Tradition and Modernity Revisited

Extract

EPOCHS OF MAJOR SOCIAL CHANGE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SPURT to intense intellectual effort. The emergence of the new nations and their economic and political modernization constitutes one such epoch in history. The phenomenon has demanded from the student of society new modes of understanding and analysis, has provided him with both a challenge and an opportunity, and has called for new insights and a continuous re-fashioning of conceptual schemes. What is more, the nature of the change in these societies differs in significant respects from the experience of earlier epochs. It is neither the cumulative result of an outburst of creativity that marked the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West, nor a sharp break with the past brought about by a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ revolution, although undoubtedly both of these strands are involved in varying proportions. A deliberate attempt at condensing several centuries into a short span, the occurrence of ‘simultaneous change’ in so many spheres of life, the phenomenon of cultural dualism in so many societies, and the complex interactions caused by the constant closing in of national and international horizons, have led to a situation of continuous flux and readjustment that seems to have neither a beginning, nor possibly an end.