Late Modernity

Late modernity: ‘Modernity without modernism’

Bauman (2001, p. 75) characterizes late modernity as modernity without

modernism: ‘we have been landed now in an as yet unexplained world

of modernity without modernism: while continuing to be moved by an

eminent modern passion for emancipatory transgression, we no longer

entertain a clear vision of its ultimate purpose or destination’. Neoliberals

have substituted modernization for modernity, a concept imbued with

the idea that all economic progress is characterized as ‘good change’. In

this view, ‘development’ is the constant expansion of economic growth

underpinned by rapacious production, consumerism and possessive

individualism. In this late modern reality, neo-Tocquevillean social theor-

ists, notably the aforementioned Fukuyama (1995) and Putnam (1993),

have claimed that there is a positive correlation between modernization

and civil society, because the former promotes co-operation, prosperity

and trust simultaneously leading to higher levels of social solidarity and

economic prosperity. On the face of it, this is two-world theory where the

economic sphere is dominated by market values, and a social world

defined by depoliticized ideas, such as building social capital, in a post-

socialist world order. According to this vision, there is no longer a society

in the modernist sense of the welfare state or a public sphere, only individ-

ual enterprise, self-reliance and charity.

Hayek has contended that ‘the social’ is merely something which was

developed as a practice of individual action in the course of social evolution

(Hayek, 1976, p. 78). For Hayek, ‘the social’ was an abhorrent concept that

conjured up images of totalitarianism that characterized the modern social-

ist age. In his Mirage of Social Justice, he equates the pursuit of equality with

tyranny (Hayek, 1976). Other neoliberal social theorists have challenged the

normative basis of social solidarity based on the collectivist ideal of the

welfare state, which they view as creating a dependent underclass

(Murray, 1984; Marsland, 1995, 1996). In Margaret Thatcher ’s famous

aphorism, ‘there is no such thing as society’ (Sunday Times, 9 November

1988). This was intended to be the obituary of the welfare state and the

idea of a public sphere. Bourdieu (1998) in a witty polemic against neolib-

eral globalization, Acts of Resistance, contextualises these political changes.

According to Bourdieu’s analysis, the crisis of politics and the rise of

street protests in France and other countries are due to the ‘hollowing-out’

of the State, which in turn has undermined the public sphere. He argues

that citizens who are rejected by the state in turn reject the state ‘in the

same way. One has the sense now that citizens, feeling themselves ejected

from the state (which, in the end, asks no more than obligatory material con-

tributions, and certainly no commitment, no enthusiasm), reject the state,

treating it as an alien power to be used so far as they can to serve their

own interests’ (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 4 – 5).

What is clear is that civil society as the postmodern agora is a politically

contested concept. There is a divergence between Anglo-Saxon and Euro-

pean perspectives, epitomized by neo-Tocquevillean and Bourdieusienne

interpretations of civil society. Neo-Tocquevillians exalt a traditionalist

view of a world of consensus that is adapted to the realities of global neo-

liberalism, in which economic prosperity and human progress are pre-

sented as interdependent, within a capitalist society. Bourdieu (1998,

p. 25) views this interpretation as one of the new myths of our time that

has ‘kidnapped the state: it has made the public good a private good, has

made the public thing, res publica, the Republic, its own thing’. He argues

that ‘at stake is winning back democracy from technology’ (Bourdieu,

1998, p. 26). The Bourdieusienne concept of civil society stresses a conflict

between democracy and oligarchy, devolving on the right to association

that is rooted in symbols, values and ideology that reflects the zeitgeist of

our age. This vision is of an activist civil society, constituted by a Social

Left, standing in the way of the neo-Tocquevillean colonization of the

concept that detaches it from a theory of the state and the historic commit-

ment to social citizenship.