Modernity, Successive Modernities, and the Formation of the Modern Subject

Abstract

In light of the contested nature of modernity as an academic concept, the theoretical discussion in this chapter is guided by the general question as to how we can still make sense of modernity. How can we define and understand the related concepts of modernity, modernization, and “the modern”? In classical sociology, the emergence of modern society was discussed as processes of rationalization, differentiation, and individualization. In juxtaposing tradition with modernity, classical sociologists conceptualized modern society as a relatively homogeneous structure of the social that evolved over time and space after a rupture with tradition by gradually increasing its rationality (Reckwitz 2008a, 227–9). Emphasizing the theme of rationalization, post-World War II sociologists constructed modernization theories that proposed the linear and progressive development of societies toward convergence in a universal form of a modern social order. History has proven wrong these universal projections of the modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s with their assertion of being able to predict the course of social change. Empirically, modernization has generated both convergence and divergence among societies, representing modernity in a multiplicity of culturally different forms; it is to this multiplicity of forms that contemporary theories of “multiple modernities,” successive modernities, entangled modernities, or varieties of modernity refer.1