Following Castoriadis, I shall understand by ‘modernity’ the conjunction of two key significations: autonomy and control. Autonomy refers to the freedom of a society to make its own laws; control has to do with the expansion of rational mastery over the world of things, including the development of science and technology and their application to production and the control of nature (Castoriadis 1990: 15–17). Peter Wagner has developed this idea more precisely into an ‘interpretative approach’, which focuses on the responses that human beings give to certain basic problématiques of social life, responses that change with the onset of modernity. These problématiques are, first, the search for true knowledge (the epistemic problématique); second, the construction of a viable and good political order (the political problématique); and third, the way in which the satisfaction of needs is organized (the economic problématique) (Wagner 2001: 7). Responses to these problématiques do not lead to the same institutional solutions everywhere. For instance, Wagner distinguishes North American interpretations of rationality as instrumental rationality, and of autonomy as individual autonomy, from other interpretations that conceive of collective autonomy as collective self-determination and favour non-instrumental kinds of rationality (Wagner 2001: 17, 20). This is why it is possible to speak of different trajectories of modernity.

The first theories of modernization in the 1960s understood the combination of autonomy and rational control as realized solely and definitively in the institutions that emerged in Europe and the US.