Modernity

Depending on the field, 'modernity' may refer to different time periods or qualities. In historiography, the 17th and 18th centuries are usually described as early modern, while the long 19th century corresponds to 'modern history' proper. While it includes a wide range of interrelated historical processes and cultural phenomena (from fashion to modern warfare), it can also refer to the subjective or existential experience of the conditions they produce, and their ongoing impact on human culture, institutions, and politics (Berman 2010, 15–36). As an analytical concept and normative ideal, modernity is closely linked to the ethos of philosophical and aesthetic modernism; political and intellectual currents that intersect with the Enlightenment; and subsequent developments such as existentialism, modern art, the formal establishment of social science, and contemporaneous antithetical developments such as Marxism. It also encompasses the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, and shifts in attitudes associated with secularisation and post-industrial life (Berman 2010, 15–36). In the view of Michel Foucault (1975) (classified as a proponent of postmodernism though he himself rejected the 'postmodernism' label, considering his work as 'a critical history of modernity'—see, e.g., Call 2002, 65), 'modernity' as a historical category is marked by developments such as a questioning or rejection of tradition; the prioritization of individualism, freedom and formal equality; faith in inevitable social, scientific and technological progress, rationalization and professionalization, a movement from feudalism (or agrarianism) toward capitalism and the market economy, industrialization, urbanization and secularisation, the development of the nation-state, representative democracy, public education (etc.) (Foucault 1977, 170–77). In the context of art history, 'modernity' (modernité) has a more limited sense, 'modern art' covering the period of c. 1860–1970. Use of the term in this sense is attributed to Charles Baudelaire, who in his 1864 essay 'The Painter of Modern Life', designated the 'fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis', and the responsibility art has to capture that experience. In this sense, the term refers to 'a particular relationship to time, one characterized by intense historical discontinuity or rupture, openness to the novelty of the future, and a heightened sensitivity to what is unique about the present' (Kompridis 2006, 32–59). The Late Latin adjective modernus, a derivation from the adverb modo 'presently, just now', is attested from the 5th century, at first in the context of distinguishing the Christian era from the pagan era. In the 6th century, Cassiodorus appears to have been the first writer to use modernus 'modern' regularly to refer to his own age (O'Donnell 1979, 235 n9). The terms antiquus and modernus were used in a chronological sense in the Carolingian era. For example, a magister modernus referred to a contemporary scholar, as opposed to old authorities such as Benedict of Nursia. In early medieval usage, modernus referred to authorities younger than pagan antiquity and the early church fathers, but not necessarily to the present day, and could include authors several centuries old, from about the time of Bede, i.e. referring to the time after the foundation of the Order of Saint Benedict and/or the fall of the Western Roman Empire (Hartmann 1974, passim). The Latin adjective was adopted in Middle French, as moderne, by the 15th century, and hence, in the early Tudor period, into Early Modern English.The early modern word meant 'now existing', or 'pertaining to the present times', not necessarily with a positive connotation.Shakespeare uses modern in the sense of 'every-day, ordinary, commonplace'. The word entered wide usage in the context of the late 17th-century quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns within the Académie française, debating the question of 'Is Modern culture superior to Classical (Græco–Roman) culture?'In the context of this debate, the 'ancients' (anciens) and 'moderns' (modernes) were proponents of opposing views, the former believing that contemporary writers could do no better than imitate the genius of classical antiquity, while the latter, first with Charles Perrault (1687), proposed that more than a mere 'Renaissance' of ancient achievements, the 'Age of Reason' had gone beyond what had been possible in the classical period. The term modernity, first coined in the 1620s, in this context assumed the implication of a historical epoch following the Renaissance, in which the achievements of antiquity were surpassed (Delanty 2007). Modernity has been associated with cultural and intellectual movements of 1436–1789 and extending to the 1970s or later (Toulmin 1992, 3–5).