Exploring Approaches to Modernity: Cultural and Acultural Perspectives

When people describe a city as “modern,” they usually mean something visible – flyovers, metro lines, glass office towers, smartphones in every hand. But for social theorists, modernity is not just a checklist of infrastructure. It is a deeper question about how societies change their values, their sense of self, and their way of reasoning about the world. The puzzle that has occupied thinkers for decades is whether modernity is a single, universal destination that every society eventually reaches, or whether it is a particular cultural story that began in the West and carries Western assumptions wherever it travels. The philosopher Charles Taylor framed this debate sharply by separating two competing explanations: a cultural approach and an acultural approach. Understanding the difference between them helps explain why a country like India can build world-class technology hubs while keeping joint families, festivals, and caste networks very much alive.

What modernity actually means 🔗

Before comparing the two approaches, it helps to settle what is being explained. Modernity refers to the bundle of transformations that reshaped Western Europe and North America from roughly the seventeenth century onward: the spread of scientific reasoning, industrial production, secular outlooks, individual rights, and bureaucratic states. The disagreement is not about whether these changes happened. It is about why they happened and what they mean for the rest of the world. Charles Taylor argued that modernity is best understood not as a fixed condition but as a movement from one constellation of understandings to another, which is why the explanation we choose matters so much.

The cultural approach to modernity 🔗

A cultural theory of modernity treats the modern West as one culture among many, with its own specific understandings of the person, nature, society, and the good. In this view, modernity is not a neutral upgrade that any society installs. It is the rise of a distinct culture, comparable to how we might describe Chinese civilisation or medieval Christendom as cultures with their own moral and spiritual horizons. The transformation from a pre-modern world to a modern one is therefore a change between cultures, not a simple escape from culture altogether.

Self-identity, morality, and inner life 🔗

What makes the cultural approach distinctive is its focus on the inner architecture of the modern person. It looks at how ideas of selfhood, conscience, and moral worth shifted. The modern Western self came to value autonomy, authenticity, and the right to define one’s own purpose – notions that earlier societies did not share in the same way. As Taylor explains in his essay on the two theories of modernity, even something as seemingly universal as modern science grew in close symbiosis with a particular cultural constellation of beliefs about person, nature, and society. The cultural approach insists that these moral and psychological sets are not accidental by-products. They are the heart of what modernity is.

Why the comparison matters 🔗

A key strength of the cultural view is that it refuses to flatten differences. Taylor warned that if a civilisation fails to recognise how it contrasts with others, it ends up with a distorted self-understanding and projects its own categories onto everyone else. That warning is especially relevant for societies outside Europe, because it suggests that “becoming modern” need not mean becoming a copy of the West. It opens space for the idea that different cultures can produce different versions of the modern world.

The acultural approach to modernity 🔗

The acultural theory tells a very different story. Here, modernity is described in culture-neutral terms, as a set of transformations that any and every culture could undergo – and probably will be forced to undergo. The drivers are seen as transcultural forces: the growth of reason, scientific consciousness, secularisation, instrumental rationality, and the sharp separation of fact from value. In this account, the specifics of European or American culture are not the engine of change. Instead, modernisation is understood as the result of a rational or social operation that is, in principle, available to humanity everywhere.

Modernity as universal discovery 🔗

Acultural theories often narrate history as a process of “coming to see” – coming to see that nature follows regular laws, or that older religious explanations were mythical. On this reading, modern beliefs are not one cultural option among several but the rational conclusion any society reaches once it sheds superstition and ignorance. Taylor noted that even the more social explanations, which point to mobility and industrialisation, tend to smuggle reason back in, treating old habits and traditional moralities as things that collapse simply because they lack rational grounding. He argued that acultural accounts have dominated thinking about modernity for the past two centuries.

The blind spot of neutrality 🔗

The danger Taylor identified is that the language of culture-neutral progress can quietly lock us into what he described as an ethnocentric prison – projecting our own forms onto everyone else while believing we are simply describing universal reason. When changes that actually reflect a specific Western culture are reclassified as the inevitable consequence of technology or social development, the cultural roots disappear from view. The decline of religious practice, for instance, is frequently treated as an automatic effect of modernisation rather than as one possible cultural outcome. That move makes alternative modernities look impossible before the conversation even begins.

Socio-cultural shifts and intellectual evolution 🔗

Both approaches agree that modernity reshapes values, norms, and the organisation of society – they only disagree on how to interpret that reshaping. The shift from agrarian villages to industrial cities changes how families are structured, how authority is justified, and how individuals relate to the state. Bureaucracies replace personal patronage. Formal education replaces inherited knowledge. Markets reorganise everyday work. These are not small adjustments; they remake the texture of social life.

From convergence to multiple modernities 🔗

In the 1950s, many social scientists assumed that all industrialising societies would eventually converge on a single Western pattern. That assumption did not survive contact with the evidence. The sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt argued that the homogenising assumptions of the Western programme of modernity were never realised, and that many non-Western societies became unmistakably modern without simply imitating the West. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences journal that introduced his work presents multiple modernities as a direct refutation of those earlier convergence theories. This is a crucial bridge between Taylor’s two camps: it accepts that modernity has shared ingredients while insisting that each civilisation cooks them differently.

The intellectual core that survives 🔗

What, then, holds “modernity” together if not a single cultural template? Theorists of multiple modernities locate the shared core not in institutions but at a more abstract level of cultural and ontological orientation. The most important shared principle is a radically new conception of human agency – the idea of humans as autonomous beings able to exercise control over their environment through rational mastery and conscious activity. The scholarship tracing the path from occidental rationalism to multiple modernities shows how this builds on Max Weber’s emphasis on rationality while adding that the legacies of older civilisations shape how modernity actually crystallises in each region. So the intellectual evolution is real, but it branches rather than marching in a straight line.

Rationality versus cultural specificity 🔗

The deepest tension between the two approaches comes down to this: how much of modernity is universal reason, and how much is local culture? The acultural view foregrounds rational progress and tends to treat cultural variation as noise – surface differences over a common rational substructure. The cultural view reverses the emphasis, treating the supposedly neutral rationality as itself a culturally shaped achievement. Neither position is obviously correct, and the debate continues precisely because both capture something true. Industrial machinery, vaccines, and statistical reasoning do travel across borders with remarkable ease. Yet the meaning people attach to family, religion, gender, and authority clearly does not flatten into a single global form.

The Indian case as a test 🔗

India offers an unusually clear illustration of why pure acultural explanations fall short. Indian sociologists initially borrowed the Western modernisation framework but quickly adapted it, because the data refused to fit. M. N. Srinivas, for example, developed concepts like Sanskritisation and Westernisation to capture change that preserved continuity rather than erasing it, as discussed in academic accounts of understanding modernity in India. Yogendra Singh went further with his thesis on the modernisation of tradition, arguing that traditional institutions in India do not simply vanish under modern pressure – they acquire new functions and absorb modern elements. Caste associations turn into political interest groups. Religious preaching adopts modern broadcast media. Joint families negotiate with urban work and migration rather than collapsing overnight.

Why this matters for cities and development 🔗

For anyone studying urban growth and development, this distinction is not merely academic. If you believe the acultural story, you might expect every modernising city to look and behave the same way, and you would treat surviving traditions as backwardness to be cleared away. If you take the cultural and multiple-modernities view seriously, you instead expect Indian cities to generate their own modern forms – modern in their technology and governance, yet distinct in how residents organise community, faith, and family life. The scholarship on multiple modernities suggests that recognising these plural pathways leads to more realistic policy than forcing every society through one template. Development becomes a question of adaptation and synthesis, not imitation.

Bringing the two approaches together 🔗

It would be a mistake to treat the cultural and acultural approaches as enemies where one must win. Each highlights a genuine feature of modern life. The acultural lens correctly captures the portable, transferable elements – scientific method, industrial technique, bureaucratic administration – that genuinely do spread across very different societies. The cultural lens correctly captures the way values, identities, and moral horizons remain rooted in specific histories, which is why no two societies modernise in identical ways. Taylor’s own preference for the cultural reading was based on its ability to give a more balanced assessment of modernity, one that can identify both the gains and the spiritual costs without issuing a single sweeping verdict for or against. Read together, the two approaches give students a far richer toolkit for analysing how societies change than either could provide alone.

What do you think? When you look at your own city, do you see modernity arriving as a neutral, universal force that erases the past – or as a new culture that blends with older traditions to create something distinct? And if rationality and culture pull in different directions, which one do you think shapes a society’s future more powerfully?

References

1. https://mercaba.org/SANLUIS/Filosofia/autores/Contempor%C3%A1nea/Taylor,%20Charles/Two%20theories%20of%20modernity.pdf
2. https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/daedalus/downloads/Daedalus_Wi2000_Multiple-Modernities.pdf
3. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34236/chapter/290286684
4. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp4/chapter/understanding-modernity-in-india-2/
5. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp4/chapter/module-name-title-modernization-of-tradition/
6. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp2/chapter/multiple-modernities-shmuel-n-eisenstadt-and-peter-wagner/