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‘Modernity’ and the Making of Social Order in Twentieth-Century Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2014

DENNIS SWEENEY
DENNIS SWEENEY*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta, Department of History and Classics, 2–28 Henry Marshall Tory Building, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H4, Canada; dsweeney@ualberta.ca
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Extract

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’.

Type
Forum: Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain (1995)
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 209 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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