Practice question · Multiple choice
Giddens describes the present as a radicalised modernity while Lyotard describes it as postmodernity. What is actually at issue between those two descriptions?
Hints
- Ask what each position licenses a researcher to keep using.
- One says the old toolkit still works if pushed harder; the other says it has stopped fitting.
Show the answer
A. Whether the concepts developed to analyse modern society still apply, or whether a genuine rupture has made them obsolete
Why
Both agree that a great deal has changed. They divide over whether differentiation, rationalisation and individualisation still name the mechanisms, or whether those categories now obscure more than they reveal. That is a decision about a research programme, not a matter of emphasis, which is why the argument has lasted.
Practise Modernity and Postmodernity
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More questions on Modernity and Postmodernity
- Complete the account of the rival diagnoses of the present.
- Arrange these interventions in the modernity debate, earliest first.
- Arrange the steps of Beck’s argument from industrial modernity to the risk society.
- Fredric Jameson and David Harvey treat postmodern phenomena as a cultural style rather than an epochal break.…
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- Estimate how many years separate Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne and Bauman’s Liquid Modernity.
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