Modernity, history, democracy

Abstract

The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe: the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama says or, rather, the end of modernity? For Fukuyama, the end of history means in effect the completion of modernity. Competitive capitalism allied to liberal democracy is the culmination of historical development, a social order that reconciles economic efficiency with a mass democratic representation. According to Zygmunt Bauman,' on the other hand, the full flowering of modernity is not Western capitalism but, precisely Communism. The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe was a defeat for the project of modernity, which sought to bring the social and material worlds under human control. Nature was to be remade in such a way as to subordinate it to human purposes, while the irrationalities of social life were to be overcome by rational management. Spontaneity was seen as meaningless and chaotic, the antithesis of an order constructed by means of legislative control. In Bauman's words: "Throughout its history, Communism was modernity's most devout, vigorous and gallant champion pious to the point of simplicity. It also claimed to be its only true champion ... it was under Communist, not capitalist, auspices that the audacious dream of modernity, freed from obstacles by the merciless and seemingly omnipotent state, was pushed to its radical limits: grand designs, unlimited social engineering, large and bulky technology, total transformation of nature."2