The multiple modernities thesis has been the focus of scholarly debates in the last decade and has become widely accepted in the study of non-Western societies. Yet the thesis suffers from a major incoherence which lies in its principal assumptions about the process by which social change occurs. The article offers a critique of the multiple modernities thesis which challenges Eisenstadt’s understanding of diverse cultural contexts and their localized institutional constellations on account of its dualistic division into two levels: the intangible (ontological visions or culture) and the tangible (structure or system) by which it seeks to account for the plurality of modern societies.
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