First Modernity and Modernization

Abstract

The liberal economic system, the nation-state, the individualistic professional ethics, and scientific rationalism are assigned to the first modernity and modernization. In the dissemination of the institutionalization of modern culture and the enforcement of functional differentiation since the nineteenth century, the first modernity and modernization had their culmination in modernism. The basic institutions include the nation-state, the cultural program of individualization (for example, Durkheim’s theorizing vis-à-vis the cult of the individual) and instrumental activism (interventionism), the acquisition economy (separation of household and business), scientific rationalism along with the devaluation of everyday knowledge, as well as the assumption that ecological resources are almost unlimited. Structural differentiation includes the differentiation and interpenetration of systems of action and communication, the territorial limitation of the organization of the political system (modern state organization), the gender-specific division of labor, the small family along with the membership and prestige order established by social stratification, as well as the hierarchical social exchange between the knowledge monopoly of experts and lay people between the scientific system and other functional systems.