Early Modernity and Emergent Capitalism

The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated.

Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity

Bruno Latour declares, in We Have Never Been Modern, that "Modernity comes in as many versions as there are thinkers or journalists. . ." (10). I suppose that the impossible task of this journal's forum on the question of (early) modernity is to contend with all of that intellectual baggage. The easiest solution is to reject the label of "modernity" (and, along with it, "early modernity") entirely. We could take all the definitions and debates and throw them into a massive data dump. But that would be too easy. The weight of our predecessors hangs on us, demanding that we respond, even if we reject the popular notion that would declare modernity to be a rationality, progress, Westernization and modernization that came to replace other and older ways of life. So what definition of "modernity" or "early modernity" can we employ, if any? What is modernity? Is it a style? a trope? a narrative? a shift in paradigm or episteme? Is it a historical "period"? If so, when did it begin? When did it end? or did it end?

We could begin by accepting the notion that there is a historical "period" called "modernity" (and I do not like the term "period" because it implies a full stop, a rupture, a break, and an end), but if we were to do that, we would need to emphasize that this "modernity" is merely a conceptual framework, one of many possible frameworks, for understanding the past. A historical narrative that includes modernity is part of a story we tell about the past, but it is a narrative that is never completely disinterested or all-comprehensive. And yet the telling and re-telling of the past, our painstaking efforts to sort through the many-layered historical record, and the endless debates generated by the impulse to recount and comprehend our shared origins—these are enabling, even necessary, labors.

Inevitably, "modernity" is an artificial notion, but that does not mean that it is a useless one. History in its fullness is a vast and largely irrecoverable mass of events, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And yet it is our job as scholars to make some sense of the past, examining and analyzing the existing archive in order to reconstruct the shapes of time and organize history in a meaningful way that helps us to understand our relationship to earlier times and societies. Since economic systems are the primary mechanisms of social reproduction that organize human societies, they comprise the appropriate objects of description for a basic understanding of long-term historical change. As Engels puts it, "according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life" (39). Following a long line of scholars, from Marx to R. H. Tawney to Immanuel Wallerstein to Robert Brenner, I contend that the shift from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode is the process that gradually initiates modernity. In other words, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we begin to perceive a wide-ranging social and cultural transformation that we can call "the early modern."¹ And what began in the early modern period (with primitive accumulation and the origins of globalization) unfolded in the form of industrial capitalism and today has become postmodern consumer capitalism.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed to the early modern period as the beginning of what would later become a world-wide capitalist system:

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. . . . Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This...