“Modernity” is an umbrella term for the period from about 1500 to the recent Present.  Under the umbrella are found the ideas and institutions of science, capitalism, and the nation-state, along with their sub-units and opponents.  If a single idea is associated with Modernity it is Progress. 

            “High Modernity” is the shared absolute confidence in the expertise of those possessing much intellectual capital.  While engineers and bureaucrats possess valuable expertise, at the core of High Modernism stands a reverence for science,[1] scientific knowledge, and (implicitly) in scientists.[2]  These offer the sole credible way of understanding the world.  Together, technology, government, and academia provide the levers with which Science can improve the natural and social worlds.  Historians have labeled the political expression of these beliefs as “the “Responsive National State” and the “Project State.”[3]

High Modernism is not explicitly anti-democratic.  The reverse of the pro-expertise medal is a disregard for the contexts (historical, social, and geographical) in which improving change is intended to occur.[4]  Ordinary people are liable to resist the unfamiliar.  Therefore, government by strong authority systems offer a common way of implementing reform.  By its very nature, High Modernism is “elitist” and anti-populist. 

James Scott, who died recently, left an immense scholarly foot-print on these issues.  In one key book, he analyzed “how certain scheme for the improvement of the human condition have failed.”[5]  His case list is eclectic.  It includes the Soviet collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s; the construction of the new capital of Brasilia within the context of Brazilian economic development in the 1950s; and the forced “villagization” program in Tanzania in the 1970s. 

All such schemes were changes imposed on unwilling common people from above.  All of them made the subjects miserable, if they didn’t kill them in droves.  All of them failed to achieve their goals.  They failed, in part, from life’s complexity exceeded expert plans. 

What of the non-elite majority who are to be helped, reformed, improved, modernized by experts?  The question arose in what academic scholars have called “subaltern studies,” basically the study of the subjects of foreign empires.  In the eyes of foreign rulers, these people have a voice only to the degree that they assimilate to the culture of the foreign ruler, accept the assumptions of their overlords.[6]  There is a reciprocal nature to such reform-from-above.  The reformers either expect resistance or encounter resistance.  They push through with more assertive means, justified as expert opinion and deriding the opposition as irrational.  Resistance continues.  Why can’t the same analysis be applied to the citizens of advanced nations? 

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[1] Now grudgingly understood to include the “Social Sciences” (economics, sociology, psychology, political science) to the extent that they employ quantification and modeling. 

[2] We’ve been here before.  See Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932). 

[3] On the former, see John  P. McKay’s contribution to John P. McKay, Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler, A History of Western Society, vol. II,  pp. 809-817; and Charles S. Maier, The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2024). 

[4] This, the knowledge provided through the Humanities. 

[5] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1985). 

[6] There is a tedious explanation of all this at Subaltern (postcolonialism) – Wikipedia