ABSTRACT
I The history of sociology’s relationship to modernity presents us with a paradox. In its struggle consciously to assert itself as an independent academic discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century and especially around the turn of the century, sociology often took as its object of study that of which it was a product-modernity. It might even be suggested that those who not merely analysed its features but also experienced and expressed its central features in their writings (i.e. actually belonged to the modernist tradition) were the most successful in carrying out this task. This, it has been argued elsewhere, was true of Simmel who came closest to expressing and analysing the modes of experiencing the ‘new’ and ‘modern’ life-world.1 But the study of modernity itself reveals a fractured history. If we take as axiomatic that the conceptualization of modernity presupposes a theory of modernization and, in turn, if we note that the original formulation of modernité by Baudelaire included a theory of modernism, then we can see how the study of modernity possesses a fragmented history. Sociology now abounds in theories of modernization which refer largely to the transformation of political, economic and social systems or sub-systems. Sometimes, as Habermas has argued with respect to the recent neo-conservative social theories of Bell and others, these are combined with a denunciation of the culture of modernism in order to assert the existence of post-modernism, postindustrialism and post-capitalism.2 For its part, modernism-understood largely as a series of aesthetic movements-has been confined to the attentions of those who deal with art and culture. The result is that modernity itself is either subsumed under modernization or modernism or it disappears altogether as an object of investigation. For instance, to take up a distinction which Habermas applies in his overview of modernity, those social theories which are most successful in dealing with the modernization of social systems are often least successful in either analysing the ‘life-world’ or indicating sufficiently the mediations between the two.3
