Abstract
The chapter looks more closely at globally relevant cultural scripts of modernity and their appearances in the modern history of the Muslim world. These cultural scripts characterize the meso level of social reality such as epitomized in institutions, movements, and formal organizations. Formal organizations in particular build an important nexus between the outer poles of the macro and micro levels of modernity. I will introduce a number of conceptual tools from the Stanford school of sociological institutionalism. In a second step, this chapter briefly analyzes the processes of reform and decline in the Ottoman Empire in applying these conceptual lenses of the world cultural approach. This empirical excursion, then, leads to a theoretical contextualization of the concepts and assumptions of the Stanford school with respect to the other theories employed in my heuristic framework. The chapter ends with another empirical excursion, which applies my multilayered theoretical framework to the example of the historical construction of Islam as a modern religion.
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- 1.
The sultans farmed fiefs out to the upper strata of society, opening them for both official functionaries and local leaders. At the beginning, these tax farms were only granted for a brief term; however, later the state granted the tax farmer a life interest that turned into a heritable property (Lewis 1961, 446).
- 2.
The German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler coined the term defensive modernization in his study on the modernization of Germany. Wehler defined the term as a political strategy of the traditional elite of a country to adjust to outer constraints imposed by the dominant power of a revolutionary country, in the German case France. One purpose of this strategy is to safeguard the traditional order through reforms from above against revolution from below. Defensive modernization is the attempt to prevent major changes in the political, economic, and social power relations of a society by limited reforms (Wehler 1989, 345 and 532–533).
- 3.
It is not the place here for a detailed critique of the Stanford school’s reductionist interpretation of Weber’s theory of rationalization on which the school draws. In my opinion, the Stanford school confuses instrumental rationality with formal rationality. While the first implies a rationalization of social action according to a means-end calculation, formal rationality is, according to Weber, characterized by mere calculability, by the conviction that in principle social reality is based on entirely formal rules. The latter, however, include not only instrumental rationality, but also value rationality, the belief in the formal construction of legitimate norms and values that are oriented toward ethical, political, utilitaristic, or religious postulates (Weber 1920, 10). Instrumental rationality is therefore only a part of formal rationality, which, in Weber’s eyes, characterized the modern rationalization process. See also the discussion in Bogner (1989, 100ff.).
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In this argumentation, the Stanford school interprets modern systems theory through the lenses of Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism. This becomes clear in George Thomas’ dismissal of the idea to perceive functional differentiation as an “objective response to complexity” (Thomas 2011, 27). Yet Luhmann does not assume that functional differentiation is a natural or effective response to the complexity of modern society (Thomas 2011, 32). At least in his later work, since his “autopoietic turn,” Luhmann distanced himself from Parsons’ structural functionalism. Therefore, we can interpret Luhmann’s concept of world society in terms of a polytextual and emerging social structure. It is polytextual in terms of consisting of a multiplicity of subsystems that follow their autonomous communicative logics; and it is an emerging structure of sociocultural evolution that does not respond to the reproductive demands of a preestablished society as a whole. Evolutionary variations occur independently from selections and there is no causal link between variations and the conditions of historical selections (Kuchler 2003, 29). Functional differentiation is not the result of an effective division of labor, but function systems emerge through the operational closure of specific forms of communication. It is not efficiency but communicative connectivity on which the functional separation of social systems rests. In this sense, the primacy of functional differentiation in modernity is the accidental result of sociocultural evolution (Luhmann 1987; Schimank 2005, 51 and 54).
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- 6.
The history of the Islamic international movement has been described by Reinhard Schulze (1990). For more information on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, see www.oic.org.
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Jung, D. (2017). Modernization, Organization, and Global Cultural Scripts: The Meso Level of Modernity. In: Muslim History and Social Theory. The Modern Muslim World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52608-9_5
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