Lost Modernities - Context

Context

One of the long-running debates amongst historians, political scientists, and sociologists has been the argument over what constitutes modernity. For the purpose of addressing the arguments found in Alexander Woodside’s Lost Modernities, we will look at two broadly defined groups of thinkers who have approached this question in rather different ways.

Firstly, we will consider the larger group of historians who seek modernity in a certain set of social or political relationships which separate modernity from some earlier period. Authors such as Jacob Burckhardt, Anthony Giddens, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Max Weber have each posited different starting points, different institutional metrics of, and different dangers for, modernity which will be explored at greater length below. However, their approaches have several things in common. The key institutions that denote the transition from antiquity to modernity are all European in their origins, and all appear in Europe sometime after the turn of the 16^th century, from whence they make their way out to the rest of the world.

The second group of thinkers we will address are positivist historians such as Fredrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and more recently, Francis Fukiyama. What positivists have in common is a belief that history has an end, a point toward which social and political institutions are developing and at which, having achieved the pinnacle of socio-political development, they will crystallize into the best of all possible worlds. Again, these authors have very different conceptions of what the endpoint of historical evolution will be, but the notion of a rational progression to history leading to an ultimate (inevitable?) society sets them apart.

Despite the fact that most of these authors trained in Western societies, studied Western societies, and produced work relating primarily to Western societies, their thinking has informed dominant narratives in both Asian and World history to a curious degree. In some cases this is patently absurd- contact between educated European elites and East Asia during much of the 19^th century was only marginally greater than that between Europe and the surface of the moon. Authors such as Marx, who did occasionally reference China, did so informed more by rumor and assumption than by accurate scholarship, let alone first-hand experience.

Later authors have done a better job of attempting to include Asia in their theories of modernity, but have tended to fit Asia into those theories as an afterthought rather than beginning there and moving outward. In part, this is probably due to the fact that history has traditionally been taught with strict territorial limitations (American history, German history, Korean history, etc.) that makes addressing international movements across large spans of time more difficult.

Asian thinkers have produced a fair amount of work constructing their own historical narratives, but a number of factors have limited its influence on the dominant narrative. The 19^th and early 20^th centuries were politically unsettled across East Asia, dominated by colonialism and domestic unrest. To the extent that stability did return after World War II, historical narratives were filtered through communist ideology and tended to obscure as much as they explained. Only after the fade of communism has an energetic effort at new world-historic narratives really been attempted, and Woodside makes a helpful contribution to the debate.