2 - Modernity, Historicity and Transdisciplinarity

Summary

This chapter attempts to build a transdisciplinary methodology to historicize modernity. The need for transdisciplinarity stems from the idea that disciplinary divisions and categories (such as the political, the economic, the social and the international) are the products of modernity, and hence cannot be used to study modernity’s history, which would otherwise impose the structure of modern (capitalist) society onto a differently constituted past. I use a twofold methodological critique to problematize these disciplinary divisions and the attendant tendency to transhistorize the sociospatial parameters of the modern present: the critique of “methodological presentism” and "methodological internalism.