Abstract
The idea that human history is marked by certain ‘discontinuities’ and does not have a smoothy developing form is of course a familiar one and has been stressed in most versions of Marxism. My use of the term has no particular connection with historical materialism, however, and is not directed at characterising human history as a whole. There undoubtedly are discontinuities at various phases of historical development — as, for example, at the points of transition between tribal societies and the emergence of agrarian states. I am not concerned with these. I wish instead to accentuate that particular discontinuity, or set of discontinuities, associated with the modern period.
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Notes
William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Oxford: Blackwell. 1983).
See the statistics provided in Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures (Washington, D.C.: World Priorities, 1983).
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1978), p.179.
Alan Fox, Beyond Contract (London: Faber, 1974).
For one of the few generalised discussions of trust in systems, see Susan P. Schapiro, ‘The social control of impersonal trust’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 93, 1987.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (London: Hogarth, 1962).
Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p.242.
Donald L. Patrick and Graham Scambler (eds), Sociology as Applied to Medicine (New York: Macmillan, 1982).
See Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);
Robert D. Sack, ‘The Consumer’s World: Place as Context’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol.78, 1988.
I follow closely Held’s thought [here]. See David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).
C. Edward Crowther Intimacy. Strategies for Successful Relationships (New York: Dell, 1988) p.45.
Allison James and Alan Prout Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (Brighton: Falmer, 1990). The ‘new paradigm’ James and Prout suggest for studying childhood relates closely to the ideas developed here.
Barbara De Angelis, Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know (London: Thorsons, 1990), p.274.
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© 1993 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Cassell, P. (1993). The Nature of Modernity. In: Cassell, P. (eds) The Giddens Reader. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22890-4_6
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