The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
Modernity refers to a historical period which began in Western Europe with a series of cultural, social and economic changes during the seventeenth century, and it is usually characterized by three features: first, culturally, a reliance on reason and experience conditioned the growth of science and scientific consciousness, secularization and instrumental rationality; second, as a mode of life it was based on the growth of industrial society, social mobility, market economy, literacy, bureaucratization and consolidation of the nation-state; and third, it fostered a conception of the person as free, autonomous, self-controlled and reflexive. Opposed to traditional forms of thought and life, modernity can be conceptualized as a mode of social and individual experience that is shared by many men and women all over the world due to the expansion and prestige of scientific enquiry, technological innovation, political models of democracy and nation-state boundaries, and the subjective drive for self-development. Modernity is inherently globalizing. Giddens (1991) has argued that the globalizing tendencies of modern institutions is accompanied by continuous changes in the perception of the self and redefinitions of identities. From this perspective, modernity is more than a historical product; it is an uncompleted programme that can still play a very creative role in present-day societies. Modernity implies an openness towards a determinate future characterized by material progress, social stability and self-realization.
According to Berman (1982), to be modern is to live in an environment that, at the same time, promises adventure, growth, joy, power and transformation of the self and the world, and threatens to destroy everything we have and we are. Modernity is a paradoxical unity which has constantly been on trial. The paradoxes of modernity are closely related to the discontinuities between the growth of reason; the logic of industrialism; the power of the nation-state; and the personal quest for freedom and self-realization. Bauman (1991) has pointed out that modernity would be better defined by the consciousness of a universal order that allows no place within the boundaries of the nation-state for strangers, diversity and tolerance. In his perspective, the Holocaust is a product of modernity. Foucault (1977) has analysed the emergence of disciplinary powers (in psychology, penology and sexology) in circumstances of modernity. Wagner (1994) argues that the modern project is unable to reconcile its conflicting commitment to liberty and to discipline, and that its history is characterized by the coexistence of the discourses of liberation and control. It has also been stated that in no contemporary society have religion or collective identities disappeared, and Mingione (1991) has shown that reciprocal obligations between individuals continue to be recognized in modern societies. Family or religious ties, ethnic solidarity, and gender and sexual identities play a very important role in the processes of allocating power and distributing resources. In contemporary societies, western and non-western, the realization of the self is often accompanied by loyalties, formerly seen as pre-modern, to different communal groups.
Eduardo P Archetti
University of Oslo
References
Bauman, Z.
(1991) Modernity and Ambivalence, Ithaca, NY.
Berman, M. (1982) All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London. (Original French edn, Surveiller et punir, Paris, 1975.)
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge, UK.
Mingione, E. (1991) Fragmented Societies. Oxford.
Wagner, P. (1994) A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, London.
Further reading
Lash, S. and Friedman, J. (eds) (1992) Modernity and Identity, Oxford.
Osborne, P. (1992) ‘Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category’, New Left Review 192.
Turner, B.S. (ed.) (1990) Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, London.
See also: modernization; post-modernism; post-modernity.
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