In “Orientations,” our introductory chapter, we looked at the idea of the European high modernist poetry of suffering as promising a richness of linguistic innovation and oft en still overlooked conceptual resources that could be of service in the eventual rearticulation of those intuitions involved in the principled moral and ethical bases for a common European social policy. Before turning to several of those modernist works themselves, in this chapter we need to elucidate in an initial way only some of the many elements to be understood today in reflective talk about modernity.

“Modernity” itself is a tendentious term that still accommodates a number of competing interpretations. One central issue is just when we might date the origins of modernity. Answering this question depends very largely on one's interests. Modernity begins for those with mainly political interests with the emergence of the nation-state in the mid to late seventeenth century. Those with mainly economic interests on the other hand see modernity beginning a century later with the onset of the industrial revolution in England. Modernity begins roughly at the same time for those who have strong sociological interests, specifically with Kant's articulation of the Enlightenment ideals of ethics and politics around the time of the French and American revolutions. For others, however, who stress the primacy of science in the modern era, the origins of modernity lie in the work of Newton.