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Introduction
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Tendential Modernity

Profile image of Constantin SchifirnetConstantin Schifirnet

Social Science Information 2012 51: 22

https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018411426518
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Abstract

This article approaches the concept of tendential modernity as a type of evolution towards principles and norms of modernity within societies with an insufficiently functioning capitalist economy. In these societies, there is a gap between faster institutional renewal and slower economic development. Consequently, cultural, political and intellectual modernity outrun economic modernity. Tendential modernity refers to the ideas and actions aimed at modernization which remain partial and not finalized. Modernity is more an aspiration, a societal developmental intention, a goal to be reached, but which is never fully realized. Due to the fact that modernity is merely a tendency that is never finalized, the transitions are never completed. Modernity moves slowly and with difficulty through the intricate network of socio-institutional structures of the patriarchal and traditional society. It is inlay modernity, not structured under a clear, dominant form. My thesis is applied to the study of Romanian society’s modernization through all its stages: the emergence of the national state, the period between the two World Wars, the communist period and the post-communist period. Even though these periods are not all homogeneous in their rate of development, tendential modernity characterizes the evolutionary process of modern Romania

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