A Working Definition of "Modernity"?

Author(s): Mark Elvin

Source: Past & Present , Nov., 1986, No. 113 (Nov., 1986), pp. 209-213
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/650986

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 VIEWPOINT
A WORKING DEFINITION OF
"MODERNITY"?
Reading a recent essay by Kolakowski called "Modernity on Endless
Trial" alerted me to the realization that Europocentric historians still
seem to find the concept of "modernity" elusive.' For a historian
whose work focuses on an area outside Europe (in my case, mainly
China), the term can be given a fairly clear and definite sense, even
if, like most historians' terms, it is hazy at the edges. It would be
interesting to know how this non-European perception appears to
colleagues who possess a much more refined knowledge of European
history than I do. The practical advantages of the definition offered
below are (1) that it is not based on chronology, and so escapes the
confusion caused by continuous updating (or, in other words, the
pressures to treat what is "more recent" as thereby "more modern"),
and (2) that it enables one to see societies as varying combinations of
"modern" and "non-modern" elements, sometimes mutually suppor-
tive, sometimes mutually indifferent, and sometimes mutually hostile.
In this view, of course, neither present-day Western Europe nor
present-day North America emerges as wholly "modern".
A negative preliminary remark needs to be made: any attempt to
formulate "modernity" simply in terms of some sort of increased
"rationality", whether in economics or politics or religion, meets
what are probably insurmountable difficulties. The case of late im-
perial China is the one with which I am most familiar.2 It does not
seem that early "modern" Europe (to revert to a chronology-based
usage of the term for a moment) had any demonstrably decisive
superiority vis-a-vis eighteenth-century China as regards rationality

1 L. Kolakowski, "Modernity on Endless Trial", Encounter, lxvi (Mar. 1986), pp.

8-12. On p. 9 he says, "[W]e have no clear idea what modernity is", and on p. 10 he
tries to connect it with "our contemporary and widespread . . . discontent of civilisa-
tion". There is no serious attempt at a working definition.
2 On the Chinese economy, see M. Elvin, "Why China Failed to Create an
Endogenous Industrial Capitalism: A Critique of Max Weber's Explanation", Theory
and Society, xiii (1984). On politics, see T. Metzger, The Internal Organization of the
Ch'ing Bureaucracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). On religion, see, inter alios, T. Metzger,
Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture
(New York, 1977).

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 210 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 113

in these three domains. (Mischief might

opposite: competitive civil-service exami
the environment in the areas of irrigat
on Sundays, a comparatively this-wor
so forth.) Science is the one exception. T
be made with regard to Tokugawa Ja
different emphases,3 and possibly other
the suggested definition is based on a
characterization of means; and applyi
to ends, apart from the aspect of int
problematic.
From a non-European point of view, what impresses above all
about "modern" Europe is its ability to create power. This even
applies, at the level of impressions, to its music.4 As a first approxima-
tion let us therefore define "modernity" as a complex of more or less
effectively realized concerns with power. The complex contains at
least the following three components: (1) Power over other human
beings, whether states, groups or individuals, according to the level
of the system under consideration.5 (2) Practical power over nature
in terms of the capacity for economic production. (3) Intellectual
power over nature in the form of the capacity for prediction, and -
more generally - of an accurate and compactly expressed understand-

3Thus Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan

(Glencoe, Ill., 1957), p. 19, argues that "the Meiji period . . . was a culmination of
and intensification of the central values rather than a rejection of them". Among these
values were a strong concern with gaining political power over others (p. 37) and an
emphasis on practical performance (p. 14). This fits in neatly with the definition
offered in the next paragraph of the text, and provides part of the explanation as to
why Japan adapted so quickly to "modernity". See also the essays in Marius Jansen
(ed.), ChangingJapanese Attitudes towards Modernization (Princeton, 1965), esp. Albert
Craig's "Science and Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan".
4 Laurence Picken, of Jesus College, Cambridge, once compared Western orchestral
music, with its precise scores, standardized pitches, and its conductor, to the blue-
prints, standardized parts and managing director of a modern factory, and contrasted
it with the "artisanal" quality of most non-Western musics. I hope I have remembered
Picken correctly after a lapse of some thirty years. He should not be held responsible
for the exact phrasing of this observation.
5 W. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D.
1000 (Oxford, 1983) suggests the extent to which the modern European world was
born out of a many-sided competition for military domination that eventually involved,
and conditioned, whole societies, and was characterized by a far-reaching rationality
of means. As he says of Wallenstein and DeWitte (p. 121), "[w]hat worked was all
they cared about". The exaltation of competition, whether between individuals or
states or systems, is something apostles of modernity tend to have in common, whatever
their other differences.

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 A WORKING DEFINITION OF "MODERNITY"? 211

ing.6 The single-mindedness with which each of these three

pursued is only limited (apart from the intervention of "non
motivations) by their mutual interdependence. Modern
growth depends on science, for example,' while the relative
phy of political control over thought and culture can imperi
and intellectual creativity required for science, and probabl
less immediately evident, social adaptations.8
This first approximation has considerable suggestive v
far as "power" is thought of as "a capacity to direct ener
be applied both literally, as in the case of the eighteent
thermodynamic revolution that discovered how to turn
directed energy) partially into usable work (directed en
somewhat metaphorically, as in the cases of the more effectiv
power and internal administrative control, and the increase
per person of goods and services, that are characteristic sym
modernity. But is it possible to be at least a little more
case might be made in favour of defining "power" for o
purposes as "the capacity to change the structure of sys
though uncomfortably abstract, this formulation has the adv

6 Prediction is a fairly objective standard. "Understanding" can cause t

accepts that, in some ultimate sense, there is no criterion allowing one t
paradigm to another. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revo
edn. (Chicago, 1970), p. 74, where he maintains that "[t]here is no sta
than the assent of the relevant community". Stephen Toulmin has noted,
and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science (London, 1961
that many powerful theories yield no verifiable predictions (Darwin's t
origin of species through variation and natural selection being a case in
thus prediction on its own is an inadequate criterion. One way out, sug
idea due to Wen-yuan Qian (unpublished MS.), would be to see "power
as being broadly indicated by capacity to include, within an integrated
more and more variables (such as position, long-term time, short-term
electric/magnetic charge, temperature, and so on). In the terms of the
definition of "power" proposed in the next paragraph of the text, namely "
to change the structure of systems", one might also relate the onset of
in science to the appearance of the sequence of successor paradigms self
superseding their predecessors, a concept made famous by Kuhn, Structure
Revolutions, pp. 12, 52, 77, 84-5.
7 Thus Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure and
Haven, 1966), p. 9, emphasizes that "[t]he epochal innovation that distin
modern economic epoch is the extended application of science to problem
production".
8 A striking example, because its deleterious effect on popular welfare
is the destruction by the Maoist Red Guards of the seeds and sample
agricultural research stations during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revo
when the intellectuals (known as "stinking elements") were subjected
and often violent, maltreatment, ultimately because they were feared a
political criticism.

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212 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 113

(1) differentiating "power" in this contex

domination (2) allowing for both the d
aspects of "modernity", and (3) includ
which may be thought of, for this purpo
systems.
Since concerns with the various form
exist to some extent in societies normally
we may define a society as a whole as
complex, as a whole, is clearly domina
perhaps one should add, enjoying some m
mentation.) The complex can coexist with
ited, range of other values. (Thus Japa
identical to the present-day West to be r
ern".) Such coexistence may be in fact ess
that, for most people, undiluted moderni
able. (And this, in a way, is one of th
makes in his essay.) Pursuing this line of
unparadoxical to argue that, in general, t
is more easily and effectively achieved wh
support between some continuing "trad
those that we have defined as being s
conversely, that an uncompromising an
ern" may be in many respects counte
example, the modernizing radicals attacke
savagery that may have made adaptation
Lastly, let us sketch some of the other im
to the semantics of "modernity". (1) I
example, it implies no particular positi
otherwise of representative democracy, b
should ask empirically in any given case
meets, or indirectly contributes to meetin
(2) It respects ambiguities that in fact ex
there is nothing, for example, that would
to personal freedom (in all or any of the
term) is a characteristically modern goal.
for example, the police - who are a chara
tion - under some circumstances defend it and under others diminish
it. (3) It evokes the moral emptiness of modernity. If it is a concern

9 See M. Elvin, "The Double Disavowal: The Attitudes of Radical Thinkers to the
Chinese Tradition" (paper presented to the second Sino-European conference, Oxford,
1985, and forthcoming in the proceedings edited by Y. M. Shaw).

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 A WORKING DEFINITION OF "MODERNITY"? 213

with various forms of power, then power for what? The qu

to be left open. (4) It implies no fixed position as regar
evolution (let alone the question-begging notion of "prog
though the recent past suggests that at least the short-term c
power of predominantly "modern" societies, and modes of b
and thought, is close to irresistible. It is equally evident
should be cautious about its long-term future. Apart from th
logical discontents touched on above, it is clear that in "
societies as presently constituted there is a developing contr
between the operational units of time used by "modern" ins
such as firms and state bureaucracies (five to fifteen ye
maximum in most cases1') and the operational units of time
by a growing number of "modern" technologies (from d
centuries, particularly as regards environmental contaminat
source depletion, and so forth). It is an interesting question
or not a radical lengthening in the operational time-units of
day institutions would, or would not, require and/or cause a
in their essential nature.
We should, I think, rest content with the relatively limited goal
proposed here, namely trying to characterize a transition that, for
those societies that have gone through it, occurred in a relatively
short period when seen in the sweep of world history. I have offered
an East Asian perspective on the question, but whether it will seem
to others, with different points of view, a clarification or a distortion
I am unsure. As the Chinese proverb has it, "One throws a brick,
hoping for a jade in return".

St. Antony's College, Oxford Mark Elvin

'o So long as planners, private and public, use current interest

cent) and the compound-interest formula to compare present an
evident that only under the most extraordinary circumstances will
equal trade-off between the two even begin to approach that of
In ordinary circumstances, success-indicators are of course calcu
in capitalist and socialist enterprises alike, on the basis of a year's t
and in an organizational unit of account that may often not ma
social and economic impact of what it is doing. But this is a dif

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