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Modernity
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Modernity is a term that refers to the modern era. It is distinct from modernism, and, in different contexts, refers to cultural and intellectual movements of the period c. 1630-1940. The term "modern" can refer to many different things. Colloquially, it can refer in a general manner to the 20th century. For historians, the Early Modern Period refers to the period roughly from 1500 to 1800, with the Modern era beginning sometime during the 18th century.
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Modernity is a term that refers to the modern era. It is distinct from modernism, and, in different contexts, refers to cultural and intellectual movements of the period c. 1630-1940. The term "modern" can refer to many different things. Colloquially, it can refer in a general manner to the 20th century. For historians, the Early Modern Period refers to the period roughly from 1500 to 1800, with the Modern era beginning sometime during the 18th century. In this schema, industrialization during the 19th century marks the first phase of modernity, while the 20th century marks the second. 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 and into the present.
Related terminology
Modern can mean all of post-medieval European history, in the context of dividing history into three large epochs: ancient history, the Middle Ages, and modern times. In the context of contemporary history, politics and other subjects, it is also applied specifically to the period beginning somewhere between 1870 and 1910, through the present, and even more specifically to the early 20th century, though the late modern times would be marked by the late 18th century (Industrial, American, and French Revolutions).
Modern as post-medieval
One common use of the term is to describe the condition of Western history since the mid-1400s, or roughly the European development of moveable type and the printing press.
In this context the "modern" society is said to develop over many periods, and to be influenced by important events which represent breaks in the continuity:
Particular ways of periodizing modernity include:
Important events in the development of modernity in this context include
Change to modernity in different fields
Sociological thought
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)
Modern sociological thought is believed to have begun with Ibn Khaldun, an Arab sociologist from North Africa who flourished in the 14th century. His Muqaddimah, written in 1377, is considered the first treatise on sociology, which he referred to as his "new science". Though he lived several centuries before the modern era, his work still resembles modern sociological thought in many ways (Adem 2004, [accessed 19 September 2008]).
Political thought
One of the first modern political thinkers was Niccolò Machiavelli, who lived in the city-state of Florence, Italy, in the early 16th century. He is especially famed for his literary works, including his seminal Discourses on Livy, on the governance of republics and the cultivation of republican virtue, and his famous The Prince, on the efficient administration of monarchies.
- A positive attitude towards change and attempts to make progress in technology, economics and military power, despite the dangers involved in revolutionary change.
- A positive attitude towards experimentation with new forms of government, including democracy or that of a republic, combined with a realistic attitude towards extant institutions, such as that of monarchies, assessing their strengths and weaknesses based on their record of accomplishments and failures.
- A positive attitude towards larger states, despite holding that small communities were superior in most respects.
- A realistic view towards the problems of the day, including the willingness to not idealize the present, but to state things as they were, not as they should be, perhaps best illustrated by Machiavelli's famous statement in The Prince that, for a sovereign, "... it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking" (The Prince, chapter 17).
Later, 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 (derived from the word "liberty" which means "freedom") empowered members of the disenfranchised Third Estate. In many nations, the power of elected bodies and leaders supplanted traditional rule by hereditary monarchs.
Science and technology
One of the most important aspects of modernity is the encouragement of advance or progress in useful sciences and arts. Politically, this demanded an end to caution in allowing radical ideas to be made public, which radically changed religion and education in European society.
Revolutions in science and technology have been no less influential than political revolutions in changing the shape of the modern world. The scientific revolution, beginning with the discoveries of Johannes Kepler and Galileo, and culminating with Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), changed the way in which educated people looked at the natural world.
Inventions
What is now called technology is the most obvious success of modernity. Mechanical and scientific invention has changed human health and all aspects of human society: economic, religious, social, and theoretical.
For example, modern machines in Britain sped up the manufacture of cloth and iron. The horse and ox were no longer needed as beasts of burden. The newly invented engine powered the car, train, ship, and eventually the plane, revolutionizing the way people travelled. Newly discovered energy sources such as petroleum and nuclear power could power the new machines. Raw goods could be transported in huge quantities over vast distances; products could be manufactured quickly and then marketed all over the world, a situation that Britain, and later the US, Europe and Japan all used to their advantage.
Progress continued as science saw many new scientific discoveries. The telephone, radio, X-rays, microscopes, electricity all contributed to rapid changes in life-styles and societies. Discoveries of antibiotics such as penicillin brought new ways of combating diseases. Surgery and various medications made further progress in medical care, hospitals, and nursing. New theories such as evolution and psychoanalysis changed humanity's "old fashioned" views of itself. The theory of evolution, the law of the progress of species and races, and the various new theories of the laws of the progress of history, also set the stage for the ideas of racism and ethnological superiority to be used as a basis for nationalism and political systems.
Industry
An Industrial Revolution initiated by mechanical automation of the manufacture of cotton cloth and the use of steam engines, commenced in the 18th century in Great Britain, followed in the 19th century by a later series of developments, which saw modern systems of communication and transportation introduced in the form of steamships, railroads and the telegraph. In the late 19th century, a Second Industrial Revolution, prompted by developments in the chemical, petroleum, steel and electrical industries, furthered transformed the modern world.
Warfare
Warfare was changed with the advent of new varieties of rifle, cannon, gun, machine gun, armor, tank, plane, jet, and missile. Weapons such as the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, known along with chemical weapons and biological weapons as weapons of mass destruction, actually made the devastation of the entire planet possible in minutes. All these are among the markings of the Modern World.
Culture
New attitudes towards religion, with the church diminished, and a desire for personal freedoms, induced desires for sexual freedoms, which were ultimately accepted by large sectors of the Western World. Theories of "free love" and uninhibited sexual freedom were advanced only later in the 1960s.
The arts
The Modern Age, when used in reference to the arts, reflects a tendency extant during the period from 1860s through the 1970s. More recent art is most often called Contemporary art. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Key movements in modern art include Impressionism, Cubist painting, typified by Pablo Picasso, modernist literature such as that written by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and the 'new poetry' headed by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
See also Postmodern art
Universality
England: The Glorious Revolution of 1688 established a king selected by parliament, ending the troubles in that country in the seventeenth century. This was primarily done by the faction called the Whigs, who used the term "modern" for generations thereafter to gain credit. Later generations and political parties did not consider this a sufficient change to merit the term.
France: Although the French still glory in the magnificence of King Louis XIV, the end of his reign in 1715 is considered by them as a handy spot from which to tout the next phase of French glory, the Enlightenment, which they call « l'Age des lumières ». In other words, what happened in Britain does not concern them. After the French Revolution of 1789, they declared that the modern age had been surpassed by the contemporary age.
Russia: It took some time for the European socialists to conceive that the next great revolution would start someplace other than in France. But the Russians have always compared themselves to the French. After the October revolution, the Communist party of the Soviet Union declared that the "modern age" began with Peter the Great and the "contemporary age" began with this Bolshevik revolution.
Japan: The Japanese call the dynasties previous to the Tokugawa dynasty as medieval, and the Meiji Restoration of 1866–1869 is considered equivalent to the French Revolution of 1789, but haven't assimilated a form of the word modern for Tokugawa.
As for the Third World, the obvious benchmarks are colonization by European imperial powers during the "New Imperialism" and the subsequent decolonization in the twentieth century. But "modern" and "contemporary" are not used for this purpose.
The United States: A seemingly natural dividing point as far as Spain and the new world are concerned is the voyage of Columbus in 1492. But the need for such an undertaking was underscored by the taking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire of the Turks in 1453, so historians once took this as their benchmark.
Defining characteristics of modernity
There have been numerous ways of understanding what modernity is, particularly in the field of sociology.
Modernity may be considered "marked and defined by an obsession with 'evidence'", visuality, and visibility (Leppert 2004, 19).
In general, large-scale integration 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.
The paradox of modernity
Modernization brought a series of seemingly indisputable benefits to people. Lower infant mortality rate, decreased death from starvation, eradication of some of the fatal diseases, more equal treatment of people with different backgrounds and incomes, and so on. To some, this is an indication of the potential of modernity, perhaps yet to be fully realized. In general, rational, scientific approach to problems and the pursuit of economic wealth seems still to many a reasonable way of understanding good social development.
Technological development occurred not only in the medical and agricultural fields, but also in the military.
Modernity and the contemporary society
There is an ongoing debate about the relationship between modernity and present societies. The debate has two dimensions. First, there is an empirical question of whether some of the present societies can be understood as a developmental continuation of modernity (see late modernity), a variation of modernity (see hypermodernity), or as a distinctive type (see postmodernity). Second, there is a judgement of whether modernization has been, and is, desirable for a society. Seemingly new phenomena such as globalization, the end of the Cold War, ethnic conflicts, and the proliferation of information technologies are taken by some as reasons to adopt a new vision to navigate social development. However modernity came with a structure of self-determination which is greatly seen in contemporary societies.
See also
Sources
- 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.
- Giddens, Anthony. 1998. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804735689 (cloth) ISBN 0804735697 (pbk.)
- 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
- Saul, John Ralston. 1992. Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. New York: Free Press; Maxwell Macmillan International. ISBN 0029277256
Further reading
- Berman, Marshall. 1982. "All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity." New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 067124602X Reprinted 1988, New York: Viking Penguin ISBN 0140109625
- Carroll, Michael Thomas. 2000. Popular Modernity in America: Experience, Technology, Mythohistory. SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 0791447138 (hc) ISBN 0791447146 (pbk)
- Crouch, Christopher. 2000. "Modernism in Art Design and Architecture", New York: St. Martins Press. ISBN 0312218303 (cloth) ISBN 031221832X (pbk)
- Jarzombek, Mark. 2000. The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674948386 (hb) ISBN 0674948394 (pbk.)
- Perreau-Saussine, Emile. 2005. "Les libéraux face aux révolutions: 1688, 1789, 1917, 1933". Commentaire no. 109 (Spring): 181–93.
- 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
- Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, Sage, 1994
- Arendt, Hannah. 1958. "The Origins Of Totalitarianism" Cleavland: World Publishing Co. ISBN 0805242252
External links
- - Modern mans' encounter with religion
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