“Modernity”: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical Concept

Abstract

THE EVIDENCE FOR MODERNITY’S OBSOLESCENCE as an analytical concept for historical study is both overwhelming and overstated. Many of the polemical barbs that have been directed against modernity by practitioners of global and postcolonial history are fair-minded and compelling. After all, empirically speaking, modernity has often been used as a transparent normative justification for the West’s predatory and imperious mission civilisatrice. As “moderns”—that is, as the presumptive representatives of a more advanced stage of civilization—Europeans customarily assumed that it was their moral duty to rescue non-European peoples, still mired in the backwardness of their traditional ways, from their condition of ignorance and dereliction. During the nineteenth century, the discourse of Western legalism—of rights and sovereignty—was employed as an ideological justification for European colonialism, in Africa in particular. The fact that native inhabitants lacked the Western concept of sovereignty was employed as a pretext both to deny them the right to self-rule and, correlatively, to justify colonial legal and political trusteeship, with its attendant horrors and excesses. 1 To peruse any creditable survey of the history of European colonialism makes Hegel’s bon mot concerning history as a “slaughterbench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed” look like an egregious understatement. 2 In the Belgian Congo alone, the overall toll from King Leopold II’s draconian policies is estimated at ten million needless and senseless deaths. Even when, following World War II, the era of decolonization erupted, in many instances local elites, having been exposed to the pro-Western biases of the European educational system, felt that their only recourse lay in formulating their own path to modernity—so thoroughly had they internalized the ideological idiom of their oppressors. Thus, rather than looking inward and cultivating their own indigenous cultural and political traditions, they perceived their primary goal as catching up with the West. Even today, non-Western historians take their bearings almost exclusively from their European progenitors. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed, “Insofar as the 1 See Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (New York, 2002), 98–110. 2 G. W. F. Hegel,Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Indianapolis, 1953), 27.