Ultra-modern

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Ultra-modern ( English high modernism or high modernity ) is the name for a section of modernity , which is characterized by an unbroken trust in the progress of science and technology as a means of reorganizing the social and natural world. The historian Ulrich Herbert proposed the term as a term for an era conceived as a unit, namely the period from around the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s in Europe .

definition

According to the political scientist James C. Scott , who coined the term in the late 1990s, ultra-modernity is characterized by the following features:

  • Strong confidence in the potential for scientific and technological progress, including confidence in the expertise of scientists, engineers, bureaucrats and other intellectuals.
  • Try to master nature (including human nature) to meet human needs.
  • One focus is on making complex environments or concepts (e.g. old cities or social dynamics) legible, mostly through spatial arrangement (e.g. urban planning on a grid).
  • Disregard of the historical, geographical and social context in the development.

Periodization

For Europe, the historian Ulrich Herbert conceived the period - understood as a unit - between around 1880/1900 and 1960/1980 as a phase between two “dynamic modernization spurts” under the term ultra-modern. This periodization offer also has an impact on the positioning of German history in the 20th century, which Herbert tries to understand instead of a German special route in the context of a transnational ultra-modernity.

literature

  • Ulrich Herbert : Europe in High Modernity. Reflections on a Theory of the 20th Century. In: Journal of Modern European History. Volume 5, 2007, pp. 5-21.
  • Lutz Raphael : The “ultra-modern” order pattern? The theory of modernity and the history of European societies in the 20th century. In: Ute Schneider , Lutz Raphael (Ed.): Dimensions of Modernity. Festschrift for Christof Dipper. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57298-6 , pp. 73-91.

Remarks

  1. ↑ James C. Scott : Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 1999, p. 4.
  2. ↑ James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State , pp. 4-5; Peter J. Taylor: Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1999, pp. 18, 32.
  3. ↑ Uwe Fraunholz, Thomas Hänseroth , Anke Woschech: Ultramodern Visions and Utopias. On the transcendence of engineered progress expectations. In this. (Ed.): Technology Fiction: Technical Visions and Utopias in the Ultra Modern. Transcript, Bielefeld 2012, pp. 11–24, here pp. 16–19 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  4. ↑ Edgar Wolfrum : The ultra-modern and the extreme Germans. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . August 13, 2014 (Review of Herbert's History of Germany in the 20th Century ).