The Crucial Century

Marx, Nietzsche and their contemporaries experienced modernity as a whole at a moment when only a small part of the world was truly modern. [Over] a century later, when the processes of modernization have cast a net that no one, not even in the remotest corner of the world, can escape, we can learn a great deal from the first modernists, not so much about their age as about our own.

We have lost our grip on the contradictions that they had to grasp with all their strength, at every moment in their everyday lives, in order to live at all. Paradoxically, these first modernists may turn out to understand us--the modernization and modernism that constitute our lives--better than we understand ourselves. If we can make their visions our own, and use their perspectives to look at our own environments with fresh eyes, we will see that there is more depth in our lives than we thought. We will feel our community with people all over the world who have been struggling with the same dilemmas as our own. And we will get back in touch with a remarkably rich and vibrant modernist culture that has grown out of these struggles: a culture that contains vast resources of strength and health, if only we come to know it as our own.

It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead. To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities--and in the modern men and women--of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

--Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1988), 36.

[Photos top to bottom: Karl Marx (d. 1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), Muhammad 'Abduh (d. 1905), Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897)].