The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity

Abstract

The view of modernity as a distinct civilization implies that modernity has to be seen as a new type of civilization - not unlike the formation and expansion of the Great Religions. According to this view, the core of modernity is the crystallization and development of mode or modes of interpretation of the world, or of a distinct social imaginaire, indeed of the ontological vision, of a distinct cultural programme, combined with the development of a set or sets of new institutional formations - the central core of both being an unprecedented 'openness' and uncertainty. This civilization, the distinct cultural programme with its institutional implications, crystallized first in Western Europe and then expanded to other parts of Europe, to the Americas and later on throughout the world, giving rise to continually changing cultural and institutional patterns which constituted, as it were, different responses to the challenges and possibilities inherent in the core characteristics of the distinct civilizational premises of modernity. The continual changeability of the institutional and ideological patterns of modernity indicate that the history of modernity is best seen as a story of continual development and formation, constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programmes of modernity and of distinctively modern institutional patterns, and of different self-conceptions of societies as modern - of multiple modernities.