Cover

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Part I: Re-theorizing Modernity

1 Retrieving Modernity’s Past, Understanding Modernity’s Present

2 Changing Views of Modernity: From Convergence and Stability to Plurality and Transformations

A concept with a history

Modernity as a set of institutions and its critique

Modernity as experience and as interpretation

Neo-modernization vs. the plurality of modernity

3 Successive Modernities: Crisis, Criticism and the Idea of Progress

Increasing doubts: modernity and progress in historical perspective

Multiple modernities and the spectre of relativism

Crises, critique and transformations of modernity

Intermediate observation on history and theory

Historical sociology and social and political theory (1): critique and the generation of progress

Historical sociology and social and political theory (2): progress in historically sensitive philosophy

Inclusion and individualization in European successive modernities

Further questions (1): material progress

Further questions (2): political progress

Further questions (3): crisis without critique and progress?

4 Disentangling the Concept of Modernity: Time, Action and Problems to Be Solved

The destructuring of social theory and the rise of civilizational analysis of modernities

Continuity and commonality in the transformations of the social: from multiple modernities to societal self-understandings

The basic problématiques of human social life: towards a novel comparative sociology of trajectories of modernity

Part II: Analysing Contemporary Modernity

5 The Link Between Capitalism and Democracy Reconsidered

Why should there be a link between capitalism and democracy?

Conceptual reflections: from determinism to structured contingency

Historical reflections: forms of democracy and capitalism up to 1970

Interim conclusion: the democratic crisis of capitalism

Liberal society and citizen disaffection: capitalism and democracy after the 1970s

A constitutive tension between economic and political modernity

6 European and Non-European Trajectories of Modernity Compared

Varieties of postcolonial situations

Comparing non-European and European varieties of modernity

7 Violence and Justice in Global Modernity: Reflections on South Africa with World-Sociological Intent

The lunar landing and the Sharpeville massacre

South Africa and the ‘birth of the modern world’

The autumn of European modernity and South African exceptionalism (1948–1961)

‘Problems of legitimacy’ and ‘governability crisis’ in different settings (1961–1978)

The democratic crisis of apartheid and capitalism (1978–1989/94)

Democracy and society in South Africa after apartheid (1994–present)

Current European modernity from a South African point of view

Conclusion

8 Towards a World Sociology of Modernity

Space (1): multiple modernities and our relation to the axial age

Time (1): from the ancients to the moderns

Space (2): 1800 – European modernity or modern world-making?

Time (2): 1880s–1960s – a global organized modernity

Time (3): 1970s–the present – globalization as the destructuring of organized modernity

Space (3): the global present – rethinking freedom, equality and solidarity

References

Index

Copyright © Peter Wagner 2012

The right of Peter Wagner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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To Asteris Stefan

Title page

Preface

Fifty years ago, the globe was neatly divided into three areas: the First World of liberal–democratic industrial capitalism, the Second World of Soviet-style socialism, and the Third World of so-called developing countries. Within the First World, there was a clear view about how to understand the present of the time. The First World only was composed of ‘modern societies’, which were superior to all others because they had institutionalized freedom and had developed an institutional differentiation according to functional needs. In this view, the Second World societies had embarked on an erroneous path which they could only maintain at the risk of perishing in the system competition with the First World; and the societies of the Third World were in the process of following the First one in processes of ‘modernization and development’. Only First World societies, thus, were modern in the sense of being in their own time. The Second World had aimed to create its own, specific future but necessarily failed; and the Third World needed to catch up to reach the present. This was the time when our sociological thinking about ‘modern society’ and ‘modernization’ emerged as an extremely coherent attempt at understanding the present of that time.

But it is no longer our time – and arguably no longer our modernity. The world has changed considerably and much beyond the sociological imagination of anyone writing in the 1960s.

The western societies of the 1960s were ‘industrial societies’, built on the innovations of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution, with electrical engineering, chemical engineering and the combustion engine, and the possibility of a ‘post-industrial society’ just beginning to be considered. Now, we speak of knowledge societies in the wake of a Third Industrial Revolution based on electronic engineering and producing the new information and communication technologies that enhance global interconnectedness.

During the 1960s, governments believed in crisis-free national economies that were steered by Keynesian demand management techniques. Now, most of the economic policy institutions of that time have been dismantled in the wake of a new belief in market self-regulation, and the global capitalism that resulted from this change has already entered into a deep crisis, comparable only to the Great Depression of 1929, which many economists thought was the last one ever. And, across the last half-century, we have also witnessed the rise of regional economies to world competitiveness – first Japan, then Taiwan and South Korea, now China, to mention only a few – that are not based in the cultural context of Protestantism and its social ethic which many sociologists had considered a requirement.

The 1960s were the peak of the era of decolonization, witnessing the rapid dismantling of European empires, but it was expected that the new states and societies would emulate the western model and, given that they were ‘late’, would keep lagging somewhat behind. Now, we know that liberation from western dominance can also mean a fundamental challenge to the model of modernization, as in the case of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Islamism, or at least the emergence of distinct varieties of modernity, for the creation of which local problem-solving is more important than the look to the West. The new powers in the world – such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa – emerge from different historical trajectories, such as experiences of a regional version of communism, colonial domination, extreme inequality in an entrenched oligarchic setting or apartheid, and their ‘modernities’ are bound to be shaped by those experiences, and sometimes now their choices are seen as models to be emulated elsewhere.

Of the changes over the last fifty years, democratization is the one that was most predicted – modern societies were supposed to be democratic polities – but both the speed of change after a long period of persistent authoritarianism in the world (benevolently viewed by western powers, we should add) and its consequences were highly unexpected. Political scientists now speak of ‘waves of democratization’ as something self-evident, and they refer to the end of military dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s, followed by South Korea and Latin America, and then the demise of Soviet-style socialism in Eastern Europe from 1989, the end of apartheid in South Africa during the same years, and now the democratic movements in Northern Africa and the Middle East, which still have to bring democratic regimes about. Two aspects tend to be forgotten when seeing something like a natural process at work in democratization. First, the world of the 1960s appeared neat and stable largely because it was undemocratic. The United States of America feared democracy in Latin America; Europe feared democracy in the Muslim Maghreb; the ‘modern’ Kemalist government in Turkey feared Islamic and Kurdish expression in its own society; Israel feared democracy in Palestine; and these fears are far from over. When global modernity becomes truly based on collective self-determination, the world will have changed. Second, democracy in the 1960s meant collective self-determination within the well-defined boundaries of nation-states, and the assumption was that such societies could indeed determine their own destiny because they were separate and distinguishable from other societies in the world. Now we may have more democratically constituted societies, but global interdependence may mean that those collectivities have very little to indeed decide and determine.

In sum, technology, economy and politics have changed beyond recognition in the world over the past half-century. If a part of the world was seen as a ‘modern society’ then, its modernity was radically different from the modernity of our present. If other parts of the world then were seen as having to face ‘modernization’, they have interpreted this challenge often in very different ways from those expected. For these reasons, an attempt at understanding our present time cannot rely on the tools and concepts of even such a seemingly recent past as that of the 1960s. This book thus aims to provide a renewed reflection about modernity with a view to better understanding our present time.

For a long time, it was common to think that modernity originated in the West and that it opened up a new and better era in the history of humanity. This book returns to these claims but discusses them in the light of the current global nature of modernity. Modernity’s claims and expectations have become inescapable in evermore walks of life and for many more people than before. In the course of their realization and diffusion, however, these claims and expectations have also been radically transformed. Newly arising issues will need to be discussed by posing the following questions:

The reflections in this book are based on an approach to ‘modernity as experience and interpretation’ which I had tried to elaborate as a rather novel way of linking comparative–historical sociology to social and political philosophy. The questions above were in the background of my earlier writing (Wagner 2008), but they had not yet been explicitly addressed. The answers I now hope to give to them can be found in this book. The current constellation of modernity forces us to reconsider our ways of theorizing it. This will be done in the first part of the book. The second part will embark on analyses of key aspects of our present time with the help of a revised understanding of modernity, as elaborated on in the first part.

Chapter 1 discusses the global nature of modernity by way of a brief review of key ideas of modernity from the point of view of the present. The thinking about modernity has always aimed at the global and the universal. Modernity was seen as normatively and functionally superior to other forms of socio-political organization. Universal claims were made in its name, and its worldwide diffusion was expected. It is now, however, in our era of so-called globalization, of radical time–space compression, that these claims and expectations become truly inescapable. But they have to be read differently after centuries of experience of translating them into socio-political practices. Subsequently, chapter 2 elaborates systematically on the recent change in perceptions of modernity. It focuses on two key issues: rather than seeing ‘modern societies’ converge to a single institutional expression, many observers now identify a persistent plurality of modern forms of socio-political organization. Secondly, rather than seeing ‘modern societies’ as basically stable once their full institutional expression has been reached, most observers now agree that modernity has been undergoing quite radical change from at least the 1970s onwards.

The new concerns with persistent plurality and possibly profound transformations of modernity open up further questions. Chapter 3 investigates if and how we can sustain the idea of progress that has long informed the debate about modernity if modernity has more than one shape and goes on changing. Finally, chapter 4 suggests that a new understanding of modernity needs to build on the insight in the contingency of historical developments. The history of modernity is not a smooth unfolding of basic ideas and principles as they move towards concretization in historical reality. Rather, it is a struggle over the interpretation of such ideas and principles, a struggle in the course of which central problems of human social life need to be addressed and in which any solution to these problems may engender new problems to be addressed in the future.

The reasoning in the first part of this book uses historical and contemporary examples wherever possible, but it does so with a view to elaborating a novel understanding of modernity. The approach changes in the second part. From chapter 5 onwards, the focus will be on the trajectories of modernity in different parts of the world, with a view to seeing clearly how modern world-views have changed societies and how we have arrived at the current constellation of modernity. Conceptual reasoning will now be in the service of understanding historical change.

Chapter 5 explores the relationship between what arguably have been the core institutions of modernity – or imaginaries of modern institutions – over the past two centuries, namely, capitalism and democracy. It will demonstrate that, whatever ‘logic’ of capitalism and of democracy there may be, the political and economic history of those two centuries is better grasped by focusing on the articulation between the two phenomena, on the challenges that capitalism posed for democracy and those that democracy posed for capitalism. The aim of this exercise is to provide an understanding of the peculiar situation of the present in which a globally diffused capitalism seems to be aligned with unstoppable processes of ‘democratization’, but in which both political and economic institutions are highly crisis-ridden.

From the analysis of core institutions of modernity in chapter 5, our reasoning moves on to systematically explore in chapter 6 the varieties of modern self-understandings that have emerged globally. This chapter begins with the insight into the persistent plurality of modern forms, as discussed in chapter 2, and offers an approach for analysing this plurality comparatively, based on the conceptual reflections in chapter 4. While being global in outlook, the focus of this chapter will be on two ‘post-colonial’ societies, Brazil and South Africa, that have rarely been studied in terms of modernity and will provide the tools for comparing their ‘modernities’ with the European one that has traditionally been at the centre of the analysis of modernity. Chapter 7 will deepen the analysis of South Africa. The task of this case study is to show how to address a key question that emerges when we conceive of modernity in plural terms: what are the aspects that all modernities have in common and what marks the singularity of any particular modernity? With these reflections, all the tools are in hand to conclude the book by outlining the contours of a world sociology of modernity that is capable of helping us to understand our present time. This will be done in chapter 8.

This book would not have existed without the occasion that first solicited it, the Nordic Summer University in Tyrifjord, Norway, in July 2009. Therefore, I would like to express my thanks to the organizers, and in particular to Ingerid Straume, for providing the occasion on which to reflect anew about the ways in which social and political thought and research can help understanding of our present condition (an earlier and shorter version of my lectures appeared as the ‘summer talks’ of NSU). Thanks are also due to Mikael Carleheden for asking for a contribution to an issue of Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal for Social Theory on ‘successive modernities’, which has been the starting point for the reflections in chapter 3. A first version of chapter 2 was written while lecturing at the Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve in March 2010, and I would like to thank Jean de Munck for having created this occasion. The thoughts about novel ways of comparing modernities, contained in chapters 4 and 6, have appeared in an early form in an issue of the European Journal of Social Theory which was devoted to the work of Johann Arnason who has been a discussant for matters of modernity for more than ten years now. Chapter 8 originated as a contribution to a volume honouring the work of Björn Wittrock to whom the same applies for more than a quarter-century. Chapter 5 goes back to a keynote lecture given at the conference of the International Social Theory Consortium, organized at the University of Sussex in June 2010 by Gerard Delanty and Stephen Turner. Chapter 7 draws on my contribution to the fiftieth anniversary issue of Social Science Information/Information sur les sciences sociales. Parts of chapter 1 also appear in the Encyclopedia of Globalization, edited by George Ritzer (2012) and parts of chapter 2 have appeared in the Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, edited by Gerard Delanty and Stephen Turner (2011).

More thanks: work on this book, in particular on the second part, has greatly benefited from funding by the European Research Council for the project ‘Trajectories of Modernity’ (TRAMOD) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme as Advanced Grant no. 249438. The members of the research project contributed to the book through intense discussions of some of the following chapters. At Polity Press, John Thompson and Sarah Lambert received the proposal and accompanied the work on the manuscript with enthusiasm and trust. Two anonymous reviewers for Polity offered observations on imbalances and lacunae that made me revise and, I hope, improve the structure of the book.

If this book differs from my preceding one by having a wider horizon, in both the geographical and the figurative sense, this is to an inestimable extent due to Nathalie Karagiannis.

Bellaterra, 27 June 2011

Part I: Re-theorizing Modernity

1

Retrieving Modernity’s Past, Understanding Modernity’s Present

The most common – even though far from unproblematic – view about modernity holds that this term refers to a novel kind of society that emerged from a sequence of major transformations in Europe and North America, culminating in the industrial and democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Significantly, this view often entails both that these transformations catapulted Europe (or the West) to the front position in the course of world history and that the thus established western model would diffuse worldwide because of its inherent superiority. Thinking about modernity thus meant thinking about globalization, even though these terms have come into frequent use only since the 1980s and 1990s respectively.

Global – or universal – significance was claimed for European modernity from the very beginning. A key event in the formation of what we consider to be modern Europe was the so-called discovery of the Americas with their hitherto unknown populations, and this event triggered European reflections about the nature of humankind and provided a background to philosophical speculations about the ‘state of nature’, as in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1690). From René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) onwards, Enlightenment thought claimed to have established the very few, but absolutely firm, foundations on which universal knowledge could be erected, most basically freedom and reason. The American and French Revolutions were seen as having inescapably introduced humanity to liberal democracy, based on individual rights and popular sovereignty. Already in his Democracy in America of the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville considered equal universal suffrage the telos of political history. And from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) to the mid-nineteenth century, political economists claimed to have discovered in market self-regulation an absolutely superior form of economic organization. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided an image of economic globalization whose evocative power has not been surpassed.

A common basic understanding of modernity underlies this debate, which stretches over more than two centuries and addresses very different aspects of human social life. Modernity is the belief in the freedom of the human being – natural and inalienable, as many philosophers presumed – and in the human capacity to reason, combined with the intelligibility of the world, that is, its amenability to human reason. In a first step towards concreteness, this basic commitment translates into the principles of individual and collective self-determination and in the expectation of ever-increasing mastery of nature and ever more reasonable interaction between human beings. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), as well as the granting of commercial freedom, can be understood as an application of these underlying principles of modernity, as can the technical transformations captured by the term ‘industrial revolution’.

These principles were seen as universal, on the one hand, because they contained normative claims to which, one presumed, every human being would subscribe and, on the other, because they were deemed to permit the creation of functionally superior arrangements for major aspects of human social life, most importantly maybe the satisfaction of human needs in market-driven, industrial production and the rational government of collective matters through law-based and hierarchically organized administration. Furthermore, they were seen as globalizing in their application because of the interpretative and practical power of normativity and functionality.

None of these claims, however, was straightforwardly accepted. Even though the intellectual commitment to these principles was possibly widespread, considerable doubts existed about the possibility or probability of translating these principles into institutional arrangements without considerable modifications and losses. Among the early critical reflections, only two shall be mentioned. Immanuel Kant was committed to the idea of enlightened and accountable government and expected the republican principle (though not the democratic one) to flourish worldwide. However, he did not believe in what might have been considered the crowning of this process, the creation of a world republic, but argued for the normative superiority of a global federation of republics instead (On Perpetual Peace, 1795). Karl Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’ (thus the subtitle of Capital, 1867), in turn, undermined the belief that the transformation of the human being into a market agent was based on the principles of liberty and equality, as political economy had suggested. Rather, this novel social formation, which he referred to as bourgeois society, divided humankind into two classes, the owners of means of production and those who had only their labour power to sell, who stood in an increasingly antagonistic relation to each other.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the trajectory of European (or western) societies had separated so considerably from those of other parts of the world that the particularity of ‘Occidental rationalism’, as Max Weber put it – not without hesitation – in the introduction to his comparative sociology of world religions (1920, now mostly read as the preface to The Protestant Ethic), had become a key topic of historico-sociological investigation (for a recent analysis, see Pomeranz 2000). The ambiguity of Weber’s terminological choice has stayed with the debate on modernity ever since. Weber seemed to claim both that rationalization had western origins and even preconditions in western cosmology and that it had ‘universal significance’, adding to the latter the much-overlooked parenthesis ‘as we [presumably the westerners] are inclined to think’. Thus, it permitted both the promoters of later modernization theory and those more recent authors and advocates of the theorem of multiple modernities to refer to Weber as the main source of inspiration. The former, headed by Talcott Parsons, suggested that the western ‘breakthrough’ to modernity would (need to) be emulated by elites in other societies because of its normative and functional superiority, and that therefore western modernity would diffuse globally in processes of ‘modernization and development’, as the sociological jargon of the 1960s had it. The latter, inspired by the late Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, were not denying the ‘universal significance’ of western social transformations since the 1700s, but held that the encounter of other civilizations with western modernity did not lead to the mere diffusion of the western model but rather to the proliferation of varieties of modernity generated by the encounter of different ‘cultural programmes’, which had consolidated much earlier, with western ideas and practices.

The opposition between neo-modernization theory and the multiple modernities theorem, which marks current sociological debate on modernity, tends to sideline the third aspect of Weber’s view of ‘Occidental rationalism’, namely a profound scepticism as to the fate of modernity. From this angle, Weber’s reflections stand mid-stream in the tradition of a profound critique of modernity that was elaborated between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, with Karl Marx marking the beginning and Theodor W. Adorno the end, at least in its strong form, of this approach. Marx accepted the modern commitment to freedom and reason, as his expectation of a future ‘free association of free human beings’ demonstrates, but emphasized the impossibility of realizing it under conditions of class domination. Market liberty in bourgeois society would lead to alienation and commodification, human beings relating to each other as things. Similarly, Weber saw the Protestant Reformation as an increase of individual autonomy, eliminating the institutional mediation of the church between the believer and God (The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, 1904/5 and 1920). Once the social ethic associated with Protestantism, which emphasizes professional commitment and success, had contributed to bringing about the institutions of modern capitalism, however, a rationalized conduct of life would be imposed on the inhabitants of the ‘dwellings made of steel’ (the rendering of Weber’s stählernes Gehäuse as ‘iron cage’ is rather misleading) characteristic of modernity. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Dialectics of Enlightenment, 1944) provided the most extreme version of the theorem that the modern commitment to freedom and reason tends towards self-cancellation in its transformation into historically concrete social forms. They see the origins of this regression in the very philosophy of the Enlightenment that, in its insistence on the knowability of the world, transforms all qualities into mere quantities of the same and reduces the unknown to the status of a variable that is subject to the rules of mathematical equations. Such conceptualization entered into a totalizing alliance with industrial capitalism and produced, by the middle of the twentieth century, a society dominated by a culture industry in which nothing could be heard or touched that had not been heard or touched before. Novelty and creativity were equally eliminated in societies as otherwise different as the mass culture of the United States (the text was written in Los Angeles), Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Such radical critiques of modernity gradually lost their persuasive power during the second post-war period of the twentieth century. An echo of them is found in Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of ‘one-dimensional man’ and ‘one-dimensional society’ (1964), a diagnosis the reception of which, in the student revolt of the late 1960s, both demonstrated its appeal and tended to undermine its validity since ‘the cultural revolution of 1968’ arguably (re)introduced a plurality of dimensions into the contemporary world. When Zygmunt Bauman revived the analysis of modernity as the obsessive attempt to create order and eliminate ambivalence (Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989; Modernity and Ambivalence, 1991), he did so partly in historical perspective, offering a novel view on the Nazi genocide of the European Jews as an utterly modern phenomenon, and partly situated his own writings at the exit of such organized modernity towards a postmodernity that reintroduced a concern with freedom, even though possibly a transformed and reduced one compared to earlier promises.

Such a view about modernity undergoing a major transformation had indeed arisen in the late 1970s, pioneered by Jean-François Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition (1979). Lyotard radicalized the earlier sociological debate about a transformation from industrial to post-industrial society, promoted by authors such as Raymond Aron and Daniel Bell, by suggesting that the emerging social configuration was of such novelty that established concepts could no longer grasp it. Thus, his work contributed to launching a broad investigation, which has characterized much of political philosophy and comparative–historical sociology since, into the openness of the modern commitment to freedom and reason to a plurality of possibly interpretations. As a consequence, the earlier opposition between an affirmative view of modernity as the institutionalization of freedom and reason, on the one hand, and the critical analysis of the self-cancellation of the modern normative commitment, on the other, could now be reread as evidence of, first, the ambiguity of the conceptual underpinnings of modernity and, second, the variety of possible translations of those commitments into institutionalized social practices, such as democracy and capitalism (Wagner 2008).

This insight gave new impetus to research on modernity. In political philosophy and social theory, the nature of the ambiguity and thus plurality of the modern commitment required further investigation, not least with a view to understanding the degree of openness of this commitment to interpretation and to reviewing, not necessarily discarding, the universalist claims that had accompanied this commitment from its beginnings. In social research, the hypothesis of a recent major transformation of ‘modern societies’ between the 1960s and the present has informed many analyses from the mid-1980s onwards. Such research will need to address in particular the question whether such transformation, if it is ongoing, shows a specific direction breaking with or confirming the tendencies of modernity as they had been postulated in earlier theorizing. In the following, chapter 2 will address the question of the recent transformation of modernity and the plurality of modern forms from the angles of both political philosophy and social research. Chapter 3 will take up the question of the historical direction of the transformations of modernity and will review the concept of progress in this light. And chapter 4 will suggest a novel conceptualization of modernity that lends itself to the comparative analysis of contemporary societies and their historical trajectories, to be embarked on in Part II of this book.

Capitalism is the currently predominant mode of economic modernity, and it has been the central target of critical social theory since Marx. In turn, democracy is the dominant interpretation of political modernity, but it has been much less in the focus of social theory. Chapter 5 will ask whether capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked to each other, as much social theory has assumed, but it will renew this question in the light of the current debate about the unavoidability of neo-liberal capitalism and the prevailing image of incessant ‘waves of democratization’ across the globe. Chapter 6 will bring together the insights from the preceding chapters to explore the possibility of a comparative sociology of modernities, which will need to investigate whether (a) the observable plurality of modern forms of socio-political organization is (b) created from within specific historical trajectories and to explore (c) the conditions for persistence of such plurality under current conditions of globalization (Wagner 2011).

This threefold task is mindful of the interpretations given to Weber’s reflections on modernity, but the current condition of global modernity tends to sharpen the issues raised in earlier theorizing. The plurality of modern forms may lend itself to varieties of world-making projects (Karagiannis and Wagner 2007), but at the same time the often observed homogenizing tendencies of globalization may impose a return to the view of modernity as a single and unique form of social and political organization that is without lasting alternatives. In that latter case, though, the critique of modernity may emerge in a new guise, as the critique of anomic individualization and reification that entails the risk of loss of world as a meaningful dwelling space, of worldlessness (see Arendt 1958 for the latter term; Honneth 2005 for the former). Chapter 7 will pursue this investigation further by focusing on one particular society and polity, South Africa, to understand how its historical trajectory was entangled with, but also differed from, the one of European modernity, if and how its post-apartheid modernity is specific in the current world context and, finally, how far we can learn from South Africa’s modernity about the possible plurality of modern forms of life today. Chapter 8 returns from this case to the general agenda and will try to outline the contours of a world sociology of modernity that takes up the Weberian agenda in the light of the ‘cultural problems’ of today.