Kumar notes that the 1960s counter-culture set itself against everything in modernism: “Pop art and pop music, the ‘new wave’ in cinema and the ‘new novel’ in literature, thne elision of the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘life,’ the cultivation of sensibility through sex and drugs rather than aesthetic contemplation of intellectual study, the elevation of the claims of the ‘pleasure principle’ over those of the ‘reality principle’: in all these ways the counter-culture assailed what it saw as the elitist,... Read more

In a 1965 essay, Leslie Fiedler celebrated the new movements of the 1960s as post-modern, post-Freudian, post-Humanist, post-Protestant, post-white, post-male. Read more

Kumar suggests that there is no useful distinction to be made between postmodernity as a socio-political concept and postmodernism as a cultural concept. All the instincts of postmodernists are against such a differentiation of spheres. For postmodernists, it is no longer useful to distinguish subsystems within the social world – culture, society, politics, economy are all collapsed together. This does not lead, however, to an undifferentiated premodern social situation. The plurality of society is not denied (far from it –... Read more

Kumar defines modernism as an intellectual, cultural and artistic revolt against modernity. Yet modernism itself, especially as expressed in architecture, was complex and racked with internal contradictions: “It could denounce the ‘inauthentic’ present in the name of the future, as in Futurism and Constructivism; and it could with equal force do so in the name of the past, as in the appeal to a time of lost wholeness in the novels of Proust, or to a former ‘organic community’ in... Read more

At least two: The modernity of science and technology, the factory system and city planning, of bureacracy and management. And on the other hand the modernity of sensibility, literature, hedonism, the lust for ever-new experience. On the one hand, Industrialization; on the other, the Romanticism that challenged it. On the one hand, modern urban architecture; on the other, the modernism of an Eliot who sees an inferno in the modern city. And yet, perhaps one: British Romantic poets supported the... Read more

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . . All fixed, fast-frozen relationships . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Zygmunt Bauman? No: Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto . Read more

Kumar suggests that “some of the principal hall-marks of modernity” are already evident in the Christian notions of time and history. Both Christianity and modernity separate time from nature, and humanize time; time is seen by both as “linear and irreversible”; both see history as an Aristotelian drama with beginning, middle, and end; both look to the future rather than toward the past (Christianity, he nicely says, “reverses chronology and views the story backwards, from its end point”); both create... Read more

The Latin modernus was coined in the late fifth century, as an antonym to antiquus , and variations of modernus became particularly common after the 10th century. Thus, Krishan Kumar writes, “Modernity is . . . an invention of the Christian Middle Ages,” and was used to emphasize the radical difference between the darkness of pagan antiquity and the brightness of the Christian world. Read more