is not, however, self-evident. In fact, if one were to ask sociologists about the central features of classical modernity, one would receive a great variety of answers. Often enough, and especially in Germany, modernity is equated with a process of functional differentiation. What is meant by this is, accordingly, the differentiation of specialized and functional subsystems (the economy, law, politics, mass media, education, etc.), each of which follows its own self-imposed logic and structure. Although it was Niklas Luhmann who formulated this approach most systematically, its basic ideas extend back to theories about the division of labor. On the international stage, however, another interpretation has been more influential. Going back to Karl Marx, this interpretation treats capitalism as the central organ of modernity in the form of an economic and technological formation that is oriented toward the uninterrupted accumulation of capital and leads to its vastly unequal distribution. It goes without saying that each of these approaches has identified important characteristics of modernity. Neither, however, is sufficient. From my perspective, the structure of modernity will only become comprehensible if one begins with the process of rationalization,1 as Max Weber argued most convincingly.2 Authors as varied as Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, and Zygmunt Bauman would go on to espouse this idea as well, though each in his own way.3
The understanding of modernity as a process of rationalization can and must, however, be understood in a more abstract and fundamental way than has previously been the case, for what lurks behind rationalization is the social logic of the general. By rationalizing the social world, modern practices attempt to impose their general forms and configure the world according to them. In praxeological terms, the social logic of the general – with its “generalization,” and by means of “doing generality” – encompasses four interconnected complexes of social practices that have an empirically open relationship to one another: practices of observation, evaluation, production, and appropriation. Whenever a society is subjected to rationalization and generalization, these four sets of practices are always at work.
Here, practices of observing the world (in science, the economy, the state, etc.) are unambiguously and unilaterally oriented toward the general – that is, systems of general concepts and schemata have been developed and applied in order to make it possible to register, measure, and differentiate every element of the world (people, nature, things, etc.) as a particular example of general patterns. In the case of practices of evaluating (for instance, in law or in school), those elements of the world that fit into the schema of the general are clearly treated positively and given preference for seeming “correct” or “normal.”4 Practices of producing (for instance in industry or education) are here at their heart oriented toward systematically creating elements of the world (things, subjects, spaces, etc.) that correspond to the schemata of the general and, in extreme cases, are even identical and fully interchangeable with one another. Finally, practices of appropriating the world now typically take the form of objectively dealing with things, subjects, etc., that are regarded as standardized and interchangeable entities – for instance, by treating objects as functional and useful, or subjects as having a certain role or function.
That said, it would be a misperception to identify modernity entirely with the social logic of the general and its formal rationalization. To do so would be to fall victim to the totalization of the general that characterizes the rationalistic discourse of modernity (in philosophy and sociology, above all) and to formulate no more than a partial understanding of it. Even classical modernity cannot entirely be understood in terms of the logic of the general, and late modernity even less so. At this point, however, we will have to deal with the features of the general and its dominance in an “artificially” pure and rationalistic form before moving on to the next step, which will be to distinguish it from the social logic of singularities.
Typifications and Rationalizations
Historically speaking, it would of course be short-sighted to claim that a social logic of the general did not exist until the beginnings of modernity in the late eighteenth century or that there had not been any formats of formal rationality until 250 years ago. In a certain respect, both already existed in premodern societies – in the archaic (preliterate and nomadic) and in the traditional (high-cultural) societies as well. However, it is necessary to distinguish two different modes of the social logic of the general: typification and rationalization.
The practices that constitute the social world are always based on typification – that is, on making the individual elements of the world comprehensible and manageable in such a way that they can be categorized as particular examples of general sorts or types: people, animals, things, gods, and so on. If it is true that the “life-world of everyday life” is largely based on custom and repetition, this implies that, in the semantics of natural language and in implicit knowledge, typifying classifications are regularly performed, and thus that the particular, with which everyone is constantly confronted, is regularly subsumed under the general.5 Here the particular is, so to speak, the general-particular. Such a logic of typification prevailed to a great extent in archaic “cold societies” (in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s terms) of illiterate premodernity, which were relatively resistant to change, but it of course also features in (late) modern societies as well. As typifications, however, socially relevant generalities are usually not the object of rationalization; they are not, that is, subjected to systematic control and reflection. In the mode of typification, accordingly, it is not to be expected that general concepts are necessarily distinguished from one another in a sharp manner. As semantic prototypes, they rather represent zones of similarities.6
In premodern societies, too, there were also specific complexes of behavior that were instrumentally or normatively rational and formed something like insular complexes of rationalization. These distinguished themselves through the targeted systematization of behavior according to explicit rules and principles. The techne of these societies, for instance, was instrumentally rational and based more on practical than on theoretical knowledge. It is thus indicative of a systematic activity for processing nature, an activity that enabled these societies to domesticate and distance themselves from the world. Later, with the creation of high-cultural empires and their administrative and legal practices, normative practices also began to be systematized, and this led not only to the codification of social rules but also to the intellectual systematization of (especially religious) views of the world, not least through the medium of writing.7
The historically early forms of a rationalistic logic of the general have the same cause as the more sophisticated forms that came later: they can all be interpreted as a social response to scarcity and disorder. Society’s relation to nature is defined first and foremost by scarcity and imminent shortages. With instrumentally rational practices, societies attempt to counteract scarcity by conserving means, labor, time, and energy. Instrumentally rational practices follow a rule of thrift in order to reduce scarcity and, at best, to fulfill all of society’s demands. In addition, however, there is also a basic problem of order that, though also relevant to society’s relation to external nature, concerns above all the relation between its subjects. This problem became especially acute at the moment when tribal and nomadic social forms were displaced by social systems under the conditions of sedentariness and elementary divisions of labor, which applied to people regardless of their physical presence. Normative rationalizations were thus attempts – by means of legal systems, for instance – to guarantee social coordination and control on a permanent basis.
Modern society went beyond the isolated instrumentally rational and normative-rational practices of traditional societies. Western modernity, which originated in early-modern Europe and began to flourish toward the end of the eighteenth century with the rise of industrialization, science, market economies, urbanization, and democratization, is essentially synonymous with the expansive institutionalization of entire systems of social practices that involved the systematic and lasting rationalization of behavior, production, things, subjects, and knowledge by means of a social logic of the general. Thus, modernity is both an extensive and an intensive generalization machine.
