Studies in Social and Political Thought Page 73 What Do We Have in Common? Modernity and the Paradoxes of Postnational

This article tries to develop an antiessentialist theoretical framework for understanding the notion of modernity and its current changes from a nation-state institutionalization of modernity to a postnational one. It refers to Lyotard’s “Postmodern Condition ” and discusses three topics of Lyotard’s description of modernity: the social science repre-sentation of modernity, the paradox of social integration under mod-ern conditions, and the question of whether there is something like a normative foundation in the concept of modernity. It is argued that a theory of modernity has to be a theory of world society. On the one hand an antiessentialist approach to modernity and its postnational changes stresses both the necessity and impossibility of social integra-tion and differentiates between a national and a postnational solution of the paradox of modernity. On the other it describes – with refer-ence to Nancy and Derrida – the normative content of modernity as a structural unfinished community building