I

If it is true that all major social theorists and sociologists since the midnineteenth century have sought to delineate and sometimes explain the origins of that which is ‘new’ in modern society, then why might we wish to single out the endeavours and contribution of Georg Simmel in delineating the study of modernity? If we turn to classical social theorists and sociologists, then we do indeed find important attempts to investigate modernity. Marx, for instance, highlights three dimensions of modernity: the revolutionary new destruction of the past, the ever- new destruction of the present and the ever- same reproduction of the ‘socially necessary illusion’ of the commodity form as a barrier to a qualitatively different future. Marx's investigation of modernity goes in search of the laws of motion of capitalist society that will explain the phenomenal and illusory forms in which that society appears to us, especially in the sphere of circulation and exchange of commodities. What is largely absent in Marx's analysis is the detailed investigation of the phenomenal forms, of ‘the daily traffic of bourgeois life’, of ‘the movement which proceeds on the surface of the bourgeois world’, of how individuals experience modernity in everyday life.

Indeed, if we define modernity as the modes of experiencing that which is new in modern society (which is broadly how Baudelaire viewed modernity when he introduced the concept of ‘modernité ’ in 1859), then we find that the classical sociologists did attempt to delineate that which is new in modern society but largely failed to analyze modernity as modes of experiencing the new.