Eisenstadt multiple modernities pdf

One has to distinguish between modernity, modernization, the modern, and modernism. Modernity is used for the characterization of the socio-structural innovations in the spheres of economics, politics and the legal systems as 43 On these distinctions, see mainly Preyer, Soziologische Theorie der Gegenwartsgesellschaft 3 vols.

I: Mitgliedschaftstheoretische Untersuchungen, pp. See also B. Turner ed. These innovations are the functional differentiation that occurred in Old Europe and throughout its history. This is the classical sociological attitude. Modernization is used when referring to a process which is determined by place and time and has to be understood as a unique evolutionary direction which leads to a modern cultural and societal innovation.

This process is characterized by a long lasting structural tendency. Classical sociology has systematized this structural change as a differentiation of action systems, structural differentiation and the emergence of a global world system which itself emerged from evolutionary universals.

The theory of modernization was systematized by American sociologists after World War II, who stand more or less in the tradition of Weber. The Modern describes the distinction of the contemporary and the old, e. This expression is also used with an evaluative intent. It has been in use since the second half of the 18th century. Since the midth century, the Modern has been used synonymously with the West.

This geographical metaphor served as a broad classification of Western Civilization in a rhetorical manner and in an intentional way. Modernism is used to characterize the intellectual social movement and attitude of the so-called avant-garde, from the late 19th century until the s. At the same time, counter movements in culture and politics have also played a significant role.

When referring to Modernism, the modern epoch is a description of the autonomy and the abstraction of science, art, law, and social coherence. The classical sociologist Durkheim and in particular Weber have analyzed modernity and modernization by the cultural and institutional factors and constellations which come together historically in Europe. They assumed more or less that this cultural program would be adopted globally in the process of Westernization.

The extension of education, modern means technology of communication, the individualist orientation, and economic rationality take effect in most societies. Modernism as a world culture has spread since the beginning of the 20th century. Modernity has influenced the most institutional domains of societies.

But in the process of modernization since the midth century, after World War II and in the contemporary scene of most societies, the anti-modern political movement has reacted against the structural change of modernization with different interpretations of modernity, like, for example, the reformist, the socialist, and the nationalist movement, and also contemporary fundamentalism.

They all assumed, even if only implicitly, that the cultural program of modernity as it developed in modern Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately take over in all modernizing and modern societies; with the expansion of modernity, they would prevail throughout the world.

His analysis started with the political systems of empires. Eine Neubewertung, Frankfurt a. These boundaries delineate the relations of the social systems with their environments. Eisenstadt systematizes with the notion of multiple modernities the different constellations between agency creativity and structure and between culture and social-structure, as well as the role of elites within the expansion of the cultural visions in the socio-structural evolution.

Modernization as a multiple modernization is a social change which goes back to the Axial-civilizations. They facilitate an analysis of the impact of these elite coalitions and counter-coalitions on the institutional structure of their respective societies, on the modes of structural differentiation, and on the dynamic of these societies.

Above all, the analysis of the Axial civilizations provides an arena for a most fruitful analysis of the relation between 45 Eisenstadt, A Sociological Approach to Comparative Civilizations: The Development and Directions of a Research Programm. The Harry S. The research places emphasis on the autonomous cultural elites because the dynamic of these civilizations is initiated by them as articulators of the solidarity and trust within different collectivities.

Theoretically, multiple modernities do not represent a type of sociology that enumerates historical events; it is a multi-dimensional theoretical description of structural evolution. Multiple modernities do not assume that global modernity is derived from the West as a single pattern and does not describe a plurality of societal structures. Multiple modernities are to be understood as a critique of the classical theory of modernization. We have evidence that modernization does not lead to a unification and convergence of social structures.

Therefore, modernization is neither a way towards evolutionary universals, nor is it based on them. Multiple modernities represent a structural change that continuously modifies belief- systems and their implementation in a process of translation and social interaction. There are many modernities, not only one single pattern of modernization. Paradigmatically, the relationship between Axial civilizations and modernity is re-systematized. Structural evolution shows—when modernization has begun by structural differentiation—that there are multiple Axial civilizations and multiple modernities.

This is the reason why it is a new theory of modernity. In socio-structural evolution, the First Axial Age civilization is a structural innovation. This age is the key for the evolutionary investigation of societies because it is the socio-structural breakthrough of a political and religious center of a society which initiates a new problem of social integration which is not to remove in the socio-structural evolution of societies.

The structural change was initiated by the connection between both tendencies: 1. It emerged as the principal distinction between the transcendental and the mundane world and the problematization of the conceptions and premises of cosmological and social orders by growing reflexivity second-order thinking. This leads to the problem of bridging the gap between different levels of reality which was assumed. There is a tendency for the disembedment of social interaction and its organization from the ascriptive complex of particular kinship and territorial 47 The term goes back to K.

Schwartz, The Age of Transcendence. In Daedalus New York , Eisenstadt ed. Frankfurt a. Ihre institutionelle und kulturelle Dynamik. Arnason, S. Wittrock eds. The development of free recourses and their organization leads to differentiated and complex social systems which created potential challenges of established institutional order. In this context, Eisenstadt analyses protest and social change in the framework of socio-structural evolution and the search of new models of social order which have as their foundation the difference between the transcendental dimension and the mundane life.

Thus a potential universal orientation emerged, in contrast to the archaic thinking and a hierarchy of ontological levels of reality which implies an ontological subordination of the lower to the higher level.

This goes along with the claim that the leading principles of the cosmological order are an orientation of the ongoing lifestyle. It should be stressed that the structural changes of the institutional formation of the Axial civilizations established a new type of societal center. It is the place of the charismatic dimension of human existence and represented the transcendental vision of ultimate reality. Thereby is transformed the collective identity of the members of society and the institutional order.

It created a new civilizational collectivity which is distinct form the primordial, ethnic and local collectivities. This initiated various reconstructions and transformations of different collectivities, that is, of the relationship between agency, culture and social structure. It is a feature of the Axial civilizations that new autonomous status groups make their appearance, for example, the ancient Israelic prophets and priests, Greek philosophers and sophists, the Hindu Brahmins and Chinese literati and their precursors.

These are new types of religious and cultural activists which need to be distinguished from ritual and magical experts in pre-Axial civilizations. The Axial civilizations were crystallized by different institutional structures which did not manifest themselves as a particular stage in evolutionary change automatically.

The change goes along with conflicts and struggles between and among the active groups and their visions and adaptive strategies. This is a typical feature of the Axial civilizations in general. In particular, what is constituted here is the long-lasting macro- structural change of the confrontation of different visions and arrangements of cultural and social orders with the struggle and concurrence about the resources which are available for institutionalizations.

Therefore socio-structural evolution means the implementation of particular institutional structures and this has initiated continuous contestations.

He exemplifies by his case studies of India, China, Israel, North America, Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, as well as between a comparison of Western and East Europe and the non-axial culture of Japan, the structure of collective identities, the various centre-periphery formations, the patron-client relations and modern social movements.

He characterizes the transition from the European Middle Age to the Western Modern Era as the change from collective identities to the modern society. In particular he emphasizes the role of religious groups for the socio-structural breakthrough which initiated a new centre-periphery constellation as a characterization of modern society. They are structured by the basic premises of cosmic and social order, and these cosmologies exist in these societies as their orthodox and heterodox interpretations.

This process is crystallized throughout their history. There is a pattern of institutionalizations that develops in the course of their history caused by their experience and through their encounter with other civilizations. There are basic internal tensions, dynamics and contradictions caused by demographic, economic and political changes, and they are accompanied by the institutionalization of modern frameworks.

The different programs of modernity are formed by the encounter and interaction of the abovementioned processes. The result of these interactions determines the way in which civilizations and societies position themselves in an international system, and thus how their structural evolution takes place in a global system. In European history, structural evolution leads to the modern European state system. It crystallized in a world-system that was first shaped in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Shifts of hegemonies take place in the different international state systems, and they are caused by economic, political, technological, and cultural changes. In structural evolution, confrontations of modernities are caused by their expansions as the unfolding of a process which goes back to the Axial civilizations.

This is a result of their basic premises and their institutionalizations which emerged in Western and Northern Europe and other parts of Europe and later in the Americas and Asia in the Islamic, Hinduist, Buddhist, Confucian and Japanese Civilizations. Here, the frame of reference is the special nature of civilizations with their own concepts of rationality, and how heterodoxies and sect movements affect the dynamics of structural change.

Therefore, the distinction between the European Western original modernity and the token of later modernities is significant in this framework, as the later modernizations did not happen under the same conditions that caused the first. The antinomies tensions, paradoxes of the cultural program of Western modernity which are inherent from its beginning are: 1.

Weber has not analysed the later modernities. I: Mitgliedschaftstheoretische Untersuchungen, , on the revisions of modernity This is the place where Eisenstadt locates the research of social movements and their function in the process of Western modernization. Protestantic fundamentalism, fascism, communism and contemporary Islamic fundamentalism are particular responses against the process of modernization standing in the context of modernity; they are not pre-modern or traditional social movements themselves.

But in a comparative evolutionary perspective, these movements are similar to religious movements. This is exactly the specific difference in the construction of Medieval Christianity that must be characterized in terms of evolution by a structural differentiation between the church and the state.

Neither of them is a politically organized society. The classical period of modernity from the great revolutions to the First World War was a reconstruction of the political system focused on the nation-state and the revolutionary state. This established a new membership condition for the political system and the participation in societal communication.

But in most modern societies there was a general civilizational orientation. Eisenstadt emphasizes that the implementation of the cultural program has caused not only the vision of a pluralistic society but also a totalitarian Jacobin program. Communism, fascism and fundamentalism are the three Jacobin social movements which are involved in Western modernization. The tension between the totalistic and the pluralistic version of the political takes also effect in collective identities and their construction as primordial, civil and universalistic community, that is, as a homogeny or a heterogenic universe of the social.

The self-perception of society as modern, that is, as a distinct cultural and political program and in relation to other societies, is a feature of modernization which historically emerged in different societies like, for example, in Europe, Japan, and China. Therefore, modernity re-interprets the paradigm of structural social change from within, but not as a universalization or a generalization of the social pattern of European modernization. Theoretically, the translation and re-interpretation of 51 A partial exception is modern Japanese society.

Eisenstadt, , R. The research on social movements in the paradigm of multiple modernities has a further sociological significance in the research of structural change which is re-described as modernization. In some cases, this process leads to more abstract identities like, for example, universalistic orientations of human rights and civic patterns of behavior of the higher education elites in the West. However, primordial solidarities and identities do not disappear.

Collective identities like ethnic, national, religious, civilizational and ascriptive solidarities of different, regional identification are elementary social relationships of the cohesion of the members of social systems, all defined by membership conditions.

This is not a contingent fact, nor is it epiphenomenal as is often argued, but it evolved in continuation from the delimitation of the expansions of social systems. This also helps us explain the significant role which religious movements play, not only in the processes of modernizations in the past, but also in the contemporary scene.

Oxford: Blackwell. Berger, P. Further Thoughts on Religion and Modernity. Society , 49 4 , — Article Google Scholar. Eisenstadt, S. Israel Society. New York: Basic Books. Multiple Modernities. Eisenstadt Ed. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Israel Democratic Institute. Israel: Jerusalem. Katz, J. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Levy, S. Katz Eds. Liebman, C. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scholem, G. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. In the political sphere modernization has been characterized, first, by growing extension of the territorial scope and especially by the intensification of the power of the central, legal, administrative, and political agencies of the society. In the economic sphere it was manifest in the development of encompassing markets and widespread bureaucratic organizations.

Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities Michael Sussman has published many articles on international security, counter terrorism, foreign policy strategy, decision making, predictive analysis, and the Middle East.

This outlook has been characterized by an emphasis on progress and improvement, on happiness and the spontaneous expression of abilities and feeling, on individuality as a moral value, and concomitant stress on the mlutiple of the individual and, last, on efficiency. His publications, radio and television interviews have been issued in different languages in many countries. Parsons, Societies in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives.

Princeton University Press,pp. These developments have been very closely related to the expansion of media of communication, the growing permeation of such central media of communication into the major groups of the society, and the wider participation of these groups in the cultural activities and organizations created by the centrally placed cultural elites. He was also the winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize. Modernities, Jan Nederveen Pieterse 7. Librarian administrators click here.

Eisenstadt contributed to the understanding of cultures and civilizations. This page was last edited on 7 Septemberat In the economic sphere proper these developments have been characterized by the development of a very high level of technology based on and combined with Newtonian sciencefostered by the systematic application of knowledge, the pursuit of which became the province of specialized scientific institutions, and by the secondary industrial, commercial and tertiary service occupations, as against the primary extractive ones.

It was undermined not only by personal or family fortunes or misfortunes but by the very nature of the system of social organization, by the continual changes and structural differentiation. Moderniies, at different stages of the development of modern political systems, there have developed, as mentioned above, different problems that became important, eiesnstadt different types of organizational frameworks through which such problems were dealt with.

His research fields are: Historically, mmodernities first processes of modernization, those of western and central Europe, have developed from within a social order that was characterized by the existence of multiplicity of different political units sharing the same cultural heritage. Modern or modernizing societies have developed from a great variety of different traditional, premodern societies.

What, in short, is the nature The symbols of common national social and cultural identity were no longer chiefly traditional, defined in terms of restricted tribal, traditional, miltiple status groups. His family moved to Poland a few generations before Eisenstadt was born in in WarsawPoland. American Sociological Review 62S.