ABSTRACT
The division of labor figures as perhaps the most frequently defined marker of the modern order. From the onset of the modernizing revolutions, a host of discontents have been associated with the division of labor and its effects in the modern occupational and market systems. The institution of universal rights was viewed with less apprehension than the other features of modernity, except by bigots and those with parochial interests to protect. One discontent was famously articulated by Simmel, with his notion of the tragedy of culture. For Simmel, modernity was marked by the accelerated production of "objective culture," all those forms of symbolic work such as science, art, music, philosophy, and the like. critiques of the modernization literature have focused on the changed realities attendant on our increasingly globalized era. One thesis, represented most vocally by Martin Albrow, urges us to abandon the term "modernity" altogether.
