Modernity

Modernity typically refers to "a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period," marked in particular by the rise of industrialism, capitalism, secularization, the nation-state, and its constituent forms of surveillance (Barker 2005, 444). The term is related to the modern era and modernism but forms a distinct concept. In different contexts, the term may refer to a condition associated with cultural and intellectual movements of a period beginning anywhere from 1436 to 1789 (or for a few as late as 1895), and extending to the 1970s or later (Toulmin 1992, 3-5).

Related terminology

While the term "modern" can be traced back to the fifth century, when it was used to distinguish the Christian era from the pagan age, the word did not gain widespread currency until the seventeenth-century French “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” on whether modern culture is superior to classical culture. Already with its earliest use, however, modernity was associated with the renunciation of the recent past, in favor of new beginnings and a reinterpretation of historical origins. The distinction between "modernity" and "modern" did not arise until the nineteenth century, however (Delanty 2007). Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century, replaced by post-modernity, while others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by post-modernity; they^{[weasel words]} use terms like late modernity and liquid modernity.^{[citation needed]}

Toward a definition of Modernity

In sociological thought

In sociology, a discipline which arose largely as a reaction to the social problems associated with "modernity" (Harriss 2000, 325), the term does not refer to a historical era as such, but rather to particular processes and discourses which followed the Enlightenment, defined especially by 'rationalization': "The term refers to processual aspects, especially tensions and dynamics. Modernity is thus a particular kind of time consciousness which defines the present in its relation to the past, which must be continuously recreated; it is not a historical epoch that can be periodized" (Delanty 2007).

At its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization. Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past. (Giddens 1998, 94)

Modernity can be described as "the loss of certainty and the realization that certainty can never be established once and for all. It is a term that also can simply refer to reflection on the age and in particular to movements within modern society that lead to the emergence of new modes of thought and consciousness" (Delanty 2007). In sociological terms, modernity aimed toward "a progressive force promising to liberate humankind from ignorance and irrationality" (Rosenau 1992, 5). In the work of theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman, however, modernity commonly represents a move away from the central tenets of enlightenment and toward nefarious processes of alienation, such as in commodity fetishism and the events of the Holocaust (Adorno 1973; Bauman 1989).

As a result of recent debate on globalization, comparative civilizational analysis, and the postcolonial concern with “alternative modernities”, the conception of multiple modernities was introduced by Eisenstadt (2003; see also Delanty 2007) A conceptualization of modernity as plural condition is central to this approach, and a gradual movement away from the exclusive concern with western modernity to a more cosmopolitan perspective is associated with this turn in theory. "Modernity is not westernization and its key processes and dynamics can be found in all societies" (Delanty 2007).

In political thought

The American and French Revolutions led to the formation of some of the first republics to be founded on explicitly modern political theories, modelled on the earlier, but short-lived Republic of Corsica (Saul 1992, 55–61). The modern political system of Liberalism empowered members of the disenfranchised Third Estate.^{[citation needed]} In many nations, the power of elected bodies and leaders supplanted traditional rule by hereditary monarchs.

In the arts

In art history, "modernity", as distinct from both the Modern Age and modernism, is a "term applied to the cultural condition in which the seemingly absolute necessity of innovation becomes a primary fact of life, work and thought. … Modernity is more than merely the state of being modern or the opposition between old and new" (Smith 2009). In his essay "The Painter of Modern Life" (1864) Charles Baudelaire provided one of the most famous uses of the term and its most well-known definition: “By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent” (Baudelaire 1964, 13).

Defining characteristics of modernity

There have been numerous ways of understanding what modernity is, particularly in the field of sociology. For instance, modernity may be considered "marked and defined by an obsession with 'evidence'", visuality, and visibility (Leppert 2004, 19).

In general, large-scale social integration, associated with modernity, involves:

Increased movement of goods, capital, people, and information among formerly separate areas, and increased influence that reaches beyond a local area.
Increased formalization of those mobile elements, development of 'circuits' on which those elements and influences travel, and standardization of many aspects of the society in general that is conducive to the mobility.
Increased specialization of different segments of society, such as the division of labor, and interdependency among areas.

These social changes are somewhat common to many different levels of social integration, and not limited to what happened to the West European societies in a specific time period. For example, these changes might happen when formerly separate virtual communities merge. Similarly, when two human beings develop a close relationship, communication, convention, and increased division of roles tend to emerge. Another example can be found in ongoing globalization—the increased international flows changing the landscape for many. In other words, while modernity has been characterized in many seemingly contradictory ways, many of those characterizations can be reduced to a relatively simple set of concepts of social change.^{[citation needed]}

References

Adem, Seifudein. 2004. "Decolonizing Modernity: Ibn-Khaldun and Modern Historiography". In Islam: Past, Present and Future, International Seminar on Islamic Thought Proceedings, edited by Ahmad Sunawari Long, Jaffary Awang, and Kamaruddin Salleh, 570–87. Salangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia: Department of Theology and Philosophy, Faculty of Islamic Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics, translated by E.B. Ashton. London: Routledge. (Originally published as Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1966)
Barker, Chris. 2005. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage. ISBN 0-7619-4156-8
Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press.; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0745606857 (Polity, cloth) ,ISBN 0745609309 (Polity, 1991 pbk), ISBN 0801487196 (Cornell, cloth), ISBN 080142397X (Cornell, pbk)
Delanty, Gerard. 2007. "Modernity." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer. 11 vols. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 1405124334
Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, 2 vols. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Giddens, Anthony. 1998. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804735689 (cloth) ISBN 0804735697 (pbk.)
Harriss, John. 2000. "The Second Great Transformation? Capitalism at the End of the Twentieth Century". In Poverty and Development into the 21st Century, revised edition, edited by Tim Allen and Alan Thomas, 325–42. Oxford and New York: Open University in association with Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198776268
Leppert, Richard. 2004. "The Social Discipline of Listening". In Aural Cultures, edited by Jim Drobnick, 19-35. Toronto: YYZ Books; Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery Editions. ISBN 0920397808
Norris, Christopher. 1995. "Modernism". In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich, 583. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198661320
Rosenau, Pauline Marie. 1992. Post-modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691086192 (cloth) ISBN 0691023476 (pbk)
Saul, John Ralston. 1992. Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. New York: Free Press; Maxwell Macmillan International. ISBN 0029277256
Smith, Terry. “Modernity”. Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. (Subscription access, accessed September 21, 2009).
Toulmin, Stephen Edelston. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0029326311 Paperback reprint 1992, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-80838-6

External links

Religion and Modernity- Modern mans' encounter with religion