Modernity

Modernity, in its sociological usage, generally refers to the social and cultural characteristics describing the period of history in the West since the 17th and 18th centuries. Typically, modernity is described in terms of contrast between the modern period and the feudal era that preceded it, especially in terms of changing capacity for understanding, harnessing, and transforming the nonhuman world.

Although there have been dramatic improvements since the feudal era, most sociological discussion and analysis has focused on the negative aspects of modernity. Scholars have raised many issues in their attempts to characterize modernity. Some of the more common characteristics of modernity include: the replacement of religion by science as the major social institution establishing truth; rapid social, economic, and political change; the nation state; global commerce, capitalism, and industrialization; totalizing political ideologies; a highly specialized and mobile workforce; the breakdown of community and increasing individualization; uncertainty and reflexivity; normlessness; the ascendancy of instrumental reason in all social arenas; centralized administration and bureaucracy; the idea of progress; and the domination of nature.

These various, but interlinked, characteristics of modernity could be roughly grouped into those seen by some to be progressive, such as the replacement of superstition with rationality and science; while others seem more problematic, such as the loss of community and increasing normlessness. Social progress is a concept that forms a central aspect of modernity. But grave doubts began to arise in the 19th century among existentialist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, which intensified in the 20th century. After two world wars, the Holocaust, increasing social estrangement, and the increasing awareness of what the application of science and engineering was doing to the environment, radical doubt increasingly developed regarding the progressive ideal of modernity.

This later period, especially since World War II and extending to the present, is sometimes categorized as “high,” “late,” or “reflexive” modernity. The spirit of open inquiry and questioning of traditional institutions that form a major aspect of modern social change have increasingly been directed at the institutions of modernity itself. This period is characterized by chronic and pervasive doubt and uncertainty, which has replaced the sometimes brash confidence in social progress that was the zeitgeist of earlier “classical” modernity. Sociologist Anthony Giddens states “modernity effectively involves the institutionalization of doubt.”

However, critique of the institutions of modernity has been around from the beginning. The Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries rebelled against many of the changes, and 19th and early 20th century sociologists made in-depth analysis of the negative aspects of social change that had occurred since the feudal period. Much of the focus of this analysis was on the disruption of traditional communities and the commodification of labor. German sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Karl Marx are particularly noted for analyzing and describing these changes.

Postmodernists (those arguing that modernity has ended and a new historical period has begun) and neomodernists (who see the current social problematic as only an acceleration of social schemas characteristic of modernity) both maintain that it is an age of radical uncertainty and doubt, including the questioning of the very institutions associated with modernity, such as science, reason, and the possibility of human progress through the application of efficiency and scientific knowledge. The neomodernist perspective expressed by sociologist Ulrich Beck argues that the rise of new social movements and the critique of modernist institutions such as science and technology, “does not stand in contradiction to modernity, but is rather an expression of reflexive modernization.”

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