modernity essay in english

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Article contents

Modernity and modernization.

• Robbie Shilliam Robbie Shilliam School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.56
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 30 November 2017

Modernity is defined as a condition of social existence that is significantly different to all past forms of human experience, while modernization refers to the transitional process of moving from “traditional” or “primitive” communities to modern societies. Debates over modernity have been most prominent in the discipline of sociology, created in the nineteenth century specifically to come to terms with “society” as a novel form of human existence. These debates revolved around the constitution of the modern subject: how sociopolitical order is formed in the midst of anomie or alienation of the subject; what form of knowledge production this subject engages in, and what form of knowledge production is appropriate to understand modern subjectivity; and the ethical orientation of the modern subject under conditions where human existence has been rationalized and disenchanted. In its paradoxical search for social content of modern conditions of anomie, alienation, and disenchantment, sociology has relied upon Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. Sociological inquiry of modernity and the anthropological/comparative study of modernization have provided two articulations of sociopolitical difference—temporal and geocultural, respectively—that have exerted a strong impact upon approaches to and debates within IR. The attempt to correlate and explain the relationship between temporal and geocultural difference presents a foundational challenge to understandings of the condition of modernity and the processes of modernization.

• modernization
• sociopolitical order
• knowledge production
• Émile Durkheim

Introduction

Modernity refers to a condition of social existence that is radically different to all past forms of human experience. Modernization refers to the transitional process of moving from “traditional” or “primitive” communities to modern societies. IR is by and large a derivative discipline when it comes to debates over modernity and modernization. However, these debates have influenced IR in two main ways: firstly, via the exploration of continuity and change in the international system; secondly, and at a more subterranean level, via some of the “great debates” of the discipline and the development of contending theoretical approaches.

Debates over modernity have proceeded most influentially in the discipline of sociology. In fact, the category itself is largely a product of this discipline, and scholars created the discipline in the nineteenth century specifically to come to terms with “society” as a novel form of human existence. These debates have impacted upon IR primarily in the deployment of the contrast between traditional and modern forms of sociopolitical order in order to ascribe and explain the different constitutions of the domestic and international spheres. The sociology of modernity tends to approach different forms of human existence in temporal terms, specifically, the rupture between traditional community and modern society. Indeed, there has often been an implicit assumption in sociological literature that the historical experiences of Western Europe are the defining experiences of the ruptures that created modernity, hence universalizing a particular geocultural experience. Because of this, sociology has usually been reluctant to relate the chronological difference of tradition/modernity to the persistence of synchronous geocultural difference in the modern world order. It is this later form of difference that theories of modernization have directly addressed.

The investigation of modernization as a process has pluralistic intellectual roots: methodologically it utilized a comparative form of analysis in order to illuminate transitional processes between and within Western and non-Western (mainly excolonial) polities in broadly political-economic terms. In fact, the intellectual space available for comparative analysis of different socioeconomically organized polities was provided by social anthropology and its turn to ethnography as a way of exploring the continued existence of “primitive” communities in the modern world. While cognate investigations certainly precede World War II (for example, Veblen 1939 ), it is in the postwar period that modernization theory really developed as a form of comparative analysis that specifically targeted the political transitions of ex-colonial states towards modern societies. While such analyses experienced their heyday during the Cold War, the legacies of modernization theory – both its insights and its oversights – are still felt in both IR and IPE via the attempts to capture the geoculturally pluralistic character of modern world development.

Together, then, the sociological investigation of modernity and the anthropological/comparative study of modernization have provided two articulations of sociopolitical difference, the former temporal, the latter geocultural. These two articulations of difference have impacted significantly upon approaches to and debates within IR; in many ways, the as yet unresolved relationship between temporal and geocultural difference provides one of the deepest challenges to the investigation of the form and content of international relations.

The first part of this essay investigates modernity by reference to historical and contemporary debates within sociology and illuminates, where appropriate, the influence of these debates upon IR. To begin with, the part sketches out the sociological investigation of the modern subject interpolated as an individual inhabiting an impersonalized society. Subsequently, a number of important debates over the constitution of this modern subject are discussed: how sociopolitical order is formed in the midst of anomie or alienation of the subject; what form of knowledge-production this subject partakes of, and what form of knowledge-production is appropriate to understand modern subjectivity; and finally the ethical orientation of the modern subject under conditions where human existence has been rationalized and disenchanted.

The second part of the essay starts by placing the emergence of modernization theory within the intellectual space provided by social anthropology for investigating continued geocultural plurality in an apparently “modern” world. Subsequently, the part documents the rise of modernization theory focusing on the Third World during the Cold War. The grounding in modernization theory of present-day debates in IR over the security/development nexus (especially the notion of “failed states”) is drawn out, as well as the interface between modernization theory and evolving notions of globality. Critiques of modernization theory are then documented, notably the rise of dependency theory and notions of underdevelopment. The second part finishes by drawing attention to current critiques of the way in which social anthropology has inherited the narrative of temporal rupture from sociology, in so doing conflating the traditional and primitive so that the persistence within modernity of supposedly premodern social relations of, for example, race and religion cannot be adequately accounted for.

Sociology and the Modern Subject

Sociological inquiry starts with the assumption that modernity is temporally distinct from tradition (Shils 1961 :1425; Habermas 1987b :8). Although chronological notions of the “modern” existed for centuries before, sociologists have usually placed the beginnings of modernity – and thus their own discipline – within the tumultuous effects of the “dual revolutions” that occurred within Europe at the end of the eighteenth century (Nisbet 1967 ). In fine, the rupture thesis of modernity states that the (French) democratic and (British) industrial revolutions radically undermined preexisting localized communities and their traditions by profaning sacred values and dismantling associated sociopolitical hierarchies.

The new science of sociology was charged with investigating the theoretical, practical, and ethical challenges deriving from the interpolation – through the abovementioned revolutions – of the “individual” as the subject of an impersonalized organizational form of human coexistence, “society” (Elias 1978 :34–7). Standing on the modern side of the chasm, sociologists have claimed that the condition of human being must be thought through without the comforting sureties of timeless tradition and spiritual faith. Rather than considered as part of an enchanted objective whole, the individual must be examined by prizing open its interior life. Subsequently, the development of the modern subject must be investigated in terms of an open-ended, constantly shifting process rather than embedded within an eschatological narrative; and meaning – if there is to be found any meaning – must be understood as immanent in this new human existence rather than transcendental (Lash and Friedman 1992 ).

With this in mind it is interesting to note that, similarly the sociology problematique, the core problematique of IR theory has always been the paradoxical search for order under conditions of anarchy. However, for this task, sociology has not relied upon a Realist canon of classical political thinkers, but upon Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber.

Order, Anomie, and Alienation

For Durkheim, traditional societies exhibited a mechanical form of solidarity because the individual was bound to the “collective conscience” directly instead of through a series of mediating institutional nodes. With no room to become authors of their own agency, individuals were effectively inorganic matter, hence Durkheim’s mechanical metaphor (Durkheim 1964 :130). Alternatively, industrialization prompted the specialization of tasks that, with a more complex division of labor, resulted in institutional differentiation (pp. 354–61). As the totalizing moral code of tradition was replaced with an instrumental approach to social interaction based on institutionalized specialization, individuals came to understand their social existence in terms of anomie (Durkheim 1964 :128, 361; 1970 :382) Durkheim claimed that the new form of solidarity, unlike the mechanical type of traditional communities, gained its strength by encouraging the development of individual personality, a requirement of the complex division of labor. Because both the parts and the whole were “living,” modern society exhibited an “organic” form of solidarity (Durkheim 1964 :124, 131).

Durkheim’s claim regarding the radically different constitution of sociopolitical order in modernity has been mobilized in IR as a way of mapping out the divided terrain of politics so that the “international” is effectively rendered as a premodern space in opposition to the modern space to be found within the state. In the pivotal chapter 6 of his hagiographic neorealist script, Theory of International Politics , Kenneth Waltz ( 1979 ) argues for the different structural qualities of domestic and international politics by referring to Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity (see for example Waltz 1979 :115). Waltz claims that the international realm is characterized by the mechanical form of solidarity. Populated by an array of non-differentiated functionally like units, the international realm lacks a complex division of labor and can therefore only be composed of relations of thin interdependence, because the functional likeness of parts leads to systemic competition: anarchy is the condition of anomic relations between parts. Alternatively, the domestic realm for Waltz is characterized by an organic form of solidarity wherein a functional differentiation of units allows the parts to be bound together in a socially thick integrative hierarchy. But Waltz radically misinterprets Durkheim’s schema by reversing the social integrity of the two forms of social solidarity. That is to say, contra Waltz, that the more anomie among parts, the thicker their social integration (see Barkdull 1995 ). By Durkheim’s sociological reading, “anarchy” is at least as socially constituted as “hierarchy,” which puts into question Waltz’s seminal division of the substance of domestic and international politics.

Marx marked capitalist modernity in distinction to precapitalist modes of production, wherein the division of labor was organized through the direct access of the producer to communally regulated land and wherein exploitation – the appropriation of surplus product – proceeded through localized hierarchical relations of personal dependency between lord and serf (Marx 1973 :156–66). “Primitive accumulation” was the term Marx gave to the violent and conflict-ridden historical process of privatizing property and, via the “enclosure” of the commons, divorcing the producer from direct access to the means of production (Marx 1990 :873–940). In the capitalist mode of production, Marx argued, land and labor became commodities, “things” disembodied from personal and communal attachments. Concomitantly, exploitation proceeded through non-hierarchical relations between impersonalized individuals exchanging commodities, especially labor, via wage contracts (see, for example, p. 179). The capitalist mode of production required a differentiation of spheres to be upheld by the state apparatus (see Wood 1981 ): between the public sphere of civil society, which allowed for exchange amongst equal individuals as political subjects, and the private sphere of the economy, which allowed for exploitation of contracted workers as their labor power was alienated (Marx and Engels 1973 :70) by the owners of the means of production for the accumulation of capital (Marx 1990 :270–306). In this respect, the pursuit and amassing of social power in the form of capital accumulation proceeded in the “economic” rather than the “political” realm.

Marx’s thesis on capitalist modernity has been influential to IR in providing both structuralist and agential explanations of the making of the modern world order. Robert Cox ( 1987 ) has written an influential argument on this movement using a neo-Gramscian framework to delineate the structural interlocking of political, economic, and ideological aspects of power that made up the capitalist hegemony of the twentieth century Pax Americana (see also Rupert 1995 ). Justin Rosenberg ( 1994 ) has used a classical Marxian standpoint to construct a structural explanation of anarchy which competes with that provided by Waltz. Rosenberg argues that the apparent anarchy of geopolitics – a horizontalized space of like units pursuing their self-interest – is an effect of the global social structure of capitalist modernity, a structure that depends upon the differentiation of economic (the world market) and political (interstate relations) spheres. For Rosenberg, anarchy is not a presocial condition, but the geopolitical condition of possibility for the global instantiation of capitalist social relations and the accumulation of social power on a world scale in the form of capital. Alternatively, agential explanations of the global rise of capitalist modernity are most evident in the Historical Materialist critique of the neo-Liberal policy of the last 25 years as the instrument through which the capitalist class of advanced economies have mounted a new wave of “enclosures” (Midnight Notes Collective 1990 ). In IR/IPE this interpretation of the socially transformative content of capitalist globalization has been pursued most forcefully by a broad range of neo-Gramscians (for example, Gill 1995 ; van der Pijl 1998 ).

Weber developed a sociology of religion in order to understand why and how modern forms of social action and political rule took on the content of “instrumental rationality.” The Protestant calling, for Weber, was historically peculiar among spiritual maxims in that it did not encourage an indulgence in the pleasures of the earthly world, nor did it approve fleeing from the world, but rather demanded an ascetic of methodological labor within the world (on this narrative see Weber 1963 :216–21; 1982b ; 2001 ). However, the pursuit of methodological labor led to a “disenchantment” of the world that the subject inhabited. Ultimately, the Protestant ethic produced a self-conscious privileging of predictability and calculability as the means of social interaction over the value-laden ends that such conduct was mobilized towards. Crucially for Weber, this “instrumental rationality” that became the preeminent form of modern social interaction was also distinguishable from other types of political authority, namely charismatic and traditional, by the way that it allowed for a domination of technical means over moral ends. Thus, for Weber, modern political authority was unique in that the form of social solidarity it regulated was a disenchanted one devoid of moral ends, and the epitomic organizational structure of instrumental-rational political authority was the modern bureaucracy. The bureaucratic accumulation of information on society was a legitimate exercise of authority not by dint of its direct moral ends but because it provided for calculable, predictable, and deliberate means of social planning (see Weber 1978a :66–8, 215–26; 1978b :958–75).

Although profoundly influential in organization theory and sociology, Weber’s main impact upon IR has been in historical-sociological accounts of the development of the modern state that do not, by and large, pay attention to the importance that his sociology of religion holds for making sense of his typologies of modern political authority (but see, suggestively, Hurd 2004 ). Nevertheless, Weber’s articulation of the instrumental-rational form of modern political authority has been used in IR to problematize the neo-Realist and neo-Liberal institutionalist debate regarding the standing and power of international organizations. Specifically, scholars have used Weber to inject the dimension of legitimate rule into the debate: international organizations can be said to hold a relative autonomy from the states that constructed them due to their particular modern purpose of accumulating and disseminating knowledge of the international realm and their claim to legitimacy justified by the instrumental-rational pursuit of this purpose (for example Finnemore 1996 ; Barnett and Finnemore 1999 ; and in general see Ruggie 1998 ).

In fine, all three figures – Durkheim, Marx, and Weber – have been used in sociology to uncover the paradoxically social content of modern conditions of anomie, alienation, and disenchantment, and these uses have been influential on debates in IR over the peculiar substance of the international sphere of relations.

There has, however, developed a sustained and foundational critique of the gender-blind character of the classical sociological approach to modernity (for example, Pateman 1988 ; Murgatroyd 1989 ). Absent from these inquiries is a sustained examination of the affective and personalized social relations of the family, and, what is more, an inquiry into the hierarchies of power that construct these relations through the institution of patriarchy. A number of feminist scholars have argued that modern society structurally requires the reproduction of segregated spheres: the public (including both the political realm of civil society and the economic realm of wage contracts) and the personal (especially the family). The latter sphere cannot, then, be understood as a premodern relic; and, because of the substance of its social relations, neither can it be analyzed as simply one more institution within a generic functionally differentiated division of labor. This critique then begs some questions: (1) how rupturing of traditional communities were the revolutions that produced modernity? and (2) how might a focus on the co-constitutive relationship between, for example, anomie and affection, patriarchy and capitalism, or emotive authority and that based, on instrumental rationality affect understanding of the condition of modernity? Various feminist works in IR have addressed these questions (for example, Elshtain 1987 ; Enloe 1990 ).

Knowledge Production and the Modern Subject

The epistemological concern for Verstehen , that is, an interpretive understanding of the first-person perspective, was a mid to late nineteenth-century critical response by German intellectuals to the popularity of natural-scientific explanations of the social world that, by positing universally applicable cause–effect models, seemed to rob social explanation of any need to engage with the particular subject. For example, Neo-Kantians of the Heidelberg school took to heart Kant’s claim that abstract universal reason could never be substantively manifest within a pluralistic and imperfect political world, but went further than Kant by claiming that no system of meaning could hold universal validity. Neo-Kantian epistemology allowed scholars such as Georg Simmel (for example 1980 ) and Weber (for example 1975 ) to investigate a plurality of culturally specific systems of meanings and values .

Out of these concerns, Karl Mannheim ( 1936 ) created a new academic subfield in the interwar period called the “sociology of knowledge.” For Mannheim, any attempt to inject understanding ( Verstehen ) into social policy would have to recognize that meaningful worldviews were culturally differentiated amongst groups so that morality in the social realm would always be radically relative and could not claim universal anchorage (Mannheim 1936 :17–21, 32) In fact, Mannheim proved influential in what has come to be known, retrospectively, as the “first great debate” in IR. In large part, E.H. Carr translated Mannheim’s thesis into the famous Realism/Idealism conundrum in his Twenty Years’ Crisis (Jones 1998 ): Realism’s purpose for Carr was to uncover the idealism of liberal thought in its positing of a universal morality; yet Realism itself required some idealism – some principled engagement with meaning – because without this, Realism could not inject any direction into political affairs (Carr 2001 ). If Carr and his retroactively identified Realist ilk are said to have won the debate, then, in this respect, it was decidedly not objectivism that triumphed over idealism (contra Mearsheimer 2005 ).

Another, related, intellectual current was the rise of a new hermeneutics with scholars, most famously Wilhelm Dilthey ( 1996 ), seeking to understand (rather than explain) the inner experience of the individual by reference to his or her particular external historical-social milieu. In the USA, George Herbert Mead utilized Dilthey’s hermeneutics in part to construct a social psychology of “object relativism.” For Mead ( 2002 ), the inner meanings held by the individual subject became object when his or her gestures invoked the same responses in other individuals as they had in the subject. Through this aspect of language, subjective meanings became socially constructed as objects. Indeed, the legacy of the Verstehen approach is perhaps strongest in the rise of “social constructivism” as a contender approach to both neo-Realism and neo-Liberal Institutionalism. The intellectual sociological sources of IR constructivism are many and disparate, and have by no means been understood as complementary in their originating academic spheres. But for the purposes of explicating the influence of the sociological debates over Verstehen , the discussion will focus upon Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality ( 1966 ), a text that has proved influential for much constructivist theory in IR.

Berger and Luckmann accepted Marx’s claim that what is specific to humanity is the social and historical organization of its relationship with nature (p. 51). And they took from Mannheim the point that meaning is not a question only for philosophers but is constitutive of the everyday social life of the subject (p. 9). They expanded this position by drawing upon the symbolic-interactionist school of sociology, heavily influenced by Mead’s object-relativism, in order to claim that through language, subjective meanings become constructed as social objects. With all this, Berger and Luckmann proposed a dialectical approach to hermeneutics: subjects apprehend the objectified social reality but in turn are involved in an ongoing production of this reality so that the social construction of reality is effectively institutionalized through social roles organized by reference to symbolic universes (pp. 66, 73–4, 103). Berger and Luckmann noted that in traditional societies, there was little room for uninstitutionalized actions within a totalizing symbolic universe; but they argued, in a Durkheimian manner, that with the differentiation of institutional tasks associated with modern society the symbolic universe splits into many particular sub-universes. This, they claimed, makes the process of the integration of subjects into a social whole driven not by functional requisites but primarily by the need for legitimation . In fact, legitimation becomes the prime mode of politically ordering societies due to the constantly transformative hermeneutics that are required for modern subjects to take on meaningful roles in a complex division of labor. Thus modern society was qualitatively more amenable to constant changes within its symbolic universe (pp. 79–86, 199).

It is precisely these specific qualities of modern rule that Nicolas Onuf uses in the book that introduced constructivism to IR ( 1989 ) in order to critique the “premodern” focus of Realists on the coercive play of self-interests in world politics rather than on the social construction of meaning. Similarly, although there are other intellectual sources of Alexander Wendt ’s constructivism (for example, Anthony Giddens ’s structuration theory and Roy Bhaskar ’s Critical Realism), Wendt himself ( 1995 :76) seems to suggest the greater importance of Berger and Luckmann for constructivism. Invoking the above dialectic of hermeneutics, Wendt argues ( 1992 :397) that collective meanings constitute structures that organize actions; and actors acquire identities – “relatively stable, role-specific understandings and expectations about self” – through these collective meanings. With this interpretive approach, Wendt critiques the neo-Realist understanding of anarchy as a purely objective structural feature of international relations and posits, instead, the socially constructed nature of anarchy between (anthropomorphized) states. As such, even if anarchy has become an objectified social meaning within world affairs it cannot be said to be objectively timeless.

In all these ways, then, the “third debate” in IR has relied heavily upon existing sociological investigations into the unique character of modern subjectivity and the forms of knowledge that derive from, and are adequate to represent, this character. And this influence is most clearly exampled in the development of Constructivism, the most popular recent challenge to neo-Realism and neo-Liberal Institutionalism.

Rationality and Freedom

Enlightenment thought posited that human beings could be freed from tradition and blind faith by the use of reason so as to reorder their relationship to nature and other humans according to rational principles (Kant 1991 ). In short, control over – and improvement of – the social and natural worlds, spurred on by the amassing of scientific knowledge, were considered to be the causes of progressive freedom. However, this optimistic viewpoint was, and has always been, countered by a more pessimistic assessment that the very means for promoting the ends of freedom – knowledge and control – might, instead, end up producing a modern form of unfreedom (Mills 1959 ). The claim that the promise of Enlightenment turned into the reality of modernity seemed to be empirically confirmed by two world wars, Nazism, Stalinism, and the increasing autonomy of economic activities and industrial advance from public oversight (see especially Marcuse 1964 ; Bauman 1989 ; Horkheimer and Adorno 1997 ).

While Marx ( 1990 :272–3) alluded to the substantive (if not formal) conditions of unfreedom that capitalist modernity placed upon the working class, Friedrich Nietzsche directly explored the socio-psychological dimension of this unfreedom. For Nietzsche ascetic ideals, especially those that seek to regulate action through positing a metaphysical god or transcendent truth, were life-denying in that they rendered the meaning of existence secure and circumscribed; and ascetic ideals found their nadir in the Enlightenment creation of a disenchanted scientific outlook. While Nietzsche argued that the “death of god” should be seen as an opportunity to radically affirm social existence in its contingent and fluid characteristics, i.e. to call the value of truth into question, instead, he observed, the ascetic aspect of modern life produced a self-forgetfulness in the subject by interpolating him or her as an impersonal element in mechanical activity that would be valued for its absolute regularity (see especially Nietzsche 2003 :97–8).

Nietzsche ( 1997 ) contrasted the possibility immanent in modern subjects of becoming “over-men” who celebrated the open-ended possibilities of living after truth with the tendency for modern subjects to become “last men” – stagnant, herd-like, and contented with a mechanical life. Philosophy failed the “over-man”; instead, the positing of truth as unity had to be understood as a will to power – the will of a particular perspective to dominant others. Accepting this then made the embrace of ontological pluralism an ethical imperative once God was found to be dead ( 1967 : bk. 2:III, bk. 3:III). Taking Nietzsche’s critique of truth and power to heart, Weber believed that in a “polytheistic” world, social science could and should help to answer why the ethical ends of human action had become a problem for modern subjects to believe in (1982a:143). Echoing Nietzsche, Weber argued that the promise of modern freedom lay, paradoxically, in the space opened up by disenchantment and the “death of God” for the cultivation of an awareness of the ethical and practical limits of one’s own subject position. This would help to stem the colonization of social action and interaction by a purely means-oriented instrumental rationality (Weber 1982a ).

Nietzsche and Weber have been mobilized in IR to fundamentally challenge the neo-Realist assumption that undistorted knowledge of political action must exclude ethical concerns over those actions (Walker 1993 ; Barkawi 1998 ). Instead, scholars have argued that rationality needs to be seen as a value-system peculiar to modernity rather than a transcendental entry-point to “truth.” In fact, such critiques have been used to retrieve Hans Morgenthau ’s Nietzschean and Weberian influence and to reinterpret the “godfather” of Realism as not a proto-positivist but ethically anti- positivist (Pichler 1998 ; Peterson 1999 ; Bain 2000 ; Williams 2005 ). Both of these lines of attack on neo-Realism have cleared the way for the current development of a non/anti-positivist realist position on the ethical character of formulating prudential foreign policies for a polytheistic world (Lebow 2003 ; Williams 2005 ; Molloy 2006 ).

Also gathering pace in the 1980s was an attempt by cultural and political theorists to recover a dialectical approach that presented modernity as constituted by tendencies towards both creation and destruction of freedom (for example, Berman 1983 ). Subsequently, buoyed by the new possibilities emerging from the end of the Cold War, many scholars began to likewise reinterpret the historical roots and legacies of modernity. Stephen Toulmin ( 1990 ) claimed that modern thought had skipped over the skeptical and critical attitude of sixteenth century humanism and instead had selectively appropriated the seventeenth century pursuit of mathematical and logical rigor. In a seminal address to the International Studies Association, Hayward Alker ( 1992 ) used this focus on humanism to reclaim an ethical orientation for IR theory in the new world order.

The debate still unfolds regarding the extent to which an ethical promise of freedom can be understood to be immanent in – or transformative of – the modern subject, and it has defined much of the terrain of “post-positivist” debate within IR (Hoffman 1987 ; George and Campbell 1990 ; Devetak 1995 ). But perhaps the most consistent and dominant voice in this debate has been that of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas accepts the Weberian narrative of disenchantment leading to an increased dominance of means-oriented instrumental rationality in the governing of modern society so that reason loses its emancipatory content by robbing the modern subject of an ends-orientation to the social world. In fine, politics becomes the management of technological progress (Habermas 1970 ). However, Habermas argues that the Weberian narrative should not be understood as the telos of modernity; rather, it is possible to retrieve an ends-oriented rationality within modern society.

To this effect, Habermas ( 1971 ) divides up knowledge-constitutive interests – that is to say, the means by which subjects organize social life – into three cognitive areas: technical interests that inform work life; practical interests that inform social life in terms of inter-subjectivity and norm-based communications; and emancipatory interests that inform notions of freedom from existing social constraints including distorted communication between subjects (Habermas 1983 : pt. III). For Habermas, the problem arises when means-oriented rationality expands out of the technical realm to “colonize” the practical realm of intersubjectivity and communicative action wherein consensus amongst individuals is arrived at intersubjectively through free and equal dialogue of truth claims and the judgment of existing norms (Habermas 1987a :196). Thus Habermas describes the dialectic of modernity in terms of the dual and frictional development of the instrumental rationality of the social “system” and the communicative rationality of the “life-world” (Habermas 1987 ). The moral imperative of political thought and action is to recover and promote the latter (Habermas 1987 ; 1997 ).

Habermas’s thesis on communicative action has occupied a central position in IR’s “third debate,” especially in the critique of positivist epistemology and its evacuation of ethical considerations from the study of foreign policy (for an overview see Diez and Steans 2005 ). The most sustained engagement with Habermas in IR probably comes from Andrew Linklater , who has increasingly argued that a thin moral universalism is transforming the nature of the international sphere, and that this transformation is driven by the spread of dialogic reasoning via the universalization of the modern subject across polities (Linklater 1992 ; 1998 ; 2005 ). Habermas himself has now contributed directly to the debate on the possibilities of “global citizenship” with a set of discussions on the development of the European Union. Habermas notes that the EU experiment proceeds through the frictional development of two forms of integration – functional (instrumental-rational) associated with the advance of capitalism, and social (communicative-rational) associated heretofore with the rise of the welfare state but now holding the possibility of developing a post-national constellation; and one that holds a cosmopolitan promise of cultivating a consensual and inclusive foreign policy at stark odds to the self-interested and violent nature of recent US adventures (Habermas 2001 ; 2006 ).

There are a number of problems, however, with the universal assumptions that underwrite such cosmopolitan positions, problems, moreover, that example the longstanding parochialism that has accompanied sociologies and social and political theories of modernity. First, Habermas, like many of the “modernist” theorists, renders the dialectic of freedom in purely masculine terms as the struggle over/for rationality in the public realm, yet pays little attention to how this dialectic might play out in the feminized personal realm, for example over libidinal desire (Felski 1995 ; Hutchings 2005 ). This makes it difficult to explore the complexities of women’s experiences of social change, as if the personal realm of social existence is immune from the dialectics of modernity. In fact, one might even say that it is in this realm that the struggle for freedom foundationally lies: the revolutionary ruptures responsible for the modern condition, while perhaps creating new opportunities for freedom for (some) men, created new unfreedoms for women by driving them into social roles associated with the nuclear family unit (see Kelly 1984 ).

Second, and to presage the core issues that accompany theories and narratives of modernization, despite a focus on dialogic politics Habermas shares with many normative political theorists within and outside of IR a peculiar insular geocultural outlook on modernity. For example, Habermas reads the European project of cosmopolitanism as a contestation with its own production of nationalism and barbaric fascism, but does not directly invoke the colonial dimension of European history. In effect, Habermas posits the dynamic of the dialectic of modernity firmly within European history. This sharp temporal and geocultural circumscribing of the formation and condition of the modern subject is by no means a constraint unique to Habermas. Indeed, the temporal openness that many sociologists as well as social and political theorists have ascribed to modern society has always run into tension with the selfsame sociologists’ circumscription of its geocultural origins within (Western) Europe. This has been both a theoretical and practical challenge to understanding modernity in global terms, and it is a challenge that lies at the heart of modernization theory.

Modernization

Anthropology and the primitive.

There has long been an implicit division of intellectual labor between sociology and anthropology such that the former has studied the individual in modern society, while the latter has studied the primitive in his or her community. However, even the classic sociologists – for example, Durkheim – developed their inquiry of modern social being by direct comparative reference to the non-European “primitive” milieu as much as by reference to the European traditional milieu (for example, Durkheim 1964 :58–9; see also Durkheim’s nephew and student, Mauss 1979 ). With the development of its ethnographic method in the interwar years (Malinowski 1922 ) English social anthropology opened up the primitive to detailed first-hand observation through the claim that primitive community could be scientifically assessed as a Durkheimian social system composed of roles and types (see especially Radcliffe-Brown 1948 :229–34). And with this advance, understanding of the primitive condition shifted from mythic-historical to contemporaneous-sociological, and on this basis the comparative analysis of qualitatively different political institutions could proceed both within primitive societies and between primitive and modern societies. Indeed, Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-Pritchard ( 1940 ), although anthropologists, were amongst the first scholars to produce what would be recognized nowadays as a text on “comparative politics.”

Of special importance in this volume for IR was the difference that Fortes and Evans-Pritchard encountered within the African primitive world between centralized political authorities that displayed administrative machinery and judicial institutions and decentralized sociopolitical networks that displayed no sharp divisions of rank, status, or wealth and, crucially, seemed to lack government. The challenge presented by this latter type was to explain “what, in the absence of explicit forms of government, could be held to constitute the political structure of a people” (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940 :23). Roger Masters ( 1964 ) used these musings to explain the thin sociality of the international sphere in terms of a primitive form of governance in the absence of government. Hedley Bull ( 1995 :57–62) later used Masters’s musings to, in part, inspire his influential “English School” concept of the “anarchical society.” Alternatively, Aaron Sampson ( 2002 ) has argued that the reason why Waltz could paradoxically produce a Durkheimian structural-functional theory of an anarchic state system owes much to his readings of the English school of social anthropology: Waltz’s anarchy was, in short, conceived as a “tropical anarchy.”

Thus the primitive community has been as influential a contrast to modern society as the traditional community in the attempt to describe and explain the difference between the international and domestic spheres. But what is just as important to note is that while sociology approached difference in primarily temporal terms – i.e. the rupture between the traditional and the modern – Social Anthropology sought to address difference in geocultural terms – i.e. the synchronic comparison of primitive communities and modern societies.

Explorations of Modernization

The persistence of the “primitive” in the modern world took on a geopolitically charged dimension with the emergence of the Cold War. The containment of the Communist threat required American political scientists to consider the trajectories of colonies once they had became independent (see for example Pauker 1959 ). The stakes were high: would the modernization of ex-colonial societies be so disorderly as to lead them towards the Communist orbit, or could there be an orderly management of the rupturing of old forms of social solidarity such that modernization would lead them into the American orbit? Primarily, the different geocultural bases upon which modernization in the Third World proceeded were investigated via the comparative method of political science, an approach that, as already indicated, drew significantly upon the preceding and cognate work of social anthropology (for example, Almond 1960 :3–4). Modernization theorists held to the historical narrative that posited and expected a uniformity in development patterns (manifest primarily in the rationalization of bureaucratic structures of fledgling independent states) as well as in the expansion and thickening of social relations through a complex division of labor (for example, Deutsch 1961 ). But what modernization theorists were much less sanguine about was the uniformity of trajectories towards modernity.

Of special concern, in this respect, was the fact that Third World elites inherited a state that, due to colonialism, had developed no institutions that could provide the seedbed for the modern form of political legitimacy. The attempt to retain order and stability in the midst of modernization could therefore result just as easily in authoritarian, rather than democratic, rule (see Almond 1960 , and especially Pye 1966 ). In search of a solution, Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba looked towards England’s own transition period in the seventeenth century to recover the mix of rationalism and traditionalism that produced a “civic culture” within which both old elites could retain their legitimacy at the same time as allowing newly enfranchised members of the political community to join (Almond and Verba 1963 ). A militaristic path was posited by others (Pye 1962 ; Janowitz 1964 ), and most notably by Samuel Huntington ( 1968 ).

Political scientists were mistaken, Huntington claimed ( 1968 :5–8), if they believed that modernization in the Third World entailed the gradual diminution of government and coercion in civil affairs. In fact the opposite was the case, because the military was the one political institution that had been modernized during colonialism. Moreover, its institutional functionality was not exhausted by the exercise of violence but extended to technological advancement and industrial production as well as exhibiting a Weberian ideal-typical rationalized administration that recruited from the new middle class and not from traditional sources of authority (Huntington 1968 :201). Recruits could be acculturated into the army, trained in the ways of citizenship, and taught how to identify with a larger political self. In short, modernization through militarization would lead to a “responsible nationalism” (Pye 1962 :82) instead of a disorderly populism that might create a gravitational pull towards the communist orbit.

Indeed, the militarization of Third World development also became an issue for IR scholars who imported the notion of weak and strong states from modernization literature. Against the Realist assumption that the international system was populated by functionally like units, these scholars used the notion of weak/strong states to bring attention to the fact that not all governments enjoyed sovereign command over the internal regulation of social life, or the rational mobilization of domestic resources to pursue the national interest. Indeed, the putatively sovereign status of many Third World states depended effectively upon the guarantees of international law and material aid from First and Second World “strong” states (Buzan 1988 ; Migdal 1988 ; Jackson 1990 ). Cognate to the concerns of modernization theory, the heterogeneity between First World and Third World states was considered to be a legacy of colonial rule and the result of late entry into an already formed society of states (Ayoob 1995 ).

In the early 1990s, however, investigations of the “weak” state started to be replaced by a concern for the phenomenon of “failed” states (see for example Holsti 1995 ). But in contrast to the concern for path dependency in modernization theory this shift has reintroduced a universally applicable typology of political authority wherein failure is judged according to an ideal-typical Weberian form of modern rational authority (see for example King and Zeng 2001 ). Concomitantly, the investigation of the threat that Third World instability poses to the security of the West has now become firmly grounded in the idea that the “failed state” is a breeding ground for general social ills such as disease, crime, migrants, and most recently terrorists (Kaplan 2001 ; Rotberg 2002 ; Krasner and Pascual 2005 ). Modernization theory has effectively transmuted into the “securitization of development” discourse (see Duffield 2001 ). Indeed, back in the late 1960s Robert McNamara , reflecting upon his stint as the US Secretary of Defense and thinking forward to his “fight on poverty” as President of the World Bank, astutely noted that “in a modernizing society security means development” ( 1968 :149).

Alternatively, many scholars by the late 1980s were noting that the shift from a Fordist mode of production to flexible accumulation, the globalization of the production process it entailed, and the new international division of labor it had constructed, was giving rise to a new intensification of “time-space distantiation” (Giddens 1990 ; Jameson 1991 ). In IR, aside from the rise of globalization theories and risk analyses, treated elsewhere in this Compendium, in part this debate influenced John Ruggie ’s seminal discussion ( 1993 :144–8) on the relationship between territoriality and modernity. Out of these musings has also arisen the idea of “reflexive modernization,” which posits that agents in the original age of modernity – the industrial age – understood their task to be the dissolution of the existing stable traditional order and the reconstruction of a maximal state of human existence; however, once tradition faded into historical memory modern subjects have increasingly come to face the consequences of modernization itself. In this respect, contemporary subjects who now live in a global age might experience cognitive dissonance with the identifying categories of society and the nation-state (Featherstone et al. 1995 ; Albrow 1997 ; and in IR see Shaw 2000 ; Palan and Cameron 2003 ).

Political Economy Critiques of “Modernization”

The most concentrated and influential critique of modernization theory emerged out of the Latin American experience after World War II, wherein population growth had exceeded economic growth, raising the specter of social disorder amongst the masses. The critique finds its immediate origins in the UN-sponsored Economic Commission for Latin America, wherein economists such as Raúl Prebisch ( 1963 ) claimed that modernization was not a spontaneous but rather a politically induced process. Moreover, political intervention and regulation had to tackle the disequilibrium caused by an international division of labor that placed manufacturing in the First World and primary commodity production in the Third. Some scholars versed in Marxist-Leninist theories of imperialism argued that in the peripheral economies, unlike the core economies, capitalism had to be understood as effecting the “development of underdevelopment” (Frank 1971 ; Amin 1976 ). In other words, the condition of possibility for capitalist accumulation in the center (ex-colonial) societies was the denial of an endogenously based growth process in the periphery. Other scholars argued that this condition of dependency had, itself, a semi-autonomous developmental logic to it because much depended upon how external economic forces were mediated by the politically powerful national bourgeoisie of particular peripheral states (Dos Santos 1970 ; Cardoso and Faletto 1979 ).

For the purposes of this essay, there are two important challenges that arise from the underdevelopment and dependency critiques. First, they presented a challenge to the accepted chronology that placed Latin American societies since 1492 in the “premodern” period and that were only now, belatedly, modernizing. Secondly, dependency and underdevelopment theorists were adamant that political-economic structure could not be adequately examined only by reference to national units; instead, there was a global structure of uneven development that governed at the same time the interaction between national units and the political-economic dynamics internal to each unit. These critiques of modernization theory have been most widely disseminated throughout the social sciences by Immanuel Wallerstein ’s “world systems theory” ( 1974 ). And although they do not figure in Yoseph Lapid’s ( 1989 ) influential assessment of the “third debate,” it is interesting to remember that Wendt’s seminal contribution to the agent–structure debate in IR structure/agency debate (Wendt 1987 :335–6) began by contrasting and critiquing both Waltz’s structural realism and Wallerstein’s world systems theory.

Political-economy critiques of the unilinear modernization narrative have persisted beyond the 1980s. There has been a resurgence in interest over the theoretical challenge that the condition of structural unevenness presents to understanding the development of capitalist modernity (Rosenberg 2006 ). But such interest has also been driven by empirical phenomena. For example, the fact that slums have become the dominant mode of integrating rural dwellers into the “modern” urban milieu has given rise to a new ethical critique of the progressive assumptions of modernization theory that has been termed “post-development” (see Latouche 1993 ). In fine, the way in which neo-Liberal discourse colonizes the meaning of progress and development with the practices of capitalist modernity has never ceased to be highlighted and problematized (Escobar 1995 ).

But, again, the gendered dimensions of modernization have been consistently underexplored. A number of feminist scholars argued from the 1960s onwards that assumptions held in the Western Academy regarding the naturalness of the gendered division of labor informed much development policy to the detriment of the social standing of women in many modernizing Third World societies (Boserup 1970 ; Rogers 1980 ). Subsequently, feminist political economists introduced the patriarchal family unit to the global structure of uneven development posited by world systems theory (Mies 1986 ). And at the same time as Marxists and “post-development” scholars have critiqued the “new enclosures” of the 1980s and 1990s, feminist scholars have argued that the neo-Liberal discourse is most dangerous in its avoidance of the harm done to the social institutions of care and nurturing by structural adjustment and privatization (Sassen 2000 ; Bakker and Gill 2003 ).

The Anthropological Critique of Modernization

Social anthropology, the intellectual wellspring of modernization theory, has also come under attack (and often by anthropologists themselves) for intellectual complicity in the European colonial project (Asad 1973 ). For example, Johannes Fabian ( 1983 ) argued that, through a stadial narrative of history, ethnography places the contemporaneous object of study – cultural groups – paradoxically in the past, thus rendering them as primitive and feminized objects to be scientifically represented by the modern masculine subject in the form of the ethnographer (for the gender dimension see MacCormack and Strathern 1980 ). Such critiques of social anthropology have also been mobilized in IR to argue that the positing of an anomic international state of nature standing in contradistinction to a domestic commonwealth was a necessary ideological plank for colonial disavowal of the practical and ethical coeval relationship of colonizer and colonized (Jahn 2000 ; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004 ).

The geocultural coordinates of the primitive/modern divide have been increasingly denaturalized, and this has had the effect of bolstering a long-existing critique of the standard definition of modern subjects as – in categorical opposition to the primitive – disembedded from immediate context, thus abstracted, disenchanted, impersonalized, and universalistic in their social action and interaction. Interesting work has been done, for example, regarding the congenital racialization of modern New World identity formations built upon the legacies of slavery (for example Gilroy 1993 ). But perhaps of more significance for IR, because of the current obsession with “political Islam” due to the “global war on terror,” is the questioning of the assumption that modernization equals secularization (Philpott 2002 ).

It is becoming increasingly difficult to take as a starting point Habermas’s Weberian claim ( 1998 ) that the problem of pursuing a modern ethical life arises from the loss of the religious foundation of moral traditions; even Habermas has recently ( 2008 ) qualified – if not entirely disowned – his own secularization thesis. Furthermore, this challenge to one of the central planks of modernization theory undermines the Orientalist assumption – that religious public spheres can only ever exhibit stultified, parochial, and non-progressive ethical codes and thus must be secularized in order to take part in the modern world (see Lerner 1958 ). Although, back in the 1980s, Edward Said ( 1985 ) criticized the neoconservative acceptance of such assumptions, they were again mobilized in the 2000s by the Bush regime to justify its Middle Eastern democracy promotion agenda. While the “civic culture” argument of modernization theory accepted, for the sake of political order, a necessary – but transitional – entwining of old and new social forces in the public sphere, it might be necessary, now, to understand this combination not as a moment of transition but as the enduring substance of the modern public sphere itself. And even from a conservative standpoint, this fraught combination is effectively acknowledged in Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” argument ( 1993 ), an argument that we might also consider to be a logical endpoint of his engagement with modernization theory: Westernization is but one form of modernization.

Indeed, Huntington’s argument fits into a broader reinterpretation of modernization theory, amongst sociologists especially, that attempts to reconcile the singular concept of modernity with the existence of an array of culturally particular path trajectories. “Multiple modernities” is a thesis that attempts to allow for cultural variances – often explored through, or lifted from, ethnographic studies – while still retaining a fidelity to the sociological understanding of modernity (Eisenstadt 2000 ). While scholars of the “multiple modernities” thesis claim that it addresses the plurality of human development, it has been criticized as effectively a modernization narrative in anthropological disguise (Englund and Leach 2000 ). For example, the threshold for when a civilization can be understood to have reached its modernity is determined not by reference to the cultural codes and understandings of that civilization but by reference to an abstracted description of a particular stage of human development that is itself anchored, ultimately, in an ideal-typical reading of the West European modern experience (Bhambra 2007 ).

These disputes indicate that understandings of the condition of modernity and the processes of modernization are still foundationally challenged by the attempt to correlate and explain the relationship between temporal and geocultural difference. The challenge can be no less significant for scholars who believe that the structures, processes, and agents of international relations are quintessentially modern in form and content.

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to Gurminder Bhambra , John Holmwood , Adrienne Roberts , and especially Robert Deuchars for their erudite guidance on readings.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Essay of the Month: “The Modern Essay” “The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.”

Virginia Woolf

As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into the history and origin of the essay—whether it derives from Socrates or Siranney the Persian—since, like all living things, its present is more important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely spread; and while some of its representatives have risen in the world and wear their coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gutter near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety. The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five little volumes, containing essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain principles appear to control the chaos, and we detect in the short period under review something like the progress of history.

Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.

It [the essay] should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused.

So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well be as much on the reader’s side as on the writer’s. Habit and lethargy have dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life—a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He must know—that is the first essential—how to write. His learning may be as profound as Mark Pattison’s, but in an essay, it must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this superbly over and over again. They have blown more knowledge into us in the course of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred textbooks. But when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of thirty-five little pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not previously assimilated M. Grün. M. Grün was a gentleman who once wrote a bad book. M. Grün and his book should have been embalmed for our perpetual delight in amber. But the process is fatiguing; it requires more time and perhaps more temper than Pattison had at his command. He served M. Grün up raw, and he remains a crude berry among the cooked meats, upon which our teeth must grate forever. Something of the sort applies to Matthew Arnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. Literal truth-telling and finding fault with a culprit for his good are out of place in an essay, where everything should be for our good and rather for eternity than for the March number of the Fortnightly Review . But if the voice of the scold should never be heard in this narrow plot, there is another voice which is as a plague of locusts—the voice of a man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague ideas, the voice, for example, of Mr. Hutton in the following passage:

Add to this that his married life was brief, only seven years and a half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his passionate reverence for his wife’s memory and genius—in his own words, ‘a religion’—was one which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he could not make to appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the eyes of the rest of mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all the tender and enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic to find a man who gained his fame by his ‘dry-light’ a master, and it is impossible not to feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill’s career are very sad.

A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay. A biography in two volumes is indeed the proper depository, for there, where the licence is so much wider, and hints and glimpses of outside things make part of the feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian volume), these yawns and stretches hardly matter, and have indeed some positive value of their own. But that value, which is contributed by the reader, perhaps illicitly, in his desire to get as much into the book from all possible sources as he can, must be ruled out here.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labor or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labor or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. Of all writers in the first volume, Walter Pater best achieves this arduous task, because before setting out to write his essay (‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’) he has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man, but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision, such as we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the writer’s conception as a whole before us. Only here, in the essay, where the bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness, the true writer like Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he will get shape and intensity; and then there is no more fitting place for some of those ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by calling them ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays nobody would have the courage to embark on the once famous description of Leonardo’s lady who has

learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary …

The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the context. But when we come unexpectedly upon ‘the smiling of women and the motion of great waters,’ or upon ‘full of the refinement of the dead, in sad, earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones,’ we suddenly remember that we have ears and we have eyes and that the English language fills a long array of stout volumes with innumerable words, many of which are of more than one syllable. The only living Englishman who ever looks into these volumes is, of course, a gentleman of Polish extraction. But doubtless our abstention saves us much gush, much rhetoric, much high-stepping and cloud-prancing, and for the sake of the prevailing sobriety and hard-headedness, we should be willing to barter the splendor of Sir Thomas Browne and the vigor of Swift.

Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biography or fiction of sudden boldness and metaphor, and can be polished till every atom of its surface shines, there are dangers in that too. We are soon in sight of ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of literature, runs slow; and instead of sparkling and flashing or moving with a quieter impulse which has a deeper excitement, words coagulate together in frozen sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas-tree, glitter for a single night, but are dusty and garnish the day after. The temptation to decorate is great where the theme may be of the slightest. What is there to interest another in the fact that one has enjoyed a walking tour, or has amused oneself by rambling down Cheapside and looking at the turtles in Mr. Sweeting’s shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose very different methods of exciting our interest in these domestic themes. Stevenson, of course, trimmed and polished and set out his matter in the traditional eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but we cannot help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds, lest the material may give out under the craftsman’s fingers. The ingot is so small, the manipulation so incessant. And perhaps that is why the peroration—

To sit still and contemplate—to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are—

has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by the time he got to the end he had left himself nothing solid to work with. Butler adopted the very opposite method. Think your own thoughts, he seems to say, and speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles in the shop window which appear to leak out of their shells through heads and feet suggest a fatal faithfulness to a fixed idea. And so, striding unconcernedly from one idea to the next, we traverse a large stretch of ground; observe that a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing; that Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road; take it for granted that no one really cares about Aeschylus; and so, with many amusing anecdotes and some profound reflections, reach the peroration, which is that, as he had been told not to see more in Cheapside than he could get into twelve pages of the  Universal Review , he had better stop. And yet obviously Butler is at least as careful of our pleasure as Stevenson, and to write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder exercise in style than to write like Addison and call it writing well.

But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayists yet had something in common. They wrote at greater length than is now usual, and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down to its magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of culture by which to judge it. It was worth while to speak out upon serious matters in an essay; and there was nothing absurd in writing as well as one possibly could when, in a month or two, the same public which had welcomed the essay in a magazine would carefully read it once more in a book. But a change came from a small audience of cultivated people to a larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated. The change was not altogether for the worse.

In volume iii. we find Mr. Birrell and Mr. Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a reversion to the classic type and that the essay by losing its size and something of its sonority was approaching more nearly the essay of Addison and Lamb. At any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell on Carlyle and the essay which one may suppose that Carlyle would have written upon Mr. Birrell. There is little similarity between A Cloud of Pinafores , by Max Beerbohm, and  A Cynic’s Apology , by Leslie Stephen. But the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair. As the conditions change so the essayist, most sensitive of all plants to public opinion, adapts himself, and if he is good makes the best of the change, and if he is bad the worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly good; and so we find that, though he has dropped a considerable amount of weight, his attack is much more direct and his movement more supple. But what did Mr. Beerbohm give to the essay and what did he take from it? That is a much more complicated question, for here we have an essayist who has concentrated on the work and is, without doubt, the prince of his profession.

What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence, which has haunted the essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had been in exile since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was never to his readers Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to Wat. They gave us much, but that they did not give. Thus, sometime in the nineties, it must have surprised readers accustomed to exhortation, information, and denunciation to find themselves familiarly addressed by a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves. He was affected by private joys and sorrows and had no gospel to preach and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and himself he has remained. Once again we have an essayist capable of using the essayist’s most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of yourself; that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem. Some of the essayists in Mr. Rhys’ collection, to be frank, have not altogether succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. As talk, no doubt, it was charming, and certainly, the writer is a good fellow to meet over a bottle of beer. But literature is stern; it is no use being charming, virtuous or even learned and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she seems to reiterate, you fulfill her first condition—to know how to write.

This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has not searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not molded firm periods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange melodies. Some of his companions—Henley and Stevenson, for example—are momentarily more impressive. But A Cloud of Pinafores has in it that indescribable inequality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong to life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. Yet it is true that the essayist is the most sensitive of all writers to public opinion. The drawing-room is the place where a great deal of reading is done nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie, with an exquisite appreciation of all that the position exacts, upon the drawing-room table. There is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no puns, drunkenness, or insanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some things, of course, are not said.

The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more. The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply.

But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to one room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the artist, the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our age. There are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth volumes of the present collection. His age seems already a little distant, and the drawing-room table, as it recedes, begins to look rather like an altar where, once upon a time, people deposited offerings—fruit from their own orchards, gifts carved with their own hands. Now once more the conditions have changed. The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more. The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply. Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes two, Mr. Belloc at a rough computation produces three hundred and sixty-five. They are very short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the practised essayist will utilise his space—beginning as close to the top of the sheet as possible, judging precisely how far to go, when to turn, and how, without sacrificing a hair’s breadth of paper, to wheel about and alight accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As a feat of skill, it is well worth watching. But the personality upon which Mr. Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm, depends suffers in the process. It comes to us, not with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but strained and thin and full of mannerisms and affectations, like the voice of a man shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day. ‘Little friends, my readers,’ he says in the essay called ‘An Unknown Country,’ and he goes on to tell us how—

There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men. … I went with him to hear what he had to say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men.

Happily, this shepherd had little to say, even under the stimulus of the inevitable mug of beer, about the Unknown Country, for the only remark that he did make proves him either a minor poet, unfit for the care of sheep or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a fountain pen. That is the penalty which the habitual essayist must now be prepared to face. He must masquerade. He cannot afford the time either to be himself or to be other people. He must skim the surface of thought and dilute the strength of personality. He must give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead of a solid sovereign once a year.

But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from the prevailing conditions. The essays which bring the collection to the year 1920 may not be the best of their authors’ work, but, if we except writers like Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay writing accidentally, and concentrate upon those who write essays habitually, we shall find them a good deal affected by the change in their circumstances. To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr. Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one feels that a common grayness silvers everything. They are as far removed from the extravagant beauty of Walter Pater as they are from the intemperate candor of Leslie Stephen. Beauty and courage are dangerous spirits to bottle in a column and a half; and thought, like a brown paper parcel in a waistcoat pocket, has a way of spoiling the symmetry of an article. It is a kind, tired, apathetic world for which they write, and the marvel is that they never cease to attempt, at least, to write well.

But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for this change in the essayist’s conditions. He has clearly made the best of his circumstances and not the worst. One hesitates even to say that he has had to make any conscious effort in the matter, so naturally, has he effected the transition from the private essayist to the public, from the drawing-room to the Albert Hall. Paradoxically enough, the shrinkage in size has brought about a corresponding expansion of individuality. We have no longer the ‘I’ of Max and of Lamb, but the ‘we’ of public bodies and other sublime personages. It is ‘we’ who go to hear the Magic Flute; ‘we’ who ought to profit by it; ‘we,’ in some mysterious way, who, in our corporate capacity, once upon a time actually wrote it. For music and literature and art must submit to the same generalization or they will not carry to the farthest recesses of the Albert Hall. That the voice of Mr. Clutton Brock, so sincere and so disinterested, carries such a distance and reaches so many without pandering to the weakness of the mass or its passions must be a matter of legitimate satisfaction to us all. But while ‘we’ are gratified, ‘I,’ that unruly partner in the human fellowship, is reduced to despair. ‘I’ must always think things for himself, and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted form with the majority of well-educated and well-intentioned men and women is for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently and profit profoundly, ‘I’ slips off to the woods and the fields and rejoices in a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some way from pleasure and the art of writing. But in justice to the essayists of 1920 we must be sure that we are not praising the famous because they have been praised already and the dead because we shall never meet them wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we mean when we say that they can write and give us pleasure. We must compare them; we must bring out the quality. We must point to this and say it is good because it is exact, truthful, and imaginative:

Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it were Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and sickness, which require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will still be sitting at their street door, though therby they offer Age to Scorn …

and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and commonplace:

With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of quiet virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of terraces where taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure maternal mistresses with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields slumbering in the sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed. …

It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel nor hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company which includes Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the farther shore. Very various talents have helped or hindered the passage of the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully; others fly with every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the contemporary dilemma—that lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody’s language to the land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.

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Review of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narrative by A. MacIntyre

Cambridge University Press, New York, 2016, 322 pp (Hardback), ISBN: 978-1-107-17645-4

• Book Review
• Published: 29 May 2017
• Volume 144 , pages 219–222, ( 2017 )

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Beadle, R. Review of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narrative by A. MacIntyre. J Bus Ethics 144 , 219–222 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3567-6

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Anglo-American Modernism : Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot

From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London , which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound , and many of its most notable figures were American.

The spirit of Modernism—a radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was in the air, expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of the Georgian movement (1912–22; see Georgian poetry ) and more authentically by the English and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry , and in Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English poets T.E. Hulme , F.S. Flint , and Richard Aldington and the Americans Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell .

Reacting against what they considered to be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists wanted to refine the language of poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral sentiment or imperialistic rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation of mood. To this end they experimented with free or irregular verse and made the image their principal instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, they worked with brief and economical forms.

Meanwhile, painters and sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis under the banner of Vorticism , combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the example of the Italian Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature the new sensations of movement and scale associated with modern developments such as automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and 1915) Vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece and in Lewis, its editor, its most active propagandist and accomplished literary exponent. His experimental play Enemy of the Stars, published in Blast in 1914, and his experimental novel Tarr (1918) can still surprise with their violent exuberance.

World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in Pound’s angry and satirical Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of anguish and with the wish that writers might again make form and style the bearers of authentic meanings.

In his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization in his view only too eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of industrialization upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of the fictional tradition, which he had used to brilliant effect in his deeply felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, Sons and Lovers (1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope that individual and collective rebirth could come through human intensity and passion.

On the other hand, the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot , another American resident in London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he rejected the conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope of individual and collective rebirth, but he differed sharply from Lawrence by supposing that rebirth could come through self-denial and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical intensity, no less than the seriousness and scope of their analyses of the failings of a civilization that had voluntarily entered upon the First World War, ensured that Lawrence and Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of Anglo-American Modernism in England in the whole of the postwar period.

During the 1920s Lawrence (who had left England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop viewpoints at odds with the reputations they had established through their early work. In Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence revealed the attraction to him of charismatic , masculine leadership, while, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928), Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now rivaled his influence as a poet) announced that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion” and committed himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist and paternalistic, they did not, however, adopt the extreme positions of Pound (who left England in 1920 and settled permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis. Drawing upon the ideas of the left and of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed democracy as a sham and argued that economic and ideological manipulation was the dominant factor. For some, the antidemocratic views of the Anglo-American Modernists simply made explicit the reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from its beginning; for others, they came from a tragic loss of balance occasioned by World War I. This issue is a complex one, and judgments upon the literary merit and political status of Pound’s ambitious but immensely difficult Imagist epic The Cantos (1917–70) and Lewis’s powerful sequence of politico-theological novels The Human Age ( The Childermass , 1928; Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta , both 1955) are sharply divided.

Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot were the principal male figures of Anglo-American Modernism, but important contributions also were made by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and the Irish novelist James Joyce . By virtue of nationality, residence, and, in Yeats’s case, an unjust reputation as a poet still steeped in Celtic mythology, they had less immediate impact upon the British literary intelligentsia in the late 1910s and early 1920s than Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot, although by the mid-1920s their influence had become direct and substantial. Many critics today argue that Yeats’s work as a poet and Joyce’s work as a novelist are the most important Modernist achievements of the period.

In his early verse and drama , Yeats, who had been influenced as a young man by the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements, evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland in language that was often vague and grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of Irish nationalism , he had hoped to instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), however, was marked not only by a more concrete and colloquial style but also by a growing isolation from the nationalist movement, for Yeats celebrated an aristocratic Ireland epitomized for him by the family and country house of his friend and patron, Lady Gregory .

The grandeur of his mature reflective poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929) derived in large measure from the way in which (caught up by the violent discords of contemporary Irish history) he accepted the fact that his idealized Ireland was illusory. At its best his mature style combined passion and precision with powerful symbol, strong rhythm, and lucid diction; and even though his poetry often touched upon public themes, he never ceased to reflect upon the Romantic themes of creativity, selfhood, and the individual’s relationship to nature, time, and history.

Joyce, who spent his adult life on the continent of Europe , expressed in his fiction his sense of the limits and possibilities of the Ireland he had left behind. In his collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his largely autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described in fiction at once realist and symbolist the individual cost of the sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of life in Ireland. As if by provocative contrast, his panoramic novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank and imaginatively profuse. (Copies of the first edition were burned by the New York postal authorities, and British customs officials seized the second edition in 1923.) Employing extraordinary formal and linguistic inventiveness, including the stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce depicted the experiences and the fantasies of various men and women in Dublin on a summer’s day in June 1904. Yet his purpose was not simply documentary, for he drew upon an encyclopaedic range of European literature to stress the rich universality of life buried beneath the provincialism of pre-independence Dublin, in 1904 a city still within the British Empire . In his even more experimental Finnegans Wake (1939), extracts of which had already appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, Joyce’s commitment to cultural universality became absolute. By means of a strange, polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words , he not only explored the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also suggested that the languages and myths of Ireland were interwoven with the languages and myths of many other cultures .

The example of Joyce’s experimentalism was followed by the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones and by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve). Whereas Jones concerned himself, in his complex and allusive poetry and prose, with the Celtic, Saxon, Roman, and Christian roots of Great Britain, MacDiarmid sought not only to recover what he considered to be an authentically Scottish culture but also to establish, as in his In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), the truly cosmopolitan nature of Celtic consciousness and achievement. MacDiarmid’s masterpiece in the vernacular , A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), helped to inspire the Scottish renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s.

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Modernity, Essay Example

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Societies across the globe have undergone numerous changes politically, economically and socially. Modernity has occurred in stages with a number of activities or occurrences acting as catalysts for development onto the next phase. For instance, whereas most societies began as hunters and gatherers, they were forced to reform and adopt horticulture and pastoralism. This was then followed by the full adoption of agriculture before industrialization (Anderson, 2012). Currently, society is moving away from simply relying on industries to a post industrial future, characterized by information based economies, and emphasis on completely different skill sets. Hunting and gathering societies utilized very simple technology to hunt animals and gather plants. Due to the continuous foraging for food, such societies were forced to live nomadic lifestyles, which left very little time for leisure. However, the innovation of the plough catalyzed a shift from hunting and gathering to the more organized lifestyle of horticulture and pastoralism. This shift also gave rise to specific religions and a more organized way of life. The ability to produce increased amounts of food, led to more permanent settlements and a full graduation into agrarian societies. The development into more organized groups allowed religion to thrive, allowing it to play the role of knowledge custodians. In addition to the clamor for reformation within the church, the period also saw the rise of printing houses such as Guttenberg, leading to the rapid spread of information and the rise of the age of enlightenment.

The clamor for reformation within the Catholic Church and the increased number of enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Hume and Kant, led to a shift from religious thinking and a blind belief in the supernatural. Most societies began valuing reason, science and empiricism. Elements of capitalism and independent thinking, as well as unconventional ideas began to rise. This led to universalism, individualism, toleration, progress, freedom, secularism and uniformity of human nature. Although individuals realized that they were part of a group, the need for autonomy was enhanced. Most individuals felt that some of their rights must be guaranteed, while at the same time, their inherent need for a sense of belonging and nationalism grew stronger. This critical time also saw the rise of conventional democratic political systems meant to safeguard the individual rights of citizens, especially those of affluence. The rise of scientific thought represents the turning point for capitalism and the most important step towards modernization. Not only did man realize that social institutions that ensure freedom from injustice, despotism and cruelty could be created, but also a more efficient agricultural society could arise from the application of scientific thinking (Wilson & Reill, 2004). This sparked the invention of machines and processes that could easily convert raw materials into final products that were beneficial to mankind.

In addition to the invention of machines and processes, humans also discovered ways and means of reducing illness and infirmity, hence ensuring more members of the society were productive. The increased empowerment through knowledge, not only led to the toppling of inefficient leaders and governments as was the case in France during the French revolution, but also led to increased activism for the rights of the general population, including fundamental labor rights. This increased agitation for better economic stability and distribution led to the rise of major industries that not only offered employment to the general population, but also ready markets for the farm produce, hence industrialization (Ross, 2002). This market the beginning of the industrial age, with the proliferation of an increased number of industries, hence the demand for a diverse range of raw materials, driven by the innovation that arose as a result of increased scientific thinking and the motivation to succeed individually (Goloboy, 2008).

The industrial revolution was the change in the manufacturing process from the hand production processes to the machine manufacturing in the industries. The transition occurred between 1760 and 1840 and enhanced the introduction of chemical manufacturing, iron production and better sources of power mainly steam power. With the help of new manufacturing processes major technological developments encouraged many to leave their homes to work in the industries. The new work opportunities encouraged change in the social and economic sectors of most individuals and families resulting to modernism. The industries were overcrowded and the environment poorly maintained and this encouraged workers to strongly appeal for better working conditions through movements and strikes. Other results of the new work opportunities were improved living conditions because of the increase in income and more opportunities of different members in the society. It also encouraged urbanization and improved life expectancy. In addition, the emergency of class system arose which is mainly associated with modernization. The system dictated that people interact depending on their social group which was a reflection of economic status. Changes in the working class families and role of men and women in the society and families brought the rise of modernism. For instance, women were allowed to vote and participate in other political activities which were previously forbidden (Horn, Rosenband & Smith, 2010).

Although industrial revolution brought economic progress, it also encouraged modernism which according to Goloboy (2008) is characterized by the isolation and alienation. Working in the industrials encouraged more people to gain self control because were economically stable and also encouraged self knowledge, faith in good deeds and improved humanity. These aspects made many communities especially in the countries where industrial revolution had spread rapidly for instance in France, Germany, United States and Britain. The consequences of the isolation and multiple political activities brought the rise of world wars and the fast growing economy identified by massive technological advancements and industries brought a different sense on humanity causing modernism.

The age of enlightenment and economic advancement introduced capitalism in most societies. This encouraged most people to embrace the scientific knowledge for instance steam engine and also sociological changes. Capitalism lowered the way most people viewed human life and the attitude towards society. The need to focus on personal gain rather than the group system caused alienation and the ability to separate one’s work from the expectations of the society.  The positive effects of the new system were clearly experienced through economic success, improved living standards and scientific knowledge which increased production. On the other hand, the main negative effects were on the rise of wage labor and class structure and the capital markets. Modernity therefore existed in three main phases. The initial phase was caused by the social changes which required moving from feudalism system, the second stage which occurred in 1789 to 1900 was as a result of the revolution and the final stage which occurred in 1900 to 1989 was caused the rapid spread of capitalism.

Anderson, C., & OverDrive, Inc. (2012).  Makers: The new industrial revolution . New York: Crown Business.

Goloboy, J. L. (2008).  Industrial revolution: People and perspectives . Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO.

Horn, J., Rosenband, L. N., & Smith, M. R. (2010). Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Ross, S. (2001).  The French Revolution . London: Evans.

Wilson, E. J., & Reill, P. H. (2004).  Encyclopedia of the enlightenment . New York, NY: Facts On File.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Impressionism: art and modernity.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet

Porte de la Reine at Aigues-Mortes

Jean-Frédéric Bazille

La Grenouillère

The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne

Alfred Sisley

Edouard Manet

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)

Auguste Renoir

The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas

Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris

Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise

Camille Pissarro

Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery

Allée of Chestnut Trees

Young Woman Seated on a Sofa

Berthe Morisot

Two Young Girls at the Piano

Dancers in the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass

Young Girl Bathing

Young Woman Knitting

The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning

Margaret Samu Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

October 2004

In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. Its founding members included Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , and Camille Pissarro, among others. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon , for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the Impressionists. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.

Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” not a finished painting. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions, such as in Alfred Sisley’s 1878 Allée of Chestnut Trees ( 1975.1.211 ). This seemingly casual style became widely accepted, even in the official Salon, as the new language with which to depict modern life.

In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of academic painting. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. The paints themselves were more vivid as well. The nineteenth century saw the development of synthetic pigments for artists’ paints, providing vibrant shades of blue, green, and yellow that painters had never used before. Édouard Manet’s 1874 Boating ( 29.100.115 ), for example, features an expanse of the new cerulean blue and synthetic ultramarine. Depicted in a radically cropped, Japanese-inspired composition , the fashionable boater and his companion embody modernity in their form, their subject matter, and the very materials used to paint them.

Such images of suburban and rural leisure outside of Paris were a popular subject for the Impressionists, notably Monet and Auguste Renoir . Several of them lived in the country for part or all of the year. New railway lines radiating out from the city made travel so convenient that Parisians virtually flooded into the countryside every weekend. While some of the Impressionists, such as Pissarro, focused on the daily life of local villagers in Pontoise, most preferred to depict the vacationers’ rural pastimes. The boating and bathing establishments that flourished in these regions became favorite motifs. In his 1869 La Grenouillère ( 29.100.112 ), for example, Monet’s characteristically loose painting style complements the leisure activities he portrays. Landscapes , which figure prominently in Impressionist art, were also brought up to date with innovative compositions, light effects, and use of color. Monet in particular emphasized the modernization of the landscape by including railways and factories, signs of encroaching industrialization that would have seemed inappropriate to the Barbizon artists of the previous generation.

Perhaps the prime site of modernity in the late nineteenth century was the city of Paris itself, renovated between 1853 and 1870 under Emperor Napoleon III. His prefect, Baron Haussmann, laid the plans, tearing down old buildings to create more open space for a cleaner, safer city. Also contributing to its new look was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), which required reconstructing the parts of the city that had been destroyed. Impressionists such as Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte enthusiastically painted the renovated city, employing their new style to depict its wide boulevards, public gardens, and grand buildings. While some focused on the cityscapes, others turned their sights to the city’s inhabitants. The Paris population explosion after the Franco-Prussian War gave them a tremendous amount of material for their scenes of urban life. Characteristic of these scenes was the mixing of social classes that took place in public settings. Degas and Caillebotte focused on working people, including singers and dancers , as well as workmen. Others, including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt , depicted the privileged classes. The Impressionists also painted new forms of leisure, including theatrical entertainment (such as Cassatt’s 1878 In the Loge [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]), cafés, popular concerts, and dances. Taking an approach similar to Naturalist writers such as Émile Zola, the painters of urban scenes depicted fleeting yet typical moments in the lives of characters they observed. Caillebotte’s 1877 Paris Street, Rainy Day (Art Institute, Chicago) exemplifies how these artists abandoned sentimental depictions and explicit narratives, adopting instead a detached, objective view that merely suggests what is going on.

The independent collective had a fluid membership over the course of the eight exhibitions it organized between 1874 and 1886, with the number of participating artists ranging from nine to thirty. Pissarro, the eldest, was the only artist who exhibited in all eight shows, while Morisot participated in seven. Ideas for an independent exhibition had been discussed as early as 1867, but the Franco-Prussian War intervened. The painter Frédéric Bazille, who had been leading the efforts, was killed in the war. Subsequent exhibitions were headed by different artists. Philosophical and political differences among the artists led to heated disputes and fractures, causing fluctuations in the contributors. The exhibitions even included the works of more conservative artists who simply refused to submit their work to the Salon jury. Also participating in the independent exhibitions were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin , whose later styles grew out of their early work with the Impressionists.

The last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 also saw the beginning of a new phase in avant-garde painting. By this time, few of the participants were working in a recognizably Impressionist manner. Most of the core members were developing new, individual styles that caused ruptures in the group’s tenuous unity. Pissarro promoted the participation of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in addition to adopting their new technique based on points of pure color, known as Neo-Impressionism . The young Gauguin was making forays into Primitivism. The nascent Symbolist Odilon Redon also contributed, though his style was unlike that of any other participant. Because of the group’s stylistic and philosophical fragmentation, and because of the need for assured income, some of the core members such as Monet and Renoir exhibited in venues where their works were more likely to sell.

Its many facets and varied participants make the Impressionist movement difficult to define. Indeed, its life seems as fleeting as the light effects it sought to capture. Even so, Impressionism was a movement of enduring consequence, as its embrace of modernity made it the springboard for later avant-garde art in Europe.

Samu, Margaret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Bomford, David, et al. Art in the Making: Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New Haven and London: National Gallery, 1990.

Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

House, John. Monet: Nature into Art . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Moffett, Charles S., et al. The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 . San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986.

Nochlin, Linda, ed. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904: Sources and Documents . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism . Rev. and enl. ed. . New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.

Tinterow, Gary, and Henri Loyrette. Origins of Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. See on MetPublications

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Structuring the Essay ( AQA GCSE English Literature )

Revision note.

English Senior Content Creator

Answering just one essay question can seem daunting. However, examiners just want to see your ideas and opinions on the modern text you have studied. The guide below will enable you to best express these ideas and opinions in a way that will gain the highest marks. It includes guides on:

Answering the question

Planning your essay, writing your essay.

Regardless of which modern text you study, the type of question you’ll need to write an essay for will be the same. You will be asked a question that asks you to analyse and write in detail about an aspect of the text. Your answer will need to address the text as a whole.

Completing the steps below will ensure you answer the question in the way that examiners are looking for.

6 key steps to answer the modern text exam question effectively:

1. The very first thing you should do once you open your exam paper is to look at the question:

This sounds obvious, but it’s really crucial to read through the question a few times 

Why is this important? Regardless of what subject you’re being examined in, the single-biggest mistake most students make in their exams is not reading the question through carefully enough that they answer the question they think they’re being asked, rather than the question they’ve actually been asked 

It’s especially important to get this right in your GCSE English Literature exams because you only have five essay questions to answer across two papers, so if you misread a question, you’re potentially costing yourself a large number of marks     

2 . Identify the keywords of the question:

The key words are the focus of the question: the specific themes, ideas or characters the examiners want you to focus on

For the above question, the key words of the question are “how Russell presents the importance of friendship”

This is the theme the examiners want you to explore in your essay

Do not be tempted to write a question on a related theme, even if you have revised more for it: this will affect your overall mark badly, as you won’t be directly answering the question! 

In the example above, the theme is about friendship, so make sure you plan and write an essay about friendship , rather than, for example, the role of family in the text:

Although this could be viewed as a related theme, your answer won’t be focused on the question and will lose you marks

3. Critically evaluate the idea or theme of the question in terms of the text as a whole

Think: what is this question asking, and what is it not asking?

It is asking you to explore ideas about friendship – a special relationship or bond that exists between people

The question is not asking you to explore any other themes

Again, writing about related ideas will actually lose you marks as you aren’t answering the exact question you have been set. The examiner isn’t going to reward you extra marks for information that is factually correct or demonstrates a great understanding of the text if the information is not relevant to the question being asked

Planning your essay is absolutely vital to achieve the highest marks. Examiners always stress that the best responses are those that have a logical, well-structured argument that comes with spending time planning an answer. This, in turn, will enable you to achieve the highest marks for each assessment objective. The main assessment objectives are:

It is important to remember how marks are distributed for each assessment objective: there are 12 marks for AO1, 12 marks for AO2 and 6 marks for AO3. The mark scheme places assessment objectives AO1 and AO2 as the key skills, therefore while AO3 must be addressed in your response, your essay should focus predominantly on AO1 and AO2.

Your plan should include all aspects of your response, covering all of the assessment objectives, but mainly focusing on AO1 and AO2:

Your overall argument, or thesis (AO1)

Your topic sentences for all your paragraphs (AO1)

The quotations you will be using and analysing from elsewhere in the text (AO1 & AO2)

A sense of why the writer has made the choices they have (AO2)

A sense of what contextual factors give further insight into the ideas and theme presented in the question (AO3)

Therefore, a plan may look like the following:

Some other tips:

You do not need to include a counter-argument (disagreeing with the question/including paragraphs which begin “On the other hand”)

The questions have been designed to enable as many students as possible to write essays 

Examiners say that the inclusion of a counter-argument is often unnecessary and unhelpful

It can affect your AO1 mark negatively

Once you have read and evaluated the question and created a clear plan, you are ready to begin writing. Below is a guide detailing what to include.

Your essay should include:

An introduction with a thesis statement

A number of paragraphs (three is ideal!), each covering a separate point. It’s a great idea to start each paragraph with a topic sentence

A conclusion

Introduction

Your introduction should aim to clearly, and briefly, answer the question

The best way to do this is to include a thesis statement

A thesis statement is a short statement (one or two sentences) that summarises the main point or claim your argument is making

You should include the exact words from the question in your thesis statement

Examiners want to see your own opinion : your interpretation of what the writer is trying to show

Your thesis statement should also attempt to explain why you think the writer has presented their characters in the way that they have: what are they trying to say overall? What is their message?

A good way to think about this is to ask: what is the writer’s one big idea in terms of the characters or themes addressed in the question?

Include contextual ideas and perspectives to help explain the writer’s intentions

Including the writer’s message or one big idea helps create a “conceptualised response”, which examiners reward with the highest marks

An example of a thesis statement:

Thesis statement:

“Russell presents the importance of friendship through several characters in Blood Brothers, especially Mickey and Edward whose friendship is central to the play. Russell chooses to contrast the power and beauty of their childhood friendship with its final collapse in adulthood, which results in their tragic ending. Their friendship highlights one of Russell’s key messages concerning social class, inequality and poverty which can have devastating consequences on people’s lives.”

Introductions should not be too long, or include all the details of what each paragraph will include

You will not be rewarded for including the same information twice, so don’t waste time repeating yourself

Write your thesis in the third person, not the first person (don’t use “I”)

“I believe that Russell presents ideas about the importance of friendship …. ❌

“Russell presents the importance of friendship through several characters …in order to illustrate …” ✅

Try to include three separate paragraphs that cover three separate points

This will ensure your response is to what examiners call the “full task”

Start each paragraph with a topic sentence

A topic sentence is an opening sentence which details the focus of its paragraph

It should include the words of the question

All topic sentences must relate to your thesis

They should be seen as sub-points that provide a more specific and narrower focus than your thesis statement

Everything that follows a topic sentence in a paragraph must support the point it makes

Example of a topic sentence:

“Russell initially depicts Mickey and Edward's friendship as strong despite their disparate social backgrounds, which underscores his message that natural human bonds and relationships are more important than societal norms and expectations.”

Beware of writing an overly structured paragraph which follows a set pattern

You may have learned PEE, PEAL, PEED, or other structures for your paragraphs

However, examiners often say that although these are excellent for learning what to include in essays, they can be limiting in an exam

Instead, be led by the ideas in the text, and prove your own argument (both the overall thesis and your topic sentences)

It is always a good idea to include a conclusion to your essay so that your essay reads as coherent and focused on answering the question throughout

This can result in improved marks for AO1

However, there is no need to spend a long time writing your conclusion

A conclusion for a modern text should only summarise the proof you have provided for your thesis

It only needs to be two or three sentences long

It should include the words of the question and your thesis

Remember, you do not get rewarded for including the same information twice

An example of a conclusion:

“To conclude, Russell presents friendship as a fundamental aspect of people’s lives and he demonstrates how these special relationships can be impacted by social inequality and injustice. Through Mickey and Edward, Russell argues that even the closest friendships - and by extension, all bonds between different groups in society - are tested, and potentially broken, by these inequalities.”

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Author: Nick Redgrove

Nick is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and King’s College London. He started his career in journalism and publishing, working as an editor on a political magazine and a number of books, before training as an English teacher. After nearly 10 years working in London schools, where he held leadership positions in English departments and within a Sixth Form, he moved on to become an examiner and education consultant. With more than a decade of experience as a tutor, Nick specialises in English, but has also taught Politics, Classical Civilisation and Religious Studies.

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Modernity essay: an useful essay on modernity in india.

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The other widely expressed way of coming to grips with our lack of true modernity is to say that there are “multiple modernities”, and that the Indian variety is just another expression of modernity.

Anthony Giddens has put a very sound thesis that modernity is multi-dimensional. It is neither monolith, nor liberal only. Nor it is democratic only. It has several dimensions. Indian sociologist, Dipankar Gupta in his book, Mistaken Modernity (2000), has made yet another statement which applies to different nation-states.

If modernity is multiple, it means that India should have its own variant of modernity. And, further, there are several or plural ethnicities in this country and therefore modernity in this country has to be defined in terms of the social-historical and cultural conditions of different regions or social segments of the nation.

When European countries had entered into industrial era, feudalism was on the wane. The series of revolutions which took place in Europe, gave emergence to democracy and nation-states. And, interestingly, Europe had already experienced renaissance and enlightenment. Such a kind of social conditions in Europe created modernity.

And, with the increasing force of modernity, there came into existence the form of modernity which is now called late modernity. The pioneers of sociology – Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel – were the products of modernity, i.e., capitalism, democracy and industrialism. Indian social conditions were different. Our challenges were serious. There was colonialism and in princely states, feudalism. Our first priority was to get freedom, and our ambition was to build India into a nation.

Our pioneering sociologists, G.S. Ghurye, M.N. Srinivas, D.P. Mukerji, B.K. Sarkar, Radhakamal Mukherjee, S.V. Ketkar, B.N. Dutt and K.P. Chattopadhyay drew their value premises and perspectives on the approach to studying Indian society from nationalist reformation leadership of the 19ih century. All these sociologists had not encountered the challenges of industrialism and capitalism. Nor had they any experience of western modernity.

Specifying the orientation of pioneer Indian sociologists, Yogendra Singh, in his book Indian Sociology (1986), writes:

The sociologists of the pioneer generation were less concerned with the professionalization of sociology as a discipline, in respect of concepts, theories, methodology of social observation or with establishing sociology as a branch of science. Their deeper concern, however, was with the issue of social relevance.

Yogendra Singh spells out the issues of social relevance and says that pioneers of sociology in India wanted to focus on social change. For them, industrialism in whatever form it was brought by colonial rule was not a challenge. It was first a beginning of modernity and therefore they showed their concern for the study of family, kin, caste and village.

And, what is important is that the social background of most of the sociologists of this period was that they came from renaissant middle class, urban gentry; most were educated in European, particularly British universities; and had inherited in their consciousness both a substantial package of western philosophy of science, liberalism and humanism (both Marxist and non-Marxist) and deeper concern for issues of national identity, freedom from colonial rule and establishment of a culturally, economically and politically independent Indian society.

Indian sociologists paid very little attention to the study of modernity and its impact on Indian society. Modernity as a distinct form of enquiry came late during the seventies. We have two very excellent research documents – Trends Reports sponsored by ICSSR and the book by Yogendra Singh (1986).

In the Trend Report (1969-1979), Pravin J. Patel surveys the literature in industrial sociology in India and puts his concluding remarks:

As a matter of fact quite a few studies on the reciprocal relationship between industrialization and society have a direct bearing upon modernization theory. Similarly, some of the studies on industrial organizations, trade unions and industrial relations have explicitly or implicitly used the conceptual frameworks of structural-functionalism and the dialectical analysis.

Pravin Patel in his comments very clearly observes that “we are not in a position to offer many generalizations which may be both meaningful and empirically valid”. Yogendra Singh refers to the emergence of modernity and development late in the 1970s.

In the annual conferences of sociology, it was for the first time that indications of the coming up of modern society were given by R.N. Saxena (1972) on ‘Modernization in Development: Trends in India’; S.C. Dube (1976) on ‘Indian Sociology at the Turning Point’ and A.R. Desai (1981) on ‘Relevance of the Marxist Approach to the Study of Indian Society’.

During 1970s and 1980s some efforts were made to study modernity. But it was in a sporadic way. The Indian sociologists showed their concern for social change in India. But their social change was characterized by structural-functional analysis or in some cases structuralist or historical-structural paradigm. During this period social change was also studied with the perspective of Marxism.

For instance, D.P. Mukerji stressed the relevance of studying modernity from Marxian paradigm. D.P. strongly believed that in order to push the history towards the next higher stage we shall have to modernize our traditions.

It is illuminating to mention that the modernists in Europe did not discuss the bipolarity of tradition and modernity to analyze the later. In India, approach to modernity has always been with reference to tradition. Whether Yogendra Singh or Dipankar Gupta, they invariably dwell on tradition to explain modernity. This bipolar approach seems to be borrowed from D.P.

D.P. Mukerji and modernity :

D.P. talked about modernity in an elaborate way. And what is further interesting is that D.P’s ideas about modernity have been discussed at length by T.N. Madan in his work Pathways (1994). D.P. alleges that the western concept of modernity is erroneous. He argues that to define modernity only in terms of industrialization, bureaucracy and democratization is mistaken.

It abandons holism. It dispenses with all values. What should we do for accepting modernity in India? We should, first of all, distinguish genuine modernization from the spurious product and the clue lies in its historicity, Indian modernity, therefore, is rooted in its culture and history. Western modernity has to be adapted with the genuine Indian culture.

Commenting on the approach of D.P. in this respect, Madan writes:

…. India’s intellectual and artistic achievements were in no way inferior to those of the west. Hence, the urge for a synthesis of Vedanta, western liberalism and Marxism.

Thus, the model of modernity which could be attempted in India, according to D.P. would be like this:

Indian synthesis of modernity = Western liberalism and Marxism + Vedanta and Indian culture. I.P. Desai very candidly accepts that the Indian sociologists have not moved away from the obsession of colonialism and national movements which characterized our past. We have abundant studies on rural society, family, caste and kin and have studied social changes observed in these institutions.

Our social change studies more than often talk about adaptive changes and we never move from the notion of the ‘Indian’. Our views about the ‘western’ is also the same as it was for the ‘pioneers’ of Indian sociologists. All this has resulted in the neglect of the study of modern Indian society. Modernity, therefore, has remained an untouched area.

After the attainment of independence, whatever sociology developed in India was highly influenced by American and British sociology. It was massively anchored in functionalism. There was a weak and fragile trend of Marxism. D.P. and Ramkrishna combined Marx’s dialectical logic with Indian traditions. A.R. Desai examined India’s social history in Marxian perspective.

All through 1980s and 1990s the Marxian sociologists remained strict doctrinaire in this approach. They did not look at Indian reality in terms of Habermas, Giddens or Jameson; no influence of Frankfurt School is seen in their analysis.

They have kept themselves from any study of modernity. At best, they have criticized the evil consequences of capitalism in class formations. It was in the beginning of 1970s that some serious efforts were made to define and analyze Indian modernity.

Indian sociology witnessed a radical change in its approach. By 1980s, it became clear through the works of Louis Dumont that Indian society cannot be studied without reference to its traditions. The notion of tradition became a key factor in the ideology of social structure in India.

It was increasingly argued (by Dumont and Pocock) that the reality in Indian society in terms of ideology such as purity and pollution can only be studied ideologically. The discussion on modernity at a book length level has been done by Yogendra Singh in his book, Modernization of Indian Tradition (1994) and Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph in their work, The Modernity of Tradition.

Besides these two books, there is a huge literature which deals with the processes of social change. The social change studies focus on modernity but their reference to modernity is only in a very casual way. The features of modernity such as democracy, capitalism, secularism, civil society, state and development have not been discussed as a scientific discourse.

Modernization in India is different from European moderniza­tion. Britain was cradle of European modernization. Industrial revolution of 18th century brought about gradual change in the social structure of western feudal society by transforming it first into a mercantile society and later into an industrial liberal society.

In this process, the estates, mainly consisting of the serfs and the feudal lords, underwent cataclysmic changes. Peasants and serfs were transformed into industrial workers; feudal lords, especially in Britain, took more and more to commercial and industrial entrepreneurship; and traditional guilds in the cities became obsolescent and guild masters replaced by projectors or entrepreneurs.

The transition from one stage to the other was not smooth. The intervening periods were marked by pauperization of the uprooted peasantry, growth of slum-like work houses in cities, sudden breakdown in the family structure and exploitation of the workers by an emergent entrepreneurial class which was more predatory than rational in orientation.

Modernization in India came in a different situation. Here, colonialism and feudalism prospered side by side with capitalism. Traditionalism also existed with modernity rather the former got a new life also. The social conditions for Indian modernity were of different nature.

Yogendra Singh traces the emergence of modernity in India in these words:

Modernization in India started with the western contact, especially through establishment of the British rule. This contact had a special historicity which brought about many far-reaching changes in culture and social structure of the Indian society. The basic direction of this contact was towards modernization, but in the process a variety of traditional institutions also got reinforcement. This demonstrates the weakness of assuming a neat contrariety between tradition and modernity.

Yogendra Singh, M.N. Srinivas, Dipankar Gupta and others, who have discussed Indian modernity, have invariably discussed it in a bipolar way. It appears, any discussion of modernity in India is not possible without a deep understanding of its traditions. This has not happened in the case of Europe. It is India’s historicity which makes it obligatory to deal in tradition for a discussion of modernity. We now turn to define modernity as is meant in India.

M.N. Srinivas on westernization and modernization :

M.N. Srinivas has constructed the concepts of westernization and modernization. These concepts have emerged from his empirical studies on the religion and society among the Coorgs of South India. Initially, he introduced the concept of sanskritization.

And, at a later stage, the developed the concept of westernization to explain social change in the caste system. Westernization is defined by Srinivas as “the changes brought about in Indian society and culture as a result of over 150 years of British rule, the term subsuming changes occurring at different levels… technology, institutions, ideology and values”.

But, the term ‘westernization’ does not mean only the things of the west. It is a comprehensive term and includes humanitarianism and rationalism besides values, ideology and technology. Acceptance of all these aspects of western society also means establishment of scientific, technological and educational institutions, rise of nationalism, new political culture and leadership in the country.

According to Srinivas, the increase in westernization does not retard the process of sanskritization; both go on simultaneously, and to some extent, increase in westernization accelerates the process of sanskritization. For instance, the postal facilities, railways, buses and print media which are the fruits of western impact on India render more organized religious pilgrimages, meetings, caste solidarities, etc. possible now than in the past.

Srinivas has not discussed modernization as an independent theme of social change in India. It is the by-product of his theory of social change. And, in fact, he prefers westernization to modernization. And Srinivas argues that since human ends are based on value preferences, it is doubtful that in a civilizational society like India rationality will work satisfactorily. And, for him, westernization also means primarily the British impact.

Thus, the definition and meaning of modernization boils down to the following points according to Srinivas:

1. Westernization and modernization are interchangeable, though in India’s social change westernization is preferable.

2. Modernization includes humanitarianism and rationalism.

3. Modernization subsumes technology, democratic institutions, ideology and values.

4. Building of nation-state.

5. Development of political culture.

6. There is sanskritization at the level of caste system; there is westernization or modernization at the nation-state level. Modernization is more widespread at the individual level than sanskritization.

7. Traditionalism goes hand-in-hand with modernization.

Yogendra Singh on modernity :

Initially, Yogendra Singh prepared a volume of his essays originally written for the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research (ICSSR) in 1977. The book entitled. Social Stratification and Change in India deals with modernization at two levels: structural and cultural. Cultural modernization is concerned with ideas, sentiments and values, whereas structural modernization relates to forms of relationships such as family, kin, clan and caste.

Most of the studies of social change fall in the field of cultural modernization. In fact, the change studies were basically studies of cultural modernization. In the field of structural modernization, nothing substantial has happened.

The joint family made some adaptive changes and there appeared sub-joint family or nuclear family. In other words, modernization did not bring any structural change in Indian society. This was Yogendra Singh’s position about modernization in his essays contained in this volume.

Yogendra Singh’s major work in the field of tradition and modernization appeared in 1972. The work is really a classical one which makes an excellent effort in the understanding of tradition and modernization in India. Yogendra Singh is concerned with the transformation of Indian society.

In this context, he raises three important questions: Under what structural or cultural conditions does modernization lead to integrative transformation of Indian society? What are the structural prerequisites for institutionalization of modernizing changes without breakdown? How does the Indian case warrant the possibility of institutionalization of modernity or alternatively of structural breakdown in the process?

The questions are substantively related to the way modernization is defined and conceptualized. Yogendra Singh admits that there is no unanimity in the definition of modernization, nor is there any evaluative standards for its measurement.

However, an in-depth analysis of change studies indicates that sociologists have adopted two broad approaches in the study of modernization in India. These approaches are structural and evolutionary. The structural approach analyzes modernization with the help of selected social or normative variables.

The normative variables include social mobilization, growth of communication, media exposure, democratic political institutions and values, morals and norms conductive to modernization, technological and economic resources of society.

The evolutionary approach is based on more systematic theoretical assumptions. It treats modernization as an evolutionary stage in the life of human society. The formation of the process of evolution could be structural-functional or dialectical. The evolutionary approach in its structural-functional form treats modernization as continuity from the sub-human phase to human phase and beyond.

Drawing from both these approaches to the study of modernization, Yogendra Singh defines it as under:

Modernization approximates to such a cultural order. It symbolizes a rational attitude towards issues, and their evaluation from a universalistic and not particularistic viewpoint; when it involves an emotional response to problems, orientation is emphatic and not constructive; modernization is rooted in the scientific worldview; it has deeper and positive association with levels of diffusion of scientific knowledge technological skill and technological resources in a particular society.

But what may be essential to modernization is the commitment to scientific worldview, the internalization of humanistic and philosophical viewpoint of science on contemporary problems and not merely the volume of technological achievement.

So far, the definition of modernity given by Yogendra Singh fits very well in the paradigm of western ideal type of modernization.

It includes the following important elements or features of modernity:

1. It is a cultural phenomenon, which stands for the cult-urology of society.

2. It is rational attitudes towards societal issues and problems.

3. Its norms are universalistic, applicable to the totality of all the societies.

4. Its worldview is scientific.

5. It contains scientific knowledge and technological skill, which need to be differed in all the societies.

6. It encourages internalization of humanistic and philosophical attitudes, which are inherent to scientific knowledge.

Scientific values, surely, are universalistic. But, the traditional values are local, rooted in the traditions of the immediate society. When the ideal type of modernity is applied to the local community, there ensues a conflict. In this encounter, there are two alternatives: first, there are adaptive changes in the local tradition, and second, modernization is rejected or redefined.

The challenge given by local tradition to modernity has been analyzed by Yogendra Singh:

The distinction between modern values and traditional values may be maintained on the ground that modern values, like science, being evolutionary universal, might not be typical to any one particular cultural tradition, whereas traditional cultural values may be particularistic and typical.

What Yogendra Singh argues is that modernity is a universal- cultural phenomenon, whereas tradition is local and is observed by the immediate society only. The challenge of modernity with its universal features and characteristics is the same in all societies but the responses to it are varying.

This gives rise to multiple modernities. And, therefore, Yogendra Singh very rightly says that “the substantive adaptation to modernization should be distinguished from modernization per se since in all likelihood, not for a long time to come (perhaps never), anywhere in the world shall we have a fully modern society”. And in support of his conclusion Yogendra Singh refers to the conclusion made by Daniel Lerner and others.

Dipankar Gupta: India’s mistaken modernity :

Dipankar Gupta’s work on modernity is a recent publication. In his book, Mistaken Modernity: India between Worlds (2000), Dipankar defines the concept of modernity in India’s context and says: “The mode of relations among people in our country is still not modern. Family connections, privileges of caste and status, as well as the willingness to break every law in the book characterize our social relations very deeply. This is why I argue that true modernity is about how people relate to other people (italics added), and likewise, true ethics is all about a concern with ‘others’ as equal citizens. Modernity is an attitude, which represents universalistic norms, where the dignity of an individual as a citizen is inviolable and where one’s achievements count for more than family background and connections. Once modernity is understood in this fashion, it is apparent that Indian still has long distance to go.”

Dipankar argues that modernity is not a single large block, a monolith. The true modernity, in fact, consists of ‘multiple modernities’ and viewed from this perspective, the Indian modernity is a specific variety of multiple modernities. Even in developed countries such as U.S. and Japan, there are several modernities. We have, in India, misunderstood modernity on more than one count. Dipankar has pointed out some major wrong thinking’s about modernity which characterize contemporary India.

These are as below:

Contemporary is not necessarily modern :

Some people think that whatever is contemporary is modern. Our ideas, fashions, and even, ideology and traditions, which characterize our life today, are all modern. Spending lakhs of rupees on the celebration of festivals and marriages, which was never done earlier, is considered as modern.

There is an exorbitant excitement in the celebration of certain religious festivals such as Ganesh Mahotsava, Garba, Diwali and Holi. This is contemporary and is therefore categorized as modern. Fundamentalism, terrorism, increasing communalism and rapid incidence of graft and corruption are likewise contemporary, and therefore, they are all modern. Such an under­standing of modernity is erroneous.

Is technology, the only modernity?

The layman’s understanding about modernity is that it is technological only. In other words, if there is new technology, or innovation, it is said to be the attainment of modernity. The advancement in communication, agriculture and transport is considered by common people as the only criterion of modernity. In Dipankar’s views, technology is only one part of modernity. Modernity involves certain other features also such as human values and relationships.

Only consumerism is not modernity :

Admittedly, the modern society is a consumer society. In U.S. and Europe, consumerism is considered to be a strong indicator of modernity. More there is consumerism, more there is modernity. Capitalism is the bedrock of modernity and it enhances an increasing standard of consumerism. The situation in India is different. In our country, consumerism has given rise to inequality; the poor have become poorer in the race of uplifting their standard. And, in such a situation, it is mistaken to align modernity with increasing consumerism.

It is wrong to accept violent behaviour as modernity :

It is unfortunate that in India modernization, somehow or other, is associated with unlawful, illegal and violent behaviour. Those who are affluent, often commit crime. Dipankar Gupta comments as under on this mistaken aspect of modernity:

In India, we have not paid attention on the mainsprings of modernity, but have been quick to declare certain sectors as modern because of their acquisition of artefacts and technology. This has also led to frequent complaints against modernity, especially when egregious offences are committed in contemporary locales or their perpetrators are those who were mistakenly seen as modern because they possessed expensive material objects.

Thus, sexual harassment, violence in public places, dowry deaths and a host of other fairly uncivilised forms of conduct get posted as modern. Looked at closely, none of these things is really modern. They are carry-overs of attitudes from the past.

Traditionalism is often defined as modernity :

In most of the cases, the elites and the middle class define traditionalism as modernization. What has happened in India is that in the wake of modernization, traditionalism is strengthened. Some of our traditions have been redefined as modernity.

Caste is reorganized to suit to the needs of the politicians. Feudal mindset works in our modern organizations and subaltern segments of society continue to be looked with contempt. Most of the abuses of our translations are interpreted as items and aspects of modernity. Fundamentalism and the ideology of Hindutva could be referred to as new forms of modernity. In fact, traditionalism has reappeared in the form of modernization. Such a modernization is fake and erroneous.

Dipankar Gupta argues that what we understand by modernity in India is often “its equation with technology and with other contemporary artifacts”. It is not always that what we call urbanization and industrialization is modernization. It is something else also, something more also.

Dipankar says that a modern society is one in which at least the following characteristics must be present:

1. Dignity of the individual;

2. Adherence to universalistic norms;

3. Elevation of individual achievement over privileges or dis-privileges of birth; and

4. Accountability in public life.

In Dipankar’s definition of modernity first place or priority is given to the above four attributes, and “once these attributes are in place, it does not really matter if there is a high level of technology, super fast transit system, or consumerism. Generally speaking, technology and consumerism are consequences of the four characteristics of modernization listed above, and do not by themselves constitute modernity”.

Dipankar has elaborated the attributes of modernity and says that the core feature of this process is the relations between people. These relations have to be characterized by equality with, and respect for others. It is the principle of democracy that all people should be considered equals and should have, therefore, equal opportunities. Thus, the key to modernity is what Dipankar calls, inter-subjectivity.

“Inter-subjectivity is about being able to participate in one another’s lives and share in one another’s fate …. Inter-subjectivity thus arouses the quality of empathy. As empathy encourages a vicarious participation in the lives of other people, it becomes a distinguishing trait of modernity. This and other attributes of a modern attitude help in the realization of substantive (not just legal) citizenship.”

Concluding observations on modernity in India :

Modernization as a theoretical construct, in a broader way, is pluralization of worldview. In the west, it is argued that it is a multi-dimensional process and begins from the evaluation of new classes, technology and communications resulting from the decay of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism and democratic nation-state.

Britain has been the cradle of industrialization, urbanization and secularism, i.e., separation of state from church. Here, tradition is not the referent point. Rather, it is the industrialization. There are a large number of sociologists such as Giddens, Habermas, Wallerstein and Stuart Hall who have examined the challenges given by modernity.

India’s modernity is specific to Indian social structure. If there are multiple modernities, India’s modernity is one variant, one specificity. If modernity is multi-dimensional, Indian modernity is determined by Indian traditions.

Here, there are modernization traditions. It is because of the specificity of Indian social structure that our sociologists, Yogendra Singh and Dipankar Gupta, are in a way obsessed by the role of tradition in social structure. Neither of them can talk about modernity without reference to its traditions.

Yogendra Singh defends himself:

Whereas the emphasis on social structure has led us to survey the uneven processes of social changes and modernization with the help of the contemporary sociological studies, the tradition’s framework in our analysis has necessitated that we draw from, the Indian history, or even employ a kind of historiography.

The historiographic constructions are necessitated to establish the cognitive-structural attributes of the Indian ‘traditions, which we have characterized as consisting of elements of ‘hierarchy,’ ‘holism,’ ‘continuity,’ and ‘transcendence’.

Both Yogendra Singh and Dipankar Gupta accept that modernity, in a way or the other, either strengthens traditions or traditions are mistaken as modernity. What is modernity? In the Indian context, the consensus is that it has universalistic norms, there is emphasis on achievement, its roots are in secularism, it is democratic in its design and media, communication, values, morals and ethics are its dimensional features.

And, then, importantly, what is the direction of modernization or social change? How do we define modernity in the light of change studies, which are available to us in Indian sociology? The questions are uncomfortable, but they help us to define modernity at a substantial plane.

Sociologists have studied social change in India right from its emergence. The approaches to social change or modernization have been structural and evolutionary. Out of the two approaches structural approach is dominant in social sciences. The evolutionary approach is structural-functional or dialectical.

Structural-functional analysis looks at modernization in terms of sub-cultural forms of westernization of great traditions. Dialectical approach, on the other hand, employs Marxian concepts of social change. Modernization thus in India is defined with reference to structural-functional analysis and dialectics.

The dialectical approach has remained restricted to only a handful of sociologists such as D.P. Mukerji, Ramakrishna Mukherjee and A.R. Desai. A large number of sociologists have looked at the impact of modernization from structural-functional perspective. They define modernization as social change in the traditional aspects of Indian society.

Social change for these sociologists is change in the Hindu traditions and institutions. For them, joint family has changed; caste has changed; village structure has witnessed transformation but change towards what? At best for most of these functionalists the change is from Hindu social traditions to adaptive changes.

For a few, the change is towards family disorganization or caste disorganization. Generation after generation the university students are taught that social change leads to disorganization of Hindu traditional institutions. The point of reference of social change is hardly modernity. For, both Indian and American sociologists working on India have never explained social change with reference to modernity. And here is the rub.

Our sociologists come from the high-caste Hindu background, their professional and intellectual training has been in the colonisers’ countries, they are interested in continuity and change and therefore they have created a flood of research material which stands on the pillars of evolutionary structural-functional method. In such a kind of adherence to a conservative methodology, not much has been done to evaluate the impact of modernization on Indian society.

Related Articles:

• Paragraph on Modernity in India
• Cultural Modernization in India

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Essay collections: Like short stories, but TRUE! When you're in the mood for fact over fiction, check out these must-read contemporary essay collections.

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

View All posts by Liberty Hardy

I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us  by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas  by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read  Would Everybody Please Stop?  is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds  by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food,  Longthroat Memoirs  is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails,  Longthroat Memoirs  explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays  by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure  is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours  by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession  by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to  Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and  Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life  by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.  Betwixt and Between  is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays  by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel,  Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays  by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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Essay on “Modernity” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Modernity is a Question not of Time but of Outlook

Modernity does not mean contemporariness of certain ideas, or ideals. Even the contemporary ideas may be old enough to be considered modern, their inspiration can be traced back to ideas of the past. Naturally they become quite old in their spirit. If an idea emerges out of the present circumstances even then it is not modern. In fact modernity lies in the spirit of that ideal, and means the prevailing social adjustments and also the social and political conditions available at that time. If a particular idea fits in that frame work it is modern otherwise it is not. Of course, this quotation involved all types of progress and the revival of the past.

If a person is modern in spirit he can anticipate modernity. Time changes and with the change of time the ideas also become outdated. This means as far as time is concerned modernity is somewhat short-lived but the spirit of it prevails for a longer period and so it persists till the people are able to achieve the zenith of modernity. Gandhiji’s idea of moral force may be suitable for the future generations that is when people become civilised. So he was in line with the course of progress and that is what we mean by modernity.

If we distinguish the word, `modern’ from `ancient’ we find the modern is an improvement over the ancient as far as the development of the society is concerned. The progress must be in line with the latest development of the society. The outlook of people must conform to those ideals otherwise there will be no progress in the society. If the human beings just conform to the old customs and traditions they will never be able to bring about changes, which determine the growth of a nation. Customs do not signify the passage of time rather they show that how the movement of the time stops at one or the other period. Similarly, if we follow the old concepts and the old ideas we cannot change our outlook. The result is that all of our actions will be directed and controlled by our old thinking. So the spirit of the individual determines the course of events.

The word `modern’ has two different meanings; it may mean contemporary in time; it may mean contemporary in spirit. We generally call a thing, an idea, a fashion modern in relation to its old version. But if we probe the problem a bit deeply and exhaustively we will find that it is our outlook which determines modernity. The outlook of man, varies with every generation. The accepted idea might have been given long ago but nobody bothers about its history. On the other hand the idea is understood or at least realised as modern. Out of two ideas suppose one of them had been given much earlier than the other and is accepted at present and will be called modern while the other will become obsolete and forgotten.

Ideals of human beings fundamentally remain the same; the Jews thought that aim of man should be to do the Will of God, the Greeks thought that it should be to achieve the excellence of human nature. After two thousand years we have not gone beyond these ideals. The deeper human problems remain the same; human beings change their clothes but not their nature. No doubt with the advancement we have applied science, technology, new techniques in politics and economics, human nature changes all too little. With the passage of time these ideals do not change, what changes, is our understanding, our conception and our outlook. With the increase of understanding we improved our approach to find better results. Consequently, the inferences are accepted by the present age and are called modern.

The acceptance of ideas, to a great extent, depends upon the fact that how much do they solve the problems of modern complex world. The most fitted solution is widely accepted and considered to be modern. Another consideration is the maximum utility of an idea for a great number of people. As man is becoming more intellectual, advanced progressive, his problems are also increasing in the same proportion. His desire for new inventions and passion for new ideas are increasing rapidly. When he finds a particular idea to be unsatisfactory he forgets it and it becomes obsolete within no time. Time carries, not much weight in determining the importance of an idea.

With the advancement of science, the outlook of man has undergone a drastic change. He has no reverence for the old customs and traditions. The importance attached to a particular ides because of its adoption for a long time counts no more in accepting it as a belief. Rather the one which is in harmony with the outlook is considered modern.

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Introducing Grammarly’s translation feature

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The translation feature allows you to translate text directly within Grammarly. This way, you can stay focused on your current work and minimize the need to switch to external translation tools.

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• If you are the admin of a Grammarly license, once generative AI is turned on, you can can turn on the translation feature for your team members by opening the Organization tab in the admin panel, selecting App actions , and turning on the switch next to Translate with Grammarly .
• The translation feature is currently supported in Grammarly for Windows and Mac, in Grammarly for Chrome, and in the Grammarly Figma plugin .

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To translate text as you write with Grammarly, follow these steps:

• In the assistant that opens, start typing “translate,” and click Translate with Grammarly once this option appears.
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Currently, it is possible to translate a maximum of 4,000 characters at once.

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At this time, alternative translation options can be available for text under 10 words.

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Translate with Grammarly is designed to work with text that you’ve written or are writing. It doesn’t currently work with static text, such as text on a web page or the text from an email you received, but it can translate text that you write as a reply.

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7 New Books We Recommend This Week

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“Glitter and doom.” That phrase appears in the subtitle of one of the books we recommend this week (Guy Trebay’s memoir of 1970s New York, “Do Something”), but it also serves nicely as a catchall theme for the list as a whole, which sparkles darkly: a witty horror novel, an exciting debut story collection probing the scarier side of the human psyche, a novel about a man whose unresolved daddy issues leave him at loose ends. In nonfiction, we recommend a group biography of the women who challenged social strictures in 18th-century England (that one’s more glitter than doom), a serious study of the people who helped prop up Hitler and his genocidal reign (more doom than glitter) and a true-crime history about a high-society jewel thief. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

SOMEONE LIKE US Dinaw Mengestu

Mengestu’s brilliantly slippery and destabilized fourth novel centers on Mamush, a journalist in Paris who is supposed to spend Christmas with his wife and young son in the Virginia suburb where his Ethiopian immigrant mother lives; instead, he ends up in Chicago investigating the criminal record of the man he assumes is his father.

“Mamush might be hapless, but this book is not; it’s meticulously constructed and its genius doesn’t falter even slightly under scrutiny. … Ought to cement Mengestu’s reputation as a major literary force.”

From Rebecca Makkai’s review

Knopf | $28

BEAUTIFUL DAYS: Stories Zach Williams

The stories in this striking debut collection tend toward the grimly surreal, with characters facing spiritual crises, random violence and meaningless work. Two or three of the stories are so good that they announce a genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches.

“His sentences are smooth, clean and approachable. He pushes you slowly off into the night, then down long embankments.”

From Dwight Garner’s review

Doubleday | $28

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About this game, system requirements.

• OS *: Windows 7
• Processor: 1.0 GHz
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Graphics: OpenGL 2.1 or higher
• Storage: 2 GB available space
• Processor: Apple Silicon / Intel

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