From the Editors: Paradoxes of Imperial Modernity

Abstract

11 Ab Imperio, 4/2002 From the EDITORS PARADOXES OF IMPERIAL MODERNITY The current issue of Ab Imperio ends the annual program entitled “Russian Empire/USSR and Paradoxes of Modernization”. From the point of view of the orthodox 1940s – 1950s theory of modernization (as well as in the minds of many contemporary historians and social scientists) “modernization ” appears as a linear process of the emergence of modern institutions, such as rational bureaucracy, market economy, parliamentary democracy, etc. This usage, which describes social, political and economic processes using verifiable positive data of social sciences, has outlived itself. Essentially, scholars have approached the study of modernization without a theory of the latter, which led to some new questions postulated under the impact of the cultural and linguistic turn in historical studies. Anew conception of modernity, which in many senses emerged from the ambiguous and often traumatic experience of the 20th century, was gradually substituted for the traditional theory of modernization. While accepting the innovative character of social, political, cultural and economic processes of modern history, the concept of “modernity” turns into the subject of analysis the paradoxical nature of these processes. Thus, historians looked at the combination of liberal models of social organization with racism and orientalism, of the Enlightenment project of rationalization of state and society with totalitarianism and genocide, etc. 12 From the Editors, Paradoxes of Imperial Modernity Nevertheless, the concept of modernity, which took shape in the era of the “postmodern” and of the essayistic style of historical writing, could not turn into a new historical metanarrative. While partly replacing the old-fashioned theory of modernization, the new concept keeps intact our understanding of specific features of the modern period, in which we are still dealing with such questions as what is Enlightenment, how to handle the constantly increasing pace of historical time, how to control the future and how to comprehend pre-modern times, which were innocent of all these questions. In 2002 we attempted to problematize processes of modernization and the concept of modernity, approaching them in the context of research into imperial and national phenomena. We believe that we succeeded to demonstrate the significant explanatory potential of the two paradigms, which were treated by our authors in the broadest way possible: from the narrowly functionalist understanding to the global view, where modernization (and even plural “modernizations”!) appear as element(s) of the phenomenon of modernity, loading the latter concept with a universal quality (see AI 1/2002). While accepting necessity for the diversification of the historical narrative of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union through the inclusion of different regional and national histories and problematizing the existence of the “archaic” empire in the age of social, economic, cultural and political changes, we also attempted to show relevance of the paradigms of modernization and modernity (whose theorists rarely thought about these paradigms’ compatibility with the historical fact of multinational societies) for the study of such phenomena as ethnicity, nationhood and nation building, which in the East European region are firmly written within the context of empires and multinational states. Finally, in the last issue “Social and Economic Structures and Paradoxes of Imperial Modernization” we paid attention to the topic, which was central for the old modernization theory and its critics. As before, we were interested in the problem of the realization of some ideal historical scenario under specific conditions of the maximally heterogeneous social and economic space of empire. Thus, leaving aside the deterministic and teleological principles of the orthodox modernization theory, we do not want to leave aside the very idea of the vectored character of historical processes in modern Russia. We appeal for a more adequate perception of the spatial component of the imperial chronotop and of its multidimensional and nonlinear character. Considering the above mentioned, it should not appear peculiar that we open the issue with the first Russian language publication of Alexander Gerschenkron’s classic “Economic backwardness in historical perspective”, exactly half a century after the English original publication. This work by Gerschenkron, which appeared at the peak of popularity of the modernization theory and which had survived this theory’s decline, has always been deeper than it seemed to apologetic or...