Global Modernization in Context

Abstract

This chapter traces some of modernity’s premodern origins and argues that many premodern forms survive into the modern period, such that any contemporary social configuration typically combines both modern and premodern elements, albeit to different degrees and in different shapes. To make this claim presupposes the ability to isolate the modern from the non-modern, which, their multiple entanglement in the real world notwithstanding, is indeed the task of a conceptualization of modernity. To accomplish this task is no doubt difficult, and any attempt to do so can go wrong, but if we are to use the language of modernity at all, then we have to make the effort. Drawing on the conceptualization proposed in this book, the chapter concludes with a few speculations about the likely depth and pace of future change.