The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is often claimed as a harbinger of modernity. In this essay, I compare Ecclesiastes with two overlapping constructions of modernity, taken from Matthew Arnold and Charles Taylor, focusing especially on Taylor’s motifs of inwardness, narrativity, meaninglessness, and ordinary life. I suggest that the likeness to modernity in Ecclesiastes is a complex bundle of e...

ONCE upon a time the overstressed executive bellowing orders into a telephone, cancelling meetings, staying late at the office and dying of a heart attack was a stereotype of modernity. That was before the Whitehall studies, a series of investigations of British civil servants begun in the 1960s. These studies found that the truth is precisely the opposite. Those at the top of the pecking order...

Background.The analysis of past research shows that the study of mental illness was part of the agenda of the founders of the discipline of sociology. Additionally, the sociological study of mental illness changes to reflect the mark of historical periods such as premodernity, modernity and postmodernity.Aim.The aim of this study is to compare and contrast some modern sociological theories of m...

Tom Misa indicates in a proposition in his chapter. This implies a further proposition about technology and modernity being interconnected. It is this idea of interconnectedness that led us to deplore the “great divide” between detailed technology studies, with their claim of situated developments and contingency, and abstract or theoretical discussions of modernity. We exaggerated a bit in ord...

Stefano Bianchini’s comprehensive work Liquid Nationalisms focuses on the frequent redrawing of state borders, especially in Eastern Europe, fluidity contours nations, and vagaries idiosyncratic nature political changes European continent from 19th to 21st centuries. The title this takes its inspiration Zygmunt Bauman’s famous work, Modernity (2000). which was published 2000 aftermath dissoluti...