Modernity

Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the Age of Reason of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Commentators variously consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with World War II in 1945, or as late as the period falling between the 1980s and 1990s; the following era is often referred to as "postmodernity". The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe, without assigning it to either the modern or postmodern era. (Thus "modern" may be used as a name of a particular era in the past, as opposed to meaning "the current era".) Depending on the field, modernity may refer to different time periods or qualities. In historiography, the 16th to 18th centuries are usually described as early modern, while the long 19th century corresponds to modern history proper. 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 an analytical concept and normative idea, modernity is closely linked to the ethos of philosophical and aesthetic modernism. These political and intellectual currents that intersect with the Enlightenment and subsequent developments, including existentialism, modern art, the formal establishment of social science, and contemporaneous antithetical developments such as Marxism. Additionally, it encompasses the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, as well as shifts in attitudes associated with secularization, liberalization, modernization, and post-industrial life. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modernist art, politics, science and culture had come...