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There is no doubt that Taylor is convinced of the necessity of such a tri-functional approach, judging by his masterly work on The Way the Modern World Works.9 In this work he, in effect, enhances the viewpoint of Braudel on the world systems which were centred successively on Amsterdam, London and New York. For each of these cities, as for the countries they governed and the regions of the world they influenced, Taylor draws up a general overview of their economic activity, political action and cultural evolution, all being considered without any a priori determinism favouring one or the other of these three levels of analysis. In order to judge it from a major perspective, I will only note the way in which he recognizes the cultural evolution of these three hegemonic societies.To this end, he devotes great attention to the ideological repercussions of the economic exploits of these can-do societies in a no can-do world , in other words of these effective societies in a world which was still ill-adapted. Similarly, he does not neglect any of the cultural echoes that the political success of these same societies provoked, such as the maturation of a system of international law which advances from the jus genitum promoted by Grotius of Holland, to the freedom of the high seas promoted by Imperial England, to its multiformed flowering when the policies of the dominant USA are based on international treaties rather than on the ‘big stick’ that it also knows how to use. When it concerns structures and ideological activities considered in their clear entirety, Taylor is interested, admittedly, in the approaches of specialised ideological apparatus10 but even more in the broad movements which reveal themselves in the depths of popular culture, that is to say, in the daily life of everybody – or – at the very least in the life of a large minority by which society as a whole is, in the end, led. Thus, for example, he underlines the somewhat peaceful co-existence that was more or less made to hold sway in the United Provinces which contrasts singularly with the wars of religion which devastated France and even more so Germany. As religion gives way to commerce there follows a strong development of a bourgeois and urban lifestyle and living conditions to which the mercantile class attach themselves. New tastes which become ever more a part of daily life to the point of this flowering of portraits where the scenes of everyday life become works of art in place of mythological or religious allegories, whilst versions/prints of these pictures soon reach the more popular dwellings/living conditions.
In the following stage, that of English pre-eminence - the industrial revolution, the rejection of annexations in Europe itself, the manifest preference for indirect rule in countries where the English protectorate succeeds other European colonisers and the building of a massive empire stretching to the Indies are examined closely, as is the diffusion of English political institutions in the territories where British emigration is abundant. However, he is interested as much in the cultural transformations taking place in Great Britain and which extend beyond to a greater or lesser degree towards the entire world. London becomes a sanctuary for political refugees from all countries, whilst the English universities open themselves to the elite of all continents. The English novel is imitated everywhere. The comfortable lifestyle of the British bourgeoisie is envied and imitated with the help of clubs, societies and Masonic lodges. The process of Europeanisation which sweeps the world is most often borne by English economic and cultural models.
When American primacy becomes obvious after 1945, it is, in its turn, analyzed in terms of an upset of interests, values and lifestyles given impetus from the new American centre. All the characteristics of this Americanisation of the global system, gone into great detail by Taylor, are well known, in industrial, banking, political and cultural matters, that it seems to me to be of little value to emphasize them here, except to note the very great attention he devotes to the observations of Gramsci from the 1930’s11, regarding the joint development of revenues and consumption (Fordism ), the maturation of a new popular culture (literature, radio and cinema, later continued by television) and the diffusion of new lifestyles of which the automobile, comfortable living conditions and supermarket become the linchpins, at the expense of the cities.
Primacy, preponderance and other pre-eminences that I just evoked are no strangers to the vocabulary used by Taylor, but when it concerns a clarification of these manifestations by a precise concept, it is to hegemony that he turns, in the rigorous sense that Gramsci gave it.
Taylor has indeed perfectly understood the approach of the latter, thanks to this he surpasses Braudel as regards those aspects of the world system which the world economy and classical analysis of international relations cannot fully understand. Gramsci takes into consideration all sorts of specialised devices, but he pays greater attention still to the widespread common culture in society, from where come his frequent references to living conditions, city, refined or ordinary lifestyles, in short, to everything that makes up daily life. Indeed, it is by rooting themselves in this breeding ground of social life that innovations lose their unfamiliarity and take on a durable everyday quality.
Taylor treats equally the great innovations of the three hegemonic cities (and societies) that he studies and the massive transformations of the standards and lifestyles, because hegemony is manifest through all these channels. Each hegemonic society in a world system points the way in the technical-economic order likewise in the political and cultural orientation of world affairs. It expresses its particular interests in a universal way, by converting them into general principles and into models offered to all other countries. It spreads new needs and new consumer goods, so well that it serves as an example – for a time – of the new modernity. By foreshadowing the future to which the world system seems promised, it makes its effective pre-eminence seem natural in the trade and diplomatic order and even more difficultly in the realm of ideas.
One sees Taylor fully internationalise the Gramscian theory. Gramsci who lived in an Italy that had scarcely been unified for half a century and who was more concerned with the construction of an Internationale than with seeing an Italian nation mature, had as his first concern that of understanding the success of fascism and the failures of socialism and of youthful communism in Italy. For this reason, ideological (or cultural) hegemony often seemed to him the counterpart of political domination : a domination constrains social classes; a hegemony convinces them to accept the established order. In other words, a society maintains its coherence, in spite of the transformations which work on it, by the joint effect of state constraint and the consent of the population to the established order. A consent which is maintained by ideological means of which common culture is the sediment and which in the case of Italy, owed a lot to the ‘solid bastions of civil society’, including the omnipresent Church, than to a weak state alongside a newly-formed nation, which was finding difficulty in incorporating regions which not so long ago had been independent for centuries.
By shifting the centre of gravity of the (Gramscian) reflection towards the global system, Taylor helps one to understand how the preponderance of an hegemonic society, admittedly supported by its economic and military capacities, relies upon another mechanism which becomes decisive in the long term ; the respect and the envy which its performance arouses. On the scale of the world system, a consent to the established international order is married with the multiform preponderance of the main power and to the modernity, examples of which are displayed in its cities and major regions. In short, hegemonic structures are the sources of modernity so long as their world system lasts.
It is still necessary to question the nature and length of this modernity which would serve to define the so-called modern world system the development of which was begun by Europe from the ‘long sixteenth century’ and which would continue to the point where it encompassed the entire planet up to the end of the twentieth century. Taylor is aware of this problem. Three years after The Way the Modern World Works whose reference to the singular seems to see him won over to the dominant orthodoxy, he published Modernities the plural of which is certainly better suited to the Geohistorical interpretation12 which this work sets out to be. For those who doubt the uniqueness of ‘modern times’, the reading of this book is stimulating because Taylor debates in it for all that he is worth to replace ‘the’ modernity, pons asinorum of so many sociologies with undefined historico-geographic contours, by a conception of social modernisation where the historic and geographic can find their reference points
.In substance, his approach leads him to distinguish several modernities and to explore their relations with successive hegemonies that he has previously detailed conforming to the Braudelian reference points. At the end of this research whose stages I will not discuss, Taylor seems to me to come very close to a conclusion that he does not explicitly underline and which I am going to evoke in my own terms without it seems to me betraying him.
This conclusion is that modernity and even modernization as established by West European scholarly usage, is only a commodity of language permitting one to allude to a whole series of social processes, to multiple sudden new developments, whether one might not wish to go into their detail or whether one might wish to erase some of their aspects, such as capitalism or imperialism. In effect, the main processes ( which are complex, winding, rebounding) that modernity subsumes are the difficult formation of democratic –bourgeois states, the long capitalist industrial revolution jumping from one technological innovation to another and the cultural revolution which spring forth at the same time, as the press, universal education and the growth of the media spread their effects.
Three huge processes (one political, the other economic and the third cultural) whose multiple tributaries do not cease to intertwine their courses in a geographic area expanded by colonisations, pushed back by the Russian and Chinese revolutions, expanded once more by decolonisation and made global by the implosion of state socialism. If such is the case, the research of social scientists, freed from all reference to ‘a’ perennial and quintessential modernity can describe any macrosociological reality (a world system, an historic period, a territorial space, etc) according to its own features and intrinsic virtues. Thus it follows from this, cities, might have been for a time hegemonic centres; to call them ‘modern’ can only have a comparative bearing in space as in time.
One lesson to be drawn from the works of Taylor on world systems, modernizations and world cities: is that an investigation bears fruit in a theoretical sense when it takes on well-calibrated facts (such as the geography of ‘advanced services’ linked to urban networks) to which the more general concepts have to abide by, so long as other still better-founded investigations do not broaden or relax their scope. If the research of GaWC directed by Taylor and his co-researchers can be broadened along the lines that I believed it is possible to suggest, but also according to many of the ways I have not observed, there is no doubt that the geohistorical interpretation (as Taylor says) of the phenomena that I am pleased to call ‘macrosociological’13 will gain in theoretical robustness and therefore in a practical utility.
see : world cities 2
Notes9. Peter J. Taylor - The Way the Modern World Works - World Hegemony to World Impasse, ed. Wiley, 1996
10. Churches, schools, media and all other productive institutions of high - or low - culture.
11. See his Prison Notebooks (published after 1945).
12. Peter J. Taylor Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation, Polity Press, 1999.
13. Use of this term is justified by a diverse number of works which one can consult on www.macrosociologie.com
see :
world cities 1
see : world cities 2