Modernity

11 Key excerpts on "Modernity"

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  Nationalism and Social Theory

  Modernity and the Recalcitrance of the Nation

  • Gerard Delanty, Patrick O′Mahony(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The theory of Modernity has been inspired by the historical and cultural turn in the social sciences over the last two decades. Modernity thus has a historical dimension to it but one that is conceived in terms of a ‘history of the present’. Combining insights from philosophy, political theory and sociology, the social theory of Modernity can be seen as an attempt to theorize the current situation in light of long-term social transformations. Such questions as the significance of globalization, postModernity, multiple modernities and new social movements have dominated the agenda of the new social theory of Modernity. In the following, Modernity is discussed, first, as a historical process driven by civilizational constellations; second, a more philosophical definition is offered by looking at some of the ideals of Modernity as a cultural project; third, a sociological definition is given with a focus on some of the key institutional dynamics of Modernity; and fourth, the problem of symbolic violence and radical freedom in Modernity is discussed in relation to nationalism. Modernity AND CIVILIZATIONAL PROCESSES There is some advantage to be gained by beginning with a historical perspective, since Modernity, while not being reducible to a particular historical epoch, is a historically constituted project. In order to avoid a crude reduction of Modernity to something like ‘modern history’ that is counter-opposed to the ‘medieval’ or ‘ancient’ periods, we should see it as a developmental process that is driven by distinct processes, dynam-ics, conflicts and conceptions of the world. In this way we can avoid seeing Modernity as a historical era that is defined by the categories of western history, which become absurd when applied to societies with very different histories.

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  A History and Theory of the Social Sciences

  Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air

  • Peter Wagner(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Despite the enormous variety of specific conceptualisations of Modernity, the great majority of them agree in identifying the key characteristic of Modernity: human beings think of themselves as setting their own rules and laws for their relation to nature, for their living together and for understanding themselves. Starting out from some such assumptions, however, most sociological analyses of Modernity aim at deriving a particular institutional structure from this double imaginary signification. And this is where they are led to profoundly miscon-ceptualise modern social life. Terms such as 'democracy' or 'market' certainly have one of their points of reference in the idea of the autonomy of human action. But they provide only such general indications as to be almost devoid of content - when, for instance, the political forms of former Soviet socialism are taken to be expressions of collective autonomy and therefore as democratic. Or, on the contrary, they are read in such a limiting way that the current institutions of Western societies are considered to be the only adequate interpretation of the idea of autonomy. Thus, it was the error of large parts of the social sciences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to mistake a historically specific interpretation of a problématique for a general problématique of Modernity. Sociology tended to conflate the historical form of the European nation-state with the solution to the political problématique, or as it was often called, the problem of social order, which was expressed in the concept 'society'. To put the conceptual problem in other words: the basic ideas, autonomy and mastery, were taken to be of a universal character, and as such their socio-historical emergence marked the distinction between Modernity and 'tradition'. The project of Modernity then was the full permeation of the world by this double imaginary signification. Man was to be fully autonomous and in complete control over the world.

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  Unfinished Agenda

  The Dynamics Of Modernization In Developing Nations

  • Manning Nash(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This requires that a goodly part of the honor, prestige, and good~ of a society flow to those who perform in the arenas of a society-politics, economics, science-and to definers of the world view. The social structure of Modernity is mobility-oriented-spatially, socially, and culturally. The structure facilitates the movements of persons and resources (including 6 Modernization: Meanings Old and New the powerful symbols of legitimacy and social destiny) to flow to those groups who are goal-attainers and performers. A third aspect of modernization is a psychological or personality dimension. Modernization requires innovative, consciously creative persons, who are at ease with mobility and change, who are largely self-directed, and whose short-run ends are mainly economic, but whose long-run aims are achievement for the collectivity or for humanity at large. Obviously, not everybody, nor even the majority of people, in a society needs to have this particular cluster of behavior, or personality syndrome. What is crucial is that people like these come to be occupants of the central zone of institutions and values of a society, or in Lenin's earthier phrase, come to dominate the strategic heights of economy and politics. It is now time to give a succinct definition of modernization or Modernity, which should always be played back against the nuances spelled out above. Modernization is the growth in capacity to apply tested knowledge to all branches of production; Modernity is the social, cultural, and psychological framework that facilitates the application of science to the processes of production. Contrary to what a critic said of an earlier formulation of this definition, it does not imply a movement toward technocracy in a Western political frame-work (Brookfield, 197 5).

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  Rethinking Modernity

  Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination

  • G. Bhambra(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  more generally. Early theorists of Modernity, then, were primarily interested in determining what ‘modern man’ was like and what the practical implications of being modern might entail in terms of the advancement of non-, or under-, developed countries. 3 In this way, moder- nity was understood both as a psychosocial syndrome as well as being recognized as a process of national development. At a higher level of abstraction, Portes (1973) argued that psychosocial Modernity could be identified with the set of action-orientations defined by Parsons’s pattern variables which allowed the specification both of motivational complexes (e.g., achievement versus ascription) and the associated norms and role def- initions embodied in institutions (e.g., universalism versus particularism). The emphasis on institutional regularities was the second dimension through which scholars distinguished modern from traditional societies. It was believed that the patterns – or structures – of modernization had a universal tendency to extend into all social contexts and to institute major changes in social and political structures (Levy 1965). These changes included the emergence and development of the market economy, industrial society, the nation-state, and bureaucratic rationality – modern forms of organization that were seen as impersonal, interdependent, specialized, and formal (Moore 1963: 522). As Portes (1973) argues, mod- ernization was a synthetic term covering a series of societal processes that were seen to converge into a stable whole, that is, modern society. These processes, which were often taken as the principal indices along which countries were measured and then ranked in studies of modern- ization, included, urbanization and ecological relocation, literacy, social mobility, democratic participation, mass media production and consump- tion, education, and industrialization and a factory system of production (Lerner 1958; Feldman and Moore 1962; Portes 1973).

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  Modernism and the Social Sciences

  Anglo-American Exchanges, c.1918–1980

  • Mark Bevir(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Modernism and the Social Sciences Mark Bevir The modern “social sciences” did not begin to emerge as a cluster of relatively coherent disciplines until the end of the nineteenth century. It was only during the twentieth century that many of them became housed in distinct university departments with their own appointments, bolstered by professional associations and journals, and legitimized by their own norms. The modern social sciences arose as part of a dramatic intellectual shift. Whereas the nineteenth century had been dominated by developmental historicisms that were rooted in romantic and organic concerns with life, creativity, and change, the twentieth century was increasingly dominated by formal types of social knowledge that relied on models, correlations, and classifications. 1 Modernism needs to be distinguished from Modernity. Modernity and modern history can stand in contrast to ancient and medieval history. Modernity can also be used to refer to the historical period that has come after the Enlightenment. In contrast to these uses of the word “moder- nity,” “modernism” usually refers to literary, artistic, and architectural movements dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernists rejected much of their nineteenth-century heritage. Many of them believed that urban industrial societies required new cultural forms and new types of knowledge. Some of them challenged the certainty and confidence that had characterized so much of Enlightenment and roman- tic thinking. Others among them wanted to remake their world using new scientific and technical knowledge. Although modernism is mainly associated with literary and artistic movements, it is now widely recognized that these movements were part of a broader cultural shift that was also found in the social and natural sciences. Modernists approached knowledge in atomistic and analytic ways.

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  Remaking Modernity

  Politics, History, and Sociology

  • Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, Ann Shola Orloff, Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, Ann Shola Orloff, George Steinmetz(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  In their essays for Remaking Modernity, the authors have engaged a range of analytic strategies and/or theoretical models in light of more recent so- Introduction 13 ciological research on a process or dimension of historical change. In some cases, there is an obvious continuity between classical theory and contempo-rary research. Given that secularization—including the changing institu-tional relations between church and state and the making of a ‘‘bourgeois’’ and secular self—was identified by Max Weber and others as an important aspect of Modernity, for example, how do these claims and assumptions inform recent research? How is current work revealing the limits of these claims and theories? For other themes, the redefinition of key processes is critical. State formation, the transition to capitalism, and professionaliza-tion were originally theorized as European phenomena, so what happens when we widen our frame to take in post-socialist, colonial, or post-colonial states as well? Finally, for some topics, the absence of attention in classical theory is an important feature: how should we reconceptualize theories of social and cultural change in light of research on race, gender, sexuality, nation, and other concepts that were marginalized—or simply unknown— in earlier theoretical debates? We think about these revisions and reformulations under the general heading of ‘‘remaking Modernity.’’ The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘‘modern’’ as ‘‘of or pertaining to the present and recent times, as distin-guished from the remote past.’’ To be modern is to be in the now and (if the metaphor still has life in it) at the cutting edge of history. The concept is a moving index, pointing to everything—and nothing. Sociologists since the first wave have also understood that eternal present as the apex of a develop-mental lineage.

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  The Sociology of Anthony Giddens

  • Steven Loyal(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  6 Modernity Giddens’s work on Modernity represents a new phase in the development of his writings. Building on the ‘discontinuist’ and mul-tidimensional characterisation of modern social development which he developed in A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism and The Nation-State and Violence , Giddens states in The Consequences of Modernity that Modernity refers to ‘modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence’ (Giddens 1990a, p. 1). Rather than talking of post-Modernity, which had become fashionable during the late 1980s, Giddens continues to insist on the importance of referring to contemporary society in terms of Modernity, though he makes a sharp distinction between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Modernity in his writings. RISK, TRUST AND GLOBALISATION According to Giddens, Modernity represents a sharp qualitative break from previous traditional social orders. This break involves a profound transformation that is both extensional and intensional. In terms of extensionality, globalising influences of interconnection span the globe, so that individuals now live in a global world; in terms of intensionality, the intimate and personal features of day-to-day existence become fundamentally altered. After reaffirming his view that Modernity has four major institutions – capitalism, indus-trialism, the capacity for surveillance and military power – he points to three distinct yet interconnected sources which underlie the dynamism of Modernity – the separation of time and space, the development of disembedding mechanisms and the continual reflexive appropriation of knowledge. It was noted in the last chapter that the separation and recombi-nation of space and time allow a ‘zoning’ of social life to take place.

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  Towards Glocal Social Work in the Era of Compressed Modernity

  Towards an Era of Distorted Modernity

  • Timo Harrikari, Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3    Modernity and social transformation revisited

  Even though Richmond’s quote is rather simple, it offers us a starting point and an analytical tool outlining the key changes which an individual faces in his or her environment, or as Richmond describes it, the ‘situation’. We aim to capture her idea of social diagnosis and extend it to the spheres which are not addressed, or at least, are addressed separately from the questions of the casework tradition. Throughout this work, we aim to perform ‘social diagnosis’, which cannot be attributed to any specific person. In particular, we will extend our analysis to the circumstantial evidence which connects people to social networks, systems and institutions in time and space. As we see it, each community is obliged to solve certain system functions, that is, such permanent questions as obtaining livelihood and the modes of production, setting norms and societal goals and the promoting of social relations, solidarity and integration, referring here, for instance, to Talcott Parsons’ AGIL model (Parsons 1970). These functions contain a wide range of economic, ecological, technological, political and social elements which enable and constrain the social work clients’ lives as well as the mandate, goals and methods of the activities called ‘social work’.

  Modernity is used to describe a narrative on the changes in Western societies. Modernisation theories are used to distinguish between the affirmative and critical approaches. The most famous affirmative theorisations are the classics of social philosophy. In their works, Thomas Hobbes (1651) and John Locke (1698) discussed the transition from a state of nature to a civilised society and the formation of a social contract. Cesare Beccaria, the classic writer in criminal justice, suggested that selfish people made a social contract in order to establish their security, because they were tired of living in a state of war (Beccaria 1764). In his modern classics of social contract theory, John Rawls (1999, original 1971) presented his abstract theory of a veil of ignorance where people would be capable of selecting the best societal principles and making rational political choices apart from their own interests, class position and social status.

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  Technology and Social Power

  • Graeme Kirkpatrick(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  I return to this below. Modernity Theory 53 Communication The third strand within Modernity theory to be discussed here also takes its lead from strains in Enlightenment thinking and argues that what defines modern societies is their increased complexity relative to traditional societies. This complexity requires individuals to reflect on how their actions comport with the expectations of society as a whole. Members of traditional society were integrated unreflectively into stable systems of meaning that were not challenged or subject to revision. The endemic change associated with Modernity means that finding one’s place becomes increasingly a matter for individuals (Durkheim 1964). Whereas for Enlightenment thinkers the differentiation of science was unambiguously progressive, 8 Mead understood it in more evolutionary terms. The problem of technological change becomes that of main-taining the functional integration of individuals into a social world that is de-stabilized by rapid changes and bereft of the reassurances of tradi-tional authority. In other words, the problem of Modernity is that society itself must be kept on a healthy developmental course despite its tend-ency towards convulsions caused by things like technological innovation and increases in complexity of social organization. On the other hand, societies with a more developed technological basis flow from social conditions in which individuals are free to think and experiment for themselves. This positive development presupposes human individuals who have learned from their formative socialization how to be inde-pendent of society, while remaining aware that it has formed them. As the pragmatist philosopher and social psychologist G.H. Mead put it, “A person is a personality because he belongs to a community, because he takes over the institutions of that community into his own conduct” (1967: 162).

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  Sciences from Below

  Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities

  • Sandra Harding, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Robyn Wiegman, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Robyn Wiegman(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  ∑. shrinking Modernity? Modern philosophies of science and modernization theories are both clearly the target of rts ’s analysis. ‘‘Science and Modernity have be- ∫∏ Co-evolving Science and Society come inseparable’’ ( rts 1). Science and technology have become ‘‘irre-versibly identified with the modernization project’’ ( rts 180). rts , like Beck, sees today the closure of a long period in the history of Modernity ( rts 191). This period begins with, say, Newton; it reaches its apogee from the end of World War II until the end of the twentieth century. During this period modernization programs were widely presumed to provide compelling evidence for the soundness of modern philoso-phies of science and of Modernity as a social program, rts argues. Yet today, Modernity seems to be dissipating; modernization seems to be departing from Modernity; and scientists no longer have the monopoly of the production of scientific knowledge which seemed integral to Modernity. Dissipation Di√erentiation of social institutions is always taken to be a defining mark of Modernity. Yet rts points out how the segregation from each other of the great institutions of Modernity in fact is decreasing as they transgress and become porous to each other ( rts 48). This change is accompanied by a similar problem with the ‘‘great binary categories’’ which also defined Modernity. ‘‘The great conceptual, and organizational, categories of the modern world—state, market, cul-ture, science—have become highly permeable, even transgressive. They are ceasing to be recognizably distinct domains. As a result, common-sense distinctions between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ are becoming increasingly problematic, a change which has radical implications for demarcations between science and non-science and for notions of professional identity and scientific expertise.

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  Imaginaries of Modernity

  • John Rundell(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In contemporary social theorising the result of the recognition of different and comparative modern perspectives, experiences and long-term histories has been the formation of a notion of multiple modernities. The ‘multiple modernities’ approach tends to emphasise different geographical regions, histories and interactions between civilisational contexts and Modernity in general. In other words it tends to regionalise the different experiences of Modernity. 3 However, a regionalisation of Modernity stills begs the question concerning the nature of the constituent dimensions that are to be called ‘modern’ by anyone in ‘really living Modernity’, including those who deploy the term as part of their intellectual vocabulary. This question is present either implicitly or expli- citly in the regional or multiple modernities approaches. On the more formal level of theorising, though, the emphasis is placed not so much on the distinctive- ness of particular histories and regions, but more so on the constitutive 2 Introduction: Modernity is out of joint dimensions through which Modernity can be identified or reconstructed. This book offers an alternative approach against this background. In contemporary post-Parsonian social theorising three figures stand out who have constructed their own formal versions of Modernity. These figures are Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Agnes Heller, whose works is dis- cussed at length in the following chapters. 4 Habermas, for example, has re-emphasised a differentiated notion of Modernity. In his hands, and in his critical exchanges with Luhmann’ s work, the notion of Modernity and differ- entiation came to be more or less synonymous. As will be further discussed in Chapter 1, Habermas formally posits Modernity as the internal differentiation of the activities of communicative rationality in three areas concerned with science, political legitimacy and (more or less) inner aesthetically determined self-expression.

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