THE AMBIGUOUS MODERNISM OF SEYLA BENHABIB

NICHOLAS ONUF

Abstract: Seyla Benhabib has displayed a deeply normative concern for theorigin, properties, condition and destiny of the modern world in work runningfrom Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986), to Situating the Self (1992), TheReluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996), and Another Cosmopolitanism(2006). I hope to show that Benhabib’s view of modernity is ambiguous, andthat inconsistencies in her position reach back, through Habermas and Weber,to Kant. I begin with a sketch of Benhabib’s sense of what modernity is about,turn then to what I think makes her position ambiguous, and conclude with adiscussion of what I think is missing in her treatment of modernity. The gap Iidentify is strikingly pointed up when she uses the term modernism but does nottalk about modernism at all.

Keywords: Seyla Benhabib, differentiation, modernity, modernism, rationali-zation

Situating Seyla Benhabib

Seyla Benhabib has displayed a deeply normative concern for the origin,properties, condition and destiny of the modern world throughout her dazzlingcareer. The great thinkers who figure so importantly in her work – from Hegel tothe members of the Frankfurt School in Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986), fromKant to Arendt in Another Cosmopolitanism (2006) – drew her attention becausetheir concerns collectively shaped the moral legacy of the Enlightenment. Inthe process their contributions to moral and political theory have illuminatedand clarified her concern with the experience of modernity. Yet Benhabib’smost direct consideration of modernity is to be discovered in the time betweenher early work reformulating Habermas’s effort to ground ethics in a theory

Journal of International Political Theory, 5(2) 2009, 125–137DOI: 10.3366/E1755088209000378© Edinburgh University Press 2009

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of communicative action and her recent work on citizenship, multiculturalism,liberal democracy, cosmopolitan norms and the future of the nation-state.

Two books from the 1990s capture this moment in Benhabib’s career. Oneis her most frequently cited book, and her most forthright engagement withmodernity as such: Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernismin Contemporary Ethics (1992). The other is perhaps her least cited book, abook dedicated to another thinker’s puzzling engagement with modernity: TheReluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996, new edition, 2003).1 Togetherthese books provide Benhabib with a platform for her multiple, tightly linkedinterests at the intersection of moral, political and international theory.

Whether this platform is adequate for the load it carries is a question I addresshere. Playing as I do on a book title, I hope to show that Benhabib’s view ofmodernity is ambiguous. I believe that she has erected a position that sheltersher from an ambivalence about modernity that many of us feel. I would furthersuggest her lack of ambivalence may account for, but does not excuse, her lack ofconcern for ‘the kind of ontological universe in which cosmopolitan norms canbe said to exist’ and may undermine her efforts to show how cosmopolitan normsof justice ‘shape, guide and constrain our political life’ (Benhabib 2006: 26). Sheis, of course, distressed by modernity’s excesses and failings from a moral pointof view, and behind them ‘the metaphysical illusions of the Enlightenment’, butshe is convinced that modernity has within it the resources for its renovation(Benhabib1992: 1–6, quoting 4). The inconsistencies in her position run deeperthan this sort of ambivalence, and reach back, through Habermas and Weber, toKant.

I begin with a sketch of Benhabib’s sense of what modernity is about. I turnthen to what I think makes her position ambiguous. I conclude with a discussionof what I think is missing in her treatment of modernity. The gap I identify isstrikingly pointed up when she uses the term modernism but does not talk aboutmodernism at all.

I should emphasize that I do not address Behabib’s position on modernity withthe philosophical rigor and subtlety it surely deserves. I offer an impressionisticaccount because I lack the philosophical training to produce anything better.Nor have I searched for assessments by scholars more competent to judge thephilosophical issues than I am. Instead, I have asked myself why Benhabib’sposition on modernity seems to me, as a scholar in the field of InternationalRelations, to be inadequate as social theory. I should also emphasize that myown views are very close to Benhabib’s on many points, and I have come torecognize that what I find ambiguous in her standpoint is a source of ambivalencein myself. Indeed, if I had been astute enough to study her work when I firstbecame interested in modernity, I would have understood much sooner and muchbetter the challenge that the experience of modernity poses for social theory.2

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Modernity

Benhabib adopts Max Weber’s account ‘of the emergence of modernity inthe West as a process of “rationalization” and “disenchantment”‘ (1992: 68).Weber’s account is so influential there would seem to be no other place tostart. In the broadest possible terms, modernity took form in two phases, thefirst (disenchantment) culminating in the Enlightenment quest for universalprinciples grounded in reason and the second (rationalization) still transformingthe world though the systematic use of instrumental reason. Yet Benhabibhas another compelling reason for starting with Weber: this is also JürgenHabermas’s point of departure in his characterization of Reason and theRationalization of Society (1984, volume title). Given her view that Habermasinitiated ‘the broad philosophical shift from legislative to interactive reason’(Benhabib1992: 7), his brilliant reconstruction of Weber’s account facilitates herown effort to complete this shift (see generally Benhabib1986: ch. 7–8; 1992:ch. 1–2).

On Habermas’s account, the large question for Weber was whether the processof rationalization eventuating in Western modernity was an extraordinarydevelopment, to ‘be relativized as a special case of cultural development’, ormerely an exemplary development, ‘in which an essentially general phenomenoncould appear for the first time’ (Habermas 1984: 179, emphasis in translation;also see Benhabib 1992: 69). Acknowledging that Weber ‘adopted a highlyambivalent position’ on this large question, Habermas nevertheless concludedthat ‘a universalist position follows from Weber’s conceptual approach’(1984: 179). Even if Weber had ‘relativistic reservations’ (Habermas 1984: 180),Habermas had none. Nor does Benhabib.

Indeed, whether some values are defensibly universal or all values are relativeto standpoint is, according to Benhabib, the question dividing postmodern andmodern thinkers, including the many feminist thinkers who have come to ‘feelambivalent’ about modernity’s persistent metaphysical illusions (1992: 210).Benhabib does not share in this ambivalence. She believes instead that shehas worked out a position ‘that acknowledges the plurality of modes of beinghuman, and differences among humans, without endorsing all pluralities anddifferences as morally and politically valid’ (1992: 153). She calls this position‘interactive universalism’ (1992: 3, 6, 153, 164–5, 227–8) and locates it ‘withinthe hermeneutic horizon of modernity’ (1992: 227). Nevertheless, her interactiveuniversalism might be seen as a clever patch job, one that suffices to hide herambivalence from herself but not banish it from the minds of others such asmyself.

To identify the constituents of Benhabib’s position and to see if they canbe assembled to do the work she asks of them, we need return to Habermas’suniversalist construction of Weber’s position. ‘The universalist position does

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not have to deny the pluralism and the incompatibility of historical versionsof “civilized humanity”; but it regards this multiplicity of forms of life aslimited to cultural contents, and it asserts that every culture must share certainformal properties of the modern understanding of the world if it is at all toattain a certain degree of “conscious awareness” . . . ’ (Habermas 1984: 180,emphasis in translation). As modernity emerges, ‘conscious awareness’ revealsa ‘formal stock of universal structures of consciousness expressed in the culturalvalue spheres that develop, according to their own logics, under the abstractstandards of truth, normative rightness, and authenticity’ (Habermas 1984:180). Just three in number, these universal structures or value spheres giveform to ‘scientific thought, posttraditional legal and moral representations, andautonomous art’ (Habermas 1984: 180). No doubt ‘material values’ and their‘historical configuration’ are relative, but not ‘those abstract ideas that aredecisive for the inner logics of value spheres as such’ – ‘ideas such as truthand success in the cognitive sphere of value; justice, normative rightness ingeneral in the moral-practical sphere of value; beauty, authenticity, sincerity inthe expressive sphere of value’ (Habermas 1984: 183).

Weber recognized that value spheres appear to be ‘irrational’ in the sensethat they may develop unevenly and in ways that bring abstract valuesinto conflict (Habermas 1984: 183). In Habermas’s opinion, this is an‘empirical question’ and not the source of Weber’s ambivalence (1984: 183).Instead, the source is Weber’s failure to discriminate consistently betweenthe differentiation of value spheres and the rationalization of worldviews, on thehand, and the differentiation and rationalization of ‘departments of life’, on theother (Habermas 1984: 182). In addition to ‘mystical contemplation’, Weberspecifically mentioned ‘economic life, technique, scientific research, education,war, jurisprudence and administration’ as departments of life. Any of them canappear to be irrational from the point of view of the other and all of them arecapable of ‘rationalizations of the most varied character’ (Habermas 1984: 181,quoting Weber 1930: 26). There is no limit to or logic in the proliferation ofdepartments because it is a matter of a particular society’s ‘value contents’(Habermas 1984: 184; recall ‘cultural contents’, above), not an entailment ofdifferentiated value spheres.

As shall become clear, I have deep reservations about this highly formalizedscheme that separates modernization (understood as differentiation andrationalization) into two substantially unrelated processes, one operating at thelevel of strictly limited universal values and the other at the level of infinitelyvaried social practices and institutions. Habermas has no such qualms. His self-assurance seems to have reassured Benhabib, who expressly adopts the tripartitescheme of value differentiation in arguing that a communicative ethic, such asshe endorses, cannot be ‘morally neutral’ but is nonetheless compatible with ‘aframework of universal rights and justice’ (1992: 41–6, quoting 44, 46). One

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way to substantiate my reservations about this scheme is to ask where it comesfrom.

On Habermas’s account, Weber’s three autonomous value spheres ‘weregleaned inductively and treated in a descriptive matter’; they are ‘the elementsof culture that were, with the transition to modernity, differentiated out fromthe traditional residues of religious-metaphysical worldviews transmitted bythe Greek and above all the Judeo-Christian traditions’ (1984: 186, 165). YetWeber’s discovery of three value spheres is not just a matter of reviewing thehistorical record. According to Habermas, ‘it can only be understood against thebackground of the neo-Kantian philosophy of value, even though Weber himselfmade no attempt to order systematically and analyze from formal points of view’what he had gleaned from the record (1984: 186). For my part, I cannot see the‘traditional residues’ nearly as clearly as can I see early modern challenges tothe single, teleologically unified value sphere that Scholastic thinkers had takenfrom Aristotle.

The strict separation of values from facts, including facts about values,initiated by Hume and later made into a cardinal premise of positivist modernityoffered one challenge to the unified value sphere handed down from Aristotle.The separation of emotion and reason offered a second challenge. As AlbertHirschman has suggested (1977), the triumph of reason over emotion wasinextricably related to the emergence of capitalism as a constellation of practicesand institutions. No less was the triumph of objectively corroborated factsover subjective beliefs inextricably related to the practice of justifying choicesby reference to consequences and to the emergence of positive law and theapparatus of the state. The triumph of science and technology as first and finalmeasure of modernity’s success validated both challenges together, and theresult has been a profusion of ‘departments’ – in universities, bureaucraciesand productive activities, and in opportunities for artistic expression, self-actualization, social interaction and political participation. In short, I see theemergence of Weber’s three value spheres not as intrinsic to the process ofdifferentiation and rationalization, forever after shaping the values contents ofmodern life, but as a canonical interpretation of the process at an early stage.

As Habermas intimated, it was Kant who made this interpretation possibleand whose name accounts for its canonical status. Here we do not need aclose examination of ‘the neo-Kantian philosophy of value’. We need onlyrecall the respective foci of Kant’s three critiques: pure reason (the cognitivesphere), practical reason (the moral-practical sphere), and aesthetic judgment(the expressive sphere). At least to my knowledge, Kant never claimed that thesethree ‘spheres’ logically exhaust the materials calling for critical attention orthat they form a unified system. Indeed, it seems to me that he approachedthem serially, moving from one critique to the next as he realized that thecompletion of each one left something else for his consideration. In this light,

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his late writings on a variety of topics suggest the possibility of additionalcritiques prompted by the rapidly shifting value contents of post-Enlightenmentmodernity.

Self and Other

After Kant, the value contents of modernity expanded even more dramaticallythan they had during his lifetime. Benhabib fully appreciates the scale andimportance of this development and is sensitive to its misinterpretation.Understood as ‘the rise of the social’, it distressed Hannah Arendt as the causeand consequence of the demise of the political. On Benhabib’s interpretation,there are signs of an ‘alternative genealogy of modernity’ in Arendt’s early work,one that acknowledges changing ‘patterns of human interaction’, and warrantscalling Arendt a ‘reluctant modernist’ and not the ‘nostalgic and antimodernistthinker’ that most of us find in The Human Condition (1958) (Benhabib 1996:22–30, quoting 22, 29, 28, 22).

For Benhabib, Arendt’s ‘understanding of modernity and the place of politicsunder conditions of modernity’ is unclear and quite possibly incoherent. It mightbe pointed out (as indeed Patrick Hayden has pointed out me) that we must goback to The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to appreciate fully the sources ofArendt’s reluctance to embrace modernity. Insofar as imperialism, colonialismand racism gave modernity the boost needed for its spectacular rise, Arendtmade a compelling case for her own reluctance. Yet the two books togethermake any effort to find in Arendt a clear ‘understanding of modernity’ all themore difficult. Limited to The Human Condition, however unfairly, Benhabib’s‘rereading’ is clear enough. ‘[M]odernity cannot simply be identified with thespread of commodity exchange relations and the growth of a capitalist economy;nor can modernity be reduced of to the spread of mass society alone. Modernitybrings with it new forms of social interaction, patterns of association, habits, andmores’. These ‘new forms’ register ‘transformations occurring in these spheresof modern societies’ (Benhabib 1996: 29).

As used here, the term sphere obviously does not refer to Kantian valuespheres. It does seem to refer to the explosion in the value contents of Westernmodernity and thus to the profusion of Weberian departments of life. YetBenhabib does not actually say this in setting forth Arendt’s understanding ofmodernity. Nor, as far as I can tell, does she say this elsewhere in her work.

Instead Benhabib elaborates the value contents of modernity insofar as theyassist or inhibit the modern subject in the demanding task of situating herselfin a rationalized world. This Benhabib does not do by situating the self inrelation to the differentiation and proliferation of departments of life. Rather,she situates each self in relation to others – ‘concrete others’ – who must situatetheir selves (see especially Benhabib 1992, ch. 5: ‘The Generalized and the

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Concrete Other’). Even if the values contents of modernity are increasinglyhomogenized and commodified, they must differ in some degree for every oneof us. Where there are concrete others, there are concrete differences. Wherethere are differences, there grounds for anxiety, misunderstanding, disagreement,intolerance, hostility and selfishness, and there are opportunities to reduceanxiety, misunderstanding and so on. Human interaction transcends all spheresand departments.

By centering her position on the self and its relations to the value contentsof modernity, and not on the social processes by which the value contents ofmodernity become rationalized and differentiated, Benhabib is well aware thatshe risks undermining a career-long effort to get ‘beyond the philosophy ofthe subject’ (1986: 343). A general feature of modern Western philosophy, thepreoccupation with the subject is especially marked in German philosophy fromKant and Hegel to the Frankfurt School and even Habermas, despite his shiftto interactive reason. Introducing the self to the other, as G. H. Mead had, doesnot help (or at least help enough) because that other remains generalized. ‘Thestandpoint of the generalized other requires us to view each and every individualas a rational being entitled to the same rights and duties we would want to ascribeto ourselves. In assuming the standpoint, we abstract from the individuality andconcrete identity of the other’ (Benhabib 1992: 158–9).

Generalizing the other is a characteristic move in ‘contemporary moraluniversalist moral psychology and moral theory’ (Benhabib 1992: 159; moralpsychology here refers to Lawrence Kohlberg’s work). Such a move bringshuman interaction into the moral-practical value sphere, where justice demandsuniversally valid criteria for normative judgment.

The standpoint of the concrete other, by contrast, requires us to view each andevery rational being as an individual with a concrete history, identity and affective-emotional constitution. In assuming this standpoint, we abstract from what constitutesour commonality, and focus on individuality. We seek to comprehend the needs of theother, his or her motivations, what she searches for, and what s/he desires. Our relationto the other is governed by the norms of equity and complementary reciprocity: each isentitled to expect and assume from the other forms of behavior through which the otherfeels recognized and confirmed as a concrete, individual being with specific needs,talents and capacities. (Behabib 1992: 159, her emphasis)

Beyond a general requirement to treat each other as human, no universalmoral principle or procedure emerges from this description to guide our conduct.By equity, Benhabib must mean something more than an informal metric forevaluating the scope and content of legal rules in a liberal society. I suspectshe has in mind a sense or feeling of fairness that people have about socialrelations in general, perhaps induced by their feelings (hurt, rage) when theythink concrete others have treated them unfairly. What is not at all clear is how

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this sense of fairness plays out in a world where local standards operate withinhuman communities and departments of life.

More specifically, it seems to me that status arrangements in many, perhapsmost, communities sharply restrict the set of concrete others whose behavior cantrigger feelings of unfair treatment. Much the same can be said of reciprocity.In most communities, individuals can only reciprocate in kind if they aremembers of the same status set; noblesse oblige would lose all meaningand value if peasants could reciprocate. Furthermore, reciprocity would seemto invite mutual admiration (or vilification) at potential expense to concreteothers. Generalizing reciprocity is another name for generalizing the other; whatcomplementarity can mean in this context I have no idea.

Even if ‘ignoring the standpoint of the concrete other leads to epistemicincoherence in universalistic moral theories’ (Benhabib 1992: 161), affirmingthe standpoint of the other does not, by itself, assure the epistemic adequacyof that standpoint. Adducing contextually relevant norms always finds a limitin contextual irrelevance. Moreover, identifying relevant norms shifts attentionfrom the relations of selves to the departments of life. Effectively acknowledgingas much, Benhabib returns to the universal standpoint with an ‘enlargedmentality’ – one that ‘provides us with a procedure for judging the validity ofour judgments’ (1992: 186).

What this return to the universal standpoint requires is clear enough, butwhat it gains for us is not. We should ‘act in such a way as is consistent withrespecting the dignity and worth of all individuals involved and a willingnessto settle controversial matters through the open and unconstrained discussion ofall’ (Benhabib1992: 186). Benhabib goes on to ask the very question I wouldask: ‘What does this mean concretely?’ (1992: 186). We cannot know, and notjust because the procedure for judging judgments surely varies from departmentto department. ‘Procedures do not dictate specific outcomes; they constrain thekinds of justification we can use for our actions, judgments and principles’(Benhabib1992: 187).

Universal rights and duties are necessarily specific in this sense. Especially inher recent work, Benhabib writes as if we already know the contents of theserights and duties. We know them to be universal. Recent developments confirmwhat we know: cosmopolitan norms of justice apply to ‘individuals as moral andlegal persons in a worldwide civil society’ (Benhahb 2006: 16).

I am not so sure. Faced with procedural indeterminacy, how can we besure that we know that we have specified the contents of universal normsconclusively? Why should we think these norms are anything more than thelatest value contents of an ever more differentiated world? How do we evenknow that they are universal when we cannot be sure that the moral-practicalvalue sphere, the sphere of ‘justice’ itself, is anything more than a particularsocial construction reflecting the value contents of an earlier time?

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Modernism

Weber’s account of modernity’s development centers on our changing relationto the world or, more precisely on our conscious awareness of our capacityto change the world, to rationalize its contents, by following the dictates oftruth, right and beauty. There is, however, another way to identify what makesmodernity distinctive, one that shifts emphasis from ontology to epistemology,from rationalization to representation. Postmodernists have developed this pointof view with particular relish. In their view, the conceit that we can trulyrepresent the contents of the world in our minds is at the heart of modernity’smetaphysical illusions, practical follies, and moral arrogance.

Benhabib takes this alternative view of modernity into account because it ap-peals to feminists who have come to believe that the philosophy of the subjectcan never be rid of its masculinist subjectivities. For convenience, she uses Jean-François Lyotard’s familiar exposition, in which the contents of modernity arebrought together in a ‘grand narrative’ (Benhabib 1992: 204, quoting Lyotard1984: xxiii, who also called it ‘the Enlightenment narrative’). Giving this grandnarrative its coherence and direction is an ‘episteme of representation’, whichBenhabib somewhat confusingly calls ‘modernist’ (1992: 204, 207), ‘classical’(206–7) and modern’ (207).3 Lyotard suggested that modernity produces ‘func-tional knowledge’ – knowledge that is ‘an indispensable element in the function-ing of society’ – but also induces a turn to ‘critical knowledge’ that never goes farenough (Lyotard 1984: 13; also see Benhabib 1992: 204–5). The emergence of‘two basic representational models for society’, one functional, the other critical,reflects an inherent tension in the Enlightenment narrative; the rejection of thefunctional-critical binary marks the onset of the postmodern condition (Lyotard1984: 11–14, quoting 11). Against Lyotard, Benhabib aligns herself with criticalthinking: the critique of the subject as spectator, of the world as an objective re-ality, of language as a reliable vehicle for representing the world (1992: 206–8).

Benhabib writes as if the episteme of representation has indeed come toan end. A sustained, three-pronged critique might seem to have pulled therug out from under it. Yet the demise of the episteme has not rendered usincapable of telling better stories about our common condition, stories thatsalvage modernity’s better tendencies. What then has critical thinking accom-plished? Benhabib tells us it is ‘the demise of rationalistic and transcendentalphilosophies from Descartes to Kant and Husserl’ (1992: 210). If critique hasdiscredited the philosophy of the subject, then, following Lyotard, it must alsohave put itself out of business.

If critique’s success in its own terms makes critique superfluous, what shouldwe do? Lyotard’s answer is to abandon the functional-critical binary. Thealternative is to view modernity as ‘a functional whole’ (Lyotard 1984: 11)without necessarily accepting his claim that the whole of modernity ended withthe disintegration of its grand narrative. In my opinion, this is an alternative that

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Benhabib has slighted, perhaps because she has been so deeply immersed in thecritique of the philosophy of the subject. I also suspect that she fails to see thisalternative for what it is.

Consider Benhabib’s marked tendency to use the terms modern and modernistinterchangeably. Lyotard is a self-professed postmodernist thinker, for whomthe last chapter in the Enlightenment narrative is specifically modernist. Byimplication (an implication of little interest to Lyotard), the terms classical andmodern describe earlier phases corresponding to Weberian phases in modernity’semergence. The demise of modernism spells the end of modernity as a functionalwhole – there is no next phase. As with many postmodernists, Lyotard took forgranted that modernism has distinct properties dating from the late nineteenthcentury. ‘The idea that society forms an organic whole, in the absence of whichit ceases to be a society (and sociology ceases to have an object of study),dominated the minds of the founders of the French school. Added detail wassupplied by functionalism; it took yet another turn in the 1950s with Parsons’sconception of society as a self-regulating system’ (Lyotard 1984: 11).

Benhabib might object that modernism refers to a movement in thearts – music, theater, literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture – inwhich representation turns in on itself to become its own and perhaps itsonly subject. As such, modernism would seem to have been a development ofmodernity within the expressive sphere of values, where the search for beautyand authenticity follows a logic of its own. During the nineteenth century,relentless rationalization in the cognitive sphere prompted an ‘irrational’ effort(see above) to save the expressive sphere from the mass production of culturalgoods and correlative degradation of aesthetic standards. Indeed Benhabib hascommented on this phenomenon (1989–1990). Linking ‘high modernism’ in thearts to critical tendencies flourishing at the same time, she rather dramaticallyannounced that Adorno and Horkheimer had ‘a tortured vision of the projectof the moderns’, just as did Picasso, Max Beckmann, Klee and Kandinsky(Benhabib 1989–1990: 1439). I have no quarrel with this claim. I believe,however, that ‘high modernism’ is the tip of an iceberg.

Let me enlarge the modernist mentality. Beginning as early perhaps as the1860s and with increasing energy to the end of the inter-war period, the artsdid indeed experience a revolution in the theory and practice of representation.Realism in the novel gave way to Virginia Woolf and then James Joyce, inpainting to Paul Cézanne and then Marcel Duchamps. New modes of expressioncreated opportunities and incentives to get inside the object at hand (including,of course, the objectified subject), to penetrate the hard surface of appearances,to find out how the object functions as a whole, to rearrange its parts andjolt the observer’s senses, to open up the dynamics of differentiation and(dis)integration, growth and decay, to assign value to (devalue, revalue) what wenever knew was there. To appropriate a slogan from modernist architecture, ifform follows function, then the architect should turn things inside out; aestheticsis a matter of exposure.

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In short, modernism is not just about representation. It is an injunction torepresent function first (including the function of representation), just as Lyotardintimated. Among the ‘founders of the French School’ is the towering figure ofDurkheim, whom I would call the ‘high modernist’ of social theory. If Webersaw modernity as formalization (first phase) and rationalization (second phase),then Durkheim saw functional differentiation as the modernist third stage inmodernity’s trajectory. As in sociology, so in many other newly differentiateddepartments in modern life.

This is not the place to document the impact of modernism outside the arts.4

It should suffice to say that modernism is a response to differentiation alongfunctional lines, which is in turn a conspicuous feature of modernity’s lastcentury – whether interpreted as growth or decay. In my opinion, functionaldifferentiation is the most conspicuous feature of modernity as it has globalizedin recent decades. It is a less conspicuous feature of social theory, no doubtbecause the positivist, strictly modern preoccupation with things and theirproperties dominates the social sciences. It is substantially absent in criticalthought, I suspect because critical thinkers confine modernism to the expressivesphere and because their preoccupation with the subject blinds them to the evermore differentiated value contents of the world.5

Finally, functional differentiation is largely missing from Benhabib’s work,and not just because she has immersed herself so deeply in critical thought. Moreand more, she has engaged liberalism in her project to rehabilitate modernity.As much as I appreciate her motives in doing so, I believe that she has notescaped the liberal tendency to underestimate the extent to which functionshave fractionated and departments of life have proliferated in our late modernworld. Affirming pluralism does not even begin to acknowledge what modernistmodernity has wrought functionally and institutionally.

When Benhabib talks about global civil society, she makes the world aliberal place, surely flawed, but curiously empty.6 A familiar meliorist projectshows signs of replacing a flawed and ambiguous conception of modernity – anambiguous conception, for all its flaws, reflecting the inescapable, multivalentcomplexity of modernity as we have come to experience it. It also suggests thedanger of moral complacency. In these circumstances, for Benhabib to reaffirmat least some measure of ambivalence would be a welcome event.

Acknowledgments

I drafted this paper for a plenary panel on the work of Seyla Benhabib,Conference on ‘Thinking (With)Out Borders: International Political Theory inthe 21st Century’, University of St Andrews, 12–13 June 2008. My thanks toPatrick Hayden and Tony Lang for asking me to join the panel, to Seyla Benhabibfor her comments on that occasion, and to Patrick Hayden for his excellentwritten comments on the paper as drafted.

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Notes1 Google Scholar lists 1356 citations for Situating the Self and 178 citations for The Reluctant

Modernism of Hannah Arendt (as of 9 June 2009). By way of comparison, Critique, Norm,and Utopia has garnered 284 citations and The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity inthe Global Era (2002) has 527 citations. Too little time has passed for citation counts for hermost recent books to reveal very much.

2 And have benefitted in many other respects. For the record, I have cited Benhabib only oncein my work (Onuf 2003: 49n). That few of my colleagues in International Relations have doneany better is a sad commentary on the barriers between fields of study.

3 As used here, the term episteme is Benhabib’s, not Lyotard’s. I suspect she took the term fromFoucault, who identified a succession of epistemes – Renaissance, Classical, modern – eachgiving modernity a new set of conditions for the possibility of knowledge. Classical wouldcorrespond to the time before Kant and to Weber’s first phase in modernity’s emergence, andmodern to the time after Kant and Weber’s second phase (Foucault 1971). In this scheme,Lyotard’s grand narrative fits the modern episteme.

4 But see Griffin (2007) for an important study of fascism as ‘political modernism’. Alsoconsider Edward Said’s brief but suggestive linking of imperialism and modernism in his essay‘Notes on Modernism’ (1993: 186–90). To the extent that late nineteenth century imperialismand twentieth century totalitarianism contributed to Arendt’s understanding of modernity, shemay indeed have been the reluctant modernist Benhabib had no reason to call her.

5 Habermas’s work offers a large exception. While Vol. 1 of The Theory of CommunicativeAction (1984) explicates the modern experience by reference to rationalization, Vol. 2 (1987)turns to differentiation by engaging modernist sociology (even if the term modernism and itscognates have no place in his conceptual vocabulary). There he suggested ‘that (1) we conceiveof societies simultaneously as systems and lifeworlds. This concept proves itself in (2) atheory of social evolution that separates the rationalization of the lifeworld from the growingcomplexity of social systems so as to make the connection that Durkheim envisaged betweenforms of social integration and stages of system differentiation tangible, that is, susceptible toempirical analysis’ (1987: 118, emphasis in translation).

6 For an alternative view, see Onuf (2005).

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Benhabib, S. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernismin Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge.

Benhabib, S. 1996. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. ThousandOaks, CA: Sage.

Benhabib, S. 2006. Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Foucault, M. 1971. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences,

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