Cultural Versus Acultural Perspectives on Modernity

How do we make sense of a world that has been radically transformed by science, industry, urbanization, and global trade – yet still looks strikingly different from one society to the next? That tension sits at the heart of one of sociology’s most enduring debates: is modernity a universal process that all societies travel through in roughly the same way, or is it something that takes on a unique shape depending on where and how it unfolds? Two major frameworks – the cultural approach and the acultural approach – offer competing answers, and understanding them helps explain not just how societies change, but why those changes can be so disruptive.

What do we mean by modernity? 🔗

Before diving into the two approaches, it helps to be clear about what modernity actually refers to. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, modernity is associated with individual subjectivity, scientific explanation and rationalization, a decline in religious worldviews, the rise of bureaucracy, rapid urbanization, the emergence of nation-states, and accelerated financial exchange. It marks a decisive break from traditional, agrarian societies organised around religion and kinship – and it signals an ongoing process rather than a fixed historical moment.

British sociologist Anthony Giddens described modernity as shorthand for modern society or industrial civilisation – one defined by an openness to transformation through human intervention, a market economy, and political institutions like mass democracy. That broad definition sounds universal enough. But here is where the debate begins: is this transformation genuinely universal, or is it shaped by the specific cultural conditions from which it emerges?

The cultural approach: modernity through a local lens 🔗

The cultural approach to modernity holds that modern transformations cannot be separated from the specific historical and cultural contexts in which they occur. Societies do not modernise in a vacuum – they do so through the filter of their own traditions, values, and histories. This means modernity does not look the same everywhere, and that diversity is not a failure or a deviation. It is simply how the process works.

The philosopher Charles Taylor is probably the most influential theorist of the cultural approach. In his essay “Two Theories of Modernity,” Taylor describes a cultural theory as one that sees the modern West as a particular culture – or group of closely related cultures – with its own specific understandings of personhood, nature, and the good. Western modernity emerged through the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and the industrial revolution. Those are not generic processes; they are culturally specific events with culturally specific consequences.

Diversity as a feature, not a flaw 🔗

A key strength of the cultural approach is its recognition that modernity manifests differently across societies. While Western modernity was built on Enlightenment rationalism and individualism, non-Western societies have often developed modern institutions while retaining indigenous cultural frameworks. Japan industrialised rapidly in the late 19th century without abandoning distinctly Japanese social structures. Many Muslim-majority societies have engaged with modern governance, science, and technology while actively renegotiating – rather than discarding – Islamic legal and ethical traditions.

Sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt captured this insight in his concept of “multiple modernities.” His central argument was that modernity is not synonymous with Westernisation – its key processes and dynamics can be found in all societies, but they take on distinct forms shaped by each civilisation’s own cultural logic. This framework rejects the idea of a single, convergent path to modernity and instead emphasises plural trajectories.

Limitations of the cultural approach 🔗

The cultural approach is not without its weaknesses. By emphasising difference, it can sometimes make it difficult to identify the shared structural forces – like capitalist markets or bureaucratic states – that do operate across cultural boundaries. There is also a risk, noted by critics, of romanticising traditional practices and overlooking the ways in which some local customs sustain inequality, such as rigid caste hierarchies or the subordination of women.

The acultural approach: modernity as a universal process 🔗

The acultural approach takes a different starting point. Rather than focusing on cultural particularities, it argues that modernity is driven by processes that are, in principle, culture-neutral. These processes – above all, the growth of rational thought, science, secularisation, and instrumental reason – are not the property of any one culture. They are forces that any society can undergo, and in many accounts, must undergo.

As explained on the University of Pennsylvania’s project on modernity, an acultural theory privileges transcultural factors like the growth of reason, scientific consciousness, secularisation, and the distinction between fact and value. In this framework, the specific cultural values of Europe or North America are not what drive modernisation – they are incidental to a process that could, in theory, unfold in any cultural setting.

The dominant theories of modernity over the past two centuries have been acultural in character. Modernisation theory, which was enormously influential in post-war development economics and sociology, assumed that all societies followed a broadly similar path from “traditional” to “modern” – and that the path already trodden by Western nations was the model for everyone else.

Rationalization and secularisation as core drivers 🔗

Two concepts are central to the acultural account: rationalization and secularisation. Max Weber, whose work is foundational here, understood rationalization as the process by which social life becomes governed by formal rules, calculation, and efficiency rather than tradition or emotion. According to Introduction to Sociology (BCcampus), Weber’s concept of rationalization and the associated “disenchantment of the world” describes the modern tendency to treat everything – nature, the economy, social organisation – as something that can be mastered through calculation and systematic knowledge.

Secularisation, meanwhile, refers to the declining authority of religion in public life. As defined by secularisation theorists, the social significance of religion diminishes in response to three key features of modernisation: social differentiation, societalisation, and rationalization. In the acultural account, this is not a specifically Western development – it is what happens when modern institutions and scientific reasoning take root anywhere.

The problems with the acultural approach 🔗

The acultural approach provides a clear, coherent framework for tracking large-scale structural changes. But it comes with serious problems. The most important, as Taylor argued, is that it locks us into an ethnocentric prison – projecting Western forms of development onto all other societies and treating non-Western cultures as simply “behind” on a universal timeline. In this view, traditional cultures are not different; they are inferior, backward, and awaiting the same enlightenment that Western societies supposedly achieved first.

This is not merely an academic concern. It has shaped real-world development policy, colonial ideologies, and international institutions that have often demanded that non-Western societies abandon their own cultural frameworks as the price of “development.” The acultural view also, as Taylor pointed out, screens out the possibility that Western modernity itself was shaped by a specific moral and spiritual vision – not just by culture-neutral forces of reason and science.

Émile Durkheim’s analysis adds another dimension to these problems. He observed that the transition to modern society – however it is understood – generates periods of crisis, chaos, and “normlessness” that he called anomie. When traditional ties to land, community, and shared belief are severed – by industrialisation, urbanisation, and secularisation – individuals can find themselves adrift, without the moral frameworks that previously guided behaviour. This is a risk whether modernity is understood culturally or acullturally, but it is especially acute when modern institutions are transplanted rapidly and without attention to local cultural resources.

The transformative impacts and social challenges of modernity 🔗

Both approaches acknowledge that modernity has been profoundly transformative – and that this transformation brings costs alongside benefits. On one side, modernity has been associated with gains in medicine, literacy, political rights, and material living standards. On the other, it has produced what Charles Taylor called the “malaises of modernity”: the fading of moral horizons as individualism displaces shared purpose, the dominance of instrumental reason in the market and technology, and a creeping sense that freedom is becoming hollow because it lacks meaningful direction.

Weber was even more pessimistic. He famously warned that the rationalization process could trap people in an “iron cage” of bureaucracy and rule-based control – a system so efficient and impersonal that it strips life of meaning and spontaneity. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Weber saw rationalization producing not just institutional rigidity but also a fragmentation of values: at the apex of the modern process, individuals find themselves navigating a chaotic “polytheism” of competing value systems, with no overarching framework to provide coherence.

These challenges are compounded when modernity collides with cultures that did not develop it internally. The erosion of traditional values, the weakening of community bonds, the pressure to adopt market-based relationships in place of kinship obligations – these are experienced not just as modernisation, but often as cultural loss. Whether that loss is necessary or avoidable depends, in part, on which approach to modernity you adopt.

Towards a more balanced view 🔗

The debate between cultural and acultural approaches is not simply theoretical – it has practical stakes. An exclusively acultural view tends to produce a one-size-fits-all model of development that has historically justified both colonial domination and post-colonial development frameworks that ignored local knowledge and institutions. A purely cultural view, taken to an extreme, can slide into a relativism that has difficulty identifying shared problems or building cross-cultural solidarities.

What is increasingly clear, across both sociological theory and comparative historical research, is that modernity is neither purely universal nor purely particular. Scholars working in the tradition of comparative-historical sociology have shown that the transition to modernity involves contradictory elements – roles played by emotion, religion, habit, and violence alongside formal rationality – that resist neat categorisation. Local cultures are not merely passive recipients of external modern forces; they actively shape how modernity is adopted, adapted, and contested.

Understanding both approaches – and their limitations – equips us to think more carefully about what we expect from modern institutions, and what we risk losing when the pace of change outstrips societies’ capacity to adapt on their own terms.

What do you think? Does the acultural view of modernity as a universal process of rationalization and secularisation risk erasing genuine cultural differences – or does it capture something real about how all societies eventually change? And if modernity always carries costs like anomie and the erosion of traditional values, who should decide what is worth preserving and what should be left behind?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity
2. https://journals.openedition.org/revestudsoc/28558
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
4. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/transcult/promad.html
5. https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology3rdedition/chapter/4-2-theoretical-perspectives-on-the-formation-of-modern-society/
6. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1635582/full
7. https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/theories-of-modernity/
8. https://idealsandidentities.com/2022/01/07/charles-taylor-the-malaise-of-modernity-in-the-21-century/
9. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/
10. https://sociology.yale.edu/sites/default/files/reed_adams_theory_and_society_2011_1.pdf