social, and readjusted the relation between humans and nature. It would be beneficial to examine the structural features of industrial modernity more closely, because they are antipodal to those of the late-modern society of singularities and because they continue to influence the sociological and political understanding of modernity today.
The impulse centers of post-bourgeois modernity were the United States of America and the Soviet Union. As I see it, the capitalism of the West and the socialism of the Eastern Bloc were not structural alternatives but were rather two varieties of radicalized rationalistic modernity. With its total social planning and determined de-singularization, moreover, state socialism in fact represented the purer form of industrial modernity and its logic of the general. That said, the Western capitalist version, as embodied by the culture of “Fordism” or “Americanism,” turned out to be more influential over the long term and was ultimately able to transform itself into late modernity.29 The framework of industrial capitalism gave rise to the type of collective order that was generally typical of the age of rationalization: the organization as an instrumentally rational association. Large corporations – hierarchically structured matrix organizations with clear divisions of labor – thus began to be formed around the beginning of the twentieth century. Labor in this context was, in the sense of scientific management, a system of coordinated and highly specialized activities, and the organization of labor was based on a system of jobs with unambiguous qualification requirements and routines. In both its capitalist and socialist varieties, the economic ideal of organized modernity was the industrial activity of standardized mass production.30
Organized modernity is thus that which sociologists call “industrial society,”31 and therefore it is possible to speak more basically of industrial modernity. It was a technical culture in a strict sense, one that not only backed the establishment of mass production but also impressed upon all of society its engineering-based and mechanistic model, according to which the social world appeared as a system of optimally coordinated elements. The technology of machines and the technology of the social thus went hand in hand, their common telos being efficient order and the elimination of waste and redundancy. In such a technology-oriented society, the model subjects were technicians and engineers.32
In this Fordistic society, mass production was coupled with mass consumption. Instead of antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, what appeared was the so-called “levelled middle-class society” of employees and skilled workers, who all participated in the consumption of standardized goods. This society promised a high standard of living for all. Especially during the trente glorieuses – the years 1945 to 1975 – this “affluent society” provided the imaginary backdrop of organized modernity. On the political level, this economic and technological formation was flanked by a socially regulating state, by a welfare state with a Keynesian and social-democratic or socialist plan to ensure social inclusion. The society formed along these lines was characterized by the expansive legal codification of social life and by political representation, which took place chiefly through people’s parties with their massive support and their promises to fight for the common good.33 On the spatial level, the functional city was the place where organized modernity crystallized. Both in the suburbs and in high-density public housing, the industrial city was based, as mentioned above, on functionalistic serial architecture and the spatial separation of work and domestic life.34
Whether in the economic, technological, political, or spatial sphere, organized modernity was guided by the semantics of the social, understood as the regulated collective.35 The collectivized social – whether in the form of a crowd, group, political party, workforce, or even the nuclear family – now took on an independent and superior existence, to which the individual was subordinate. Quite fittingly, then, William Whyte and David Riesman referred to the post-bourgeois subject as an “organization man.” This was a subject who developed an extreme sensitivity to the social expectations of his peers, to which he adapted accordingly. Orienting oneself toward the social standards of normality went hand in hand with a radical disciplining of emotions. As noted above, organized modernity was essentially a society of equals, of equality before the law, and of social uniformity. This culture of equality correlated with the uniformity of subjects: individuals were compelled to shape their lives to fit a “normal biography” with clear stages and with the aim of achieving life goals.36 In Simmel’s terms, the subjects of organized modernity were thus representative of an “individualism of equality.”
All of this suggests that the social logic of the general – in the forms of standardization, generalization, and formalization, which industrial modernity enforced throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century – has some obvious downsides. These include social inhibition and repression on a large scale and the elimination of genuinely unique characteristics in a radical, systemic, and historically unprecedented way. These downsides affected all social entities: things, people, collectives, spaces, and times. In organized modernity, the particular or the unique was tendentially regarded as the insignificant, undesirable, or even repulsive “other” that had to be overcome (with violence, if necessary) because it did not fit into the generally valid functional order of society. Such things were treated as vestiges of the premodern, retrograde, and decadent past or – at best – as unintended and riskily peculiar marginal phenomena of modernity.
The social struggle against this “other” and against anything apparently non-rational was waged above all against ostensibly abnormal or asocial subjects, who were classified by the psycho-social complex as exhibitors of deviant behavior.37 This struggle also led to a distaste for things and objects produced outside of industrial mass production, and encouraged the neglect or destruction of local and historical spaces – and the unique culture associated with them – in favor of the functional city. With its practices, industrial modernity thus enforced the de-singularization of the social. In the practices of observation, a vast system of general concepts and scales was developed for differentiating the general-particular, and this came at the expense of a now marginalized conceptual and perceptive sensitivity to the complexity of singularities. In the practices of evaluation, the result was to discriminate against or pathologize anything that could not be made to fit into the achievement differences determined by the logic of the general. In the practices of production, unique things were either created by mistake or were relicts of premodern niche practices. In their practices of appropriation, subjects thus became successively accustomed to adopting objectifying approaches to things and in large part “unlearned,” so to speak, how to deal with singularities.38
The rationalistic logic of the general achieved its zenith in organized, industrial modernity. It was during this time that society endeavored once and for all to triumph over the fundamental problems of scarcity and disorder mentioned above. Although many structural decisions made during this phase would remain influential in late modernity, organized modernity as an all-encompassing formation has since become history. Its social logic of the general would go on to serve as a negative example for late modernity, which would distance itself from it with its own social logic of singularities. As we will see, however, matters are somewhat more complicated. Industrial modernity was not organized in an entirely rationalistic manner, and it was not completely de-singularized. For its part, moreover, late modernity has developed its own version of rationalization, which now serves as an enabling form of infrastructure.
Notes
1 Rather than being obsolete, the theory of functional differentiation and that of capitalism are still effective for analyzing structural elements of societies that are characterized by formal rationalization. 2 See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and Wolfgang Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History, trans. Guenther Roth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 3 See, for instance, Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money: Third Enlarged Edition, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 2004); Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other
