Western modernity: one among many

The emergence of the idea of 'multiple modernities‘ in the 1990s has made a significant contribution to debates about the salient features of contemporary world, and opened up rich new veins of research. Notably, it has spawned a vast literature on varieties of experience in non-western social spheres. Less widely explored, however, have been the implications of this perspective for the analysis of Western modernity. In this paper I explore what might be learnt from such an approach through an examination of Alain Touraine‘s Critique of Modernity. Touraine has not identified himself with the emerging paradigm of multiple modernities or the civilizational analysis from which it draws its founding premises. However, Critique of Modernity is not only consonant with them, but an illuminating exemplar of their application to a systematic examination of the specificities of the Western experience.