Introduction

The development of the social sciences in general and of sociology in particular is inextricably linked with the emergence and consolidation of the nation-state in nineteenth-century Europe. The nation-state and the more general modern social organization it entails have two basic dimensions that distinguish it from all pre-modern social formations:

1. (i) the decline of segmental localism and the massive mobilization/inclusion of the population in the national centre. This ‘bringing in’ process entails the concentration of the means of not only economic but also political, social and cultural production at the top; as well as the shifting of attachments and orientations from the traditional, non-differentiated community to what Anderson (1991) has called the ‘imaginary community’ of the nation-state;

2. (ii) the top to bottom differentiation of the societal whole into distinct institutional spheres, each portraying its own logic, values and historical dynamic. This differentiation, unlike that of complex, pre-modern social formations, is not confined to the top but reaches the social base or periphery as well.

Classical sociologists have tried to understand the social realities resulting from the British Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution by focusing holistically on the above two major features of modernity. Spencer (1972) and Durkheim (1964), for instance, explored differentiation as a major feature of the evolutionary process leading to the emergence of modern societies.