Cultural Sociology
2016, Vol. 10(3) 385­–398
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1749975516637203
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Is Thinking with ‘Modernity’
Eurocentric?
Sanjay Seth
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Abstract
In recent times it has been argued that thinking with the concept of ‘modernity’ entails, or at
least makes one prey to, Eurocentrism. Those who are troubled by this have sought to rethink
the concept such that one can ‘think with’ modernity, while avoiding, or even challenging,
Eurocentrism. This article surveys some such attempts, before moving on to argue that the
question of whether modernity is principally a European phenomenon or not cannot be
adequately framed without considering the knowledge within which the question comes to be
posed; for the knowledge through which we represent and understand modernity is itself, in its
origins, European (and modern), and thus the relations between this knowledge and the ‘real’
that it purports to characterize, also need to be interrogated. Doing so, the article suggests,
complicates the task of understanding modernity in non-Eurocentric terms, and leads to the
recognition that the concept of modernity is not simply a means by which we describe, grasp
or apprehend a phenomenon external to it, but that it is itself involved in the production of the
modern. If this is so, we are (West and non-West) modern, though not in the way that we have
hitherto presumed.
Keywords
modern, modernity, colonial, colonialism, postcolonial theory, Eurocentric, Eurocentrism,
history, world history, global
Introduction
‘Modernity’ is one of the central categories of the social sciences, but in recent times it
has been argued that thinking with the concept of ‘modernity’ entails, or at least makes
one prey to, Eurocentrism. Those who are troubled by this have sought to develop intellectual
strategies whereby this entailment can be avoided and have endeavoured to
rethink the concept of modernity such that one can ‘think with’ modernity, while avoiding,
or even challenging, Eurocentrism. In the first two parts of this article I briefly
Corresponding author:
Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths, University of London, Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK.
Email: s.seth@gold.ac.uk
637203CUS0010.1177/1749975516637203Cultural SociologySeth
research-article2016
Article
386	 Cultural Sociology 10(3)
outline and discuss two such strategies: providing alternative historical accounts of
modernity in which it does not appear as a purely European product, and pluralizing
modernity, such that ‘European’ or Western modernity appears as only one form or variant
of modernity.
The first two parts of this article thus offer a brief survey – albeit one that does not
aspire to any comprehensiveness – of some of the current efforts to rethink modernity in
non-Eurocentric terms. In the third part, the nature of the enquiry shifts: drawing upon
my own work and that of others, I turn attention from considerations of what modernity
is ‘really’ like – when and where it began, and whether it is singular or multiple – to
considering the knowledge within which such questions are posed. For the attempts to
develop non-Eurocentric understandings of modernity discussed in the first two parts of
this article assume that the modern social sciences can, with appropriate adjustments and
emendations, be used to produce a non-Eurocentric understanding of modernity. But the
knowledge through which we represent and understand modernity is itself, in its origins,
European (and modern), and the relations between this knowledge and the ‘real’ that it
purports to characterize, also need to be interrogated. Doing so, I suggest, complicates
the task of understanding modernity in non-Eurocentric terms. In the fourth and final part
I suggest that the concept of modernity is not simply a means by which we describe,
grasp or apprehend a phenomenon external to it, but that it is itself involved in the production
of the modern. Recognizing this leads, I conclude, not to a better solution to the
problem of how to think modernity in non-Eurocentric ways, but to a rethinking and
reformulation of this problem.
Let it be clear at the outset that my concern is not with Eurocentrism per se, but rather
with whether thinking with ‘modernity’entails it. Eurocentrism need not, of course, only
arise as a by-product of thinking with modernity – there are all manner of garden variety
Eurocentrisms that derive from other sources, including a belief in European superiority,
or an ignorance of any history other than that of Europe. When, for instance, Hugh
Trevor-Roper wrote that ‘the history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so far as
it has significance, has been European history’ (1965: 11), the centrality he accorded
Europe was not a consequence of thinking with the concept of modernity, but of adjudging
European history to be more consequential than other histories. David Landes is
ostensibly discussing the modern when he proclaims, ‘the historical record shows, for
the last two thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development
and modernity…’ (Landes, 1999: xxi), but in this case it is clearly not the concept of
modernity that leads him into Eurocentrism, but rather the postulate of an innate European
dynamism (stretching back two millennia) that leads him to conclude that Europe
invented modernity.
The Eurocentrism this article is concerned with is not that born of a prior conviction
of Europe’s superiority; it is instead a consequence of an account which sees in the
advent of ‘modernity’ a profound historical rupture; a rupture which first occurred in
Europe and arose out of forces and processes internal to European societies, before being
spread to other parts of the world. The knowledge through which we know of this rupture
is itself a product of it, so that the categories through which we represent and characterize
the emergence of ‘newness’are themselves part of that newness. The consequence of this
account is that Europe is accorded centrality; understanding the new requires that we
Seth	 387
focus on how historical forces emerging in Europe transformed it, and then transformed,
or are transforming, or have as yet failed to fully transform, the rest of the world.
It is true, as the above example of Landes, for one, shows, that this account is not
always easy to distinguish from garden variety Eurocentrism. Nonetheless, the distinction
is real, and can be summed up as follows: in the one case it is the presumed uniqueness
of Europe that is seen as the reason why modernity (amidst other ‘achievements’)
originated there; in the other case it is the rise of modernity in Europe that leads to the
search for European distinctiveness.
The latter Eurocentrism, the one this article is concerned with, is the legacy of what is
often termed ‘classical social theory’. As is well known, Marx, Tönnies, Weber, Maine and
many other influential thinkers felt that they were living in a society that was fundamentally
different to all others that preceded it; a difference they usually sought to characterize
in dyadic terms, through contrasts such as gemeinschaft/gesellschaft, feudalism/capitalism,
status/contract, and the like. Since the societies that were seen to have undergone such
transformative change were European ones, it followed that the search for the motor(s)
driving these changes was also a search for that which made Europe different from all other
parts of the world. Conversely – as with Weber’s writings on non-Western traditions, or
Marx’s writings on India and his reference to an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ – the study
of non-Western societies was usually a search for obstacles and lacks; for that which
impeded and precluded them from an endogenous development towards the modern.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that declaring Europe to be the birthplace of the
modern was less a ‘finding’ of classical social theory, the outcome of careful empirical
enquiry, than a premise and point of departure for classical social theory. But that premise
has informed most scholarship since, which, whether conducted in the West or the
non-West, has ransacked the history of Europe for instances of dynamism and premonitions
of the modernity to come, and the history of the non-West for instances of blockage
and stasis. Modernization theory was only one of the more conspicuous, if unsophisticated,
such legacies.
Alternative Histories
For those who are troubled by this Eurocentrism, an obvious solution is to sever the historical
link between ‘modernity’ and ‘Europe’; for if one can conceive of modernity as a
phenomenon that is not uniquely and exclusively European in origin, then to think with
modernity need not entail Eurocentrism. Thus some scholars have sought to offer
accounts of the genesis of the modern that are global, or at least not solely European.
Earlier such accounts included important works by Eric Williams (1944) and C.L.R.
James (1963). In more recent times, the world systems analysis of Wallerstein, and the
dependency theory associated with Andre Gunder Frank and others, have offered a systematic
alternative account of the development of the modern (or of capitalism) in which
it was not seen to be endogenously born in Europe and then transplanted elsewhere, but
was instead seen as an effect of complex structures and processes that included Europe
and other parts of the world from the very outset.
In the eyes of some this has still not sufficiently emancipated itself from Eurocentrism,
for it still privileges Europe as the ‘centre’ of a world economy, albeit one which is now
388	 Cultural Sociology 10(3)
seen to include non-Western hinterlands or peripheries. Andre Gunder Frank, criticizing
his earlier work and that of Wallerstein, sees ‘the limitation of this Wallersteinian/
Frankian theory’ as lying in the fact that while it recognized that there was a ‘worldsystem’,
it still saw it ‘as centred in Europe and expanding from there to incorporate
more and more of the rest of the world in its own Europe-based “world” economy’
(Frank, 1998: 30). In his later work Frank seeks to redress this shortcoming, now suggesting
that a global economy was in fact an Asian invention, with Europe a minor
player. The centrality Europe came to assume in this global economy was a late development,
a usurpation of Asia’s once central role that was not fully accomplished until the
19th century. As he colourfully sums up the historical account he offers, ‘the West first
bought itself a third-class seat on the Asian economic train, then leased a whole railway
carriage, and only in the nineteenth century managed to displace Asians from the locomotive’
(Frank, 1998: 37).
In accounts such as this it is usually additionally claimed that Europe’s conquest and
exploitation of the non-Western world was not merely the consequence of, but a central
and constitutive element in, the emergence of global capitalism and the modern. Thus
James Blaut seeks to show that the most economically dynamic parts of Asia, Africa and
Europe were all on a par until the 16th century, and traces Europe’s subsequent ascendance
to the fillip given by the conquest of the New World, and by the colonial conquest
and exploitation of Asia and Africa:
Both the quantitative significance … of production and trade in colonial and semicolonial areas
and the immense profitability of the enterprise, that is the rapid capital accumulation that it
fostered … add up to a significant vector force, easily able to change the process of economic
transformation in Europe from sluggish evolution to rapid revolution. (Blaut, 1993: 193)
If such alternative historical accounts – there are many such,1 and I have only briefly
referred to two of the more polemical ones, where the differences and the stakes are
particularly clearly spelled out – are thought to be persuasive, it might appear that thinking
with modernity (or in this case, ‘capitalism’ or ‘global capitalism’) need not entail
Eurocentrism. If modernity is not endogenously produced in Europe, any search for
what makes Europe special or unique is presumably rendered otiose. Thus for Blaut,
once it has been established that Europe did not ‘take the lead’ over Asia and Africa
until after 1492, and that too ‘because of the immense wealth obtained by Europeans in
America and later in Asia and Africa’, it follows that the economic dynamism of Europe
was ‘not because Europeans were brighter or bolder or better than non-Europeans, or
more modern, more advanced, more progressive, more rational’ (Blaut, 1993: 206).
Similarly Frank, having argued that Europe managed to ‘muscle in’ on the much more
developed intra-Asian trade only because of its sudden access to American silver, concludes
that ‘Europeans had no exceptional, let alone superior, ethnic, rational, organizational,
or spirit-of-capitalist advantages to offer, diffuse, or do anything else in Asia’
(Frank, 1998: 283).
Arguments such as these provide an alternative historical account of modernity, one
in which it is not immanent in Europe. If they are empirically plausible – something I do
not attempt to judge, as my aim is rather to evaluate them as intellectual ‘strategies’ for
Seth	 389
challenging Eurocentrism – they would seem to render redundant the question of
Europe’s exceptionalism. Moreover, they carry an obvious political ‘charge’ – if the
conquest of the New World, slavery, and more generally the colonization and exploitation
of the non-Western world all went into the making of the modern, then not only was
it not solely a European achievement, it no longer looks like much of an ‘achievement’
at all; the tone or valence with which we approach the emergence of the modern changes.
Judged by the criteria of challenging Eurocentrism, however, such a strategy is only
partially successful. For bringing the non-West into the account of the emergence of
modernity need not, in and of itself, undermine the Eurocentrism of the conventional
account. This can be modified to acknowledge the ‘co-production’, as it were, of modernity,
while continuing to assign a pivotal role to Europe. Indeed, this may be the new
scholarly consensus: Chris Bayly, for instance, acknowledges that ‘to a significant extent
… it was change away from the apparent centers of the world economy, in the supposed
African and Asian “peripheries”, which galvanized the metropolitan centers into action,
modernization and conflict’ (Bayly, 2004: 472). However he still views north-western
Europe as ‘more economically, intellectually and politically dynamic than the rest of the
world at the end of the eighteenth century’, the manifestations of which included ‘an
egotistical buoyancy of philosophy, invention, public debate, and, more dismally, efficiency
in killing other human beings’ (Bayley, 2004: 469).
Futhermore, even if the non-West is made part of the story of modernity – for example,
if the origins of modernity are seen to be deeply connected with colonial exploitation
– this only pushes back, or reframes, the question of European exceptionalism: why was
it Europe that exploited others, rather than vice versa? That is, even where the normative
valence changes – where Europe’s ‘dynamism’ begins to look more like ‘rapacity’ –
‘what is it about Europe that made it unique?’ can still remain the question.2 Indeed, this
was precisely the form of the question for many anti-colonial nationalists and revolutionaries,
who thought that there was some quality, not necessarily admirable, unique to
Europe that produced the desire and the capacity for aggressive expansion and conquest.
In short, a line of enquiry less inclined to approach the advent of modernity with admiration
is still compatible with a Eurocentric account.
Finally and most important, because this intellectual strategy seeks to delink modernity
from Europe on historico-empirical grounds, it is hostage to (empirical) fortune.
What I mean by this can be illustrated if we ask the following blunt, even crude, question:
if a knockdown empirical argument convincingly established that modernity is
essentially a European phenomenon, would anti-Eurocentric scholarship put up its hands
and concede defeat? This is of course an exceedingly unlikely hypothetical – this debate
will remain inconclusive, for explanations of these sort include so many factors or variables
that a great many (if not all) competing explanations are plausible – but it is in
principle possible. And the answer is surely that anti-Eurocentric accounts would not
cease, because it is not empirical findings that determine their conclusions, but rather the
other way around. That is, in the welter of possible evidence, what is chosen and accorded
explanatory significance is to some degree determined by the desire to challenge dominant
explanations. I hasten to add that this is true of Eurocentric accounts as well – it is
simply that these are longstanding, and the presumptions, passions and prejudices that
went into their making have congealed, and are to that degree naturalized and thus
390	 Cultural Sociology 10(3)
concealed. Indeed, precisely because of this, it is all the more important that alternative
accounts be researched and published, so that scholars and students are made aware that
this is a contested domain, and that underlying the empirical disagreements are political
and ethical ‘stakes’. But it also suggests that any intellectual strategy that seeks to delink
modernity from Europe principally on historico-empirical grounds may be following a
strategy not best suited to its aims.
Alternative Modernities
Another strategy for thinking modernity without Eurocentrism is to offer, not an alternative
genealogy of the modern, but rather to pluralize these genealogies. According to this
view, the classical social theorists were mistaken in assuming that the ‘structural’ or
material features that ushered in and define modernity – including urbanization, a capitalist
economy, the emergence of the nation-state as the chief form of polity – were necessarily
accompanied by certain cultural features and modes of subjectivity. We need, in
Dilip Gaonkar’s words, ‘to revise the distinction between societal modernization and
cultural modernity’ (2001: 1). Charles Taylor similarly makes a distinction between the
economic and institutional processes that characterize the modern, and cultural ones, and
argues that economic transformation can and does articulate with existing cultures,
which leave a lasting imprint on the modernity in question:
Transitions to what we might recognize as modernity, taking place in different civilizations,
will produce different results that reflect their divergent starting points … new differences will
emerge from the old. Thus, instead of speaking of modernity in the singular, we should better
speak of ‘alternative modernities’. (Taylor, 1999: 161)
The ‘cultural’ changes that historically accompanied the structural features of modernity
in the West were not necessary and defining features of modernity, and have not been so
in the non-West. In non-Western civilizations, capitalism has thrived, urbanization has
proceeded apace, and the nation-state has replaced earlier forms of political organization,
but without this always being accompanied by disenchantment and rationalization, by
the disembedding of the individual from community, and by secularization. Indeed,
social transformations have sometimes been accompanied by the opposite. It has been
argued, for instance, that in parts of Africa modernity has seen a recrudescence of belief
in witchcraft, rather a diminution of it (see, inter alia, Ashforth, 2005; Geschiere, 1997;
Moore and Sanders, 2001).3 The conclusion to be drawn is not the one usually drawn,
namely that such societies are pre-modern, non-modern, or are incomplete and deficient
versions of modernity, but rather that they are variants of it; modernity comes in multiple
forms. One of the important implications of thinking in terms of ‘multiple’ modernities,
in other words, ‘is that modernity and westernization are not [seen to be] identical.
Western patterns of modernity are not the only authentic modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2002:
27; see also Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993).
As a strategy for thinking with modernity while avoiding Eurocentric entailments,
this has many advantages. For if modernity comes in many shapes and sizes, and thus
Europe is not the only or even the ‘normal’ form of modernity, then it is not the telos and
Seth	 391
measure of all other societies. If Europe does not show others their future, and if nonWestern
societies are not to be viewed in terms of their distance from a norm, we can
abandon the hunt for what they ‘lack’, and what the ‘obstacles and impediments’ to their
development are. But a suspicion remains that this amounts to little more than an arbitrary
broadening of definition, rather than a serious rethinking of what is meant by
modernity; and that one consequence of the resulting conceptual imprecision is that what
is now described as merely ‘Western’modernity, rather than modernity as such, nonetheless
continues to function as the secret referent or ur-form of modernity, ‘which others
[are seen to] adapt, domesticate or tropicalize’ (Bhambra, 2007: 75).
This need not be so however, and is not so in the case of Taylor, for example, who
does not merely provide a more capacious definition of modernity but addresses its
implications, including the question of the knowledge through which we characterize
modernity. Taylor argues that the conventional account of modernity, which sees it as
European, does not recognize that the background assumptions and practices of the modern
will be inflected by the traditions they encounter. It fails to see this not only because
it fails to recognize that economic and institutional transformations do not necessarily
entail cultural ones, but, more fundamentally, because it assumes that what Taylor calls
the ‘culture of modernity’is not on a par with other cultures, but is rather a culture where
representations and cosmologies are finally replaced by true knowledge. ‘At the heart of
this explanation’, writes Taylor, ‘is the view that modernity involves our “coming to see”
certain kernel truths about the human condition’ (1999: 170). That is, the conventional
account does not regard the core categories of modern knowledge as just one possible
way of construing the world, but as the right way, finally uncovered. It assumes that premodern
or ‘traditional’ cultures (including those of the West) had representations and
enchantments and metaphysics and cosmologies, whereas we moderns have come to
grasp (or been forced to see) the bedrock truths that underpinned these various constructions
all along. Or as David Kolb puts it, explicating Weber, in this view,
Modernity is an explicit recognition of what the self and society have been all along. Modern
identity is not just another in a sequence of historic constructions; it is the unveiling of what has
been at the root of these constructions. (Kolb, 1986: 9–10)
If, then, our standard understanding rests upon the presumption that the culture of modernity
becomes universalized because it ‘unveils’the truth that has been there all along, the
pluralization of modernities, if it is to be more than a mere redefinition (and one that
continues to treat Europe as the most developed or ‘pure’ form of modernity), can only
proceed by rejecting this idea. Taylor writes:
It is not that we [modern Westerners] sloughed off a whole lot of unjustified beliefs, leaving an
implicit self-understanding that had always been there to operate at last untrammelled. Rather,
one constellation of implicit understandings of our relation to God, the cosmos, other humans,
and time was replaced by another in a multifaceted mutation. (Taylor, 1999: 171)4
This is a radical argument: both because it treats ‘modernity’ not as an external material
fact (a reality) that exists independently of the knowledge by which we characterize it,5
392	 Cultural Sociology 10(3)
and because it suggests that the knowledge by which we characterize it might itself be
historically situated and limited, rather than one that transcends its historical and cultural
circumstances. In the following section I pursue these intimations, shifting attention
away from whether modernity is ‘really’Eurocentric – which presumes that it is external
to the categories through which it is represented – to the knowledge through which we
pose such questions in the first place.
Knowledge of/and Modernity
The knowledge by which we know and represent modernity to ourselves is itself modern,
and European. It began to emerge in the early modern period, challenging the premodern
knowledge(s) of Europe, which, in Taylor’s words, required ‘understanding the
world in categories of meaning, as existing to embody or express an order of Ideas or
archetypes, as manifesting the rhythm of divine life, or the foundational acts of the
gods, or the will of God’, and ‘seeing the world as a text, or the universe as a book’
(Taylor, 1975: 5). By contrast, as modern knowledge emerged and came to be defined
through a critique of scholastic, other medieval, and Renaissance knowledges, all of
these were condemned for confusing humans with their world, for attributing to the
world a meaning and purpose which in fact belongs to us, and which we have projected
onto it. One of the defining features of modern knowledge, then, was that it presumed a
sharp distinction between subject and object, knower and known. It further assumed
that the world was divided between a disenchanted nature, which was to be understood
in terms of laws and regularities, and a newly discovered object called society, which
was a realm of meanings, purposes and ends. It also reversed the order between god(s)
and men, presuming that gods were to be explained in terms of men, rather than men in
terms of gods.
Modern knowledge, and the modernity it tells us we inhabit, emerged hand in hand.
As the modern social sciences took their current shape in the 19th century, they appeared,
in Peter Wagner’s words, as ‘a form of reflexive self-understanding appropriate for
modernity’ (2001: 1); as if the phenomena of modernity revealed or unveiled certain
universal truths by ‘generating’ forms of thinking that corresponded to its structure.
However, whereas the concept of modernity is a periodizing one, modern knowledge,
while also thought to have been born in a particular time and place, is nonetheless thought
to be applicable to the past and present and future, of both the West, where this knowledge
first emerged, and also the non-West. Why should this be so? Why should a knowledge
which we know has historically and culturally specific origins, nonetheless be
considered to transcend those origins and achieve universality?
There is more than one reason of course, but the most important is a teleological
understanding according to which modernity is the privileged historical site where something
like Absolute Knowledge finally becomes possible. I am of course gesturing
towards Hegel here, but his is not the only such account, even if it is possibly the most
influential version of this account. When in the early 19th century Jacob Burckhardt
wrote that the ‘veil’ which made man ‘conscious of himself only as a member of a race,
people, party, family or corporation’ finally lifted in Renaissance Italy, enabling man to
Seth	 393
recognize himself as a ‘spiritual individual’(1960: 121), he was offering a version of this
account. When early in the 20th century Weber wrote that disenchantment was what
allowed men to recognize the melancholy fact that the world had never been imbued with
purpose and with meaning, but that all meanings and purposes ‘out there’ were what we
had ‘put’ there (1949), he too was making the point that it was only at a certain point in
the history of humankind that certain truths could finally be discerned, truths which,
however, had retrospective validity. Marx was making the same claim when he wrote,
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of
production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure,
thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished
social formations … Human anatomy thus contains the key to the anatomy of the ape. (Marx,
1973: 105)
This is the account of ‘unveiling’, an account in which the discovery of truth becomes
possible because modernity finally provides the conditions for it. In this account modernity
is privileged, and modern knowledge, the self-consciousness of modernity, is thereby
also privileged. Here, the core presumptions of modern knowledge are not yet another set
of parochial assumptions claiming universal validity, like a proselytizing religion, but
rather are embedded in an account that purports to explain both why we humans were
once bound to get things wrong, and how it became possible to get them right. This is
what I have elsewhere characterized and criticized as the ‘once was blind, but now can
see’ narrative (Seth, 2013).
This, I suggest, is more fundamental than the ‘empirical’ claim that the features that
constitute modernity first arose in Europe; or rather, this is what underlies the ‘empirical’
claim, and what makes Eurocentrism so difficult wholly to escape. For if modernity is
not a culture or a social imaginary like others, but rather what finally makes it possible
to see what the world is really like, if it is not ‘just another in a sequence of historic constructions’
but rather ‘the unveiling of what has been at the root of these constructions’,
then we cannot but privilege modernity. However much we may wish to be charitable in
our understandings of others, and endeavour to recognize that each age has its own world
view, ‘our’, modern, world view is privileged, for we, unlike others, are no longer in
thrall to enchantments and cosmologies, lacking the clear-eyed recognition of what the
world is really like. And we also privilege Europe, for the truths that modernity finally
allows us to see (and for which modern knowledge is the medium) – that the world is
disenchanted, that gods are to be explained in terms of men and not men by gods, and so
on – were first unveiled in Europe.
Is there any way in which we can ‘think’modernity without buying into this? In the next
and concluding section I suggest that there is, but that it requires a fundamental rethinking
of modernity, via a rethinking of the relation of modernity and the knowledge by which we
know and describe it; one in which the knowledge through which we understand modernity
is constitutive of that which it purportedly merely describes. This does not provide a better
answer to the question with which we began – how to think with modernity without
Eurocentrism. It does, however, recast that question in ways that are fruitful.
394	 Cultural Sociology 10(3)
Making Modernity
According to Frederic Jameson, it is not the transformations which are said to characterize
the modern that gave rise to the concept of modernity; the account in which the ‘realities’
of social transformation (rationalization, capitalism, individualism, etc.) come to be
‘grasped’ or represented in thought is mistaken. Indeed, ‘Modernity is not a concept,
philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category’ (Jameson, 2012: 40). It is a way of
providing an account of rupture and change, whether that change is seen to begin with
the Renaissance, the Reformation or the Enlightenment, and whether its defining characteristic
and/or ‘motor’ is seen to be rationalization, or capitalism, or individualism, and
so on. That so many different accounts abound (Jameson identifies at least 14 possibilities)
is itself a sign that this is a story we tell ourselves, not an objective fact that then
happens to be recognized and represented through the concept of ‘modernity’.6 The concept
of ‘modernity’ is less a fact about the world – though the phenomena it points to
(capitalism, rationalization and so on) may be real enough – than a fact about those who
invented it and deploy it, and who in inventing and deploying it signal a sense of rupture
and newness, by narrativizing a ‘now’ sharply different from ‘then’, and correlatively, a
‘we’ sharply different from a ‘them’. ‘Modernity’, concludes Jameson,
… as a trope is itself a sign of modernity as such. The very concept of modernity, then, is itself
modern, and dramatizes its own claims. Or to put it the other way around, we may say that what
passes for a theory of modernity … is itself little more than the projection of its own rhetorical
structure onto the themes and content in question: the theory of modernity is little more than a
projection of the trope itself. (Jameson, 2012: 34)
The import of Jameson’s analysis is not to ‘deflate’ the pretensions of this narrative, but
rather to indicate that the narrative of modernity has momentous consequences; the
repeated telling of this story it is one of the ways in which we make ourselves modern, and
others non-modern. This claim – that modernity is not a description of a ‘real’ external to
it, but a factor in bringing that ‘real’ into being – is amplified by Bruno Latour, who similarly
treats modernity not as a fact about the world that sociologists or economists or historians
can establish (does it really exist, where and when did it begin, and so on), but as
a form of self-description by which ‘we moderns’ distinguish ourselves from others.
According to Latour, the modern/non-modern distinction is mapped onto the nature/culture
distinction, for a sense of being ‘modern’rested, above all, on the conviction that with
modernity we ‘discovered’ or ‘unveiled’ a truth that had hitherto been obscured, and continues
to be obscured for many peoples: namely, that humans and their society on the one
hand, and nature on the other, are two ontologically distinct objects. Becoming modern
… consists in continually exiting from an obscure age that mingled the needs of society with
scientific truth, in order to enter into a new age that will finally distinguish clearly what belongs
to atemporal nature and what comes from humans, what depends on things and what belongs to
signs. (Latour, 1993: 71)
This ‘Great Divide’between humans and non-humans, between Nature and Culture, was
the foundation of the other great divide, between us moderns and the pre-moderns: for
we moderns congratulate ourselves for being
Seth	 395
the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture, between Science and
Society, whereas in our eyes all the others – whether they are Chinese or Amerindian, Azande or
Barouya – cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is Society, what is sign from what
is thing, what comes from Nature as it is from what their cultures require. (Latour, 1993: 99)
Latour argues that the distinction between nature and culture is not, however, a fact of the
world that we moderns discovered, but a distinction that we have created and have
‘policed’. It has been a productive distinction, but its very productivity has resulted in the
proliferation of hybrids of the natural and the social, to the point where the distinction
becomes increasingly unsustainable. Modernity, in this account, is not a mere ‘illusion’,
but nor is it a brute fact that is ‘grasped’ or ‘represented’ by the concept of modernity.
Rather, the phenomena and the description of the phenomena are co-produced; and as the
‘great divide’ between the natural and the cultural begins to crumble, so too does the
modern/non-modern distinction which rested upon it. With that, we belatedly realize that
we have never been modern, at least not in the way that we thought we were.
Drawing upon Latour and Jameson and others (Asad, 2003; Chakrabarty, 2000;
Mitchell, 1988, 2002; Seth, 2007, 2013), we could conclude as follows: modern knowledge
is not just a way of grasping modernity in thought, or recognizing and registering
the changes it bought about, but has been a force in bringing about the changes that it
catalogues and characterizes. As the core presumptions of modern knowledge, including
(to stick with the examples we have been using thus far) that gods and spirits are human
creations, and that nature is disenchanted, come to inform institutions and practices and
beliefs, modern knowledge serves to constitute, and not only to reflect, the modern.
Because modern knowledge and what it labels modernity are co-constitutive, modern
knowledge is most successful in performing its function of representing or understanding
where it has helped shape that which it describes. That is why it is often found wanting
when it is applied to the non-Western world, where it has not been at work for a number
of centuries, remaking the institutions and practices it describes. Nonetheless, because
the narrative of modernity circulates globally, we are now all modern.
If this is so, then our efforts to escape Eurocentrism take on a different cast. We are
all, West and non-West, modern; but none are modern in the way that we have thought.
We have all been reshaped, in different and unequal ways, by the historical forces that we
gather under the concept of modernity. But modernity is not a ‘thing’ that exists outside
of our categories; our categories are not the reflexive understanding that accompanies
and is generated by it; and they do not give us privileged insight into all pasts and presents.
Modernity is not an object that arose in some places and not in others, but a narrative
and a disposition and, often, a desire: a way in which people have told stories about
themselves and others, a way of being-in-the-world. It is, according to Talal Asad, a
‘project’, and as such, ‘Modernity is not primarily a matter of cognizing the real but of
living-in-the-world … what is distinctive about modernity as a historical epoch [is that
it] includes modernity as a political-economic project’ (2003: 14, original emphasis).
Of course, it is true that the dominant understanding is still one in which the concept of
modernity is seen to be a description or representation of something external to it, and that
exists wholly independently of how it is represented. Inasmuch as that is so, it continues
to be important to challenge Eurocentric understandings of modernity by developing
alternative historical accounts, or by pluralizing our understanding of modernity. However,
396	 Cultural Sociology 10(3)
we also need to provide competing accounts in which modernity and the knowledge that
accompanies and constitutes it is not privileged, and is not seen as revealing underlying
truths, but rather seen as one way of knowing and inhabiting the earth. Only then will our
categories, explanations and imagination become as rich, capacious and diverse as the
world(s) we actually inhabit.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1.	 Conspicuously missing from this survey are the writings of the Latin American ‘decolonial’
school, including Dussel, Mignolo, Quijano and others. This omission is not because these
writings are less important, but on the contrary because they are too complex and important
to be briefly glossed. For a collection of some of these writings, see Morana, Dussel and
Jáuregui (2008).
2.	 Scholars such as Frank and Blaut, precisely because they are polemically concerned with
denying any ‘uniqueness’ to Europe, are aware of this pitfall. Frank seeks to address it by
tentatively suggesting that Europe’s ascendancy can be explained by the fact that the access
to New World silver coincided with a cyclical decline in Asian economies (Frank, 1998:
334), and Blaut suggests that geographical accident – Europe’s good fortune to be closer to
the Americas – is what determined that Europe and not, say, south India became the site of
capitalist transformation, bourgeois revolution and ‘ruler of the world’ (Blaut, 1993: 181).
Even the conquest of America is not seen as evidence for European technological or military
supremacy, for according to Blaut, ‘the Americas were not conquered: they were infected’
(1993: 186). What these otherwise rather unconvincing arguments do suggest is that contingency,
sheer accident, should not be dismissed in any account of the ‘rise of Europe’. In a
more convincing vein, contingency is accorded its explanatory place in Kenneth Pomeranz’s
important The Great Divergence (2000), also not surveyed here; but for a brief discussion
see Seth (2014).
3.	 Indeed, there is an important line of argument that suggests that we need to rethink the idea
that even Western modernity was accompanied by rationalization, disenchantment and so
on; that this might be more the mythology of modernity than the reality of it (see, inter alia,
Bennett, 2001; Comaroff, 1994; Martin, 2011; Meyer and Pels, 2003; Owen, 2004; Treitel,
2004; Winter, 1998).
4.	 Taylor exempts the natural sciences from this, asserting that the revolution in the natural sciences
from the 17th century did uncover universal truths. For a critical discussion see Seth
(2007: 191–195).
5.	 To the objection that this is ‘idealist’, Taylor replies, rightly in my view, that ‘this kind of
objection is based on a false dichotomy, that between ideas and material factors as rival causal
agencies. In fact, what we see in human history is a range of human practices that are both at
once’ (2004: 31).
6.	 That is why the question of which of these is the true and correct account of modernity,
according to Jameson, is a misguided one. This will not be answered by evidence, for it
is the narrative that ‘organizes all such material and evidence in the first place’; ‘what we
have to do with here are narrative options and alternate storytelling abilities’ (Jameson,
2012: 23, 32).
Seth	 397
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Author biography
Sanjay Seth is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths,
University of London. He has published widely on modern Indian history, social and political
theory, and postcolonialism, including Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India
(Duke University Press, 2007) and, as editor, Postcolonial Theory and International Relations
(Routledge, 2013).