Module 2- Modernity Emerging and Rising

(SocSci 12 – The Contemporary World)

Arthur Tangara Jr (PhD Sociology Cand)

 I Asked God For Strength

I asked God for strength, that I might achieve.

I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health, that I might do greater things.

I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy.

I was given poverty, that I might be wise.

I asked for power,

that I might have the praise of others.

I was given weakness,

that I might feel the need of God.

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life.

I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing that I asked for,

but everything I hoped for.

Almost despite myself,

my unspoken prayers were answered.

I am among all, most richly blessed.

- by Henry Viscardi
Outline

Course Concerns | Module Intro| Hamilton

Individual Reflection Paper Deadline: Sept 5
Course Learning Outcomes
• CLO1: Understand the debates around the significance of modernity and its diverse aspects and evaluate their
contributions and limitations
• CLO2: Analyze contemporary events and issues in the context of modernity and other globalizing forces using an
interdisciplinary lens
• CLO3: Identify and explain similarities and differences among experiences and interpretations of cultural,
economic, political and social transformations that have shaped the contemporary world
• CLO5: Develop a critical attitude toward taken-for-granted notions and assumptions of modernity and other
globalizing forces in and beyond the Philippine context
 Has there
been a
moment in
your life where
you
passionately
fought for
something you
believed in
and actually
succeeded?
Source: Timeline 500 AD – 1000 AD (rpchurchmanassas.org)
 Socio-Political and Culture Context
Medieval Times:
• Beginning the of the Medieval Period (Middle Ages) - RCC exercised significant
(Years 450 to 800) social and political
• The Vikings (famous Danish warriors renowned for their
strength and brutality) put England under threat authority
• Islamic expansion outwards, and westwards - Church worship was at the
• Piracy and the trading of slaves center of public life
• Infamous Crusades (1100-1200) - As the only unified
• Display of battling, and the spread of religion by the sword institution throughout
• The High Middle Ages (1200-1400) Europe after the fall of the
• “Magna Carta” decreed that monarchs were forced to
acknowledge that their power over their territories was not Roman Empire, the Church
complete and absolute, and that even monarchs (rulers) were asserted its influence over
governed by the law of the land
the continent’s monarchs
• The End of the Medieval Period (1400-1492) and even had the power to
• Substantial cultural changes that arose from new ways of
thinking, new methods of learning, and the eventual rise of remove them from the
intellectual thinkers and philosophers throne.
 Hamilton, Peter. 1996. “The Enlightenment and the
Birth of Social Science.” In Modernity, An
Introduction to Modern Societies. Blackwell
Publishing, pp. 19-47.

o Provide a critical, analytical introduction

to the/ key ideas of the body of writers
and writings known as the
Enlightenment;
o Demonstrate the centrality of the social
in Enlightenment thought, · and to
indicate the relative lack of intellectual
boundaries between disciplinary
domains;
o Analyze and present the key ideas of
Enlightenment sociology and social
science
 Hamilton, Peter. 1996. “The Enlightenment and the
Birth of Social Science.” In Modernity, An
Introduction to Modern Societies. Blackwell
Publishing, pp. 19-47.

o Indicate how some key ideas of

Enlightenment sociology and social science
were incorporated within the characteristic
features of - nineteenth-century sociology
and social thought;

o Present and contextualize the thesis that

the Enlightenment represents a watershed
in human thought about society - that it ·
produced a qualitatively new way of
thinking concerned with the application of
reason, experience and experiment to the
natural and the social world
Know then thyself, presume not
God to scan, The proper study of
Mankind is Man.
(Alexander Pope, Epistle ii, An Essay on Man)
 16th & 17th Century Icons that inspired Enlightenment (Bacon, Hobbes and Locke)

Moral philosophy is nothing else but Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say,
Imagination was given to
white paper, void of all characters without
man to compensate him for the science of what is good and evil, in
any ideas; how come it to be vast store,
what he is not; a sense of the conversation, and society of
which the busy and boundless fancy of man
humor to console him for mankind. Good and evil, are names
has painted on it with an almost endless
what he is. that signify our appetites, and aversions;
variety? Whence has it all the materials of
- Francis Bacon, English Lawyer and which in different tempers, customs, and reasons and knowledge? To this I answer, in
Philosopher doctrines of men are different. one word, from EXPEREINCE.”
– Thomas Hobbes, Philosopher - Jon Locke, English Philosopher
 Mid 18th Century Origins and Influences

Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), whose ‘De

'Esprit des Lois’ (The Spirit of the Laws) is the
starting point for a modern understanding of the
relationship between the sociology of politics
and the structure of society;
David Hume (1711- 76), -Who formulated a
theory of human nature-which sets tone for
modern empirical research in psychology and
sociology

Voltaire 1694- 1788), whose writings on

science, freedom of thought and justice
express so well the excitement generated by
the critical rationalism and secularism which
characterizes the Enlightenment

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), whose

writings on 'civil society' prefigure modern
comparative sociology.
 Basic Assertions
Understanding Modern Societies is all about the formation—the invention
and the reproduction—of a modern way of thinking about society.

Crane Brinton even argued, quite

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), convincingly that the term Auguste Comte, to construct a
said, as something unique, 'philosophe', which was used to 'positive science' of society.
society-as a social fact, 'sui describe the main figures of the or in other words a sociology-
generis': Emergence of a new Enlightenment, would nowadays
group of ideas about society and
the very word Comte coined to
be rendered as 'sociologist',
the realm of the social. name this entirely new science.
given the term's usage at the
time.
 Empiricism—the idea that all Universalism—the concept
thought and knowledge about that the reason and science
the natural and social world is could be applied to any and
based upon empirical facts, every situation, and that
things that all human beings their principles were the
can apprehend upon same in every situation.
empirical facts, things that all Science in particular produces
human beings can general laws which govern
apprehend through their the entire universe, without
sense organs. exception.

The paradigm of the enlightenment—is a philosophy and approach to key questions:

Reason – the philosophes stressed
Science - the notion that
the primacy of reason and rationality
as ways of organizing knowledge, scientific knowledge,
tempered by experience and based upon the
experiment. A rationalist concept of
experimental method as
reason as the process of rational
thought based upon a clear, innate developed in the
ideas independent of experience, scientific revolution of
which can be demonstrated to any the 17th century, was the
thinking person, and which had been
key to expanding all
set out by Descartes and Pascal in the
17th century with their version: human knowledge.
rationalism with empiricism
 Individualism - the concept that
the individual is the starting point
for all knowledge and action, and
that individual reason cannot be
subjected to a higher authority.
Society is thus the sum or product
of the thought and action of a
large number of individuals

The paradigm of the enlightenment—is a philosophy and approach to key questions:

Progress-the idea that the Toleration - the notion that all

natural and social condition human beings are essentially
of human beings could be the same, despite their
improved, by the application religious or moral
of science and reason, and convictions, and that the
beliefs of other races or
would result in an ever-
civilizations are not
increasing level happiness inherently inferior to those of
and well-being European Christianity
 Secularism - an ethic most
frequently seen in the form of
virulent anti-clericalism. The
philosophes' opposition to
traditional religious authority
stressed the need for secular
knowledge free of religious
orthodoxies
The paradigm of the enlightenment—is a philosophy and approach to key questions:

Freedom - an opposition to
feudal and traditional constraints Uniformity of human
on ‘values, beliefs, trade, nature - the belief that
communication, social
interaction, sexuality, and
the principal
ownership of property’ (although characteristics of
as we shall see the extension of human nature were
freedom to women and the lower
classes was problematic for the
always and everywhere
philosophes). the same
 What is Enlightenment
o A characteristic bundle of ideas
o An intellectual movement
o A communicating group or network of intellectuals
o A set of institutional centres where intellectuals clustered- Paris, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, London, etc.
o A publishing industry, and an audience for its output
o An intellectual fashion
o A belief-system, world-view, or Zeitgeist (spirit of the age)
o A history and a geography
 Features of Enlightenment
• Enlightenment was the
creation of a new framework
of ideas about man. society
and nature, which challenged
·existing conceptions rooted
in a traditional world-view,
dominated by Christianity.
• New ideas were accompanied
by and influenced in their turn
many cultural innovations in
writing, printing, painting, They were the first people in western society outside of
music, sculpture, architecture the Church to make a living (or more properly a
vocation). As Roy Porter has put it, 'the Enlightenment
and gardening, as well as the was the era which saw the emergences of a secular
other arts. intelligentsia large enough and powerful enough for the
first time to challenge the clergy’ (Porter, 1990, p. 73).
 Features of Enlightenment
• Technological innovations
in agriculture and
manufactures, as well as
in ways of making war,
also frame the social
theories of the
Enlightenment.

• Enlightenment saw him or

herself as able to take-up
any or all of them which
caught his or her interest
 The Social, Historical and Geographical
location of the Enlightenment
- Centered in France
- Philosophes saw themselves as
cosmopolitans, citizens of an enlightened
intellectual word who valued the interest of
mankind above that of country or clan.
- Didreot wrote to Hume in 1768: 'My dear
David, you belong to all nations, and you'll
never ask an unhappy man for his birth
certificate. I flatter myself that I am, like
you, citizen of the great city of the world'
(quoted in Gay, 1973a,'p.13).
 The Social, Historical and Geographical location of
the Enlightenment

- Edward Gibbon (1737-94) stressed the strongly European or

'Euro-centric' nature of this universalistic cosmopolitanism:
'it is the duty of a patriot to prefer and, promote the
exclusive interest and glory of his native colonies but a
philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views and to
consider Europe as a great republic, whose various
inhabitants have attained almost the same level of
politeness and cultivation (quoted in Gay, 1973a, p.13).

- Age of Enlightenment, a term which implies a general

process of society awakening from the dark slumbers of
superstition and ignorance, and a notion certainly
encouraged by the philosophes themselves, although it is
one which perhaps poses more questions than it resolves
 Encyclopedie

- Influence of this massive publication

- Mid-eighteenth-century French was the
language of all of educated Europe,
except England and Spain
- Science was the supreme form of
knowledge for the philosophes because
it seemed to create a secure truths
based-on observation and experiment-
a strong force for enlightenment and
progress.
 Encyclopedie

- 2 striking characteristics of the Encyclopedie:

o Creating a plan for the enterprise—a way of linking all the
articles together in coherent manner—the decision was taken
to place man at the center
o The Encyclopedie is truly 'universalistic' in its approach - a
disaster overtake civilization, all human knowledge could be -
reconstructed. As a result, it is a vast publication: it took over
twenty years to be published, from 1751 to 1772, and amounts
to seventeen volumes of text and twelve volumes of plates
- Encyclopedism, a synonym for the refusal to accept anything
uncritically
- Renaissance Man was the archetype of cultivated knowledge—
a person whose knowledge and understanding enabled him or
her to pick up a book on physics, read a text of Tacitus, design
a Palladin villa, paint a Mona Lisa

- Men and women educated at the same level

 Tradition and Modernity
- Move from traditional social order
and a traditional set of beliefs about
the world to new forms of social
structure and ways of thinking about
the world which were distinctively
modern
- Modernity sought to demolish and
replace established forms of
knowledge dependent on religious
authority, such as the biblical the Earth does not revolve round the Sun at a uniform rate, and that the Sun is not at
account of the creation of the world, the centre of the Earth’s orbit.

with-those new forms of knowledge

which depended upon experience,
experiment and reason-
quintessentially, science.
 - The astronomic discoveries in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries of Kepler and Copernicus
about the nature of the universe, the observations of
Galileo concerning the movements of the planets, the
lessons of empirical science, and the increasingly
common accounts of distant and exotic societies
available through travelers' tales, combined to provide
an effective scientific and empirical base from which
to challenge traditional cosmologies (a cosmology is
an intellectual picture or model of the universe)
Galileo knew about and had founded upon Christian belief, which placed the earth
accepted Copernicus's heli
ocentric
at the centre of the universe, and Christendom at the
(Sun-centered) theory. It centre of the world. This was fertile ground for the
was Galileo's observations
of Venus philosophes, who opposed traditional religious
that proved the theory. authority and the false knowledge which it ordained.
Using his
telescope, Galileo found
that Venus went through - Although we must be clear that many of the
phases, just like our Moon.
philosophes were in fact believers in a God, or at least
a divine entity, this did not prevent much of their
writing from heaping scorn upon religious teaching,
and being virulently anti-clerical
 Social Orders and Social
Structure
- This new group was composed largely of lower
middle-class hack journalists and other
writers, who supplied the growing number of
popular newspapers with a diet of scandal
mixed up with simplified Enlightenment ideas
- Beneath the landed nobility there existed a
stratum of 'traditional' professional orders
which had changed little since the feudal
period - lawyers, clerics, state officials etc. -
and also a stratum of small landowners or
gentry-farmers
 Social Orders and Social
Structure
- Because they discerned in it certain dangerous and
revolutionary elements, both secular and religious
authorities tried to control the spread of Enlightenment
culture. However, the philosophes themselves refused
to believe that they were rebels or revolutionaries: they
thought that progress could come about within the
existing social order by the spread of their ideas
among men of influence. As Diderot once said, their aim
was to 'change the general way of thinking', and was
revolutionary only insofar as it sought 'the revolution
which will take place in the minds of men' (quoted in
Eliot and Stern, 1979, p.44)
Social Orders and Social
Structure

Peter Gay describes the

philosophes as a 'solid,
respectable clan of
revolutionaries’
(Gay, 1973a, p.9).
 Women and Enlightenment:
The Salon
• Hostesses of the regular salons and soirees where the
philosophes and other members of the cultivated elites would
meet.
• The institution of the salon had begun in seventeenth-century
Paris, the invention of the Marquise de Rambouillet in 1623,
who created 'a space in which talented and learned women
could meet with men as intellectual equals, rather than as
exceptional prodigies' (Anderson and Zinsser, 1990, vol.II,
p.104).
• Yet the salon proved to be a rather double-edged sword in Catherine the Great of Russia saved the Society
the expansion of women's rights. Although many of those almost singlehandedly. She protected the 201
set up in imitation of Mime de Rambouillet's were presided Jesuits she had acquired in 1772 with the First
over by women who, like her, refused sexual liaisons so as to Partition of Poland and insisted that they
free themselves for a role beyond that of wife or courtesan, continue their apostolic work as Jesuits. For
many salons were also the locus for affairs between talented decades, her successors continued to support
or titled men and intellectual women, and the reputation of all the Jesuits.
Source: Catherine the Great of Russia and Jesuits
salonieres (chaste or otherwise) was affected: it was assumed Catherine the Great of Russia was one of its staunchest
that relations between men and women, however intellectual supporters at one stage - the Enlightenment was
or artistic they might appear, could not remain platonic. essentially promoted and prosecuted, at least in its public
face, by a male intellectual elite
Modernity as the Pursuit of Modernity • 4 main areas to distinguish the thought of the
philosophes from that of the other intellectuals of the
period:
o Anticlericalism: the philosophes had no time
for the Church (especially the Catholic Church)
and its works- a perspective summed up in
Voltaire's phrase 'Ecrasez l'infame' ('crush the
infamous thing, the 'thing' being the authority
of the Catholic Church). They were particularly
opposed to religious persecution, and
although some went further, denying the
existence of a God altogether, most
acknowledged that reason indicates the likely
existence of a God, but not one who has
provided a 'revelation' of Himself through
scripture, the life of Christ, miracles, or the
Church.
Modernity as the Pursuit of Modernity • 4 main areas to distinguish the thought of the
philosophes from that of the other intellectuals of the
period:

o A belief in the pre-eminence of empirical,

materialist knowledge: the model in this
respect being furnished by science

o An enthusiasm for technological and medical

progress: scientists, inventors, and doctors
were seen as the curers of society's ills.

o A desire for legal and constitutional reform: in

the case of the French · - philosophes, this was
translated into a critique of French absolutism,
and an admiration for the British constitution,
with its established liberties.
 Enlightenment , science and progress

• Science could ensure a more efficient

and productive. agriculture, and thus
the elimination of famine; it could lead to
the invention of processes and
machines which would convert raw
materials into goods that would be -of
benefit to mankind; it could ensure the
reduction of illness and infirmity, and
the prospect of a population no longer
kept in 'ignorance -and superstition' by
received wisdom about the Christian
creation myth, and religious concepts
of cause and effect.
Enlightenment , science and progress
• The discovery that smallpox could
be prevented by simple
inoculation was only one amongst
a great range of scientific
innovations which seemed to roll
back the frontiers of a nature
hitherto quite hostile to man.

• Newton’s discovery of gravity as s

result of an apple falling on his
head, Voltaire popularize and make
more accessible the new ‘natural
philosophy’
 Fear of change, up to that time was
nearly universal was giving way to
fear of stagnation; the word
innovation, traditionally an effective
term of abuse, became a word of
praise. The very emergence
conservative ideas was 'a tribute to the
general obsession "with improvement:
a station society does not need
conservatives. - There seemed to be
Voltaire evoked:
little doubt that in the struggle of man
o Great desire for new ideas
o Understanding of how society could progress through against nature the balance of
an application of the best knowledge available in the
power—was shifting in favor of man.
arts and science
o Application of reason and knowledge, represented a (Gay, 1973b, p.3)
qualitative shift int eh attitudes of the literate elite
 Communication of
Enlightenment
• The Enlightenment forged the
unintellectual conditions in which
the application of reason to
practical affairs could flourish-
principally through the invention
of such modern institutions as
the scientific academy, the
learned journal, and the
conference. It also helped
establish a modern 'audience'
for social, political,
philosophical and scientific
ideas, and thus created the
circumstances in which a class of
- Intellectuals could live from
writing about them.
• Djion newspaper
 Enlightenment and Social Science
- Voltaire idealized Newton as a sort of new
hero; one more fitting to an age which was
concerned with reason, progress, the
future:
• If true greatness consists of having
been endowed by heaven with powerful
genius, and of using it to enlighten
oneself and others, then a man like M.
Newton (we scarcely find one like him in
ten centuries) is truly the great man,
and those politicians and conquerors
(whom no century has been without) are
generally nothing but celebrated villains.
(quoted in Gay, 1973b, pp.128-9)
 Enlightenment and Social Science
- Naturalism, the notion that cause and effect
sequences in the natural (rather an a spiritual or
metaphysical world) fully explain social phenomena, was
provide d by the . Enlightenment emphasis scientific
method. The control of prejudice IS necessary In the
social sciences as a means of preventing value-
judgements from unduly influencing the results of
empirical study.
- The overarching emphasis of the philosophes on
rationalism, empiricism and humanitarianism was
largely responsible for their work in the new social
sciences having two distinct characteristics:
o the use of scientific methods in attempting to
justify the reform of social institutions; and
o cultural relativism: the realization, by many
philosophes, that the European society in which
they lived did not represent the best or most
developed form of social organization.
 Revolution and Reformation

The Revolutionary situation was a result of the

faults of the Government, but the philosophes
gave it leaders, cadres, a doctrine direction, the
temptation of illusions and the irresistible
momentum of hope. They did note create the
causes of the Revolution, but they made them
manifest, actuated them, gave them emotive
force, multiplied them and quickened their
pace. The writings of the philosophes were not
responsible for the disintegration of ancient
regime: it was because it was disintegrating of its
own accord that their influence promoted the The French Revolution became, as the historian
Revolution. William Doyle has said, 'an opportunity for
(Sorel, 1969, pp.238-9; first published 1885) enlightened men to bring about a more
rational, just and humane organization of the
affairs of mankind'.
 Birth of Sociology:
Sint Simon and Comte
- Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) set out to construct a new
science of society from the wreckage of the Enlightenment, he
saw himself as carrying the philosophes' ideas on to a new
plane: 'The philosophy of the eighteenth century has been
critical and revolutionary; that of the nineteenth century will be
inventive and constructive' (quoted in Taylor, 1975, p.22).

- His Memoire I sur la Science de I' Homme (Memoir on the

Science of Man) and Travail sur la Gravitation Universelle
(Work on Universal Gravitation), both written in 1813, received
wide recognition as an appeal to found a new social science
which would counteract the forces of conflict and disorder. As a
result of this and later work, Saint-Simon became a key figure
in the 'liberal' political movements of post-Napoleonic Europe.
In his journal L'Industrie, Saint-Simon used the term 'liberal' to
describe economic and political values which were in
favour of greater freedom for manufacture and trade, and a
bigger say in how the century was run for those who owned
factories and other businesses
- Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was the first.:2§rson to use the term
sociology to describe the scientific study of society. Comte’s work has
been presented as a synthesis of the writings of key Enlightenment
figures such as Montesquieu, the physiocratic economist Turgot, and
Condorcet, and of his erstwhile patron and collaborator, Saint-Simon. ,._
Although the philosophes clearly inspired Cornte, his work in defining the
subject matter and methods of the new science - sociology goes far
beyond them, and offers a clear link to the professionalized discipline of
the twentieth century (Thompson, 1976, p.6).
- Comte wished to create a naturalistic science of society capable of both
explaining its past and predicting its future.
- He developed a theory which has many affinities with those of the
Enlightenment philosophes, in that it proposed a series of stage s (The
Law of Human Progress or the Law of Three Stages), through which
society has progressed. Unlike the stadial (staged) theories of Ferguson
or Smith however, his notion of development was based on the idea of
development of the human mind, and societal stages thus mirrored these
developments in terms of social organizations, types of society as
developing progressively through the emancipation of human
intellect. Where he differed from them most substantially was in the
notion that societies are in effect like giant biological organisms. Their
evolution and development thus follow well defined law-like stages much
as the development f an animal followed a clear patterns.
- Comte believed that sociology was the study of such patterns of
societal evolution, and that it would proceed through an analysis of
both static and dynamic aspects of social organization.
 Conclusions
The philosophes certainly believed that human
It formed the first stage in the forging agency, if properly informed by enlightened self-
of a modern conception of society knowledge, was perfectly capable of controlling
as an entity open to human agency, society -for what was the latter but the aggregated wills
whose workings are in principle of individually men and women?
open to our scrutiny.

It created all the elements from which intellectuals

could begin to construct an image of society which
reflected human interest.
Course Learning Outcomes
• CLO1: Understand the debates around the significance of modernity and its diverse aspects and evaluate their
contributions and limitations
• CLO2: Analyze contemporary events and issues in the context of modernity and other globalizing forces using an
interdisciplinary lens
• CLO3: Identify and explain similarities and differences among experiences and interpretations of cultural,
economic, political and social transformations that have shaped the contemporary world
• CLO5: Develop a critical attitude toward taken-for-granted notions and assumptions of modernity and other
globalizing forces in and beyond the Philippine context
 MODULE 2. MODERNITY EMERGING AND RISING
This module traces the origins of modernity. It zeroes in on the Enlightenment Period, a vibrant
episode that provided impetus for social transformations around the world. It juxtaposes this period
with what is loosely defined “premodernity” in order to highlight changes. This module also
highlights different aspects and manifestations of modernity especially during the era of
industrialization and colonization.
 Sources
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• Women and Enlightenment: The Salon – Bing

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• Comte De Saint-Simon - Bing images