Abstract

The paper questions the assumption widely held within the social sciences that “modernity” has always been a topic central to the founders of sociology. It claims that it was not before the late 1960s and early 1970s when this term caused an oftentimes heated debate. It is also remarkable that from the very beginning the discourse on modernity was accompanied by the talk of a crisis of this epoch. Since the late 1990s attempts could be seen to pluralize the term when authors referred to “multiple”, “entangled” or “colonial modernities” in order to overcome the ethnocentric bias of the early discourses on modernity and modernization. But all that could not hide the fact that these terminological shifts did not solve the most important problems of the original concept which raises the question whether “modernity” in general (whether the term is pluralized or not) can and should be regarded as a useful tool for sociological analysis.