ABSTRACT
Recently the concept of modernity has come into wide use complementing the rather simple-looking but not unambiguous term of ‘modern society’. We rather naively labelled the social formations of Europe and North America during the last few centuries ‘modern society’, and relied upon a basic distinction between these social formations and so called primitive or traditional societies. The concept of modernity denotes more a sort of condition or an experience, an existential interpretation of modern society. The concept is used to try to analyse what it is about social existence in modern society that renders it fundamentally different from what has gone before.
