Modern Social Imaginaries
The number one problem of modern social science has been modernity itself. By modernity I mean that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality), and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution).
In our day, the problem needs to be posed again from a new angle: Is there a single phenomenon here, or do we need to speak of multiple modernities, the plural reflecting the fact that non-Western cultures have modernized in their own ways and cannot be properly understood if we try to grasp them in a general theory that was originally designed with the Western case in mind?
This essay seeks to shed light on both the original and contemporary issues about modernity by defining the self-understandings that have been constitutive of it. Western modernity in this view is inseparable from a certain kind of social imaginary, and the differences among today’s multiple modernities are understood in terms of the divergent social imaginaries involved. This approach is not the same as one that might focus on the ideas as against the institutions of modernity. The social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society. This crucial point is expanded in part 3.
My aim here is a modest one. I would like to sketch an account of the forms of social imaginary that have underpinned the rise of Western modernity. This is an essay in Western history; it does not engage the variety of today’s alternative modernities.1 But I hope that a closer definition of the Western specificity may help us see more clearly what the different paths of contemporary modernization hold in common. In writing this, I have obviously drawn heavily on the pioneering work of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, as well as on work by Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, Pierre Rosanvallon, and others, which I shall acknowledge as the argument unfolds.2
My hypothesis is that central to Western modernity is a new conception of the moral order of society. At first this moral order was just an idea in the minds of some influential thinkers, but later it came to shape the social imaginary of large strata, and then eventually whole societies. It has now become so self-evident to us, we have trouble seeing it as one possible conception among others. The mutation of this view of moral order into our social imaginary is the development of certain social forms that characterize Western modernity: the market economy, the public sphere, the self-governing people, among others.
1.
I will start with the new vision of moral order. This was most clearly stated in the new theories of natural law that emerged in the seventeenth century, largely as a response to the domestic and international disorder wrought by the Wars of Religion (1562–98). Hugo Grotius and John Locke are the most important theorists of reference for our purposes here.
Grotius derives the normative order underlying political society from the nature of its constitutive members. Human beings are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit. Since the seventeenth century, this idea increasingly has come to dominate our political thinking and the way we imagine our society. It starts off in Grotius’s version as a theory of what political society is—what it is in aid of, how it comes to be. But any theory of this kind also provides an idea of moral order; it tells us something about how we ought to live together in society.3
The picture of society is that of individuals who come together to form a political entity against a certain preexisting moral background and with certain ends in view. The moral background is one of natural rights; these people already have certain moral obligations toward one another. The ends sought are certain common benefits, of which security is the most important.
The underlying idea of moral order stresses the rights and obligations that individuals have in regard to one another, even prior to or outside of the political bond. Political obligations are seen as an extension or application of these more fundamental moral ties. Political authority itself is legitimate only because it was consented to by individuals (the original contract), and this contract creates binding obligations in virtue of the preexisting principle that promises should be kept. It is Locke who first uses this theory as a justification of “revolution” and as a ground for limited government. Rights can now be seriously pleaded against power. Consent is not just an original agreement to set up government, but a continuing right to agree to taxation. Although the contract language may fall away and be used only by a minority of theorists, for the next three centuries the underlying idea of society as existing for the (mutual) benefit of individuals—and the defense of their rights—takes on increasing importance. That is, it not only comes to be the dominant view, pushing older theories of society or newer rivals to the margins of political life and discourse, but it also generates more and more far-reaching claims on political life. The requirement of original consent, via the halfway house of Locke’s consent to taxation, becomes the full-fledged doctrine of popular sovereignty under which we now live. The theory of natural rights ends up spawning a dense web of limits to legislative and executive action by way of the entrenched charters that have become an important feature of contemporary government. The presumption of equality, implicit in the starting point of the state of nature, where people stand outside of all relations of superiority and inferiority, has been applied in a growing number of contexts, resulting in equal opportunity or nondiscrimination provisions, which are an integral part of most entrenched charters of rights.
In other words, during these last four centuries, the idea of moral order implicit in this view of society has undergone a double expansion: (1) in extension— more people live by it, it has become dominant; and (2) in intensity—the demands it makes are heavier and more ramified. The idea has gone through a series of “redactions,” as it were, each richer and more demanding than the previous one, up to the present day.
It is clear that the images of moral order which descend through a series of transformations from that inscribed in the natural law theories of Grotius and Locke are rather different from those embedded in the social imaginary of the premodern age.
Two important types of premodern moral order are worth singling out, because we can see them being gradually taken over, displaced, or marginalized by the Grotian-Lockean strand during the transition to political modernity. One is based on the idea of the law of a people, a law that has existed “time out of mind,” and which in a sense defines a group as a people. This idea seems to have been widespread among the Indo-European tribes who at various stages erupted into Europe. It was very powerful in seventeenth-century England, under the guise of the ancient constitution, and became one of the key justifying ideas of the rebellion against the king in the civil war of the 1640s. From this example it is clear that these notions are not always conservative in import, but we should also include in this category the sense of normative order that seems to have been carried on through generations in peasant communities and out of which they developed a picture of the “moral economy,” from which they could criticize the burdens laid on them by landlords or the exactions levied on them by state and church.4 Here again, the recurring idea seems to have been that an original acceptable distribution of burdens had been displaced by usurpation and should be rolled back.
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Notes
- Cf. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
- Grotius’s De Jure Belli ae Pacis [The law of war and peace] is the relevant work for our discussion.
- The term moral economy is borrowed from E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964).