Interpreting Modernity and the Cultural Possibility of Social Transformation

Modernity is associated with the celebration of rationality and the intervention of science, which manifested itself in the historical development of industrialisation in the West and also colonialism in the non-West. Dominated by the ideals of reason, culture has been critiqued to have been reduced to a mechanistic representation of instrumental rationality and consumerism. Reviewing selected works of Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci and sociologist Avijit Pathak, this essay explores the possibilities of conceiving culture as a space of social transformation and humanism. Reflecting on the historical and contextual interpretations of cultural hegemony and the need for critical consciousness to overthrow the bourgeois order in Italy, and engaging with the paradoxes and constraints confronting Indian modernity, this work attempts at a critical understanding of modernity and looks into the possibility of achieving moral transformation through the reinterpretation of culture

Aesthetics · Bourgeoisie · Consumerism · Cultural hegemony · Epistemology · Hegemony · Humanism · Indigenous · Marxist philosophy · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Reinterpretation · Social science · Sociology · Subaltern · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci

• Transformation of consciousness

  Gulkhan Nuradin, Akmaral Maldybek et al.•Social Identities•2026

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