S.N. Eisenstadt and African modernities: Dialogue,extension,retrieval

Divergent responses to modernization theory

In some recent reflections on ‘presentism’ in writing on Africa, Achille Mbembe (2017) argues that African societies continue to be placed at some time behind more ‘developed’ societies or are simply identified with the absence of modernity. Presentist treatments of Africa societal development have a long lineage, nowhere more typically expressed than in Hegel’s claim that Sub-Saharan Africa, in toto, languished ‘in the conditions of mere nature…on the threshold of the World’s History’ (Hegel, 2001 [1837]: 109–17). It is well documented that this kind of interpretation formed an imaginary component of modern European self-consciousness, as well as part of the justification for colonial-imperial domination itself (Arendt, 1967 [1951]: 192; Mudimbe, 1988; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991: 86; Reid, 2011). There remains, long after formal decolonization, a pervasive tendency to set apart so-called ‘African phenomena’ and assign to them an aeonian, stagnant condition of backwardness and tradition (Thomas, 2011: 727).

Meanwhile, there has long existed a body of nuanced and critical engagements with core themes of theoretical sociology in African Studies, concerning the relationships between modernity and tradition, about large-scale societal transformation and the role of interpretive and practical agency therein, as well as the limitations of ‘Eurocentric’ categories within the social sciences. These have tended to develop from the substantive investigations of scholars of history and anthropology, and they have appeared in a more normative idiom in the work of postcolonial African philosophers. Many of these reflections have been dedicated to deconstructing the ‘invention of Africa’ (Mudimbe, 1988) that functioned as an imaginary component of the European colonial-imperial domination of African societies in the nineteenth century.

More still developed as specific responses to the discourse of modernization in the decades following the Second World War. Although the discourses of modernization were heterogeneous, they were underpinned by a general set of theoretical premises and an underlying assumption: all societies could essentially be placed on a historical continuum from traditional to modern, the latter being represented by those North Atlantic ‘Western’ nation-state societies – spearheaded by the USA – that had realized a number of core universal evolutionary processes. Such societies, conceived in the framework of the liberal-democratic, industrialized nation-state, evinced a high degree of functional differentiation, achievement-related roles, and universal value-generalization (Therborn, 2000; Knöbl, 2002; Joas and Knöbl, 2009: 308–38).

It is no coincidence that the high period of modernization discourse was coterminous with the emergence of the decolonization movements of the Global South. Implicated in US international power in the era of Cold War antagonism, it had a considerable practical orientation and its insights were deemed to be capable of steering developmental processes in non-Western societies (Gilman, 2004). These decolonizing societies represented, for social scientists concerned with modernization, ideal laboratories for testing the premises of their developmentalist schemas; the emergence of fledgling states was ‘a new domain of intellectual conquest’ in an era marked by ‘a heightened sense of possibility’ (Cooper, 2005: 37). As such, one can observe throughout the 1950s and the 1960s attempts among social scientists to delineate the nature of the ‘traditional’ societies of Africa and their ‘receptivity to change’ (for specific reference to Burundi and Rwanda, see, for example, Albert, 1960; Maquet, 1961).

It is well documented that these theories of modernization were facing significant challenges by the 1970s (Wagner, 2008: 7). Alongside theoretical treatises on dependency and the neo-colonial exploitation of the periphery by the core economic powers (Rodney, 1972; Wallerstein, 2004), there developed the philosophical deconstruction of the universalizing ‘metanarratives’ implicit in the linearity of modernization (Lyotard, 1984 [1979]). This in turn influenced the development of postcolonial criticism, which demonstrated how colonial discourses were constitutive of key paradigms in the social-scientific and humanities disciplines (Said, 1978; Mudimbe, 1988; Hall, 1992). Anthropologists, increasingly reflecting on the entanglements of their own discipline in the development and function of empire, identified and problematized the symbolic violence of stage-theoretical models of historical development whereby large parts of the world were said to exist in an earlier time than the purportedly superior, advanced industrial societies (Fabian, 1983; Kahn, 2001). The optimistic sense of possibility that pervaded post-war discourses of modernization was also weakened by events, among them the 1968 student protests, the fallout from the invasion of Vietnam and the unmasking of US neo-imperial ambitions, and the economic crises of the early 1970s (Joas and Knöbl, 2009: 312–13).

The interdisciplinary field of African Studies, as Lynn Thomas details, formed within this context, emerging in part as a critical response to the ‘racist, teleological, and condescending presumptions embedded in such conceptions of the modern’ (Thomas, 2011: 727). For example, the influential work of the anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff on the Tswana of Southern Africa took as its point of departure the failure of predictions that ‘modernising social forces and material forms would have the universal effect of eroding local cultural differences’; while unequal global flows of technology and trade had connected the world as never before, this had given rise, in terms that anticipate Eisenstadt’s formulation, to ‘many modernities’ rather than a singular institutional arrangement and cultural orientation (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991: xi). For the historian Frederick Cooper, the presentation of modernization as the unfolding of an irresistible law of history left no space for human agency or for the types of interpretive conflicts and struggles for resources characteristic of the decolonial period (Cooper, 2005: 117). For philosophers like Innocent Onyewuenyi, in terms that prefigure more contemporary decolonial theoretical and Afrocentric modes of argumentation, the descriptive veneer of modernization theory belied a technocratic, neo-colonial orientation that wrenched Africans ‘from our philosophy, from the nature of beings as we understand them…from our view of the world’ (Onyewuenyi, 1991: 45).

This critical stance towards modernization among scholars of Africa made them similarly sceptical of the emergence of the ‘modernity fad’ (Cooper, 2005) in the 1980s and the 1990s. It seems also to have provoked some suspicions of the idea of ‘multiple modernities’, as developed by Eisenstadt, a perception undoubtedly coloured by Eisenstadt’s association with the earlier discourse of modernization and its major figures. Cooper, for instance, refers to Eisenstadt as a ‘veteran modernisation theorist’, who may have rejected the notion of convergence on a singular West-defined model but nevertheless retains in his theory of multiple modernities ‘the notion of connected socio-cultural traits moving from tradition to modernities’ (Cooper, 2005: 127). This image of Eisenstadt, as an arch-modernization theorist wedded to its basic overall tenets despite alluding to the more ‘culturalist’ and pluralist framework of multiple modernities, has also characterized his reception in a nascent postcolonial sociology. Gurminder Bhambra (2007; 2014), for instance, argues that Eisenstadt’s acknowledgement of forms of cultural difference proceeds without impacting on the assumption of the European origins of modernity itself, and thus smuggles in a form of Eurocentrism while claiming to disavow it. Furthermore, it is argued that the multiple modernities framework obfuscates the constitutive role of colonial-imperial domination, violence and appropriation in the formation of European modernity, referring instead to the more neutral descriptors of Western ‘diffusion’ or ‘expansion’.

While some of these criticisms certainly correspond to omissions and shortcomings within the multiple modernities paradigm, they are too hastily based on a mischaracterization of Eisenstadt’s contributions to modernization discourses. From at least the mid-1960s, parallel to the scholars of African Studies, Eisenstadt was himself engaging in the ‘far-reaching reformulation of the vision of modernization’ (Eisenstadt, 1987: 6) that culminated in the early 2000s in a cultural and historical sociology of modernities in the plural. Eisenstadt always occupied a ‘heterodox’ position in modernization theory, highly attuned to the instability and multidirectional tendencies of the modernization processes (Alexander, 1992: 86; Spohn, 2011). He admits that this position emerged partly from his biographical experience as a Jew born in Poland, who moved to Israel in the turbulent 1930s and came of age in the new state which was ridden with problems of integration and conflict (Eisenstadt, 1998: 38–9). He was also keenly aware of how appeals to sweeping theoretical categories could run roughshod over important regional specificities. As early as 1949, he noted that, ‘there is no theoretical distinction between sociology and social anthropology’ (Eisenstadt, 1949: 121) problematizing the purported division of labour between sociologists of ‘modern’ societies and anthropologists of ‘traditional’ societies (Touraine, 1989: 5).

As quickly becomes apparent in considering his earlier, less-cited contributions to sociological theory, Eisenstadt was a sharp critical commentator on modernization discourse and its intricacies. He was aware of its shortcomings and blind spots, as well as the challenges posed by emerging theoretical programmes such as world-systems and dependency theories (Eisenstadt, 1973: 98–112; 1974). Subsequently, much contemporary critique of the paradigm of multiple modernities that charges it with more subtle formulations of the same underlying assumptions of modernization theory are in fact anticipated in his heterodox modernization theory of the 1960s, and especially in his turn towards the theme of ‘post-traditionality’ in the 1970s, prior to his increasing focus on Axial Age civilizations in the 1980s (Eisenstadt, 1980; 1982). In the ‘Axial turn’ towards the Ancient Eurasian civilizations of Israel, Greece, Christian Europe, Zoroastrian Iran, early Imperial China and in the Hindu and Buddhist civilizations, and Islam broadly occurrent in the 1980s, it is arguably the case that Eisenstadt neglects these earlier critical elements that come from closer attention to the analysis of African societies and of the Global South in general (Boy and Torpey, 2013: 248; Delanty and Mota, 2015).

For the earlier Eisenstadt, Sub-Saharan African societies in the aftermath of decolonization stood as primary counter-cases to those developmentalist discourses that smoothed over the unevenness of modernization, its potential for breakdowns, and its multiplicity of institutional expressions (Eisenstadt, 1964; 1965; Tiryakian, 2011: 245). The establishment of new states and political structures in African societies, he argued, had to be conceived ‘as an attempt at modernity, at the establishment of a new modern order, of new modern societies, which were to take their proper place among other modern societies’ (Eisenstadt, 1965: 455). What is more, this heterodox formulation of modernization was explicitly and critically counter-posed with the ‘Europocentrism’ (Eisenstadt, 1974: 238) or ‘Western-centricity’ (Eisenstadt, 1965: 458) of the more mainstream tenets of modernization theory, presaging the more contemporarily familiar term ‘Eurocentrism’ stemming from the work of macro-sociological, Marxist-influenced theorists like Samir Amin (Amin, 1988).

He argues that the principal factor in the downfall of modernization theory from the late 1960s onwards was the assumption that societies in all corners of the world would become more and more similar in orientation and in institutional arrangements to the industrial societies of the West as it expanded. Instead, in terms strikingly continuous with the opening lines of his programmatic essay on multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000), he argued that it was rather the case that the ‘very profound changes’ that the expansion has given rise to have ‘taken a great variety of forms, which may seem to be entirely different from what has happened in Europe, or from what Europe thought it was bringing to the world through this expansion’ (Eisenstadt, 1978: 167). The ‘Western-centric’ view of unilinear development and convergence assumed that the economic sphere was the primary motor of historical change and that socio-cultural factors are of secondary or epiphenomenal importance in the processes of modernization (Eisenstadt, 1965: 456; 1978: 169), an assumption that generated an overwhelming concern with the conditions of possibility of economic growth at the expense of its social and political consequences.

The orthodox view of modernization also implied that the continuity of the modernization process would be stable following the initial ‘take-off’, and this in turn was undermined by an abundance of empirical instances of the emergence of pathologies resulting from ‘implanting’ political institutions in the first stages of independence, and political and economic crises following formal decolonization (Eisenstadt, 1965: 457). Against easy appeals to the ‘reversion’ or ‘reversal’ of modernization processes into ethno-tribal antagonism or traditionalism, Eisenstadt instead concerned himself with breakdowns and crises of modernization that tended towards the generation of novel institutional arrangements. Breakdowns and crises, he argued, ‘did not necessarily lead up to the total collapse of these new regimes or to their return to some traditional social and political form’ but they rather tended ‘to coalesce together into some new forms of viable ongoing social and political systems’ (1965: 459; emphasis added). Argentina, Burma and Indonesia, in addition to examples from Sub-Saharan Africa, such as what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, are all cited as examples of such crises and breakdowns (Eisenstadt, 1964; 1965; 1973: 34). Furthermore, he rejected the idea that ‘the different institutional spheres – be they economic, political or in the field of social organization – are closely interrelated, so that they tend necessarily to go together and to coalesce in relatively similar patterns’ (Eisenstadt, 1965: 457). Modernization processes in these spheres following sharply different trajectories give rise to a wide variety of instantiations of modern society:

such new polities and societies certainly differ in many ways from the ‘older’ (Western) modern ones nor do they necessarily develop in the direction of these ‘older’ societies, and yet they by no means remain any longer simply traditional societies. (1965: 459)

A familiar shortcoming of the ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm is that it affords too much emphasis to endogeneity while neglecting the global setting, where world regions and even nation-states are essentially conceived as ‘cultural containers that are coherent and bounded and reproduce themselves over time’ and form their own distinct modernities separate from those of others (Wagner, 2009: 254; see also Dirlik, 2003). It is interesting, then, that in his writing on modernization in African societies, Eisenstadt attributes a great significance to the international setting for crystallizations of modern configurations. Modernization processes, he held, cannot simply be reduced to endogenous forces and conditions. He refers to the international situation of the 1960s, referring to the ‘growing drawing together of almost all regimes of the world into one common international setting’ under the growing shadow of the Cold War; here, due attention was given to how ‘the competition between the great powers for influence in the major areas of the world on the one hand, and the ideological legitimation for any “independent” regimes on the other hand’ (1965: 459) was inevitably shaping the institutional arrangement of newly independent nation-state societies.

His attentivity to the international setting of modernization also encompasses the constraints imposed on programmes of modernization by specific experiences of colonial imperialism. The most characteristic feature of modernization in colonial and ex-colonial societies was that it was ‘unbalanced, especially in the relations of the processes of change and transition between the “central” and the local level’ (1965: 460). The extent of change was controlled and limited by the colonial powers, not by some deficiency or lack within the inherited socio-cultural make-up of the modernizing peoples themselves. This differed, he adds, depending on the form of colonial rule, whether direct or indirect. In indirect rule colonies, in ways that evoke the more contemporary reflections of Africanist scholars like Mahmood Mamdani (1996) or Olúf̣mi Táíwò (2010), he argued that

the ‘modern’ European colonial regimes stifled the possible development of forces inherent in the traditional setting which might have facilitated an autonomous transition to some modernity, which might or might not have been similar to the ‘Western’ nation-state or revolutionary class-society. (Eisenstadt, 1974: 247)

This was evident especially among the first generation of elite figures to govern African independent nations. In the decolonizing African societies of the 1960s, he identified in the programmes of this new generation of independence leaders ‘the search for those elements of the specific historical heritage which may best contribute to the crystallization of new, more flexible, specifically African symbols of modernity’ (Eisenstadt, 1965: 465); the attempt to fuse the horizons of socio-cultural tradition with what Eisenstadt would later term a modern cultural and political programme. We are evidently a long way here from ‘orthodox’ modernization theory, from the assumption that ‘traditional’ forms of association and symbolization would inevitably make way for the Western model of the modern institutional arrangement.

Culture, tradition and interpretive agency: multiple modernities and African societies

In several important senses, as intimated, the above prefigures central pillars of the multiple modernities paradigm. This paradigm was introduced in programmatic terms as allowing for an understanding of the contemporary world as:

A story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programmes. These ongoing reconstructions of multiple institutional and ideological patterns are carried forward by specific social actors in close connection with social, political, and intellectual activists, and also by social movements pursuing different programmes of modernity, holding very different views on what makes societies modern. Through the engagement of these actors with broader sectors of their respective societies, unique expressions of modernity are realized.

Though not explicitly foregrounded by Eisenstadt himself, the notion of multiple modernities is marked by a specific mode of cultural hermeneutics (Silber, 2011). Modernities are given form via a process of continual interpretation within specific socio-cultural and experiential horizons. Central to the multiple modernities paradigm therefore is the generative role that Eisenstadt afforded to culture and tradition (Eisenstadt, 1969: 453; 1973; Joas and Knöbl, 2009: 316). As outlined above, from a very early stage, Eisenstadt explicitly argued against the counter-posing of a dynamic and open modernity, on the one hand, and a static, undifferentiated tradition, on the other. He was staunchly critical of the weak conception of ‘traditionality’ prevalent in some versions of modernization theory whereupon it was simply defined as something to be overcome, as ‘what had to be broken down in order to assure the continuous development of modern economic, political, and social forces’ (Eisenstadt, 1974: 229).

Tradition, he argued, constitutes instead ‘the reservoir of the most central social and cultural experiences prevalent in a society, as the most enduring element in the collective social and cultural construction of reality’ (Eisenstadt, 1972: 3). Tradition is not simply a stagnant cultural container but is an open-ended and expansive horizon with which differentiated and dynamic creative interpretations of the modern cultural and political programmes are fused, interpretations which inform a plurality of modern institutional arrangements. It is this conception of tradition that makes the Eisenstadtian œuvre much more complementary to the Africanist treatments of modernity than has hitherto been acknowledged. It is a rejection of the tendency to anthropomorphize modernity and ascribe to it an agential quality, to cast it in the role of a behemoth that flattens the obstacle of tradition that it encounters in its path. The characterization of modernity as that which melts the solids of Gemeinschaft bonds and the symbols and significations of historic heritage makes little room for how centuries of African precolonial historical experience – and the continual development of the reservoir of symbols and narrative that constitute ‘tradition’ – possess an effective history that continues to shape the present (Schoenbrun, 2006; Reid, 2011; Thomas, 2011: 733).

The idea of a ‘cultural programme’ of modernity is very close to the desire of Frederick Cooper, for example, to understand modernity as an organizing term for a cluster of ‘claim-making concepts’ encompassing the vocabularies of republicanism, justice, freedom, and fraternity that are instantiated in actual socio-political struggles. In Cooper, as in Eisenstadt, there is a welcome rejoinder to a tendency in some postcolonial and decolonial criticism of modernity – as in the neologism ‘coloniality/modernity’ – to place the West, or Europe, at the centre of the world, as an ‘abstracted symbol of imperial arrogance rather than a universal good, but still the reference point’ (Cooper, 1999: 3–4). Common to both Eisenstadt and Cooper is an approach that emphasizes the interpretive agency of human beings as a central component in the development of modernity, or modernities (see also Wagner, 2015: 7–8). This also aligns with the reflections on ‘Afromodernity’ in the recent work of the Comaroffs. Multiple modernities, they argue, are to be located in the ‘empirical fact’ of how the ‘many disadvantaged people across the world’ articulate ‘what they understand by the modern. And, to the degree that they can, to fashion their own versions of it, even as they live with its many constraints and contradictions’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 11). The historian Lynn Thomas suggests that more adequate conceptualizations of modernities arise from an examination of how African peoples ‘have used the term “modern” to make political claims and envision different futures’, particularly when this examination encompasses ‘locations that those theorists often deemed outside of the modern’ (Thomas, 2011: 734–7).

The dialogue with these thinkers nevertheless also necessitates the confrontation with a certain inattentiveness in Eisenstadt’s interpretive approach to material phenomena of power and inequality. A certain over-emphasis on the primacy of culture, especially emergent in the turn to Axial Age civilizations, ultimately diverts attention from, in Gregor McLellan’s words, ‘the overwhelming concentration of power and wealth in the consolidation of Western civilizational advantage’ (McLellan, 2000: 288). This of course concerns, in the first instance, the continuing institutional constraints posed at the level of the economic world-system, the realities of international relations, as well as the legacy of historical colonial connections (Dirlik, 2003; Bhambra, 2014). As the Comaroffs argue:

It is not that people in the Global South ‘lack modernity’. It is that many of them are deprived of the promise of modernization by the inherent propensity of capital to create edges and undersides in order to feed off them. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 11)

This shortcoming could be offset by a consideration of decolonizing and postcolonial societies as case studies for further studies of multiple modernities. The period of decolonization of African countries between the 1940s and the 1960s was characterized by what might be termed an ‘axial’ situation, a sense of possibility owing to crises in European politics, economies and self-defined moral authority following the Second World War and the flourishing of independence movements around the world. This period – ‘when alternative approaches for exiting colonial empire were still in play’ (Cooper, 2008: 169) – seems to be extremely ripe for the substantive analysis of ‘multiple modernities’. The disappointments of many of these possibilities, and the postcolonial crises of many African societies, would seem also to offer ample opportunities for critical reflection on the shortcomings of the paradigm itself. The capacity to institutionalize ‘modernities’, to ‘sustain distinctive social and economic policies’, was significantly impeded, particularly in the decade of the 1980s by ‘the constraints of world depression, the policies imposed by international financial institutions, external interventions and the consequent increase in domestic political tensions’ (Cooper, 2008: 169).

There is also a sense in which the earlier recognition of the variability of colonial-imperial organization and governmentality is neglected in the multiple modernities paradigm. Eisenstadt, in his late-career work on multiple modernities, does retain his earlier conviction that the variability and plurality of modern institutional arrangements and modern imaginary interpretations ought not to be attributed to endogenous, largely cultural factors alone. Rather, they are attributable to the worldwide, ‘continual expansion of modernity’ which always tended towards the creation of both ‘very intensive dislocations while at the same time opening up new options and possibilities’ (Eisenstadt, 2006: 150). Colonial-imperialist domination constituted a fundamental component of the expansion of modernity and this generated

continual confrontations between the hegemonic forces within these systems, and different non-hegemonic societies. The consciousness of the colonial experience, of being colonised, constituted continuous components in the constitution of collective consciousness and political activities in most sectors of these [colonized] societies be it during the period of imperial and colonial dominance or in the postcolonial era. (Eisenstadt, 2006: 151)

Also valuable from the work of area studies specialists is their keen eye for the specific configurations of the ‘colonial situation’ (Balandier, 1966 [1951]) and how these form important institutional foundations and interpretive horizons of distinct varieties of modernity. In their studies of the Tswana of Southern Africa, Jean and John Comaroff (1991; 1997) emphasize the ‘hybridizing’ dimensions of the colonial situation, how the colonial situation ‘provokes struggles – albeit tragically uneven ones – over power and meaning on the frontiers of empire’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991: 4). The Tswana frequently interpreted European logics and objects in creative terms that escaped the intentions of missionaries, highlighting the indeterminacies of colonial modernity and the openness of cultural programmes (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991: 17). They also argued that ritual, far from being a pre-modern vestige, constitutes a site and means through which multiple interpretations of modernity are promulgated and instantiated (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993).

Also emphasized is the ‘conjunctural’ element of the colonial situation, that the colonial situation involves a contingent, albeit highly uneven, encounter between various actors and motivations. Crucial in the development of a Southern African engagement with modernity that they studied were non-conformist Protestant evangelists, who in this instance were ‘the most active cultural agents of empire, being driven by the explicit aim of reconstructing the “native” world in the name of God and European civilisation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991: 6). The decolonial situation in Rwanda, furthermore, was made distinctive by the presence of an emerging ‘Hutu’ nationalism and a post-war generation of Catholic missionaries who, oriented by a social Catholicism informed by their own traumatic wartime experiences of occupation and conflict, stoked the coals of ethnic conflict (Carney, 2012). An important critical point arises here: homogenizing conceptions of colonial imperialism, be they in the form of normative postcolonial-theoretical rhetoric or in the neutralizing and euphemistic depictions of ‘diffusion’ in multiple modernities theorizing, neglect the important tensions between the diversity of colonial actors – administrators, explorers, metropolitan officials, missionaries, traders, and so on, as well as divergences in their motivations (Táíwò, 2010: 12; Steinmetz, 2014).

There is, however, a great deal of cross-over between Eisenstadtian reflections on the effective history of ‘cultural programmes’ and Africanist debates on the relationship between modernity and tradition. This debate has been a central theme in African philosophy in the postcolonial period, foundational to the normative projects of ‘cultural revivalism’ by such figures as Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu to the more critical appraisals of African ‘ethnophilosophical’ modes of thought from the likes of Paulin Hountondji (Wiredu, 1995; Hountondji, 1996; Gyekye, 1997; Ciaffa, 2008). To these essentially normative debates about the role and status of tradition in African postcolonial societal development, Eisenstadt provides a sociological and analytical concreteness. For Eisenstadt-inspired analyses of multiple modernities in decolonizing and postcolonial African contexts, it is not that African societies should reject corrupted socio-cultural traditions or resurrect them in projects of ‘cultural revivalism’ but instead that they have or, or attempted to, interpret the cultural programme of modernity in a fusion with the horizons of socio-cultural tradition.

Here, one might turn to the interpretations promulgated by post-independence leaders like Jomo Kenyatta who, in his ‘order and progress’ motto, evinced ‘an attempt to selectively control social change and preserve a sense of continuity, order, and authority against the turbulent commotion of colonialism’ (Berman, 2006: 8). We might also consider the adumbration of a specifically African socialism in the writings of independence leaders such as Julius Nyerere (1968) and Leopold Senghor (1964), whereby the tenets of socialism would be fused with African practices and logics of communalism. It would also provide a window onto the kinds of conflicts of interpretation that marked various competing programmes for independence in decolonizing countries. In both Burundi and Rwanda, for instance, multiple modernities in competing and conflicting terms were present in one societal setting which, owing to the racialization of the social and political institutions under indirect colonial rule, lent themselves to the sharpening of ethnic divisions (Palmer, 2018: Chapter 5).

This example, incidentally, raises some critical questions of Eisenstadt’s rather neutral definition and deployment of tradition. Far from steamrolling ‘traditional’ African societies, the administration and the form of indirect rule more often romanticized its precolonial social evolution, animated by a colonial-anthropological framework that fetishized and racialized tradition. What is at stake here, it could be argued, is how the outlining of the ‘cultural programmes’ of African societies formed part of the logic of colonial-imperial rule itself (Mudimbe, 1988; Ranger, 1983). To use the felicitous phrase of Georges Balandier, the traditions and historical experience of precolonial societies were ‘worked out as a function of a foreign presence’ (Balandier, 1970: 23). A similar challenge is represented in Olúf̣mi Táíwò’s (2010) study of how modernity was ‘pre-empted’ in the experience of nineteenth-century indirect colonial rule in West Africa. The original embrace of the cultural programme of modernity that accompanied missionaries was forestalled by the formal establishment of colonial rule and the establishment of a specific governmental logic of ‘socio-cryonics’. Here, ‘African progress was arrested in the name of preserving (the cryonic moment) what they, the rulers, decided was the African way of being human’ (Táíwò, 2010: 11).

Colonial administrators in Ruanda-Urundi, for instance, spoke of ‘allowing black humanity, in one of its most interesting parts, to evolve according to its own nature after the traditions of its own resources by making efforts to reach its originality and its particular soul’ (in Gahama, 2001: 41). According to a resident in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in 1938, the aim of indirect rule was to act as ‘a safeguard of traditions and a brake upon their evolution’, as ‘a melting pot in which past and present tendencies [would] coalesce’, and as ‘the means whereby a progressive and progressist, yet slow and smooth, assimilation could be achieved’ (in Lemarchand, 1970: 75–6). Tradition, contra Eisenstadt, is not simply a value-neutral repository for distinct interpretations of modernity that can be drawn upon by ‘society’ tout court. In colonial Rwanda, it was in the interest of various entangled institutions of power – the colonial state, the Rwandan court or Nyiginya and the Church – to maintain and safeguard the idea of a ‘traditional’, monarchical Rwanda. Fatefully, a deep antipathy towards the precolonial and colonial ‘monarchical state’, and fears about the downfall of the Rwandan republic established in 1962 at the behest of a Tutsi ‘invasion’ and its ‘fifth column’ inside Rwanda, are very clearly adumbrated in the hate media of the 1994 genocide (Newbury and Newbury, 2000: 848; Mamdani, 2001; Des Forges, 2011; Carney, 2012). More broadly, in cases such as Mobutu’s Zaire, cultural revivalism has also served as an ideological foil for authoritarian governments in the postcolonial period (Hountondji, 1996: 170).

Such examples are also ripe for the development of scholarship on an unduly neglected contribution of Eisenstadt’s late career work on multiple modernities, namely, his repeated reflections on mass violence and warnings about the potential for a ‘specifically modern barbarism’ in modernity (Eisenstadt, 1996; 1999; 2000: 25; 2005a; 2005b; 2006: 155; for a rare consideration of Eisenstadt in these terms, see Alexander, 2013: Chapter 3). He was particularly concerned with the sanctification and ideologization of violence, terror and war. Reflecting on the final decade of the twentieth century, from the vantage point of the twenty-first, Eisenstadt saw this tension most vividly in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, in the former republics of the Soviet Union, and in such aforementioned African countries as Rwanda and Burundi. Ethnic conflicts and genocide in these countries should not be thought of as outside of the modern but are themselves the clearest expressions of the ‘traumas of modernity’, a violent consequence of ‘the ongoing dialogue between modern reconstruction and seemingly “traditional” forces’ (Eisenstadt, 2000: 25–6).

The power of this claim, however, is limited by certain omissions within the multiple modernities paradigm that derive from a lack of sustained engagement with specifically African modernities. The colonization of the cultural programme of the colonized upon which autonomous interpretations of modernity are etched, that have been briefly adumbrated above, accounts for the fact that these conflicts are caused by ‘seemingly’ traditional forces. Furthermore, a significant factor of their occurrence is that ‘modern reconstruction’ entailed being entangled in relations of global constraint whereby such autonomous interpretations could not be institutionalized, leading to disappointment, resentment and to humiliation. Both of these points might be effectively addressed in the course of a dialogue with African Studies, via the extension of the framework to African cases and alongside the retrieval of aspects of Eisenstadt’s work in its pre-multiple modernities phase where he engaged with African societies most explicitly.

Conclusion

Eisenstadt’s signal work on the effective history of socio-cultural tradition in programmes of societal modernity speaks very well to debates in postcolonial African philosophy about the role and status of tradition. At the same time, certain discussions have the potential to speak to a lacuna in the multiple modernities framework – how in the practice of indirect rule in African colonies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tradition was itself mobilized as a function of colonial rule and, in the postcolonial period, often under the aegis of anti-colonialism, has been deployed ideologically in the pursuit of repressive domestic policies. Eisenstadt’s framework also converges in important ways with Africanist engagements with the problem of ‘agency’ and meaning-making as central to interpretations and institutionalizations of modernity, both of which run counter to tendencies to anthropomorphize ‘colonial modernity’ as a homogeneous behemoth that runs roughshod over the lives of those on which it is imposed.

What emerges from this dialogue, however, is a sense in which the multiple modernities framework is presently lacking in an appreciation of the significance of colonial and postcolonial histories in Africa in which there developed a rich plurality of interpretations of modernity. Furthermore, this points to a further problem related to the problem of the capacity to institute interpretations of modernity. The problems of power, in general, and the disappointments of the postcolonial period, are what Africanist historians and anthropologists enable us to understand effectively. In some ways, these reflections on African modernity that emerge from substantive area studies and from a hermeneutic dialogue with historical modes of philosophizing in African knowledge creation are more productive partners in the dialogic task of developing more globally inclusive and spatio-temporally sensitive social-scientific frameworks than purely denunciatory or deconstructive elements of postcolonial and decolonial criticism. Such a dialogue would make a contribution to the development of a genuinely ‘global sociology’ predicated on the integration of social theory and regional studies and motivated by the desire to ‘retrieve, modify and extend basic concepts of Eurocentric social theory in the light of distinctive historical experiences of other world regions’ (Arjomand, 2014: 3).