ABSTRACT The paper discusses four 'western 'models of history and social change, namely progress, rupture, time-series, and palette. It is argued that none of the four models provides conceptual tools for analysing the historical process as both continuity and change. Increasing the number of analytical components does likewise not provide better results. Instead what is needed is an analytical instrument that captures the complexity of novel constellations of 'old' and 'new' components, beyond simple admixtures.

Hegemonic ('western') imageries of large-scale social change can be subsumed under four basic types: we shall call them (1) progress, (2) rupture, (3) time series, and (4) palette. (Figure 1 displays them in an iconic form.)

The notion of progress launches the simple metaphor of quantitative change (growth and/ or betterment). It implies ceaseless, infinitely gradual, monotonic change with the definite and known direction of the unfolding in actuality of hitherto potential, endogenous features of social development. In this thinking, today is fully comparable to yesterday, and the substantive result of the comparison is constant: in its extreme form, every day offers something more, higher, better than, superior to, its respective yesterdays.[2] The Enlightenment is a rich storehouse of illustrations to this 'optimistic' (or, for its critics, 'pessimistic') view of human history, echoed in Weber's parallel notions of rationalization and bureaucratization, the gradual maturation of the division of labour and the conscience collect if from mechanical to organic solidarity in Durkheim (e.g. Heller, 1987; Burke, 1992), the historical crescendos of the increasing organic composition of capital, the falling rate of profit, the preordained victory of human society over nature, or the unfolding of the endogenous, dialectical contradictions of capitalism only to achieve their climax in the fateful transition to communism in Marx.

In his theory of the transcendence of capitalism--simultaneously dogmatized and violated in the official practices of the Soviet imperial centre--Marx elevated the notion of progress to the global level so that, in it, we find, according to Johann Arnason,

a particularly ambitious and influential interpretative synthesis of the three dimensions of the globalizing process: the development of the capitalist world economy is expected to lead to a political revolution on international scale, and the latter will be guided by a theoretical project (or, as we must in retrospect call it, an ideological construct) of universal validity. (Arnason, 1995, p. 40)

A class-oriented sociology-of-knowledge of the notion of progress is of little help: In this respect, Marxism blends with mainstream 'bourgeoise' theorizing (or, with what Max Scheler called in 1910, 'the childish liberal belief in progress' (1962 [1910], p. 57) perfectly. Again in the words of Arnason,

[T]he idea of progress constitutes the core of the cultural model shared by the two main social forces of industrial capitalism (the bourgeoisie in its entrepreneurial capacity and the workers as a contestatory class): the globalized notion of progress, represented on the oppositional side by Marxist internationalism, was a particularly emphatic--and particularly vulnerable--variation on this theme. (...) [T]he revived utopia of global mutation (most dearly articulated in Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution) provided the imaginary focus for a strategy whose broader implications and unintended consequences were unclear to the main actors. (Arnason, 1995, pp. 40-41)

Progress taken to its logical and historical, global and political conclusion leaps, thus, into the next model of historical change, rupture--the model which absolutizes the metaphor of qualitative change. It sees today as so radically different from yesterday, or tomorrow from today, that the two are not comparable except to demonstrate their difference and the known inherent qualities of the new state resulting from the transition thus capturing the direction of change. The German tradition of theorizing a shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft exemplifies this rupture mode of thinking as much as any theory of transitions between modes of production.[3] Much of nineteenth-century social theorizing-along with the many versions of its faithful contemporary offspring, modernization theory[4]--can be understood as a mixture of elements of progress and rupture. Marx's 'stages' theory of human history--an 'endogenous process not requiring determination from outside' (Laibman, 1984, p. 267), driven by class struggle and/or technological change (Katz, 1993, p. 364 and fn. 7, partly quoting Habermas, 1971)--is an epitome of the combination of progress with rupture where each subsequent stage represents a higher plateau, achieved through a quantum leap forward. (In Figure 1, this result is achieved by repeatedly multiplying progress by rupture.) The view of history as a succession of 'ages' is a convenient further example for such a 'stages' perspectives.[5]

The union of progress with rupture is made possible by their shared component, a vision of a known direction of human history: as quipped by Marx in a Darwinian moment, 'human anatomy' is indeed, for both models, the 'key to understanding the anatomy of the ape'. In progress, that move from 'ape to human' takes place through ceaseless, infinitely gradual change; in rupture, through instant mutation. We know this because our observation point is on a higher and/or better (or, as in this Darwino-Marxian metaphor, 'human') plateau (see, e.g. Godelier, 1987, pp. 453-454). That plateau--an idealized representation of the 'present'--thus serves as a matter-of-fact point of orientation used in determining the direction of social change by way of extrapolation.

Because this world view has been most clearly articulated in modernization ideologies, henceforth we shall call it modernizationism--a term we use in a specific, limited sense. As in Paul Hamilton's incisive formula,

(m)odernity itself is defined by the idea that we can break from the past by claiming to be the measure of all things and not vice versa, and that this subjectivity is not an embarrassment for science but the grounds of its possibility--an attitude shared by otherwise opposed modes of thinking from the Renaissance onward. (Hamilton, 1996, p.4)

Working with this notion of modernity, modernizationism refers here to the underlying vision that human history is one-dimensional and mono-directional so that all actually existing societies are in effect predestined to run a single historical course, the same trajectory as the experience of the 'advanced' societies. In other words, this denotation intentionally disregards other, more specific propositions of modernization theory, e.g., those concerning the primacy of cultural or ideological factors in development or the assumption of a fair competition among single-society actors. Among the perspectives we label as 'modernizationist' there are a number of disagreements concerning many such specific propositions. One implication of using such a relatively minimalist definition is that the boundary between its applications in the field of the social sciences and in politics blurs.[6]

It follows that the modernizationism isolated here, then, is not necessarily 'system-apologetic'. Despite its ardent opposition to both the prevailing structural order and the specific arguments advanced about the singular root cause of human misery--i.e. 'culture'--in modernization theories, much work on dependency and underdevelopment is also quite wrapped into this conceptual mantle (see Escobar, 1984, 1995; Manzo, 1991). To modernization theories, which invariably invoke 'culture' as the residual cause of underdevelopment, the dependency and underdevelopment literature opposes a remarkably numb world view in which in the place of culture one finds a black hole. That contrast, however, does not stop these two fractions of theory from being intimately related to each other as for their modernizationism--their underlying vision of the existence of a single human direction of history. This is particularly evident in the latter literature's implicit or explicit reliance on a stages model, its use of the reified language of the sequential pattern of the modes of production, and its interest in identifying historically specific west European and north American institutional phenomena--usually a combination of economic growth, high levels of capital accumulation and labour remuneration, egalitarian policies of distribution, a bourgeois-representative notion of democratic polity, a social-democratic welfare statelike emphasis on collective consumption, etc.--as objects of sorely missed development.

The time series model of social change preserves the assumption of unproblematic acrosstime comparability from progress while eliminating the component of the assumed single direction: here the explanandum is the outcome of the comparison. To be able to perform that operation, it is necessary to transform the--until now either perfectly uninterrupted ('progressive') or perfectly discontinuous ('ruptured')--historical time into a ratio measure of distance among disjunct 'events' by applying the quintessentially modernist notion of machine time (Thompson, 1967) to historical change.

The vast and very dignified literature on social mobility is a prime example for the time series image of social change. With its assumption of the quasi-market automatism of returns on metaphorical capital endowments, this approach focuses on comparisons across fixed time points. With its origins in econometrics, this methodology freezes the processuality of social change and reifies static states. That, in turn, makes it logically impossible to ask the question: which aspects of reality disappear, survive, and change, and how the remaining elements are rearranged and reinterpreted.[7]

Finally, we arrive at the extreme anti-historical notion of the post-modern palette. This state of flattened historicity can be reached from the above types by two alternative analytical operations: (1) either by taking the imagery of time series and removing the assumption of the irreversibility of monotonically successive 'events', or, (2) by radically generalizing rupture's principle of qualitative difference, in effect glorifying and celebrating an extreme notion of incomparability sometimes assumed, sometimes spelled out, as 'differance' In so doing, the postmodern palette lends great conceptual flexibility to its practitioners (i.e. it in fact explicitly allows for, and even promotes, time travel by deconstructing the constraining notion of vector time, machine or otherwise). The achievement of that remarkable freedom comes, however, at the cost of being forced to deny any kind of systematicity, or connection, among the events to which it refers and, so, by removing any basis for knowledge of society, idiographic and nomothetic alike. Table 1 summarizes the theoretical positions of the above four views of social change.[8] They are arranged along the dual axes of 'direction' and 'comparability'. (Modernizationism denotes those theories in the column marked as 'direction: yes'.)

Three of the four basic models of social change described so far--rupture, time series and palette--expressly disregard elements of continuity by focusing exclusively on the moment of change. Progress, meanwhile, does offer a notion of continuity, but that is of an extremely restricted nature. It projects a constant rate of change in a prophesied direction. Continuity has still no place in this imagery. So, in this simple form, none of these models provides conceptual tools for analysing the historical process as continuity and change. There is an acute need for an analytical instrument to serve as a properly historical comparative approach to social change, i.e. one that is neither ahistorical (in the sense of ignoring continuity) nor over-historicized (in the sense of absolutizing or over-emphasizing the significance of constancy).

A 'revisionist' modernizationist response to this insistence would be to argue that continuity can be accounted for by adding a constant to one of the basic modernizationist models.[9] Using their sum (change plus a constant) could serve as the basic analytical structure of such an exercise. This would represent a significant departure from the simple original model of progress, rupture, or stages (progress-by-rupture): henceforth the subject matter of analysis in historical-comparative sociology could be reformulated to produce the more complex analytical instruments of progress-and-constant, rupture-and-constant, or stages-and-constant.[10]

As Figure 2 portrays it visually, this procedure would result in allowing the discussion of perfectly uninterrupted social change in contrast to a perfectly constant, hypothetical state of affairs. It would allow the discovery and isolation of elements of constancy in the new status quo after ruptured social change--as in any standard modernizationist analysis of late-modernized societies in terms of 'modern' and 'traditional' sectors. It would, finally, explicitly provide for an understanding of the 'higher-level' social formations as carrying the sediment of preceding historical epochs--as exemplified in the 'articulation of the modes of production' position in the Brenner-Wallerstein debate.

The main shortcoming of this addition is that the simple admixture of supposedly qualitatively distinct elements does not allow the reinterpretation of each in light of the new constellation; the addition of a constant in itself fails to provide tools to understanding how the remaining elements can and do attain new significance by virtue of being placed in new contexts. Thus, the coherence of the described social reality becomes problematic. This tension cannot be resolved unless via the introduction of a new distinction between 'coherent' and 'incoherent' states (as for instance in the contrast between articulated and non-articulated modalities of growth in the political economy and economic sociology of [under]development)--which of course takes the analysis back to a modernizationist square one.

More troubling yet, the addition of a constant to one, or to a combination of both, of the basic modernizationist models of change preserves the most problematic aspect of modernizationism, the presumption of a set, and known, underlying direction of change. From that presumption follow a number of logical corollaries when that analysis is applied to social experiences outside the confines of the few ('western') societies from whose history the imagery of modernization has been deduced by way of abstraction via idealization.

The question is, of course, what if the history of the 'advanced' countries does not show 'to the less developed, the image of its own future' (as the Marx of Das Kapitalis quoted so instructively in an encyclopaedic entry on modernization by Daniel Lerner (1968))? What if there is no direction to human history? Or, what if there is a direction but it is not knowable?

Short of a completely external point of observation on all of human history, the question of whether or not there is an ultimate direction to history is of course impossible to answer empirically. There are two alternatives to proceed from this realization.

1. It is possible to assume that that condition will hold. That is indeed the path many social scientific analyses have, wittingly or unwittingly, taken. Despite the degree of elaboration of some speculative assertions concerning the purportedly 'obvious' validity of such assumptions (e.g. Tiryakian, 1991; Alexander, 1995), such statements remain assumptions. The post-state-socialist political 'transitions' are readily invoked as cases to obviate any possible objection:

Contemporary social theory must be much more sensitive to the apparent reconvergence of the world's regimes and that, as a result, we must try to incorporate some broad sense of the universal and shared elements of development (...) (Alexander, 1995, pp. 65-66). This is presented, then, as no less than a reaffirmation of a deeply anti-historicist, structural-functionalist voluntarism: It is thus seen as no less than 'a triumph on the level of the historical imagination itself' (Alexander, 1995, p. 85). That the substitution of an assumption for evidence renders such attempts circulus vitiosus is revealed the moment the analysis moves beyond a simple binary contrast of social formations. A more precise comparative-historical investigation of institutional processes requires the relaxation of the constraining assumption of the 'historic triumph' of 'western' 'representative-democratic' and/or 'market-based' modernity in favour of a sensitive understanding and repeated reappraisal of the many alternative social forms emerging under complex historical conjunctures.

2. It is thus possible to admit ignorance regarding that profound question of the philosophy of history. It follows logically from the second, agnosticist, path that there is no a priori reason to create a mono-dimensional hierarchy of social experiences in comparative terms. Unless the analyst is ready to take an extremely outdated position in proclaiming the complete isolation of individual 'nation-states' or empires from each other--an assumption effectively destroyed by the last several decades' criticisms, launched from a world-systems or globalization perspective, of the widespread reification of the 'nation-state' as the canonical unit of macro-comparative analysis, a frequent concomitant of evolutionism (see, e.g. Granovetter, 1979)--the theoretical significance of all historical and contemporary experience is of equal ontological status and ought to be followed through with equally keen theoretical interest.

At the risk of sounding obvious, it is perhaps useful to spell out here that the eighteenth-century Caribbean plantation experience provides, thus, no less useful or accurate an insight into the workings of capitalism than the dynamics of the New York Stock Exchange today. British social history ought not to be privileged as to its relative significance as a source of clues regarding the nature of modernity than the social history of the Berber people of northern Africa or the nineteenth-century social history of the Ottoman Empire. Understanding the public and private mentality of various segments of Hungarian or Romanian society today may thus provide as crucial a hint regarding the workings of the public sphere as its German or French equivalent.

It follows that, despite his heroic attachment to the modernizationist perspective-which is rather opposed here-we find ourselves in emphatic agreement with the way the great central European sociologist, Peter L. Berger states the obvious in outlining the pressing tasks before our discipline in arguing that [w]hat is called for is a sociology in the classical vein, grounded in a knowledge of history, methodologically flexible, and imbued with a cosmopolitan spirit endlessly curious about every manifestation of human life (Berger, 1992, p. 14).

Indeed, the argument outlined so far implores that '[p]arochialism in sociology is much more than a cultural deficiency; it is the source of crippling failures of perception' (Berger, 1992, p.17).

Increasing the number of analytical components through the mechanical addition of a constant to the basic modernizationist models does not tackle the challenge of understanding social reality by comparisons across social time and space. The task of apprehending social change in its complexity requires an analytical instrument that captures the complexities of novel constellations of 'old' and 'new' components, beyond simple admixtures. A model that can perform that service should be able to account for synchronic, acrosscase variation by placing 'old' and 'new' elements in their proper context via historical contingencies. This requires a mode of thinking about social change that satisfies two conditions: (1) it does not adhere to a mechanistic assumption of a single direction to human history (as does the modernizationist thinking of progress, rupture and its various combinations); and (2) it does not overlook the complexities of historical experience as encapsulated in emergent patterns (as in the sanitized time series models or the self-inflicted blindness to any pattern in the palette mode of deconstruction).

Table 1. Axial features of 'western' models of social change



                            direction: yes         direction: no



comparability: yes           'progress'            'time series'



comparability: no             'rupture'              'palette'

DIAGRAM: Figure 1. 'Western' models of history (basic concepts and stages).

DIAGRAM: Figure 2. Modernizationist models of history after adding a constant (mechanical admixture).

Alexander, J. C. (1995), 'Modern, anti, post and neo', New Left Review, Vol. 210, pp. 63101.

Arnason, J. P. (1995), 'The Soviet model as a mode of globalization', Thesis Eleven, Vol. 41, pp. 36-53.

Berger, P. L. (1992), 'Sociology: a disinvitation?' Society, Vol. 12, No. 8.

Burke, P. (1992), History and Social Theory, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.

Chirot, D. (1990-91), 'What happened in eastern Europe in 19897' Praxis International, Vol. 10, pp. 278-305.

Eisenstadt, S. N. (1974), 'Studies of modernization and sociological theory', History and Theory, Vol. 13, pp. 225-252.

Escobar, A. (1984), 'Discourse and power in development: Michael Foucault and the relevancy of his work to the third world', Alternatives, 10, pp. 377-400.

Escobar, A. (1995), Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Godelier, M. (1987), 'Introduction: the analysis of transition processes', International Social Science Journal, Vol. 39, pp. 447-458.

Granovetter, M. (1979), 'The idea of "advancement" in theories of evolution and development', American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 85, pp. 489-515.

Habermas, J. (1971), Knowledge and Human Interests, (translated by Jeremy Shapiro), Boston, Beacon Press.

Hamilton, P. (1996), Historicism, London, Routledge.

Heller, A. (1987), 'Sociology as the defetishization o f modernity', International Sociology, Vol. 2, pp. 391-401. Reprinted in Albrow, M. and King, E. (eds) (1990), Globalization, Knowledge and Society. Readings from International Sociology, London, Sage, pp. 19-33.

Hirschman, A. O. (1991), The Rhetoric of Reaction. Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.

Hobsawm, E. (1962), The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, New York and Toronto, New American Library.

Hobsbawm, E. (1975), The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hobsbawm, E. (1989 [1987]), The Age of Empire: 1875-1914, New York, Vantage Books.

Katz, C.J. (1993), 'Karl Marx on the transition from feudalism to capitalism', Theory and Society, Vol. 22, pp. 363-389.

Laibman, D. (1984), 'Modes of production and theories of transition', Science and Society, Vol. XLVIII, pp. 257-294.

Lerner, D. (1968), 'Modernization; social aspects', in Sills, D. L. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Volume 10, New York, Macmillan and The Free Press, pp. 386395.

Manzo, K. (1991), 'Modernist discourse and the crisis of development', Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 26, pp. 3-36.

Mazlish, B. (1989), A New Science. The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press.

Muller, K. (1992), '"Modernising" eastern Europe; theoretical problems and political dilemmas', Archives europeennes de sociologie, Vol. 33, pp. 109-150.

Scheler, M. (1962 [1910]), Ressentiment, (edited, with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser; translated by William W. Holdheim), New York, Schocken Books.

Sztompka, P. (1993), The Sociology of Social Change, Oxford and Cambridge, Blackwell.

Thompson, E. P. (1967), 'Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism', Past and Present, Vol. 3 8, pp. 56-97.

Tiryakian, E. (1991), 'Modernization: exhumetur in pace', International Sociology, Vol. 6, No. 2.

1. This article is part of the author's book project provisionally entitled Social Change by Fusion. Parts of an earlier version of this material have been presented at the Euroconference on Multiculturalism and Migration, London School of Economics, 1 September 1995. The preparation of this project was partly supported by grant No. T6739 received from OTKA (the National Science Research Fund of Hungary), various hidden and explicit subsidies by the Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Science, partial research travel expenses covered by the University of California, Irvine and Rutgers University, and conference travel support by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences in Vienna. The author is very grateful for useful conversation with, and comments on various, earlier versions by, first of all, his graduate students at Irvine who inspired its first version--Aneesh, Erica Bornstein, Eric Kaldor, Yoonies Park and Caleb Southworth--and his colleagues and friends Lanfranco Blanchetti-Revelli, Judit Bodnar, Andras Bozoki, Francesca Cancian, Wilfred Dolfsma, Kaveh Ehsani, Felicitas Hillmann, Susan Gal, Martha Lampland, Attila Melegh, Antal Orkeny, Akos Rona-Tas, Endre Sik, David A. Smith, Judith K. Treas, Miklos Voros, Anna Wessely, Robin M. Williams, and Susan Zimmermann.

2. Beyond the Stalinist dogma and the 1970s ideological emphasis on the 'scientific-technological revolution' this Weltanschauung was carved in the memory of central European audiences by a highly ironical motif of the Yugoslavian film Do You Remember the Dolly Bell? directed by Emir Kusturica: Its main character's recurrent self-encouragement went as follows: 'Every day, in every respect, I am making progress.'

3. Bruce Mazlish describes this as the 'break' mode of nineteenth-century social scientific explanation and presents much of the scientific thinking of the period--captured in a series of 'breaks'--as the 'chain' (Mazlish, 1989, especially pp. 30-37).

4. For a canonical version, see for instance Eisenstadt, 1974, p. 226.

5. See, e.g., Hobsbawm (1962, 1975, 1989). Chirot (1990-91) applies that vision in an explanation of the fall of state socialism (p. 281), referring to such modernizationist classics as Walt R. Rostow (fn. 7, p. 298).

6. On the political nature of modernizationism, see Miller, 1992.

7. For sake of a sense of completeness in this inventory of models of social change, a word is at order about imageries of economic cycles. They can be conceived as combinations of the three models outlined so far: growth takes place through rupture-like shifts in the direction of monotonic--positive or negative--progress occurring at machine-time intervals.

8. There is a certain affinity between this taxonomy and that presented by Piotr Sztompka (1993). The main differences are as follows: (1) Our typology breaks down the models of social change to two independent dimensions, using Sztompka's distinction between 'direction' and 'non-direction' (1993, p. 13) as one of those; (2) we account for rupture, time series and palette--all three of which Sztompka disregards or treats only implicitly as components of other types; (3) we treat stages and waves as a logical combination of elementary forms instead mixing them with elementary models as in Sztompka (pp. 13-17).

9. This would in effect involve an analytical strategy combining the two ideological strategies isolated so elegantly by Albert O. Hirschman as 'the "reactionary" futility thesis [positing] the natural-lawlike invariance of certain socioeconomic phenomena' (1991, p. 157) with its opposite number, 'the assertion of similarly law-like forward movement, motion, or progress' (Hirschman, 1991).

10. A constant cannot be added to the time-series or the palette mode because their lack of directionality disallows the contrast with historical continuity.

~~~~~~~~

By JOZSEF BOROCZ