Dialectics of Modernity:
Reenchantment and Dedifferentiation as Counterprocesses

Edward A. Tiryakian

A generation ago the sociology of development featured as vast literature having modernization as leitmotif. Owing to a variety of factors, some intellectual and others ideological, adepts of modernization analysis (with some notable exceptions, such as Inkeles [1983]) have left center stage in macrosociology. The intention of this chapter is neither to recall them for a belated encore nor to drive unnecessary nails into the coffin of a superannuated theory. I would, however, like to make some extended reflection on that fundamental social state necessarily presumed by the term "modernization": namely, "modernity" itself. The concept of modernity was never really given its theoretical due in the heyday of modernization analysis but, by quirk of fate, it is in period of global socioeconomic crisis (Amin 1982; Brandt Commission 1983; Tiryakian 1984) that the theme of modernity has become a fruitful heuristic vein of sociological analysis. The concept has, however, been shorn of the optimistic and evolutionist biases of the modernization paradigm, biases that tacitly equated the end point of modernization with a Camelot-like United States and extension with pax Americana.

If American sociologist were the major contributors to comparative modernization analysis (Black 1976), the recent major writings on the theme of modernity have had as many inputs from one side of the Atlantic as from the other (for example, Balandier 1985; Bell 1985; Berger 1973, 1977; Bernstein 1985; Eisenstadt 1973; Featherstone 1985; Habermas 1981, [1981] 1984; Nelson 1981; Tiryakian 1985a; Touraine 1984). Thus modernity is a choice topic for an exchange of theoretical perspectives such as the present volume. Having examined the burgeoning literature on modernity I propose that the single major background figure who is the common denominator to the various approaches on the

problematics of modernity is Max Weber. Weber left us an important patrimony by indicating the complexities of the broad sociohistorical process that underlay the development of Western modern society. He saw societal, even civilization, change as real (that is, having objective social consequences) but not as teleological. And it is the very ambiguity of the modern situation, so accurately and poignantly presented by Weber, that gives him wide appeal today.^[1] I propose to take two important facets of modernity that stem from Weber that seem to be accepted as "givens" by various writers and argue that a comprehensive analysis of large-scale change requires these two facets to be related to counter-processes of change.

Weber's legacy is multilayered and multitiered, but there are two central and interrelated Weberian themes commonly accepted by scholars of different ideological leanings (for example, Luhmann 1982; Tilly 1984; Habermas [1981] 1985) as being the master processes of Western social change: differentiation and rationalization. If these are the processes of social change that have generated the modern Western capitalist industrial social order (including its bureaucratic forms of social organization), the competitive civilization advantages of the West, for Weber, has also required an ancillary sociopsychological process of no less significance in the formation of Western modernity. That process involves emptying the world of magic (Entzauberung ), a process stemming from the interrelated cognitive shift to this world as the iocus of salvific activities (hence a devaluation of the sacraments as ingress to otherworldly salvation), and the replacement of magic by rational calculation. This process is exemplified by the way that the scientific method has become the accepted mode of mastering the world.

The heart of Weber's perspective is expressed in two passages in his famous address, "Science as a Vocation." In the first Weber links scientific progress today to a broader Western process of "intellectualization" or "intellectualist rationalization," which

means that principal there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted . One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits….

[1] The ambiguity of our modern condition resides in this: On the one hand scientific and technological advances have become rationalized and institutionalized as an integral part of the modern order. On the other hand the meaning of that order for its actors, which is also an integral feature of the motivational dispositions of human beings in seeking and pursuing socially approved goals, is no longer assured, not even by scientific knowledge. At best the scientist replaces John Bunyan's "Christian" (in Pilgrim's Progress ) as the modern pilgrim. At worst the scientist, in the never-ending quest for empirical certitude as a substitute for the certitude of faith, continually undoes the meaning of the world.

Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means. (Weber 1985, 138, emphasis mine)

The second passage is Weber's pithy summarization of the present age:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world." Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. (Weber 1958, 155)

The major contemporary social theorist Habermas acknowledges the legacy of Weber's interpretation. He observes:

Weber's investigations can be used to substantiate the view that all the paths of rationalization branching through civilizations … in the same direction, that of a disenchanted understanding of the world purified of magical ideas. ([1981] 1985, 196)

Weber judges the rationalization of worldviews by the extent to which magical thinking is overcome. In the dimension of ethical rationalization, he observes disenchantment primarily in the interaction between the believer and God…. In the cognitive dimension, disenchantment of the manipulation of things and events goes along with a demythologization of the knowledge of what is…. With this the fixation on the surface of concrete phenomena that is anchored in myth can be superseded in favor of a disinterested orientation to general laws underlying the phenomena. ([1981] 1985, 212–13)

Although Weber's famous thesis concerning the religious grounds of Western modernity continues to be contested (Marshall 1982), including even his interpretation of the Puritan doctrine of predestination (Roth 1986), his pronouncements on rationalization, differentiation, and disenchantment as the key factors of Western modernity have become an integral part of the sociological canon. Indeed, several features of late-twentieth-century society may be thought of as further accentuating the keys aspects of modernity advanced by Weber so many years ago.

For the sake of brevity let me choose just a few illustrations. In four decades the computer revolution has brought about changes as momentous as those of the industrial revolution two hundred years ago. of course this still-unfolding revolution is radical extension of the process of rationalization and mastering the world through exact calculations. Computer technology is enabling us to systematically explore both microscopic and macroscopic worlds, from cells and genes to planets and galaxies, with the result that the boundaries of the life-world are rapidly changing. Also the continuous progress of the life sciences and biotechnological.

developments is redrawing the frontiers of knowledge about the biochemical bases of life and death. In the process the disenchantment of the world has taken a new turn as human beings increase their empirical knowledge and ability to control the processes of reproduction. The ability to control and limit reproduction, which is conducive to changes in morality, and the ability to gain advance information concerning the fetus are contributing to the further disenchantment of the world by taking away the allure, mystery, and charm of sexuality and gender. This, perhaps, has been the ultimate domain of enchantment. It has also been a primitive domain because fertility rites have universally been used be religious cults in harnessing magical forces.

For good measure we might propose one further domain that has become increasingly disenchanted in the present century: the domain of authority. The disenchantment of authority is part of the process of secularization, and one can point to the Reformation and the disenchantment of papal authority as the beginning of this trend. The disenchantment of monarchical authority began in England in the seventeenth century with the regicide of Charles I. This event ended the view of the monarch as a divine representative who was the incarnation of magical powers. The Enlightenment and the industrial revolution further diminished the sacred aura of the monarch, leading in the nineteenth century to either republican regimes or constitutional monarchies as the typical bases of the Western polity. Monarchical and imperial authority were even more impaled during World War I, in Europe (the demise of Austria-Hungary and Wilhelmine Germany) and elsewhere (the Ottoman Empire, China, etc.). World War II and its aftermath not only witnessed the demise of some remnant monarchies (for example, in the Balkan countries) but, more important, the demise of colonial authority and the total disenchantment of the colonial premise of "assimilation." In our recent past political authority in Western democracies has been further disenchanted, both because of Watergate and because of the broader aspects of political delegitimation involved in this "twilight of authority" (Nisbet 1975).^[2]

Weber's basic perspective on modernity may be termed a post-or late-Enlightenment view of the significant underlying processes of Western social change: it lacks the optimism and some of the presuppositions of the philosophes but still contains the core belief that human endeavors—scientific, political, and economic—can lead in the not-too-distant future to the regeneration of the human condition without recourse to the transcendental. Thus Weber's thought shares the general liberal orientation

[2] I refer here not simply to political institutions but to various other institutions in which political authority has lost its diffuse aura, including the nuclear family and educational institutions.

of modern social science toward modernity (Seidman 1983; Ezrahi 1990).

To be sure, the tumultuous events of the past twenty years or so, coming on top of the global wars and totalitarian regimes that severely pockmarked the West, have greatly shaken and modified the liberal perspective. Youth movements of the counterculture (Yinger 1982; Leventman 1982), autonomist movements against the nation-state (Tiryakian and Rogowski 1985), and movements of religious fundamentalism have suggested to several scholars that the "revolt against modernity" (an identical title used by Lipset [1980] in the context of political movements and by Bell [1985] with respect to cultural movements) has deep roots and merits attention even though the secular trends still point to the fulfillment of the promises of the Enlightenment. Here again, let me invoke Habermas as illustrative of the late-twentieth-century heirs of the Enlightenment-Weberian perspective. To cite Bernstein:

One might epitomize Habermas' entire intellectual project and his fundamental stance as writing a new Dialectic of Enlightenment —one which does full justice to the dark side of the Enlightenment legacy … but nevertheless redeems and justifies the hope of freedom, justice, and happiness. The project of modernity, the hope of Enlightenment thinkers, is not a bitter illusion … but a practical task which has not yet been realized and which can still orient our actions. (1985, 31)

Perhaps we might best speak of the current sociological evaluation of modernity as pluralistic.^[3] The public arena is not as bereft or disenchanted of magical or mystical (or, very broadly, irrational ) currents and movements as Weber's image of modernity seemed to suggest. These movements and orientations, which might be taken as a subclass of Weber's Wertrationalität (Weber 1978, 1:24–26), are seen by some not just as aberrations of modernity but as providing new vehicles of meaning to modernity in a period that is characterized by disenchantment with progress but enchantment with scientific and technological advances (Swatos 1983; Balandier 1985, 149–52). In other words, the values of liberalism and their institutionalization in the public and cultural agencies of modern Western societies have become acknowledged as no longer sufficient to define the situation of modernity; at the same time the countervalues and counterprocesses that have surfaced in the past twenty years are not themselves taken as the parameters of a new order to modernity.

The recent rethinking of modernity has provided an important, albeit perhaps painful, corrective evaluation of our present situation and the

[3] Benjamin Nelson was very sensitive to this heterogeneity. His sensitivity is aptly conveyed in the title of his posthumous volume, On theRoadsto Modernity (1981) (emphasis mine).

processes of social change that have formed it in the immediate past. However, in my judgment there is need both to broaden the theoretical refinement of the master processes of change in the West and to question the assumption that the fate of modernity and the fate of the West are so inextricably bound as to be for all practical purposes one and the same. The theoretical position I advance is that Western sociology—and here we include the Marxist as well as the liberal traditions together as one general macrofamily—is correct in viewing Western civilization as dynamic and as having exerted a mighty influence vis-à-vis other regions of the globe for two or more centuries. But the very dynamics of change of Western modernity have contained not only the processes of differentiation and disenchantment but also the processes of dedifferentiation and reenchantment. These two latter processes should be seen neither as aberrations in the major evolutionary trajectory of modernity nor as nugatory and epiphenomenal but rather as fundamental to the dialectics of change. They may be termed "counterprocesses" of modernity, akin to Boulding's notion of "anti-tropic processes" that offset the exhaustion of a system's potential in the production process (Boulding 1985, 16).

1. Reenchantment

The intellectual view that magic and enchantment were driven out of the dominant sphere of Western culture has two major periods of modernity in mind. The first is that of Reformation Europe when Protestantism (especially among the Puritan and the radical sects) stripped the world of the magical mystification associated with the Catholic Church (the sacramental system, the cult of saints, belief in miracles, and the other features of the popular religion). The second period, which may be thought of as a "mop-up" phase of secularization, is that of the nineteenth century, when empirical science replaced religious versions of world reality with its own accounts.

I contend here that this view grossly simplifies the relationship of enchantment to Western modernity in that it essentially conceives of enchantment and modernity as incompatible and that advances of modernity necessarily require cognitive and cultural disenchantment. In fact, from the Enlightenment on the cultural sphere has had a variety of new ways of viewing the world as magical and enchanted. This is what I mean by "reenchantment." I further contend that advances of modernity in the West evince components of reenchantment, particularly but not exclusively in the cultural sphere.

A neglected feature of "the secularization of the European mind," to borrow Chadwick's phrase (1979), is the "alteration of consciousness" in the Western mentality. I shall sketch the major aspects of this process and

its manifestations in the recent modern period and defer for another occasion a more detailed treatment with documentation.

Weber's crucial insight concerning the shift in the focus of salvific activities to this world is highly pregnant but calls for additional theoretical analysis. The shift entails secularization, but only if we understand by this term that what previously was seen as "mundane" came (not immediately, of course, but over the course of time) to be viewed as having religious significance in its own right. The Protestant deemphasis of the church's sacraments and sacred images, all of which pointed to the marvels of the "other world," went hand in hand with the sacralization of formerly "mundane" human spheres: work (which of course received paramount attention by Weber), predication (the reemphasis of the "word" of God rather than the images of God), and—particularly in the nineteenth century, although it began with Luther—the domesticity and the sacredness of the conjugal unit.

This shift of sacredness from the transcendental or otherworldly sphere, where human agency has very little efficacy or power, to this world, where human agency has much greater rein, is one of the most important features of Western modernity. It involves a rejection of the fatalistic attitude that what happens in this world is predetermined, inherent, or follows inexorable laws.^[4] Once the Western mentality came to the awareness that human agency was decisive in this world and free of otherworldly supervision, it also, ironically, became free to see anew that this world was differentiated between what was marvelous, enchanted, and magical and what was not. In this transformation otherworldly beings, space, etc., came to be viewed in terms of this world. This secularization of magical consciousness has several ramifications that are integral to an appreciation of the process of reenchantment as a major aspect of Western modernity.

Perhaps the most important Western cultural movement of the modern period has been the romantic movement. It began somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century and, depending on what we take as its central characteristics, we can either take a conservative approach and say that it came to a close somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, or take a bolder stance and propose that romanticism has remained

[4] Paulo Freire has broadly designated this orientation as the "magical level of consciousness" (Freire 1973, 44). The phrase is suggestive, but in terms of this analysis it is better to think of a "premodern" and "modern" magical consciousness. The premodern magical consciousness conceives the forces that alter the operations of the world as being ultimately beyond human control, albeit capable of being invoked by special human agents or by some rituals some of the time. The modern magical consciousness denies a transcendent reality but accepts that the world can be transformed (even radically, as in the case of millenarian and revolutionary movements) from its natural appearances and operations solely by human means.

a powerful cultural current since its emergence. In this latter view romanticism was most recently manifested in the countercultural and youth movements of the late 1960s in which the dominant themes were the emancipation of the self from an oppressive society, the return to nature and rejection of industrial society, the primacy of one's feelings, the donning of bohemian appearance, and at the same time the search for a new harmony among human beings. An earlier major renewal of romanticism was the surrealist movement, which was the most broad-based cultural movement of this century, certainly in painting, poetry, and the cinema (from Buñuel to Monty Python), and which had an important political spillover (Gershman 1969; Benjamin 1978). Whatever its specific time frame, romanticism has had a major impact not only in the arts but also in other cultural spheres such as philosophy, religion, and, as Shalin (1986) has cogently argued, sociology itself.

I have suggested that a basic orientation of romanticism in its various forms is a rejection of one major side of modernity: the seemingly cold, drab, impersonal, anonymous, standardized, rationalized, lifeless, technocratic industrial order. But it is more than a rejection; it is also an orientation that seeks and finds, often in the imagination, the creative center of human energy, the potential for altering or conjuring a different order than the industrial one at hand. Romanticism typically places great emphasis on emotions, violence, and mood, the covert and the esoteric in opposition to the overt and exoteric. The properties of space and time—as well as the properties of objects in space and time—may be taken as different from the objective time-space matrix of the scientific-industrial order. Romanticism assumes that the scientific-industrial order can be transformed, perhaps by bringing together the past and the future so as to produce a new present. Of course, these observations are meant to be suggestive traits, and, given the great diversity of manifestations, no specification of this general Weltanschauung is possible in just a few lines. The point I wish to make is that romanticism is one of the most powerful instances of reenchantment as a feature of modernity.

A reflection of this reenchantment is the infusion and profusion throughout the nineteenth century and into the present age of themes of the fantastic, the imaginary, the grotesque, the mythic, and a particular fascination with the demonic and "darkness." Because much of this cultural elaboration was imputed to earlier ages (particularly the medieval period), we have tended to think of premodern Westerners and Western society as riddled with magical consciousness and modern consciousness as emancipated of this mythic, illusory cognitive mapping of reality. However, a brief consideration will suffice to indicate how much the culture of modernity has been stamped by the lure of the magical and enchanting. In classical music, from late Mozart (the operas The Magic Flute, Don

Giovanni ) through Wagner (Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, the Ring cycle) and Mahler (The Youth's Magic Horn ), including the great classics of ballet (Swan Lake, Les Sylphides ), there is a tremendous number of enchanted and magical themes—and even satanic themes (Faust, "Mephistopheles' Waltz")—that provide the human setting for artistic creativity. The same is true in poetry and novels, from Blake and Walter Scott to Lautreamont. In the nineteenth century, side by side with this artistic stimulus of the enchanted, also emerges the study of the fabulous and the enchanted as these have been conceived by "folks" who live on the margin of the industrial urban scene. The collection of folklore and fairy tales, pioneered by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the first half of the century and modernized by William J. Thoms and later by Paul Sebillot, became an important endeavor having a widespread appeal that continues today and had a bearing on the development of cultural anthropology and the study of popular culture (Dorson 1978).

Reenchantment in the form of witchcraft, it may be said in passing, even attaches itself to the very capitalist society that has generated a cultural opposite such as romanticism. I refer here to various aspects of cultural nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe that evoked mythical periods of national identity. But I also draw attention to the instance of socialism, including that of Marx,^[5] who used current romantic metaphors not only in the Manifesto 's opening dramatic "A spectre is haunting Europe…. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise the spectre" but even in the later Grundrisse and in Capital in his discussion of the reification of commodity production: "This enchanted and perverted world…. It is enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world…. The crude materialism of the economists … mystifies social relations" (Bottomore 1983, 411–12). And in recent months the Americans stock market, the center of capitalism and the industrial order, has been subject to a phenomenon known as the "triple witching hour"!

This does not exhaust the theme of reenchantment as a major counterprocess of modernity. Related to, but distinct from, romanticism is another major thread, which I would term exotism . Strictly speaking, if we understand by exotism the appeal or the enchantment of the unfamiliar, perhaps even to the point of seeking to travel to the unfamiliar or to bring the unfamiliar home, exotism has a very long history in the West. It is closely intertwined with many of the myths, legends, and epics of Western culture. However, exotism bears, as Weber (or Goethe before him) might say, and "elective affinity" with Western modernity. Modern

[5] The long-neglected studies of Seillière (1907, 1908, 1911, 1918) on mystical and neo-romantic currents in the ideologies of imperialism, pan-Germanism, and Marxist socialism merit reconsideration in the present context.

exotism, beginning with the romantic fascination with "primitive" nature and its indigenous population living in a state of goodness, has had crucial psychological and political functions in the dynamics of change in Western society.

Psychologically, the enchantment of the exotic has had at least two major consequences for the Western mentality. First, it has provided an important compensation for the landscape that has been transformed by the industrial revolution into a vast sea of grays and blacks as a result of the exhaust of industrial fumes. Industrialization brought about an objective "graying" of the West, particularly in the heartland of Northern Europe. One major feature of exotism is the emphasis on bright colors, "colorful" scenes, and "local color." Southern Europe, on the periphery of industrial Europe, was an early favorite setting for depictions of the exotic (as was North America and its Indians). The setting of the exotic rapidly crossed the Mediterranean, so that still early in the nineteenth century. North Africa and the Islamic world became major vehicles of Western exotic depiction. From there the exotic imagination spread to other settings: sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific islands, and the continent of Asia. In particular nineteenth century exotism found "the tropics" (that is, the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn) as its locale par excellence. The more industrialization rationalized space and nature in the West, the more exotism provided Westerners with a complementary setting: nature and populations "in the raw."

Second, exotism also provided the Western mentality with an important psychological outlet for an effective life that was becoming increasingly sublimated and inhibited with the advance of "the Victorian ethos": an ethos of sobriety and somber clothing that made public references to bodily functions, particularly sexuality, taboo. Exotic places and their natives, who were seen as living under very different rules of the game (as were the lower social strata, particularly those of a different ethnicity from that of the elites and the new middle classes), became vehicles outside the pale of civilization through which the erotic could be displayed. The linkage of the exotic and the erotic is vividly marked in depictions (paintings, novels, operas) of "native women" whose bare bodies and passionate nature could be vicariously (or otherwise) enjoyed in safety. Another illustration of this linkage is colonial stamps (for example, those issued by the Third Republic right up to World War II), which featured bare-breasted "Black Eves."

Exotism not only had those two psychological functions; it also had economic and political functions. Economically, Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century developed a craving for exotic products that contributed to the information of a consumer society. Baudelaire attracted attention in 1848 by advocating "peppers, English powders and saffrons,

colonial stuff, exotic asparagus, all that would have pleased them, even musk and incense," and in 1850 Ferdinand Hediard introduced the Parisian middle class to exotic fruits in his Comptoir d'Epice et des Colonies:

Hediard was first to bring tropical fruits and vegetables with strange names, such as guavas, mangoes, loquats and papaws…. Oranges, tangerines, and grapefruits, then a luxury, began to appear on middle-class French tables. The French expansion into Tunisia, the Congo and Indo-china helped Hediard. By 1889, exoticism was all the rage in Paris. (Dorsey 1986)

To bring the exotic to the West is one side of the economic coin; to take Westerners to the exotic is the other. I have in mind here the development of the tourist industry. It began in the nineteenth century, first in the European periphery (Scotland, Spain, Italy, even southern France), and subsequently spread to all parts of the world, particularly those subject to exotic themes that represented the opposite of the locale of the industrial setting, themes such as "colorful natives," "balmy skies," and "unspoiled nature." In the process, "touristization" often involved making a setting conform to the expectations of the exotic by staging events (dances, festivals, even sexual activities) that supposedly typify that setting for the benefit of the tourists. As a result, tourists tend to be shielded from the actual everyday life of the indigenous population.

Equally significant is the political dimension of exotism. The lure and enchantment of exotic lands was instrumental in the exploration and subsequent colonization of overseas territories from early in the nineteenth century right up to World War I. Even after World War I the colonial empires were given important legitimation and justification because of their exotic appeal, which was periodically displayed to Western publics by means of "colonial expositions." Exotic imagery not only emphasized the appeal of strange, foreign, and "colorful" lands and peoples but also, tacitly, emphasized the need for these to be coupled (read annexed, given in perpetual trust, etc.) to Western societies that had acceded to a civilization of progress. Such imagery on occasion suggested the need to seek and rescue "lost" Westerners, such as the mythic Prester John or the not-so-mythic David Livingstone in the case of Africa, and in the course of searching the territory being explored came under the political sphere of influence of the West. Once under Western suzerainty, the exotic aura that overlay the colonies, or more broadly, the non-West, functioned to legitimate Western dominance and to keep "exotic" non-Westerners from being taken seriously. The important study of Said (1978) provides ample documentation of the widespread functions of "orientalism" as a Western categorization and cultural agent of domination

of the Middle East and Asia. Curtin's earlier study (1964) provides complementary materials on Sub-Saharan Africa.

If, as I contend, reenchantment is a dialectical aspect of Western modernity, are there manifestations of the exotic today after the decolonization of former empires? I would propose that this is indeed the case but that there has been a shift in the locale of the exotic. Instead of foreign parts of the globe inhabited by strange creatures (who are thought to be a mixture of goodness and barbarism), today outer space and extraterrestrial beings are the focus of the exotic. Even as decolonization involved a certain "disenchantment" of the world (in the sense that it stripped away the veils the West had placed on the colonies), reenchantment has been renewed in the popular culture of science fiction, which has commanded a large appeal from the time of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells down to "Star Trek", E.T., and the like. (For a sociological overview of science fiction, see Bainbridge 1986.) As I noted for an earlier wave of exotism, the exotism of outer space not only has psychological and economic functions (for example, generating important objects of consumption in a consumer society) but also may have similar political functions of legitimating enormous expenditures for space exploration, colonization, and military defense (as in the case of the Strategic Defense Initiative, in which the fiction of an impenetrable defense shield has already cost billions of dollars). In any event, modern science fiction illustrates that advancements in science and technology, so much part of the rationalization process, and advancements in the sphere of the imaginary are dialectically related.

Although this does not complete the account of forms of reenchantment in modern society (for example, a more comprehensive treatment would have to look at the economic and political consequences of cultural nostalgia, particularly as the enchantment of the past attaches itself to successive decades), it is time to consider the second major counterprocess of modernity.

2. Dedifferentiation

The discussion of the counterprocess of dedifferentiation is briefer than that of disenchantment, not because of their relative importance but because I have recently dealt at some length with the former (1985b). Because dedifferentiation has been treated residually or negatively, I illustrate the importance of this process through a general consideration of Western modernity.

Obviously the legal-rational authority structures of modernity and its industrial technological order are characterized by a high level of functional differentiation. As an implicit normative standard of modernity,

this was contained in one of Parsons's "pattern variables," namely "specificity versus diffuseness" (with specificity representing the pole of modernity). By extension dedifferentiation has tended to be viewed as a pathological aspect of social evolution, a regressive process that has as its consequence the undoing of rationalization and differentiation. This, for example, was the tenor of Parsons's discussion of social movements committed to a Gesinnungsethik, movements as diverse as the religious radical movements of the Reformation or the student movements of the 1960s (Tiryakian 1985b).

For a more balanced perspective on the relationship between dedifferentiation and modernity, it is crucial to keep in mind, as Rueschemeyer has emphasized (1986), that any division of labor involves a distribution of power. Ideally, the evolution of the structural differentiation of a social system allows it to have greater adaptation to its environment and increased efficiency as its components work interactively. But social systems do not operate in a power vacuum. Therefore, unless Plato's conception of a meritocracy, as outlined in The Republic, has been implemented in the form of a universal testing system designed to rationally allocate persons to differentiated slots, then the process of differentiation will tend to have an increasing hierarchical character, with more differentiated subunits having less responsibility and less control. This means that unit members at lower echelons will have less identification with and commitment to the goals of the system and greater passivity and apathy may ensue, even if the system's officials resort to Platonic myths and rituals. Thus the process of differentiation can generate pathologies (which Durkheim analyzed in part in The Division of Labor in Society ), and by itself is not the guarantor of integration.

To be sure, a hierarchic, differentiated social system can show growth, integration, and economic efficiency, which might be taken as standards of success. But insofar as major groups of actors are excluded de facto or de jure from responsible action, the system will tend to operate at less than optimal levels of efficiency. Moreover, a change in the environment may provide the social system in question with a challenge that it cannot respond to given its present modes of stratification and differentiation.

Dedifferentiation as a counterprocess involves the restoration of the potentiality of a unit to an earlier phase of development that was characterized by a greater homogeneity of the member units. It is a process of regeneration and rejuvenation of structures; it is also a process by which the member units renew their commitments to and involvement with the system as a whole. This process tends to be more condensed and intense than differentiation.

Rueschemeyer (1986, 141–69) has indicated that several features of dedifferentiation in modern societies are worthy of note: its bundle of

rights and duties underlying moral individualism, its tension with role fragmentation and routinization, its contribution to the integration of complex institutional patterns, and so forth. The point is not that dedifferentiation is an atavism of modernity but more that it is a necessary complement of differentiation, in part because it provides for the social mobilization of actors. Insofar as the democratic impulse is one major thrust of Western modernity, the quest for the autonomy and the enhancement of life for all the people, within and among societies, will periodically be expressed in forms of dedifferentiation that are dialectically opposed to the tendencies of differentiation.

Historically, I would point to the major social revolutions of the modern period, from the French Revolution to the sexual revolution, as exemplifying dedifferentiation. The same applies to the great nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In these and other instances the actors and groups of actors seeking to emancipate themselves from a differentiated system call on the modern values of egalitarianism, freedom, and autonomy. Because differentiation often rests on the basis of ethnic segmentation, those who wield power in the division of labor are seen as either too alien or too distant. Dedifferentiation involves a dedifferentiation of social roles and social space, whereas differentiation tends to allocate some persons to some roles and to put and keep them in a given confine of social space. This general confinement (which from the perspective of the elites of a differentiated system is a rational allocation of resources) is in acute tension with modern values that stress the freedom of movement and the self-development of human beings (either as individuals or as groups).

3. Conclusion

This chapter discussed modernity in terms of two significant processes that have had a variety of manifestations in the course of Western social change. Reenchantment and dedifferentiation run counter to rationalization as the master process of Western modernity, but they are analytically and empirically necessary to understand modernity "in all its states," to borrow a phrase from Balandier (1985). I argue that modernity must be approached dialectically, not unidimensionally, and that it is necessary to bring the counterprocesses into focus for a more adequate theoretical understanding of the dynamism of modernity.^[6]

The consideration of counterprocesses is also necessary for a more

[6] In terms of Parsonian system analysis (Parsons 1978, 352–433) the process of dedifferentiation, I would suggest, is one that reemphasizes or redirects attention to the I (Integration) and L (Latency) cells, whereas differentiation has a predominant emphasis on A (Adaptation) and G (Goal-directed) cells of action systems.

general interpretation of the modern "human condition" (Parsons 1978). If rationalization, differentiation, and secularization are interrelated features of the dynamics of change, they are not simply features that have provided many of the benefits implicit in the "promise of the Enlightenment," that is, the promise of the general emancipation of the human condition by human praxis. They have also led to new forms of hierarchical control, depersonalization, and the homogenization of the physical and social environment. These features, without a counterbalance, could take modernity into the stasis envisioned by Weber's apt metaphor of "the iron cage," or, even more drastic, that envisioned by Orwell. In fact, however, reenchantment and dedifferentiation, in their diverse manifestations, have served to renew and regenerate the Western societal system, whether by social movements that challenge existing patterns of structural differentiation or by movements of the imagination that challenge the finitude of material reality and have thereby contributed to its ongoing reconstruction.

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