Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual.
George Simmel | Modern Culture
Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.
Eric Hoffer – Modernity
The consequences of what actors do, intentionally or unintentionally, are events which would not have happened if that actor had behaved differently, but which are not within the scope of the agent’s power to have brought about.
Anthony Giddens – The idea of consequences of action
The modes of life brought into being by modernity have swept us away from all traditional types of social order, in quite unprecedented fashion.
Anthony Giddens – Modernity & mode of life
The world in which we live today is a fraught and dangerous one. This has served to do more than simply blunt or force us to qualify the assumption that the emergence of modernity would lead to the formation of a happier and more secure social order.
Anthony Giddens – Modernity and Social order
In various otherwise divergent forms of thought, sociology has been understood as generating knowledge modern social life which can be used in the interests of prediction and control.
Anthony Giddens – Sociology
Modernity is inherently globalising-this is evident in some of the most basic characteristics of modern institutions, including particularly their disembeddedness and reflexivity.
The Globalizing of Modernity
Globalisation refers essentially to that stretching process, in so far as the modes of connection between different social contexts or regions become networked across the earth’s surface as a whole.
Anthony Giddens – Globalization
Civil inattention is the most basic type of facework commitment involved in encounters with strangers in circumstances of modernity.
Anthony Giddens – Civil inattention, trust and Modernity
Risk and danger, as experienced in relation t o ontological security, have become secularised along with most other aspects of social life.
Anthony Giddens – Risk, Danger
The dynamism of modernity derives from the separation of time and space and their recombination in forms which permit the precise time-space ‘zoning’ of social life; the disembedding of social systems (a phenomenon which connects closely with the factors involved in time-space separation); and the reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations in the light of continual inputs of knowledge affecting the actions of individuals and groups.
