Modernity: History of the Concept

Gurminder K Bhambra, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK

Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by R. Wagner, volume 15, pp. 9949–9954, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

Modernity is one of the central concepts of sociology. Typically, its emergence is located in the processes of economic and
political revolution in Europe in the eighteenth century. Such an understanding conflates Europe with modernity and renders
the process of becoming modern, at least in the first instance, one of endogenous European development. Coterminous with
this argument is the idea that the rest of the world was external to these world-historical processes and that colonial
connections and processes were insignificant to their development. This is challenged by more recent critical understandings
of modernity associated with postcolonial and decolonial thought.

Introduction past from the modern, industrial present; and a fundamental

‘Modernity’ has long been the dominant conceptual frame for
social and political thought, sociology, and the social sciences
more generally. The repercussions of the French Revolution
and the processes of industrialization stimulated debates about
the emergence of a modern world (modernity) and this world
was held to require a distinctively modern form of explanation
(sociology). The sociological understanding of modernity
typically rests on ideas of the modern world associated with the
processes of economic and political revolution located in
Europe and underpinned by the earlier cultural changes
brought about by the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific
Revolution. Such understandings conflate Europe with
modernity and render the process of becoming modern, at least
in the first instance, one of endogenous European develop-
ment. At the same time, the rest of the world is regarded as
external to these world-historical processes and colonial
connections are seemed to be insignificant to their
development.
While accounts of the industrial and French revolutions –
and, by implication, of modernity itself – have not remained
unchanged over time, what has remained constant has been the
historiographical frame – of autonomous endogenous origins
and subsequent global diffusion – within which these events
are located. As such, not only have ‘others’ not been recognized
as constitutive of the canonical ‘twin revolutions,’ but also the
potential contribution of other events (and the experiences of
non-Western ‘others’) to the sociological paradigm of moder-
nity has rarely been considered. This article will first present the
standard, dominant genealogy of the conceptual history of
modernity before addressing the alternate genealogy as
coloniality–modernity. It will close with a discussion of the
necessity of developing our concepts through an acknowledg-
ment of broader, connected histories and sociologies.
difference that distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world.
These paradigmatic assumptions, Gurminder K. Bhambra
(2007) argues, have framed both the standard methodolog-
ical problems posed by social inquiry and the explanations
posited in resolving them. They have also demarcated the
disciplines themselves with sociology’s remit being ‘the
modern,’ while ‘the traditional’ has been that of anthropology,
with ‘sociological laws’ common to both.
Whatever their other differences, the early sociologists
believed themselves to be living through a (or perhaps the)
great transformation in history and were concerned with
understanding how it had begun and influencing how it would
be brought to the completion they believed to be inherent
within it. This was done through an engagement with ideas of
historical stages. Once the general pattern of historical devel-
opment was known, it was believed that the trajectory of
development for other societies could be ascertained without
direct research as all human societies were deemed to follow
the same pattern; one which had been established by Europe.
This built on the earlier tradition of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment, which developed understandings of progress within
human societies in relation to ideas of successive stages in
historical development.
This was taken up and developed in the twentieth century
by Talcott Parsons (1971), who argued that a common origin
and shared heritage allowed for the evolution of a ‘European
system’ of modern societies that could be understood in its
entirety as differentiated from both earlier societies and from
the rest of the world. Jürgen Habermas (1996), in turn, argued
for modernity to be understood as an ‘unfinished’ project
where the future was not about the reproduction of the present,
but was considered to be a space for the further development of
projects and trends. The ‘unfinished project’ is the bringing to
fruition of what is already predicated in the Western experience.

Modernity and the Social Sciences Modernization Theory

The dominant accounts of modernity within the social sciences Following in the classical tradition of sociology, modernization
rest on two fundamental assumptions: rupture and difference – theory took as its idea of change the standard notion of a linear
a temporal rupture that distinguishes a traditional, agrarian movement from a traditional past to a modernized future.

692 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 15 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03134-2

Explanations of the processes of modernization were primarily
located in the context of a historical understanding of societies,
where each form was deemed to be superseded by a progres-
sively higher one. Traditional, or premodern, societies were
put forward as objects of comparison with societies already
deemed to be modern and the problem was set up in terms of
accounting for the historical transition from one to the other.
The debate on convergence around modern institutions and
the economy, however, also occurred in the context of coun-
terclaims arguing for divergence around issues of culture and
political organization.
Parsons (1971) was particularly interested in understanding
the implications of the transition to modernity and looking at
why the breakthrough to modernization had not occurred
elsewhere than in Europe. In common with most other theo-
rists at the time, he believed that modern society had emerged
in the West, and that this provided the base from which the
system of modern societies then developed. Modernization
scholars, such as S.N. Eisenstadt (1974), also believed that
Western modernization should be used as a model of global
applicability and other societies classified in terms of their
relative modernization in comparison with this model; that is,
other societies were to be studied in terms of the extent to
which they approximated the characteristics of Western
industrial societies. While becoming modern in the first
instance might derive from peculiar circumstances which were
historically contingent and even perhaps unlikely (for example,
as set out by Weber in his study of the Protestant Ethic), once
Europe had become modern, it was deemed to be able to show
the way to the rest of the world as a model to be imitated. The
birth of modernity, it was believed, could be induced.
Reinhard Bendix (1967) usefully summarizes moderniza-
tion theory as resting on three related assumptions: first, an
understanding of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as mutually
exclusive; second, social change occurring as a consequence of
phenomena internal to the society changing; and third, a belief
that modernity would eventually replace tradition and, in
doing so, would have the same effects across the globe. In this
sense, modernization theory rests on a notion of convergence
whereby the difference of other societies – as constituted
through their traditions – would be erased through the process
of the global diffusion of Western institutions. Once the
structures of modernization extended to other areas, it was
believed that the previous indigenous patterns, or structures,
would change and that change would be in the direction of the
relatively modernized societies.
While this position was largely dominant within the
debates on modernization, it was not uncontested at the time,
for example, by Dean Tipps (1973). Further, critical scholars,
such as Henry Bernstein (1971), believed that using notions of
a stagnant past, where the differences among societies were not
regarded as relevant to the issue of modernization, and
a dynamic heterogeneous present, both distorted the character
of traditional societies and obscured understandings of the
different forms of relationships between traditional societies
and, what were regarded as, new institutions. This body of work
came to be known as underdevelopment or dependency
theory.
The demise of modernization theory, and related under-
standings of modernity, was associated with the explicit move
Modernity: History of the Concept 693
away from structural–functional explanations in sociology. The
latter was associated with the rise of more radical approaches,
particularly those influenced by Marxism, and the related
decline of Parsons. The fall of communism in the 1990s,
however, reversed these sensibilities. For a number of
commentators, the convergence thesis which had been dis-
carded had turned out to be confirmed with Francis Fukuyama
most famously proclaiming a new ‘end of history.’ This is the
context in which some writers, most notably Eisenstadt (2000),
returned to modernization theory seeking to challenge this
triumphant liberalism, while also acknowledging the force of
events. At the same time, the processes of decolonization,
which had been the initial context for modernization theory,
had themselves given rise to postcolonial critiques of the
Eurocentrism of dominant understandings of modernity. The
new paradigm of multiple modernities, then, was articulated in
relation to these varying concerns.
Multiple Modernities
Decolonization in the 1960s was followed by the fall of
communism in Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s. The
perceived seismic shift in the global order – in particular,
globalization being seen as the creation of a world market after
the breakup of the Soviet-dominated economic bloc – renewed
sociological debates about the nature of the modern world
leading to the development of a new paradigm, that of multiple
modernities. While for some, such as Fukuyama, these events
confirmed the convergence claims of modernization theory
and the role of the United States as ‘lead society,’ for theorists of
multiple modernities, the removal of ‘cold war’ constraints
instead allowed for greater divergence. The insistent claims of
scholars from the Third World – be they theorists of under-
development or then postcolonial theorists – also required
engagement and address.
Theorists of multiple modernities, such as Eistenstadt and
others writing in Daedalus (2000), believe that, in outlining
their new approach, two fallacies are to be avoided. The first,
associated with earlier modernization theories, is that there is
only one modernity. The second is that of Eurocentrism or, in
their words, Orientalism. The argument is that while the idea of
one modernity, especially one that has already been achieved
in Europe, would be Eurocentric, theories of multiple moder-
nities must, nonetheless, take Europe as the reference point in
their examination of alternative modernities. Thus, while
theorists of multiple modernities point to the problem of
Eurocentrism, they do so at the same time as asserting the
necessary priority to be given to the West in the construction of
a comparative sociology of multiple modernities. As such,
multiple modernities continue to be understood as derived
from the creative appropriation, by those that followed, of the
institutional frameworks of modernity that are seen to origi-
nate in Europe, and so the problem of Eurocentrism remains
integral to the new paradigm.
Within the approach of multiple modernities, modernity is
understood simultaneously in terms of its institutional constel-
lations as well as a cultural program. Understanding modernity in
this way allows scholars to situate ‘European modernity’ – seen
in terms of the conflation of the institutional and the cultural
694 Modernity: History of the Concept
forms – as the originary modernity and, at the same time,
allows for different cultural encodings that result in multiple
modernities. For example, Nilufer Gole (2000) reflects on the
idea of modernity from what she terms its Islamic edge, that is,
Turkey, in order to discuss non-Western patterns of moderni-
zation. The idea of multiple modernities, then, is consistent
with the idea of a common framework of modern institutions –
for example, the market economy, the modern nation-state,
and bureaucratic rationality – which originated in Europe
and was subsequently exported to the rest of the world. This
explains the apparent paradox that theorists of multiple
modernities can dissociate themselves from Eurocentrism at
the same time as apparently embracing its core assumptions.
Further, in charting the development of specifically multiple
modernities, scholars suggest that the first radical trans-
formation occurred in the Americas, followed by the commu-
nist and national-socialist types in Europe. Not only
modernity, then, but also multiple modernities are seen to
have their origin in Europe or the Western civilizational
framework at large.
Similar problems can be seen in the proliferation of theories
of alternative modernities, global modernities, hybrid, and
entangled modernities despite it seeming that the debates
around these issues have moved beyond their initial, limited
Eurocentric understandings of the world. In a collection of
articles on alternative modernities, Dilip Gaonkar (2001)
suggests that the emergence of the debate on alternative
modernities reinforces the fact that something specifically
modern is held to be inescapable. The West is understood as
the major clearing house of modernity and in its globalization
has traveled from the West to the rest of the world meaning that
non-Western peoples must now begin to engage their tradi-
tions with modernity in different forms of hybrid ‘modernities.’
These assertions rest on a number of assumptions not least that
there is an original modernity which was born in and of the
West, and that the West is significantly different from the rest of
the world such that while it can enjoy an original modernity,
everybody else has to make do with a hybrid version, in which
different modernities are no more than the combination of the
adopted ‘originary’ form with ‘nonmodern’ elements. Gaonkar
(2001) argues that a minimal requirement for thinking in
terms of alternative modernities is to opt for a ‘cultural,’ as
opposed to an ‘acultural’ theory of modernity which enables us
to understand how non-Western cultures have tropicalized, or
domesticated, key features of modernity. Even though the idea
of modernity is seen less as the terminus toward which non-
Western peoples constantly tend and more in terms of being
constitutive of plural and diverse global systems, the West
remains the pivot around which these ideas circulate.
The challenge posed to modernization theory by the
approach of multiple and alternative modernities has some
significance in its own terms, but it is much less fundamental
than its advocates suppose. The basic premise of theorists of
multiple and alternative modernities, of questioning the
dominant assumption of convergence and its corollary idea of
one trajectory to modernity, is an important qualification to
modernization theory. What is significant in its omission,
however, is the failure to address adequately the way in which
the West remains the point of reference. Further, in maintain-
ing its focus on the internal dynamics of separate civilizations
and the inability to take a point of view other than from the
West, the comparative approach exacerbates the problem of
Eurocentrism by ignoring and even actively excluding (through
its use of ideal types) the connected and entangled histories
that constitute the basis of an adequate understanding of the
global context of sociohistoric processes. As Arif Dirlik (2003)
argues, by identifying ‘multiplicity’ with culture, the idea of
multiple modernities seeks to contain challenges to modernity
by conceding the possibility of different ways of being modern,
but doing nothing to address the problems with the concep-
tualization of modernity itself. Delinking our understandings
of sociohistoric processes from a European trajectory and
focusing not only on the different sources and roots but also on
the ways these interacted and intersected over time would
provide us with a richer understanding of the complexities of
the world in which we live and the historical processes that
constitute it. There is a need, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam has
argued, to address these interconnections as opposed to reifying
the entities that are supposed to be connected.
Postcolonial Theory and the Coloniality/Modernity
Paradigm
Two traditions that have been most significant in reconceptu-
alizing understandings of modernity have been those associ-
ated with postcolonial theory and the coloniality/modernity
school of thought. Since the 1960s and 1970s, knowledge
claims in the social sciences and humanities have been under
pressure from the rise of subaltern positions and an explicitly
recognized politics of knowledge production. If we now
understand dominant approaches as Eurocentric, for example,
it is because of new voices emerging in wider political arenas
and in the academy itself. The end of colonialism as an explicit
political formation has given rise to understandings of post-
coloniality and, perhaps ironically, an increased recognition of
the role that colonialism played in the formation of modernity.
Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has been integral to
the opening out and questioning of the assumptions of the
dominant discourses and, following Boaventura de Sousa
Santos (2007), arguing for the possibility of other knowl-
edges. This is also developed by Sujata Patel (2014) who argues
for the contestation of colonial modernity within and by the
global south in order to establish other understandings of
modernity.
Such arguments have been most successful in their chal-
lenge to the insularity of historical narratives and historio-
graphical traditions emanating from Europe or what are seen as
northern epistemologies (see Spivak, 1988). This has been
particularly so in the context of demonstrating the parochial
character of arguments about the endogenous European origins
of modernity in favor of arguments that suggest the necessity of
considering the emergence of the modern world in the
broader histories of colonialism, empire, dispossession, and
enslavement.
Postcolonial theory, according to Homi Bhabha (1994),
attempts to disrupt standard discourses of modernity by shift-
ing the frame through which we view the events of modernity
and questioning what we consider those events to be. This is
not a version of multiple modernities, in that it does not offer

an alternative modernity to be placed alongside those already
seen to be existing. Rather, it calls on us to interrogate the
conceptual paradigm of modernity, as it has commonly been
understood, from the perspectives of those Others usually
relegated to the margins, if included at all. These Others,
usually constituted as being outside modernity, exist in both
the global south and the global north. Their perspectives
are now taken to be central to understanding modernity
conceptually.
The task, as Bhabha (1994) puts it, is to take responsibility
for the unspoken, unrepresented pasts within our present and,
through an understanding of them, reconfigure what it means
to be modern. This reconsideration does not relegate difference
simply to cultural expression, but calls upon that difference to
make a difference to the narratives of modernity already in
place. The issue, according to Bhabha (1994), is more about
reinscribing ‘other’ cultural traditions into narratives of
modernity and thus transforming those narratives – in both
historical terms and theoretical ones – rather than simply
renaming or reevaluating the content of these other
‘inheritances.’
The meaning of modernity, according to Bhabha (1994),
does not derive from a foundational event in the past, but from
its continual contestation in the present. This negotiation calls
into question both the conditions with which modernity is
typically associated and those who lay claim to it. In naming
ourselves as modern, as Bhabha (1994) suggests, one moves
from the periphery to the center and, in the process, transforms
the understanding of ‘modernity’ from which and about which
one speaks. This resonates with the work of the coloniality/
modernity school of thought, which is linked to world-systems
theory as well as scholarly work in development and under-
development studies.
The theoretical distinction – coloniality/modernity – was
first articulated by Anibal Quijano (2007). He argues that
with the sixteenth-century conquest of the lands that we
now call Latin America emerged a new world order which
ended up encapsulating the whole planet. This coloniality of
power, expressed through political and economic spheres,
he continues, was strongly associated with the coloniality of
knowledge (or of imagination), articulated as modernity/
rationality. The modernity that Europe takes as the context
for its own being is, he suggests, so deeply imbricated in the
structures of European colonial domination over the rest of
the world that it is impossible to separate the two: hence,
modernity/coloniality. This understanding enables critique
of the European paradigm of modernity/coloniality to be
more than a simple refutation of modernity. Rather, it
presents a more complicated and more complex definition
of it.
The elaboration of the mutual coconstitution of modernity/
coloniality and the extension of the timeframe of modernity
back to the fifteenth century are two of the key contributions
made by Quijano (2007) to its reconceptualization. Both
aspects radically challenge standard notions of modernity. The
temporal dimension is stretched back from the eighteenth
century to the fifteenth century and the spatial dimension is
expanded from northern Europe, specifically France and
Britain, also to include southern Europe, specifically Spain and
Portugal, and Latin America. Acknowledging these shifts
Modernity: History of the Concept 695
establishes colonialism as the precondition for the develop-
ment of (ideas of) modernity and all subsequent understand-
ings of modernity have to take into account the conditions of
its emergence.
Walter Mignolo (2007) builds on Quijano’s earlier theo-
retical work and, in particular, further elaborates his conception
of modernity/coloniality in the context of the work of
epistemic decolonization necessary to undo the damage
wrought by both modernity and by understanding modernity/
coloniality only as modernity. Mignolo (2007) argues for
a process of ‘delinking’ that is both an epistemic delinking from
the rhetoric of modernity and a practical delinking – that is,
a struggle to break free – from the logic of coloniality. His
project of ‘delinking’ points to the need to change the terms
(concepts) as well as the content (histories) of the conversa-
tions on modernity/coloniality that enables the histories and
thought of other places to be understood as prior to European
incursions and to be used as the basis of developing connected
histories and sociologies of encounters through those
incursions.
Mignolo (2007) argues for the importance of recovering
earlier histories, that is, histories prior to colonization, from
which to articulate both alternative possibilities of living and
modes of resistance to the logics of modernity/coloniality.
Shifting the historical frame of significant events from Europe
to other parts of the world, and prior to European contact,
necessitates a historiography of global history cognizant of
colonialism and coloniality. This rewriting does not involve the
inscription of a new form of universal modernity, but rather,
for Mignolo (2007), a differently understood pluriversal form,
where local histories and their narratives of colonization and
decolonization can connect through shared experiences and
create new ways of being modern and understanding
modernity.
Conclusion
In standard histories of sociology, modernity, or the modern
world, is seen to come into being as a consequence of the
‘twin’ revolutions – the French and the Industrial. In more
critical work, it has also long been associated with the
processes of dispossession, enslavement, colonialism, and
imperialism. This understanding of the coconstitution of
coloniality–modernity, and the general silence around this, is
central to any proper appreciation of the history of the
concept.
See also: Geist (Spirit): History of the Concept; Progress:
History of the Concept; Sociology, History of.
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