We are all modern today. But modernity today is not what it used to be. Over the past few decades, modernity has been radically changed by globalization, individualization, new inequalities, and fundamentalism. A novel way of analysing contemporary societies is needed. This book proposes such an analysis.

Every society seeks answers to certain basic questions: how to order life in common; how to satisfy human needs; how to establish knowledge. Sociology long assumed that the answers had been found once and for all: a liberal-democratic state, a market economy, and free scientific institutions. This trinity used to be called ‘modern society’.

By contrast, this book is based on the idea that, under conditions of modernity, there are no stable and certain answers to these questions. There is a plurality of possible answers, every proposed answer can be criticized and contested, and every society needs to find its answer on its own.

This new sociology of modernity proposes two key instruments through which to understand the answers given to those questions: the experiences human beings have of their own modernity and the interpretations they give to those experiences. It reviews the history of ‘Western’ modernity in this light and then focuses on the specific answers that were and are being developed in Europe.

• Contents 8
• Preface 10
• 1: Ways of Understanding Modernity 14
• Part I: Interpretations of Political Modernity: Liberty and its Discontents 32
  • Overture: Multiple Interpretations of Political Modernity 34
  • 2: Modernity and the Question of Freedom 37
  • 3: The Political Forms of Modernity 52
  • 4: Modernity as a Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics 75
• Part II: Interpretations of Economic Modernity: The Endgame and After 88
  • Overture: Capitalism and Modernity as Social Formations and as Imaginary Significations 90
  • 5: The Critique of Capitalism and its Impasse 96
  • 6: Towards a Historical-Comparative Sociology of Capitalism 116
  • 7: The Exit from Organized Economic Modernity 136
• Part III: Interpretations of Epistemic Modernity: Distance and Involvement 156
  • Overture: The Quest for Knowledge beyond Experience and Interpretation 158