Description
Book Synopsis* This is a brief, authoritative and accessible introduction to the idea of modernity, written by a leading social theorist. * Wagner shows that modernity was based on ideas of freedom, reason and progress, but he examines the extent to which these ideas have been, and can be, realized in the modern world.
Trade Review‘Modernity as an organizing theoretical-interpretative device has had an untidy and unruly history. No one recognizes this better than Peter Wagner, and no one has done more to unpack, analyse, tame, and repack its meanings and its claims.
Modernity extends his previous work significantly, and consolidates his position as simultaneously the most creative and the most sensible of writers of our time on the topic. He is especially to be congratulated for referring to historical and comparative actualities.'
Neil Smelser, University of California, Berkeley ‘Peter Wagner's work is simply indispensable to those who wish to conceptualize modernity in a truly global way that challenges the Eurocentrism built into all classical writings on the subject. Wagner is a high theorist but his openness to questions of historical diversity remains exemplary.'
Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago
‘Peter Wagner's developing "world sociology of modernity", outlined in this splendid book, is a major advance in his and our thinking about modernity around the world. The book is also an excellent and very readable summary of the current state of the field.'
William Outhwaite, Newcastle University
Table of ContentsPreface
Part I
Re-theorizing modernity
Chapter 1
Retrieving modernity's past, understanding modernity's present
Chapter 2
Changing views of modernity:
from convergence and stability to plurality and transformations
Chapter 3
Successive modernities:
crisis, criticism and the idea of progress
Chapter 4
Disentangling the concept of modernity:
time, action and problems to be solved
Part II
Analyzing contemporary modernity
Chapter 5
The link between capitalism and democracy reconsidered
Chapter 6
European and non-European trajectories of modernity compared
Chapter 7
Violence and justice in global modernity:
reflections on South Africa with world-sociological intent
Chapter 8
Towards a world-sociology of modernity
References
