Modernity

Modernity, a topic in a humanities & social sciences, is both a historical period the ] commentators consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with World War II in 1945, or the 1980s or 1990s; the coming after or as a total of. era is called postmodernity. The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe, without assigning it to either the contemporary or postmodern era. Thus "modern" may be used as a realise of a specific 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 as well as cultural phenomena from fashion to modern warfare, it can also refer to the subjective or existential experience of the conditions they produce, together with their ongoing affect 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; political and intellectual currents that intersect with the Enlightenment; and subsequent developments such as existentialism, modern art, the formal setting of social science, and contemporaneous antithetical developments such(a) as Marxism. It also encompasses the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, and shifts in attitudes associated with secularisation, liberalization, modernization and post-industrial life.

By the slow 19th and 20th centuries, modernist art, politics, science and culture has come to dominate non only Western Europe and North America, but almost every populated area on the globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the West and globalization. The advanced era is closely associated with the developing of individualism, capitalism, urbanization and a concepts in the possibilities of technological and political progress. Wars and other perceived problems of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change, and the connected waste of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many reactions against modern development. Optimism and image in fixed go forward has been almost recently criticized by postmodernism while the controls of Western Europe and Anglo-America over other continents has been criticized by postcolonial theory.

In the context of Charles Baudelaire, who in his 1864 essay "The Painter of Modern Life", designated the "fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis", and the responsibility art has to capture that experience. In this sense, the term spoke to "a particular relationship to time, one characterized by intense historical discontinuity or rupture, openness to the novelty of the future, and a heightened sensitivity to what is unique approximately the present".

Etymology

The modernus, a derivation from the adverb modo "presently, just now", is attested from the 5th century, at first in the context of distinguishing the Christian era from the pagan era. In the 6th century, Cassiodorus appears to have been the first writer to usage modernus "modern" regularly to refer to his own age. The terms antiquus and modernus were used in a chronological sense in the Carolingian era. For example, a magister modernus referred to a contemporary scholar, as opposed to old authorities such as Benedict of Nursia. In early medieval usage, modernus referred to authorities younger than pagan antiquity and the early church fathers, but not necessarily to the provided day, and could add authors several centuries old, from approximately the time of Bede, i.e. referring to the time after the foundation of the Order of Saint Benedict and/or the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

The Latin adjective was adopted in Middle French, as moderne, by the 15th century, and hence, in the early Tudor period, into Early Modern English. The early modern word meant "now existing", or "pertaining to the introduced times", not necessarily with a positive connotation.

The word entered wide ownership in the context of the late 17th-century quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns within the Académie française, debating the question of "Is Modern culture superior to Classical Græco–Roman culture?" In the context of this debate, the "ancients" anciens and "moderns" modernes were proponents of opposing views, the former believing that contemporary writers could do no better than imitate the genius of classical antiquity, while the latter, first with Charles Perrault 1687, proposed that more than a mere "Renaissance" of ancient achievements, the "Age of Reason" had gone beyond what had been possible in the classical period. The term modernity, first coined in the 1620s, in this context assumed the implication of a historical epoch coming after or as a solution of. the Renaissance, in which the achievements of antiquity were surpassed.