DEREK SAYER - Capitalism and Modernity

To begin with what might appear to be a digression in a work of social theory, in a way which may or may not be apparent, events of 1989 in two central squares of capital cities frame what I try to say here. As I was close to finishing this book there came the tender revolution (as the Czechs call it) whose most visible manifestation was the people congregating nightly in their hundreds of thousands in Wenceslas Square in Prague, to reclaim those who had long been officially erased from the national life and memory the playwright Vclav Havel, the gymnast V#x011B;ra #x010C;#x00E1;slavsk, the popsinger Marta Kubiov, and perhaps most poignantly of all, the minor forestry official Alexander Dubek. This was not the sort of revolution to which the modern world is used. It was, for once, a revolution against those ersatz gods of modernity who have stolen, by divine right of ideology, decades of peoples lives, hopes and dreams; a refusal of the reduction of the personal to the political.

Informing this unusual revolution was (in Vclav Havels own words) a profound distrust of all generalizations, ideological platitudes, clichs, slogans [and] intellectual stereotypes, a distrust bred by forty years of experience. Havel (1989) drew a simple conclusion:

The stifling pall of hollow words that has smothered us for so long has cultivated in us such a deep mistrust of the world of deceptive words that we are now better equipped than ever before to see the human world as it really is: a complex com-munity of thousands of millions of unique, individual human beings, in whom hundreds of beautiful characteristics are matched by hundreds of faults and negative tendencies. They must never be lumped together into homogeneous masses beneath a welter of hollow clichs and sterile words and then en blocas classes, nations or political forcesextolled or denounced, loved or hated, maligned or glorified.

Such totalizing representations have been identified, in recent social theory, as critical components of power. They are by no means confined to socialism. In this book I argue that they are characteristic of modern sociality, and constitute its greatest threat to human life, what I have elsewhere called the violence of abstraction (1987). This violence is rooted in, but now goes far beyond, the capitalism which was modernitys progenitor. Its locus is the forms society and subjectivity take in the modern world. From this point of view we may be witnessing, in Eastern Europe, not the return of the prodigal to the fold of the West hailed by politicians from Thatcher to Bush, but something quite new: a post-modern revolution, if you will. I hope so. But to quote Havel again, if it is a long time since there were so many grounds for hoping that everything will turn out well, at the same time there have never been so many reasons for us to fear that, if everything went wrong, the catastrophe would be final. He rehearses a dismal litany, from atomic war and ecological disaster to social and civilizational catastropheby which I mean the widening gulf between rich and poor individuals and nations. Humanity remains poised on a knife-edge of survival.

Students played a major part in the tender revolution. But a few short months before, on the other side of the modern world, other students, equally courageous, had been less fortunate. As I was starting to write this book, they were brutally slaughtered in Tienanmen Square, Beijing, by a government which had commended itself to the West by its pursuit of what it called the four modernizations. These did not include the First Amendment. The events in the two squares were later to be brought together in a nice coincidence. We learned that President George Bush (having just vetoed a bill which would have permitted Chinese students in the USA to remain there after their visas had expired) had sent a high-level mission to Beijing to normalize US relations with the Peoples Republic of China, on the same day on which that dean of normalizers, President Gustav Husk, announced his intention to resign his tenancy of Prague Castle. Neither in the West nor in the East can we yet congratulate ourselves on living in a post-modern world. The modern deities still demand their human sacrifices. There remains, then, reason to ponder sociological critiques of modernity. I try to explicate what remain two of the most profound (despite Marxisms substantial contribution to the twentieth-century ideological pantheon) in what follows.

I would like here to express my deep gratitude to those friends and colleagues who improved my efforts by freely giving of that most precious of modern commodities, their time. Philip Corrigan, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Raymond Morrow, P.A.Saram, Teodor Shanin and Bryan Turner read the manuscript of this book, in some cases through several drafts. All provided me with very helpful comments and suggestions, which I have done my best to respond to. To Alena I owe a great deal more than the translation of