ABSTRACT
Modernity started to change in the 17th and 18th centuries as major thinkers began to articulate and promote principles of modern culture. Modern selves, communities, and states had been developing until this point around dreams of possibility rather than principles. So, developing criteria for distinguishing what was modern from what was not and for measuring progress was a shift of profound importance. It reoriented modern life away from shared cultural imaginaries and toward impersonal standards. Progress began to be equated with the pursuit of private property and industrial production, too, so eorts to modernize fueled the development of capitalism and the industrial production of modern things. Principles of modernity became self-reinforcing as spaces from factories, cities, hotels, and stores to libraries and homes came to embody conceptions of modern progress (see Figure 4.1). Discursive modernity became hard to escape or think beyond.1
