'Modernity' and the Making of Social Order in Twentieth-Century Europe. (2nd April 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: SWEENEY, DENNIS
• Is Part Of: Contemporary European history. Volume 23:Number 2(2014:May)
• Page Start: 209
• Page End: 224
• Publication Date: 2014-04-02
• Subjects: Europe -- History -- 1945- -- Periodicals; 940.5
• DOI: 10.1017/S0960777314000137
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0960-7773

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="text-abstract"> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <p>It is hard not to be struck by the continuing interest in the concept of 'modernity' or 'the modern' for making sense of the economic, cultural and political transformations of twentieth-century Europe. Seemingly laid to rest by the early 1980s for its association with modernisation theory, modernity as a concept was revived during the late 1980s and 1990s largely by European historians working on countries, especially Germany and Russia, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories that modernisation theorists deemed models of developmental backwardness or case studies in the failure to modernise and its consequences. But, like its striking re-appearance in scholarship on those areas of the world – especially Asia and Africa – written off as the most irredeemably un-modern or 'traditional' by modernisation theorists, this renewed interest in modernity derives from very different interventions in post-structuralist theory and cultural and postcolonial studies, which have generated new definitions, and critiques 'modernity' and its 'dark side' from the vantage point of 'postmodernity'.</p> </abstract>