Classical theories of modernity and the idea of modernisation

1. What is modernity?

Modernity refers to the forms of social life and organisation that emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century and spread across the world: industrial production, capitalism, the nation-state, science, secularisation, urbanisation and a belief in progress and individual rights. Sociology itself was born as an attempt to understand this new society after the French and Industrial Revolutions.

2. Durkheim: from mechanical to organic solidarity

In The Division of Labour in Society (1893) Émile Durkheim contrasted:

• Mechanical solidarity: small, traditional societies held together by likeness, a strong collective conscience, and repressive law.
• Organic solidarity: modern societies held together by interdependence of specialised parts, a weaker collective conscience, individualism, and restitutive law (contract, commercial and administrative law).

Modernity is the growth of the division of labour, driven by increasing dynamic density. Its pathologies are anomie (lack of regulation in rapid change) and the forced division of labour. Suicide (1897) linked anomic and egoistic suicide to modern conditions. Durkheim was broadly optimistic: occupational associations and moral education could restore regulation.

3. Weber: rationalisation and the iron cage

For Max Weber the distinctive feature of the modern West is rationalisation: the spread of calculation, rules and efficiency into every sphere.

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05): the Calvinist ethic of disciplined work and saving helped create modern capitalism.
• Bureaucracy as the most technically efficient form of administration, resting on legal-rational authority.
• Disenchantment of the world: magic and religion give way to science and technique.
• The iron cage: a rationalised order that, once established, imprisons people in routine, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”.

Weber was pessimistic: rationality brings efficiency but loss of meaning and freedom.

4. Marx: capitalism as the motor of modernity

For Marx modernity is capitalism. The Communist Manifesto (1848) describes the bourgeoisie revolutionising production constantly: “all that is solid melts into air”. Capitalism creates a world market, cities and technology on an unprecedented scale, but also exploitation, alienation, commodity fetishism and recurrent crisis. Marx was both admiring and critical, and optimistic about the future: modernity’s contradictions would lead to socialism.

5. Simmel: money and the metropolis

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900) and “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903):

• Money makes relationships impersonal and calculable; quality is reduced to quantity.
• The city bombards the individual with stimuli; the response is the blasé attitude, reserve and intellectualism.
• The tragedy of culture: objective culture (the products of human creativity) grows beyond the capacity of individuals to absorb it.
• The city also frees the individual from the close control of small communities.

6. Modernisation: definition

Modernisation is the process by which a traditional society acquires the characteristics of modernity. It became a field of study in the 1950s and 1960s, applied to newly independent countries. Definitions:

• Daniel Lerner (The Passing of Traditional Society, 1958): the process of social change whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics common to more developed ones, marked by urbanisation, literacy, media participation and “empathy” (the capacity to imagine oneself in new roles).
• Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973): modernisation implies a rational attitude towards issues and their evaluation from a universalistic, not particularistic, viewpoint.

7. Characteristics of modernisation

1. Economic: industrialisation, use of inanimate energy, market economy, occupational specialisation.
2. Political: nation-state, democracy, bureaucracy, participation, rule of law.
3. Social: urbanisation, nuclear family, achieved status, social mobility, spread of education and mass media.
4. Cultural: secularisation, rationality, science, individualism, universalistic values.
5. Psychological: openness to new experience, planning, belief in human efficacy (Alex Inkeles’s “modern man”).

8. The process of modernisation

Classical modernisation theory saw a sequence: traditional society → take-off (industrialisation, W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, 1960) → urbanisation and mass education → political participation → mass consumption. Its agents are technology, education, the media, the State and the market.

In India the process was studied through related concepts:

• Sanskritisation and Westernisation (M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, 1966).
• Yogendra Singh’s analysis of change in the “little” and “great” traditions, from orthogenetic (internal) and heterogenetic (external) sources.
• Modernisation in India is selective and adaptive: caste, joint family and religion persist and adapt (the “modernity of tradition”, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, 1967).

How this is examined

“Classical theories of modernity” (six marks, April 2022): a paragraph per thinker and the table. “Define modernisation. Explain its characteristics and process” (10 marks, October 2023): two definitions, the five characteristics, the process, and the Indian discussion, ending with the Eurocentrism critique.