chapter 11
...................................................................................................................................................MODERNITY AND
ITS CRITICS
...................................................................................................................................................jane bennett
Seeking insight into the political events and debates swarming around them,
undergraduates enrolled in ‘‘Modern Political Thought’’ courses are often
surprised to learn that the focus is on writers from the seventeenth, eight-
eenth, and nineteenth centuries. This is because, as part of the series ancient–
medieval–modern–contemporary, ‘‘the modern’’ in political theory is that
which has alreadypassed, although its traces are said to remain in the
background of today. The term ‘‘modernity’’ functions somewhat diVerently
in the discipline: it names acontemporarycondition. As I contend at the end
of this chapter, modernity is alive and kicking even within a theoretical
framework ofpostmodernism.
In what does the condition of modernity consist? First, in a distinctive
constellation of intellectual tendencies, including the propensity to subject
established norms and practices to critical reXection, to seek physical
causes for disease, to believe both in universal human rights and in
cultural speciWcity, and to aYrm oneself as an individual even while
lamenting the lack of community. The condition of modernity refers,
second, to a set of institutional structures associated with such a
temper, including popular elections, rule by law, a secular bureaucracy,