The majority of studies of post-communism – habitually grouped under the heading of 'transitology' – understand the transition ultimately as a political and cultural convergence of the ex-communist societies with Western Europe. Even those critical approaches that regard the post-communist transition as a relatively unique phenomenon (as in the approaches of path dependency and neo-classical sociology) tend to conflate normative prescriptions with empirical descriptions and to move within an overall framework of what Michael Kennedy has aptly called 'transition culture'. This (...) article argues instead that the transition's nature can only be fully grasped if a case-specific and historical-contextual approach is taken. In theoretical terms, a three-step movement to grasp diversity in Central and Eastern Europe is proposed: (1) the acknowledgement of the plurality of modernizing agency and its creativity; (2) the acknowledgement of multi-interpretability and difference as primary elements of modernity; and (3) a sensitivity to the resulting institutional variety in societal constellations. In substantive terms, it is argued that diversity is a distinctive mark of Europe that is bound to persist in an enlarged Europe, despite the spirit of assimilation in the accession process. (shrink)

Recent writing in social theory has seen a renewed preoccupation with questions of religion, secularization and civilizational difference. This article reappraises the work of one early twentieth-century thinker in relation to these issues: the German historical theologian and close colleague of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923). The article concentrates particularly on Troeltsch’s late writings on Europe and ‘Europeanism’. The thesis is defended that Troeltsch offers an important gloss on Weber’s famous assertion of the ‘universal significance and validity’ of occidental rationalism. (...) Troeltsch offers a thicker, more concretized reading of Weber’s statement that serves as a precursor to contemporary thinking about ‘multiple modernities’ and also as a fund of trenchant counter-responses to the claims of recent post-colonial critics about Eurocentrism in western social science. Troeltsch’s writings give us one example among many of a current of cosmopolitan reflexivity in European social thought between the wars that avoided both nationalism and chauvinism, on the one hand, and nihilism and obscurantism, on the other. (shrink)