How to Revisit the Question of Modernity? Some Propositions

Abstract

Abstract Often dismissed as evolutionism and sometimes accused of maintaining neocolonial domination, the field of studies dedicated to modernity and processes of modernisation has been progressively discredited in the social sciences over the last forty years. However, for some time now, a number of historians and sociologists have sought to rehabilitate this field on new grounds. Rejecting both the miserabilist and populist approaches that have held the monopoly on studies of modernity for too long, their work outlines a research program whose coherence and main arguments are presented in this article. We show that this research program proposes a properly methodological definition of modernity – as the present of humanity – and imposes four major conditions on the study of modernity and processes of modernisation: the refusal of state-centrism; an attention to the practical foundations of different conceptions of “modernity”; an adherence to the principle of contemporaneity; and finally, a commitment to anchoring the generalising ambition of the social sciences within a rigorous search for processual analogies.