Modernity A term describing the particular attributes of modern societies. A good deal of sociological work is based on the assumption of a sharp divide between pre-modern and modern societies. There is considerable debate as to the qualities of the two kinds of society as well as to when Western societies became modern.
Modernity is distinguished on economic, political, social and cultural grounds.
For example, modern societies typically have industrial, capitalist economies, democratic political organization and a social structure founded on a division into social classes. There is less agreement on cultural features, which are said to include a tendency to the fragmentation of experience, a commodification and rationalization of all aspects of life, and a speeding up of the pace of daily life. There is disagreement about the periodization of modernity, some writers associating it with the appearance and spread of capitalism from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, some with the religious changes of the fifteenth century onwards which provided the basis for rationalization, others with the onset of industrialization in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and still others with cultural transformations at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century which coincide with modernism . Recently it has been argued that contemporary societies are no longer modern but postmodern. Modernism Penguin Dictionary of Sociology 2.