ABSTRACT
Since modernity is the subject-matter of the book, the second chapter furnishes a “heuristic” or “operative” concept of modernity. “Operative” is here used to acknowledge the fact that there is hardly any exhaustive definition of modernity, perhaps given the complexity of modernity itself. Because they possess some of the most theoretically rich ideas on modernity, this chapter draws on the insights of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Immanuel Wallerstein to provide an operative concept of modernity most relevant for our present purposes. This chapter pays a close attention to how Habermas sees modernity in terms of the “uncoupling” of systems from the lifeworld, and how he analyzes the pathologies of modernity as resulting from the “colonization” of the lifeworld by systems. Next, it explores the way in which Taylor uses the concept of “social imaginaries” to make sense of the unprecedented transformations that go by the name “modernity,” as he analyzes the malaises of modernity in terms of modern “social imaginaries.” In turn, this chapter engages Wallerstein’s world-system theory, wherein “modernity” is nothing over and above the emergence of a monolithic capitalist world-system, a system that effectively determines the social, economic, and political status of nations in our world today.
