What Is Modernity?

Wherever they live and in whatever condition, most people across the world consider themselves modern, even though they have very different understandings of what that means. It is easier to say what modernity is not than what it is. It is not a place or territory; you don't know you have arrived by a stamp in your passport. It is not a date or moment that when it arrives transports you into the modern world. It is neither an attitude nor the product of a modernist aesthetic. So what is modernity? How do we know who is modern and when they became so?

These questions have preoccupied many of the finest social scientists over the past two centuries. Despite the many differences in their accounts, most accept that becoming modern is a process that entails the demolition of "traditional" forms of life and the construction of new, "modern" alternatives to them. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the founding fathers of the social sciences viewed this process as revolutionary and endowed it with an inexorable logic that would eventually transform the entire world. They advanced two competing types of analysis: one emphasizing economic and social conditions; the other cultural, political, and institutional ones. They were not by any means mutually exclusive forms of explanation. Most accepted that all these domains of life were dramatically transformed; rather the argument was over where causal responsibility lay—was it economic changes that led to cultural ones or vice versa, did social forces generate political changes, and so on. Critically, both sets of explanations were rooted in structural and comparative understandings of change. They sought to explain not just whether the transition to modernity was driven by economic, social, political, or cultural structures but how similar processes of modernization were occurring in different countries at roughly the same time.

Marx never used the term modernity, yet he clearly identified the emergence of capitalism in Britain as sweeping away traditional forms of economic and social organization. As he memorably wrote in The Communist Manifesto, "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind." Many others have followed Marx in considering the creative destruction of industrial capitalism as a central feature of modernity even if they do not always share his analysis of its causes or corrosive effects. Writing almost a century later, Polanyi considered what he called The Great Transformation (1944) to be not capitalism and its new forms of production per se but the ideological invention of the free market and the reorganization of social life around it. Polanyi here was writing less against Marx than those who, during the 1940s and 1950s, valorized the free market model of capitalism and used the British case of industrialization as an exemplary world historical model whose stages of economic growth and modernization others should follow.

Just as Marx believed the modern "bourgeois epoch" came with class struggle and the "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions," so others have analyzed modernity as the experience of a new set of social conditions. Following Engels's The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1844), there has been a good deal of focus on the process of urbanization that was often seen as an effect of workers flooding to jobs in the new urban centers of industrial manufacturing. The recrafting of social relations within these new cities, and their dynamics of antagonism, cohesion, or anomie, preoccupied the classical sociology of Durkheim and Simmel.

These accounts of modernity as an economic or social condition rooted in industrial capitalism and urbanization have not gone unchallenged. Since the late nineteenth century there have been rival accounts that emphasized the cultural, political, and institutional foundations that structure modern life. A key element of these accounts, particularly in their early articulation by Maine, Tonnies, and Weber, was the rise of individualism and its increasing centrality to modern systems of legal, social, and political organization. The polymath Henry Maine—legal theorist, historian, and civil servant—identified the transition from status to contract as the basis of modern civilization. He did so by mapping the ways in which the foundations of legal authority and power changed from systems based on kinship or tribal loyalties to those centered upon the individual and adjudicated by the state. Similarly, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies identified two types of social organization that he termed Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. While the former was characterized by a sense of innate community and the mutuality of social life, the latter denoted an individualism in which voluntary association was instrumental and self-serving. Although he acknowledged that these two social forms could coexist, Tonnies believed that there had been a transition from Gemeinschaft to Geselleschaft in modern industrial and urban conditions. Finally, Max Weber also placed the rise of the individual at the center of the modern condition. He did so in two ways. First, he found the origins of capitalism in the competitive individualism unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. And, second, he traced the transformation of political authority away from the charismatic forms that ensured specific groups or persons could rule communities to the modern, anonymous bureaucracies that governed subjects through abstract systems of rational control.

Clearly, all these classical accounts of modernity posit a clear separation between the traditional and the modern. One might even say, and many have, that their characterization of the traditional (as archaic, primitive, feudal, etc.—all the terms have pejorative connotations) serves less to accurately describe the past than the distance of the present conditions they seek to analyze and capture. To a certain extent this was the point. The object was to emphasize the historical novelty of systems and conditions that their contemporaries took for granted as natural. Establishing that the way the modern world worked was of relatively recent vintage made it mutable and therefore possible to change again.

And yet these caricatures of the traditional yielded caricatures of the modern. Because the traditional was intended to illuminate the modern, and vice versa, there was no understanding of the forms of imbrication that unsettled any clear distinction between them. Indeed, the transition from the traditional to the modern...