From Modernization to Multiple Modernities: Eurocentrism Redux

Abstract

This chapter continues my treatment of the relationship between the idea of modernity and the form of sociological argument, a relationship that arises with the very emergence of sociology as I argued in the previous chapter. With the development of this paradigmatic concern with modernity, the future was no longer seen as being about the reproduction of the present, but was considered to be a space for the further develop-ment of projects and trends (Burke 1992). These trends and projects were to be the trends and projects of modernity itself where modernity could also be understood, in Habermas's (1996) words, as an unfinished project-one that was not yet realized, but could be used as a normative framework to address global processes. The 'unfinished project' in general terms, however, is the bringing to fruition of what is already predicated in the Western experience. Ideas of evolution and progress are central to the concern with the future and, for most WTiters 1 as I have argued, the history of the West is seen as a precursor of the future of the non-West. In this chapter, I will address theories of modernization and the recent idea of multiple modernities, which is argued by its proponents to escape the Eurocentrism that is finally allowed to be a characteristic of modernization theory. The professionalization of sociology in the post Second World War period coincided both with the dominance of structural-functional modernization theory and a world environment characterized by move-ments of decolonization and independence. The cold war competition for influence in the third world between capitalist and communist political systems and the associated emergence of a strong non-aligned movement meant that, at least in the immediate post-war period, sociologists were 56 From Modernization to Multiple Modernities 5 7 attuned to developments outside of Europe and North America. If, as argued in earlier chapters, colonialism had not had a,-, impact on the development of sociological understandings and analytical categories, as I shall be arguing in this chapter, movements for liberation and decolonization did. In this period, academics who had previously been concerned with interrogating their own past in the West began to turn their scholarly focus to the present conditions of what was seen as the 'underdeveloped' world (Portes 1973: 248). The nature of the relationship between developed and lesser developed countries became one of the primary questions to emerge within sociological research and the problem was largely posed in terms of whether these countries would evolve in a common direction. Following in the dassical tradition of sociology, modernization theory took as its idea of change the standard notion of a linear movement from a traditional past to a modernized future. As discussed previously, explanations of the processes of modernization were primarily located in the context of a historical understanding of societies where each form was deemed to be superseded by a progressively higher one. Traditional, or pre-modern 1 societies were put forward as objects of comparison with societies already deemed to be modem and the problem was set up in terms of accounting for the historical transition from one to the other. The debate on convergence around modern institutions and the economy 1 however 1 also occurred in the context of counterdaims arguing for