The use terms and concepts like modernity, modernism, and modernization is a leitmotif and common denominator of various disciplines. However, modernity, modernism, and modernization are also controversial concepts that range from the theoretical to the empirical. Resurging in the last decades in the light of globalization, the climate crisis, technological advancement, and populism, the questioning of modernity begins to couple with questions of our present time and plans for the future.

When and how did we start being modern? One may note that the attribution of specific characteristics of modernity traces back to a fundamental switch from one epoch to another: the dissociation with tradition; the adoption of secularism and religious disenchantment; the use of the scientific method as the predominant paradigm (as if never changing); the acceptance of the utter dominance of reason, rationality, and positivism; the emergence of the nation state; the assertion of universal human rights and universal values – and so on. Art, literature, fashion, mores, and hygiene concerns (the new manners as described by Norbert Elias, 1969) all become part of the rhetoric of modernity, leading to a self-celebratory promise of a new civilization.

Since the 70s, the resurgence of modernity studies started to occupy the framework of a “post-” condition. French philosophers and sociologists such as Lyotard, Bell, and Touraine have interrogated the features of a fundamental change from an industrial society to a programmed or communication society (Touraine 1971 [1969]; Castells 1996, 1977) in which identities and information appear to be more emphasized than the classic conflicts surrounding labor issues and control of the means of production (Touraine 1977 [1973]).