Modernity: An Analysis

What makes you modern? We know that modernity means technology, industry, cities. But is there a modern attitude? A modern psychology?

What sets apart from pre-moderns? Can we even imagine what a traditional attitude might feel like?

Traditional life was circular. We were tied to the land day after day, month after month – the idea of improvement, or of relationships with a wider world, were largely non-existent.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment – Kant, Marx, Mill, Francis Bacon, and - were motivated by a powerful idea. That we could rationally understand the world, and use the world to shape history. They were all, in varying ways, about ordering the world, putting things in their place, making it predictable, usable.

So what makes up this modern attitude? I try to answer this question through Anthony Giddens' 'The Consequences of Modernity'.

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Sources:

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity

Anthony Giddens, Runaway World

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman, Prophet of Postmodernity

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity’s DIscontents

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity

Credits:

Anthony Giddens Photo, Szusi, CC BYSA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons