The Essence of Modernity - Essay Example

Modernity Thesis ment According to Rousseau and Marx, modernity is marked by the disappearance of honor and emergence of self interest. Why does this happen Main body Sociology is a modern discipline. It was called into being by the emergence of a new type of social reality, heralded by the French Revolution and accompanied (some would say produced) by the Industrial one, which both prompted and made possible the reexamination of society as such. The new society replaced the traditional social order in Europe, the ancient regime, and, the opposition between ancients and moderns being a long tradition was called "modern." The nature of modern society and the conditions of transition to modernity (of modernization) have been at the center of concerns that preoccupied sociology since its earliest days. It was on this, after all, although perhaps differently phrased, that the great proto-sociologists, Rousseau and Marx, as well as the founding fathers of the discipline, focused. This venerable tradition has been continued on this continent in the form of modernization theory and later, somewhat euphemistically, theory of development. Tradition weighs heavily on the study of modern society. Our views of it are still to a large extent defined by the ideas of our (disciplinary) fathers. It is rarely recognized that the perspective reflected in these ideas was necessarily limited, that for the lack of empirical evidence (the newness of modernity and the lack of experience with it) they had to be highly speculative. The only thing that was known to the first theorists of modernity was the nature of the social order it came to replace. The modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s, composed as it was predominantly of structuralist-functionalist as well as Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches (which, it should be kept in mind, are also structuralist and functionalist), was at its basis a variety of historical materialism.( Marx, 65) In the framework of the modernization theory, as in the framework of classical Marxism, history was viewed as a linear progression through definite stages, culminating in a particular, known stage (modernity) in which all societies would at some point converge. The mechanism behind this progression, in modernization theory as in Marxism, was assumed to be economic: industrialization driven by capitalist (or commercial) interests was the fundamental factor in the process, and it was this features of societies commonly seen as modern and those commonly seen as traditional. Its explanation of its emergence would be based On empirical historical research. It has been widely recognized that it is not a relic of the past, bound to disappear with the advancement of the modern Order, as Marx has prophesied in the Communist Manifesto, and today it is usually included among the elements of modernity. The nature of this recent theorizing, however, is not new. Essentially, as in earlier sociological attempts to conceptualize nationalism within the framework of the modernization paradigm, nationalism is viewed as a cultural and psychological function of the process of modernization, a Superstructural product of its basic "objective" structures. (Marx, 110) The emergence of' nationalism is seen as tightly connected to the modern phenomenon of state-formation and as related to the trend of the secularization of culture. But almost invariably the factor truly responsible for its rise (as well as for the development of the state and secularization) is believed to be economic: in the final analysis (to use an appropriate turn of speech) nationalism is explained as a functional prerequisite or product of industrialization and capitalism. In this respect theories of modernity of the historical materialist derivation on the whole proved very adaptable. Such political adaptability may be attributed on the one hand to their general vagueness, and, on the other, to the fact that they either incorporated or could be interpreted easily as social critique. Most vehement detractors of capitalism came from among the intellectuals, both those who became members of the aristocracy and those who felt entitled to be considered its members. Rousseau wrote in the Social Contract: "The word finance is a slavish word . . . I hold enforced labor to be less opposed to liberty" (Rousseau, 77). Although Marx misconstrued the nature of his difference form Hegel, he did not invent the fact of difference itself. The actual difference between them does not lie in the fact that one was a critic of representation and the other was an apologist, for they were both critics, but rather in the specific character of their respective critiques. This difference emerges most sharply in how they handled the critique of representation, first articulated by Rousseau that has been coeval with the modern form of representation itself. Hegel combined his critique of representation with what we might call a critique of the critique of representation (Rousseau, 91) - and especially of the abstract ideal of 'true democracy' which Rousseau initiated and Marx later reconstructed. It was Hegel's critique of this 'abstract ideal' which Marx misread as conservative and doctrinal. In relation to the economic forms of the modern age, Marx contended that the simplest and most abstract element is the commodity and he analyzed its self-division into value and use value. The movement is from abstract right through contract and law to the state. For Marx and Rousseau, it is from value through exchange value and money to capital. Marx and Rousseau maintained that the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo had made considerable advances in understanding the economic forms of the modern age - value, exchange value, price, money, capital, interest, rent, profit, etc. - but he argued that it naturalized 'labor' as the origin of value without questioning under what circumstances labor takes this form. He argued that in analytical terms political economy was strong: it perceived, for example, that the magnitude of value was determined by the average amount of labor time that goes into the production of a commodity. But dialectically political economy was weak: it treated commodity form as a natural fact of life rather than as the product of historically determinate relations. Marx and Rousseau saw himself as the first to comprehend adequately the historical specificity of the value form and release it from the naturalistic framework in which it had previously been imprisoned. Conclusion So it can be concluded that modernity is marked by the disappearance of honor and emergence of self interest. Marx and Rousseau pushed the idea of 'the social' beyond anything conceived or conceivable within the natural law tradition. One weakness of Marx's approach, however, was that it could give the impression that the economic forms of capitalist social relations are their only forms, or at least that they are the essential forms of capitalist society, and that other non-economic forms - moral, legal, political, cultural, etc. - are in some sense epiphenomenal or inessential or even illusory. While we must recognize that Marx offered a critique of political economy, not an economics, there still remains something rather one-sided in the way he treated the economic as the privileged sphere of contemporary social life. This one-sided view of capitalist social relations is necessarily unconvincing to readers who seek recognition of the fact that modernity also conveys ideas of personality, free will, romantic love, moral agency, individual right, legal equality, collective self-regulation, etc. The individual is after all a juridical, moral, political, cultural and erotic subject as well as a 'bearer' of economic forces. Works cited Marx, Karl. 1978.The Marx-Engels Reader. (Editor), Robert C. Tucker. W. W. Norton & Company; 2nd edition (February). ISBN: 039309040X Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.1997. Rousseau: 'The Discourses' and Other Early Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). Victor Gourevitch (Editor) Cambridge University Press (July 13, 1997). ISBN: 0521424453 Read More