Constantin Schifirneț, TENDENTIAL MODERNITY, Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2021.
https://www.lap-publishing.com/…/tendential-modernity…
This book brings together my essays principally concerned with tendential modernity and its relations with Europeanisation, mass media, religion and education. These papers highlight the multiple approaches in the analysis of the impact of tendential modernity in the analysis of Romanian society.
The book explores the concept of tendential modernity, which is presented as the most appropriate approach to an explanation of the process of modernization in contemporary societies. In opposition to the classical definition of modernity, related to progress and linear evolution, and to never-ending advances in a pre-determined direction, tendential modernity shows a particular penchant for the co-habitation of modernity with pre-modern social practices and traditions. In these societies, there is a gap between faster institutional renewal and slower economic development. Consequently, cultural, political and intellectual modernity outrun social and economic modernity.
The book analyzes an explanatory model of modern evolution, the features of tendential modernity, and resistance to modernity. Tendential modernity refers to the ideas and actions aimed at modernisation which remain partial and not finalised. Modernity is more an aspiration, a societal developmental intention, a goal to be reached, but which is never fully realised. Due to the fact that modernity is merely a tendency that is never finalised, 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 modernity structured under a clear, dominant form. My thesis is applied to the study of Romanian society’s modernisation through all its stages: the emergence of the national state, the period between the two World Wars, the communist period and the postcommunist period. Even though these periods are not all homogeneous in their rate of development, tendential modernity characterises the evolutionary process of modern Romania.
CONTENTS
Preface /5
Chapter One. Tendential modernity /9
Chapter Two. Tendential modernity: a type of modernity without a dominant form / 42
Chapter Three. The forms without substance and the tendential modernity /59
Chapter Four. The Romanian identity in the context of tendential modernity /83
Chapter Five. National public space, European public space /103
Chapter Six. Tendential modernity and innovation /120
Chapter Seven. Orthodoxy, church, state, and national identity in the context of tendential modernity /125
Chapter Eight. Religion and tradition /155
Chapter Nine. Spiru Haret, education and school legislation reform /166
Chapter Ten. The student, the agent of change in the university field /181
Chapter Eleven. Adult education in the society of tendential modernity /194
Chapter Twelve. From Romanian indigenous modernisation to Europeanisation /203
Chapter Thirteen. The Europeanisation of the Romanian society and the tendential modernity /211
Chapter Fourteen. The Europeanisation through innovation and imitation in a society of tendential modernity /228
Chapter Fifteen. The intellectual’s state in the context of the Romanian society’s Europeanisation /235
Chapter Sixteen. Mass media in national public sphere and in European public sphere /253
Chapter Seventeen. The mass media and tendential modernity in the transition process from the national society to the European Community /263
Chapter Eighteen. Europeanisation, identity and mass media in a society of tendential modernity /271
Chapter Nineteen. The Europeanisation of the institutions’ image in a society with tendential modernity /280
Chapter Twenty. Information about policies and initiatives of European Union transmitted by the domestic social actors at public television /292
Chapter Twenty-one. The manipulation on online newspapers in the European societies of tendential modernity /306
Chapter Twenty-two. The Europeanisation as reflected in the online newspapers in a society of tendential modernity /316
Chapter Twenty-three. Europeanisation of Corporate Social Responsibility in a society of tendential modernity /329
Bibliography /341
