Modernity as Experience and Interpretation
Modernity as Experience and Interpretation

Author: Peter Wagner

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 074565584X

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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 answer on its own. This new sociology of modernity proposes two key instruments through which to understand the answers given to those questions: the experiences human beings have of their own modernity and the interpretations they give to those experiences. It reviews the history of ‘Western’ modernity in this light and then focuses on the specific answers that were and are being developed in Europe.

Modernity
Modernity

Author: Peter Wagner

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2012-02-13

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0745652913

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This is a brief, authoritative and accessible introduction to the idea of modernity, written by a leading social theorist. Wagner shows that modernity was based on ideas of freedom, reason and progress, but he examines the extent to which these ideas have been, and can be, realized in the modern world.

Modernities
Modernities

Author: Peter James Taylor

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 1054

ISBN-13: 9780816633951

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A thoroughly readable, far-reaching analysis of "modernity" and "the modern, " this book focuses on the specific periods and places where ideas and practices of being modern are created and challenged. Peter J. Taylor contends that modernity is a multiple phenomenon: that is, different modern times and different modern spaces exist in a world of multiple modernities. He argues that three "prime modernities" have been defined by the development of the modern world -- from mercantile modernity to British-led industrial modernity to today's American-led consumer modernity -- and illustrates the cultural expression of these modernities as "acts of the ordinary, " such as paintings, the home, and the suburbs. In a masterly analysis of politics and the state in terms of the modern, Taylor shows how each political organization of a particular modernity creates an appropriate political reaction -- for instance, the socialism prompted by British modernity and the environmentalism called forth by American modernity. In noting the tendency of states to create spaces and eschew places, he draws an intriguing parallel between nation states and home-households. Taylor describes the project of Americanization as a new form of modernity and also suggests an end to American hegemony.

Modernity
Modernity

Author: Peter Wagner

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0745656846

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We live in a modern age, but what does ‘modern’ mean and how can a reflection on ‘modernity’ help us to understand the world today? These are the questions that Peter Wagner sets out to answer in this concise and accessible book. Wagner begins by returning to the question of modernity's Western origins and its claims to open up a new and better era in the history of humanity. Modernity's claims and expectations have become more prevalent and widely shared, but in the course of their realization and diffusion they have also been radically transformed. In an acute and engaging analysis, Wagner examines the following key issues among others: - Modernity was based on the hope for freedom and reason, but it created the institutions of contemporary capitalism and democracy. How does the freedom of the citizen relate to the freedom of the buyer and seller today? And what does disaffection with capitalism and democracy entail for the sustainability of modernity? - Rather than a single model of modernity, there is now a plurality of forms of modern socio-political organisation. What does this entail for our idea of progress and our hope that the future world can be better than the present one? - All nuance and broadening notwithstanding, our concept of modernity is in some way inextricably tied to the history of Europe and the West. How can we compare different forms of modernity in a 'symmetric', non-biased or non-Eurocentric way? How can we develop a world-sociology of modernity?

Tradition and Modernity
Tradition and Modernity

Author: Kwame Gyekye

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0195112253

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Gyekye offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times, and shows how Western philosophical concepts help in addressing a wide range of specifically African problems.

All that is Solid Melts Into Air
All that is Solid Melts Into Air

Author: Marshall Berman

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780860917854

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The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

Theorizing Modernity
Theorizing Modernity

Author: Peter Wagner

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2001-01-22

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1412933765

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This book argues that sociology has lost its ability to provide critical diagnoses of the present human condition because sociology has stopped considering the philosophical requirements of social enquiry. The book attempts to restore that ability by retrieving some of the key questions that sociologists tend to gloss over, inescapability and attainability. The book identifies five key questions in which issues of inescapability and attainability emerge. These are the questions of the certainty of our knowledge, the viability of our politics, the continuity of our selves, the accessibility of the past, and the transparency of the future. The book demonstrates how these questions are addressed in different forms and by different intellectual means during the past 200 years and shows how they persist today.

Experience Without Qualities
Experience Without Qualities

Author: Elizabeth S. Goodstein

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13:

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Tracing the emergence and evolution of the modern discourse on boredom in French and German literary, philosophical, and sociological texts, this book fills a gap in the intellectual and cultural history of European modernity.

Resonance
Resonance

Author: Hartmut Rosa

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-07-26

Total Pages: 551

ISBN-13: 1509519920

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The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.