Modernity, Modernism and Rousseau's Enlightenment Era

CHAPTER 1
The spirit of revolution, Berman says, causes modernity to be an inverse relationship between modernization and modernism. Modern life is deeply attracted to the prospect of development. In the 18 century European societies were set on the idea that mankind was set on a positive trajectory away from savagery and ignorance towards prosperity and civilization but another philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau violently disagreed and had very provocative things to say to our own times. A childhood marked by deep instability and isolation due to economic disparities, Jean- Jacques Rousseau went to Paris and began contemplating the subject of recent advances in art, trademark of the enlightenment movement, and whether they had contributed

Written from the left, it deserves the widest discussion and scrutiny on the Left. Such discussion must start by looking at Berman’s key terms ‘modernization’ and ‘modernism’, and then at the linkage between them through the two-headed notion of ‘development’. [3] If we do this, the first thing that must strike one is that while Berman has grasped with unequalled force of imagination one critical dimension of Marx’s vision of history in The Communist Manifesto, he omits or overlooks another dimension that is no less critical for Marx, and complementary to it. Capital accumulation, for Marx, and the ceaseless expansion of the commodity form through the market, is indeed a universal dissolvent of the old social world, and can legitimately be presented as a process of ‘constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and agitation’, in Marx’s words. Note the three adjectives: constant, uninterrupted, everlasting. They denote a homogeneous historical time, in which each moment is perpetually different from every other by virtue of being next, but—by the same token—is eternally the same as an interchangeable unit in a process of infinite recurrence. Extrapolated from the totality of Marx’s theory of capitalist development, this emphasis very quickly and easily yields the paradigm of modernization proper—an anti-Marxist theory, of course, politically. For our

The most obvious way in which this differential temporality enters into the very construction of Marx’s model of capitalism is, of course, at the level of the class order generated by it. By and large, it can be said that classes as such scarcely figure in Berman’s account at all. The one significant exception is a fine discussion of the extent to which the bourgeoisie has always failed to conform to the free-trade absolutism postulated by Marx in the Manifesto but this has few repercussions in the architecture of his book as a whole, in which there is very little between economy on the hand and psychology on the other, save for the culture of modernism that links the two. Society as such is effectively missing. But if we look at Marx’s account of that society, what we find is something very different from any process of planar development. Rather, the trajectory of the bourgeois order is curvilinear. It traces, not a straight line ploughing endlessly forward, or a circle expanding infinitely outwards, but a marked parabola. Bourgeois society knows an ascent, a stabilization and a descent. In the very passages which contain the most lyrical and unconditional affirmations of the unity of economic