Without engaging with the history of philosophical, social, and cultural thought, it is impossible to understand how modes of thought, systems of belief, and patterns of behavior are formed. Unfortunately, I had to get on the soapbox again — too many people speak with excessive confidence about motivations and values without the slightest idea where these actually come from.
The Origins of Modernity
As a historical and intellectual project, modernity began to take shape in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, crystallized in the 18th, and was institutionalized in the 19th.
I. Proto-Modernity (c. 1550–1650)
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) — proposed the inductive method and the idea of knowledge as a tool of power (“knowledge is power”).
René Descartes (1596–1650) — laid the foundations of rationalism and articulated the autonomous subject of thought.
Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton — provided a scientific model of nature based on measurement, mechanics, and universal laws.
Core idea of this period: Reason is the source of knowledge; nature is an object of calculation; knowledge is a tool of control.
II. The Enlightenment (c. 1680–1800)
Immanuel Kant — affirmed the autonomy of the subject and called for an “exit from self-imposed immaturity” through reason.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot — secularized morality, embraced belief in progress and human rights.
Adam Smith — rationalized economic life through the idea of self-regulating order.
Core idea: History has direction; progress is attainable; universal norms exist and should be implemented.
III. Modernity as a Social Project (19th century)
Auguste Comte — positivism and the idea of “scientific governance of society.”
Karl Marx — conceptualized history as a process subject to direction and transformation.
Hegel — interpreted history as the unfolding of reason.
Max Weber — saw rationalization as key to understanding modern society.
These thinkers concluded that society could be governed rationally, the historical process could be subjected to theoretical engineering, and the human being was both the object and the subject of transformation.
What Is Modernity?
Modernity is not merely a historical epoch, but a mode of thought. It rests on belief in progress, reason, universal truths, and the human capacity for rational self-organization. At its core lies the idea that history has direction and society a structure amenable to engineering. This was the age of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, industrialization, liberal democracy, and socialism — projects differing in content but united by a shared modernist logic.
Modernity began with the rejection of theocentrism. In place of God — reason. In place of revelation — method. In place of divine order — an order derived from nature or history. Political regimes, economic theories, social reforms — all were to be constructed as if they were machines. Rationally. Efficiently. Based on universal principles.
Social and Political Forms of Modernity
In the 20th century, modernity produced two grand forms: liberal capitalism and planned socialism. Both were offspring of the same project, despite their apparent opposition. Both believed in the possibility of rational governance of society. Both sought to shape a new kind of human being: rational, functional, interchangeable.
Scientific and technological progress, urbanization, the emergence of mass society, standardized education, institutions of modernization — all expressed the conviction that human reason could and should subject the world to its control.
The Collapse of Modernity
Modernity did not collapse overnight. Its erosion was a gradual process, beginning after World War II. The main blows came from within.
Modernity presumed a single developmental path for all countries and peoples. But in practice, universal models failed to translate across contexts. Modernization frequently resulted in authoritarianism, violence, and systemic breakdown (Latin America, the Middle East, Africa).
The more rationalization modernity introduced, the less room remained for freedom. Bureaucratization, technocratic management, and alienation were the by-products of efforts to organize everything.
The collapse of Nazism — and later of the Soviet project (discussed below) — ultimately undermined belief in grand systemic models. Postmodernity emerged precisely as a refusal to believe in metanarratives — whether liberalism, communism, or progress.
The shift toward relativism and pluralism rendered the modernist idea of objective knowledge as a universal foundation increasingly obsolete.
Socialist Illusions as Catalyst of Collapse
The Soviet project represented the most radical and consistent attempt to realize modernity. It proposed an alternative universalist model — not market-based, but historical-dialectical, claiming knowledge of the laws of development and the ability to institutionalize them. The logic was straightforward: if history follows laws, and those laws are known, then history can be governed. Hence — the Party as the bearer of reason, the Plan as the structure of order, violence as a legitimate mechanism of transformation. Not as a failure, but as a systematic instrument of modernity.
Yet it was this very internal consistency that led to systemic catastrophe. Violence, embedded as a rational tool of restructuring, rapidly turned into a mechanism of dehumanization: the individual became raw material to be processed for the sake of an ideal future. The economy proved persistently unmanageable — the command-administrative model collapsed in the face of real-world complexity. The reason was not a lack of democracy, but the illusion of total calculability. Ideology lost its cohesive power: by the 1980s, belief persisted only in ritual form. As a result, the collapse of the Soviet alternative was not merely the end of a specific political system — it was proof that even the most ambitious project of rational social engineering ends not in utopia, but in disintegration, cynicism, and tyranny.
After 1991, the world ceased to believe not only in communism. It ceased to believe in the very possibility of universal progress. The “end of history” was not the triumph of modernity, but the transition to postmodernity.
Legacy and Ruins
Today, modernity survives as infrastructure: railroads, universities, legal systems, the scientific method, nation-states. But as a project — it is dead. Contemporary consciousness no longer believes that society can be improved through reason, universal values, or theoretical models.
Both liberal modernity and socialist modernity failed — one through internal emptiness and market logic, the other through dictatorship and planning. In this failure, socialism was not merely a casualty but the central experiment — whose defeat made a return to modernist certainty impossible. ■