The Contested History of Autonomy by Gerard Rosich

Author:Gerard Rosich
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Part Two

The Contested Legacy of Europe and the History of Modernity

9

The Narrative of Modernity

The widespread use of the catchword ‘globalization’ to conceptualize contemporary political modernity would seem to originate from its ability to offer some kind of response to the ongoing transformation of modernity and to describe its reach, periodization, nature and meaning. It succeeds at this precisely because it points to a major change in the present, unifying into a single theorem different transformations at work in contemporary societies (regional integration, global migration, technological developments and so on), and intertwining them in a loose and vague manner from a macroperspective. Nonetheless, one senses that the term is only useful if it refers to a new reality, namely global connectedness in the broadest sense of the expression. Indeed, what is novel about this fact, in relation to the past, is that globalization now affects de facto the entire surface of the planet, and it is no longer a project that has to be promoted and/or imposed.1 If in the past it was a project that informed different varieties of utopian universalism, ranging from Christianity to internationalism, nowadays we can claim that it has become a reality with which all humans have to reckon. From this angle, we would be all modern now. Yet the problem with a mere proclamation of global connectedness as the background of global modernity is that it does not specify what this global nexus might consist of (the question of what links do or should structure the world), what are the units that are connected (peoples, individuals, nations, regions, cities, states etc.), what form the link takes at the moment of interconnecting the units (imperial, cosmopolitan, federative, anarchic etc.) or whether global refers to the planet or to the human world. It is precisely the answers given to these questions that render problematic the concept of global modernity in itself. Providing such answers may help to unveil it as a reinterpretation under current conditions of old universalizing political programmes driven by divergent or opposing projects that, when placed within their historical context, turn out to be particularistic in nature.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.