Towards a Sociological Understanding of Modernity and Its Characteristics and Issues

Abstract

Modernity is defined as a condition of social existence that is significantly different to all past forms of human experience, while modernization refers to the transitional process of moving from “traditional” or “primitive” communities to modern societies. Debates over modernity have been most prominent in the discipline of sociology, created in the nineteenth century specifically to come to terms with “society” as a novel form of human existence. These debates revolved around the constitution of the modern subject: how sociopolitical order is formed in the midst of anomie or alienation of the subject; what form of knowledge production this subject engages in, and what form of knowledge production is appropriate to understand modern subjectivity; and the ethical orientation of the modern subject under conditions where human existence has been rationalized and disenchanted. Sociological inquiry starts with the assumption that modernity is temporally distinct from tradition. Although chronological notions of the “modern” existed for centuries before, sociologists have usually placed the beginnings of modernity – and thus their own discipline – within the tumultuous effects of the “dual revolutions” that occurred within Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. In fine, the rupture thesis of modernity states that the (French) democratic and (British) industrial revolutions radically undermined preexisting localized communities and their traditions by profaning sacred values and dismantling associated sociopolitical hierarchies.