European Modernity and the Sociological Imagination

Bibliographic Data

ID20045360
AuthorsG K Bhambra (0000-0003-3658-1575, corresponding author)
Year2007
Pages34-55
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueRethinking Modernity (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230206410_3
OpenAlexW2503961464
ISBN9780230206410
LanguageEN
Citations received20

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as I shall elaborate in this chapter, saw the consolidation of a particular mode of thought that would provide the theoretical basis from which Western civilization viewed its relationships to other societies and peoples. The fundamental characteristics of the emerging theoretical paradigm were twofold: first, the assumption of a ruptural break from the past that made the modern world discontinuous from, and 'after', that which had preceded it, and, second, an assumption of the uniqueness of 'the West' in its initiation of a distinctive form of society. As Hayden White argues, this way of thinking involved the West's 'relationship not only to cultures and civilizations preceding it, but also to those contemporary with it in time and contiguous with it in space' (1980: 2). This chapter delineates the shifts in social thought that were central to the development of this way of thinking and, in doing so, discusses how these shifts became integral to sociology as a discipline

Civilization · Epistemology · Modernity · Social science · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · History · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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