division of Europe began with a compromise that was never seriously called into question. In short, the regional context was crucial to China’s modern transformations, and it was very different from the Russian case. So was the civilizational background, which should now be considered more closely. It is a commonplace that Chinese history reflects an extraordinary civilizational continuity, but some questions arise when it comes to more precise definitions and to opinions on the importance of this legacy for twentieth-century and contemporary China. The argument for continuity rests on key institutions, especially the pattern of rulership (commonly known in Western scholarship as the imperial institution, although this term suggests doubtful associations with European traditions), as well as its cultural framework, subject to modifications and additions in the course of a long trajectory but

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never ruptured in a fundamental way, at least not until the old order began to decompose in the nineteenth century. On this view, the unification of China in the late third century BCE, after a long period of political fragmentation and interstate struggle, can be seen as the decisive step towards the formation of a civilization. The preceding period had been characterized by a more sustained proliferation of intellectual currents, unequalled at any other stage of Chinese history. The imperial regime drew cultural and ideological support from a selective appropriation of these sources; some schools of thought were given central status, others marginalized or even forgotten, but the configuration established under the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) was flexible enough to allow for rediscoveries and changes of emphasis. There is, consequently, a case for including a period roughly coinciding with the much discussed Axial Age (some five centuries around the middle of the last millennium BCE) in the genealogy of Chinese civilization. And if we add the fact that the tradition most prominent in the making and maintaining of the imperial order, the complex of texts and ideas known as Confucianism (although the ‘ism’ is clearly misplaced), took a strongly idealized view of the Zhou dynasty that had come to power towards the end of the second millennium BCE and later succumbed to the fragmentation that culminated in the period of the ‘Warring States’, a further extension into the past seems justified. Christoph Harbsmeier (2005) refers to an ‘axial millennium’, a significantly longer timespan of gestation than in the other civilizations usually associated with the Axial Age. Uncertain sources about the Zhou dynasty leave open many questions about its character and the scope of its power; but some scholars have tried to trace the sacred monarchy that collapsed in the early twentieth century back to the Bronze Age. As for the cultural orientations that shaped the horizons and pathways of Chinese civilization, Benjamin Schwartz’s work (1985a, 1985b, 1996) is particularly seminal. He identified three central and value-laden meanings – imaginary significations, as we might call them – that have dominated the field: the notion of an encompassing socio-cosmic order, the idea of a supreme institution responsible for proper adaptation to that order and a hierarchical continuity from family organization to the political apex. If we consider the question of their relevance to recent and contemporary Chinese history, the traditional vision of a socio-cosmic order is obviously no longer relevant, but it remains to be seen whether it is possible to apply Blumenberg’s notion of Umbesetzung, as done earlier with reference to Russia, and identify a cultural frame of reference that has replaced it. The traditional version of a supreme institution collapsed in 1911–1912, but further analysis is needed to clarify the issue of a modern equivalent; this will necessitate a more detailed examination of responses to the Soviet model. Premodern patterns of hierarchy were incompatible with modern demands of mobilization; that does



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not settle the question of adaptations that might result in specific forms and directions of development. There is ample scope for disagreement on the role of China’s civilizational legacy in the making of modern institutions, ideologies, and practices. It should be noted that the views defended here are closer to those who argue that ‘traditional culture is massively present in contemporary Chinese civilization, in the form of vestiges, as an unconscious structure, as a level of language, as an object of structure and devotion, in the guise of nationalist glorification and reinvention of tradition, and that is not all’ (Pierre-Étienne Will, in Kuhn 2004, 14). It is not being suggested that an intact civilization has survived the transition to modernity or is in the process of restoration after a temporary eclipse. Rather, the point is that a specific configuration of the modern condition presupposes the involvement of traditional factors. That is, as we have seen, a key aspect of the problematic summed up in the notion of multiple modernities. One of the distinctive features that set China apart from other cases is the conjunction of a particularly powerful civilizational legacy, much older, more complex, and more self-contained than the Russian one, with the Communist project of an alternative modernity, even – for a short but eventful period – in a version supposed to outdo the radicalism of the Soviet model. To put in an impressionistic observation, it is perhaps easiest to locate symptoms of problematic but significant continuity at the intersection of ideas and politics. The Confucian tradition has been a matter of debate, an apple of discord and a source of reference, to an extent that does not apply to any legacy with Axial roots in other civilizations. In the aftermath of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, an official campaign was launched against Confucian influences; at the time, this seemed so outlandish that many Western observers saw it as a covert operation against somebody in the political leadership. It is now clear that it was nothing of the kind. Soon after the change of course in the late 1970s, Confucius and some key aspects of the tradition that took off from the texts ascribed to him were re-evaluated and given a much more prominent place in official and licensed discourse than before the campaign. Chinese interpreters of Confucianism disagree on the significance to be attributed and the themes to be emphasized, and foreign analysts disagree on the question of genuine continuity or artificial appropriation, but the question of Confucianism is in any case on the agenda and looks likely to stay. Another example of re-engagement with traditional thought serving to clarify contemporary issues is a debate on the ‘interstate political philosophy’ of the period before imperial unification and its relevance to China’s position in world affairs (Yan 2011). If we want to take the case for at least partial but constitutive continuity beyond such details, the evidence for the contrary view must first be given

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its due. The crises, breakdowns, and disasters that marked the path from late imperial to republican and Communist China are all too familiar and easily presented as a repeated or cumulative rupture with the old order. After 1850, China suffered an exceptionally destructive series of rebellions and civil wars, finally overcome by the imperial regime, but at such a cost that its capacity for regeneration was fatally undermined. Defeat by Japan was followed by the suppression of the 1898 reforms and then by the collapse of the imperial institution, often but somewhat misleadingly described as a revolution. The republican government had to fight various rivals for the succession to the empire, at local or central levels, and then came the ‘struggle for survival’ (Mitter 2014) against Japan. After the American victory over Japan, an all-out civil war was won by the Communists. The first phase of their rule brought two disasters, up to a point comparable to Soviet precedents but with notably different implications. Collectivization of agriculture, seen as essential to the rapid and controlled economic transformation intended by the regime, came in two waves. The first, although dictated from above and accompanied by considerable violence, was much less destructive than Stalin’s collectivizing drive had been. The second, marked by the establishment of the ‘people’s communes’ in the late 1950s, exceeded the imperatives of central control and the limits of economic sustainability far more than the Soviet assault on rural society had done; it reflected an explosive burst of revolutionary imagination, harnessed to despotic power and divorced from conditions on the ground. Industrializing ambitions linked to the communes came to nothing, and the whole ‘great leap forward’ resulted in one of the greatest famines in recorded history. This catastrophe makes the revival of rural society in the course of broader changes, from the late 1970s onwards, all the more remarkable. The other disaster was the ‘Cultural Revolution’ launched in 1966. It has sometimes been compared to Stalin’s great purge, but closer study has more and more underlined the contrasts. A point of contact may be found in the efforts of a leader to reinforce his sway over the party-state and his power over policymaking, but the starting position, the chosen strategy, and the longerterm consequences were very different. Stalin was pursuing a continuous path from leadership through dictatorship to despotic rule; Mao was fighting back against a push to confine him in a ceremonial role, and his countermove was to claim a more complete fusion of political and doctrinal authority than either he or any other Communist leader had previously achieved. Instead of inventing conspiracies and staging show trials, Mao relied on blanket ideological condemnations and the mobilization of grassroots violence against real and potential rivals; as a result, variously motivated protest movements proliferated, fought each other, and spun out of control to such an extent that the army had to be brought in to restore order. The outcome was widespread



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destruction of cultural heritage and resources, an all-round setback to development and a far-reaching disruption of the party-state apparatus. To sum up, the trajectory of Chinese Communism differs from its Russian counterpart in that the latter gained its entry into history and its foundational shape in the wake of the single and unique civilizational calamity of World War I, more fateful in Russia than anywhere else, while the former’s more tortuous arrival to power came after a century-long series of disasters. More generally speaking, there is no example of a modernizing transformation, comparable to the present Chinese one, following a record of troubles like the one just recapitulated. This is, at first sight, a reason to doubt interpretations of Chinese modernity as shaped or significantly influenced by tradition, and a temptation to explain the radical change still in progress as a response to challenges and opportunities created by the decomposition of the old order. But that is not the whole story, and there are solid grounds to stress the involvement of traditional forces and orientations – adding up to a civilizational legacy – in modern transformations. This is not to suggest a return to cultural determinism. Chinese modernity is neither pre-programmed by tradition nor are the inputs of the latter necessarily dominant in relation to other factors. But their interaction with new situations and horizons merits closer analysis. To begin with, a general consideration can serve to justify the line of enquiry. If the past four decades have revealed a surprising and sustained potential for improvising strategies of development, it is a plausible assumption that cultural habits and resources had something to do with this and that the protagonists were building on a legacy, rather than on the imagined blank page that Mao had wanted to use for other purposes. In particular, the transformation of Chinese agriculture supports such conjectures. This does not take us very far, but may be worth keeping in mind when it comes to more specific questions. On the other hand, the very policies that led to shipwreck and forced a change of course can be linked to traditional precedents. Mao’s exorbitant claims to wisdom and authority have been compared to some extreme cases among imperial rulers, especially the unifier of China, Qin Shihuang, and the founder of the Ming dynasty that ended Mongol domination in 1368 (Rapp and Andrew 2000). The vision of a people united around a spiritually omnipresent leader recalls notions of a ‘great unity’, recurrent in the Chinese tradition and sometimes taken up by rebel movements. But to get beyond such punctual analogies, overused by Western commentators on China and often expanded into adventurous constructions, the question of continuity through revolutionary change must be posed in terms of processes, their long-term trends and their successive turns. In addition to the general reasons for favouring processual approaches (a position now more widely accepted than in dominant twentieth-century schools of sociological thought, but not yet fully elaborated), there are particular grounds for

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stressing their relevance to modern China. They can serve to problematize assumptions about invariant and self-contained cultural patterns, supposedly anchored in the tradition and reproduced by those who aspired to overthrow it (for a critique of these ‘culturalist’ views, see Pierre-Etienne Will’s comments in Kuhn 2004, 17–23). Interpretations in this vein have been proposed by admirers as well as detractors of Chinese Communism, and they sometimes resulted in distinctions between polar opposites within the tradition, for example a culture of dependency and a culture of rebellion; the emphasis on the latter archetype seemed more plausible at a time when Mao’s exhortations to rebel were taken more seriously than they are now. Empirical reasons to focus on processes are particularly salient in the Chinese case. Both the long-drawn-out decomposition of the imperial regime, with periodic disasters, and the vicissitudes of the Communist one suggest that kind of perspective. The contrast with Russia is significant; the downfall of Russian autocracy had a very different prehistory, and although the Soviet model underwent changes, they unfolded within a more containing pattern, and there were no analogies to the self-defeating derailment initiated by Mao in the late 1960s, nor – a fortiori – to the successful reorientation from the late 1970s onwards. The processes to be analysed can be defined in more specific terms. The ancien régime that decayed and collapsed was, above all else, a state of exceptional dimensions, duration, and cultural prestige. After an intermezzo, eventful but short in relation to Chinese history, it fell to the Communist movement to rebuild a Chinese state; Communist rule then led to shifting trends of state consolidation and intervention, including an episode of major disruption, and finally to a set of innovations that must now be described as a reinvention of the developmental state. The framework for the following discussion will therefore be the problematic of state formation and transformation, but also state decay and collapse, as well as state resurgence and reorientation. Recent scholarship has brought new approaches to bear on these questions in the Chinese context; here the task is to pull together some of the threads, explore key issues that go beyond the present state of the debate, and reconsider – in this light – the significance of Chinese adaptations of the Soviet model. The last point is also a way of placing the Chinese transformation in the context of modern civilization. R. Bin Wong’s pioneering comparative analysis of state formation and transformation in Europe and China (Wong 2000) is an obvious starting point. Wong’s argument focuses on four main determinants of the processes in question: challenges, capacities, claims, and commitments. These concepts call for a brief clarification and that may be done through comparison with the classic analyst of state formation, Norbert Elias. Wong does not mention Elias; he refers to Charles Tilly, who drew on Elias’s work and added some



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significant aspects to the field of enquiry, but did not fully appreciate the reach of Elias’s conceptual and historical framework. The concept of challenges opens up a perspective that was tacitly simplified in Elias’s work. In The Civilizing Process (Elias 2000), interstate competition, including frequent wars, is the challenge that overshadows all others but is not mentioned by that name. As will be seen, the spectrum is much broader, and a comparative approach can distinguish varying relationships between interstate competition and other challenges. The concept of capacities relates to Elias’s work in a different manner. It refers to ‘the human and material resources the state can mobilize for its purposes and the effectiveness with which it can achieve its goals’ (Wong 2000, 82). In this way, Elias’s twin pillars of statehood, fiscal extraction and means of violence, are brought under a common denominator, which also includes the development of an administrative apparatus; the concept of capacities allows for the possibility that capacity-maximizing processes may not be as uniformly geared to the achievement of monopoly as Elias would have it. Last but not least, it highlights control and mobilization as two main outlets for state capacities, with the implication that their relative weight and the relationship between them may vary from one historical context to another. Claims and commitments are, as Wong emphasizes, shaped by cultural contexts but not unilaterally determined. Claims become operative through demands addressed to the state by elites – cultural, political, and economic – as well as by popular strata and movements, but also through the demands that the state makes on social actors and resources. On both sides, the articulation and implementation of claims also depends on the evolving balance of forces and the available scope for confrontation or negotiation. The introduction of this category enables a more differentiated view of state interaction with social forces than Elias had indicated; his account of struggles between state-building monarchs and elites defending their privileges tended to collapse this aspect into the overall picture of power structures evolving through competition and cumulation. Finally, commitments – ‘ideologically expressed preferences for certain styles of rule’ (Wong 2000, 82) – are more decisively and lastingly shaped by culture than claims are. A  key point in Wong’s comparison of China and Europe is that the Chinese state was based on cultural orientations ‘that assigned a high priority to maintaining popular welfare and that associated ruling with instructing the people’ (2000, 92). But although cultural factors, notably neglected in Elias’s analysis of state formation in Europe, are thus brought into the picture, culture is in the final instance treated as a part of structural dynamics, and a more holistic view of its influence on the whole process is not developed. That line of interpretation would deal with the perception and understanding of challenges, the imaginings and rationalizing

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reforms of state capacities, and the broader cultural horizons behind the articulation of claims and commitments. Some reflections on this enlarged context will be attempted below. But first we should return to the first of Wong’s categories, the concept of challenges, and relate it to another aspect of Chinese history that Wong does not identify as such, and only partially include in his concrete analyses. This is the distinctive record of intercivilizational encounters. In the context of comparative civilizational analysis, the theme of intercivilizational encounters is the most important corrective against the untenable but surprisingly resilient notion of closed cultural worlds. But it is also important to recognize that each civilization has its own specific constellation and sequence of such encounters. They represent challenges, at least on one side, sometimes on both, and not only to the states involved but also to their whole cultural framework. The Chinese experience is, in a long-term perspective, characterized by a very singular pattern. In premodern times, two encounters of a very different type, both prolonged but one more so than the other, dominate the record; more recently, a repeated encounter, first abortive and then overwhelming, has been decisive for the turn taken by Chinese history. One of the two premodern cases is the spread of Buddhism into China, beginning in the first century CE and in all essentials settled into final contours around the end of the first millennium. This process has often been singled out as an exceptionally striking case of peaceful expansion, both religious and cultural (various aspects of Indian culture were transmitted together with Buddhist thought and piety); that aspect stands out when the phenomenon is seen from the Indian side. From the Chinese point of view, the arrival of Buddhism was a challenge on two levels: this was a teaching coming from outside the licensed plurality of traditions that had already taken shape under the Han dynasty, and capable of creating its own institutions (the Buddhist monasteries), not automatically adapted to state control. On the doctrinal level, the problem was solved by adding a variously Sinicized Buddhism to the pre-existing religious traditions, thus establishing the paradigm of the three teachings (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) that became a lasting feature of Chinese civilization, and – no less importantly – by integrating Buddhist themes into new versions of indigenous thought, notably Neo-Confucianism. On the institutional level, the final move was the ninthcentury action against Buddhist monasteries, sometimes described by Western historians as a persecution, although it was not directed against Buddhism as a religion, only against the power and independence of Buddhist institutions. But in the meantime, Buddhism had also been turned into a resource. The reunification of China by the Sui dynasty, completed in 589, was clearly aided by Buddhist ideas of kingship, and the reinvigorated cultural primacy of China in the region was closely linked to its embrace of Buddhism. In



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particular, the Chinese input into the great seventh-century transformation of Japan was more directly shaped by Buddhism than the other traditions. The other long-drawn-out encounter was of a very different character. Interaction and conflict with Inner Eurasian ‘shadow empires’ (Barfield 1992) on the northern frontiers began roughly at the same time as the imperial unification of China. The reference to shadowy formations may concern limited historical sources, or the cultural asymmetry between China and the aspiring conquerors beyond its borders. But we can conclude from scholarly research on Inner Eurasian state formation, more or less imperial in ambition and practice, that the political cultures, institutional structures, and organizational practices on this side of the encounter were complex enough for the processes in question to be described as intercivilizational. This also explains the variety of the power structures that developed in the wake of Inner Eurasian conquests in China. A long-popular stereotype ascribes to China a continuous history of assimilating its conquerors; in fact, the record reveals changing combinations of inputs from the conquerors and the conquered. Obviously, no rulers coming from the other side of the frontier could ignore China’s superior cultural resources, but the intruders brought with them patterns of power that could be further developed along their own lines. A model of institutional dualism, with separate power structures for the tribal constituency of the conquering dynasty and for the control of Chinese society, was applied from the end of the first millennium. The first completely successful invaders, the Mongol empire-builders of the thirteenth century, were also the ones who most systematically maintained their own methods of rule. The question of Chinese responses to the challenge from Inner Eurasia is more complicated and less settled among historians. But two major episodes of this kind may at least be noted. The T’ang dynasty that ousted the Sui unifiers in 618 and went on to preside over the most prestigious and cosmopolitan age of Chinese civilization had Central and Inner Eurasian connections, and that seems to have facilitated a markedly versatile relationship to the three religious traditions then domiciled in China, as well as a receptive attitude to new religious communities arriving in China at the time. The first century and a half of T’ang rule became a cultural model that could be invoked in various later situations. For present purposes, developments following the overthrow of Mongol rule in 1368 are more important; they can be seen as a prelude to early Chinese modernity. The strategy put into practice by the founder of the Ming dynasty and the Yongle emperor (1402–1424) appears as an all-round effort to terminate the Inner Eurasian threat, once and for all, and raise Chinese power to a level where it would become unchallengeable. An internal reform campaign, meant to discipline the bureaucracy and strengthen the autocratic rule of the emperor, was followed up by military activism on the northern border and an extension of the ‘tributary system’,

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a symbolic affirmation of Chinese sovereignty over neighbouring as well as some more distant ones. The maritime expeditions, overly romanticized in later accounts and sometimes regarded as an incipient parallel to the European venture that began a little later, were primarily a part of this last-named policy and thus an attempt to boost the cultural component of Chinese power (Finlay 2008). Interest in overseas trade was of some importance, but there is no evidence for large-scale or long-term plans for maritime expansion. And in any case, the initial strategy of the Ming dynasty turned out to be an overstretch; the repercussions, together with other disintegrative factors, led to gradual decline, defensive policies, and withdrawal from foreign contacts (although the ban on overseas trade could not be consistently enforced). The dynasty finally collapsed under the joint onslaught of internal rebellion and external aggression; it was the victor of this very bloody multi-power conflict that became the dominant force of early Chinese modernity. A first contact with the West had already been made during the declining phase of the Ming dynasty. The early seventeenth-century Christian mission to China is a very particular case in the history of intercivilizational encounters. Despite official benevolence and readiness to draw on expertise available through the missionaries, Christianity as such made no headway. Scholars who have discussed this episode (Gernet 1982, Nelson 2011) tend to stress the radical incompatibility of Christian beliefs with basic presuppositions of Chinese thought and culture. That seems convincing, as far as it goes; we can only speculate about possible developments if the Ming crisis had been prolonged further. It can be reasonably assumed that cultural factors interacted with political ones and that the all-round restoration under the following dynasty was decisive for the blockage of an alien religiosity. The Chinese experience with Christianity would then be a more muted parallel to Japan, where the Catholic mission had been briefly successful in the context of political fragmentation but then massively suppressed by a reunified state. In any case, this first encounter left no significant cultural memories on the Chinese side; when it came to the second, it can more plausibly be argued that perceptions shaped by the two long-term experiences of other cultural worlds were of some importance. Westerners were, not without reason, often seen as barbarians (there were even signs of this scheme being applied to the Sino-Soviet conflict); the recurrent attempts to adapt lessons from the West to a Chinese spirit were reminiscent of the response to Buddhism. On the European side, the results of the first encounter were very different, though indirect and temporary. Information and impressions transmitted by the Jesuit missionaries were a decisive contribution to the positive image of China constructed in Europe, from Leibniz to key figures of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. But this chapter in the history of European views on Asia was more important for internal developments of European thought than



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for relations with China. In the latter regard, it may even have been counterproductive. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, closer contact with China led to a quick and exaggerated disillusionment. On a detached theoretical level, this was evident in Hegel’s portrayal of China as the unawakened embryonic phase in the progress of the world spirit. Hegel’s speculative and ultra-Eurocentric interpretation was to have practical consequences: it influenced Marx’s views on China and thus – indirectly – the initial China policies of the Soviet Union and the Comintern. On a more down-to-earth level, recent scholarship suggests that abrupt changes of opinion inspired by early nineteenth-century observers of China helped to justify the Opium War that began in 1840 (Platt 2018). The Manchu state that installed the Qing dynasty in 1644 and went on to conquer the whole of China, as well as unprecedentedly large territories beyond its northern end western borders, was originally an interstitial formation on the fringes of China and the Mongol imperial remnants. It developed into the most enduring synthesis of Chinese and Inner Eurasian imperial traditions and the largest imperial formation in the history of East Asia. The Qing regime drew on Chinese statecraft and the accompanying political ideologies, but it also maintained a separate Manchu identity and legacy with Inner Eurasian affiliations. It was important for the whole subsequent course of events that this composite political and cultural entity faced the main wave of Western influence in the region, as well as the internal activation of modernizing, Westernizing and nationalist forces (interconnected, but not always convergent). Before discussing the second encounter with the West and its ramifications, it is therefore necessary to take a closer look at some characteristics of the Qing regime, with regard to both permanences and innovations. As indicated earlier, the focus will be on the problematic of state formation and its accompanying trends. POLITICS AND RELIGION Most fundamentally, the Qing order was a final consolidation of traditional Chinese patterns regarding statehood, political authority, and cultural frameworks. The discussion should therefore start with some clarifying comments on these foundations. A seminal essay by Benjamin Schwartz (1996, 114–24) stresses ‘the primacy of the political order in East Asian societies’. This regional primacy was of course a result of Chinese civilizational influence on the neighbouring countries, with significant local variations in Korea and Japan. Eisenstadt had emphasized this point in his comparative analysis of Axial Age civilizations; he saw China and Greece as the two examples of Axial transformations resulting in a strong focus on the political sphere and

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its role in the constitution of human societies, but also as illustrations of the very different paths that could be taken on the basis of this common orientation. The Chinese way led to the construction of a strong political centre, the Greek one shifted the centre into the middle of the political community. We might add that both alternatives had specific implications for perspectives on human autonomy, but not in the straightforward sense of Greek autonomy in contrast to Chinese heteronomy. The Greek way was more conducive to participation and debate about institutional alternatives, but the Chinese one could and did, due to the aforementioned commitments of the centre, enable the development of evaluative criteria that provided arguments for critics of its actual performance. As historians of China (notably Metzger 1986) have emphasized, a combination of advice and criticism, although never easy to maintain, was one of the models transmitted by the Confucian tradition; and as Eisenstadt noted, the notion of a ‘mandate of heaven’, unanimously regarded as the core of traditional Chinese political culture, had ambiguous implications, although its legitimizing power was stronger than the other side: it underlined the accountability of rulers and their duty to cultivate the art of ruling. To put it another way, the very self-definition of the centre allowed a certain scope for autonomous judgement. The elevated status of the political centre was not ipso facto a guarantee of effective strength. A debate between Eisenstadt (1985) and Thomas Metzger (1984) highlighted this point. In view of compromises between imperial rulers and local elites, as well as the long-term withdrawal of the state from economic life, Metzger preferred the notion of an inhibited centre; the limits to central power were, in the last instance, inherent in the attempt to rule a very large territory, without adequate resources and despite a growing gap between state capacities and the increasing complexity of social life. A closer look at the terms of debate suggests that the disagreement may not be as significant as the two authors thought. Schwartz’s formulations indicate a way of synthesizing both points of view. As he saw it, the ‘idea of an all-embracing socio-political order centring on a particularly powerful conception of universal kingship . . . emerged very early within the Chinese cultural world’, earlier than the centralized bureaucratic state, but ‘in speaking here of a conception of all-encompassing authority, one is not necessarily speaking of the concentration of power and authority at the territorial centre, but rather of the conception of the supreme jurisdiction of the political order in all domains of social and cultural life’ (Schwartz 1996, 114–15). He further underlined three crucial qualifications. The shared and enduring orientation did not preclude the development of conflicting interpretations, including even – at the margin and in interludes – tendencies to minimize the role of the political order; the exercise of central power depended on alliances and compromises with social forces, and the patterns of such arrangements varied widely in the course of



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Chinese history. But the principle of ultimate jurisdiction enabled punctual interventions in every domain of life, and it occasionally tempted rulers to strive for despotic power. Schwartz warned against uncritical identification of Communist rule (which he described as totalitarian, at least in its earlier phase) with these traditional patterns; but it can be plausibly argued that the Communists inherited the traditional problematic and that their responses to it are to some extent reminiscent of traditional precedents. Mao Zedong’s injunction to ‘put politics in command’ is in line with the traditional conceptions singled out by Eisenstadt and Schwartz. Another of his famous statements, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’, reflects a strain of violence that had surfaced on several occasions in the history of China (and of its interaction with the Inner Eurasian empires), been overshadowed by other themes of the dominant imaginary but then overwhelmingly present during the long-drawn-out crisis of the old order and the subsequent struggle between aspirants to the succession. The problem of balancing central power and local governance has been a permanent concern of the Communist government, especially in the post-1978 phase; and the threat of despotic excesses from within the highest echelons of the regime, uncontrollable in the late 1960s, has hardly been conjured. There is a further aspect of the traditional Chinese state to be considered. Max Weber’s analysis of China is marked by difficulties in conceptualizing the Chinese state; he realized that the notion of patrimonial bureaucracy did not grasp the very specific character of the imperial Chinese state but found it difficult to formulate more precise terms. He twice used the expression ‘church state’ but did not develop it; he was obviously alluding to theocratic aspects, but the general notion of theocracy, as he used it, was too vague. Interpreters of Weber’s work have not paid much attention to this detail, but one of the most authoritative scholars on Chinese religion, John Lagerwey, has adopted the concept of a church state and put it to systematic use (Lagerwey 2010, 2013). His argument involves, first of all, a reassessment of the place and role of religion in Chinese society. Contrary to once widespread views of China as a markedly secular society, he argues that Confucianism, though not originating as a religion, became one when it was adopted by the Han dynasty, in the last centuries BCE as an official creed; the best proof of its religious character lies in the importance of sacrificial rites and canonical texts. Daoism was a more autonomously organized native religion; Buddhism was legitimized as a third text-based religion, but as a rule subordinated to the native ones. All three were opposed to an inferior popular religion, centred on local temples, which the state strove to control. But at the top of this complex religious culture was the imperial institution. ‘Headed by a Son of Heaven, who possessed the Mandate of Heaven to rule, the state in fact functioned like a church’ (Lagerwey 2013, 157). Lagerwey compares it to the papacy

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in medieval Western Christendom. But it is tempting to expand that analogy and suggest that the Chinese imperial state was more like what Europe would have seen if the papacy had merged with the Holy Roman Empire, tolerated but contained – from that position of strength – a more pluralistic religious culture and developed – up to a significant point – the bureaucratic power apparatus that was in fact built up by multiple monarchic states. The divine legitimacy of emperors could tempt them to claim a directly divine status. The whole framework functioned as a counterweight to that option, but it occasionally happened, more easily on a Daoist basis than in connection with the other religions. That background serves to clarify the phenomenon of the Mao cult. The crisis and collapse of the imperial order and the imposition of the Soviet model disrupted the traditional framework of religious life and authority; when it began to re-emerge, the first sign was an extreme and distorted version. Lagerwey refers to a divinization of Mao, and that term seems appropriate, if it is borne in mind that in the Chinese context it has a meaning very different from monotheistic associations. If ‘the gods were generally defined as humans who deserved to be remembered for their contribution to public or state welfare’ (2013, 165), the Mao cult may be seen as a mixture of imperial and popular precedents. But it departed from them in trying to occupy the whole space of ideological power and prescription. A constellation more similar to the old order, but with significant shifts, took shape after the shipwreck of Maoism. The Chinese state now recognizes several religions, including Christianity, but Confucianism is not defined as a religion. As Lagerwey argues, that reflects a decision to co-opt it as a secular teaching, ‘a patriarchal, elitist and hierarchical ideology of power’ (2013, 166), and in the context of Communist rule, that means an upgrading rather than the opposite. The Confucian connection becomes complementary to a residual Marxism-Leninism that can no longer function as a self-contained and exclusive ideology. However, the party retains ultimate control over the composition and legitimacy of the ideological mix (which includes a minimalist dose of neoliberal economics), and that makes its role analogous to the erstwhile imperial institution. To return, briefly, to the problematic of the imperial state, it should be added that the religious dimension, as analysed by Lagerwey, affects the relationship between strengths and weaknesses of the centre. A certain detachment from routine affairs is inherent in the sacral character of the imperial institution and conducive to devolutions of power. On the other hand, the uncontested ultimate authority could – especially in critical situations or at conjunctures inviting major interventions – translate into massive and overwhelming force. Mao’s vision of an alternative to these options seems to have centred on direct inspiration and mobilization by a divinized leader.



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TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SOVIET MODEL The preceding chapter discussed aspects of the Chinese tradition and noted some continuities across the dividing line between Communism and the Chinese past. It remains to engage more closely with the Communist regime, to reflect on its genesis, its transformation of the Soviet model, and the theoretical lessons to be drawn from this experience. From the Chinese point of view, the Soviet model was both an offshoot of the West and an alternative to it, and on both counts a paradigm of modernity. The former perspective was justified by two very different reasons, the recent record of Russia as one of the Western powers that had humiliated China and then fought each other, and the roots of Bolshevism in Western traditions of radicalism. The perception of an alternative also had a twofold basis: Bolshevism appeared as an antagonist of the Western bloc that had imposed a defective peace order and discriminated against China and as a uniquely successful way of restoring an imperial state while revolutionizing its social basis. This ambiguity explains how radical Westernizers associated with the anti-traditionalist May Fourth Movement could soon turn to Communism as a more promising alternative and in some cases revert to a more overtly Westernizing position (as did Chen Duxiu, the first leader of the Chinese Communist movement). In general terms, the Chinese embrace and erratic adaptation of the Soviet model cannot be described, as does the most authoritative work on Communist China’s foreign relations, in terms of abandoning the economic half of the model while retaining the political half (Garver 2018, 1). Apart from treating the Soviet model as a fixed entity, disregarding changes to it and Chinese responses to them, this view misleadingly suggests that the two components are cleanly separable. On the economic side, the Chinese record does not add up to a wholesale abandonment; we can rather speak of an ongoing attempt to rescue a rational component from an unworkable project. The command economy has been consigned to oblivion, but the strategic pursuit of priority national objectives is still on the agenda, and that in turn presupposes a political centre with certain capacities. But a party-state that has withdrawn from the command economy and opted for an eclectic ideological framework, instead of the closed Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, is no longer an intact Soviet-type institution. It draws closer to the developmental state of other East Asian countries, especially Japan, though with a superadded Leninist monopoly of political power. The context changes, and with it the meaning of the political. On this side, it is less a matter of rescuing a rational element than of preserving an institutional core with coercive powers and imaginary claims.

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This record of rebalancing an imported model in response to internal preconditions, geopolitical circumstances, and arising problems has a prehistory, and some landmarks stand out as particularly important. To begin with, the troubled ascent of Chinese Communism was part of a geopolitical quadrangle: the interplay of two domestic actors, the Communist movement and the mainstream nationalist Guomindang party-cum-government, and two international ones, the Soviet Union and Japan. The history of alliances, conflicts, and finally an all-out civil war between the first two was to a certain extent marked by mimetic rivalry. Both sides started out with a view of the Soviet regime as an ally and a model to be learnt from; the Guomindang attitude, influenced by other sources (including European Fascism), was more eclectic than the Communist one, and the leadership relied on a different coalition of social forces, but the aim was at least a state ruled by a durably hegemonic party, if not an outright monopoly of power (later realized in Taiwan). There is no comparable case of rival receptions of Bolshevism becoming contenders for the rebuilding of a fragmented but not colonized state. On the Guomindang side, the attraction of Bolshevism weakened perceptions of Japan as an example to be followed, at a time when Japan was also emerging as the main threat to Chinese territorial integrity and political independence. The deepening antagonism culminated in total war, and this turn of events probably saved the Chinese Communists from total defeat. In the 1930s, the Guomindang regime had come close to destroying their last holdouts. It was the respite gained as a result of the Sino-Japanese war, more than any significant contribution to it, that enabled the Communists to re-establish a power basis. The Soviet factor was not only important as a source of influence but also a part of the geopolitical setting. In the interwar years, Soviet fear of Japan (probably magnified by suspicions of an East Siberian separatism that might serve Japanese purposes) was a major determinant of foreign policy, and that explains Stalin’s insistence on maintaining good relations with the Guomindang regime, even when it was on the offensive against the Communists; it was an obvious ally against Japan. The mixture of revolutionary mission and great power politics complicated the relationship of Chinese Communism to the Soviet centre of the world movement and became one of the key issues in intraparty disputes. Mao Zedong, who, after several rounds, won out in these confrontations, had a complex but clearly defined relationship to the Soviet leader: he accepted Stalin as a role model and a grand strategist of ‘socialist construction’, but not as a mentor and only in name as a guide to political tactics. This consistent stance appears to have been one of his strengths in the long-drawn-out struggle for supreme leadership. As will be seen, geopolitical conjunctures continued to affect the destinies of Chinese Communism. But with that background in mind, more must be said about the relationship between the Communists and the Guomindang.



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There were affinities and rivalries, but also continuity between them as well as with longer-term historical trends. In general terms, both of them linked up with projects of reformers in the late imperial period: the Chinese state was to be reinvigorated through simultaneous broadening of participation and strengthening of the centre; the latter goal entailed, crucially, the construction of a more clearly defined and controllable fiscal basis (Will in Kuhn 2004, 16). Both parties equated participation with authoritarian mobilization, but each in its specific way. They also shared the insight that their strategies of Chinese self-strengthening could only succeed through a sustained development of national identity. John Fitzgerald (1996) has analysed the discursive and political efforts to ‘awaken the nation’, with particular emphasis on the nationalist phase dominated by the Guomindang, but also in regard to the Communist pursuit of the same goal. The continuity is evident on the level of rhetoric and aspirations to renewed great power status, but also in the fact that nationalists disappointed by the Guomindang could cross over to the Communists. Some Western observers, commenting on the nationalist mobilization still in progress and if anything more pronounced under Xi Jinping’s leadership than in the days of his predecessors, have described the whole process as a civilization trying to become a nation. That formulation puts the cart before the horse. A civilization is not a collective actor in the sense that movements, states, and nations can be; a more adequate understanding would focus on a process of nation formation, state-led to a very significant extent, involving the identification with a selectively interpreted civilizational legacy and its supposedly enduring message to the world. The concept of a civilizational nation, proposed by two Scandinavian scholars but far too little discussed, fits this case (Antlӧv and Tӧnnesson 1996; they included China alongside Russia and the United States as an example of civilizational nationhood but did not discuss its formation at length). To put the Chinese experience into perspective, a brief comparative excursus will be useful. The two most instructive cases to consider are a neighbouring country and a broader spectrum of European developments. Maruyama Masao’s seminal analyses of modern Japanese nationalism (Maruyama 1963) highlighted its extreme and exclusive character. The concept of ultranationalism, coined by Maruyama, served to demarcate an ideology that made the nation the measure of all things, more fundamental than individual liberties, moral principles or religious convictions. Although racial themes were not absent from Japanese nationalist discourses, the main emphasis was on the sacral status of the nation, expressed in a quasi-familial union with a permanent dynasty of divine origin and elaborated by a particularistic religion centred on that union. The rapid imposition of this inseparably religious and political creed after 1868 was aided by prior advances of

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nation formation, not least due to eighteenth-century ideological currents. By contrast, Chinese nationalism had to start from less advanced preconditions, although it could to some extent draw on the cultural homogeneity that the imperial order had fostered among its elites; it could take extreme forms, including racist ones, but there was no dominant version comparable to Japanese ultranationalism. Several reasons for this can be distinguished. The foreign ethnicity of the Qing emperors precluded a national sublimation of the dynastic state; the nationalist position had to be articulated against alien rulers. After the downfall of the Qing, an indigenous attempt at imperial restoration lacked all legitimacy and collapsed almost instantly. The preceding republican episode had not been more durable, but the Guomindang regime invoked it as a legitimizing origin, and this official link to universalist principles, even if honoured in the breach rather than the observance, was not compatible with ultranationalism. The alternative universalism of the victorious Communists also excluded a Japanese path. It seems clear that in the first stage of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Mao genuinely aspired to recognition as the ideological leader of the international Communist movement; and even after the unity of the movement had irretrievably broken down, the Chinese Communist Party continued to proclaim the universal validity of Mao Zedong thought. The other side of the contrast between China and Japan was the very different record of Marxism. In China, signs of original Marxist theorizing faded before the Communist wave; in Japan, the direct political impact of Marxism was marginal, but a very strong tradition of independent Marxist theorizing became (as Maruyama 2006 argued) a vehicle for the kind of autonomous critical thought that had previously not been strongly represented in Japanese culture. The other example is the nationalization of empire that took place in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in varying ways and with very varying success. This phenomenon has only recently been given its due in historical scholarship; a traditional tendency to overemphasize nation state and nationalisms as primary causes of World War I  has given way to full recognition of its character as an inter-imperial conflict, but the connections between the two levels are less familiar. Here we need not discuss the European varieties, but the Chinese case merits a brief comment. The basic premise of later development was the nationalist claim to the territorial legacy of the Qing regime. Given the traditional belief in the intrinsic superiority of the Chinese empire, there was a case for rejecting the dynasty while retaining what it had added to the realm. This notion of ‘one China’ became an integral part of the nationalist imaginary, reinforcing the quest for renewed great power status that has accompanied the Chinese revolution throughout its Guomindang, Communist, and post-Communist phases. In this case, the nationalization of empire has thus taken the form of



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integrating both the inherited imperial territory and the long-frustrated but not abandoned imperial aspiration to global pre-eminence into the nationalist project. Another brief comparison with Japan will round off this picture. The modern Japanese turn to imperial expansion was, on the one hand, an easily drawn consequence of the exalted dynastic sovereignty that the Meiji restoration had reinforced and perpetuated on a new basis; conquest and colonization strengthened the image of a uniquely sacred centre. On the other hand, it was taken for granted that competition with Western powers would involve emulation of their imperialist strategies. Early victories over China and Russia confirmed this orientation. The nationalization of empire was, in these conditions, a self-evident implication of ultranationalism; and together with a whole wave of national hubris, it culminated in a suicidal assault on the strongest Western power. The sequel to that was a conversion of the imperial state into a developmental one (Gao 2010). To grasp the involvement of Chinese Communism in long-term processes of state formation and transformation, two mythologizing but not entirely unfounded accounts must be reduced to proper dimensions. Popular Western views of the Chinese revolution have often magnified the role of guerrilla warfare, and that assumption has even been taken on board by authors fundamentally hostile to the Communist cause (Schmitt 2007). It is not to be disputed that guerrilla tactics helped the Communists to survive their greatest crisis after the defeat in 1927, nor that this was a significant factor in later struggle against the Guomindang and the Japanese. But the crucial development was the transformation of guerrilla forces into a more conventional army (it was not a guerrilla army that won the decisive battle of the civil war in late 1948), and that was a key aspect of the state building that made the Communists a serious alternative to Guomindang rule. The other interpretation, linked to overestimation of the guerrilla factor, is the claim that the Communists were swept to power by a revolutionary peasantry. This reflects the unwarranted assumption that revolutions must be made or even led by a class. The facts of the matter, as described in historical scholarship, confirm that mobilization of peasant support was essential; but the first attempt in that vein was unsuccessful, later successes depended on tactical choices that varied from one area to others, and the centre that coordinated these operations was the peripheral party-state set up by the Communists in their northwestern refuge. The reduction of the Communist takeover to a peasant revolution is a lapse into mythology. That said, there is one further implication of the Communist guerrilla experience to be noted. It may have had a stronger influence on the Chinese Communist imaginary than on the road to power. Sebastian Heilmann (2018) suggests that the surprising efficiency of Chinese economic strategies,

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confounding Western expectations, may reflect a guerrilla style of policymaking. His thesis is that this results in a more flexible relationship between political institutions and practical policies than Western analysts tend to assume. That claim certainly merits more discussion; but the view adumbrated here is that Chinese flexibility has something to do with the civilizational distance retained even when the Soviet model was adopted. The key episode is the Yan’an period, beginning in 1935. This was, first and foremost, an opportunity and a space for steps towards state formation. The Chinese historian Gao Hua (2019) has analysed this process in great detail. Conditions during the Sino-Japanese war enabled the Communists to enlarge their territorial basis and gain experience in governing it through a party apparatus. They also developed a style of government by campaigns, which was to prove very important when it came to taking control of a much larger territory and a much more complex society. Last but not least, the building of a peripheral state went hand in hand with the elevation, institutionalization, and canonization of a leader; this was achieved in ways departing from Communist precedents and indicative of later divergences. Mao’s regaining of a leading position after a major setback and against rivals favoured by the Soviet leadership was already a rare event in Communist history, but the establishment of ‘Mao Zedong thought’ as an addition to Marxism-Leninism was a more significant innovation. Although it did not directly challenge the closed list of the classics, the claim to a special status and the possibility of more ambitious bids for authority were clearly signalled. This gave a particularly potent ideological charge to the party-state building in progress. The unifying ideological focus on a leader elevated above his peers was meant to counterbalance the flexibility of governance that was needed in the unstable circumstances of the Yan’an refuge. But there was another side to the emerging regime, indicative of Mao’s dependence on the Soviet model even when he strove to neutralize Soviet control and carve out a space for autonomous strategic judgement. The thought reform was carried out with very brutal methods, and there was no tolerance for any dissent other than Mao’s own low-key deviation. Although there were no Moscow-style show trials, there were secret executions of suspected Trotskyists, and an unconditionally loyal manager of terror, Kang Sheng, became Mao’s closest ally. In retrospect, the Maoist regime constructed in Yan’an resembles a controlled microcosm of the power machinery unleashed on the whole of China during the Cultural Revolution. The unhinged character of the latter reflected the vastly different situation arising when the model was to be implemented on an incommensurably larger scale, against a whole officialdom seen as having betrayed its mission, and by a leader much more self-deluded than he had been in Yan’an. All these aspects of the Yan’an experience combine to raise a further question: what was meant and what could be covered by the ‘Sinification of



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Marxism’, first announced by Mao in 1938. Since Western admirers have often read more into this formula than texts or actions could justify, it is best to begin with a clarification of what it was not. There was no reference to – and only a very rudimentary knowledge of – classical Marxism. What Mao had in mind was Soviet Marxism. But his much-lauded texts on contradiction and practice do not contain any original thinking; the insights imagined by some Western Marxists are simply not there. It is now well established that Mao drew on Soviet sources and was helped by advisers. But that is not the whole story. As Werner Meissner (1989) pointed out, Mao was the first Communist leader who freed his party from Soviet control (Tito was the second), and he used the approved orthodoxy of dialectical and historical materialism to justify this move in an unobtrusive way. Seen in this light, the Yan’an writings on ostensibly philosophical topics reflect a muted but genuine mimetic rivalry. Mao wanted to show that he could write catechisms like Stalin’s canonical text on dialectical and historical materialism. Sinification was, on the most elementary level, a code word for the loosening of ties to Soviet leadership and lessons. There was, however, more to Mao’s notion of Sinification. Although there is no reason to impute to him any particular affinities with the Chinese philosophical tradition, he was conversant enough with the Chinese cultural background to draw on it in his political practice. Gao Hua (2019) argues that the emphasis on re-education and correct thinking in the Yan’an campaigns shows clear traces of Confucian influence. This would be an example of what might be called ‘immanent Confucianism’, entrenched in habits, credences, and practices and therefore capable of surviving the collapse of the core Confucian institutions and doctrines. One implication of the Sinifying turn was a rationale for connecting with this cultural layer. It did not do much to modify Chinese applications of the Soviet model in the aftermath of Communist victory, especially in regard to developmental policies. But on another level, Mao was tapping into currents and reinvigorating forces that could go beyond his intentions. The Sinification of Marxism resonated with the still active idea of combining Western skills and techniques with a Chinese spirit, and it was open to further innovations. To invoke an approach central to the present book, Mao was both leaning on and reactivating a social imaginary capable of far-reaching adaptations and transformations, official as well as independent and even heterodox. At one end of the spectrum, the slogan of socialism with Chinese characteristics – to be discussed below – is a descendant of Mao’s Sinifying turn; at the other, attempts to develop distinctively Confucian interpretations of Marxism, liberalism and conservatism reveal an unexhausted hermeneutical potential. The main landmarks of Chinese experiences with the Soviet model and attempted revisions of it are familiar, more so than the historical context in

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which they took place, and have been extensively researched. Two aspects of the first phase after 1949 stand out as decisive. In the aftermath of the Guomindang collapse, the Communists had to take quick control of an enormous territory, including the main urban centres. There was no Soviet precedent for that kind of operation (the Bolsheviks had reconquered the Russian Empire from a metropolitan basis). At the same time, and despite the huge preparatory tasks, plans for industrial development were already marked by efforts to accelerate beyond the received Soviet practices. The imperative of acceleration, obviously linked to the still latent rivalry with the Soviet Union, was to be applied with greater force and more disastrous consequences a few years later, when the leadership embarked on the ‘Great Leap Forward’. For Mao and his associates, the mobilizing capacities of the party were the main guarantee of successful acceleration, but the most effective mobilizing process during the Great Leap was counterproductive: it led local functionaries to exaggerate the irrationalities of the policies imposed by the centre. The self-derailing attempt to outdo Stalinist strategies of industrialization and collectivization could not be repeated. But the phantasms of mobilization persisted, aggravated by Mao’s assumption that population growth was unequivocally beneficial, because it meant more labour power to be mobilized. The next turning point was the ‘Cultural Revolution’ that began in 1966; this is now one of the most extensively researched episodes in modern Chinese history, but it has proved more difficult to conceptualize it for comparative purposes. It may be taken as agreed that this was not a revolution in the sense used by comparative historians; but the official use of the term was probably one of the phenomena that undermined the established idea of revolution in the last decades of the twentieth century (the most important of the others were events that fitted some aspects of the idea but stood in stark contrast to others). What happened in China between 1966 and 1971 was clearly a political and social crisis of a very unusual kind. It was, most visibly, a case of a leader attempting to regain the power he had once wielded and saw as mandated to him by history and by his own unique genius; to achieve this, he had to assault the power apparatus over whose creation he had presided, and did so with results that can be described as a ‘triumphant debacle’, to use Kotkin’s term for Stalin’s breakthrough around 1930. However, in this case, the debacle proved more consequential than the triumph, and it rapidly paved the way for a triumph of the kind that Mao would least have wanted. The question of institutional and political alternatives at issue is more complicated. Mao’s reference to his adversaries as ‘capitalist roaders’ was the most extreme case of capitalism serving as a metaphor for a whole complex of ideas and practices that were to be rejected. As Mao saw it, the party-state was losing dynamism, drifting towards administrative routine and by the



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same token losing the spirit of antagonism to Western modernity, which he regarded as essential to the revolutionary mission. As the Czech historian Jan Slavík pointed out at the time of Lenin’s death (Slavík 1924), the problem faced by the Bolsheviks in power was that instead of the promised withering away of the state, what was actually happening was the withering away of the revolution, accelerated by those who claimed to be continuing it and strove to believe in their own delusions. Mao’s initiatives can be understood as attempts to resist the withering away of the revolution. But those who credit him with a theory of uninterrupted revolution, comparable to or converging with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, miss the main point. What he envisaged is better described as permanent mobilization, uniting the masses with a supreme and all-knowing leader. It is less clear how he proposed to solve the problem of succession; the official anointing of Lin Biao as a successor can hardly have been more than a tactical stopgap measure, but Mao’s megalomania may have reached a point where he began to think that his image, enshrined in cultural memory, would be a sufficient guarantee of adequate leadership. Mao’s notions about political economy have with some justification been described as ‘neither plan nor market’ (Riskin 1991). As mentioned in chapter III, an advanced industrial society beyond state and market seems to have been the ultimate goal of Marx’s utopia, but we cannot assume that Mao was linking up with that source. His thoughts on this matter, never anywhere near realization, seem to have tended towards decentralized management, nationally unified through ideological control. Analogously, his political vision might be described as ‘neither party nor state’; the attacks on party functionaries and state officials during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution disrupted the party-state apparatus, and Mao’s notions of alternative governance emphasized direct communication between leader and masses, with some channelling through loyal followers. In practice, his offensive boiled down to improvising groups of supporters, often prone to rivalries and wholly incapable of replacing the established bureaucracy. Finally, the ideological strategy was, in slightly more paradoxical terms, a pattern of ‘neither ideology nor science’. During the Cultural Revolution, expertise was devalued and higher education neglected; the ideological edifice of Marxism-Leninism was overshadowed by simplistic extracts from the pronouncements and public ruminations of the leader. Indications of ‘Mao Zedong thought’ going beyond Marxism-Leninism had been present from the Yan’an period onwards, but the Cultural Revolution went much further. If the attempts to restructure and reorient the regime from above were ill-conceived and off target, the mobilization of mass support backfired even more disastrously. Encouragements of protest and appeals to social discontent of various kinds led to mass collective action, but the result was

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what one historian of the period calls ‘fractured rebellion’ (Walder 2008), a countrywide wave of violent and destructive struggles between groups very difficult to identify in social or political terms, but in any case refractory to Mao’s plans. At this point, Mao called in the army, which had been a background guarantor of the whole strategy, but now took charge in a direct and brutal fashion. From 1969 to 1971, China became to all intents and purposes a military dictatorship, with the Mao cult as a legitimizing facade. It is not a far-fetched suggestion that the stratocracy that Castoriadis saw – a decade later – as an emerging regime in the Soviet Union, was in fact pioneered in China for a very short span of time. But its demise exemplifies, once again, the interconnections between domestic and geopolitical factors. The years in question were the high water mark of the Sino-Soviet conflict; it turned violent in 1969, and although Chinese fears of a Soviet invasion now seem exaggerated, living memories of a war for survival were no doubt a contributing factor. In that situation, precautionary defensive measures inevitably made the role of the army more visible than domestic concerns would have warranted, and available sources indicate that this prompted Mao to move against the military leadership, thus making it clear that his absolute authority mattered more than any mundane power politics. But the only possible practical solution was a rebuilding of the party-state that had been the main target of the self-styled revolution. AFTER MAOISM The outcome was a five-year interregnum, ending with Mao’s death in 1976; but it was also, for the heirs in waiting, an occasion to take stock and consider options. The balance of Mao’s legacy was starkly evident. As Andrew Walder writes, ‘Mao’s contributions to China after 1956 were unsuccessful by his own standards and destructive in ways he surely did not imagine. During both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the destructive aspects of Mao’s initiatives far outweighed any outcomes that could be construed as positive’ (Walder 2017, 319). The setbacks to economic development had made a mockery of China’s aspirations to overtake other countries; the Chinese economy lagged behind the Soviet bloc as well as the more rapidly developing economies of East Asia, not to mention the most advanced capitalist ones. As Walder also notes, this did not alter the fact that massive progress had been made in public healthcare and education. But at the same time, rapid population growth ‘prevented aggregate growth rates from translating into improved living standards’ (321). To put it another way, the situation was simultaneously marked by self-inflicted disasters, achievements that could serve



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to support a more rational strategy of development, and basic structural problems that had to be reckoned with. These were the preconditions for the post-Mao transformation of China, commonly dated from Deng Xiaoping’s assumption of power in 1978. It is a near-consensus of scholarship on the Deng era and its sequel that the reorientation of economic development had a pragmatic character; a very general orientation was evident from early on, but specific decisions and initiatives responded to circumstances. The idea of a ‘grand strategy’, if defined in strongly binding terms, would therefore be misleading. But in view of the results, it is hardly convincing to describe the whole process as a matter of improvisation. A more specific account of the relationship between orientations and outcomes is needed. The reorientation began with a selective repudiation of the past, and this part of the story merits closer examination. Mao had to be acknowledged and revered as the leader who reunified China and put it on the path to resurgence; this set strict limits to the criticism of his policies. The official assessment has remained predominantly positive, and the more cultic turn taken under Xi Jinping, although not to be mistaken for a return to Maoism, reflects a need to legitimize strong leadership through a figure that links imperial and revolutionary traditions. But in practice, the break was a good deal more radical than the prescribed formulations would seem to allow. Andrew Walder’s interesting suggestion that Mao unwittingly did to himself what Khrushchev had done to Stalin (2017, 291–93) throws light on this issue. In 1972, Mao arranged for the publication of a clandestine document produced by his then dead or disgraced adversaries, containing scathing criticisms of his record. We can safely assume that Mao was by then too convinced of his superhuman status to realize that the publication might work against him rather than against the authors, but there are good reasons to believe that this was exactly what it did. If so, this is a particularly striking example of autocratic hubris out of control. But if the post-Mao leadership was aware of broad disaffection, it also had ways of deflecting it onto surrogate targets, at least on the level of publicly acceptable discourse. The demonization of Mao’s closest associates as ‘the gang of four’ appealed to traditional stereotypes of the bandits that had on several occasions troubled Chinese society; the portrayal of the Cultural Revolution as a time of chaos also evoked older images of great disorder. If the beginning of the new course was a major but officially muted reaction against the road previously taken, the direction was also more challenging than formal declarations could spell out. If it took a leader as identifiable with the party’s history and as conversant with its workings as Deng Xiaoping to shift the course away from Maoism, it took statements as bland as his exhortation to ‘learn truth from facts’ to gain acceptance of the new policies.

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The learning process thus initiated was many-sided; the facts in question included the established fact of the Cultural Revolution resulting in chaos, as well as the emerging facts of pressure for change in the countryside. But more innovatively, Deng was in fact calling for learning from capitalism. For a regime defining itself as a radical alternative to another (an alternative modernity, in the terms used here), learning from the rival can never be an unproblematic option, and the road taken will depend on both conditions and presuppositions. The obvious case for comparison is Russia after the October Revolution. Once in power, Lenin was quick to admit the need to learn from the experience of countries further advanced along the capitalist path, but his thoughts on that were fleeting, not too consistent, and – most importantly – still confined within the expectations of rapid international success of the revolution. When the Bolsheviks turned to the NEP policy of concessions to private property, entrepreneurship, and trade, possibilities of learning were blocked by the ideologically boosted fear of a capitalist threat from ‘petty commodity production’. The Stalinist turn to industrialization and collectivization did not reflect preceding learning processes; the use of Western expertise and technology during the 1930s was officially downplayed and overshadowed by an ideological closure that cast suspicion on any kind of learning from a global adversary. The reform Communist attitude after 1956 was different. Those who proposed significant changes to existing Sovietstyle regimes could admit that capitalist economies and societies based on them were in crucial respects more advanced than the ‘socialist world’, even if the latter was still credited with a potential to overtake its rivals. For the Chinese architects of post-Mao reform, open alignment with East European reform Communism was out of the question, even if some tacit lessons could be learnt. But the Chinese situation was very different from conditions at critical junctures in the history of the Soviet bloc. The state of the economy at the time of Mao’s death was such that something more than a NEP-style intermezzo had to be envisaged; at the same time, the total failure of attempts to build an international Maoist front meant that there was no prospect of rapid advance in the global arena. Another factor conducive to a long-term orientation was that the Chinese leadership did not fear a capitalist threat from de-collectivized agriculture. This reflected a more general feature setting the Chinese situation apart from the Soviet one. Carl Schmitt’s quasimythological reference to the Chinese revolution as having a ‘stronger telluric base’ than the Russian one points to an important fact: after the ups and downs of a long struggle, the Chinese Communists were much more familiar with basic aspects and elements of their society than the Bolshevik leaders had been. That did not guarantee realistic strategies, nor exclude adventurous interpretations (even Mao’s phantasmagoric transmutation of experienced



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realities should not be mistaken for sheer ignorance); but it left a certain basis for getting back on the ground. Two successively emerging contextual factors were crucial for the direction taken by the reformist long-term strategy. The highly visible record of capitalist development in East Asian countries, historically regarded as parts of the Chinese cultural world, was bound to impress those who set out to revitalize the centre of that world. Not that learning from the experience of Japan and the ‘little dragons’ could ever play a role equal to that of the adopted Soviet model. A firm decision to maintain the political monopoly of the party-state shaped the whole process (there is no evidence that those who advocated a more flexible response to the democracy movement of 1989 were willing to consider a pluralistic regime). Even if the scope and rationale of party power were redefined, this set strict limits to alignment with other East Asian patterns of development. But awareness of the regional dynamics was a significant influence, all the more so since the strengthening of China was bound to reactivate memories of its primacy in the East Asian sphere. The other contextual factor was the changing structure and increasingly global reach of capitalist development. From the 1980s onwards, these transformations created both opportunities and problems for Chinese economic strategies. In particular, two interconnected trends had a decisive impact: the globalization of finance and the changes often described as the business revolution, resulting from the globalization of supply chains (Nolan 2015). The Chinese pact with capitalism has provoked a deluge of writing by Western observers. During the first phase, the dominant view was that the development of a ‘market economy’ would, sooner or later, lead to a democratic transformation. More recent approaches tend to draw different conclusions; given the waning confidence in a predestined harmony of market and democracy, predictions of a Chinese crisis, setback, or collapse that would not necessarily aid the cause of democracy have become more frequent. But some kind of economic determinism seems to be common to the liberal optimists of the 1990s and the liberal doomsayers of the early twenty-first century: it is the supposedly problem-ridden symbiosis of state and market that is either expected to be self-correcting in favour of the market or irrational enough to undermine the regime without guaranteeing a benign exit. In the latter case, the structural weakness is variously identified as a statist blockage to entrepreneurship, an unsound mixture that corrupts both sides and gives rise to ‘crony capitalism’, or a long-term limitation of adaptive capacity due to state interference with economic mechanisms. A radical variation on the theme of inbuilt instability is the argument that the unleashing of capitalist dynamics has caused a runaway growth of inequality, with the state ill prepared to respond to attendant problems.

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None of the crisis predictions has so far shown any signs of coming true. It would be vastly premature to claim that the Chinese balancing act has resulted in a lasting reconciliation of Leninist statehood with globalized capitalism. But cautious and well-informed observers have pointed to the regime’s record of adaptive measures and warned against overdramatized expectations. The strategy of opening to capitalism, at home and abroad, through state action as well as an expanding private sector and with both long-term aims and ways of coping with unintended consequences, thus resulted in a doubleedged constellation. China was exposed to the vicissitudes of global economic currents, but it also became strong enough to significantly affect their course and, consequently, a key connecting link between geopolitics and economics. On the home front, the official ideological framework developed to cope with these complications can be summed up in the notion of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. It may seem to lack substantive content, but a closer look at its connotations reveals multiple legitimizing points of reference. It is worth noting that no such formulation would have been acceptable in the Soviet Union: invoking ‘Soviet characteristics’ was incompatible with the principled identification of socialism and the Soviet model, and ‘Russian characteristics’ could not be allowed to obscure the multinational structure of the Soviet state. The Chinese formulation links up with Mao’s pre-war rhetoric about the Sinification of Marxism and suggests an open-ended continuation of that line. The appeal to socialism highlights the basic continuity of the regime as well as its achievements in improving living standards; the reference to Chinese characteristics can aim at the venerable traditions of Chinese civilization, at the modern imaginary of Chinese nationalism, or at the reaffirmation of Chinese strength in the global arena. In all respects, the party-state is the ultimate validating institution: it defines socialism as well as the Chinese characteristics to be added to it, be it the affirmation of national strength or the acceptance of entrepreneurs into the party, and the legitimizing connection works both ways: the ability of the party to apply and expand the idea of socialism with Chinese characteristics justifies its rule. This notion of a core institution, embedded in an encompassing order and guaranteeing its maintenance but claiming authority to redefine its borders, has clear affinities with the imperial tradition. It is a commonplace that the radical transformation and the geopolitical resurgence of China represent a challenge to Western notions of world order and habits of conducting international relations. But the Chinese experience is also a challenge to established ways of thinking about the determinants, trajectories, and alternatives of modern social development. There seems to be no similarly complex case of breaks with tradition, radical, and



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sometimes violent, combining with underlying continuities and alternating with revivals of specific legacies; since the varying ways of relating to tradition are a key theme in the debate on multiple modernities, this makes China a particularly revealing case. At the same time, China belongs to the type of countries escaping colonization and therefore developing more autonomous responses to Western expansion (coastal footholds and unequal treaties cannot be regarded as equivalents of colonialism); but the varieties and vicissitudes of this long interactive process are hardly equalled by any record elsewhere. The Chinese reception and restructuring of the Soviet model is without doubt the most significant development of that kind and may even come to seem more important in future for global history than the original invention of the model. Several aspects of the restructuring process deserve underlining. The double turn taken in the late 1970s, towards a reconsolidation of the Leninist party-state and towards an eclectic and evolving strategy of capitalist development, is perhaps the most difficult to square with entrenched Western assumptions about alternatives and compatibilities. The capitalist component has never dominated the whole economy, and state capitalism is a misnomer, but the unprecedented coexistence poses a number of problems; they concern the relationship between state and entrepreneurship, the changing balance between economic and political power, and – last but not least – the gradual and conditional integration into a global capitalist economy, very different from Soviet policies. But the reorientation also affected the structures of the political sphere. Changing tasks and situations led to rearrangements of the relationship between party and state, with attendant problems that are still on the agenda (by contrast, the major shift in the balance of power and competences between party and state, initiated by Gorbachev, was cut short before the consequences could unfold). A further singular pattern is the geopolitical trajectory of Communist China. Changing alliances have been a recurrent phenomenon in modern great power politics, not without effects on global conflicts, but no state with a continuous regime has made turnabouts comparable to the Chinese ones. The close but troubled alliance with the Soviet Union gave way to an escalating conflict, where each side came to see the other as the most acute threat, and then to a realignment that matured into a de facto alliance with the United States. That relationship became even closer after the collapse of the common Soviet enemy; economic ties developed so far that some observers fell for an illusion of the pre-1914 type and argued that a serious conflict between the two powers was no longer possible. The present situation proves otherwise and is giving rise to a new Sino-Russian alliance, with very different relative strengths and without the problems of a shared but increasingly dispute-prone ideology.

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THE QUESTION OF CHINESE DEMOCRACY If the dominant trend in contemporary China is best described as the formation of a new type of authoritarian regime, that diagnosis is bound to raise the question of possible democratic alternatives. It goes without saying that the present essay, written by an outsider, will not attempt any empirical judgement on signs or chances of democratization. But it may be useful to reflect on ways to pose the question in the Chinese context, and with a view to comparative connections. On a preliminary note, there is now no justification for framing the problems and prospects of Chinese democracy in relation to a global (even final, as some observers would have it) surge of democratic change. Such expectations are now discredited worldwide and have given way to a much less optimistic mood. As for the specific Chinese situation, 1989 showed that neither the reforms launched by the post-Maoist leadership nor the movements striving for more radical change would push the regime beyond the limits of the party-state. Developments during the past three decades lend no support to the belief that a high-growth economy with increasing links to world markets will inevitably move closer to the model of democracy taken for granted in the West. Given this sobering background, the question of Chinese democracy must be put in a balanced perspective and related to a complex concatenation of circumstances. The first point to note is that the present state of the problem has a long prehistory. This is not an exceptional situation; Gauchet’s analysis of modern democracy in the European context, discussed earlier, shows that a closer look at early beginnings is essential to the understanding of twentieth-century developments and their legacy. But the chronology, the historical landmarks, and the substantive implications of the Chinese longterm perspective are different. There is no Chinese parallel to the European experience of absolutism as a loosening of ties to religious traditions; as Yves Chevrier (2007, 392) suggests, this is the other side of the fact that an absolutism sui generis had for a long time been functioning in tandem with a selective plurality of traditions. On the other hand, the problems and crises encountered by the last imperial dynasties had provoked reflections and inspired a current of thought described by some scholars as constitutionalist. The most clear-cut formulations of this trend began in the early nineteenth century, but precursors can be found among thinkers responding to the early seventeenth-century crisis of the Ming dynasty. In fact, the concerns and proposals of these heterodox thinkers might be described – in terms later adopted – as a mixture of constitutional and participatory themes. The main aim was to promote and regularize broader access to political power for the educated strata of society; this was, consequently, a plea on behalf of a narrow social basis, but through ideas that could and did lend themselves



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to extension beyond that constituency. Later variations on the theme seem significant enough to support Pierre-Étienne Will’s description of the turn to more explicit and radical visions of democracy, influenced by Western sources, as a transformation of Chinese traditions (Will 2004). A second distinctive feature is the overshadowing of democratic aspirations and episodes by a variously focused imaginary of revolution. In Chinese cultural memory and historiography, as well as in the corresponding ideological problematic, the relationship between democracy and revolution differs from the most representative Western approaches. Interpretations of the French and the Russian revolutions (in both cases best described as many revolutions in one) are enmeshed in debates about the conflictual interaction of democratic and anti-democratic forces in the revolutionary process; the course of the Russian revolution was very different from the French, but efforts to understand the democratic potential of movements and institutions emerging in 1917, including those instrumentalized by the Bolsheviks, are, if anything, more prominent in retrospect after the fall of the Soviet Union than before. The now widely accepted view of the Russian revolution as a historical tragedy of exceptional dimensions is based on this insight into internal conflicts. As for the third paradigmatic but for some time less theorized and debated revolution, the American one, it has more recently been invoked as a clearer example of unequivocal and enduring democratic goals; but critics have rightly objected that the acceptance of slavery and the openly admitted imperial mission make that view untenable. There is no comparable Chinese paradigm of an internally contested and lastingly controversial revolution. The Communist victory in 1949, most frequently mentioned in comparative studies of revolutions, differed fundamentally from Russia in 1917–1921, not least because of the much more marginal role played by democratic forces. But this takeover in the wake of civil war became the mainstay of a revolutionary imaginary that shaped views on past episodes, though often in line with the self-understanding of their protagonists. The rise of the Guomindang in the 1920s is commonly described as a nationalist revolution (for a recent attempt to portray it as a conservative one, see Tsui 2019) and was in fact presented as such by prominent spokesmen. Dominant narratives of Chinese revolutions also include the Fourth of May protest movement that emerged after World War I  and became a model of cultural revolution (that notion was reclaimed by Mao in the 1960s). Less plausibly, the end of the imperial regime in 1911–1912 came to be characterized as a revolution, although detailed analyses of the events were bound to raise doubts. The influence of the revolutionary model, in China and abroad, is perhaps most strikingly reflected in the attempt of a prominent Sinologist (Fairbank 1987) to interpret the whole sequence of transformations since the early nineteenth century as one long revolution.

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The overpowering weight of the revolutionary imaginary has discouraged enquiry into the background and intermittent articulations of democratic aims; but some noteworthy points have been made. In the present context, one focus of analysis merits special mention. The exit from the imperial tradition has come under reconsideration; for a long time, the dominant view was that events at the beginning of the twentieth century were no more than an abortive prelude to the transformative turns taken by the Guomindang and the Communists. Particular attention has recently been paid to the ‘new policies’ implemented in the last years of the Qing dynasty, 1900–1911 (Mühlhahn 2019, 203–47; Chevrier 2003 and 2007).This short episode ended in failure and crisis and may well have been doomed beforehand (speculations on that subject are inconclusive), but more than a century later, it appears as a ‘significant chapter in modern Chinese institutional history’ and an attempt to ‘usher in what could best be described as a modern, activist, and fiscally efficient state’ (Mühlhahn 2019, 218). Several aspects of this initiative merit special notice; and as with many other twists and turns of modern Chinese history, a comparison with Japanese as well as European developments is useful. The reforms – clearly oriented towards a radical restructuring of government, a constitutional monarchy, and a redefinition of China as a nation state – were undertaken by officials of the Qing dynasty, in collaboration with emerging social elites. This was a remarkable revival of activism, not least in light of the triple disaster (defeat by Japan, the Boxer Rebellion and foreign intervention against it) that had almost destroyed the dynasty, and after the failure of attempted reforms in 1898. No European exit from empire involved a comparably ambitious reform is such a short timespan (in Germany, it took an inconclusive revolution to trigger the transition from empire to republic). But it is equally true that no European example of a similarly quick and unspectacular derailment after promising beginnings can be found (to mention Germany again, the post-imperial republic was destroyed by a totalitarian explosion). The measures taken and the ideas introduced by the reformers turned against the dynasty, which proved to be a pushover; but there was no replacement. What had once been a key strength of the Qing dynasty now became a fatal weakness: its foreign ethnicity and its very ability to combine Chinese and Inner Eurasian imperial traditions set it on collision course with the Chinese nationalism that was boosted by the reforms. A brief comparison with Japan will highlight several factors accounting for a different transition to the modern nation state. The question of unified or separate centres of sacred and secular authority is relevant. Comparative analyses have noted the fundamental difference between China and India; Japan can, in a sense, be described as an intermediate case. Its trajectory after the seventh-century transformation began with a more emphatically sacred monarchy than the Chinese one, but power soon shifted to the court



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aristocracy and then to a military elite, while the imperial dynasty retained its sacral aura and its place in cultural memory as a former centre of direct rule. The latter aspect could be reactivated by the protagonists of the Meiji revolution/restoration of 1868: the dynasty was brought back as a theoretically sovereign ruler, in practice adapted to the demands of a bureaucratic nation state with a self-limiting constitutional framework (to what extent emperors could actively interfere in politics is a matter of debate among historians). In any case, the Japanese modernizers could rely on a traditional alternative that did not exist in China. Another factor was the effective combination of central and local power developed by the Tokugawa shogunate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; obviously, the much larger territory ruled by the Qing was more difficult to control, but the different power devices of the Japanese rulers were also important. The nationalist and modernizing turn after 1868 could also draw on a tradition of nationalist ideas that was missing in China. Last but not least, the conversion of the traditional military elite – the samurai – into bureaucrats was a crucial aspect of the Japanese transformation. By contrast, the Chinese reformers deactivated their bureaucratic tradition when they abolished the examination system in 1905, and no adequate alternative was available. But if all these considerations underline Japanese strengths, it must be added that the strengths also translated into temptations to embark on a hubristic pursuit of imperial power. However, the abolition of the examination, often seen as a final blow to institutionalized Confucianism, is not the whole story about the reformist attitude to tradition. As Yves Chevrier (2007, 382) puts it, ‘The intellectual modernity that appears on the horizon of the nation state is a fundamental component of the political exit from empire’; and as he also shows, this intellectual modernity does not involve a totalistic turn against tradition. Rather, the nationalist awakening was accompanied by a selective reassessment of traditions. Chevrier quotes Hobsbawm’s well-known formulations about the ‘invention of tradition’, but this term seems misleading. It conflates the artificial traditionalization of new practices with the supposed invention of tradition as a whole; on the latter level, it would be more adequate to speak of a reinvention (that concept has, for example, been used to describe the relationship of East Asian capitalism to European models). A reinvention links up with aspects of the original, but with interpretive variations and changes of emphasis. That kind of hermeneutical effort went on alongside the political reforms, rather than in an integral union with them. This was the time when a Chinese terminology for culture and related themes was invented, and one current of the emerging nationalist discourse used it to define a cultural heritage or essence of the Chinese nation. In short, a search for new understanding of the relationship between tradition and modernity took off in the context of political reforms and was cut short by the failure of the latter.

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On this point, Chevrier’s analysis is convincing, and so is his analysis of the subsequent iconoclastic turn against tradition (beginning in 1915 and culminating in the May Fourth Movement) as a political backlash against the failed political venture. The anti-traditionalists understood themselves as primarily cultural innovators, but their movement became the precursor of the political revolutions that shaped twentieth-century Chinese history. When discussing the problematic and the vicissitudes of democracy in China, the specific issue of liberalism and its reception should not be left unmentioned. The current glorification of liberal democracy as an integral whole and condemnation of deviations lumped together as ‘illiberal’ is a poor guide to this field. More promising is Marcel Gauchet’s distinction between a ‘liberal fact’, consisting in the limitation of state power by fundamental rights and an independent civil society, and liberalism as an ideology that emphasizes the ‘spontaneous dynamics of individual liberties’ as a reason to limit ‘the role of public authority’ (Gauchet 2003, 341–42). The last part of the formulation is evidently aimed at neoliberal views, and a more flexible version might draw a line between the liberal component of modern democracy, varying in weight and precise meaning from case to case, and the liberal ideologies that interpret this component in different ways and with changing implications for the broader context. This distinction is important when it comes to the question of non-European responses to European expressions of liberalism. Benjamin Schwartz (1964) analysed the work of a pioneering Confucian translator and interpreter of Western liberal thought, Yen Fu (1854–1921); as Schwartz showed, Yen’s reception of liberal ideas reflected a strong tendency to link them to Western superiority in wealth and power, and his approach influenced even the choice of equivalent terms in Chinese. Schwartz argued that this mode of reception left its mark on later Chinese attitudes to liberalism, and that it was a recurrent tendency in non-European responses to European hegemony. In terms of Gauchet’s distinction, it might be described as a one-sided emphasis on liberal ideologies in context, at the expense of the liberal fact and its meaning for modern democracy. But the line of argument can also be taken further and applied to the fate of Marxism in the Chinese Communist context. In the 1920s, the appeal of Marxist ideas was to some extent based on their promise of mass mobilization, but the social message was already accompanied by the Bolshevik example of restoring an empire in a shape more suited to the accumulation of wealth and power. The Yan’an period reinforced the state-building tendencies in an environment with limited scope for mobilization and only long-term perspectives of wielding power on an imperial scale. After 1949, emulation of the Soviet model became the main guideline; but the visions of mass mobilization resurfaced in Mao’s policies and culminated in the phantasm of a permanently activated society, unified around a personified state. Post-Maoist China has



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switched to an unequivocal emphasis on the accumulation of wealth and power; the Marxist connection of official discourses appears to have shrunk to the minimum needed to maintain Leninist continuity in the political sphere. But this official downgrading has enabled a certain revival of Marxian ideas for critical purposes. Finally, the situation after Mao’s death and the demise of his associates posed the question of democratic change in new terms. Briefly, Mao’s attempt to re-educate the party-state through a violent turnover of personnel had failed, and the apparatus had to be rebuilt, first by bringing in the army and then by restoring the disgraced functionaries. The restoration was completed with Deng Xiaoping’s return to power, but it could not entail a full-scale renewal of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The erstwhile official ideology offered no guidance in the unprecedented conditions created by Mao’s derailment, and besides, the conflict with the Soviet Union was now so acute that an ideological alignment with Soviet prescriptions was unthinkable. The provisional response to this crisis was Deng’s slogan of ‘four modernizations’ (in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence). This political emphasis on the notion of modernization was unprecedented in the history of Communist regimes, and it enabled an emerging movement to demand democratic reforms as an integral part of the modernizing process; but despite certain attempts to bridge the gap between official and dissident understandings of modernization, the disagreement came to a catastrophic end in 1989. It may be useful to glance back at critical appraisals of the situation after the beginning of the new course but before the full implications of the clash between regime and opposition had become clear. Two very authoritative scholars saw it differently. Mark Elvin (1990, a text dating in all essentials from 1985) characterized Chinese intellectual and political history in the twentieth century as a ‘double disavowal’. The first stage was a collapse of Confucianism (engulfing much of the more complex tradition that had come to be seen as defined or dominated by Confucian ideas), more complete than anything that happened to cultural or religious traditions elsewhere in Asia. There was, consequently, very little scope for mediation between modernity and tradition; in Elvin’s words, ‘There was astonishingly little creative conservatism in China’ (1990, 3), especially in comparison with India. The intellectual scene was, for a while, dominated by a radical Westernizing enlightenment. Then came the Communist version of modernity, partly instrumentalizing and partly discarding the ideas of the radical enlightenment. Its turn to collapse, intellectually and morally, if not in terms of the hold on power, came with the self-destruction of Maoism. As a result, ‘By the middle 1970s China was left spiritually and intellectually resourceless’ (1990, 5). Elvin admitted that a very small minority of thinkers in the Confucian style had created some of the elements of a cultural synthesis that would

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be both ‘modern’ and still recognisably ‘Chinese’’ (1990, 5), but their work had not fared well under Communism and provided only a very slender hope for the future. Tu Weiming (1991, clearly reflecting opinions formed before 1989), responding explicitly to Elvin and other observers of post-Maoist China, accepted much of the argument about loss of both traditional and modern bearings but saw a remedy where others had not looked for it. In his view, Japan and the later industrializing societies of East Asia were doubly important for China: as peripheral domains of Chinese civilization, with a record of adapting traditions of Chinese origin to modernizing transformations, and – because of the cultural affinity – as more manageable versions of the Western challenge. The road to be taken by China was therefore an open-minded and constructive engagement with the experience of these neighbours. In that sense, the periphery could now become a teacher of the centre. Thirty years later, it will hardly be disputed that neither of these diagnoses stands confirmed. Although the experience of modernization elsewhere in East Asia was of some importance for the Chinese turn to gradual acceptance of capitalism, the systematic opening desired by Tu Weiming has certainly not taken place. For that to happen, Sino-Japanese relations would have had to develop in a way very different from the real history of recent decades. The failure to establish a mutually instructive modus vivendi between China and Japan is one of the most unfortunate non-performances of international politics in our times; and in more general terms, East Asia has become an area of tension between Chinese and American interests, rather than a periphery offering lessons to the centre. The relationship to the United States, partly symbiotic and partly confrontational, has turned out to be vastly more important to China than contacts with capitalist latecomers in East Asia. As for Elvin’s thesis, the empirical observations about past ideological breakdowns now seem more convincing than the conclusions. Intellectual resourcelessness is, to put it mildly, not a term easily applicable to the most recent phase of Chinese history. For one thing, the resources invested in learning from capitalism have proved effective; for another, it is now known and well documented that intensive reflection and debate on the reasons for the Soviet collapse took place within the institutions of the regime, and the determination to avoid that fate was reinforced by lessons drawn from these discussions. On a more public level, ideological control was relaxed and a limited pluralism of opinions was admitted, to such an extent that it could seem reminiscent of the traditional imperial practice of tolerating diverse currents but retaining control of their acceptable limits. There is no doubt about the recent shift to more restrictive cultural policies; but if we regard the present state of the regime as a phase in an ongoing transformative process, it is premature to speak of a definitive closure. In any case, it is clear that Confucian sources have been reactivated, both by official instances with ulterior



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political motives and in a more authentic but multivocal and inconclusive way in the intellectual sphere. Enough has been done to show that this revival can open up new perspectives on the question of democracy. And in that sense, we can accept a modified version of Elvin’s thesis. The problematic of tradition and modernity (or, in terms more congenial to the approach taken here, civilizational legacies and modern transformations) was indeed repeatedly suppressed, but it is being restated, and neither the cultural damage done in the meantime nor the political constraints on present debates are sufficient reasons to dismiss it as no longer relevant. That said, the determination of China’s rulers to preserve the political monopoly of the party-state and outlaw open challenges to it is beyond doubt. But the idea of a ‘perfect dictatorship’ (Ringen 2016) makes no sense and resembles caricatural visions of totalitarian regimes as capable of total control. The measures taken to consolidate the party-state apparatus and its social reach are of multiple kinds and may in the long run be conducive to dissonances. They include welfarist reforms as well as increased social control, changes to the power balance between central and local authorities in the Chinese heartland as well as repressive policies in border regions, and efforts to curb corruption as well as to strengthen the presence of the party inside the private sector. The overarching imperative that remains in force is the coordination of state building on a great power scale with economic growth relying on but not abandoned to capitalist mechanisms; this two-pronged project allows for social commitments as well as upgrading of social control but avoids mobilization in the Stalinist or Maoist style. To call it political capitalism is to suggest – gratuitously – that an opening to capitalist development must necessarily give it free rein and that a combination of economic and political strategies will inevitably put economics in command. There are no good reasons to accept the self-description of the regime as socialist, but it can be seen as a distinctive and still developing pattern of balancing the accumulation of wealth and power, combined with authoritarian-paternalist relations between state and society. Predicting the future of this regime is risky for specialists and off limits for outsiders; but we may conclude with a quotation from the author of a particularly detailed analysis of the Chinese political order (Cabestan 2014). As he sees it, we should ‘keep up our fight for democracy and inform readers about the political reality of today’s China, a strong China ruled by an authoritarian, arrogant and popular political system that will remain in power for a long time but is doomed in the long run’ (Cabestan 2018, 285).

Chapter 8

Concluding Reflections: Global Modernities in World Context

As indicated at the beginning of chapter 2, the problematic of multiple modernities includes the question of global formations and their diverse patterns and historical changes. The analyses developed in the last chapter may help to gain a closer view of this field. Communism as a historical phenomenon cannot be understood without proper regard to its global dynamics and dimensions. Its two major breakthroughs to power, 1917 in Russia and 1949 in China, occurred in the context of global crises, more precisely in connection with an unfolding sequence of crises that twice erupted into violence on global scale. The second explosive turn, more devastating in the European arena, was also more global in that its impact on East Asia was much greater (there are good reasons to see Japan’s assault on China in 1937 as the first act of what is now known as World War II); the United States was more directly and massively drawn into the conflict, and the outcome was an international regime far more novel than the halfwayhouse arrangement imposed after World War I. But if Communist power was a product of acute global crisis, it also came with a vision of new global order. The project of a world revolution that would put an end to conflicts between both states and classes was a premise of Bolshevik strategy in 1917 and during the following struggle. The victory of the Chinese Communists involved a twofold twist to this perspective. Revolutionary hopes and initiatives were to be shifted more decisively from the Western arena that the Bolsheviks had only half-heartedly abandoned and towards the under-privileged nonWestern parts of the world; and the revolutionary transformation to be undertaken on the domestic front was linked to the aim of restoring China to its rightful prominent place in the global arena. In a twenty-first-century retrospect, the results of these ambitions appear as a mixture of straightforward failures, ambiguous successes, and uncertain 180



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prospects of further developments. The Communist ideology, centred on promises of world revolution, proved capable of diffusion across national, regional, and civilizational borders; this is a key point for the interpretations of Communism as a secular religion. Notwithstanding marginal and often preposterous attempts to revive the ‘idea of Communism’, it now seems clear that the comparatively brief but eventful life of this ideological megaforce ended with the evaporation of its promises. Before and after the fin-de-siècle mutations, those less convinced of Communism’s novelty as a secular religion often stressed its fusions with nationalism in various countries and conjunctures. But although that is an important part of the story, it should not be mistaken for a complete and sufficient explanation. The historical mixtures of Communism and nationalism were not all of the same kind, and their character depended on contingent circumstances as well as long-term historical legacies and – not least – on possibilities opened up by the ideology itself. To mention some prominent examples, the symbiosis with nationalism did not develop along the same lines in Korea, Albania, China, and Vietnam. Furthermore, the harnessing of Communism to imperial restoration – following the Russian example, but in different conditions and with different choices made along the way – results in specific processes, irreducible to a nationalist model; this was most obviously the case in China, but short-lived effects of imperial traditions and temptations can be detected in lesser upheavals, such as the Ethiopian revolution that occurred in the twilight of Communism and has therefore attracted less comparative attention than it deserves. Finally, concerning the international appeal of Communism as an ideology, there are some qualifications to be added. Cases of markedly unsuccessful performance suggest not only historical but also civilizational obstacles. In Latin America, Communism had a noteworthy cultural influence, but as a political movement, it was an almost unmitigated failure; the single half exception, the Cuban revolution, was achieved through an improbable and asymmetric alliance with the regional tradition of ‘caudilloism’, and attempts to establish a more standard version of the party-state were severely suppressed. Even more striking is the failure of Communism in the Islamic world. Two Communist movements came to power in marginal countries, one in the course of a very chaotic de-colonizing process (South Yemen), the other in an understructured state that had escaped colonial domination (Afghanistan). In both cases, the regimes self-destructed through violent internal conflicts, largely of tribal origin. Further aspects of the Communist presence in international affairs might be noted. It is an interesting fact that the existence of a great power claiming Marxist credentials could lend empirical support – at a distance – to Marxist traditions with different orientations, strong cultural influence in their respective countries, and varying relations to Communist movements (Italy and

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Japan are the most prominent examples). But if the political record is complicated, the attempt to translate the ideological project into detailed organizational terms was an ongoing and unmitigated failure. The Communist International was from the outset badly adapted to an already unrealistic end (world revolution), and the fundamental absurdity of the whole construction became increasingly patent; in several cases, it led to major political disasters. However, this series of defeats was the obverse of success on another level and of a kind very different from the initial proclaimed goals. The international organization was instrumentalized (albeit in a marginal position) for the purpose of rebuilding the Soviet Union as a great power. That aim was realized, but at the cost of extreme violence and institutional regression. The results were significant enough for the Soviet state to play a key role in defeating another great power, whose reconstruction along totalitarian lines had resulted in the most destructive version of the modern pursuit of power so far invented. The domestic re-legitimation and international upgrading gained through victory over Nazi Germany was followed by two massive setbacks in the global arena. Both were linked to attempts at limited internal reform after the end of Stalinism, although not reducible to that factor. On the one hand, the emerging Eurasian power bloc, made up of the two largest Communist states, did not last long. The Sino-Soviet conflict, beginning in the late 1950s and culminating around 1970, changed global correlations of forces, added another cold war to the one that had been going on since the late 1940s, and imposed new political imperatives on both sides to the controversy. Although the mutual estrangement of Chinese and Soviet Communism was triggered by new policies of the post-Stalinist Soviet leadership, it seems clear that the rivalry of two empires contending for authority over an international ideological movement was bound to result in escalating discord. The other blow to Soviet power was the failure of an alternative strategy for competition with capitalist states. Attempts to scale down Cold War tensions and reach a modus vivendi with the United States (‘peaceful coexistence’) were to be complemented by a new emphasis on economic performance, based on an enduring faith in the perfectibility of the command economy (obviously grounded in its wartime performance) and its ability to outflank capitalist economies. These illusory expectations were doubly refuted: not only was the Soviet economy unable to overtake the US one, it was itself overtaken by Japan. This latter development was all the more significant because it reflected the dynamic of a distinctive capitalist regime, different from the Western models. The capitalist form of economic life thus proved its superior ability to sustain growth as well as to develop diverse frameworks for it. At a later stage, the diversity came under attack in the name of a supposed uniquely rational model; the type of growth



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favoured by the latter then resulted in crisis and raised new doubts; but that is another story. The Sino-Soviet conflict paved the way (albeit a roundabout one) for China to chart a new course for development. The process thus initiated is still unfolding but advanced enough to show that its outcome will be decisive for geopolitical patterns of the twenty-first century. As we have seen, the regime taking shape through this multifaceted reorientation is too complex and novel to be described as a version of Communism or a variant of the Soviet model. But the reunification of the Chinese empire under Communist rule was a key factor in the continuing building and restructuring of a developmental state; the Chinese experience is therefore a crucial case for the assessment of Communism’s historical legacies, and for both empirical and theoretical reasons, conclusive judgements would be premature. The question to be raised here is a more general one: what does this brief survey of the two main Communist trajectories (with some allusions to the multiple local ones) tell us about approaches to the questions of globality and globalization? If global constellations are to be analysed in multidimensional terms, giving due weight to political, ideological, and civilizational aspects, the experiences discussed previously are exemplary illustrations. The multidimensional view, opposed to economic reductionism, is the defining feature of historical-sociological perspectives on globalization. From this point of view, it seems misguided to argue that the survival of Communism in the formative Soviet mode ‘would not have led to globalization’ (Milanovic 2019, 3). As the present writer has suggested elsewhere (Arnason 1995), it makes more sense to speak of a failed mode of globalization. The geopolitical impact of the Soviet Empire, its ideological project of a new world order, and its presence as an alternative version of modernity combined – in changing ways – to have a powerful impact on world affairs. Even in the economic sphere, it has been shown that Soviet development – not least the industrialization essential to great power ambitions – was less isolated from international contexts and trends than official pretensions to autarchy would suggest. The great schism that split the Eurasian bloc had global repercussions; and the terminal crisis of Communism at the end of the twentieth century, although deeply rooted in internal problems of each regime, unfolded in a challenging global setting. Multiple aspects of this constellation have been analysed by historians and other scholars, but there is no doubt about a conjunction of key factors. A new phase of capitalist development linked a new pattern of global growth to utopian promises – of individual emancipation and enrichment through the unleashing of markets, with particular emphasis on financial ones – that had long been an integral part of the economic regime, but with varying emphasis. The consolidation of democratic regimes with a strong component of social citizenship, together with the advances of European integration,

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contrasted with the failure of reform Communism; tensions between this side of perceived Western superiority and the capitalist resurgence were not as visible as they later became. Finally, the strain of military competition with a richer and more inventive superpower posed growing problems; this factor was, admittedly, not nearly as significant for China as for the Soviet Union, but we can assume that the anticipation of future progress to superpower status, with corresponding military potential and commitments, was of some importance for those who initiated a new strategy of development from the late 1970s onwards. To sum up, the emergence of Communism involved an encounter of global forces at their most intense with intra-state (more precisely intra-imperial) dynamics at their most revolutionary, and due allowance must be made for contingent events on both sides. The result was a new configuration of social power, with correspondingly novel global aspirations; they took different directions in economic, political, and cultural domains. Multiple mutations, all linked to setbacks in the global arena as well as to unsolved domestic problems, marked the end of Communism as a comprehensive project, but with exits in different directions and different uses and/or denials of the Communist legacy. The Communist experience, situated in a broader context, shows that the multiple globalizing dynamics – economic, political, cultural, and in the final instance civilizational – can diverge and interact in both mutually reinforcing and disruptive ways. It remains to be seen how this insight can be adapted to a more large-scale and long-term context, with a view to problematizing the more commonly accepted but simplifying accounts of globalization. This broader horizon will be clarified in light of the civilizational approach. CIVILIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES Modernity as a new civilization is defined by new cultural orientations, and it is characterized by an unprecedented global reach. The connection between these two features is one of the underdeveloped themes in Eisenstadt’s work, so much so that his argument has even been misunderstood and taken to mean that globality is, in the final instance, the defining aspect of the modern world. That is, as we have seen, not the view taken here; rather, the key to the processes through which modernity unfolds, including the globalizing ones, is to be found in the dynamics and paradoxes of an internally contested, multidimensional and historically enmeshed cultural vision of human autonomy. Attempts to trace the specific links of this complex imaginary signification to global horizons can nevertheless draw on various comments in Eisenstadt’s writings, not least the reference to several world systems,



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economic, political, and ideological (Eisenstadt 1978), opposed to what he saw as the reductionism of Wallerstein’s widely discussed and applied world system theory, based on unquestioned assumptions about the primacy of the economic sphere. The use of the term ‘system’ should, in this context, be understood as a concession to the language of the ongoing debate; both the thrust of Eisenstadt’s overall argumentation and the present analysis suggest that the point at issue is the plurality of sociocultural spheres and their interrelations, irreducible to systemic models. The valid implication of the comment is that the economic, political, and cultural (rather than ideological) spheres, in their capacity as contexts and horizons of autonomy, are also constitutive components of global modernity. Further elaboration of these indications cannot be undertaken in a vacuum. Globalism, as we might call it, is a pervasive trend in recent social and political thought, proliferating on both theoretical and ideological levels and adaptable to different political views. If the civilizational way to conceptualize global modernity is to gain more currency, it has to confront the visions of a unified world that took shape and seemed plausible in the fin-de-siècle conjuncture; the years from 1991 to 2008 may be seen as a primary background, but the intellectual projections of that period did not quit the field. They range from simple idealizations of the liberal-democratic-capitalist version of modernity that seemed to have triumphed at the end of the twentieth century to much more sophisticated theories of world society, but shared presuppositions can be identified; they have to do with perceptions of the situation that appeared to signify or at least to promise the end of an illegitimate alternative modernity and the return to sustainable foundations. The two preceding chapters should have gone some way to stating the case for a more balanced view. Besides the direct or indirect over-interpretations of a historical conjuncture, some other sides to the debate should be taken into account. To begin with, world system theory is older than the post-1990 conceptions of a unified world, and its basic assumptions were very different. As defined by Wallerstein, they centred on a critical conception of capitalism, drawing on Marxian arguments but not bound to Marx‘s specific claims, and explicitly opposed to traditional Marxist views of capitalism as a stage of progress, holding out the promise of a more advanced society. The revival of interest in critical perspectives after the great recession ensured a continuing scope for this approach, not least as an antidote to triumphalist accounts of capitalist globalization. But the shared focus on capitalism also implies a certain convergent reductionism that calls for closer scrutiny; and there are other reductionist turns to be noted. Wallerstein had originally used the concept of world system to describe a modern formation and distinguish it from the imperial power structures that had dominated successive epochs of premodern history; later authors extended it into the premodern and even archaic past, where it was

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applied to units functioning on a much smaller scale (which Wallerstein had originally described as mini-systems). Although comparative analyses on this basis could throw light on details, the conceptual levelling was an obstacle to further interpretation. A reductionist stance was also evident in the treatment of Communist regimes. Drawing on earlier Marxist critiques of the Soviet model, Wallerstein argued that the emphasis on state-controlled accumulation, seen in the context of a world-encompassing system, was reason enough to describe these self-proclaimed alternatives as offshoots of capitalism. In later writings, Wallerstein moved beyond the one-sided economic focus of his early work and came to consider the world system as a civilization. But this turned out to be less innovative than the expression suggested. Wallerstein argued that the ambiguous relationship between the two meanings of the term ‘civilization’, the universal and the particular, could be clarified in connection with the dynamics of the capitalist world system. What had happened was that a particular civilization, the civilization of capitalism (Wallerstein quoted Schumpeter’s use of this formulation, no doubt in part inspired by Marx), had successfully imposed its own patterns and criteria as universally valid; the emergence of a pluralist discourse on civilizations was then primarily linked to the experience of societies subordinated to the world system and drawing on their cultural identities and resources to resist its power. This was of course a misleading oversimplification. It is true that both nineteenth- and twentieth-century non-Western responses to Western expansion and direct or indirect imperial rule have in varying degrees relied on ideas with affinities to the pluralist conception of civilizations, but this was much more pronounced in some cases than others; East Asian notions of combining borrowings from the West with indigenous traditions and spiritual orientations are an obvious case, whereas – for example – Islamic resistance was more closely associated with a universal faith. And in any case, the distinction between civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural was, as such, spelt out by European thinkers; it appeared in the margin of the Enlightenment, which was mainly concerned with the singular, and was fully articulated in classical sociology, especially by the Durkheimian school. According to Wallerstein, the superadded element that made capitalism a civilization was a specific unifying vision of knowledge, power and progress. He quoted a description of the ‘Baconian/Cartesian/Newtonian world-view’ as promising that ‘the study and interpretation of nature’ would give rise to ‘the kingdom of man’ (Wallerstein 1988, 73); the implicit reference to autonomy is obvious, but for Wallerstein that was less important than the fact that this version of progress – including liberal and Marxist variations – had been imposed on a world dominated by the Western centres of the capitalist system, thus imprisoning weaker societies within a universalist frame of reference that could neither be accepted nor refused. The perspective of



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a knowledge-based, intrinsically unlimited pursuit of power over nature was attuned to the demands of capitalist accumulation. Writing in 1988, he claimed that the scientistic underpinnings of this alliance were being called into question by new developments in the philosophy of science, bringing more indeterminacy, uncertainty, and creativity into conceptions of nature, and that this was linked to an impending crisis of the capitalist system; but he offered no evidence for that connection, nor reasons to expect it to develop. In the upshot, the civilizational perspective thus shrank to a stronger emphasis on ideology (although of a kind not overtly appearing in that guise), and Wallerstein’s understanding of that aspect was still close to Marx, although not as directly associated with class analysis. The ideological component of the world system was seen as a functional complement to the asymmetric division of labour and distribution of power that had determined its dynamics from sixteenth-century beginnings to the present day, and the belief in progress, imposed on both subaltern parts of the system and its supposed adversaries by the dominant centres, appeared as its core content. The focus on progress and its changing meanings in global contexts is not unjustified (as we have seen, this problematic is an offshoot of the social imaginary that centres on autonomy), but to gain a better grasp of the civilizational dimension claimed by Wallerstein, we need to go beyond ideology, and that means linking up with Eisenstadt’s reflections on the subject. In short, the record of world system theory is ambiguous: it opened up new fields for comparative study and global history, but reductionist presuppositions limited the intellectual yield of this move. To justify the line to be taken in the following discussion, one more instance of reductionism should be noted. Here as elsewhere, the very concept of system has serious drawbacks. In one of the earliest responses to Wallerstein’s work, Aristide Zolberg (1983) rejected the combination of world and system as a ‘conceptual misalliance’. That still seems a valid and relevant point; it may be useful to spell out some basic implications. The world in question is a historical one, suddenly enlarged by the first steps towards the European conquest of the Americas and less dramatically consolidated by new contacts between Europe and Asia. History can only be understood in terms of constellations and trajectories, the former always extending beyond the horizons of participants and interpreters, the latter always involving multiple trends, open possibilities, and emerging novelty. Systemic patterns superimposed on this background, as a result of historical processes and then on the level of more or less theorized interpretations, never exhaust the field. To put it another way, the relational and processual character of social-historical reality is not absorbable into systemic frameworks. In another publication, Zolberg (1981) identified the historical factor most obviously sidelined in Wallerstein’s model: the early

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modern processes of state formation, in key cases with imperial extensions. They were not reducible to side effects of economic change. These points will be taken on board for the purposes of a civilizational approach to the issues raised by Wallerstein. In that context, later developments of world system theory seem unimportant; the most representative authors have retreated from the civilizational debate. Coming back to Eisenstadt, the idea of three world systems should be replaced with a conception of globalizing processes, especially in the economic, political, and cultural spheres (ideology comes into the picture as a link between the last-named one and the others). HISTORICAL LANDMARKS AND CONCEPTUAL SIGNPOSTS If the novelty of modernity as a civilization has to do with transformative cultural orientations, rather than with the global horizon as such, the point of exploring the latter is twofold. In the first place, we have to consider global constellations, interconnected or successive, that involve developments and intertwinings of the civilizational trends; and then there are global concatenations of tensions, crises, and upheavals, affecting different parts of the world in different ways and sometimes triggering transformations that may in turn have a global impact. It is the interaction of these critical conjunctures with more localized situations that most obviously justifies speaking of global patterns as one type of multiple modernities. The first global constellation to be noted took shape around and after 1500. Contrary to Wallerstein’s suggestion that this was the moment when a capitalist world economy emerged as an irreversible alternative to world empires, the new situation is best characterized as a mutually reinforcing intertwining of commercial and imperial factors, both of them important for the later development of modern capitalism, and accompanied by other trends less directly impacting on history, but not insignificant in the longer run. Moreover, the global pattern was a combination of European and non-European, primarily Asian developments. The restructuring of empires and the building of new ones was a Eurasian trend, and it is convenient to begin with that part of the story. The European conquest of the Americas, much more rapid and centralized in the south than in the north, had massive effects in the global arena. An unprecedented destruction of local cultures and civilizations paved the way for overseas empire building, a significant political phenomenon in itself (as discussed in a preceding chapter), with global repercussions of several kinds. The overseas connection affected state formation, interstate competition, and imperial ambitions within Europe. For the monarchies of



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the Atlantic seaboard, it opened access to new resources and imposed new tasks; conversely, advances of state building at home influenced the overseas trajectories (both the English and the Spanish transatlantic empire fell apart in the wake of state-strengthening initiatives in the metropolitan centres; in the former case, rivalry with French power was a significant contributing cause, decisive in the latter). At the same time, the colonization of the Americas and the expanded space for the extraction of resources led to the formation of more extensive commercial networks, reaching across the Pacific to East Asia. Other arenas of European commercial expansion were the Atlantic, where the slave trade involved transactions with emerging and competing African states, and the Indian Ocean, where European powers could for some time only establish footholds. The main obstacle to further penetration was the other side of the multi-imperial constellation: the fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury formation of Muslim empires – Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal – not all equally long-lived, but more lasting and consequential than anything seen since the spiralling decline of pan-Islamic imperial power began in the ninth century. The most distant part of the Eurasian imperial multiverse, the Qing realm constructed from 1644 onwards, can, in this context, be described from various angles: as a final successful fusion of Chinese and Inner Eurasian imperial domains, a conservative restoration of traditional Chinese patterns after a period of instability uncertain trends under the late Ming dynasty, but also as a dynamic and prosperous society that maintained China’s economic lead until sometime during the Industrial Revolution. The early modern global constellation was, in short, a very specific intertwining of a commercial upsurge, conducive – in the longer run – to more comprehensive capitalist development, and a multicentral and multidirectional imperial expansion, more ambiguously related to preconditions and possibilities of capitalist take-offs. This pattern cannot be described as an incipient world system, nor was it unilaterally imposed by European forces. To grasp its structures, a perspective far beyond Europe is necessary. This does not mean that European empires were ‘empires of the weak’ (Sharman 2019); rather, there were different combinations of strengths and weaknesses, ultimately favourable to European geopolitical and economic actors, although the part of contingent factors in that outcome should not be overlooked. But the view beyond Europe also highlights a very unique case of what we might call negative globalization. Tokugawa Japan, from 1600 onwards, withdrew from involvement in affairs beyond its borders and minimized contact with both long-established East Asian neighbours and the more marginal Western arrivals in the region; but economic growth and all-round sociocultural development within this isolated domain was remarkable, and at the same time, knowledge of the outside world was remarkable by comparative standards, and stood the Japanese in good stead when they reverted to a strategy of active involvement.

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There is one more aspect of the early modern constellation to be noted, and it brings the discussion back to European specifics. The multicultural perspective highlighted by Lévi-Strauss and mentioned in a preceding chapter should also be seen as a distinctive globalizing factor, even if its impact was a very gradual and ambiguous one. The virtually simultaneous intensification of interest in classical antiquity, development of contacts with the Orient beyond Islam, and discovery of Amerindian societies opened up a framework for the self-reflection and contextualization of European cultures; the implications were slow to develop, but as the debate on ‘Orientalism’ and Eurocentrism has shown, the early modern beginnings are important. However, this triple reference to alterity could also serve the opposite end: to emphasize the superiority of European culture. During the heyday of Eurocentric thought, from the early nineteenth century to 1914, a strong belief in progress and in the West as its most advanced embodiment. During the twentieth century, all three references acquired new meaning for critical reflection on European culture and modernity. This specific combination of cultural horizons is a distinctively European pattern. It represents a type of globalization that opens up possibilities of future and uncertain changes, rather than having a direct impact. Ideological globalization in a more specific sense was very limited during this phase, mainly confined to religious expansion in tandem with colonization, and most notable in the transatlantic effects and metamorphoses of the two reformations, emphasized by Eisenstadt (in overly metahistorical terms) as civilizational factors in the making of different Americas. In this regard, the next phase to be considered was very different. Here we come to an unfolding constellation that exemplifies – even better than the first phase – the distinction between global forms of modernity and the more circumscribed contexts where decisive transformations of its basic components (in terms of the three spheres foregrounded throughout this text) take place. The difference was first reflected in distance and then in intensified interaction. It is plausible to start with the conjuncture described by C. A. Bayly as ‘perhaps . . . the first global crisis’ (Bayly 2004, 91). It began around 1720, with the simultaneously accelerating decline of the Safavid and Mughal empires, and the immediate effects ‘stretched from Mesopotamia in the west to Thailand in the east’ (90). The weakening of power centres led to fragmentation and a last, very brief but also very destructive attempt to imitate the examples of plundering and massacring conquerors coming from the periphery (the rule of Nader Shah in Persia, 1735–1747). More importantly, the disintegration of indigenous imperial power created openings for European expansion. Historians have often distinguished between a first and a second British Empire, centred respectively on North America and India; but decisive moves towards the conquest of India were made from 1757 onwards. There was thus a brief moment when the empire was active on both fronts,



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and both of them involved war with France (Napoleon’s supposed dictum that the battle of Waterloo had already been lost in India may or may not be authentic, but it does contain a grain of truth). The measures taken to sustain this global reach sparked rebellion in the most sensitive and significant place: the North American colonies. The crises of the Safavid and Mughal empires were interrelated, yet not global in the sense that the repercussions and resulting horizons were (for one thing, British interest in closer commercial contact with China and the build-up to more aggressive action to that end grew directly out of the Indian venture). But this phase of the global crisis had a limited impact on situations and perceptions in the centres most actively involved in its culminating episode, the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763. Historical scholarship has now firmly established the view of this conflict as the first global one, rather than a European war. Its consequences made the interconnections of global, regional, and national events and processes more visible; this reduction of distance occurred against the background of ‘an explosive combination of military ambition and financial need’ (Bayly 2004, 97), characteristic of a whole interstate constellation. But the revolutionary dynamic triggered by this critical juncture in state formation and interstate rivalry developed its own diversifying momentum: ‘Different societies took different trajectories through an age of revolution which had different origins, but global consequences’ (2004, 101). The two paradigmatic revolutions, the American and the French, diverged in terms of resultant transformations, cultural memories, and ideological interpretations; upheavals on a lesser scale and in more peripheral contexts added further variations. Bayly’s conclusion is that the main beneficiary of the revolutionary processes was the state, emerging from the crisis as more capable of extracting resources and controlling society and, by the same token, as more equipped for global expansion. As he emphasizes, this leap forward in state formation was very much a learning process. But the empowered state operated in an even more radically changed context of meaning. It may be useful to distinguish two levels of reference. Ideologically articulated visions included the ideas of constitutional democracy and popular sovereignty, but also the very briefly ascendant but lastingly influential Jacobin model and the gradually emerging project of a transformation that would avoid the weaknesses of Jacobinism while realizing more radical aims (that was the beginning of Communism in the modern but not yet twentieth-century sense). On the level more properly described in terms of imaginary significations, the notions of a new order, people, nation, and revolution could be appropriated and reinterpreted by forces different from those involved in the original breakthroughs. All these interpretive trends and orienting meanings ushered in a new era of ideological globalization. But that wave, very diversified in itself, unfolded in interaction

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with another globalizing force coming from elsewhere: the Industrial Revolution. One of the most globally influential ideological constructs took off from a shortcut between the industrial and democratic revolutions, identifying the social forces empowered by the former with the main protagonists of the second. This was the thesis proposed in the Communist Manifesto, never tenable but suggestive of connections to be explored and most appealing because it went hand in hand with the promise of another and more radical revolution, expected to overcome the conflicts and dissonances resulting from the imperfect union of the two recent ones. Eric Hobsbawm (1962) redefined their interrelations in much more flexible but still recognizably Marxian terms. It can be safely said that the task of a more radical revision, without withdrawal of the very question, is still on the agenda of global history. Bayly’s notion of a world crisis from 1720 to 1820, with a dividing line between roughly the first six and the last four decades of that period, is a convincing approach (the final date is chosen with reference to revolts on Europe’s Mediterranean frontier, foreshadowing more central and serious challenges to the order imposed by the victors of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815). The following century, most commonly defined – depending on the thematic focus – either as a long one from 1789 to 1914 or as a shifted one from 1815 to 1914, is in many ways the most rewarding period for global approaches, and the most outstanding examples of historiography in that vein deal with it (especially Osterhammel 2009, but Bayly’s book, quoted earlier, is also in that class). Its place in history is marked by multiple contrasts and paradoxes. The nineteenth century went global in unprecedented ways, but it is also true that ‘no other century was, even to an approximate degree, a European epoch’ and that this European centrality was achieved not only through political and economic power but also through models accepted even by ‘many of Europe’s victims’ (Osterhammel 2009, 21). On the ideological level, this state of affairs was reflected in Eurocentric visions of history, with varying emphasis on past, present, or future, and not all conceived in the same spirit. The case for a European primacy, going beyond the empirically evident dominance, could be made on the basis of exceptional cultural breakthroughs, prefigured by classical ancestors, completed in modern times and entitling to global leadership. Another version cast Europe in the role of an evolutionary vanguard, exemplifying a road yet to be taken – preferably with European assistance – by more backward regions. Racial ideologies of European supremacy were a distinct category. But Europe could also be envisioned as the initiating centre of a coming revolution, destined to engulf and transform the rest of the world (the Communist Manifesto is one of the most Eurocentric texts ever written). The variety of Eurocentrisms is one of the factors that have complicated discussions of this theme; another is the unwillingness or inability of critics to admit the historical fact of European centrality. The



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more or less enduring centrality of a particular region or civilization is not, as such, an exceptional phenomenon; an obvious example is the ‘centrality of Islamic civilization’ (Cook 2015) in Afro-Eurasian history from the eighth century onwards. The attempts to sidestep the whole problematic through an a priori denial of European specificity and its worldwide impact have done more to confuse the issues than to resolve them. But if nineteenth-century European centrality had a more global reach than its precursors, and if the global horizon enabled a new kind of ideological projection, this constellation was also more rapidly self-undermining than comparable ones on a more limited scale had been. The very success in achieving global ascendancy created new challenges to European unity and exemplarity. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the victorious conservative powers had attempted to stabilize an interstate European order, more systematically and ambitiously conceived than later accounts have often acknowledged (Schroeder 1994). The close association with resistance to social and political change was not the only factor that weakened this regime; the rivalry of states with imperial aspirations was in the long run too disruptive to be contained within a negotiated framework. During the latter half of the century, this uncontrollably centrifugal trend developed into a global inter-imperial contest that affected developments within the European arena in multiple ways. As Osterhammel (2009, 13) notes, the British Empire was the first truly worldwide one (although it could be argued that the Spanish one had at least seen itself as such, on somewhat better grounds than the premodern ones). Other imperial powers tried partly to imitate the British example, partly to outperform it in some distinctive ways; both kinds of rivalry could also find imaginary outlets in the projects of states disadvantaged by late arrival or unhelpful location (Hitler’s admiration for the British Empire, coupled with a determination to outdo it in his own way, is well known). Finally, nineteenth-century observers anticipated the rise of two great powers with crucially important though different European connections, but in control of spaces beyond the borders of traditional European geopolitics and able to mobilize resources beyond the reach of core European states. The Russian and American roads to superpower status turned out to be more complicated than widely expected; in one case, the prelude included collapse, revolution, and total war, while the other was, after a brief but decisive intervention in 1917–1918, marked by partial withdrawal and a refocusing on economic boom and bust, before establishing – at lesser cost – a more dominant position than its eastern rival. As for nineteenth-century ideological globalization, there was – as we have seen – a whole cluster of themes generated by the revolutionary transformations around 1800 and lending themselves to global diffusion with local variations. But the global interplay of spread and reception was also shaped by

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the unifying idea of and belief in progress. The nineteenth century was indisputably the golden age of this notion, and the social imaginary constituted around it. But the imaginary signification of progress was open to extensive variation. Liberal interpretations predominated, but they were accompanied and contested by radical projects of restructured progress as well as conservative visions of reconciling tradition and progress. If the history of the nineteenth century was a decisive forward leap of globalization, it could also be read as a confirmation of one-sided views on this transformative turn. There are two misconceptions of this kind, best treated as inverted mirror images of each other; although their definitive formulations are products of twentieth-century thought, they clearly draw on experiences and conceptualizations that go back to the nineteenth-century take-off. On the one hand, the globalizing dynamic was obviously driven by accelerated developments in dominant centres, so much so that it could seem reducible to an extension of processes unfolding in metropolitan areas and reaching beyond them: industrialization, state formation and empire building, nation formation, to mention only the most salient ones; the globalization of ideologies and scientific methods lends itself to the same view. In the nineteenth century, such perspectives sustained the belief in a world-transforming civilizing mission of Euro-American imperialism. In the wake of world wars and decolonization, the self-image of the hegemonic West had to be revised, but notions of a ‘world revolution of Westernization’ (Laue 1989) could still be defended. Even in the early twenty-first century, the idea of a global civilization spreading from Western ‘lead societies’ has not gone out of use. On the other hand, theorists of ‘world society’ have turned the argument around and claimed that worldwide extension gives rise to a new framework, encompassing all smaller-scale units and imposing its patterns of integration and differentiation across a global field. This approach emerged later than the various conceptions of Westernization, but it relates to the same record of historical experiences and interpretive disputes. Its most articulate version is based on a radical reformulation of systems theory (Luhmann 1975, Stichweh 2000; for a critique on which the following discussion draws, see Knӧbl 2007, 45–54). Both conceptual demarcations and historical contextualizations leave something to be desired. If a world society is constituted through the – in principle – infinite possibility of expanding communication (this was Luhmann’s original definition), it becomes difficult to draw a historical boundary that would separate this formation from more limited ones; historians will object that the tendency to expand networks of communication has been at work throughout the human record and that its actual reach has always depended on a vast range of conditioning and contributing factors. It is no more clear how this formulation is to be reconciled with Stichweh’s more categorical statement ‘that there is only one social system that consists of all



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communications and nothing else’ (Stichweh 2000, 31); how would we ever identify and demarcate such a system? As Knӧbl notes, the claims to theorize integration and differentiation within the framework of world society remain verbal; no convincing reasons have been given for treating nation states as functional components of a system constituted by communication only. If the idea of a world society is conceptually vague and lacking in empirical grounding, its attraction can perhaps be explained in other terms, most plausibly in the context of recent debates on the concept of society. In the last decades of the twentieth century, social theorists of different persuasions objected to over-integrated and overly self-contained images of society, theorized by a dominant trend of the sociological tradition (most markedly by Talcott Parsons) and ultimately – as the critics saw it – derived from idealizing visions of the nation state. Closer analysis of this core problematic had to deal with it on two levels: the integration of society could be conceived in functional or normative terms. Durkheim’s sociological theory provided a classical reference for the distinction; in his foundational work on the division of social labour, he emphasized both the moral character of the social bond and the functional interdependence of social actors. Parsons changed the terms of debate and analysed normative integration as a particular case of systemic integration; Habermas reintroduced the difference and insisted on the primacy of normative interaction and its communicative foundations. Luhmann took the opposite line and redefined systemic integration in terms flexible enough to minimize the normative dimension; against that background, the concept of world society appears as a final disconnection from normative integration, no longer seen as a precondition of order, and a definitive affirmation of the systemic aspect, at a level where it cannot be transcended (there is nothing beyond the global horizon). The idea of world society thus appears as a way out of a conceptual crisis, an attempt to rescue a traditional concept by ditching a part of its meaning and moving another part to an impregnable position. But the weak foundations of this construct suggest that it should also be situated in another context. Alongside the appropriation of resources, the extension of power and the discovery of new horizons, globalizing processes have always generated illusions of varying strength and duration. The first book to be titled ‘The Great Illusion’ (Angell 1911) was directed against obsolete ideas about profiting from war, but its basic assumption – that economic arguments could prevail against geopolitical impulses to war – itself turned out to be an illusion. The label of Great Illusion now seems more applicable to a complex of mutually supporting beliefs that characterized the end of the twentieth century and the very first years of the twenty-first one (and may even have tapped into more archaic undercurrents of millenarian notions). On the economic level, two complementary misconceptions held sway (though never uncontested,

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neither among economists nor in the public sphere). The financialization of capitalism was equated with an extension of market principles, now applied in a more comprehensive way, accelerating economic transactions and thus conducive to more intensive globalization. At the same time, it was claimed that scientific insight into economic life had reached a level where the minimum of governance needed to ensure self-regulation without crises could be defined. This idealized image of capitalism made it easier to believe in its final reconciliation with democracy. Last but not least, the exits from Communism were viewed through the perceived collapse in Eastern Europe, the imagined transition in Russia and the totally misunderstood transformations in China, and the whole process was seen as a case of systemic failure; it was then taken for granted that a gradual but irreversible and comprehensive assimilation to the Western model of liberal democracy would follow. The streamlined version of the latter reduced capitalism to a market economy and democracy to free political competition within a legal order. It is hardly necessary to note that this composite picture of a beckoning global harmony has fallen to pieces. But it should not be equated with the more general trend known as neoliberalism. The latter is capable of mutations and adaptations going beyond the fin-de-siècle version. The argument of this book also takes note of the criticisms levelled against the long dominant concept of society, but the proposed conclusion differs fundamentally from the one that gave rise to the concept of world society. To recapitulate, the most basic assumption is the paradigm of differentiated sociocultural spheres, more specifically the economic, political, and cultural ones; the divergences and tensions between them are the most decisive evidence against over-integrated concepts of society. But the other side of this constellation is that certain patterns of partial unity are superimposed on the field of tensions; nation states, empires, and civilizations are conspicuous cases in point, but although these formations constitute – to use Toynbee’s term – intelligible units of enquiry into the social-historical domain, their boundaries are also crossed by activities and processes characteristic of the underlying spheres. The scope for such border crossings varies from one historical context to another; global reach is their most distant horizon, and the question of global modernities has to do with distinctive constellations in that setting. As has been seen, the present reflections aim at a frame of reference that would allow for varying ways of interaction between global, regional, civilizational, and national pattern, without a priori unilateralisms of the kind just mentioned. Examples from earlier phases of modernity have already been mentioned, and more recent ones may be added. The global constellation of the last decades before World War I was marked by multiple mutually conditioned and cumulatively disruptive dynamics. Imperial rivalries in the global arena interacted with intra-European ones,



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resulting in escalating tensions on both sides; smaller states developed geopolitical ambitions that set them on collision course with core powers. Technological progress, going through the phase known as the second industrial revolution, expanded the range of mobilizable resources, and major innovations in the techniques of transport and communication intensified the globalizing processes. Nationalist and socialist movements complicated the political scene, achieved limited reforms, and provoked counter-mobilization. In retrospect, this complex field of forces and frictions appears as a prelude to World War I. No plausible case has been made for this conflict having been a necessary outcome, nor is there a tenable account that would identify a single decisive cause; but the upshot of increasingly nuanced historical scholarship is that the outbreak of war can only be understood in light of global antecedents and that developments around the turn of the century had led to an accumulation of crisis factors while making it more difficult to deal with them in cooperative ways. The descent into violence was the result of clashing responses to perceived global ramifications of a local crisis, but it led in turn to local prolongations of the conflict, and in the Russian case to total collapse and revolution, with massive worldwide consequences. This ‘imperial apocalypse’ (Sanborn 2015), all the more spectacular since pre-war views on Russia had tended to exaggerate its power potential, was not a foreordained chain of events. Specific background features, circumstances, and contingencies were involved. Another pattern of interaction between global and localized processes prevailed during the interwar years. On the geopolitical level, a fragile peace order, more fundamentally weakened by structural limits to the post-war settlement than by bad decisions, was confronted with a particularly disruptive constellation of established and aspiring powers. The strongest member of the victorious alliance, the United States, opted for a half-withdrawal from world affairs, whereas the older colonial empires pursued further expansion without much regard for a changed situation. Other powers were, for varying reasons, dissatisfied with the new order and committed to strategies of reversal; that was the case with Germany, Italy, and the Soviet version of the Russian Empire, and all three came under totalitarian rule, albeit with significant differences. Finally, Japan – at this stage the single Asian power that counted – had reaped disproportionate gains from modest involvement in the war and was tempted to make the most of that advantage. Coinciding with this very unsettled state of world politics, the capitalist economy went through a phase of instability, culminating in the Great Depression. The economic crisis aggravated interstate tensions as well as domestic political ones; it is worth noting that a recent study (Straumann 2019) links the breakthrough of the Nazi movement in Germany directly to the financial breakdown in 1931. On the global scale, the crisis maximized the impact of ideologies that

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had crystallized in the aftermath of the war and contributed to the rise of totalitarian movements and regimes. The interwar drift to disaster resulted in two separate but interconnected explosions of violence: Hitler’s attempt to impose German imperial rule on the European continent, which brought about an alliance of two otherwise incompatible adversaries, and the Japanese onslaught on China, European colonial empires in Asia, and the United States. The joint effect of these – in retrospect – almost unbelievably hubristic excesses was a division of the world along new lines and with new global implications. This brief comparison of two recent historical phases suggests that rapid and radical changes to global patterns, involving economic, political, and ideological factors, should be put on the map of multiple modernities. But to clarify the point at issue, basic conceptual distinctions should also be noted. The difference between the global and the universal has been duly acknowledged in debates. The category of universality implies a validity claim; in the context discussed here, it is primarily associated with alternative modernities and their inbuilt aspirations to paradigm status, more or less successfully pursued on a global scale. The Soviet model made emphatic claims to universality and some headway towards global power but proved unsustainable on both levels. Less has been said about the difference between worldwide diffusion and globality. For instance, references to the globalization of the nation state must obviously be understood in the former sense; but as this very example shows, the theme then merges with other aspects of multiple modernities. The diffusion of the nation state as an institutional complex is accompanied by variations that can be analysed in the context of single states, regions, or civilizations. If the category of global modernities is to retain a more specific meaning, it must refer to constellations constituted in and constitutive of the global arena and capable of interaction with more circumscribed formations. Such a case was the aforementioned configuration preceding World War I, most prominently characterized by the interconnected (but not at all mutually reducible) dynamics of culminating imperialism and a capitalist economy in a state recently described by a historian as ‘anxious triumph’ (Sassoon 2019), extending its global reach in a rapidly changing environment. Another global formation, differently structured, was the interwar conjuncture. If we distinguish global modernities from national, regional, and civilizational ones, and allow for structural and processual interconnections between these several levels, the question of the context within which they interact must be raised. At that point the distinction between global history and world history becomes more meaningful than it often is. World history is, in that sense, more encompassing than global history; the social-historical world is the spatial, temporal, and experiential horizon that enables us to grasp changing relations between more specific formations. Within that frame of



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reference, a certain pride of place – no causal, structural, or hierarchical, let alone normative primacy – must be given to civilizations. To use Max Weber’s term, their character as cultural worlds, neither closed nor unchanging but distinctive and durable, makes for a special relationship to world history. This book is an attempt to explore modernity from that point of view; clarifying the more general perspective is another task.

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Index

absolutism, 34, 84 – 85, 110, 127, 172 Abulafia, David, 37 accumulation, 10, 15, 20 – 21, 27 – 28, 46, 64, 88, 103, 108, 121 – 23, 176 – 77, 179, 186 – 87, 197 aesthetic dimension, 66 aesthetic fundamentalism, 66 Afghanistan, 139, 181 Africa, 81 Aglietta, Michel, 26 Akbar, 91 Albert, Michel, 28 Algeria, 38 America (s), 6, 37 – 38, 81 – 82, 86, 98, 181, 187 – 90; American revolution, 92 – 93, 173, 191; Latin America, 37, 181; North America, 38, 190 Anthropocene, 64, 100 antinomies, 7 anti-Semitism, 74 Antlӧv, Hans, 159 App, Urs, 82 arenas, 9 – 10, 189 Arendt, Hannah, 38, 60 – 61, 131 art, 47, 62, 66 – 68, 94, 154 articulation (s), 9 – 10, 14, 16 – 17, 20, 47, 52, 55, 59, 68, 71, 76, 89, 99, 149 – 50, 174

Asia, 22, 77, 82, 87 – 88, 90, 94, 101 – 4, 141 – 43, 153, 166, 177 – 78, 180, 187, 189, 198; East Asia, 22, 77, 87, 94, 98, 101 – 4, 141 – 43, 153, 166, 178, 180, 189 Atlantic, 30, 34, 37, 81 – 82, 189 autocracy, 37, 115, 132 – 33, 148 autonomy, 10 – 12, 14, 22, 25 – 26, 29 – 30, 35 – 36, 39 – 41, 44, 46 – 47, 49 – 50, 55, 62 – 66, 70 – 73, 81, 83, 85, 89, 92 – 94, 100, 104 – 5, 108, 111 – 12, 126 – 30, 137, 154, 184 – 87 Axial Age, 144, 153 Baberowski, Jӧrg, 134 Baczko, Bronislaw, 137 Baechler, Jean, 96 – 97, 117 Barbaras, Renaud, 68 Barfield, Thomas, 151 Bauman, Zygmunt, 114, 116 Bayly, C.A., 33 – 34, 90 – 91, 190 – 92 Beck, Ulrich, 78 Beria, Lavrenty Petrovich, 138 Bernstein, Eduard, 108 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 26 Blumenberg, Hans, 48, 53, 62 – 64, 70 – 71, 75, 83, 105, 114 – 15, 144 211

212

Index

Bolshevism, 4, 112, 118, 120, 125, 129, 132 – 33, 139 – 40, 157 – 58; market Bolshevism, 140 Boltanski, Luc, 22 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1 Boucheron, Patrick, 80 Brague, Rémi, 9 Breuer, Stefan, 32, 66 Britain, 37, 84; British Empire, 37 – 38, 190, 193 Bronze Age, 144 Broszat, Martin, 114 Buddhism, 151 – 52, 155 Bukharin, Nikolai, 121 Burckhardt, Jacob, 66 bureaucracy, 29, 64, 88, 151, 155, 165 Byzantine legacy/traditions, 90, 101 Cabestan, Jean-Pierre, 179 Cambodia, 93 Cambridge World History, 96 Capital, 107 – 8 capitalism, 10, 15, 17 – 30, 40, 44 – 46, 57, 59, 64 – 65, 72, 82, 86, 88, 92, 102, 106 – 10, 121, 123 – 24, 126, 143, 164, 168 – 71, 175, 178 – 79, 185 – 86, 188, 196; cultures of, 26 – 27; modern, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 40, 45, 82, 188; spirit of, 21 – 22, 27, 46, 86; varieties of, 25, 27 capitalist revolution, 45 – 46 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 10 – 11, 16, 31, 40 – 41, 49, 56 – 57, 60, 66, 113 – 14, 125, 166 Central Europe, 74, 77, 81, 119 certainty, 49, 64, 110, 137 charisma, 62, 72, 112 – 13 Chen, Duxiu, 157 Chevrier, Yves, 172, 174 – 76 Chiapello, Eve, 22 China, 2 – 4, 17, 28, 39, 82, 86, 88 – 89, 92, 94, 98 – 99, 101 – 3, 131, 139, 141 – 55, 157, 159 – 62, 164, 166 – 67, 169 – 81, 183 – 84, 189, 191, 196, 198; Chinese civilization, 77,

144 – 45, 150 – 51, 170, 178; Chinese Communism, 3, 99, 104, 118, 141, 147 – 48, 158, 161, 182; Chinese democracy, 172, 176; Chinese empire, 3, 38, 142, 160, 183; Chinese modernity, 7, 79, 147, 151 – 52; Chinese revolution, 104, 160 – 61, 168, 173 Christianity, 43, 53, 69, 71, 101, 103, 105, 115, 132, 152, 156; Orthodox Christianity, 101, 115, 132; Western Christendom, 44, 80, 82, 84, 156 citizen, 12, 41, 61 civilization, 2 – 12, 17, 48 – 53, 58, 70, 75 – 77, 80, 82, 86, 88, 90, 97, 100, 109, 112 – 14, 122, 126, 132, 136, 144 – 45, 148, 150 – 51, 153, 159, 170, 178, 184, 186, 188, 193 – 94, 196, 198 – 99; civilizational dimension, 9, 187; civilizational nation, 159; civilizational pattern, 2, 7, 10, 12, 52, 88, 196; civilization of modernity, 3, 77 class, 4, 12 – 13, 32, 62, 69, 74, 108 – 11, 121, 124, 127 – 28, 135, 137, 161, 180, 187, 192; class absolutism, 110, 127 classical sociology, 8, 72 – 73, 109, 186 Cold War, 97 – 98, 130, 139, 143, 182 collective action, 22, 42, 49, 165 collectivization of agriculture, 121, 135, 146 colonialism, 38, 81, 94, 102, 143, 171 command economy, 121, 157, 182 commercial capitalism, 25 communication, 58, 134, 165, 194 – 95, 197 Communism, 2 – 4, 77, 93, 97 – 100, 103 – 4, 117 – 20, 125 – 27, 141, 147 – 48, 157 – 58, 161, 168, 178, 180 – 84, 191, 196; Communist International, 111, 182; Communist Manifesto, 72, 106, 192; reform Communism, 125 – 26, 168, 184 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 71



Index 213

Confucianism, 144 – 45, 150, 155 – 56, 163, 175, 177; Confucian civilization, 77; Neo-Confucianism, 150 Conrad, Sebastian, 86 constitutionalist thought, 172 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 49; Copernican revolution, 83 Courtois, Stéphane, 114 Crimean war, 101, 132 culture, 6, 8, 10, 16, 20, 22, 26 – 28, 38, 43, 47, 51, 54 – 55, 58, 62, 65 – 66, 68, 75, 80, 82, 86 – 87, 89, 91, 102 – 3, 113, 124, 141, 145, 148 – 50, 151 – 52, 154 – 56, 160, 175, 188, 190; cultural memory, 35, 65, 152, 165, 173, 175, 191; cultural orientations, 7, 9, 11, 17, 56, 71, 126, 144, 149, 184, 188; Cultural Revolution, 142, 145 – 46, 162, 164 – 68, 173; cultural sphere, 2, 8, 14 – 15, 17, 27, 31, 47, 55, 57, 62, 66, 94, 123 – 24, 127, 185, 188; cultural worlds, 3, 7, 48, 51, 54, 58 – 59, 75, 86, 113, 150, 152, 154, 169, 199 Daoism, 150, 155 Darwin, Charles, 49 Darwin, John, 38 Decembrist revolt, 132 democracy, 10, 12 – 13, 22, 29, 40 – 46, 73, 92, 122, 129, 169, 172 – 73, 176, 179, 191, 196; and autonomy, 10, 40 – 41, 44, 129; democratic revolution, 37, 71, 93, 111, 192; liberal, 176; as a mixed regime, 41; structuring principles of, 41 Deng, Xiaoping, 167 – 68, 177 Descartes, René, 53, 64, 109 – 10, 116 Deutschmann, Christoph, 20, 46 differentiation, 2, 17, 30, 35, 41, 52, 58, 71, 79, 130, 133 – 34, 194 – 95 Dumont, Louis, 11 – 12, 17, 47 Durkheim, Emile, 9, 15, 42, 49, 58, 72 – 73, 109, 113, 195; Durkheimian school, 8, 186

economic power, 17, 46, 192 economic sphere, 21, 23 – 24, 26 – 27, 31, 40, 44, 57, 65, 105, 122, 183, 185 economics of conventions, 27 Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, 6 – 7, 9 – 10, 49, 61, 77, 82, 87, 153 – 55, 184 – 85, 187 – 88, 190 Elias, Norbert, 16, 29 – 30, 32, 39, 58, 73 – 74, 84, 134, 148 – 49 elite (s), 31, 37, 89, 101, 111, 127 – 28, 131 – 32, 149, 154, 160, 174 – 75 Elvin, Mark, 177 – 79 empire (s), 3 – 4, 29, 36 – 39, 60, 80 – 82, 89 – 91, 98 – 99, 101 – 104, 109, 117, 122, 129, 132 – 33, 140, 142, 146, 151, 155 – 56, 160 – 61, 164, 174 – 76, 182 – 83, 188 – 91, 193 – 94, 196 – 98; imperialism, 109; transoceanic empires, 37 – 38, 81 Engels, Friedrich, 65, 107 – 8, 121 Engelstein, Laura, 135 Enlightenment, 33, 39, 53 – 54, 65, 71, 84 – 87, 91 – 92, 109, 152, 177, 186; moderate, 85; radical, 65, 85, 177 entrepreneur, 59, 170 entropy, 48 epiphany, 67 – 68; epiphanic art, 67 – 68 equality, 11 – 13, 71 Ethiopian revolution, 181 Eurasia, 88, 98, 151; Inner Eurasia, 151 Eurocentrism, 87, 190, 192 Europe, 4, 32, 34, 37 – 38, 55, 74, 77, 81 – 82, 86 – 91, 93 – 94, 97 – 100, 103, 114, 119, 132, 141, 143, 148 – 49, 152, 156, 160, 187 – 89, 192, 196; European expansion, 6, 18, 57, 63, 81 – 82, 94, 190; European hegemony, 94, 176; European Union, 5; Western Europe, 32 Fairbank, John, 98, 173 Fascism, 100, 158 Ferguson, Adam, 71 Ferretti, Maria, 133 figurations, 16

214

Index

financial capital, 26 – 27; financial crisis, 26 – 28, 45, 92; financialization of capitalism, 26, 196 Finland, 36 Fitzgerald, John, 159 five year plan, 136 Foucault, Michel, 39 France, 28, 38 – 39, 44, 82 – 83, 141, 191; French revolution, 93, 173, 191 freedom, 29, 39, 50 – 52, 54, 70, 75, 104. See also liberty Gao, Bai, 161 Gao, Hua, 162 – 63 Garver, John, 157 Gauchet, Marcel, 17, 24 – 25, 31, 41 – 46, 62, 71 – 73, 128 – 29, 172, 176 Gellner, Ernest, 14, 49 geopolitics, 18, 29, 84, 170, 193 George School, 66 German idealism, 52, 104 Germany, 28, 34 – 35, 38, 43, 74, 84, 113 – 14, 120 – 21, 131, 174, 182, 197; Nazi Germany, 43, 114, 131, 182; Weimar Germany, 74 Gernet, Jacques, 152 Giddens, Anthony, 14, 16 Glinski, Dmitri, 140 globalization, 4, 26, 43, 143, 169, 183 – 85, 189 – 91, 193 – 94, 196, 198; globalizing processes, 4, 8, 94, 184, 188, 195, 197; global modernity, 2, 4, 185 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 125 – 26, 139 – 40, 171 Graziosi, Andrea, 135 Great Leap Forward, 146, 164, 166 great purge, 121, 134, 136 – 37, 146 Greek polis, 61 Greenfeld, Liah, 27 guerrilla warfare, 161 Habermas, Jürgen, 56, 58, 62, 195 Habsburg Empire, 38 – 39 Han dynasty, 144, 150, 155 Harbsmeier, Christoph, 144 Hartog, François, 41

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 42, 49, 52 – 54, 71, 104 – 5, 153 Heidegger, Martin, 49 Heilmann, Sebastian, 161 Heller, Agnes, 76 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 52, 67 Hitler, Adolf, 74, 114, 135, 193, 198 Hobsbawm, Eric, 96 – 97, 175, 192 Hodgson, Marshall, 88, 90 – 91 homo economicus, 59 Hopkins, A.G., 24 human rights, 7, 12, 25, 41 Huntington, Samuel, 7 Husserl, Edmund, 49 Ibn Khaldun, Abderrahman, 89 ideology, 16, 35, 45, 47, 51, 74, 99, 108, 113, 115 – 16, 118, 123, 125, 127, 135, 156, 159, 165, 171, 176 – 77, 181, 187 – 88; ideological power, 17, 20, 130, 156 imaginary signification (s), 10 – 11, 16, 21, 30, 40, 56 – 57, 60, 62, 66, 76, 84, 94, 100, 111, 114, 130, 137, 144, 184, 191, 194 imagination, 10, 16, 21, 51 – 52, 55 – 56, 63, 68, 75 – 76, 93, 146; creative, 10, 52 individualism, 11, 48, 50 India, 4, 17, 36, 38, 81, 174, 177, 190 – 91 Indian Ocean, 81, 189 industrialization, 18 – 19, 23 – 24, 88, 121, 123, 125, 135, 164, 168, 183, 194; industrial revolution (s), 18, 24, 37, 44 – 46, 71, 85 – 86, 93, 109, 189, 192, 197; industrial society, 22, 69, 72, 165 institution (s), 7, 10 – 11, 15 – 16, 18, 20, 26 – 27, 33, 39, 42, 46, 54 – 55, 59 – 60, 66, 102, 106, 109, 113 – 14, 119, 128 – 29, 131, 133, 134 – 36, 138, 141, 143 – 46, 150, 155 – 57, 162 – 63, 170, 173, 178; institutional spheres, 11, 30, 32 intercivilizational encounter (s), 3, 86, 102, 150 – 52



Index 215

Iran, 93 Islam, 81, 91, 190; Islamic radicalism, 61; Islamic revolution, 93; Islamic world, 4, 81 – 82, 87, 89 – 91, 181; Shi’ism, 90; Sunni Islam, 91 Israel, Jonathan, 52, 85 – 86 Italy, 34 – 35, 181, 197; Italian city republics, 32 Jacobinism, 61, 85, 191 Jansen, Marius, 141 Japan, 27 – 28, 36, 79, 81 – 82, 89, 94, 101, 103 – 4, 141 – 43, 146, 151 – 53, 157 – 58, 160 – 61, 169, 174, 178, 180, 182, 189, 197; Japanese civilization, 77; Japanese empire, 98 – 99, 104, 142; Japanese modernity, 77, 79; Japanese nationalism, 89, 159 Jesuits, 152 Kang, Sheng, 162 Kant, Immanuel, 52, 56, 104 Kautsky, Karl, 110 Keene, Donald, 103 Keynes, John Maynard, 26 Khlevnyuk, Oleg, 135 Khmer Rouge, 93 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich, 138, 167 knowledge, 2, 11, 18, 44 – 45, 48 – 51, 54, 56, 62 – 65, 70 – 71, 73, 75 – 76, 82, 86, 100, 103, 105 – 7, 110, 116, 130, 133 – 34, 163, 186 – 87, 189 Knӧbl, Wolfgang, 194 – 95 kokugaku, 36, 142 Korea, 88, 141 – 42, 153, 181 Koselleck, Reinhart, 41, 71 Krejčí, Jaroslav, 12 Kroeber, Alfred, 114 Kronstadt rebellion, 121 Kumar, Krishan, 37 Lacan, Jacques, 49 Lagerwey, John, 155 – 56 Lefort, Claude, 31, 128 – 30, 136 legitimation, 16, 37, 76, 111, 113, 182

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 4, 23, 108 – 16, 118 – 22, 124, 127 – 28, 133, 135, 138, 165, 168 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 86, 190 liberalism, 43 – 44, 50, 71, 163, 176 liberty, 11, 72. See also freedom life orders, 14, 21 Lin, Biao, 165 Loewenstein, Bedřich, 74 Lӧwith, Karl, 81 Luhmann, Niklas, 194 – 95 Lukács, Georg, 115 Luxemburg, Rosa, 65 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 30 Malia, Martin, 117 mandate of heaven, 154 – 55 Mann, Michael, 25, 39, 58, 127 Mao, Zedong, 104, 146 – 48, 155 – 56, 158, 160, 162 – 68, 173; Mao Zedong thought, 160, 162, 165 market, 12, 19 – 20, 22 – 23, 25 – 26, 28, 32, 46, 121, 140, 165, 169, 172, 183, 196 Márkus, Gyӧrgy, 47, 55, 58, 62 Martinez-Gros, Gabriel, 89 – 90 Maruyama, Masao, 159 – 60 Marx, Karl, 12, 15, 17 – 22, 25 – 26, 39, 47, 50, 53 – 54, 57, 60, 65, 70, 72 – 73, 104 – 10, 115 – 16, 121, 124, 153, 165, 185 – 87 Marxism, 21, 45, 51, 58 – 59, 65, 76, 102, 104, 106 – 7, 109 – 10, 114 – 16, 119, 124, 127 – 28, 133, 137, 156, 160, 162 – 63, 165, 170, 176; Marxism-Leninism, 45, 51, 76, 115 – 16, 124, 127, 133, 137, 156, 162, 165; Soviet Marxism, 104, 163 Mauss, Marcel, 9 May Fourth Movement, 142, 157 meaning, 8 – 11, 14 – 17, 29 – 30, 34, 39, 41, 45, 47 – 52, 55 – 59, 61 – 62, 64 – 70, 74 – 75, 84, 86 – 87, 92, 94, 97, 99, 104 – 5, 111, 113, 115 – 16, 120, 122, 126 – 27, 134, 136 – 38, 144,

216

Index

156 – 57, 176, 186 – 87, 190 – 91, 195, 198 Meiji revolution-restoration, 142, 161, 175 Meissner, Werner, 163 Mensheviks, 133 meritocracy, 88 Mesopotamia, 190 Metzger, Thomas, 154 Middle Ages, 80 – 81, 96 Middle East, 139 Middle millennium, 96 Milanovic, Branko, 28, 183 mimetic rivalry, 64, 70, 133, 158, 163 Ming dynasty, 147, 151 – 52, 172, 189 Mises, Ludwig von, 29 mobilization, 13, 23, 39, 60, 74, 81, 107, 118 – 19, 121, 124, 132 – 33, 136, 144, 146, 149, 156, 159, 161, 164 – 65, 176, 179, 197 modernity, 1 – 4, 6 – 8, 10 – 11, 14, 17, 21, 23, 29, 32 – 34, 36 – 40, 44, 47 – 56, 58, 64 – 66, 69 – 70, 72, 74 – 75, 77 – 84, 86 – 89, 91 – 97, 99 – 100, 102, 106 – 7, 114, 116 – 18, 122 – 27, 130 – 31, 133 – 34, 140, 145, 147, 151 – 52, 157, 165, 168, 175, 177, 179, 183 – 85, 188, 190, 196, 199; alternative modernity, 54, 65, 69, 77 – 78, 99, 118, 122, 125 – 26, 133, 145, 168, 185, 198; cultural modernity, 47, 49, 53, 55, 66, 69; early modernity, 4, 33, 37, 80 – 84, 86, 88 – 89, 92; entangled modernities, 6; Euro-Atlantic modernity, 29; liberal modernity, 72, 79; multiple modernities, 2, 4, 6 – 8, 18, 25, 54 – 55, 77, 99, 116 – 17, 122, 145, 171, 180, 188, 198; organized modernity, 79 – 80; revolutionary modernity, 92, 95; second modernity, 78; stages of modernity, 78; varieties of modernity, 2, 6. See also modernization modernism, 1, 67; modernist art, 67 modernization, 6, 38 – 39, 54 – 55, 79, 88, 99, 102, 124, 134 – 35, 142, 177 – 78

Mokyr, Joel, 65, 85 – 86 money, 15, 19 – 21, 25 – 26, 59 – 60 Mongols, 90, 101, 132, 142, 147, 151, 153 Monotheism, 91 Moscow, 133, 162 Moyn, Daniel, 12 Mughal empire, 89, 91, 189 – 91 Mühlhahn, Klaus, 174 Napoleon, 101, 108, 132, 191 Napoleonic Wars, 35, 37, 92, 192 – 93 nation, 9, 34 – 36, 38, 41, 77, 92, 109, 127, 129, 159 – 60, 174 – 75, 191, 194 – 96, 198; national absolutism, 127; national identity, 13, 34 – 36, 159; nationalism, 13, 22, 27, 34 – 35, 89, 91, 127, 159 – 61, 170, 174, 181; national movements, 34 – 36; nation formation, 34 – 36, 127, 159 – 60, 194; nation state, 9, 34 – 36, 38, 41 – 43, 77, 109, 160, 174 – 75, 195 – 96, 198 Nelson, Benjamin, 88, 152 neoliberalism, 45, 140, 196 Nicoletti, Michele, 60 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52, 73 Nordic region, 77 Occidental rationalism, 32, 55 Opium War, 98, 103, 153 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 98, 192 – 93 Ottoman Empire, 38, 89 – 90, 189 Pacific, 104, 189 paradigm of production, 59, 105 paradigm of war, 74 Paris Commune, 106 Parsons, Talcott, 8, 14, 58, 195 party-state, 120 – 22, 130, 135, 137 – 39, 143, 146 – 47, 157, 161 – 62, 164 – 66, 169 – 72, 177, 179, 181 Patočka, Jan, 49, 51, 53 – 56, 68, 70, 75 – 76 periodization, 18, 24, 78 – 80, 83 – 84, 87, 92, 94 – 97, 99 Peter I, 132; Petrine revolution, 132 phenomenology, 49, 59, 68



Index 217

Plaggenborg, Stefan, 2, 116, 133 – 35, 138 Platt, Stephen, 153 Poggi, Gianfranco, 1 Polanyi, Karl, 19 – 20, 23 the political, 12 – 13, 17, 20 – 23, 26, 29 – 34, 38, 40 – 46, 53 – 54, 58, 60 – 62, 65, 83, 85, 89, 93 – 94, 108, 122 – 24, 127, 129, 140, 144 – 45, 151, 153 – 54, 157, 169, 171, 175 – 77, 179, 182, 197 political community, 12, 30, 32, 41 – 42, 46, 62, 129, 154 political man, 60, 62 political revolution (s), 44, 92 – 94, 176 political sphere, 20, 29 – 31, 33, 40 – 41, 43, 46, 57 – 58, 60 – 61, 83, 93 – 94, 123, 140, 153, 171, 177 Popper, Karl, 50 Portugal, 34, 37 power, 3 – 4, 9 – 11, 14 – 21, 24, 28 – 34, 36 – 39, 41 – 42, 45 – 46, 48 – 49, 54, 58, 60 – 62, 72, 74, 81 – 85, 88 – 90, 92 – 94, 98 – 104, 111 – 13, 115, 118 – 25, 127 – 37, 139, 142 – 47, 149 – 52, 154 – 62, 164 – 69, 171 – 72, 174 – 77, 179 – 87, 189 – 90, 192 – 93, 195, 197 – 98; economic power, 17, 46, 192; ideological power, 17, 20, 130, 156; political power, 15, 17, 46, 84, 122, 129, 155, 157, 171 – 72; religious power, 17 Prague Spring, 126 progress, 3, 13, 18, 20 – 21, 24 – 25, 28, 38 – 39, 41 – 44, 46, 48 – 50, 60 – 61, 63 – 64, 69 – 75, 80, 83, 86, 97, 102, 105, 119, 123, 127 – 28, 134, 136 – 38, 147, 153, 159, 162, 166, 184 – 87, 190, 194, 197 psychoanalytic moment, 49 Qing dynasty, 153, 174 rationalization, 18, 20, 24, 33, 50 Read, Christopher, 118 reason, 2, 4, 6, 19, 24, 26, 28, 31 – 32, 34, 41, 44 – 46, 51 – 52, 54 – 56, 60, 62, 71, 75, 80, 82, 84, 88, 92, 99, 105,

109, 113, 123, 127, 130, 136, 138, 147 – 48, 152, 157, 160, 163, 167, 176, 178 – 80, 183, 186 – 87, 195, 197 Reddaway, Peter, 140 Reformation, 7, 33, 82 – 83, 91, 190; Catholic reformation, 82 – 83, 91; Protestant reformation, 82 – 83, 91 regime of historicity, 41 region (s), 4, 35, 44, 77, 79, 84, 87 – 90, 98, 101 – 3, 132, 139, 141 – 43, 150, 153, 179, 189, 192 – 93, 198 regulation, 9, 19, 27, 73, 196 relativism, 55 – 56 religion, 17 – 18, 20, 22, 40, 42, 44 – 45, 47, 49, 62, 66, 73, 82, 87, 94, 115 – 16, 123, 137, 150, 153, 155 – 56, 159, 181; religio-political nexus, 34, 44, 90 – 91; religious revolution, 44 Renaissance, 46, 66 reoccupation (Umbesetzung), 53, 64 revolution (s), 2 – 3, 19, 24, 29, 33, 44 – 46, 62, 74, 78, 83, 85 – 86, 92 – 94, 98, 104, 107 – 12, 114 – 15, 118 – 21, 123, 125, 129, 132 – 33, 135, 137, 139, 142, 145 – 46, 160 – 62, 164 – 69, 173 – 75, 180 – 82, 189, 191 – 94, 197; professional revolutionary, 61, 111; revolutionary tradition, 51, 65, 114 – 15, 132 – 33, 139, 167; revolution of 1905, 115, 133 Rexroth, Frank, 63, 83 Ringen, Stein, 179 Riskin, Carl, 165 Roman Empire, 80, 156 Romanticism, 52 – 54, 67 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 12 rule of law, 41 Russia, 3 – 4, 98, 100 – 102, 109 – 10, 114, 116, 119 – 20, 129, 132, 141, 144, 147 – 48, 157, 159, 161, 168, 173, 180, 196 – 97; Kiev Rus, 100; Russian Empire, 38, 79, 101, 117, 122, 132, 164, 197; Russian revolution, 92 – 93, 107 – 8, 110, 173 the sacred, 66, 144 Safavid empire, 89, 189, 191

218

Index

Santayana, George, 4 Sarkisyanz, Emanuel, 115 Sassoon, Donald, 198 Schmitt, Carl, 31 – 32, 60 – 61, 116, 129, 161, 168 Schulze, Reinhard, 91 Schumpeter, Joseph, 26, 59, 186 Schwartz, Benjamin, 144, 153 – 55, 176 science, 9, 19, 43 – 45, 47 – 50, 58, 61 – 65, 71, 73, 86, 110, 116, 124, 124, 128, 165, 177, 187; scientific inquiry, 45, 62, 64; scientific revolution, 33, 44, 62, 83, 85 – 86, 93; scientific world-view, 45, 51, 76, 110 Scott, James, 33 secularization, 40, 70 self-affirmation (Selbstbehauptung), 62 Seven Years’ War, 37, 191 Simmel, Georg, 15, 109 Simms, Brendan, 74 Sinification of Marxism, 162 – 63, 170 Sino-Japanese relations, 142, 178 Sino-Soviet conflict, 152, 160, 166, 182 – 83 Skidelsky, Robert, 26 Skocpol, Theda, 39 slave trade, 81, 189 Slavík, Jan, 165 social imaginary/imaginaries, 1, 10 – 11, 17, 46, 56, 71, 84, 111 – 12, 123, 132, 163, 187, 194 social labour, division of, 195 social life, division of, 1 socialism, 23, 53, 65, 102, 105, 108, 120 – 23, 126, 133, 138, 163, 170; with Chinese characteristics, 163, 170; in one country, 102, 121 – 22, 133, 138; socialist movements, 22, 197; socialist tradition, 22, 43 society, 8 – 12, 16, 21 – 23, 42 – 43, 50, 53, 56 – 58, 69, 71 – 73, 76, 78, 80, 91, 101, 106, 111, 119 – 20, 122, 130 – 31, 133 – 35, 137 – 39, 146, 151, 155, 162, 165, 167 – 68, 172, 176, 149, 185, 189, 191, 194 – 99 socio-cultural spheres, division of, 122

Sombart, Werner, 18, 22, 86 Sorel, Georges, 45 Southeastern Europe, 81 South Yemen, 181 sovereignty, 34, 46, 64, 105, 129, 152, 161, 191 Soviet model, 3, 28, 45, 53, 104, 113 – 14, 116 – 17, 122 – 23, 126 – 27, 129 – 30, 134 – 38, 140 – 41, 144 – 45, 148, 156 – 57, 162 – 63, 169 – 71, 176, 183, 186, 198 Spain, 82 – 83; Spanish Empire, 37 – 38, 189, 193 Spencer, Herbert, 72 Stalin, Joseph, 121 – 23, 125, 134 – 38, 140, 146, 158, 163 – 64, 167; Stalinism, 45, 126, 137, 182; Stalinist phase, 134 state, 3, 9, 12, 15 – 17, 19, 22 – 24, 26 – 43, 46, 51, 55, 63, 66, 70 – 71, 77, 79, 81 – 85, 88 – 94, 98, 101, 103 – 104, 107, 109, 113, 119, 123, 125 – 26, 129, 132 – 34, 137, 141, 143 – 44, 148 – 62, 165, 168 – 72, 174 – 76, 178 – 83, 188 – 89, 191 – 98; monarchic states, 32, 156; state building, 30, 37, 83 – 84, 88, 149, 161 – 62, 176, 179, 189; statecraft, 33, 89 – 90, 153; state formation, 26, 29 – 30, 33 – 34, 40, 83 – 84, 89 – 92, 101, 107, 134, 148 – 49, 151, 153, 161 – 62, 188, 191, 194; state strategies, 33, 36 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 107 Steiner, Franz Baermann, 109 – 10, 114, 116 Stichweh, Rudolf, 194 – 95 Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, 30 St. Petersburg, 96, 100, 107 Straumann, Tobias, 197 stratocracy, 125, 166 structure, 1, 15 – 16, 19 – 20, 25 – 27, 30, 32 – 33, 36 – 37, 40, 47, 51, 55, 61, 64, 72, 78, 91, 104, 114, 118, 121, 124, 126, 130, 136, 145, 149, 151, 169, 170 – 71, 185, 189



Index 219

subjectivity, 11, 19, 49 – 51, 59, 63; expressivist subject, 51; self-defining subject, 51 Sui dynasty, 150 – 51 supercivilization, 50, 54, 75; moderate, 50, 75 ; radical, 51, 75 Swedberg, Richard, 19, 22 Szamuely, Tibor, 133 system, 4, 8 – 9, 27, 33, 36, 44, 57 – 58, 78, 89, 105, 107, 117, 125, 130, 151, 175, 179, 184 – 89, 194 – 95 T’ang dynasty, 151 Taylor, Charles, 49, 51 – 57, 66 – 68, 74, 112 technological progress, 18, 20, 25, 60, 72, 197 Thailand, 190 theology, 70 – 71 theoretical curiosity, 63 Third World, 58 – 59, 139 Tilly, Charles, 33, 148 Timur, 90 Tito, Josip Broz, 163 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 22 Tӧnnesson, Stein, 159 Tooze, Adam, 27 totalitarianism, 45, 60 – 61, 75 – 76, 100, 114, 128 – 31, 133, 140; totalitarian projects, 38, 43, 129; totalitarian regimes, 60, 79, 113, 128 – 31, 179, 198 Touraine, Alain, 69 Toynbee, Arnold, 196 tradition, 7, 22, 30, 38 – 39, 42 – 43, 46, 49 – 51, 53 – 54, 57 – 58, 63 – 65, 70 – 72, 76, 88, 90 – 92, 94, 96, 107, 113 – 16, 131 – 33, 139, 142 – 45, 147 – 48, 150 – 51, 153 – 54, 157, 160, 163, 167, 170 – 79, 181, 186, 194 – 95; invention of, 145, 175 transcendence, 68 tributary system, 151 trinitarian model/orthodoxy, 1 Trotsky, Lev, 21, 65, 119, 127, 165 Tsui, Brian, 173

Tu Weiming, 178 Tucker, Robert, 132 twentieth century, 2, 4, 8, 22, 28 – 29, 36, 40, 42 – 43, 49 – 50, 57 – 59, 61 – 62, 66, 69, 77, 79, 92, 94 – 100, 107, 110, 114, 117, 124, 129, 141, 143 – 44, 147, 160, 164, 172, 174, 176 – 77, 183, 185 – 86, 190 – 91, 194 – 95; short, 69, 95 – 97, 99, 117, 124, 141 United States, 4, 28, 74, 98, 143, 159, 171, 178, 180, 182, 197 – 98 Vandermeersch, Léon, 77 vanguardism, 111, 115, 128 Vietnam, 88 – 89, 141, 181 violence, 15, 32, 38 – 39, 61, 73, 84, 97, 99, 117, 124, 132 – 36, 146, 149, 155, 180, 182, 197 – 98 Wagner, Peter, 14, 72, 79 Wahhabis, 91 Walder, Andrew, 166 – 67 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 8, 185 – 88 Warring States, 26, 144 wealth, 2, 14 – 17, 19 – 21, 28, 46, 57, 59, 65, 90, 176 – 77, 179; absolute wealth, 20 – 21, 59; abstract wealth, 46, 57 Weber, Max, 14, 16 – 21, 25, 29, 32, 40, 43, 48, 50, 55, 57, 59, 62, 64, 72 – 73, 82, 85 – 86, 109, 112 – 13, 127 – 28, 155, 199 Westernization, 2, 194 What is to be done?, 110 – 11, 133 Wickham, Chris, 63 Will, Pierre-Étienne, 145, 148, 159 Wong, R. Bin, 148 – 50 Woodside, Alexander, 88 – 89 world history, 3, 38, 96, 198 – 99 world orders, 2, 14, 92, 97 – 98, 124, 170, 183 world society, 185, 194 – 96 world system (s), 4, 8, 78, 184 – 89; world system theory, 8, 78, 185, 187 – 88

220

World War I, 17, 23 – 24, 36 – 37, 42 – 43, 61 – 62, 73 – 74, 92, 97 – 99, 101, 103, 109, 119, 124, 129, 142, 147, 160, 173, 180, 196 – 98 World War II, 93, 114, 126, 180 Xi, Jinping, 159, 167

Index

Yan, Xuetong, 145 Yan’an, 162 – 63, 165, 176 Yen, Fu, 176 Yongle emperor, 151 Zhou dynasty, 144 Zola, Emile, 44 Zolberg, Aristide, 187

About the Author

Johann P. Arnason is Emeritus Professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and an associate of the Department of Historical Sociology at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague. He has also taught at the University of Leipzig and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His research interests centre on historical sociology, with particular emphasis on the comparative analysis of civilizations. His publications include The Future that Failed: Origins and Destinies of the Soviet Model, London 1993; Social Theory and Japanese Experience: The Dual Civilization, London 1996; and Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions, Leiden and Boston 2003.

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