They Have Never Been Modern? Then What Is the Problem with those Persians? Paul James 1 The question of what it means to use the concepts of modernity and the modern sounds like an arcane theoretical concern. Were not those issues sorted out at the end of the twentieth century in the Great Debate between the moderns and postmoderns? Did not the postmoderns win that struggle, only to disintegrate a decade later in their infinite recursions into relativism? Are not we now living in a time when we are all a bit modern and a bit postmodern, variously immersed in digital and personal networks of swirling meaning? However, for all of the marginal theoretical interest in the question of the modern today, the concept continues to carry extraordinary unacknowledged weight in mainstream descriptions and arguments. Long after the Great Debate, the modern continues to be counter-posed against other ways of life that are defined in the negative as pre-modern. In other words, those persons living as members of ‘pre-modern’ communities still do not have their dominant formations named except in the negative or in relation to the higher-order concept of ‘the modern’. They are held in place by 31 1 With thanks to Liam Magee and Simon Cooper. Paul James, 'They have Never been Modern: Then What Is the Problem with those Persians', in S. Pascoe, V. Rey and P. James, eds, Making Modernity from the Mashriq to the Maghreb, Arena Publications, Fitzroy, 2015.