Abstract

The rise of Confucian East Asia suggests that traditions are present as active agents in modernity and, by implication, the modernizing process can assume different culture forms. Notwithstanding the established fact that modernization as the most dynamic economical, political and social force for transforming the world in human history originated in Western Europe, it was in its inception a mixture of conflictual and even contradictory orientations. If we have conceptual difficulty generalizing about British, French and German modernities, American modernity must be treated as a separate case. We can, therefore, characterize the story of modernization as a master narrative containing a variety of globally significant local knowledge. Precisely because an overwhelming majority of cases of local knowledge that are globally significant are Western (Western European and North American) in origin, the phenomenon of East Asian modernity is particularly intriguing. With a view toward the future, it seems reasonable to expect an increasing number of cases of normal or even exemplary modernity will come from the non-Western world.

Key words: Confucianism, East Asia, modernities