Notes on Modernization

Modernization is the transformation from a traditional, rural, agrarian society to a secular, urban, industrial society.

Modern society is industrial society. Industrialism is a way of life that encompasses profound economic, social, political, and cultural changes.

Modernization is a continuous and open-ended process, is not a once-and-for-all-time achievement. The phenomena of industrialization and modernization that are taken to have begun some two centuries ago and that were not until much later identified as distinct and novel concepts have not yet arrived at any recognizable closure.

It is not fully understood what produced the leap into modernity and why, just as some groups of hunters and gatherers gave rise to agrarian society, some agrarian societies gave rise to industrial society. What is clear is that it took place between the 16th and 18th centuries and that it began in the countries of northwestern Europe—especially England, the Netherlands, northern France, and northern Germany.

One reason advanced for this is that northwestern Europe was the origin and heartland of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. In his great work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), the German sociologist Max Weber suggested that Roman Catholicism and to an even greater extent such Eastern religions as Hinduism and Buddhism were essentially otherworldly religions. They placed doctrinal emphasis on religious contemplation and the life hereafter. Protestantism, on the other hand, was predominantly a “this-worldly” religion. It broke down the distinction between the church and the world, between the monastery and the marketplace. Every man was a priest; everything he did, at work or at play, he did in the sight of God. Weber sought to show that Protestantism, and especially its Puritan variety, developed a particular type of character that valued frugality and hard work. Protestantism particularly promoted a work ethic. For the Protestant, all work, all occupations, were in a sense a religious vocation. Work was to be pursued with a fitting seriousness and order, in a spirit of rational enterprise that eschewed waste and frivolous adventurism. Such an attitude was admirably suited—though not intentionally—to the development of industrial capitalism. The Protestant nations, therefore, according to Weber, invented modern capitalism and so launched the world on a course that it still follows. Some later historians have disputed Weber's thesis and have adduced evidence that the early development of capitalism and of industrial organization preceded the rise of Protestantism. In either case, their mutual accommodation remains striking.

In a similarly persuasive way, the rationality of the Protestant work ethic has seemed linked to the development of modern science. This, too, took place largely in northwestern Europe in the course of the 17th century. In no other place, at no other time, was there anything like the scientific revolution of these years in England, France, and the Netherlands. It is true that the Industrial Revolution, in its early phases at least, did not depend on the theoretical science of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, or others of the period. What was crucial was the rationalist culture and the scientific habits of mind that this culture nurtured. Moreover, the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and verification could be applied not only to nature but also to society. Eventually, toward the end of the 18th century, what would later be called social science—economics and sociology especially—began to find a place alongside natural science. The scientific outlook—skeptical, autonomous, applying fixed standards of observation to continually changing phenomena, to reach conclusions that were never to be considered more than provisional—became the hallmark of modern society.

Western society was not merely plunging ahead on its own; it was paving the way for the rest of the world. As Karl Marx said, albeit two centuries later, “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”

Modern society owes its origin to two great upheavals in the 18th century, one political, the other economic. Both were part of a broader pattern of change that, since the Renaissance and Reformation, had set the West on a different path of development from that of the rest of the world. This pattern included the individualism and, in the end, the secularism, that was the Protestant legacy. It also included the rise of science, as a method and as a practice. Both of these culminated in explosive events toward the end of the 18th century. The first helped provoke political revolutions in America and France. The second, in creating an atmosphere conducive to technological innovation, was one of the chief elements in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

The American and French revolutions established the political character of modern society as constitutional and democratic, meaning not necessarily that every government thenceforward was of such character but that even those most conspicuously not so frequently claimed to be. From the time of those revolutions it became clear to practically all thinkers that no political system could now claim legitimacy that was not in some sense based on “the will of the people,” constitutionally expressed. It was this message that was so brilliantly spelled out by the clear-sighted French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville in his works, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) and Democracy in America (1835–40).

The American Revolution added a further ingredient to the political form of modern society. It asserted the principle of self-determination. Only those states were legitimate in which a people of common culture ruled for themselves a common territory. Foreign rule, or rule by an alien elite, as in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, was unnatural. Only nation-states were natural political entities; only they were legitimate. “National self-determination” became one of the most powerful catchphrases of the liberal and radical ideologies that largely shaped the modern states of the 19th and 20th centuries.

That self-determination could be a highly ambiguous demand, as with democracy, was shown especially in the experience of central and eastern Europe, where the question of whose presumed nationality should be the basis of the state divided ethnic groups bitterly and murderously. Who, in the extremely mixed domains of what was Austria-Hungary before 1918, was to constitute an autonomous national group—Magyars, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Romanians? Only force would resolve the issue, so that modern Romania ended up with substantial Magyar and Saxon minorities inside its national boundaries while Yugoslavia contained a number of ethnic groups not much less various than those of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy which in part it was created to replace. But, once again, it was not the practical difficulties that mattered. As with democracy, it was the pure ideal of nationalism that became the irresistible force. And, once invented by the West, it could not be contained there. Along with democracy, it was one of the ideals absorbed by the colonies of the Western powers, and it became a powerful factor in the dissolution of Europe's overseas empires.

If the American and French revolutions laid down the political pattern of the modern world, the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain laid down the economic pattern. The changes that took place in Britain during the 19th century became almost a prototype of industrialization.

To choose to industrialize—and not so to choose meant risking backwardness and dependence—was to imitate consciously the British Industrial Revolution. Great Britain was the pioneer industrial nation of the world; there simply was no other model to fix on. Even later, when it was clear that the British method of industrialization might not be exclusively valid or universally applicable, the general form of society that emerged in the course of the Industrial Revolution was widely regarded as typical.

Certain episodes and tendencies in the British case were pointed to as characterizing industrial development as such. These included the movement from the land to the cities, the massing of workers in the new industrial towns and factories, and the rise of new distinctions between family life and work life, and between work and leisure as notions meaningful to large classes of persons. Such features, with various others, were compounded into a powerful image of industrialism as a whole and wholly new social system and way of life.

Foreigners such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx observed and reflected on the changes they saw in England. They were convinced that what was happening in Britain would be repeated, more or less exactly, in other societies as they underwent industrialization.

One consequence of this tendency to generalize the British experience was that the idea of industrialism itself grew in scope and significance. It came to symbolize and to embody not just the economic and technological changes that lay at its heart, but other political, social, and cultural changes that appeared to be organically connected with it, whether as causes, concomitants, or consequences. Thus, the democratic movement triggered by the American and French revolutions was seen as the necessary political transformation that, sooner or later, must accompany all movement toward an industrial society. Similarly, changes in urban life, in family form, in individual and social values, and in intellectual outlook, were all seen as linked to industrialism. Industrial society came to stand as the epitome of modern society. And through the lens provided by industrialism, earlier developments, such as Protestant individualism and the scientific revolution, came to be seen as preconditions or presentiments of industrialism, elements incorporated into a systematic and more comprehensive movement that had its own compelling logic and momentum. Industrialism, it came to be agreed, was a package and had to be purchased as such.