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This article provides information about the Gidden’s theory of modernity:
Recent social changes have led to debates over the very nature of the contemporary social world. There is a debate between those who continue to see contemporary society as a modern world and those who argue that a substantial change has taken place in recent years and that we have moved into a new, postmodern world.
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Most of the classical sociologists were engaged in an analysis and critique of modern society which is clear in the works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel. As we move into the 21st century, it is obvious that today’s world is a very different place. The issue is whether the changes in the world are modest and continuous with those associated with modernity or are so dramatic and discontinuous that the contemporary world is better described by a new term, “postmodern.”
A host of social changes are fundamentally altering our world, and traditional “class politics” and faith in progress are being replaced by “identity politics” and “new” social movements such as feminism, gay liberation, ecologism, ethnic revivalism, “religious neo-fundamentalism”. These changes have brought with them a challenge to the “philosophical discourse of modernity”.
The conceptual framework of social science and the historical legacy of Enlightenment rationality have been challenged by new postmodern knowledge, of which contends that reason is a form of illegitimate power that marginalises and excludes cultural vocabularies that do not conform to its categories. As per Giddens in order to understand and conceptualise contemporary society, a new sociological theory capable of grasping its complexity is required.
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He describes the modern world as a “juggernaut”. Modernity in the form of a juggernaut is extremely dynamic, it is a “runaway world” with great leaps in the pace, scope and profoundness of change over prior systems. Giddens defines modernity in terms of four basic institutions. The first is capitalism, characterised by commodity production, private ownership of capital, property less wage labour and a class system derived from these characteristics.
The second is industrialism, which involves the use of inanimate power sources and machinery to produce goods. Industrialism is not restricted to the workplace, and it affects an array of other settings, such as “transportation, communication and domestic life”. The third, is surveillance capacities which is defined as “the supervision of the activities of subject populations (mainly, but not exclusively) in the political sphere”. The fourth is military power, or the control of the means of violence, including the industrialisation of war.
It should be noted that at the macro level, Giddens focuses on the nation-state (rather than the more conventional sociological focus on society), which he sees as radically different from the type of community characteristic of pre-modern society.