Anti-Modernization, National Character and Social Structure

Abstract

Laqueur is examine the question of modernity and its limits, or more precisely, fundamentalist assaults on modernization. In his strong emphasis on Europe, America and Israel, it is too easily forgotten that Laqueur has also been a powerful student of the Third World nationalisms and revisionist socialisms. The revolt against modernity, which sometimes comes as reaction and other times as revolution, is basic to our understanding of political cleavage in portions of the Third World and Second World, and no less than to sociological cleavage in advanced industrial centres. Walter Laqueur reminds us that national character remains important, and that no revolutionary approach has emerged that sheds a clearer light or gives more dramatic insights into so-called laws that 'lay hid in the night'.' To raise the issue of modernity and its discontents is to enter the heart and soul of current debates on the structure and purpose of social life in historical settings. It is also at the centre of so much discussion as to what constitutes a national entity. For despite 150 years of communist ideology, and nearly half that amount of regimes professing communist practice, nationalism, far from being liquidated or subsumed under categories of class struggle, remains a powerful force, if not the most independent single factor, in defining relations amongst peoples.2 And in consequence, the work of Walter Laqueur remains central to all contemporary debates on the relationship of nationalism to modernity. In this, he is not only an analyst of, but part of the great twentieth-century European migration of Hans Kohn, Hans Kelsen, George Mosse, Jacob Talmon and Henry Pachter, among others.3 The sense of the limits of modernity has structural no less than historical roots. One of the very few 'iron laws' of development is that