NOTES AND DISCUSSION

BUDAPEST CENTRAL: AGNES

HELLER’S THEORY OF
MODERNITY

Peter Beilharz

Agnes Heller’s work has long been caught up with the idea of History
and history, histories, the big world pictures and also the small personal
stories which run alongside and under their hypostatized versions in the
politics of state or in popular culture and its mythologies. Modernity, or the
modern, is the other big theme in Heller’s work, this again with the matching
emphasis on the experience of modernity and its core value of contingency.
Together with this enthusiasm for the value of contingency, Heller insists on
the necessity of pluralism. Having learned her Marxism from Lukács, as
Weberian-Marxism, Heller’s theory has always had Marx as its guide, even as
her personal project becomes detached from Marx after The Theory of Need
in Marx (1976). The angel of history who persistently shadows her work into
the more recent period, however, is that of Weber. Weber’s spirit is closer to
that of our own times, and his perspectivism and methodological pluralism
better reflect postmodern sensibilities, a life after high modernism, after
Fordism, after the big dreams and nightmares of totalitarianism.
The best statement of this methodological pluralism in Heller’s work in
its sociological form came in 1983, with the publication of the programmatic
Fehér-Heller statement ‘Class, Democracy, Modernity’, in Eastern Left,
Western Left. Marx’s temptation is to reduce modernity to capitalism, to side-
step civil society and to leave the state in the background, as epiphenom-
ena. Fehér and Heller, in the 1983 text, begin rather with the
Weberian-Marxism ambit, that modernity is the period and the region in

Thesis Eleven, Number 75, November 2003: 108–113

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
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 Beilharz: Budapest Central 109

which capitalism, industrialization and democracy appear simultaneously,

reacting to, reinforcing, complementing and checking each other (Fehér and
Heller, 1987: 201). This formulation was a theoretical anticipation of the
projects now collectively assembled, twenty years later, under the categories
which refer to alternative or multiple modernities. America is not the only
modernity (or capitalism, or empire) on this thinking. The very same year
(1983) Fehér and Heller together with György Markus published their remark-
able analysis of Soviet-type modernity in Dictatorship Over Needs. Over the
following years, Zygmunt Bauman (1989) published Modernity and the Holo-
caust and Jeffrey Herf (1984) published Reactionary Modernism, and the
species of German totalitarian modernity were on the map alongside the
Soviet experience. In this period of their Australian sojourn, the Hungarians
also came to know something of this, lazy or accidental modernity. Having
begun in a small country, in Hungary, and travelled via another, in the
antipodes, Fehér and Heller’s next step was to America, to New York, to the
centre of the web, to the aura left by Hannah Arendt at the New School. The
books continued, personal instalments in a personal theory. Their reception
was never spectacular; there was no choreographed spectacle, no A-list book
launches of glitterati; there was always more work to do, commuting between
New York and Budapest.
A Theory of Modernity came in under the radar (Heller, 1999). Heller’s
reception in the centres has always been marginal. Fifteen years spent
teaching in Manhattan has not shifted this – perhaps because she changes
her mind? Or perhaps because she happily goes her own way. She does not
seek a school, or to establish a constituency. As Heller puts it in opening A
Theory of Modernity, it is entirely possible that the self-same author will
devise more than one theory of modernity in a lifetime. The pretexts exist,
as in the 1983 essay ‘Class, Modernity, Democracy’, as do the post-texts, like
The Three Logics of Modernity (Heller, 2001). As Heller observes, A Theory of
Modernity can also be read as the closing frame of a trilogy, which began
with A Theory of History (1982) and had A Philosophy of History in Fragments
(1993) as its interval. The formal difference between the first two volumes is
striking, not least in voice. A Theory of History, ironically, is closer to tra-
ditional philosophy of history, while the Fragments book shifts away from
the more authoritative tone of historiography towards the fictive which ends
in An Ethics of Personality with imaginary letters between imaginary relatives
(Heller, 1996). At a different level, the two earlier books could be incorpor-
ated conceptually, as universal and particular, the fragment.
One point of consistency across Heller’s theory, however, lies in its
attention to the everyday. Heller’s is not merely a sociology of modernity,
or, if it is, it includes a sociology of modernity as everyday life. Modernity
has its dynamics, at higher levels of abstraction, from rationalization to
commodification and differentiation, but it is mediated by the level of experi-
ence. Heller’s own encounter with modernity, or modernities has been
110 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

extraordinary, and yet common – from Budapest to Auschwitz, to the Hun-

garian version of communism, through to exile in Australia, hope in America,
and the entirely unexpected return to Budapest after the fall of Communism.
Through all this, the quality of insight in Heller’s work depends on intuition,
and experience counts as much as insight or intellect. Agnes Heller therefore
sets out, not to survey other peoples’ theories of modernity, but to generate
a personal theory that will nevertheless have some universalistic claims. Even
the biggest theoretical claims, here, are personal, for the presence of Marx
persists, as does the ghost of Weber via Lukács, where it all began, in
Budapest all those years ago. Marx recedes; Weber persists because of the
breadth of his frame of reference, and because attitudinally he was the first
swallow of the postmodern, identified more conventionally into the 80s with
the figure of Nietzsche, even more fashionably with Heidegger.
In my recollection of the time we spent together in Melbourne over the
years from 1978–1986, it was Ferenc Fehér who prompted the heightened
sense of being-after. Here the postmodern was not a project, but a condition,
or a sensibility. Or to use the language Heller uses in A Theory of Modernity,
it is a matter of perspective. Heller presents this book as a theory of mod-
ernity from a postmodern perspective. Much of what passes for postmodern,
in comparison, is actually closer to the perspective we call modernist, as in
the mantra ‘all that is solid’. Postmodernity is not the stage that comes after
modernity. It is modern. Modernism is also part of the postmodern, even
though modernist modernity cannot regain its absolute self-confidence.
Modernist modernity was locomotive; its image of transience, such as it was,
was the railway station. The residual traditionalism of this earlier modernism
lay in its hesitance to embrace motion fully, and in its use of the future as a
horizon or destination beyond rather than a present of Jetztzeit. Some of these
future horizons were awful. The locomotive breath pushed its victims to
Auschwitz and to the Gulag. Our postmoderns, in comparison, accept life on
the railway station, this perhaps especially in Europe; in America, in com-
parison, the poor stick with Greyhound, the tourists in the airport terminals.
Whatever the form of propulsion, today, the future is closer, ever unknown
with Heller. We now live on Budapest Central. Yet the moral implication of
living in this transience is not bad; it implies responsibility for the present,
rather than the abstract, and always potentially dangerous commitment to the
distant future of utopia or dystopia. This is an ethics of responsibility, or care,
rather than of ultimate ends.
Marx was the locomotive of classical theory, Trotsky his great historic
inheritor. Weber was too melancholic for this, seeking respite rather in
Ascona, while Hegel stays settled in the old Weimar. Marx lived up to his
own expectations in at least one sense – he was the most revolutionary of
theorists, ultimately the advocate of both technology and redemption. Mod-
ernity, here defined as capitalism, is dynamic and future oriented. Marx
cannot finally disentangle the goal of human autonomy from the drive to
 Beilharz: Budapest Central 111

rational mastery. If Romanticism and Enlightenment are the two faces of

modernity, then it is Marx who manages most powerfully to wear both of
these masks. This is why Marx is so central for us, as Castoriadis showed,
and why he remains so inseparably bound to the Promethean spirit, too close
to the gods for us as mere mortals.
Now we are a world after Marx. Modernity is autopoetic, and functional
– this much of Luhmann is retained by Heller. We move, we choose or are
forced to move, to fulfil or to fail in our destinies, not to follow the pre-
scriptions of our birth. We retain this sense of romantic action even as we
suffer under the weight of the forces we call structures. This is precisely what
we call contingency, and it is central to Heller’s thinking, which is at least as
much a philosophy of experience as it is a sociology of action. We make our-
selves; in this sense we choose ourselves, however successfully. The world
moves, and we also move it.
Yet this theory of action occurs within the theory of modernity and its
logics or dynamics. Heller’s is not a naïve argument; but it refuses that kind
of victim thinking which runs through from Rousseau, where we can only
ever be creatures of our circumstances. Heller now suggests that there are
three logics of modernity: the logic of technology, the logic of the functional
allocation of social positions, and the logic of political power. Modernity is
best seen not as a homogenized or totalized whole, but as a fragmented
world of some open, but not unlimited, possibilities. These logics are plural,
and pluralizing. Ours is neither the world of the iron cage, nor of hopeless
globalization. These three logics of modernity can work together, or in
tension; they need carriers, or agents.
It is not technology, but mentality or imagination that enframes. Yet if
the first logic of modernity is typically indicated by the word technology, the
second logic refers to markets, labour markets, and money, all the ingredi-
ents of Gesellschaft. This is the point at which romantics come out in a rash,
for they compare not the old world and the new, but the new and an (old)
ideal, that of Gemeinschaft. Merit and meritocracy may not work, but it is a
better (more modern) guide than the value of mindless tradition here.
Monetization frees people from personal dependency. Monetization may not
be very dignified, but it does expand the realm of freedom. Heller’s shadow
thinker as sociologist here, then, is neither Marx nor Tönnies, but Simmel.
Her philosophical doppelganger is Kierkegaard. Nor does this sensibility then
mean that societies like ours can be equal, or satisfied, or dispense with alien-
ation, neither the reality nor the concept. The rich do not sleep on Budapest
Central. But we still have to hold modernity to its promise, of democracy and
freedom. For, to repeat Heller’s is not a naïve sociology, even if its concern
is to identify room to manoeuvre. Nor is it a sociology of action, waiting for
the next social movement. Its optimism is more immediate and anthropo-
logical. The world moves, the big world moves, but so do the smaller worlds
we inhabit. Contingency depends here, less on technological necessity than
112 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

on historical imagination, positive or negative. Liberal democratic modernity

offers more room to move than the alternative modernities of fascism or com-
munism, because of the tension built into its first two terms. The main value
of liberation is freedom; for democracy, equality is the highest value. Power
and democracy are in constant tension.
The mood in which Heller’s theory of modernity is offered is positive,
and open. Its frame, the logics of modernity and its institutional relations,
foreground the immediacy of personal lifeworlds, home, place, things. She
closes A Theory of Modernity with an opening, for it is, in this way of thinking,
easier to answer questions than to leave them open. The last lines read as
follows: ‘Postscript: perhaps I have answered too many questions – more
than I should have. If this is so, please re-translate my answers into so many
new questions’ (Heller, 1999: 235). Heller’s is a theory of modernity based
on democratic personality.
Which might return us, finally, to the question of the relative marginal-
ity of her work. Perhaps the problem with most mainstream critical theory is
that it appeals because it combines the appearance of an immediately demo-
cratic or mimetic attraction (‘here, you can deconstruct yourself’) with the
romantic gloom characteristic of our time (‘nothing will change, it can only
get worse’, for the others at least). The challenge of Heller’s work, in contrast,
is after all closer to the spirit of Enlightenment and the real strength of its call,
not only to think for yourself but to be, to act as yourself. This is a big ask.
The call to autonomy is not easily heard in the Babel of noisier theorists.
Tucked away in a footnote, Heller’s Theory of Modernity also casts out
a line to its own solitude:
It is not contingent which authors and works become ‘famous’, or prescribed
reading, or themes for conferences, and quoted many times; many authors who
are neither worse nor less interesting than those who have ‘made it’, and yet
they remain entirely unknown, and rarely published. It becomes important, for
example, where one happens to be born. A man or woman who is born in
Paris has a thousand times greater opportunity to become prescribed reading
than a person born in Australia. Whom one knows, who is quoting someone,
and who meets whom (by accident) are also important factors of selection.
(Heller, 1999: 283n.19)

Budapest Central has more than one centre, just as does the railway
system of Melbourne or New York. Heller’s message is like the song of the
metro busker, the chance encounter with the troubadour that makes you see
the world differently, even if just for a moment, as a new line of vision opens
up. Everyday life has its own epiphanies. If you’re in the wrong centre, you’ll
risk missing it, or hearing its echoes at a distance. You can walk on; you
might pause, read the book, imbibe the spirit of this most grateful commuter
of modernities. There are crossroads in the underground, and not only in the
labyrinth; there are exits and arrivals, even after Auschwitz. There is the
present. There is the gift.
 Beilharz: Budapest Central 113

Peter Beilharz is Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory at
Latrobe University. He is presently working on a four volume edition of American
Postwar Critical Theory for Sage Publications, and with George Ritzer on the Sage
Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2 volumes, 2004). [Email: P.Beilharz@latrobe.edu.au]

References
Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fehér, F. and Heller, A. (1987) ‘Class, Democracy, Modernity’, in F. Fehér and A. Heller
Eastern Left, Western Left. Oxford: Polity.
Fehér, F., Heller, A. and Markus, G. (1983) Dictatorship Over Needs. Oxford: Blackwell.
Herf, J. (1984) Reactionary Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Heller, A. (1976) The Theory of Need in Marx. London: Allison and Busby.
Heller, A. (1982) A Theory of History. London: Routledge.
Heller, A. (1993) A Philosophy of History in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heller, A. (1996) An Ethics of Personality. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heller, A. (1999) A Theory of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heller, A. (2001) The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern
Imagination. Budapest: Collegium Budapest.