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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
modernity
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Another characteristic of good design is modernity.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ If subjects exercise symbolic violence in traditional societies, fields or structures produce symbolic goods and hence exercise symbolic violence in modernity.
▪ It is one of the shining accomplishments of modernity that individuals have learned to share their fates with people very unlike themselves.
▪ Living in modernity facilitates this belief because we live in a world of rapidly changing fashions and technologies.
▪ Postmodernism points to a more organic, less differentiated enclave of organization than those dominated by the bureaucratic designs of modernity.
▪ The Enlightenment was the morning star of modernity.
▪ The fact that superstition, occultism, and vague forms of religious paganism persist into modernity is nothing to shout about.
▪ The problem with modernity, Enlightenment man's home is that it masks the reality of his hopelessness from him.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Modernity

Modernity \Mo*der"ni*ty\, n. Modernness; something modern.
--Walpole.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
modernity

1620s, from Medieval Latin modernitatem, noun of quality from modernus (see modern).

Wiktionary
modernity

n. The quality of being modern or contemporary.

WordNet
modernity

n. the quality of being current or of the present; "a shopping mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village" [syn: modernness, modernism, contemporaneity, contemporaneousness]

Wikipedia
Modernity

Modernity is a term of art used in the humanities and social sciences to designate both a historical period (the modern era), as well as the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in post- medieval Europe and have developed since, in various ways and at various times, around the world. 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 .

As a historical category, modernity refers to a period marked by a questioning or rejection of tradition; the prioritization of individualism, freedom and formal equality; faith in inevitable social, scientific and technological progress and human perfectibility; rationalization and professionalization; a movement from feudalism (or agrarianism) toward capitalism and the market economy; industrialization, urbanization and secularization; the development of the nation-state and its constituent institutions (e.g. representative democracy, public education, modern bureaucracy) and forms of surveillance . Some writers have suggested there is more than one possible modernity, given the unsettled nature of the term and of history itself.

Charles Baudelaire is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) in his 1864 essay "The Painter of Modern Life," to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience. In this sense, it 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 .

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 as diverse as Marxism, existentialism, modern art and the formal establishment of social science. It also encompasses the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, and shifts in attitudes associated with secularisation and post-industrial life .

Usage examples of "modernity".

In the seventeenth century, the absolutist reaction to the revolutionary forces of modernity celebrated the patrimonial monarchic state and wielded it as a weapon for its own purposes.

Well, if that modernity has come to an end, and if the modern nation-state that served as the ineluctable condition for imperialist domination and innumerable wars is disappearing from the world scene, then good riddance!

In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony.

Yet the conservative reaction to modernism is no less unsuited to modernity, for it has produced a kind of stubborn Luddism.

In other words, the nation was posed as the one and only active vehicle that could deliver modernity and development.

The thought of this initial period, born simultaneously in politics, science, art, philosophy, and theology, demonstrates the radicality of the forces at work in modernity.

At one time, in modernity, this monopoly was legitimated either as the expropriation of weapons from the violent and anarchic mob, the disordered mass of individuals who tend to slaughter one another, or as the instrument of def ense against the enemy, that is, against other peoples organized in states.

Not only is modernity not devoid of the Goddess, her Goodness and Agape and Compassion are written all over it, with its radically new and emergent stance of worldcentric pluralism, universal benevolence, and multicultural tolerance, something that no horticultural society could even conceive, let alone implement.

In the sixteenth century, in the midst of the Reformation and that violent battle among the forces of modernity, the patrimonial monarchy was still presented as the guarantee of peace and social life.

Musical modernity and the programmatic form had come to seem inseparable.

Its scope, the depth of the strata it has affected, all the positivities it has succeeded in disintegrating and recomposing, the sovereign power that has enabled it, in only a few years, to traverse the entire space of our culture, all this could be appraised and measured only after a quasi-infinite investigation concerned with nothing more nor less than the very being of our modernity.

Our subjectivism is as different from his individualism as his modernity was from medievalism.

It is a question of transforming a necessity imposed on the multitude-a necessity that was to a certain extent solicited by the multitude itself throughout modernity as a line of flight from localized misery and exploitationinto a condition of possibility of liberation, a new possibility on this new terrain of humanity.

In those origins of modernity, then, knowledge shifted from the transcendent plane to the immanent, and consequently, that human knowledge became a doing, a practice of transforming nature.

The second mode of modernity needed above all to guarantee its control over the new figures of social production both in Europe and in the colonial spaces in order to rule and prof it from the new forces that were transforming nature.