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What is social theory & modernity?
Is modernity a classical sociological concept?
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Is modernity a way of organizing social life?
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.
Dec 3, 2020 · Summary. Within social theory, the term ‘modernity’ is most often used to refer to societies that are built on the principles of individual freedom and instrumental mastery.Furthermore, such societies are assumed to have emerged in Western Europe and North America from the late eighteenth century onwards.All debate notwithstanding, this has ...
- Abstract
- Moral reenchantment
- Epistemic rift
- Patriarchal supersession
- Racial recognition
- The combinatorics of culture in transitions to modernity
- The analytics of cultural causality in transitions to modernity
- Causal image 1: Semiotic mechanisms
How did cultural dynamics help bring about the societies we now recognize as modern? This article constructs seven distinct models for how structures of signification and social meaning participated in the transitions to modernity in the West and, in some of the models, across the globe. Our models address: (1) the spread, via imitation, of modern ...
According to this model, pre-modern societies were characterized—culturally at least—by an overarching religious meaning-system that endowed social life with sacrality, order, and sense, and anchored the lives and purposes of pre-modern persons. Modernity overthrows this meaning system, and puts in its place myriad meaning-systems that come to comp...
In this model, the fundamental break that inaugurates the modern is a break in social epistemology: certain influential elites, and eventually, large sections of the population, reconstitute their worldview. In the new, modern worldview, the natural, the human, and the divine become separated (Latour 1993). Inquiry into the advent, triumph, and soc...
In this model, modernity emerges when the symbolic power of father-rule evident in patriarchal politics is converted into a symbolic contract among brothers that constitutes the ideological backing of the emergent modern state. Patriarchal patrimonial rule, which rests on the allegiance that subjects— themselves fathers to whom is delegated the pre...
In this model, it is the recognition of the non-modern, non-Western, “traditional” or “exotic” Other that supplies the basis for Western peoples to conceive of themselves as “modern.” People in the West become or start acting modern when they see themselves in contrast to what they construe as traditional, primitive, or exotic (e.g., “Oriental”). T...
Whence modernity, then? Culturally speaking, one response is synthetic, and it goes like so: At its origins, the transition to modernity involves the construal and invention of an elite, white, male cadre of individuals whose perceived faculties and performances become the legitimating basis for reconstituting social life itself.9 The initial colon...
We set forth above one possible synthetic road forward for analysts of transitions to modernity. But by describing the seven pillars, we also intend to make broad, cultural-theoretic accounts of modernity into a set of articulated, and ultimately empirically identifiable, models about how meaning and signification mattered in the transitions to mod...
In structural linguistics,12 a sign consists of a signifier (a written mark or a sound) and a signified (the concept to which it points). In semiotics more broadly conceived, virtually any object, gesture, image, or utterance can serve as a signifier insofar as meaning is conventionally attributed to it. Signifiers point to concepts or notions (sig...
Nov 2, 2021 · This chapter examines the concept of modernity in the history of sociology as a key problem for classical theory that is of continued relevance today. The conceptual history of modernity can be seen as the biography of classical sociological theory, since classical...
- Cesare Silla, Brandon Vaidyanathan
- 2021
Oct 27, 2021 · Modernity was considered as a way of organising social life. Theories of Modernity are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, these theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies.
- Kavita S. Jerath
- 2021
Modernisation refers to the process—a transition from traditional to modern societies. Modernity, on the other hand, is the result of this process. It’s the cultural, social, and economic atmosphere developed after this transformation.
Oct 22, 2018 · Summary. The idea of modernity concerns the interpretation of present time in terms of a repositioning of the present in relation to the past and to the future. The notion of modernity in classical sociological theory expressed the transformation observed in political institutions as well as in the economic and societal transformation of ...
