The Enlightenment Now

One potentially tricky area of sociology is the study of modernity and how this fits with the bigger picture of studying society, both in the past, the present and looking towards the future.

For students new to Sociology, getting heads around concepts at first such as modernity, postmodernity and late-modernity can cause a head spin. Simply put, all three concepts are in their own ways provide different means of a society making 'progress'. 

Modernity is examined in the following article, and although a heavy read, it highlights some of the key aspects of the Enlightenment (a period where scientific rationality and liberalism took hold within science and humanities across much of Europe), including: democracy, peace and inequality.