ABSTRACT
It seems timely to be looking at the question posed nearly 20 years ago by the Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt of whether a “general trend toward structural differentiation” in the domestic institutions of modernizing societies along with “continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs” by social movements that are pursuing different visions of “modernity” has generated a world in which societies live in “multiple modernities.” My paper will argue that, given the “number of possibilities realizable through autonomous human agency” (Eisenstadt 2000: 3), there have always been multiple modernities promulgated by different forms of states and societies, just as Eisenstadt suggests, through “continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs… [and]… multiple institutional and ideological patterns… carried forward by specific social actors… [and]… social movements pursuing different programs of modernity, holding very different views of what makes society modern” (Eisenstadt 2000: 2).
