Apocalypse in the Long Run: Reflections on Huge Comparisons in the Study of Modernity

Methodologies of historical sociology face research problems centered on the instability of historical referents, their historical non-independence, and the privileging of objective time of the clock and calendar. The present essay, by reflecting on an analysis of the apocalyptic in the long run (Hall 2009), proposes the potential to solve these problems by way of a phenomenology of history, which analyzes the enactment and interplay of multiple social temporalities. Whereas high-modern theories of modernity tended to portray a secular trend toward the triumph of rationalized social order centred in diachronic time, analysis of the historical emergence of apocalyptic times in relation to other temporalities - especially objective (or diachronic) temporalities, the here-and-now, and the collective synchronic - reveals that the apocalyptic has survived within modernity through the articulation of rationalized diachronic time with the sacred strategic time of apocalyptically framed ‘holy war.’ Overall, the ‘empire of modernity’ is a hybrid formation that bridges diachronic and strategic temporalities. Despite diachronic developments that tend toward what Habermas described as the colonization of the lifeworld, a phenomenological analysis suggests the durability of the here-and-now and collective synchronic times. These analyses unveil a research agenda that deconstructs the high-modern ‘past’ versus ‘present’ binary in favour of a model that analyzes the interplay of multiple social forms, and thus encourages a retheorization of modernity as ‘recomposition’ encompassing multiple temporalities.