Modernity as experience and interpretation

Polity Press

2008

x, 307 p.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-296) and index.

9780745673967

Contents: Ways of understanding modernity -- Modernity and the question of freedom -- The political forms of modernity -- Modernity as a project of emancipation and the possibility of politics -- The critique of capitalism and its impasse -- Towards a historical-comparative sociology of capitalism -- The exit from organized economic modernity -- The critique of science and its prospects -- Varieties of socio-political interpretations of modernity -- Logics of European history -- Regionalizing European modernity -- The social theory and political philosophy of modernity -- The conceptual history and historical sociology of modernity.

We are all modern today. But modernity today is not what it used to be. Over the past few decades, modernity has been radically changed by globalization, individualization, new inequalities, and fundamentalism. A novel way of analysing contemporary societies is needed. This book proposes such an analysis." "Every society seeks answers to certain basic questions: how to order life in common; how to satisfy human needs; how to establish knowledge. Sociology long assumed that the answers had been found once and for all: a liberal-democratic state, a market economy, and free scientific institutions. This trinity used to be called 'modern society'." "By contrast, this book is based on the idea that, under conditions of modernity, there are no stable and certain answers to these questions. There is a plurality of possible answers, every proposed answer can be criticized and contested, and every society needs to find its answers on its own.

Английский