© F. Enke Verlag Stuttgart Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197 165
Modem, Anti, Post, and Neo:
How Social Theories Have Tried to Understand the “New World“ of
“Our Time“1
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Department of Sociology, U.C.L.A., 405 Hilgart Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90024, USA
A bstract: This article links the cognitive contents of the different theoretical perspectives that have emerged since
World War II to their meaning-making functions, and links both to their social origins broadly understood. It views
social theorists as intellectuals who try to understand the crisis of their times. In doing so, they draw not only upon
the cognitive resources of earlier social theories but upon the structured traditions of cultural codes and narratives.
In order to explain the new and often unnerving experiences of their changing societies, intellectuals develop binary
oppositions whose constructions of sacrality and profanity allow them to place the present in relation to a simplified
past and future, thus creating “history.“ Social theory is also built upon changing narrative forms, genres of collective
heroism, romantic individualism, tragedy, comedy, realism, and irony. The author suggests that in recent years
the comic and ironic perspectives of postmodern theory have been challenged by a neo-modern perspective that is
more heroic and romantic and more confident about solving the “problems of our time.“
History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise.
[Yet] as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except
in textual form, [and] our approach to it and to the
Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization.
Fredric Jameson
Sometime during the mid-1970s, at the annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association,
a major debate erupted around modernization theory
that crystallized a decade of social and intellectual
change. l\vo speakers were featured, Alex Inkeles
and Immanuel Wallerstein. Inkeles reported
that his studies of “modern man“ (Inkeles/Smith
1974) had demonstrated that personality shifts toward
autonomy and achievement were crucial and
predictable results of social modernization, which
1 Drafts of this essay were delivered at colloquia organized
by the UCLA Center for Comparative Social
Analysis; the Research Committee on Theory of the
International Sociological Association and the Swedish
Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences;
the UCLA Center for Social Theory and History;
and the Sociology Departments of the Universities
of Montreal and McGill. Colleagues on each of
these occasions offered helpful criticisms. Among
them, the comments of Piotr Sztompka and Bjorn
Wittrock were particularly helpful. Critical readings
were also supplied by Donald N. Levine, Robin
Wagner-Pacifici, Hans Joas, Bernard Barber, and
Franco Crespi. I acknowledge with particular gratitude
Ron Eyerman, whose ideas about intellectuals
stimulated the present work, and John Lim, whose
work on the New York intellectuals proved particularly
helpful. This essay is dedicated to Ivan Szelenyi.
revolved most centrally around the industrialization
of society. The response to Inkeles was appreciative
from many of the senior members of the audience,
skeptical from the younger. Wallerstein responded
to Inkeles in a manner that pleased the
younger generation more. “We do not live in a
modernizing world but in a capitalist world,“ he
proclaimed (1979: 133), asserting that “what makes
this world tick is not the need for achievement
but the need for profit.“When Wallerstein went on
to lay out “an agenda of intellectual work for those
who are seeking to understand the world systemic
transition from capitalism to socialism in which we
are living“ (1979: 135, original italics), he literally
brought the younger members of the audience to
their feet.2
2 As I remember the event, and it was certainly an event,
the entire audience became rather heated up.
One leading leftist sociologist of development offered
the sarcastic intervention that modernization
theory had actually produced world-wide poverty,
and made the pointed suggestion that Inkeles try
selling his tired modernization line somewhere else.
At this point, shouts arose from various quarters of
the audience and this distinguished social scientist
had to be physically restrained from underscoring his
theoretical point in a decidedly nonintellectual manner.
The article from which I am quoting, written by
Wallerstein and published in a collection published
by him in 1979, clearly was drawn from the A.S.A.
talk referred to above, although my references to the
talk are drawn from memory. Tlryakian (1991) places
WaUerstein’s article in a similar historical perspective
166 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
Fifteen years later, the lead article in the American
Sociological Review was entitled “A Theory of
Market Transition: From Redistribution to Markets
in State Socialism.“ The transition referred to
in this article was rather different from the one
Wallerstein had in mind. Written by Victor Nee,
once inclined to Maoism and now a rational choice
theorist specializing in China’s burgeoning market
economy, the article suggested that the only hope
for organized socialism was capitalism. In fact,
Nee portrayed socialism exactly as Marx had depicted
capitalism, and provoked remarkably similar
expectations. State socialism, he wrote, was an
archaic, out-dated mode of production, one whose
internal contradictions were leading to capitalism.
Employing the class conflict analytic of Marx to
the productive system that Marx believed would
end such conflict for all time, Nee argued that it is
state socialism, not capitalism, that “appropriates
surplus directly from the immediate producers and
creates and structures social inequality through the
processes of its reallocation“ (1989: 665). Such expropriation
of surplus - exploitation - can be overcome
only if workers are given the opportunity to
own and sell their own labour power. Only with
markets, Nee insisted, could workers develop the
power to “withhold their product“ and protect
their “labor power“ (p. 666). This movement from
one mode of production to another would shift
power to the formerly oppressed class. “The transition
from redistribution to markets,“ he concluded,
“involves a transfer of power favoring direct
producers“ (ibid.).
1. A New “Transition“
In the juxtaposition between these formulations of
modernity, socialism, and capitalism there lies a
story. They describe not only competing theoretical
positions but deep shifts in historical sensibility.
We must understand both together, I believe, if either
contemporary history or contemporary theory
is to be understood at all.
Social scientists and historians have long talked
about “the transition.“ An historical phrase, a social
struggle, a moral transformation for better or
for worse, the term referred, of course, to the
movement from feudalism to capitalism. For
Marxists, the transition initiated the unequal and
and provides an analysis of the fate of modernization
theory that bears a marked similarity to the one I undertake
here.
contradictory system that produced its antithesis,
socialism and equality. For liberals, the transition
represented an equally momentous transformation
of traditional society but created a set of historical
alternatives - democracy, capitalism, contracts and
civil society - that did not have a moral or social
counterfactual like socialism ready to hand.
In the last five years, for the first time in the history
of social science, “the transition“ has come to
mean something that neither of these earlier treatments
could have foreseen. It is the transition from
communism to capitalism, a phrase that seems oxymoronic
even to our chastened ears. The sense of
world-historical transformation remains, but the
straight line of history seems to be running in re­
verse.
In this recent period we have witnessed perhaps
the most dramatic set of spatially and temporally
contiguous social transformations in the history of
world. The more contemporary meaning of transition
may not entirely eclipse the earlier one, yet
there is no doubt that it has already diminished its
significance and will arouse significantly more intellectual
interest for a long time to come.
This second great transformation, to redirect Polanyi’s
(1944) famous phrase, has produced an unexpected,
and for many an unwelcome, convergence
in both history and social thought. It is impossible
even for already committed intellectuals to ignore
the fact that we are witnessing the death of a major
alternative not only in social thought but in society
itself.3In the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that
either citizens or elites will try to structure their
primary allocative systems in non-market ways.4
3 This impossibility is strikingly expressed in the cri de
coeur issued by Shoji Ishitsuka, one of Japan’s leading
Lukacs scholars and “critical theorists“:
“The whole history of Social Enlightenment, which
was so great for its realization of the idea of equality,
has well as so tragic for its enforcemnt of dictatorship,
has ended ... The crisis of the human sciences
[which as resulted] can be described as a crisis of recogniton.
The progress-oriented historical viewpoint
has totally disappeared because the historical movement
is now toward capitalism from socialism. The
crisis also finds its expression in the whole decline of
stage-oriented historical theory in general.“ (Ishitsuka
1994)
4 “We should henceforth conclude that the future of
socialism, if it has one, can only lie within capitalism,“
writes Steven Lukes (1990: 574) in an effort to
come to grips with the new transitions. For an intelligent,
often anguished, and revealing intra-left de-
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 167
For their part, social scientists will be far less likely
to think of antimarket “socialist societies“ as counterfactual
alternatives with which to explain their
own. They will be less likely to explain economic
stratification by implicitly comparing it with an
egalitarian distribution produced by publicly rather
than privately held property, a “plausible world“
(Hawthorn 1991) that inevitably seems to suggest
that economic inequality is produced by the existence
of private property itself. Social scientists
will, perhaps, also be less likely to explain status
stratification by postulating the counterfactual tendency
to communal esteem in a world that is uncorrupted
by individualism of a bourgeois rather than
socialist kind. Similarly, it will become much more
difficult to speak about the emptiness of formal democracy,
or to explain its limitations by pointing
merely to the existence of a dominant economic
class, for these explanations, too, require counterfactuals
of a traditionally “socialist“ kind. In brief,
it will be much less easy to explain contemporary
social problems by pointing to the capitalist nature
of the societies of which they are a part.
In this essay, I do not propose a return to “convergence“
or modernization theories of society as
such, as some reinvirgorated propnents of the early
tradition (Inkeles 1991, Lipset 1990) apparently
do.5*I will propose, however, that contemporary
social theory must be much more sensitive to the
apparent reconvergence of the world’s regimes and
that, as a result, we must try to incorporate some
broad sense of the universal and shared elements
of development into a critical, undogmatic, and reflective
theory of social change. Indeed, in the
conclusion of this essay I will demonstrate that a
growing range of widely diverse contemporary social
theorists, from literary radicals and rational
choice theorists to postcommunists, are speaking
convergence even if (apologies to Moliere) they
bate on the ideological and empirical implications of
these events, see the debate to which Lukes’ essay
forms a part: Goldfarb (1990), Katznelson (1990),
Heilbroner (1990) and Campeanu (1990).
5 For some contentious and revealing formulations of
these issues, see the debate between Nikolai Genov,
Piotr Sztompka, Franco Crespi, Hans Joas, myself,
and other theorists in the 1991 and 1992 issues of
Theory, the Newsletter of the Research Committee
on SociologicalTheory of the International SociologicalAssociation.
Those exchanges, which reproduced
many of the old lines of modernization versus antimodernization
debate, demonstrated how difficult it
is to step outside of binary thinking on the convergence
issue, for reasons that the following analysis of
codes will make clear.
don’t believe it is prose, and I will address the challenging
question, recently raised so trenchantly by
Muller (1992), of whether this emerging conversation
can avoid the relatively simplistic and totalizing
form that obliterated the complexities of earlier
societies and the particularisms of our own.
Despite this new and more sophisticated form,
however, what I will later call neo-modern theory
will remain as much myth as science (Barbour
1974), as much narrative as explanation (Entrikin
1991). Even if one believes, as I do, that such a
broader and more sophisticated theory of social
development is now historically compelling, it remains
the case that every general theory of social
change is rooted not only in cognition but in existence,
that it possesses a surplus of meaning in Ricoeur’s
(1977) deeply suggestive phrase. Modernity,
after all, has always been a highly relativist term
(Pocock 1987, Habermas 1981, Bourricaud 1987).
It emerged in the fifth century when newly Christianized
Romans wished to distinguish their religiosity
from two forms of barbarians, the heathens
of antiquity and the unregenerate Jews. In medieval
times, modernity was reinvented as a term implying
cultivation and learning, which allowed
contemporary intellectuals to identify backward,
with the classical learning of the Greek and Roman
heathens themselves. With the Enlightenment,
modernity became identified with rationality,
science, and forward progress, a semantically
arbitrary relationship that seems to have held
steady to this day. Who can doubt that, sooner or
later, a new historical period will displace this second
“age of equipoise“ (Burn 1974) into which we
have so inadvertently but fortuitously slipped.
New contradictions will emerge and competing
sets of world-historical possibilities will arise, and
it is unlikely that they will be viewed in terms of
the emerging neo-modernization frame.
It is precisely this sense of the instability, of the imminent
transitoriness of the world, that introduces
myth into social theory. Despite the fact that we
have no idea what our historical possibilities will
be, every theory of social change must theorize not
only the past but the present and future as well. We
can do so only in a nonrational way, in relation not
only to what we know but to what we believe,
hope, and fear. Every historical period needs a
narrative that defines its past in terms of the present,
and suggests a future that is fundamentally
different, and typically “even better,“ than contemporary
time. For this reason, there is always an
eschatology, not merely an epistemology, in theorizing
about social change.
168 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
I proceed now to examine early modernization
theory, its contemporary reconstruction, and the
vigorous intellectual alternatives that arose in the
period between.61will insist throughout on the relation
of these theoretical developments to social
and cultural history, for only in this way can we understand
social theory not only as science but also
as an ideology in the sense made famous by Geertz
(1973). For unless we recognize the interpenetration
of science and ideology in social theory, neither
element can be evaluated or clarified in a rational
way. With this stricture in mind, I delineate
four distinctive theoretical-cum-ideological periods
in postwar social thought: modernization theory
and romantic liberalism; antimodernization theory
and heroic radicalism; postmodern theory and
comic detachment; and the emerging phase of
neo-modernization or reconvergence theory,
which seems to combine the narrative forms of
each of its predecessors on the post-war scene.
While I will be engaging in genealogy, locating the
historical origins of each phase of post-war theory
in an archaeology way, it is vital to keep in mind
that each one of the theoretical residues of the
phases which I examine remains vitally alive today.
My archeology, on other words, is not only an investigation
of the past but of the present. Because
the present is history, this genealogy will help us to
understand the theoretical sedimentation within
which we live intellectually today.
2. Modernization: Code, Narrative,
and Explanation
Drawing from a centuries-long tradition of evolutionary
and Enlightenment inspired theories of so-
6 Paul Colomy and I (1992) have introduced the term
“reconstruction“ to indicate a path of scientific cumulation
that is more radical vis-a-vis the originating
tradition than the kinds of efforts at specification,
elaboration, or revision that more typically mark the
efforts of social scientists who wish to keep their theoretical
tradition alive in response to intellectual
challenge and the loss of scientific prestige. Reconstruction
suggests that fundamental elements of the
founder’s “classical“ work are changed, often by incorporating
elements from its challengers, even
while the tradition as such is defended, e.g., Habermas’s
effort to “reconstruct historical materialism“ in
the mid-1970s. Reconstruction should also be distinguished
from “theory creation,“ in which a fundamentally
different theoretical tradition is created,
e.g., Habermas’ later effort to create the theory of
communicative action.
cial change, “modernization“ theory as such was
born with the publication of Marian Levy’s book
on Chinese family structure (1949) and died sometime
in the mid-60s, during one of those extraordinarily
heated rites of spring that marked student
uprisings, antiwar movements, and newly humanist
socialist regimes, and which preceded the long
hot summers of the race riots and Black Consciousness
movement in the U.S.
Modernization theory can and certainly should be
evaluated as a scientific theory, in the postpositivist,
wissenschaftliche sense.7As an explanatory effort,
the modernization model was characterized
by the following ideal-typical traits.8*
1. Societies were conceived as coherently organized
systems whose subsystems were closely inter­
dependent.
2. Historical development was parsed into two types
of social systems, the traditional and the modern,
statuses which were held to determine the
character of their societal subsystems in determinate
ways.
3. The modern was defined with reference to the
social organization and culture of specificallyWestern
societies, which were typified as individualistic,
democratic, capitalist, scientific, secular, and
stable, and as dividing work from home in genderspecifc
ways.
4. As an historical process, modernization was
held to involve nonrevolutionary, incremental
change.
7 By scientific, I do not evoke the principles of empiricism.
I do mean to refer, however, to the explanatory
ambition and propositions of a theory, which must be
evaluated in their own terms. These can be interpretive
and cultural, eschew narrative or statistical causality
and, indeed, the natural scientific form. By
extra-scientific, I mean to refer to a theory’s mythical
or ideological function.
8 I draw here from a broad range of writings that appeared
in the 1950s and early 1960s by such figures as
Daniel Lemer, Marion Levy, Alex Inkeles, Talcott
Parsons, David Apter, Robert Bellah, S. N. Eisenstadt,
Walt Rostow, and Clark Kerr. None of these authors
accepted each of these propositions as such,
and some of them, as we will see, “sophisticated“
them in significant ways. Nonetheless, these propositions
can be accepted as forming the common denominator
upon which the great part of the tradition’s
explanatory structure was based. For an excellent
overview of this traditon that, while more detailed,
agrees in fundamental respects with the approach
taken here, see Sztompka 1993: 129-136.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 169
5. The historical evolution to modernity - modernization
- was viewed as likely to succeed, thus
assuring that traditional societies would be provided
with the resources for what Parsons (1966) called
a general process of adaptive “upgrading,“ including
economic take-off to industrialization, democratization
via law, and secularization and science
via education.
There were important aspects of truth in these
models, which were articulated by thinkers of considerable
historical and sociological insight. One
truth, for example, lay in the insight that there are
functional not merely idealistic exigencies that
push social systems toward democracy, markets,
and the universalization of culture, and that shifts
toward “modernity“ in any subsystem create considerable
pressures on the others to respond in a
complementary way.9This understanding made it
possible for the more sophisticated among them to
make prescient predictions about the eventual instability
of state socialist societies, thus avoiding
the rational-is-the-real embarrassments encountered
by theorists of a more leftist kind. Thus, Parsons
(1971: 127) insisted long before Perestroika
“that the processes of democratic revolution have
not reached an equilibrium in the Soviet Union
and that further developments may well run
broadly in the direction of Western types of democratic
government, with responsibility to an electorate
rather than to a self-appointed party.“ It
should perhaps also be emphasized that, whatever
their faults, modernization theorists were not provincials.
Despite their ideological intent, the most
important of them rarely confused functional interdependence
with historical inevitability. Parsons’
theorizing, for example (1962: 466, 474), stressed
that systemic exigencies actually opened up the
possibility of historical choice.
Underneath the ideological conflicts [between capitalism
and communism] that have been so prominent,
there has been emerging an important element of very
broad consensus at the level of values, centering in the
9 Probably the most sophisticated formulation of this
truth is Smelser’s elaboration (e.g., 1968), during the
final days of modernization theory, of how modernization
produced leads and lags between subsystems,
a process which, borrowing from Trotsky, he called
uneven and combined development. Like virtually
every other important younger theorist of the period,
Smelser eventually gave up on the modernization
model, in his case for a “process“ model (Smelser
1991) that delineated no particular epochal characteristics
and which allowed subsystems to interact in
a highly open-ended way.
complex we often refer to as “modernization“ ... Clearly,
definite victory for either side is not the only possible
choice. We have another alternative, namely, the eventual
integration of both sides - and of uncommitted
units as well - in a wider system of order.1011*
Despite these important insights, however, the historical
judgment of subsequent social thought has
not erred in its evaluation of modernization theory
as a failed explanatory scheme. Neither nonwestern
nor precontemporary societies can be conceptualized
as internally homogeneous (cf., Mann
1986). Their subsystems are more loosely coupled
(e.g., Meyers/Rowan 1977, Alexander/Colomy
1990) and their cultural codes more independent
(e.g., Hall 1985). Nor is there the kind of dichotomized
historical development that can justify a
single conception of traditional or modern, as Eisenstadt’s
(e.g., 1964; cf., Alexander 1992) extensive
investigations of “Axial Age“ civilizations makes
clear. Even the concept, “western society,“
built upon spatial and historical contiguity, fails
sufficiently to recognize historical specificity and
national variation. Social systems, moreover, are
not as internally homogeneous as were supposed,
nor are there necessarily grounds for optimism
that modernization will succeed. In the first place,
universalizing change is neither imminent nor developmental
in an idealist sense; it is often abrupt,
involving contingent positions of power, and can
have murderous results.11 In the second place,
even if one were to accept a linear conceptual
scheme, one would have to acknowledge Nietzsche’s
observation that historical regression isjust as
possible as progress, indeed, perhaps even more
likely. Finally, modernization, even if it does triumph,
does not necessarily increase social contentment.
It may be that the more highly developed
a society, the more it produces, encourages,
10 I am grateful to Muller (1992: 118) for recalling this
passage. Muller notes the “acute sense of reality“
(ibid., Ill) displayed in modernization theory’s
“amazing hypotheses“ (ibid., p. 112) about the eventual
demise of state socialism. He insists, quite correctly
in my view, that “it was not the [neo-Marxist]
critique of capitalism in the 1970s which correctly
read the secular trends of the late twentieth century
- it was Parsons’ theory“ (ibid.).
11 “Seen historically, ‘modernization’has always been a
process propelled by inter-cultural exchange, military
conflicts and economic competition among
states and power blocks - as, likewise, Western postwar
modernization took place within a newly created
world order“ (Muller 1992: 138). See also the critiques
of classical differentiation theory in Alexander
(1988) and Alexander/Colomy (1990).
170 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
and relies upon strident and often utopian expressions
of alienation and criticism (Dürkheim 1937).
When we look back on a “scientifically invalidated“
theory that dominated the thinking of an entire
intellectual stratum for two decades, those of
us who are still committed to the project of a rational
and generalizing social science will be inclined
to ask ourselves, why was it believed? While we
would ignore at our peril the partial truths of modernization
theory, we would not be wrong to conclude
that there were extra-scientific reasons involved.
Social theory (Alexander/Colomy 1992)
must be considered not only as a research program
but as a generalized discourse, one very important
part of which is ideology. It is as a meaning structure,
as a form of existential truth, that social scientific
theory functions effectively in an extrascientific
way.12
To understand modernization theory and its fate,
then, we must examine it not only as a scientific
theory but as an ideology - not in the mechanistic
Marxist or more broadly Enlightenment sense
(e.g., Boudon 1986) of “false consciousness“ but
in the Geertzian (1973) one. Modernization theory
was a symbolic system that functioned not only to
explain the world in a rational way, but to interpret
the world in a manner that provided “meaning and
motivation“ (Bellah 1970b). It functioned as a
metalanguage that instructed people how to live.
Intellectuals must interpret the world, not simply
change or even explain it. To do so in a meaningful,
reassuring, or inspiring manner fashion means
that intellectuals must make distinctions. They
must do so especially in regard to phases of history.
If intellectuals are to define the “meaning“ of their
12 This existential or mythical dimension of social scientific
theory is generally ignored in interpretations of
social scientific thought, except for those occasions
when it is glossed as political ideology (e.g., Gouldner
1970). Simmel acknowledged a genre of speculative
work in social science, which he called “philosophical
sociology,“ but he carefully differentiated it
from the empirical disciplines or parts thereof. For
example, he wrote in his Philosophy of Money that a
philosophical sociology was necessary because there
exist questions “that we have so far been unable either
to answer or to discuss“ (quoted in Levine 1991:
99, italics added). As I see it, however, questions that
are essentially unanswerable lie at the heart of all social
scientific theories of change. This means that one
cannot neatly separate the empirical from the nonempirical.
In terms I employ below, even theorists in
the social sciences are intellectuals, even if most intellectuals
are not social scientific theorists.
“time“, they must identify a time that preceded the
present, offer a morally compelling account of why
it was superseded, and tell their audiences whether
or not such a transformation will be repeated vis-avis
the world they live in. This is, of course, merely
to say that intellectuals produce historical narratives
about their own time.13*
The ideological dimension of modernization theory
is further illuminated by thinking of this narrative
function in a structuralist, or semiotic way
(Barthes 1977). Because the existential unit of reference
is one’s own time, the empirical unit of reference
must be totalized as one’s own society. It
must, in other words, be characterized as a whole
regardless of the actual nature of its divisions and
inconsistencies. Not only one’s own time, then, but
one’s own society must be characterized by a single
linguistic term, and the world that preceded the
present must be characterized by another single
broad term as well. In light of these considerations,
the important ideological, or meaningmaking
function that modernization theory served
seems fairly clear. For Western but especially
American and American-educated intellectuals,
modernization theory provided a telos for postwar
society by making it “historical.“ It did so by providing
postwar society with a temporal and spatial
identity, an identity that could be formed only in a
relation of difference with another, immediately
preceding time and place. As Pocock has recently
emphasized, “modernity“ must be understood as
the “consciousness rather than the condition of being
‘modern’.“ Taking a linguistic model of consciousness,
he suggests that such consciousness
must be defined as much by difference as identification.
The modern is a “signifier“ that functions
as an “excluder“ at the same time.
13 “We can comprehend the appeal of historical discourse
by recognizing the extent to which it makes
the real desirable, makes the real into an object of
desire, and does so by its imposition, upon events
that are represented as real, of the formal coherency
that stories possess ... The reality that is represented
in the historical narrative, in ‘speaking itself,’speaks
to us .. and displays to us a formal coherency that we
ourselves lack. The historical narrative, as against
the chronicle, reveals to us a world that is putatively
‘finished,’done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not
falling apart. In this world, reality wears the mask of
a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which
we can only imagine, never experience. Insofar as
historical stories can be completed, can be given narrative
closure, can be shown to have had a plot all
along, they give to reality the odor of the ideal.“
(White 1980: 20, original italics)
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 171
We call something (perhaps ourselves) modern in order
to distance that of which we speak from some antecedent
state of affairs. The antecedent is most unlikely to be
of neutral effect in defining either what is to be called
“modern“ or the “modernity“ attributed to it (Pocock
1987: 48).
If I may give to this approach a late-Durkheimian
turn (Alexander 1989), I would like to suggest that
we think of modernity as constructed upon a binary
code. This code serves the mythological function
of dividing the known world into the sacred
and profane, thereby providing a clear and compelling
picture of how contemporaries must act to
manoeuvre the space in between.14 In this sense,
the discourse of modernity bears a striking resemblance
to metaphysical and religious salvation discourse
of diverse kinds (Weber 1964, Walzer 1965).
It also resembles the more secular dichotomizing
discourses that citizens employ to identify themselves
with, and to distance themselves from, the
diverse individuals, styles, groups, and structures
in contemporary societies (Wagner-Pacifici 1986,
Bourdieu 1984).
It has been argued, in fact (Alexander 1992, Alexander/Smith
1993), that a “discourse of civil society“
provides a structured semiotic field for the
conflicts of contemporary societies, positing idealized
qualities like rationality, individuality, trust,
and truth as essential qualities for inclusion in the
modern, civil sphere, while identifying qualities
such as irrationality, conformity, suspicion, and deceit
as traditional traits that demand exclusion and
punishment. There is a striking overlap between
these ideological constructions and the explanatory
categories of modernization theory, for example
Parsons’ pattern variables. In this sense, modernization
theory may be seen as a generalizing and
abstracting effort to transform an historically specific
categorical scheme into a scientific theory of
development applicable to any culture around the
entire world.
Because every ideology is carried by an intellectual
cadre (Konrad/Szelenyi 1974, Eisenstadt 1986), it
is important to ask why the intellectual cadre in a
particular time and place articulated and promoted
a particular theory. In regard to modernization
14 Of course, as Caillois (1959) pointed out, and as
Durkheim’s original work obscured, there are actually
three terms that so classifiy the world, for there is
also the “mundane.“ Myth disdains the very existence
of the nundane, moving between the highly
charged poles of negative repulsion and positive at­
traction.
theory, despite the importance of a small number
of influential Europeans like Raymond Aron (e.g.
Aron 1962), we are speaking primarily about
American and American-educated intellectuals.15
Following some recent work by Eyerman (1992;
cf., Jamison/Eyerman 1994) on the formation of
American intellectuals in the 1950s, I would begin
by emphasizing the distinctive social characteristics
of the postwar period in the United States, particularly
the sharpness of the transition to the postwar
world. This transition was marked by massive
suburbanization and the decline of culturallybounded
urban communities, a dramatic reduction
in the ethnicity of American life, an extraordinary
lessening of labor-capital conflict, and by unprecedented
long term prosperity.
These new social circumstances, coming as they
did at the end of two decades of massive national
and international upheaval, induced in postwar
American intellectuals a sense of a fundamental
historical “break.“16 On the left, intellectuals
15 The retrospective account by Lerner, one of the architects
of modernization theory, indicates the pivotal
nature of the American reference:
“[After] World War II, which witnessed the constriction
of European empires and the diffusion of American
presence ... one spoke, often resentfully, of the
Americanization of Europe. But when one spoke of
the rest of the world, the term was “Westernization“.
The postwar years soon made clear, however, that
even this larger term was too parochial... A global
referent [was needed.] In response to this need, the
new term ‘modernization’ evolved.“ (Lerner 1968:
386)
An interesting topic of investigation would be the
contrast between European theorists of modernization
and Americans ones. The most distinguished
European and the most original, Raymond Aron,
had a decidedly less optimistic view of convergence
than hisAmerican counterparts, as he demonstrated,
e.g., in his Progress and Disillusion (1968), which
forms an extremely interesting counterpart to his
convergence argument in Eighteen Lectures on Industrial
Society. While there seems little doubt that
Aron’s version of convergence theory also represented
a response to the cataclysm ofWorldWar II, it was
a more fatalistic and resolute reaction than an optimistic
and pragmatic one. See the account in his
Memoires (Aron 1990).
16 “The Forties was a decade when the speed with
which one’s own events occurred seemed as rapid as
the history of the battlefields, and for the mass of
people in America a forced march into a new jungle
of emotion was the result. The surprises, the failures,
and the dangers of that life must have terrified some
nerve Qfawareness in the power and the mass, for, as
172 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
like C. Wright Mills and David Riesman issued
jeremiads against what they feared was the massification
of society. In the liberal center, theorists
like Parsons suggested how the same transition had
created a more egalitarian, more inclusive, and
significantly more differentiated society.17 On the
right, there were cries of alarm about the disappearance
of the individual in an authoritarian and
bureaucratic welfare state (Buckley 1951, Ayn
Rand 1957). On every side of the political spectrum,
in other words, American intellectuals were
motivated by a sense of dramatic and bifurcating
social change. This was the social basis for constructing
the traditional/modern binary code, an
experience of bifurcation that demanded an interpretation
of present anxieties, and future possibilities,
in relation to the imagined past.
To fully understand the interrelation between history
and theory that produced the new intellectuals,
however, we must think about narrativity in
addition to symbolic structure. In order to do so,
we will draw upon the dramaturgical terms of
genre theory, which stretches from Aristotle’s poetics
to the path-setting literary criticism of Northrop
Frye (1957), which inspired the more recent “negative
hermeneutics“ of historically-oriented literary
critics like White (1987), Jameson (1980), Brooke
(1984), and Fussell (1975).18*
if stricken ... the retreat to a more conservative existence
was disorderly, the fear of communism spread
like an irrational hail of boils. To anyone who could
see, the excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no
preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of
the national self.“ (Mailer 1987 [I960]: 14).
17 It terms of the break induced in American intellectuals
by the postwar period, it is revealing to compare
this later change theory of Parsons with his earlier
one. In the essays on social change he composed in
the decade after 1937, Parsons consistently took Germany
as his model, emphasizing the destablilizing,
polarizing, and antidemocratic implications of social
differentiation and rationalization. When he referred
to modernization in this period, and he rarely did, he
employed the term to refer to a pathological, overrationalizing
process, one that produced the symptomatic
reaction of “traditionalism.“After 1947, Parsons
took the United States as the type case for*his
studies of social change, relegating Nazi Germany to
the status of deviant case. Modernization and traditionalism
were now viewed as structural processes
rather than as ideologies, symptoms, or social ac­
tions.
18 It is ironic that one of the best recent explications of,
and justifications for, Frye’s version of generic history
can be found in the Marxist criticism of Jameson,
In such dramaturgical terms we can characterize
the historical period that preceded the era of modernization
theory as one in which intellectuals “inflated“
the importance of actors and events by emplotting
them in a heroic narrative. The 1930’s and
the war years that followed defined a period of intense
social conflict that generated millennial world-historical
- hopes for utopian social transformation,
either through communist and fascist
revolutions or the construction of an unprecedented
kind of “welfare state.“ Post-war American intellectuals,
by contrast, experienced the social
world in more “deflationary“ terms. With the failure
of revolutionary proletarian movements in Europe
and the head-long rush to normalization and
which purports to refute its bourgeois form yet makes
heavy use of its substantive content. Jameson
(1980: 130) calls Frye’s method a “positive hermeneutic“
because “his identification of mythic patterns
in modern texts aims at reinforcing our sense of the
affinity between the cultural present of capitalism
and the distant mythical past of tribal societies, and
at awakening a sense of the continuity between our
psychic life and that of primitive peoples.“ He offers
his “negative hermeneutic“ as an alternative, asserting
that it uses “the narrative raw material shared by
myth and ‘historical’literatures to sharpen our sense
of historical difference, and to stimulate an increasingly
vivid apprehension of what happens when plot
falls into history ... and enters the force fields of the
modern societies“ (ibid.)
Despite the fact that Jameson is wedded to a reflection
theory of ideology, he produces, in fact, an excellent
rationale for the use of genre analysis in understanding
historical conflicts. He argues that an influential
social “text“ must be understood as “a socially
symbolic act, as the ideological - but formal
and immanent - response to a historical dilemma“
(ibid., p. 139). Because of the strains in the social environment
that call texts forth, “it would seem to follow
that, properly used, genre theory must always in
one way or another project a model of the coexistence
or tension between several generic modes or
strands.“ With this “methodological axiom,“ Jameson
suggests, “the typologizing abuses of traditional
genre theory criticism are definitely laid to rest“
(ibid., p. 141).
For the relevance of generic theory to the analysis of
social rather literary texts, see the historical writings
of Slotkin (1973), the sociological studies of WagnerPacifici
(1986) and Gibson (1991), and more recently
the work of Margaret R. Somers (e.g., 1992).
For the particularities of my own approach to social
genre and its relation to cultural codes, I am indebted
to conversations with Philip Smith (1991, 1993)
and Steven Sherwood (1994), whose own writings
are important theoretical statements in their own
right.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 173
demobilization in the United States, the heroic
“grand narratives“ of collective emancipation
seemed less compelling.19No longer was the present
perceived primarily as a way station to an alternative
social order, but, rather, as more or less
the only possible system there ever could be.
Such a deflationary acceptance of “this world“ was
not necessarily distopian, fatalistic, or conservative.
In Europe and America, for example, there
emerged a principled anticommunism that wove
together the bare threads of a collective narrative
and committed their societies to social democracy.
Yet, even for these reformist groups, the deflation
of prewar social narratives had strong effects, effects
that were very widely shared. Intellectuals as
a group became more “hard-headed“ and “realistic.“
Realism diverges radically from the heroic
narrative, inspiring a sense of limitation and restraint
rather than idealism and sacrifice. Black
and white thinking, so important for social mobilization,
is replaced by “ambiguity“ and “complexity,“
terms favored by New Critics like Empson
(1927) and particularly Trilling (1950), and by
“skepticism,“ a position exemplified in Niebuhr’s
writings (e.g., Niebuhr 1952). The conviction that
one has been “born again“ - this time to the social
sacred - which inspires utopian enthusiasm, is succeeded
by the “thrice born“ chastened soul described
by Bell (1962c) and by an acute sense that
the social God has failed (Crossman 1950). Indeed,
this new realism convinced many that narrative
itself - history - had been eclipsed, which produced
the representations of this newly “modern“
society as the “end of ideology“ (Bell 1962a) and
the portrayal of the postwar world as “industrial“
(Aron 1962, Lipset/Bendix 1960) rather than as
capitalistic.
Yet, while realism was a significant mood in the
postwar period, it was not the dominant narrative
frame through which postwar social science intel-
19 By using the postmodern term “grand narrative“
(Lyotard 1985), I am committing anachronism, but I
am doing so in order to demonstrate the lack of historical
perspective implied by the postmodernist slogan,
“the end of the grand narrative.“ Grand narratives,
in fact, are subjected to periodic historical deflation
and inflation, and there are always other, less
inflated generic constructions “waiting“ to take their
place. I will point out below, indeed, that there are
important similarities between the postwar period of
narrative deflation and the 1980s, which produced a
broadly similar intuming that postmodernism characterized
to such great effect as an historically unprecedented
social fact.
lectuals charted their times. Romanticism was.20*
Relatively deflated in comparison with heroism,
romanticism tells a story that is more positive in its
evaluation of the world as it exists today. In the
postwar period it allowed intellectuals and their
audiences to believe that progress would be more
or less continuously achieved, that improvement
was likely. This state of grace referred, however,
more to individuals than to groups, and to incremental
rather than revolutionary change. In the
new world that emerged from the ashes of war, it
had finally become possible to cultivate one’s own
garden. This cultivation would be an enlightened,
modernist work, regulated by the cultural patterns
of achievement and neutrality (Parsons and Shils
1951), culminating in the “active“ (Etzioni 1968)
and “achieving“ (McClelland 1953) society.
Romanticism, in other words, allowed America’s
postwar social science intellectuals, even in a period
of relative narrative deflation, to continue to
speak the language of progress and universalization.
In the United States, what differentiates romantic
from heroic narratives is the emphasis on
the self and private life. In America’s social narratives,
heroes are epochal; they lead entire peoples
to salvation, as collective representations like the
American revolution and the civil rights movement
indicate. Romantic evolution, by contrast, is not
collective; it is about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn
(Fiedler 1955), about the yeoman farmer (Smith
1950), and Horatio Alger. American intellectuals,
then, articulated modernization as a process that
freed the self and made society’s subsystems responsive
to its needs. In this sense modernization
theory was behavioral and pragmatic; it focussed
on real individuals rather than on a collective historical
subject like nation, ethnic group, or class.
Existentialism was basic to the romantic American
ideology of “modernism.“ American intellectuals,
indeed, developed an idiosyncratic, optimistic
reading of Sartre. In the milieu saturated with existentialism,
“authenticity“ became a central criterion
for evaluating individual behavior, an emphasis
that was central to Lionell Trilling’s (1955) modernist
literary criticism but also permeated social
theory that ostensibly did not advocate modernization,
for example, Erving Goffman’s (1956) micro­
20 Romanticism is used here in the technical, genre
sense suggested by Frye (1957), rather than in the
broad historical sense that would refer to postclassical
music, art, and literature, which in the terms
employed here was more “heroic“ in its narrative im­
plications.
174 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
sociology, with its equation of freedom with role
distance and its conception of back-versus-front
stage,21and David Reisman’s (1950) eulogy for the
inner-directed man.
These individualistic romantic narratives stressed
the challenge of being modern, and they were
complemented by an emphasis on irony, the narrative
Frye defines as deflationary vis-a-vis romance
but not downright negative in its effects. In the
1950s and early 1960s, the modernist aesthetic in
England and America stressed irony, introspection,
ambiguity. The dominant literary theory, socalled
New Criticism, while tracing its origins back
to Empson’s The Seven Types ofAmbiguity (1927),
came into its own only after the heroic and much
more historicist criticism of the 1930s. The key
contemporary figure in American letters was Lionel
Tilling, who defined the psychological and aesthetic
goal of modernity as the expansion of complexity
and tolerance for ambiguity. Psychoanalysis
was a major critical approach, interpreted as an
exercise in introspection and moral control (Rieff
1959). In graphic art, “modern“ was equated with
abstraction, the revolt against decoration, and
with minimalism, all of which were interpreted as
drawing attention away from the surface and providing
pathways into the inner self.
It is evidently difficult, at this remove, for contemporary
postmodern and post-postmodern intellectuals
to recapture the rich and, indeed, often ennobling
aspects of this intellectual and aesthetic modernism,
almost as difficult as it is for contemporaries
to see the beauty and passion of modernist architecture
that Pevsner (1949) so effectively captured
in his epoch-defining Pioneers of Modern
Design. The accounts of intellectual-cum-aesthetic
modernism proffered by contemporary postmodernists
- from Baumann (1989), Seidman (1991,
1992, and Lasch (1985) to Harvey (1989) and Jameson
(1988) - is a fundamental misreading. Their
construction of it as dehumanizing abstraction,
mechanism, fragmentation, linearity, and domination,
I will suggest below, says much more about
the ideological exigencies that they and other contemporary
intellectuals are experiencing today
21 When I arrived at the University of California,
Berkeley, for graduate school in Sociology in 1969,
some of the Department’s Chicago school sociologists,
influenced by Goffman and Sartre, announced
an informal faculty-student seminar on “authenticity.“
This represented an existentialism-inspired response
to the alienation emphasis of the sixties. As
such, it was historically out of phase. Nobody attended
the seminar.
than it does about modernism itself. In culture, in
theory, and in art, modernism represented a spareness
that devalued artifice not only as decoration
but as pretension, and undercut utopianism as a
collective delusion that was homologous with neurosis
of an individual kind (Fromm 1955, 1956). It
was precisely such admirable qualities that Bell
(1976) designated as early or “classical modernity“
in his attack on the sixties in The Cultural Contradictions
of Capitalism.
This picture was not, of course, an entirely homogeneous
one. On the right, engagement in the
Cold War provided for some intellectuals a new
field for collective heroism, despite the fact that
America’s most influential modernist thinkers were
not as a rule Cold Warriors of the most righteous
kind. On the Left, both within and outside the
U.S., there were important islands of social criticism
that made self-conscious departures from Romanticism
of both a Social Democratic and individualist
ironic sort.22*Intellectuals influenced by
the Frankfurt school, like Mills and Riesman, and
other critics, like Arendt, refused to legitimate the
humanism of this individualist turn, criticizing
what they called the new mass society as forcing individuals
into an amoral, egotistical mode. They
inverted modernization theory’s binary code,
viewing American rationality as instrumental rather
than moral and expressive, big science as technocratic
rather than inventive. They saw conformity
rather than independence; power elites rather
than democracy; and deception and disappointment
rather than authenticity, responsibility, and
romance.
In the 50s and early 60s, these social critics did not
become highly influential. To do so they would
have had to pose a compelling alternative, a new
22 The present account does not, in other words, assume
complete intellectual consensus during the
phases described. Counter trends existed, and they
should be noted. There is also the very real possibility
(see n. 28, below) that intellectuals and their audiences
had access to more than one code/narrative at
any given point in historical time, an access that
Wagner-Padfici (personal communication) calls discursive
hybridity. My account does suggest, however,
that each of these phases was marked, indeed was in
part constructed by, the hegemony of one intellectual
framework over others. Narratives are constructed
upon binary codes, and it is the polarity of binary oppositions
that allows historicizing intellectuals to
make sense of their time. “Binarism“ is less an esoteric
theoretical construct than an existential fact of
life.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 175
heroic narrative to describe how the sick society
could be transformed and a healthy one put in its
place.23This was impossible to do in the deflationary
times. Fromm’sArt of Loving (1956) followed
his denunciation of The Sane Society (1956); in the
fifties, social solutions often were contained in individual
acts of private love. No social program issued
from Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality
(1950). Not only did C. Wright Mills fail to identify
any viable social alternatives in his stream of critical
studies, but he went out of his way to denounce
the leaders.of the social movements of the thirties
and forties as “the new men of power“ (Mills
1948). After nearly twenty years of violenceproducing
utopian hopes, collective heroics had
lost their sheen. The right-wing populism of McCarthy
reinforced the withdrawal from public life.
Eventually, however, Americans and Western Europeans
did catch their breath, with results that
must be related, once again, to history and social
theory alike.
3. Antimodernization Theory:
The Heroic Revival
Sometime in the later 1960s, between the assassination
of President Kennedy and the San Francisco
“love“ summer of 1967, modernization theory
died. It died because the emerging younger generation
of intellectuals could not believe it was true.
Even if we regard social theory as semiotic system
rather than pragmatically inducted generalization,
it is a sign system whose signifieds are empirical reality
in a rather strictly disciplined sense. So it is
23 This points to one quibble I have with Jameson and
Eyerman’s Seeds of the Sixties (1994), their brilliant
account of these critical intellectuals in the 1950’s.
Jameson and Eyerman argue that they failed to exert
influence, not primarely because of the conservatism
of the dominant society. It seems important to add,
however, that their own ideology was partly responsible,
for it was insufficiently historical in the futureoriented,
narrative sense. A more important disagreement
would be that Jameson and Eyerman
seem to accept “mass society“ as an actual empirical
description of both social structural and cultural
modernization in the fifties. In so doing, they may be
mistaking an intellectual account for a social reality.
These vestiges of a realist epistemology - in what is
otherwise an acutely cultural and constructivist approach
- makes impossible to appreciate the compelling
humanism that informed so much of the work of
the very fifties intellectuals whom these critics often
attacked.
important to recognize that during this second
postwar period serious “reality problems“ began
to intrude on modernization theory in a serious
way. Despite the existence of capitalist markets,
poverty persisted at home (Harrington 1962) and
perhaps was even increasing in the third world.
Revolutions and wars continually erupted outside
of Europe and North America (Johnson 1983), and
sometimes even seemed to be produced by modernization
itself. Dictatorship, not democracy was
spreading throughout the rest of the world (Moore
1966); postcolonial nations seem to require an authoritarian
state (Huntington 1968) and a command
economy to be modern, not only in the
economy and state but in other spheres as well.
New religious movements (Bellah/Glock 1976)
emerged in Western countries and in the developing
world, with sacralization and ideology gaining
ground over secularization, science, and technocracy.
These developments strained the central assumptions
of modernization theory, although they
did not necessarily refute it.24
24 A publication that in retrospect takes on the appearance
of a representative, and representational, turning
point between these historical phases, and between
modernization theory and what succeeded it,
is David Apter’s edited book, Ideology and Discontent
(1964). Among the contributors were leading
modernization social scientists, who grappled with
the increasingly visible anomalies of this theory, particularly
the continuing role of utopian and revolutionary
ideology in the third world, which inspired
revolutions, and, more generally, with the failure of
“progressive“ modernizing development. Geertz’s
“Ideology as a Cultural System,“ so central to developments
in post-modernization theories, appeared
first in this volume. Apter himself, incidentally, demonstrated
a personal theoretical evolution paralleling
the broader shifts documented here, moving from an
enthusiastic embrace, and explication, of Third
World modernization, which concentrated on universal
categories of culture and social structure (see,
e.g., Apter 1963), to a post-modern skepticism about
“liberating“ change and an emphasis on cultural particularity.
This latter position is indicated by the selfconsciously
antimodernist and antirevolutionary
themes in the striking deconstruction of Maoism that
Apter (1987) published in the late 1980s. The intellectual
careers of Robert Bellah and Michael Walzer
(cf., my discussion of Smelser’s shifting concerns in
n. 9, above) reveal similar though not identical con­
tours.
These examples and others (see n. 21, above) raise
the intriguing question that Mills described as the relationship
between history and biography. How did
individual intellectuals deal with the historical succession
of code/narrative frames, which pushed them
176 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
Factual problems, however, are not enough to create
scientific revolutions. Broad theories can defend
themselves by defining and protecting a set of
core propositions, jettisoning entire segments of
their perspective as only peripherally important.
Indeed, if one looks closely at modernization theory
during the middle and late 1960s, and even during
the early 1970’s, one can see an increasing sophistication
as it geared up to meet its critics and to
address the reality problems of the day. Dualistic
simplifications about tradition and modernity were
elaborated - not replaced by - notions that portrayed
a continuum of development, as in the later
neo-evolutionary theories of Parsons (1964, 1966,
1971), Bellah (1964), and Eisenstadt (1964). Convergence
was reconceptualized to allow parallel
but independent pathways to the modern (e.g.,
Shils [1972] on India, Eisenstadt [1963] on empires,
Bendix [1965] on citizenship). Notions like
diffusion and functional substitutes were proposed
to deal with the modernization of nonWestern civilizations
in a less ethnocentric manner (Bellah
1957; Cole 1979). The postulate of tight subsystem
links was replaced by the notion of leads and lags
(Smelser 1968), the insistance on interchange became
modified by notions of paradoxes (Schluchter
1979), contradictions (Eisenstadt 1963), and
strains (Smelser 1963). Against the metalanguage
of evolution, notions about developmentalism
(Schluchter/Roth 1979) and globalism (Nettle and
Robertson 1968) were suggested. Secularly gave
way to ideas about civil religion (Bellah 1970b) and
by references to “the tradition of the modern“
(Gusfield 1976).
Against these internal revisions, antagonistic theories
of antimodernization were proposed on the
grounds that they were more valid explanations of
the reality problems that emerged. Moore (1966)
replaced modernization and evolution with revolution
and counterrevolution. Thompson (1963) replaced
abstractions about evolving patterns of industrial
relations with class history and consciousness
from the bottom up. Discourse about exploitation
and inequality (e.g., Goldthlprpe 1969,
Mann 1973) contended with, and eventually disinto
interstitial positions vis-a-vis the “new world of
our time“? Some remained committed to their earlier
frameworks and became, as a result, either permanently
or temporarily “obsolete.“ Others changed
their frameworks and became contemporary, not
necessarily for opportunistic reasons but because of
personal encounters with profoundly jarring historical
experiences, which sometimes gave them a keen
appreciation for “the new.“
placed, discussions of stratification and mobility.
Conflict theories (Coser 1956, Dahrendorf 1959,
Rex 1961) replaced functional ones; state centered
political theories (Bendix et al. 1968, Collins 1976,
Skocpol 1979, Evans et al., 1985) replaced value
centered and multidimensional approaches; and
conceptions of binding social structures were challenged
by microsociologies that emphasized the
liquid, unformed, and negotiated character of everyday
life.
What pushed modernization theory over the edge,
however, were not these scientific alternatives in
and of themselves. Indeed, as I have indicated, the
revisors of the earlier theory had themselves begun
to offer coherent, equally explanatory theories for
many of the same phenomena. The decisive fact in
modernization theory’s defeat, rather, was the destruction
of its ideological, discursive, and mythological
core. The challenge that finally could not be
met was existential. It emerged from new social
movements that were increasingly viewed in terms
of collective emancipation - peasant revolutions
on a world-wide scale, black and Chicano national
movements, indigenous people’s rebellions, youth
culture, hippies, rock music, and women’s liberation.
Because these movements (e.g., Weiner
1984), profoundly altered the Zeitgeist - the experienced
tempo of the times - they captured the
ideological imaginations of the rising cadre of in­
tellectuals.
In order to represent this shifting empirical and existential
environment, intellectuals developed a
new explanatory theory. Equally significant, they
inverted the binary code of modernization and
“narrated the social“ (Sherwood 1994) in a new
way. In terms of code, “modernity“ and “modernization“
moved from the sacred to the profane side
of historical time, with modernity assuming many
of the crucial characteristics that had earlier been
associated with traditionalism and backwardness.
Rather than democracy and individualization, the
contemporary modern period was represented as
bureaucratic and repressive. Rather than a free
market or contractual society, modern America became
“capitalist,“ no longer rational, interdependent,
modern, and liberating but backward,
greedy, anarchic, and impoverishing.
This inversion of the sign and symbols associated
with modernity polluted the movements associated
with its name. The death of liberalism (Lowi
1969) was announced, and its reformist origins in
the early twentieth century dismissed as a camouflage
for extending corporate control (Weinstein
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 177
1968, Kolko 1967). Tolerance was associated with
fuzzy-mindedness, immorality, and repression
(Wolfe et al. 1965). The asceticism of Western religion
was criticized for its repressive modernity and
Eastern and mystical religious were sacralized instead
(Brown 1966, cf., Brown 1959). Modernity
was equated with the mechanism of the machine
(Roszak 1969). For the third world, democracy
was defined as a luxury, strong states a necessity.
Markets were not luxuries but enemies, for capitalism
came to be represented as guaranteeing
underdevelopment and backwardness. This inversion
of economic ideals carried into the first world
as well. Humanistic socialism replaced welfare
state capitalism as the ultimate symbol of the
good. Capitalist economies were held to produce
only great poverty and great wealth (Kolko 1962),
and capitalist societies were viewed as sources of
ethnic conflict (Bonacich 1972), fragmentation,
and alienation (Oilman 1971). Not market society
but socialism would provide wealth, equality, and
a restored community.
These recodings were accompanied by fundamental
shifts in social narratives. Intellectual myths
were inflated upwards, becoming stories of collective
triumph and heroic transformation. The present
was reconceived, not as the denouement of a
long struggle but as a pathway to a different, much
better world.25 In this heroic myth, actors and
groups in the present society were conceived as being
“in struggle“ to build the future. The individualized,
introspective narrative of romantic modernism
disappeared, along with ambiguity and irony
as preferred social values (Gitlin 1987: 377-
406). Instead, ethical lines were sharply drawn and
political imperatives etched in black and white. In
literary theory, the new criticism gave way to the
new historicism (e.g., Veeser 1989). In psychology,
the moralist Freud was now seen as antirepressive,
erotic, and even polymorphously perverse
(Brown 1966). The new Marx was sometimes
a Leninist and other times a radical communitarian;
he was only rarely portrayed as a social democrat
or humanist in the earlier, modernist sense.26
25 See, for example, the millennial tone of the contemporary
articles collected in Smiling through theApocalypse:
Esquire's History of the Sixties (1987).
26 An illustrative case study of one dimension of this
evolution would be the British New Left Review. Created
initially as a forum for disseminating humanistic
Marxism - oriented towards existentialism and consciousness
- vis-a-vis the mechanistic perspective of
the Old Left, in the late 1960s it was an important forum
for publishing Sartre, Gramsci, Lefebvre,
The historical vignette with which I opened this essay
provides an illustration of this shift in sensibility.
In his confrontation with Inkeies, Wallerstein
portentously announced, “the time has come to
put away childish things, and look reality in the
face“ (1979:133). He was not adopting here a realist
frame but rather donning a heroic guise. For it
was emancipation and revolution that marked the
narrative rhetoric of the day, not, as Weber might
have said, the hard dreary task of facing up to
workaday demands. To be realistic, Wallerstein
suggested, was to realize that “we are living in the
transition“ to a “socialist mode of production, our
future world government“ (1979: 136). The existential
question he put to his listeners was, “How
are we relating to it?“ He suggested that there
were only two alternatives. They could relate to
the imminent revolution “as rational militants contributing
to it or as clever obstructors of it (whether
of the malicious or cynical variety).“The rhetorical
construction of these alternatives demonstrates
how the inversion of binary coding (the
clear line between good and bad, with modernity
being polluted) and the creation of a newly heroic
narrative (the militantly millennial orientation to
future salvation) were combined.27*Wallerstein
made these remarks, it will be recalled, in a scientific
presentation, later published as “Modernization:
requiescat in pace.“ He was one of the most
influential and original social scientific theorists of
the anti-modernization theory phase.
The social theories that this new generation of radical
intellectuals produced can and must be considered
in scientific terms (see, e.g., van den Berg
1980 and Alexander 1987). Their cognitive
achievements, indeed, became dominant in the
1970s and have remained hegemonic in contemGorz,
and the early Lukacs. By 1970, it had turned
into a forum for Leninism and Althusserianism. The
cover of its Fall, 1969, issue was emblazoned with the
solgan, “Militancy.“
27 In order to forestall misunderstanding in regard to
the kind of argument I am making here, I should emphasize
that this and other correlations I am positing
between code, narrative, and theory constitute what
Weber, drawing on Goethe, called “elective affinities“
rather than historically, sociologically, or semiotically
causal relations. Commitment to these theories
could, in principle, be induced by other kinds of
ideological formulations, and have been, in earlier
times and other national milieux. Nor need these
particular versions of code and narrative always be
combined. Nonetheless, in the historical periods I
consider here, the positions did mesh in complementary
ways.
178 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
porary social science long after the ideological totalities
in which they were initially imbedded have
since disappeared.28Yet to study the decline of a
mode of knowledge, I would insist once again, demands
broader, extra-scientific considerations as
well. Theories are created by intellectuals in their
search for meaning. In response to continuing social
change, generational shifts occur that can
make the scientific and ideological efforts of earlier
intellectual generations seem not only empirically
implausible but psychologically shallow, politically
irrelevant, and morally obsolete.
By the end of the 1970s, the energy of the radical
social movements of the preceding period had dissipated.
Some of their demands become institutionalized;
others were blocked by massive back-
28 This brief aside about the “lag“ in generational production
is important to emphasize. It is primarily
new generations coming to political and cultural selfconsciousness
that produces new intellectual ideologies
and theories, and, as Mannheim first emphasized,
generational identities tend to remain constant
despite shifts in historical time. The result is that, at
any given point, the “intellectual milieu“ considered
as a totality will contain a number of competing ideological
formulations produced by historicallygenerated
archaeological formations. Insofar as
there remain authoritative intellectual figures within
each generation, furthermore, earlier intellectual
ideologies will continue to socialize some members
of succeeding generations. Authoritative socialization,
in other words, exacerbates the lag effect,
which is further increased by the fact that access to
the organizational infrastructures of socialization e.g.,
control of graduate training programs in major
universities, editorships of leading journals - may be
attained by the authoritative members of generations
whose ideology/theory may already be “refuted“ by
developments that are occurring among younger
generations. These considerations produce layering
effects that make it difficult to recognize intellectual
successions until long after they are crystallized.
These inertial effects of generational formations suggest
that new ideologies/theories may have to respond
not only to the immediately preceding formation
- which is their primary reference point - but in
a secondary way to all the formations that remain in
the social milieu at the time of their formation. For
example, while postmodernism will be portrayed
here as a response primarily to antimodemization
theories of revolutionary intent, it is also marked by
the need to posit the inadequacy of postwar modernism
and, indeed, of prewar Marxism. As I indicate
below, however, postmodernism’s responses to the
latter movements are mediated by their primary response
to the ideology/theory immediately preceding
it. Indeed, it only understands the earlier movements
as they have been screened by the sixties generation.
lash movements that generated conservative publics
and brought right-wing governments to power.
The cultural-cum-political shift was so rapid as to
seem, once again, to represent some kind of
historical-cum-epistemological break.29 Materialism
replaced idealism among political influentials,
and surveys reported increasingly conservative
views among young people and university students.
Maoist ideologues - one thinks of BernardHenri
Levy (1977) in Paris and David Horowitz
(1989) in the U.S. - became anticommunist nouvelle
philosophes and, some of them, neoconservatives.
Yippies became yuppies. For many intellectuals
who had matured during the radicalism of the
1960s and 1970s, these new developments brought
unbearable disappointment. Parallels with the
1950s were evident. The collective and heroic narrative
of socialism once again had died, and the
end of ideology seemed once again to be at hand.
4. Postmodemization Theory:
Defeat, Resignation, and
Comic Detachment
“Postmodernism“ can be seen as an explanatory
social theory that has produced new middle range
models of culture (Lyotard 1984, Foucault 1976,
Huyssen 1984), science and epistemology (Rorty
1979), class (Bourdieu 1984), social action (Crespi
1992), gender and family relations (Halpern 1990,
Seidman 1991), and economic life (Harvey 1989,
Lasch 1985). In each of these areas, and others,
postmodern theories have made original contributions
to the understanding of reality.30It is not as a
29 This sense of imminent, apocalyptic transformation
was exemplified in the 1980s by the post-Marxist and
postmodern British magazine, Marxism Today\
which hailed, in millennial language, the arrival of
“New Times.“
Unless the Left can come to terms with those New
Times, it must live on the sidelines [...] Our world is
being remade [...] In the process our own identities,
our sense of self, our own subjectivities are being
transformed. We are in transition to a new era.
(Marxism Today; October 1988; quoted inThompson
1992: 238)
30 A compendium of postmodernism’s middle level innovations
in social scientific knowledge has been
compiled by Crook, Pakulski, and Waters 1992. For a
cogent critique of the socio-economic propositions
such middle-range theories of the postmodern age either
advance or assume, see Herpin 1993. For other
critiques, Archer 1987, Giddens 1991, andAlexander
1991,1992.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 179
theory of the middle range, however, that postmodernism
has made its mark. These discussions have
become significant only because they are taken to
exemplify broad new trends of history, social structure,
and moral life. Indeed, it is by intertwining
the levels of structure and process, micro and macro,
with strong assertions about the past, present,
and future of contemporary life that postmodernism
has formed a broad and inclusive general theory
of society, one which, like the others we have
considered here, must be considered in extrascientific
terms, not only as an explanatory source.
If we consider postmodernism as myth - not merely
as cognitive descriptions but as their coding and
narration into a “meaningful“ frame - we must
deal with it as the successor ideology to radical social
theory, animated by the failure of reality to unfold
in a manner that was consistent with the expectations
generated by that antimodernization
creed. From this perspective, we can see that while
postmodernism seems to be coming to grips with
the present and future, its horizon is fixed by the
past. Initially (at least) an ideology of intellectual
disappointment, Marxist and postMarxist intellectuals
articulated postmodernism in reaction to the
fact that the period of heroic and collective radicalism
seemed to be slipping away.31They redefined
31 In December, 1986, The Guardian, a leading independent
British newspaper broadly on the Left, ran a
three-day long major series, “Modernism and PostModernism.“
In his introductory article, Richard
Gott announced, by way of explanation, that “the
revolutionary impulses that had once galvanized politics
and culture had clearly become sclerotic“ (quoted
in Thompson 1992: 222 ). Thompson’s own analysis
of this event is particularly sensitive to the central
role played in it by the historical deflation of the heroic
revolutionary myth.
“Clearly this newspaper thought the subject of an alleged
cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism
sufficiently important for it to devote
many pages and several issues to the subject. The
reason it was considered important is indicated by
the sub-heading: “Why did the revolutionary movement
that lit up the early decades of the century fizzle
out. In a major series, Guardian critics analyze
late twentieth century malaise“ ... “The subsequent
articles made it even clearer that the cultural “malaise“
represented by the shift from modernism was
regarded as symptomatic of a deeper social and political
malaise.“ (ibid.).
The stretching of revolutionary fervor, and the very
term “modernism,“ to virtually the entirety of the
pre-postmodernism twentieth century - sometimes,
indeed, to the entire post-Enlightenment era - is a
tendency common to postmodernist theory. A natuthis
exalted collective present, which had been
held to presage an even more heroic imminent future,
as a period that was now passed. They declared
that it had been superseded not for reasons
of political defeat but because of the structure of
history itself.32 The defeat of utopia had threatened
a mythically incoherent possibility, namely
that of historical retrogression. It threatened to undermine
the meaning structures of intellectual life.
With postmodern theory, this imminent defeat
could be transformed into an immanent one, a necessity
of historical development itself. The heroic
“grand narratives“ of the Left had merely been
made irrelevant by history; they were not actually
defeated. Myth could still function. Meaning was
preserved.
The most influential early attributions of postmodernism
were filled with frank revelations of theoretical
perplexity, testimonies to dramatic shifts in
reality, and expressions of existential despair.
Frederick Jameson (1988: 25), for example, identified
a “new and virtually unimaginable quantum
leap in technological alienation.“ Despite his
methodological commitments, Jameson resists the
impulse to fall back on the neo-Marxism certainties
of the earlier age. Asserting that shifts in the
productive base of society had created the superstructural
confusions of a transitional time, he bemoaned
(ibid., 15) “the incapacity of our minds, at
least at present, to map the great global multinational
and decentered communication network in
which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.“
Referring to the traditional role of art as a
vehicle for gaining cultural clarity, Jameson complained
that this meaning-making reflex had been
blocked: we are “unable to focus our own present,
as though we have become incapable of achieving
aesthetic representations of our own current experience“
(ibid., 20).33
ral reflection of its binary and narrative functions,
such broad claims play a vital role in situating the
“postmodern“ age vis-a-vis the future and the past.
32 “La revolution qu’anticipaient les avant-gardes et les
partis d’extr&me gauche and que ddnouncaient les
penseurs et les organisations de droit ne s’est pas
produite. Mais les soci6t6s avanc£s n’en ont pas
moins subi£s une transformation radicale. Tel est le
constat commun que font les sociologues ... qui ont
fait de la postmodernitie le th£me de leurs analyses.“
(Herpin 1993: 295)
33 This mood of pessimism should be compared to the
distinctly more optimistic tone of Jameson’s “Preface“
to The Political Unconscious, his collection of
essays written during the 1970s, in which he seeks to
“anticipate ... those new forms of collective thinking
180 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
Yet, the intellectual meaning-making triumph of
mature postmodernism is already visible in Jameson’s
depiction of this new order as privatized,
fragmented, and commercial. With these terms,
the perplexities and blockages of rationality which
Jameson succeeded in articulating can be explained
not as personal failure but as historical necessities
based on reason itself. What threatened
meaninglessness now becomes the very basis for
meaning; what has been constructed is a new present
and a new past. No wonder that Jameson described
(ibid., p. 15) postmodernism as first and
foremost a “periodizing concept,“ suggesting that
the term was created so that intellectuals and their
audiences could make sense of these new times:
“The new postmodernism expresses the inner truth
of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism“
(ibid.).
Postmodern theory, then, may be seen, in rather
precise terms, as an attempt to redress the problem
of meaning created by the experienced failure of
“the sixties.“ Only in this way can we understand
why the very dichotomy between modern and
postmodern was announced, and why the contents
of these new historical categories are described in
the ways they are. From the perspective developed
here, the answers seem clear enough. Continuity
with the earlier period of antimodern radicalism is
maintained by the fact that postmodernism, too,
takes “the modem“ as its explicit foe. In the binary
coding of this intellectual ideology, modernity remains
on the polluted side, representing “the other“
in postmodernism’s narrative tales.
Yet, in this third phase of postwar social theory, the
contents of the modem are completely changed.
Radical intellectuals had emphasized the privacy
and particularism of modem capitalism, its provinciality,
and the fatalism and resignation it produced.
The post-modernization alternative they
posited was, not postmodern, but public, heroic,
collective, and universal. It is precisely these latter
qualities, of course, that postmodernization theory
has condemned as the very embodiment of modernity
itself. In contrast, they have coded privacy, diminished
expectations, subjectivism, individuality,
and collective culture which lie beyond the boundaries
of our own world,“ describing them as the “yet
unrealized, collective, and decentered cultural production
of the future, beyond realism and modernism
alike“ (1980: 11). Scarcely a decade later, what
Jameson found to beyond modernism turned out to
be quite different from the collective and liberating
cultural he had sought.
particularity, and localism as the embodiments of
the good. As for narrative, the major historical
propositions of postmodernism - the decline of the
grand narrative and the return to the local (Lyotard
1984), the rise of the empty symbol, or simulacrum
(Baudrillard 1983), the end of socialism
(Gorz 1982), the emphasis on plurality and difference
(Seidman 1991,1992) - are transparent representations
of a deflationary narrative frame. They
are responses to the decline of “progressive“ ideologies
and their utopian beliefs.
The resemblances to radical antimodernism, then,
are superficial and misleading. In fact, there is a
much more significant connection between postmodernism
and the period that preceded radicalism,
that is, modernization theory itself. Modernization
theory, we recall, was itself a deflationary
ideology following an earlier heroic period of radical
quest. It, too, contained emphases on the private,
the personal, and the local.
While these similarities reveal how misleading the
intellectual self-representations of intellectual ideologies
can be, it is obviously true that the two approaches
differ in fundamental ways. These differences
emerge from their positions in concrete historical
time. The postwar liberalism that inspired
modernization theory followed upon a radical
movement that understood transcendence within a
progressivist frame, one which, while aiming to
radicalize modernism, hardly rejected it. Thus,
while the romantic and ironic dimensions of postwar
liberalism deflated heroic modernism, its
movement away from radicalism made central aspects
of modernism even more accessible.
Postmodernism, by contrast, followed upon a radical
intellectual generation which had condemned
not only liberal modernism but key tenets of the
very notion of modernization as such. The New
Left rejected the Old Left in part because it was
wedded to the modernization project; they preferred
the Frankfurt School (e.g., Jay 1970),
whose roots in German romanticism coincided
more neatly with its own, antimodernist tone.
While postmodernism, then, is indeed a deflationary
narrative vis-a-vis heroic radicalism, the specificity
of its historical position means that it must
place both heroic (radical) and romantic (liberal)
versions of the modem onto the same negative
side. Successor intellectuals tend to invert the binary
code of the previously hegemonic theory. For
postmodernism, the new code, modernism: postmodernism,
implied a larger break with “universalist“
Western values than did the traditionalism:
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modem, Anti, Post, and Neo 181
modernism of the immediate postwar period or the
capitalist modernism: socialist anti-modernization
dichotomy that succeeded it.34
In narrative terms as well there are much greater
deflationary shifts. Although there remains, to be
sure, a romantic tenor in some strands of postmodernist
thought, and even collectivist arguments
for heroic liberation, these “constructive“ versions
(Thompson 1992; Rosenau 1992) focus on the personal
and the intimate and tend to be offshoots of
social movements of the 1960s, e.g., gay and lesbian
“struggles,“ the women’s “movement,“ and the
ecology activists like Greens. Insofar as they do
engage public policy, such movements articulate
their demands much more in the language of difference
and particularism (e.g., Seidman 1991 and
1992) than in the universalistic terms of the collective
good. The principal, and certainly the most
distinctive thrust of the postmodern narrative,
moreover, is strikingly different. Rejecting not only
heroism but romanticism as well, it tends to be
more fatalistic, critical, and resigned, in short
more comically agnostic, than these more political
movements of uplift and reform suggest. Rather
than upholding the authenticity of the individual,
postmodernism announced, via Foucault and Derrida,
the death of the subject. In Jameson’s (1988:
15) words, “the conception of a unique self and
private identity [are] thing[s] of the past.“Another
departure from the earlier, more romantic version
of modernism is the singular absence of irony. Rorty’s
political philosophy is a case in point. Because
he espouses irony and complexity (e.g., Rorty
1985,1989), he maintains a political if not an epistemological
liberalism, and because of these commitments
he must distance himself from the postmodernist
frame.
Instead of romance and irony, what has emerged
full blown in postmodernism is the comic frame.
Frye calls comedy the ultimate equalizer. Because
good and evil cannot be parsed, the actors - protagonists
and antagonists - are on the same moral
level, and the audience, rather than being normat­
34 Postmodern theorists are fond of tracing their antimodern
roots to Romanticism, to anti-Enlightenment
figures like Nietzsche, to Simmel, and to
themes articulated by the early Frankfurt school. Yet
the earlier, more traditionally Marxist rebellion
against modernization theory often traced its lineage
in similar ways. As Seidman (1983) demonstrated before
his postmodern turn, Romanticism itself had
significant universalizing strains, and between
Nietzsche and Simmel there exists a fundamental disagreement
over the evaluation of modernity itself.
ively or emotionally involved, can sit back and be
amused. Baudrillard (1983) is the master of satire
and ridicule, as the entire Western world becomes
Disneyland at large. In the postmodern comedy,
indeed, the very notion of actors is eschewed. With
tongue in cheek but a new theoretical system in his
mind, Foucault announced the death of the subject,
a theme that Jameson canonized with his announcement
that “the conception of a unique self
and private identity [are] thing[s] of the past.“
Postmodernism is the play within the play, an historical
drama designed to convince its audiences
that drama is dead and that history no longer exists.
What remains is nostalgia for a symbolized
past.
Perhaps we may end this discussion with a snapshot
of Daniel Bell, the intellectual whose career
neatly embodies each of the scientific-cummythical
phases of history I have thus far described.
Bell came to intellectual selfconsciousness
as a Trotskyist in the 1930s. For a
time after World War II he remained in the heroic
anticapitalist mode of figures like C. Wright Mills,
whom he welcomed as a colleague at Columbia
University. His famous essay on the assembly line
and deskilled labor (1962b [1956, 1947]) demonstrated
continuity with prewar leftist work. By insisting
on the concept of alienation, Bell committed
himself to “capitalism“ rather than “industrialism,“
thus championing epochal transformation
and resisting the postwar modernization line.
Soon, however, Bell made the transition to realism,
advocating modernism in a more romantically
individualist than radical socialist way. Although
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society appeared
only in 1973, Bell had introduced the concept as an
extension of Aron’s industrialization thesis nearly
two decades before. Postindustrial was a periodization
that supported progress, modernization,
and reason while undermining the possibilities for
heroic transcendence and class conflict. Appearing
in the midst of antimodernist rebellion, The Coming
of Post-Industrial Society was reviewed with
perplexity and disdain by many intellectuals on the
antimodernist left, although its oblique relationship
with theories of postscarcity society were
sometimes noted as well.
What is so striking about this phase of Bell’s career,
however, is how rapidly the modernist notion of
post-industrial society gave way to postmodernism,
in content if not explicit form. For Bell, of
course, it was not disappointed radicalism that
produced this shift but his disappointments with
what he came to call late modernism. When Bell
182 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
turned away from this degenerate modernism in
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, his story
had changed. Post-industrial society, once the
epitome of modernism, now produced, not reason
and progress, but emotionalism and irrationalism,
categories alarmingly embodied in sixties youth
culture. Bell’s solution to this imminent selfdestruction
of Western society was to advocate the
return of the sacred (1977), a solution that exhibited
the nostalgia for the past that Jameson would
later diagnose as a certain sign of the coming of the
postmodern age.
The comparison of Bell’s postindustrial argument
with Harvey’s post-Fordism (1989) is revealing in
this regard. Harvey takes similar developments in
the productive arrangements of high-information
capitalism but draws a far different conclusion
about their effects on the consciousness of the age.
Bell’s anti-Marxism - his (1978) emphasis on the
asynchronicity of systems - allows him to posit rebellion
in the form of youth culture and to posit
cultural salvation in the ideal of “the sacred return“
(cf., Eliade 1954). Harvey’s continued commitment
to orthodox base-superstructure reasoning,
by contrast, leads him to postulate fragmentation
and privatization as inevitable, and unstoppable,
results of the post-Fordist productive mode.
Bell’s conservative attack on modernism embraces
nostalgia; Harvey’s radical attack on postmodernism
posits defeat.
Postmodern theory is still, of course, very much in
the making. As I have already mentioned, its middle
range formulations contain significant truths.
Evaluating the importance of its general theorizing,
by contrast, depends upon whether one places
poststructuralism under its wing.35*Certainly theo-
35 It depends upon a number of other contingent decisions
as well, for example upon ignoring postmodernism’s
own claim that it does not have or advocate a
general theory. (See, e.g., my exchange with Seidman
[Alexander 1991 and Seidman 1991].) There is,
in addition, the much more general problem of
whether postmodernism can even be spoken of as a
single point of view. I have taken the position here
that it can be so discussed, even while I have acknowledged
the diversity of points of view within jt.
There is no doubt, indeed, that each of the four theories
I examine here only exists, as such, via an act of
hermeneutical reconstruction. Such an ideal-type
methodology is, I would argue, not only philosophically
justifiable (e.g., Gadamer 1975) but intellectually
unavoidable, in the sense that the hermeneutics
of common sense continually refers to “postmodernism“
as such. Nonetheless, these considerations
lists of the strong linguistic turn - thinkers like
Foucault, Bourdieu, Geertz, and Rorty - began to
outline their understandings long before postmodernism
appeared on the scene. Nevertheless,
their emphasis on relativism and constructivism,
their principled antagonism to an identification
with the subject, and their skepticism regarding
the possibility of totalizing change make their contributions
more compatible with postmodernism
than either modernism or radical antimodernization.
Indeed, these theorists wrote in response to
their disappointment with modernism (Geertz and
Rorty vis-a-vis Parsons and Quine), on the one
hand, and heroic antimodernism (Foucault and
Bourdieu vis-a-vis Althusser and Sartre), on the
other. Nonetheless, Geertz and Bourdieu can
scarcely be called postmodern theorists, and
strong culturalist theories cannot be identified with
the broad ideological sentiments that term postmodernism
implies.
I would maintain here, as I have earlier in this paper,
that scientific considerations are insufficient to
account for shifts either towards or away from an
intellectual position. If, as I believe to be the case,
the departure from postmodernism has already begun,
we must look closely, once again, at extrascientific
considerations, at recent events and social
changes that seem to demand yet another new
“world-historical frame.“
5. Neo-Modernism:
Dramatic Inflation and Universal
Categories
In postmodern theory intellectuals have represented
to themselves and to society at large their response
to the defeat of the heroic utopias of radical
social movements, a response that, while recognizing
defeat, did not give up the cognitive reference
to that utopic world. Every idea in postmodern
thought is a reflection upon the categories and
false aspirations of the traditional collectivist narrative,
and for most postmodernists the distopia of
the contemporary world is the semantic result. Yet,
while the hopes of Left intellectuals were dashed
by the late 1970s, the intellectual imagination of
others was rekindled. For when the Left lost, the
should not obscure the fact that a typification and
idealization is being made. In more empirical and
concrete terms, each historical period and each social
theory under review contained diverse patterns
and parts.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 183
Right won and won big. In the 1960s and 1970s,
the right was a backlash, reactive movement. By
1980 it had become triumphant and began to initiate
far-reaching changes in Western societies. A
fact that has been conveniently overlooked by
each of the three intellectual generations we have
considered thus far - and most grievously by the
postmodernist movement that was historically coterminous
with it - is that the victory of the neoliberal
Right had, and continues to have, massive
political, economic, and ideological repercussions
around the globe.
The most striking “success“ for the Right was, indeed,
the defeat of Communism, which was not
only a political, military, and economic victory but,
as I suggested in the introduction to this essay, a
triumph on the level of the historical imagination
itself. Certainly there were objective economic elements
in the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union, including
growing technological deficiencies, sinking
export proceeds, and the impossibility of finding
desperately needed capital funds by switching to a
strategy of internal growth (Muller 1992: 139). Yet
the final economic breakdown had a political
cause, for it was the computer-based military expansion
of America and its NATO allies, when
combined with the right-wing inspired technology
boycott, that brought the Soviet party dictatorship
to its economic and political knees. While the lack
of access to documents makes any definitive judgment
decidedly premature, there seems no doubt
that these policies were, in fact, among the principal
strategic goals of the Reagan and Thatcher governments,
and that they were achieved with signal
effect.36
This extraordinary, and almost completely unexpected
triumph over what once seemed not only a
socially but an intellectually plausible alternative
36 The link between Glasnost and Perestroika and President
Ronald Reagan’s military build-up - particularly
his StarWars project - has been frequently stressed
by former Soviet officials who participated in the
transition that began in 1985. For example:
“Former top soviet officials said Friday that the implications
of then-President Reagan’s “Star Wars“
proposal and the Chernobyl accident combined to
change Soviet arms policy and help end the Cold
War. Speaking at Princeton university during a conference
on the end of the Cold War, the officials said
•.. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was convinced
that any attempt to match Reagan’s Strategic
Defense Initiative of 1983 ... could do irreparable
harm to the Soviet economy.“ (Reuters News Service.
February, 27, 1993)
world (see pp. 166f, above) has had the same kind
of destabilizing, de-ontologizing effects on many
intellectuals as the other massive historical
“breaks“ I have discussed above. It has created, as
well, the same sense of imminence and the conviction
that the “new world“ in the making demands
a new and very different kind of social theory.37*
This negative triumph over state socialism has
been reinforeced, morever, by the dramatic series
of “positive successes“ during the 1980s for aggressively
capitalist market economies. This has been
most often remarked upon (most recently by Kennedy
1993) in connection with the NIC’s, the newly
industrialized, extraordinarily dynamic Asian
economies which have arisen in what was once called
the Third World. It is important not to underestimate
the ideological effects of this worldhistorical
fact: high level, sustainable transformations
of backward economies were achieved not by
socialist command economies but by zealously
capitalist states.
What has often been overlooked, however, is that
during this same time frame the capitalist market
was also reinvigorated, both symbolically and ob-
37 This sense of fundamental, boundary-destroying
break is clearly exhibited in the recent work of Kenneth
Jowitt, which searches for biblical imagery to
communicate a sense of how widespread and threatening
is the contemporary genuine intellectual dis­
orientation:
“For nearly half a century, the boundaries of international
politics and the identities of its national participants
have been directly shaped by the presence of a
Leninist regime world centered in the Soviet Union.
The Leninist extinction of 1989 poses a fundamental
challenge to these boundaries and identities...
Boundaries are an essential component of a recognizable
and coherent identity ... The attenuation of
or dissolution of boundaries is more often than not a
traumatic event - all the more so when boundaries
have been organized and understood in highly categorical
terms ... The Cold war was a “Joshua“ period,
one of dogmatically centralized boundaries and
identities. In contrast to the biblical sequence, the
Leninist extinction of 1989 has moved the world from
a Joshua to a Genesis environment: from one centrally
organized, rigidly bounded, and hysterically
concerned with impenetrable boundaries to one in
which territorial, ideological, and issue boundaries
are attenuated, unclear, and confusing. We now inhabit
a world that, while not “without form and
void,“ is one in which the major imperatives are the
same as in Genesis, “naming and bounding.““
Jowitt comparies the world-reshaping impact of the
vents of 1989 with those of the Battle of Hastings in
1066.
184 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
jectively, in the capitalist West. This transpired not
only inThatcherite England and Reaganite America,
but perhaps even more dramatically in the
more “progressive“ and interventionist regimes
like France and, subsequently, in countries like Italy,
Spain, and even more recently, in Scandinavia
itself. Not only was there, in other words, the obvious
and ideologically portentous bankruptcy of
most of the world’s Communist economies, but
there was the marked privatization of nationalized
capitalist economies in both authoritariancorporatist
and socialist-democratic states. The
world-wide recession that followed the longest period
of sustained growth in capitalist history does
not seem to have dampened the revival of market
commitments, as the recent triumph of Clinton’s
neoliberalism in the United States demonstrates
very well. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the intellectual
successors to modernization theory, neoMarxists
like Baran and Sweezy (1964) and Mandel
(1968), announced the imminent stagnation of
capitalist economies and an inevitably declining
rate of profit.38 History has proved them wrong,
with far-reaching ideological results (Chirot 1992).
“Rightward“ developments on the more specifically
political plane have been as far-reaching as those
on the economic. As I mentioned earlier, during
the late 1960s and 1970s it had become ideologically
fashionable, and empirically justifiable, to accept
political authoritarianism as the price of economic
development. In the last decade, however,
events on the ground seem to have challenged this
38 One of the little noticed battle grounds of intellectual
ideology over the last 30 years has been the “shopping
center,“ a.k.a. “the mall.“ Making its appearance
after World War II in the United States, it came
to represent for many conservative liberals the continuing
vitality - contrary to the dire predictions of
Marxist thought in the 1930s - of “small business“
and the “petit bourgeoisie.“ Later, neo-Marxists like
Mandel devoted a great deal of space to the shopping
centers, suggesting that this new form of organization
had staved off capitalism’s ultimate economic
stagnation, describing it as the organizational equivalent
of advertising’s “artificial creation“ of “false
needs.“ In the 1980s, these same sprawling congeries
of mass capitalism, now transformed into upscale but
equally plebeian malls, became the object of attack
from postmodernists, who saw them not as wily stop
gaps to stagnation but as perfect representations of
the fragmentation, commercialism, privatism, and
retreatism that marked the end of Utopian hope (and
possibly of history itself). The most famous example
of the latter is Jameson (e.g., 1988) on the LosAngeles
Bonaventure Hotel.
view, and a radical reversal of conventional wisdom
is now underway. It is not only Communist
tyrannies that have opened up since the mid-1980s,
but the very Latin American dictatorships that
seemed so “objectively necessary“ only an intellectual
generation before. Even African dictatorships
have recently begun to show signs of vulnerability
to this shift in political discourse from authoritarianism
to democracy.
These developments have created social conditions
- and mass public sentiment - that would seem to
belie the postmodern intellectuals’ coding of contemporary
(and future) society as fatalistic, private,
particularistic, fragmented, and local. They
also would appear to undermine the deflated narrative
frame of postmodernism, which has insisted
either on the romance of difference or, more fundamentally,
on the idea that contemporary life can
only be interpreted in a comic way. And, indeed, if
we look closely at recent intellectual discourse, we
can observe, in fact, a return to many earlier, modernist
themes.
Because the recent revivals of market and democracy
have occurred on a world-wide scale, and because
they are categorically abstract and generalizing
ideas, universalism has once again become a viable
source for social theory. Notions of commonality
and institutional convergence have reemerged,
and with them the possibilities for intellectuals
to provide meaning in an utopian way.39It
seems, in fact, that we are witnessing the birth of a
39 For example in his recent plea to fellow members of
the academic Left - many if not most of whom are
now postmodern in their promotion of difference
and particularism - Todd Gitlin argues not only that
a renewal of the project of universalism is necessary
to preserve a viable critical intellectual politics but
that such a movement has already begun:
“If there is to be a Left in more than a sentimental
sense, its position ought to be: This desire for human
unity is indispensable. The ways, means, basis, and
costs are a subject for disciplined conversation ...
Now, alongside the indisputable premise that knowledge
of many kinds is specific to time, place, and interpretive
community, thoughtful critics are placing
the equally important premise that there are unities
in the human condition and that, indeed, the existence
of common understandings is the basis of all
communication (= making common) across boundaries
of language and history and experience. Today,
some of the most exciting scholarship entails efforts
to incorporate new and old knowledge together in
unified narratives. Otherwise there is no escape from
solipsism, whose political expression cannot be the
base of liberalism or radicalism.“ (Gitlin 1993:36-7).
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 185
fourth postwar version of myothopeic social
thought. “Neo-modernism“ (cf. Tiryakian 1991)
will serve as a rough-and-ready characterization of
this phase of postmodernization theory until a
term appears that represents the new spirit of the
times in a more imaginative way.
In response to economic developments, different
groupings of contemporary intellectuals have reinflated
the emancipatory narrative of the market,
in which they emplot a new past (antimarket society)
and a new present/future (market transition,
full-blown capitalism) that makes liberation dependent
upon privatization, contracts, monetary
inequality, and competition. On one side, a much
enlarged and more activist breed of intellectual
conservatives has emerged. Although their policy
and political concerns have not, as yet, greatly affected
the discourse of general social theory, there
are exceptions that indicate the potential is there.
James Coleman’s massive Foundations of Social
Theory (1989), for example, has a self-consciously
heroic cast; it aims to make neo-market, rational
choice the basis not only for future theoretical
work but for the re-creation of a more responsive,
law-abiding, and less degraded social life.40
Much more significant is the fact that within liberal
intellectual life, among the older generation of disillusioned
Utopians and the younger intellectual
groups as well, a new and positive social theory of
markets has reappeared. For many politically engaged
intellectuals, too, this has taken the theoretical
form of the individualistic, quasi-romantic
frame of rational choice. Employed initially to
deal with the disappointing failures of working
class consciousness (e.g., Wright 1985 and Pzeworski
1985; cf. Elster 1989), it has increasingly
served to explain how state communism, and capitalist
corporatism, can be transformed into a
market-oriented system that is liberating or, at
least, substantively rational (Pzeworski 1991,
Moene/Wallerstein 1992, Nee 1989). While other
politically engaged intellectuals have appropriated
market ideas in less restrictive and more collectivist
ways (e.g., Szelenyi 1988, Friedland/Robertson
1990), their writings, too, betray an enthusiasm for
40 The massive negative response among contemporary
social theorists to Coleman’s tome - the review symposium
in Theory and Society (e.g., Alexander 1991)
is not an untyptical example - is less an indication
that rational choice theory is being massively rejected
than an expression of the fact that neo-modernism
is not, at this time, sympathetic to a conservative political
tilt. This may not be true in the future.
market processes that is markedly different from
the left-leaning intellectuals of earlier times.
Among the intellectual advocates of “market socialism,“
there has been a similar change. Kornai,
for example, has expressed distinctly fewer reservations
about free markets in his more recent writings
than in the path-breaking works of the 1970s
and 1980s that brought him to fame.
This neo-modern revival of market theory is also
manifest in the rebirth and redefinition of economic
sociology. In terms of research program, Granovetter’s
(1974) earlier celebration of the strengths
of the market’s “weak ties“ has become a dominant
paradigm for studying economic networks
(e.g., Powell 1991), one that implicitly rejects
postmodern and antimodern pleas for strong ties
and local communities. His later argument for the
“imbeddedness“ (1985) of economic action has
transformed (e.g., Granovetter and Swedberg
1992) the image of the market into a social and interactional
relationship that has little resemblance
to the deracinated, capitalist exploitator of the
past. Similar transformations can be seen in more
generalized discourse. Adam Smith has been undergoing
an intellectual rehabilitation (Hall 1986;
Heilbroner 1986; Boltanski/Thevenot 1991: 60-84;
Boltanski 1993: 38-98). Shumpter’s “market realism“
has been revived; the individaulism of Weber’s
marginalist economics has been celebrated
(Holton/Turner 1989); so has the marketacceptance
that permeates Parsons’ theoretical
work (Turner/Holton 1986 and Holton 1992).
In the political realm, neo-modernism has
emerged in an even more powerful way, as a result,
no doubt, of the fact that it has been the political
revolutions of the last decade that have reintroduced
narrative in a truly heroic form and challenged
the postmodern deflation in the most direct
way. The movements away from dictatorship, motivated
in practice by the most variegated of concerns,
have been articulated mythically as a vast,
unfolding “drama of democracy“ (Sherwood
1994), literally as an opening up of the spirit of humanity.
The melodrama of social good triumphing,
or almost triumphing, over social evil - which Peter
Brooke (1984) so brilliantly discovered to be
the root of the nineteenth century narrative form has
populated the symbolic canvas of the late 20century
West with heroes and conquests of truly
world-historical scope. This drama started with the
epochal struggle of Lech Walesa, and what seemed
to be virtually the entire Polish nation (Tiryakian
1988) against Poland’s coercive party-state. The
day-to-day dramaturgy that captured public imagi­
186 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
nation ended initially in Solidarity’s inexplicable
defeat. Eventually, however, good did triumph
over evil, and the dramatic symmetry of the heroic
narrative was complete. Mikhail Gorbachev began
his long march through the Western dramatic imagination
in 1984. His increasingly loyal world-wide
audience fiercely followed his epochal struggles in
what eventually became the longest running public
drama in the postwar period. This grand narrative
- which might be entitled “The Making, Unmaking,
and Resurrection of an American Hero: Gorbachev
and the Discourse of the Good“ (Alexander/Sherwood,
ms.) - produced cathartic reactions
in its audience, which the press called “Gorbymania“
and Dürkheim would have labelled the
collective effervescence that only symbols of the
sacred inspire. This drama was reprised in what the
mass publics, media, and elites of Western countries
construed as the equally heroic achievements
of Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, and later of
Boris Yeltsin, the tank-stopping hero who succeeded
Gorbachev in Russia’s post-Communist phase
(Alexander/Sherwood 1992). Similar experiences
of exaltation and renewed faith in the moral efficacy
of democratic revolution were produced by the
social drama that took place in 1989 in Hanamen
Square, with its strong ritualistic overtones (Chan
1994) and its classically tragic denouement.
It would be astonishing if this reinflation of mass
political drama did not manifest itself in equally
marked shifts in intellectual theorizing about politics.
In fact, in a manner that parallels the rise of
the “market,“ there has been the powerful reemergence
of theorizing about democracy. Liberal
ideas about political life, which emerged in the
eighteen and nineteenth centuries and which were
displaced by the “social question“ of the great industrial
transformation, seem like contemporary
ideas again. Dismissed as historically anachronistic
in the anti- and post-modern decades, they have
become quite suddenly ä la mode (cf., Alexander
1991).
This re-emergence has taken the form of the revival
of the concept of “civil society,“ the informal,
non-state, and non-economic realm of public and
personal life that Tocqueville, for example, defined
as vital to the maintenance of the democratic
state. Rising initially from within the intellectual
debates that helped spark the social struggles
against authoritarianism in Eastern Europe (cf.,
Arato and Cohen 1992) and Latin American (Stepan
1985), the term was “secularized“ and given
more abstract and more universal meaning by
American and European intellectuals who were
connected with these movements, like Cohen and
Arato and Keane (1989ab). Subsequently, they utilized
the concept to begin theorizing in a manner
that sharply demarcated their own “left“ theorizing
from the anti-modernization, anti-formal democracy
writings of an earlier day.
Stimulated by these writers and also by the English
translation (1989) of Habermas’s early book on the
bourgeois public sphere, debates about pluralism,
fragmentation, differentiation, and participation
have become the new order of the day. Frankfurt
theorists, Marxist social historians, and even some
post-modernists have become democratic theorists
under the sign of the “public sphere“ (see, e.g.,
the essays by Postpone, Ryan, and Eley in Calhoun
1992 and the more recent writings of Held,
e.g., 1987).41*Communitarian and internalist political
philosophers, like Walzer (1991, 1992), have
taken up the concept to clarify the universalist yet
non-abstract dimensions in their theorizing about
the good. For conservative social theorists (e.g.,
Banfield forthcoming, Wilson forthcoming, and
Shils 1991 and forthcoming), civil society is a concept
that implies civility and harmony. For neofunctionalists
(e.g., Sciulli 1992, Mayhew 1992,
and Alexander 1992), it is an idea that denotes the
possibility of theorizing conflicts over equality and
inclusion in a less anticapitalist way. For old functionalists
(e.g., Inkeles 1991), it is an idea that suggests
that formal democracy has been a requisite
for modernization all along.
But whatever the particular perspective that has
framed this new political idea, its neo-modern status
is plain to see. Theorizing in this manner suggests
that contemporary societies either possess,
or must aspire to, not only an economic market but
a distinctive political zone, an institutional field of
universal if contested domain (Touraine 1994). It
provides a common empirical point of referent,
which implies a familiar coding of citizen and ene­
41 There is clear evidence that this transformation is
world-wide in scope. In Quebec, for example, Arnaud
Sales, who worked earlier in a strongly Marxist
tradition, now insists on a universal relatedness
among conflict groups and incorporates the language
of “public“ and “civil society“:
“If, in their multiplicity, associations, unions, corporations,
and movements have always defended
and represented very diversified opinions, it is probable
that, despite the power of economic and statist
systems, the proliferation of groups founded on a tradition,
a way of life, an opinion or a protest has probably
never been so broad and so divesified as it is at
the end of the twentieth century.“ (Sales 1991: 308).
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 187
my, and allows history to be narrated, once again,
in a teleological manner that gives the drama of
democracy full force.
6. Neo-Modernism and Social Evil:
Nationalism as Polluted Representation
This problem of the demarcation of civil as opposed
to uncivil society points to issues that go beyond
the narrating and explanatory frameworks of
neo-modern theory that I have described thus far.
Romantive and heroic narratives that describe the
triumph, or possible triumph, of markets and democracies
have a reassuringly familiar form. When
we turn to the binary coding of this emerging historical
period, however, certain problems arise.
Given the resurgence of universalism, of course,
one can be confident that what is involved is a
specification of the master code, described earlier
as the discourse of civil society. Yet, while this almost
archetypical symbolization of the requisites
and antonyms of democracy establishes general
categories, historically specific “social representations“
(Moscovici 1984) must also be developed to
articulate the concrete categories of good and evil
in a particular time and place. In regard to these
secondary elaborations, what strikes one is how
difficult it has been to develop a set of binary categories
that is semantically and socially compelling,
a black-versus-white contrast that can function as a
successor code to postmodern: modern or, for that
matter, to the socialist: capitalist and modern: traditional
symbolic sets that were established by earlier
intellectual generations, and which by no
means have entirely lost their efficacy today.42
To be sure, the symbolization of the good does not
present a real problem. Democracy and universalism
are key terms, and their more substantive embodiments
are free market, individualism, and human
rights. The problem comes in establishing the
profane side. The abstract qualities that pollution
must embody are obvious enough. Because they
are produced by the principle of difference, they
closely resemble the qualities that were opposed to
modernization in the postwar period, qualities that
identified the pollution of “traditional“ life. But
despite the logical similarities, earlier ideological
formulations cannot simply be taken up again.
Even if they effectuate themselves only through
42 See my earlier remarks (n. 28, above) on the inertial
effects of intellectual ideologies and on the social
conditions that exacerbate them.
differences in second order representations, the
differences between present day society and the
immediate postwar period are enormous. Faced
with the rapid onrush of “markets“ and “democracy,“
and the rapid collapse of their opposites, it has
proven difficult to formulate equally universal and
far-reaching representations of the profane. The
question is this: Is there an oppositional movement
or geo-political force that is a convincingly and
fundamentally dangerous, that is a “worldhistorical“
threat to the “good“? The once powerful
enemies of universalism seemed to be historical
relics, out of sight and out of mind, laid low by an
historical drama that seems unlikely soon to be reversed.
It was for this semantic reason that, in the
interim period after “1989“, many intellectuals,
and certainly broad sections of Western publics,
experienced a strange combination of optimism
and self-satisfaction, energetic commitment and
moral disrepair.
In comparison with the modernization theory of
the postwar years, neo-modern theory involves
fundamental shifts in both symbolic time and symbolic
space. In neo-modern theory, the profane
can neither be represented by an evolutionarily
preceding period of traditionalism nor identified
with the world outside of North America and Europe.
In contrast with the postwar modernization
wave, the current one is global and inter-national
rather than regional and imperial, a difference articulated
in social science by the contrast between
early theories of dependency (Frank 1966) and
more contemporary theories of globalization
(Robertson 1992). The social and economic reasons
for this change center on the rise of Japan,
which this time around has gained power, not as
one of Spencer’s military societies - a category that
could be labelled backward in an evolutionary
sense - but as a civilized commercial society.
Thus, for the first time in 500 years (see Kennedy
1987), it has become impossible for the West to
dominate Asia, either economically or culturally.
When this objective factor is combined with the
pervasive de-Christianization of Western intellectuals,
we can understand the remarkable fact that
“orientalism“ - the symbolic pollution of Eastern
civilization that Said (1978) articulated so tellingly
scarcely more than a decade ago - seems no longer
to be a forceful spatial or temporal representation
in Western ideology or social theory, although it
has by no means entirely disappeared.43A social
43 This would seem, at first glance, to confirm Said’s
quasi-Märxist insistence that it was the rise of the
188 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
scientific translation of this ideological fact, which
points the way to a post- postmodern, or neomodern
code, is Eisenstadt’s (1987: vii) call for “a
far-reaching reformulation of the vision of modernization,
and of modem civilizations.“ While
continuing to code modern in a thoroughly positive
way, this conceptualization explains it, not as
the end of an evolutionary sequence, but as a highly
successfully globalizing movement.
Instead of perceiving modernization as the final stage in
the fulfillment of the evolutionary potential common to
all societies - of which the European experience was the
most important and succinct manifestation and paradigm
- modernization (or modernity) should be viewed
as one specific civilization or phenomenon. Originating
in Europe, it has spread in its economic, political and
ideological aspects all over the world ... The crystallization
of this new type of civilization was not unlike the
spread of the great religions, or the great imperial expansions,
but because modernization almost always
combined economic, political, and ideological aspects
and forces, its impact was by far the greatest, (ibid.)
Original modernization theory transformed Weber’s
overtly Western-centric theory of world religions
into a universal account of of global change
that still culminated in the social structure and culture
of the postwar Western world. Eisenstadt proposes
to make modernization itself the historical
equivalent of a world religion, which relativizes it,
on the one hand, and suggests the possibility of selective
indigenous appropriation (Hannerz 1987),
on the other.
The other side of this decline of orientalism among
Western theorists is what seems to be the virtual
disappearance of “third world-ism“ - what might
be called occidentalism - from the vocabulary of
intellectuals who speak from within, or on behalf
of, developing countries. A remarkable indication
of this discursive shift can be found in an opinion
piece that Edward Said published in the New York
Times protesting the imminent Allied air war
against Iraq in early 1991. While reiterating the familiar
characterization of American policy toward
Iraq as the result of an “imperialist ideology,“ Said*
West’s actual power in the world - imperialism - that
allowed the ideology of orientalism to proceed. What
Said does not recognize, however, is that there is a
more general code of sacred and profane categories
of which the “social representations“ of orientalism
is an historically specific subset. The discourse of civil
society is an ideological formation that proceeded
imperialism and that informed the pollution of diverse
categories of historically encountered others Jews,
woman, slaves, proletarians, homosexuals,
and more generally enemies - in quite similar terms.
justified his opposition not by pointing to the distinctive
worth of national or political ideology but
by upholding universality: “Anew world order has
to be based on authentically general principles, not
on the selectively applied might of one country“
(Said 1991). More significantly, Said denounced
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the “Arab
world,“ representing them in particularizing categories
that polluted them as the enemies of universalism
itself.
The traditional discourse of Arab nationalism, to say
nothing of the quite decrepit state system, is inexact, unresponsive,
anomalous, even comic ... Today’s Arab
media are a disgrace. It is difficult to speak the plain
truth in the Arab world ... Rarely does one find rational
analysis - reliable statistics, concrete and undoctored
descriptions of the Arab world today with its ... crushing
mediocrity in science and many cultural fields. Allegory,
complicated symbolism and innuendo substitute
for common sense, (ibid.)
Wlien Said concludes that there appears to be a
“remorseless Arab propensity to violence and extremism,“
the end of occidentalism seems com­
plete.
Because the contemporary re-coding of the antithesis
of universalism can be geographically represented
neither as nonWestern nor temporally located
in an earlier time, the social sacred of neomodernism
cannot, paradoxically, be represented
as “modernization.“ In the ideological discourse of
contemporary intellectuals, it would seem almost
as difficult to employ this term as it is to identify
the good with “socialism.“ Not modernization but
democratization, not the modern but the market these
are the terms that the new social movements
of the neo-modern period employ. These difficulties
in representation help to explain the new saliency
of non-national, international organizations
(Thomas/Louderdale 1988), a salience that points,
in turn, to elements of what the long-term representation
of a viable ideological antinomy might
be. For European and American intellectuals, and
for those from outside of the West as well, the
United Nations and European Community have
taken on new legitimacy and reference, providing
institutional manifestations of the new universalism
that transcend earlier great divides.
The logic of these telling institutional and cultural
shifts is that “nationalism“ - not traditionalism,
communism, or the “East“ - is coming to represent
the principal challenge to the newly universalized
discourse of the good. Nationalism is the
name intellectuals and publics are now increasingly
giving to the negative antinomies of civil society.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 189
The categories of the “irrational,“ “conspiratorial,“
and “repressive“ are taken to be synonymous
with forceful expressions of nationality, and equated
with primordiality and uncivilized social forms.
That civil societies have always themselves taken a
national form is being conveniently neglected,
along with the continuing nationalism of many
democratic movements themselves.44It is true, of
course, that in the geo-political world that has so
suddenly been re-formed, it is the social movements
and armed rebellions for national selfdetermination
that trigger military conflicts that
can engender large scale wars.
Is it any wonder, then, that nationalism is now routinely
portrayed as the successor of communism,
not only in the semantic but in the organizational
sense? This equation is made by high intellectuals,
not only in the popular press. “Far from extinguishing
nationalism,“ Liah Greenfeld (1992)
wrote recently in The New Republic, “communism
perpetuated and reinforced the old nationalist values.
And the intelligentsia committed to these values
is now turning on the democratic regime it inadvertently
helped to create.“
The democratic intelligentsia, which took shape in opposition
to the Communist state, is, in fact, much more
motivated by nationalist than by democratic concerns
... To accomplish a transition from communism to democracy,
Russia needs to renounce the traditions that
made communism possible: the anti-democratic values
of its nationalism, (ibid.)
It does not seem surprising that some of the most
promising younger generation of American social
theorists have shifted from concerns with modernization,
critical theory, and citizenship to issues of
identity and nationalism. In addition to Greenfeld,
one might note the new work of Rogers Brubaker,
whose studies of central European and Russian nationalism
(e.g., Brubaker 1994) make similar links
between Soviet communism and contemporary nationalism,
although from a less culturalist, more
neo-institutional perspective. One might note also
some of the recent writings of Craig Calhoun (e.g.,
1992).
44 Exceptions to this amnesia can, however, be found in
the current debate, particularly among those French
social theorists who remain strongly influenced by
the Republicain tradition. See, for example, Michel
Wieviorka’s (1993: 23-70) lucid argument for a contested
and double-sided understanding of nationalism
and Dominique Schnapper’s (1994) powerful defense
of the national character of the democratic
state. For another good recent statement of this
more balanced position, see Hall 1993.
It is the failure to confirm such a semantic and organizational
analogy with communism that has
prevented religious fundamentalism from occupying
a similar categorically polluting role. It has
been unable to do so despite the currency of
fundamentalism-versus-modernity in everyday
speech (e.g., Barber 1992) and the myriad examples
of its very real dangers to democracy, markets,
and social differentiation that are ready to hand.45
On the one hand, because intellectuals in democratic
nations are continually criticising the renewal
of fundamentalist forms of religiosity in their
democratic countries, it is difficult for them to
equate secular with democratic or to place fundamentalist
religiosity completely outside the pale of
democratic life. On the other hand, postcommunist
nations are not particularly fundamentalist; nor
has fundamentalism posed the same kind of real
politik basis for the renewal of large scale conflict
as the militant assertion of national rights.
In Winter, 1994, Theory and Society, a bellweather
of intellectual currents in Western social theory,
devoted a special issue to nationalism. In their introduction
to the symposium, John Comaroff and
Paul Stern make particularly vivid the link between
nationalism-as-pollution and nationalism-
as-object-of-social-science.
Nowhere have the signs of the quickening of contemporary
history, of our misunderstanding and misprediction
of the present, been more clearly expressed than in
the ... assertive renaissance of nationalisms ... World
events over the past few years have thrown a particularly
sharp light on the darker, more dangerous sides of nationalism
and claims to sovereign identity. And, in so doing,
they have revealed how tenuous is our grasp of the
phenomenon. Not only have these events confounded
the unsuspecting world of scholarship. They have also
shown a long heritage of social theory and prognostication
to be flatly wrong. (Comaroff and Stern 1994: 35)
While these theorists do not, of course, deconstruct
their empirical argument by explicitly relating
it to the rise of a new phase of myth and science, it
is noteworthy that they do insist on linking the new
understanding of nationalism to the rejection of
Marxism, modernization theory, and postmodern
thought (ibid., 35-37). In their own contribution
to this special revival issue, Greenfeld and Chirot
insist on the fundamental antithesis between democracy
and nationalism in the strongest terms.
After discussing Russia, Germany, Roumania, Syr-
45 Most recently, see Khosrokhavar’s (1993) illumating
discussion of how the negative utopia of shi’ite religion
undermine the more universalistic strains in the
Iranian revolution.
190 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
ia, Iraq, and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, they
write:
The cases we discuss here show that the association between
certain types of nationalism and aggressive, brutal
behavior is neither coincidental nor inexplicable. Nationalism
remains the world’s most powerful, general,
and primordial basis of cultural and political identity. Its
range is still growing, not diminishing, throughout the
world. And in most places, it does not take an individualistic
or civic form. (Greenfeld/Chirot 1994: 123).
The new social representation of nationalism and
pollution, based upon the symbolic analogy with
Communism, also has permeated the popular
press. Serbia’s expansionist military adventures
have provided a crucial field of collective representation.
See, for example, the categorical relationships
that are established in the following editorial
from the New York Times.
Communism can pass easily into nationalism. The two
creeds have much in common. Each offers a simple key
to tangled problems. One exalts class, the other ethnic
kinship. Each blames real grievances on imagined enemies.
As a Russian informant shrewdly remarked to David
Shipler in The New Yorker: “They are both ideologies
that liberate people from personal responsibility.
They are united around some sacred [read profane]
goal.“ In varying degrees and with different results, old
Bolsheviks have become new nationalists in Serbia and
many former Soviet republics.
The Times editorial writer further codes the historical
actors by analogizing the current break-up of
Czechoslovakia to the nationalism that preceded
it, and which ultimately issued from World War I.
And now the same phenomenon has surfaced in Czechoslovakia
... There is a ... moral danger, described long
ago by Thomas Masaryk, the founding president of
Czechoslovakia, whose own nationalism was joined inseparably
to belief in democracy. “Chauvinism is nowhere
justified,“ he wrote in 1927, “least of all in our
country ... To a positive nationalism, one that seeks to
raise a nation by intensive work, none can demur. Chauvinism,
racial or national intolerance, not love of one’s
own people, is the foe of nations and of humanity.“ Masaryk’s
words are a good standard for judging tolerance
on both sides. (June 16, 1992; reprinted in the International
Herald Tribune)
The analogy between nationalism and communism,
and their pollution as threats to the new internationalism,
is even made by government officials
of formerly Communist states. For example,
in late September, 1992, Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s
Foreign Minister, appealed to the United Nations
to consider setting up international trusteeships to
oversee the move to independence by former Soviet
non-Slavic republics. Only a UN connection, he
argued, could prevent the newly independent
states from discriminating against national minorities.
The symbolic crux of his argument is the analogy
between two categories of pollution. “Previously,
victims of totalitarian regimes and ideologies
needed protection,“ Kozyrev told the U.N.
General Assembly. “Today, ever more often one
needs to counter aggressive nationalism that
emerges as a new global threat.“46
7. Modernization Redux?
The Hubris of Linearity and the Dangers
of Theoretical Amnesia
In 1982 (p. 144), when Anthony Giddens confidently
asserted that “modernization theory is
based upon false premises,“ he was merely reiterating
the common social scientific sense of the day,
or at least his generation’s version of it. When he
added that the theory had “served ... as an ideological
defence of the dominance of Western capitalism
over the rest of the world,“ he reproduced
the common understanding of why this false theory
had once been believed. Today both these sentiments
seem anachronistic. Modernization theory
(e.g., Parsons 1963) stipulated that the great civilizations
of the world would converge towards the
institutional and cultural configurations ofWestern
society. Certainly we are witnessing something
very much like this process today, and the enthusiasm
it has generated is hardly imposed by Western
domination.
The sweeping ideological and objective transformations
described in the preceding section have
begun to have their theoretical effect, and the theoretical
gauntlet that the various strands of neomodernism
have thrown at the feet of postmodern
theory are plain to see. Shifting historical conditions
have created fertile ground for such postpostmodern
theorizing, and intellectuals have responded
to these conditions by revising their earlier
theories in creative and often far-reaching ways.
Certainly, it would be premature to call neomodernism
a “successor theory“ to postmodernism.
It has only recently become crystallized as an
intellectual alternative, much less emerged as the
46 In a telling observation on the paradoxical relationship
of nationalism to recent events, Wittrock (1991)
notes that when West Germany pressed for reunification,
it both affirmed the abstract universalism
of notions like freedom, law, and markets and, at
the same time, the ideology of nationalism in its most
particularistic, ethnic and linguistic sense, the notion
that the “German people“ could not be divided.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo 191
victor in this ideological-cum-theoretical fight. It is
unclear, further, whether the movement is nourished
by a new generation of intellectuals or by
fragments of currently competing generations who
have found in neo-modernism a unifying vehicle to
dispute the postmodern hegemony over the contemporary
field. Despite these qualifications, however,
it must be acknowledged that a new and very
different current of social theorizing has emerged
on the scene.
With this success, however, there comes the grave
danger of theoretical amnesia about the problems
of the past. Retrospective verifications of modernization
theory have begun in earnest. One of the
most fulsome and acute apologias appeared recently
in the European Journal ofSociology. “With
an apparently more acute sense of reality,“ Muller
(1992: 111) writes, “the sociological theory of modernity
had recorded the long-term developments
within the Eastern European area, currently taking
place in a more condensed form, long before
they were empirically verifiable.“ Muller adds, for
good measure, that “the grand theory constantly
accused of lacking contact with reality seemingly
proves to possess predictive capacity - the classical
sociological modernization theory of Talcott Parsons“
(ibid., original italics). Distinguished theorists
who were once neo-Marxist critics of capitalist
society, like Bryan Turner, have become believers,
defending Western citizenship (Turner 1986)
against radical egalitarianism and lauding Parsons
for his “anti-nostalgic“ endorsement (Holton/Turner
1986) of the basic structures of modern life.
Among former Communist apparatchiks themselves,
there is growing evidence (i.e., Borko cited
in Muller 1992: 112) that similar “retro-dictions“
about the convergence of capitalist and communist
societies are well underway, tendencies that have
caused a growing number of “revisits“ to Schumpeter
as well.
The theoretical danger here is that this enthusiastic
and long overdue re-appreciation of some of the
central thrusts of postwar social science might actually
lead to the revival of convergence and modernization
theories in their earlier forms. In his reflections
on the recent transitions in Eastern Europe,
Habermas (1990: 4) employs such evolutionary
phrases as “rewinding the reel“ and “rectifying
revolution.“ Inkeles’ (1991) recent tractatus to
American policy agencies is replete with such convergence
homilies as a political “party should not
seek to advance its objectives by extra political
means.“ Sprinkled with advice about “the importance
of locating ... the distinctive point where additional
resources can provide greatest leverage,“
the article displays the kind of over-confidence in
controlled social change that marked the hubris of
postwar modernization thought. When Lipset
(1990) claims the lesson of the second great transition
as the failure of the “middle way“ between
capitalism and socialism, he is no doubt correct in
an important sense, but the formulation runs the
danger of reinforcing the tendentious, either/or dichotomies
of earlier thinking in a manner that
could justify not only narrow self-congratulation
but unustified optimism about imminent social
change. Jeffrey Sachs and other simpliste expositors
of the “big bang“ approach to transition seem
to be advocating a rerun of Rostow’s earlier “takeoff“
theory. Like that earlier species of modernization
idea, this new monetarist modernism throws
concerns of social solidarity and citizenship, let
alone any sense of historical specificity (Leijonhofvud
1993), utterly to the winds.
While the recent social scientific formulations of
market and democracy discussed above avoid the
most egregious distortions of the kind I have just
described, the universalism of their categories, the
heroism of their Zeitgeist, and the dichotomous
strictures of their codes make the underlying problems
difficult to avoid. Theories of market transition,
even in the careful hands of a scholar as conscientious
as Victor Nee, sometimes suggests a linearity
and rationality that historical experience belies.
Civil society theory, despite the extraordinary
self-consciousness of philosophers like Cohen and
Walzer, seems unable to theorize empirically the
demonic, anti-civil forces of cultural life that it
normatively proscribes (cf., Alexander 1994 and
Sztompka 1991).
If there is to be a new and more successful effort at
constructing a social theory about the fundamentally
shared structures of contemporary societies
(cf., Sztompka 1993: 136-41), it will have to avoid
these regressive tendencies, which resurrect modernization
ideas in their most simplistic forms. Institutional
structures like democracy, law, and market
are functional requisites if certain social competencies
are to be achieved and certain resources
to be acquired; they are not, however, either historical
inevitabilities or linear outcomes, nor are
they social panaceas for the problems of noneconomic
subsystems or groups (see, e.g., Rueschemeyer
1992). Social and cultural differentiation
may be an ideal-typical pattern that can be analytically
reconstructed over time; however, whether or
not any particular differentiation occurs - market,
state, law, or science - depends on the normative
192 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 23, Heft 3, Juni 1994, S. 165-197
aspirations (e.g., Sztompka 1991), strategic position,
history and powers of particular social
groups. No matter how socially progressive in itself,
morever, differentiation displaces as much as
it resolves, and can create social upheaval on an
enormous scale. Social systems may well be pluralistic
and the causes of change multidimensional; at
any given time and in any given place, however, a
particular subsystem and the group that directs it economic,
political, scientific, or religious - may
successfully dominate and submerge the others in
its name. Globalization is, indeed, a dialectic of indigenization
and cosmopolitanism, but cultural
and political asymmetries remain between more
and less developed regions, even if they are not inherent
contradictions of some imperialistic fact.
While the analytic concept of civil society must by
all means be recovered from the heroic age of democratic
revolutions, it should be de-idealized so
that “anti-civil society“ - the countervailing processes
of decivilization, polarization, and violence
- can be seen also as typically “modern“ results.
Finally, these new theories must be pushed to
maintain a decentered, self-conscious reflexivity
about their ideological dimensions even while they
continue in their efforts to create a new explanatory
scientific theory. For only if they become aware
of themselves as moral constructions - as codes
and as narratives - will they be able to avoid the totalizing
conceit that gave early modernizing theory
such a bad name. In this sense, “neo-“ must incorporate
the linguistic turn associated with “post-“
modern theory, even while it challenges its ideological
and more broadly theoretical thrust.
In one of his last and most profound theoretical
meditations, Francois Bourricaud (1987: 19-21)
suggested that “one way of defining modernity is
the way in which we define solidarity.“ The notion
of modernity can be defended, Bourricaud believed,
if, rather than “identify[ing] solidarity with
equivalence,“ we understand that the “‘general
spirit’ is both universal and particular.“ Within a
group, a generalizing spirit “is universal, since it
regulates the intercourse among members of the
group.“ Yet, if one thinks of the relations between
nations, this spirit “is also particular, since it helps
distinguish one group from all others.“ In this way,
it might be said that “the ‘general spirit of a nation’
assures the solidarity of individuals, without necessarily
abolishing all their differences, and even establishing
the full legitimacy of some of them.“
What of the concept of universalism? Perhaps,
Bourricaud suggested, “modem societies are characterized
less by what they have in common or by
their structure with regard to well-defined universal
exigencies, than by the fact of their involvement
in the issue of universalization“ as such (italics
added).
Perhaps it is wise to acknowledge that it is a renewed
sense of involvement in the project of universalism,
rather than some lipid sense of its concrete
forms, that marks the character of the new
age in which we live. Beneath this new layer of the
social top soil, moreover, there lies the tangled
roots and richly marbled subsoil of earlier intellectual
generations, whose ideologies and theories
have not ceased to be alive. The struggles between
these interlocutors can be intimidating and confusing,
not only because of the intrinsic difficulty of
their message but because each presents itself not
as form but as essence, not as the only language in
which the world makes sense but as the only real
sense of the world. Each of these worlds does
make sense, but only in an historically bounded
way. Recently, a new social world has come into
being. We must try to make sense of it. For the task
of intellectuals is not only to explain the world;
they must interpret it as well.
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