Abstract

The article deals with the inflexion that occurred in the studies of modernity from the 1960s onwards. New ruptures were proposed within modernity itself, giving rise to narratives on postmodernity, hyper-modernity, new modernity, late or advanced modernity, second modernity or multiple modernities. Modernity was supposed to draw a more or less indelible border between past and present; the others and the Westerners; tradition and modernity; community and society; holism and individualism. Modernity was a caesura: the ultimate base of all “Grands Partages”. What we have witnessed in the the last fifty years is the duplication at the very heart of modernity of this baptismal caesura. All the critical movements of the last decades share this same conviction: the caesura of modernity ceases to be one and definitive, to become, on the contrary, pluralistic and always on work. In this perspective, contemporary modernity –the new question of modernity– is inseparable from the generalization of a critical appraise of its great dogmas, assumptions or experiences.