With the Enlightenment Project that followed the French revolution came a host of new ideas. Ideas that changed the way the world was perceived in all walks of life. Science, art, technology, literature- everything was turned around and made up in a new way. This upheaval of age-old traditions and practices to give space to new, better discourses and methods is usually known as modernity.
Modernity is very closely related to the industrial age as it is when people moved away from their farms and into new societies that it became possible for such an intellectual revolution.
Modernity refers to the period where people became more open to new ideas and the market flourished. The ideas of democracy and nation-state became more and more popular and the global society became more dynamic than it had ever been before. People became more concerned with the future, rather than lamenting about the past. Social practices were altered and baseless traditions were done away with. It is during this time that political ideologies such as liberalism and socialism came into being.
The individual became important and gained an identity as more than just a surf. The ideas of freedom, positive and negative, and equality came into being. Progress became the center point of all human activity, as opposed to earlier when all activity was driven by the desire to gain territorial power.
Modernity was had various political, sociological and scientific connotations that ultimately helped shape the world into what it is today.
