The Modernization Imperative Bruce Charlton and Peter Andras 96 pp., ISBN 0 907845 525 (pbk.), £8.95/$17.90 Available at reduced (subscription) price via: essays in political and cultural criticism Search Inside the Book at Amazon.com Search Inside the Book at Amazon.co.uk Book Ordering (secure web form) "This book presents a powerful and new analysis of how modernisation alters society, why it is both inevitable and desirable -- and why we need to understand it properly. The authors are not fooled, like many academics, by golden-age nostalgia." Matt Ridley, author Nature via Nurture, Genome, Origins of Virtue and The Red Queen. "An excellent statement of our conditions, full of insights and clarifying connections."  Martin Trow, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley.  Critical Culture Wars overview by Nathalie Rothschild

This book argues that contemporary society in Western democracies is generally misunderstood to be a pyramidal hierarchy dominated either by government or the economy. Neither view is correct.

We live in a fundamentally pluralistic society divided into numerous ‘modular’ social systems each performing different functions; these include politics, public administration, the armed forces, law, economics, religion, education, health and the mass media. Because each is specialized, none of these systems are dominant and there is no overall hierarchy of power. Modernizing societies are therefore structured more like a mosaic than a pyramid.

Modernization is the tendency for growth in the adaptive complexity and efficiency of the social systems. Growth in complexity is shaped by selection processes which maintain the functionality of social systems. The best examples are the market economy, science and democratic politics.

The process of modernization is both inevitable and, on the whole, desirable: this constitutes the modernization imperative. Therefore, the proper question should not be whether society should modernize, but how.
 

Bruce Charlton is Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Editor in Chief of the journal Medical Hypotheses. In 2000 he was a Visiting Distinguished Millennial Fellow at King’s College London. Dr Charlton is the author of more than 100 research and theoretical papers in scientific, medical and other subjects; and the book Psychiatry and the Human Condition (2000).

Peter Andras is a lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published in many fields including chaotic dynamical systems, artificial neural networks, and modelling of vision and cognition.  From 1992-1998 he was director of Civitas – the foundation for civil society in Romania.

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