Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies.

• Author: Altinordu, Ates
• Position: Book review

Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies

Edited by Massimo Rosati and Kristina Stoeckl

Surrey: Ashgate, 2012, 188 pages, ISBN 9781409444121.

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES AND POSTSECULAR SOCIETIES brings together the two recently much discussed concepts in its title and explores them through a number of case studies. The introduction by Massimo Rosati and Kristina Stoeckl, the volume's editors, provides a useful recapitulation of these two ideas and draws attention to their potential links. The framework of multiple modernities, as developed by Shmuel Eisenstadt and further articulated by a number of his colleagues and students, contains many advantages over its intellectual alternatives. While it allows the comparative analysis of the modern features of different world societies, it has a much less rigid structure than classical modernization theory. The latter assumed that all societies would follow more or less the same (Western) trajectory of modernization and eventually converge in their cultural and institutional features. The multiple modernities model avoids the ideological underpinnings of its precursor by positing that each society selectively appropriates and interprets the cultural program and institutional patterns of modernity in line with its preexisting cultural characteristics. Thus, societal patterns that diverge from their Western counterparts are not automatically labeled non-modern. Finally, the decoupling of modernity from Westernization and the attribution of reflectivity and creativity to non-Western cultures provides an important alternative against simplistic versions of civilizational analysis in the Huntingtonian mold.

The association of modernity with secularity has increasingly come under question within the last three decades. The concept of postsecular society has arguably emerged as the most coherent response to this challenge in philosophy and the social sciences. The editors of the present volume largely adopt Habermas's definition of the concept: the postsecular refers to the understanding that religion has and will continue to have a vital presence in modern societies, leading to the co-existence of secular and religious worldviews and practices in the public sphere. As a normative ideal, postsecularity requires reflectivity and openness to communication on the part of both secular and religious citizens.

The notions of multiple modernities and postsecular society seem to be a natural fit. Secular public spheres may be said to be largely a feature of West European modernity (adopted by Westernizing elites elsewhere with varying degrees of success), while religion tends to have a strong public presence outside Europe. The contention that religious actors and discourses have a legitimate place in the public spheres of modern societies (as Jose Casanova has eloquently argued in Public Religions in the Modern World) thus supports the idea that non-Western societies represent distinctive interpretations of modernity, not deviations from a singular, universal model. The rigid assumptions of radical Enlightenment thinking which have deeply influenced the social sciences--the association of modernity with the privatization of religion and the historical experience of Western Europe--are giving way to a more contingent and pluralistic understanding of modernity, and...