Modernity

The project of modernity, according to some accounts, had its origins in the European Enlightenment, though it came to fruition in the nineteenth century. The so called Enlightenment project is supposed to represent rationalism, technocentrism, the standardization of knowledge and production, a belief in linear progress and universal, absolute truths. It may be argued that modernity sustains an integrated and determinate appreciation of realtiy which is has been characterized as correponding to a “totalizing" discourse or "metanarrative.” Modernity embraces comprehensive theories about the world and history. It also sustains an interest in universalistic political projects and more particularlly universalistic emancipatory projects. In other words, projects for a general "human emancipation" rather than very particular struggles against very diverse and particular oppressions. Modernity, is a concept that seems to capture everything aesthetics to philosophy from the eighteenth century until about the 1970s.This long phase of modernity may, of course, be subdivided the into smaller phases. But it is important to note that modernity has been conceived, not just as a historical periodization or a new form of historical time, but, as a world-historical project.

There is a common appreciation of modernity as a phase in history during which price-making market relations, i.e., capitalism, was a natural outcome emergent from already existing tendencies. In this reading, "natural" evolurtionary processes led from early forms of exchange to modern industrial capitalism. In this reading modernity obtains when shackled economic forces, the economic rationality of the bourgeois, are liberated from traditional constraints. This particular appreciation of modernity belongs to a periodization of history that cuts across the great divide between capitalist and noncapitalist societies. It treats specifically capitalist dynamics as if they were the universal laws of history. And it heroically merges very different historical developments, capitalist and non capitalist. At its worst, this view of history makes free price-making markets historically inevitable. It dangerously naturalizes the market.

Philosophically, modernity embraced a particular onto-epistemological perspective or world view. It is from this which modernity sought derive its knowledge of reality and thereby to act on that reality. We may say that philosophically modernity is affiliated with:

• Atomism--the proposition that systems consist of unchanging parts and are simply the sum of their parts.

• Mechanicalism-- the proposition that relationships between parts are fixed, systems move smoothly from equilibrium to another, and changes are reversible.

• Universalism--the proposition that diverse, complex phenomena are the result of underlying universal principles that are unchanging over time and space. In this connection one could refer to modernity's view of history as a progressively meaningful whole with a beginning and a millennial end.

• Objectivism--the proposition of a “spectator theory of knowledge." It is one which presumes that inquiry is an activity in which the investigator merely observes nature and describes it by some sort of value-neutral, preordained language uniquely suited to the task.

• Monism-- the proposition that our separate individual modes of understanding complex systems are convergent.

The existence of these constructs in our approach to knowledge, i.e., science, and their absence in the concrete reality of society provides the onto-epistemological basis for the multiplying crises of the modernity project.