An appraisal of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s global historical sociology

Abstract

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt was one of the great sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century and a major visionary for the sociological challenges of the twenty-first century. As I claim, his overall work should be understood as a life-long critical conversation with the classical modernization paradigm from a heterodox and peripheral point of view — reflecting the Holocaust experience of European modernity as well as the precarious construction of a modern society in Israel. As such, his oeuvre can be viewed as an alternative, neo-Weberian synthesis of classical sociology to mainstream sociology. To demonstrate this claim, I firstly reconstruct Eisenstadt’s heterodox theory of modernity, emphasizing the tensions, contradictions and paradoxes of global modernity. Secondly, I highlight the contours of his comparative-civilizational, multiple modernities approach that has materialized in numerous path-breaking analyses of several civilizations — not only of Western but particularly of non-Western civilizational complexes. Thirdly, I emphasize the innovative research direction of his civilizational analysis for the new field of world history. Fourthly, I show also his innovative research direction in the recently growing area of the sociology of globalization and world society. Taken together, I see Shmuel Eisenstadt’s oeuvre as one of the great inspirations for a global historical sociology of the twenty-first century.