Concept
modernity
In this lesson: the social life of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transformation in which old bonds dissolved, cities grew and the division of labour and calculability spread; the shared background of the classical theorists.
In this lesson “modernity” names the shared background of classical social thought: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries population growth and technical innovation enlarged cities, the guilds collapsed and regional interdependence gave way to international interdependence. According to the IEP’s Durkheim entry the transformation brought the rise of the individual, greater anonymity in city life and the weakening of traditions; for Durkheim the creation of the individual may be the defining characteristic of modernity.
Simmel sums up the two centuries as a demand to be freed from bonds and a demand for specialisation through the division of labour. For Weber rationalization is, in the SEP author’s phrase, one of the two theses that helped launch his reputation as one of the founding theorists of modernity. So “modernity” here is not one theory’s concept but the shared problem that these thinkers described in different words: what holds society together when old bonds dissolve? (this summary is ours).
Example
A guild apprentice knows everyone and everyone knows him; his great-great-grandchild in a large industrial city sees hundreds of faces a day and knows none (an imagined example).