Modernity & Post-Modernity

The nation state:

• Each country developed a political unit that had its own sovereignty.
• Within each boundary, the population would usually share a common language and culture. 

• Capitalism:
  • The economic system of the modernist era.
  • It is the job of the state to regulate the capitalist system however its nature is to bring about inequality within society.

• Growth of science and rationalisation:
  • The dominance of religious belief in the traditional societies wanes (reduces) and is replaced by the new dominant belief system.

• Individualism:
  • Although social class, gender and ethnicity still classify people into set groups, there is generally more personal freedom than in traditional societies.

• Postmodernists argue that things have changed from the Modernist era due (mainly) to globalisation.
• They argue that all countries are now connected and therefore the separate nation states are no longer significant in the way that they used to be.

• Each nation state no longer has total autonomy as several global political organisations exist.
  • Examples include the United Nations and The European Union.
• Therefore postmodernists argue that due to such changes, modernism no longer exists and we need new theories such as postmodernism to explain society.

• They believe we are experiencing the ‘death of the social’.
• Jean Baudrillard argues that for some individuals their only interaction with the outside world is through the media and this, therefore, shapes the way they think about the world.

• As a result, the traditional need for a sense of belonging to a community has become redundant and no longer relevant.
• Baudrillard refers to this process as the ‘death of the social’.