Issue materials

Today, academic research in the human and social sciences is dominated by analytical, objectivistic methods that push an aesthetic understanding and interpretation of the world beyond the ranks of science. This not only deprives the modern project of a humanistic kind of knowledge. The individualistic career model that is sanctified by the contemporary scientific ideal of detachment also thwarts the collective modern dream of progress. However, this article argues that aesthetic thinking and dreaming of a better future are substantial parts of the original modern project, as we see in the early modern thinking of Descartes and Bacon. This article wants to revalue aesthesis as an essential part of knowledge and pleas, in line with Nietzsche, for a sensibly audacious science. 

Keywords: Sensibly Audacious Science; Aesthesis; Experimental Knowledge; Modern Science; René Descartes; Francis Bacon; Friedrich Nietzsche.

This work is a translation of the first chapter from Charles Taylor's book “Modern Social Imaginaries”. The author focuses on the hypothesis that we will be able to shed the light on both initial and contemporary contradictions in the understanding of modernity, if we take into account that modernity is inextricably linked with a certain kind of social imaginary. Distinctions between multiple modernities should be as well understood in terms of social imaginaries involved. Central to Western modernity is a new conception of the social moral order. Initially formed in the minds of several influential intellectuals, this concept later started to shape social imagination of different social groups, and then of societies. Nowadays the modern moral order has become so self-evident to us that it is difficult to consider it as just one of the possible concepts. One of the results of this order dominating over other conceptions in our social imaginary was the emergence of certain social forms that characterize the essence of Western modernity: a market economy, the public sphere, self-government, etc. 

Keywords: Modernity; social imaginary; moral order; the modern concept of the moral order.

The article discusses key factors and directions of the value-institutional evolution of Modernity. It is argued that the progress of humankind towards global peace paradoxically turned into if not a denial, but a consistent radicalization of value-based political foundations of Modernity. The idea of value unity and institutional diversity of global Modernity is argued against the concept of multiple modernity as a rhetorically shadowed civilizational approach. It is argued that the constant self-adjustment of the core value system of Modernity is carried out in the context of non-simultaneity, which gives ground for discussions about the insurmountability of pre-modern cultural barriers and traditions of different civilizations. The conclusion is made that the success of Modernity is caused by the possibility of completing existing world economy to the level of world politics. In fact, the world economic integration has largely surpassed the compensatory possibilities of global political regulation, therefore contributing the intensification of various conflicts and inequalities. Intensive interaction and interdependence of humanity at the global level presupposes formation of ethical mechanisms of world politics based on the concern for the interests of humanity as a whole. Such possibility goes beyond political institutions and decision-making means associated with leading nation-states. It seems that in the discussion about the ethical regulation of the global (second or late) Modernity, the position of subjects that are able to offer humanity “game on increase”, which presupposes transparent, egalitarian, universal solutions to universal problems, is a priori stronger.

Keywords: Modernity; radicalization of Modernity; world economy; world politics; capitalism; liberal consensus; progress; postmodernity; nationalism; cosmopolitanism; collective action.

In recent decades, the belief in progress that was widespread across the two centuries following the French Revolution has withered away. This article suggests, though, that the diagnosis of the end of progress can be used as an occasion to rethink what progress meant and what it might mean today. The proposal for rethinking proceeds in two big steps. First, the meaning of progress that was inherited from the Enlightenment is reconstructed and contrasted with the way progress actually occurred in history. In this step, it is demonstrated that progress was expected through human autonomy, but that it was actually brought about by domination and resistance to domination. A look at the short revival of progress after the middle of the twentieth century will confirm this insight and direct the attention to the transformation of the world over the past half century, on which the second step focuses. This socio-political transformation is analyzed as spelling (almost) the end of formal domination. The current era has often been characterized by the tendencies towards globalization and individualization as well as, normatively, by the increasingly hegemonic commitment to human rights and democracy. A critical analysis of the current socio-political constellation, however, shows that the end of formal domination does not mean the end of history; it rather requires the elaboration of a new understanding of possible progress. Progress can no longer predominantly be achieved through resistance to domination, but rather through autonomous collective action and through the critical interpretation of the world one finds oneself in. 

Keywords: modernity; progress; autonomy; domination; resistance.

The nationally embedded and relatively broad-based economies characteristic of developed industrial countries are usually seen as the incarnation of a modern economy. These economies are largely internally oriented and are based, to a relatively great extent, on production and services based on local and national needs. Their provenance is generally assumed to have been processes of development that began in the sixteenth century and that, in the nineteenth century, accelerated with the expansion of industrial production and the growth of global trade. This article challenges that assumption. It argues that today’s modern economies represent, not the culmination of long-term processes, but a recurring phenomenon within capitalism. It argues that, in the history of capitalism, there have been phases of nationally embedded and global free market capitalism – periods when capital is relatively more, and relatively less, free from the regulation of nation state. Today’s nationally embedded economies represent, not a further point along a unilinear developmental trajectory, but a return to features of the moral economies that characterized both European and non-European societies before the nineteenth century. 

Keywords: capitalism; class compromise; embedded economies; neo-liberalism; shock therapy.

While the term ‘postmodernism’ may have been exhausted, the temporality of our own era remains trapped in a postmodern consciousness of time, a ‘now-time’, visible in the short-term focus of governments and the emaciation of planning, in low interest rates encouraging spending rather than saving, in the dominance of immediate gratification, in the ‘curation’ of culture via Instagram and social media. Modern conceptions of time were vital in the transition from traditional to modern societies – namely, the emergence of the idea of linear time instead of cyclical notions of temporality. This chapter will identify three temporal modes within modernity: the focus on the past, which was critical in Enlightenment and was accompanied by the emergence of modern historiography; the focus on the future, which begins with the modern utopians Saint Simon and Charles Fourier and reaches its nadir with postwar planning; and the focus on the present, which will be associated with neoliberalism and postmodernity. All these, it will be argued, are modern, and differentiated from traditional societies’ temporalities. The following chapter will anchor these temporal notions in key issues relating to our cities via the lenses of architecture and planning, two disciplines in which time plays a crucial part.

Keywords: time; postmodernism; modernism; modernity; architecture; planning.