Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition

Abstract

Modernity may thus be delineated in terms of a conjunction, with global implications, of a set of cultural, institutional, and cosmological shifts. In the contemporary discussion about the uniformity or diversity of modern societies, two positions have occupied a prominent place outside of academic discourse. Modernity in this sense is not so much a new unified civilization, global in its extensiveness, unparalleled in its intrusiveness and destructiveness. Rather, modernity is a set of promissory notes, a set of hopes and expectations that entail some minimal conditions of adequacy that may be demanded of macrosocietal institutions no matter how much these institutions may differ in other respects. Thus, it would be deeply misleading to describe the formation of modernity as involving a uniform process of secularization. Rather, it meant that a previous chasm between a mundane and a transcendental sphere came to be differentially reinterpreted in different European societies.