Late modern period  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

This page Late modern period is part of the politics series.
Illustration:Liberty Leading the People (1831, detail) by Eugène Delacroix.

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

In many periodizations of human history, the late modern period followed the early modern period. It began approximately around the year 1800 and depending on the author, either ended with the beginning of contemporary history after World War II in 1945, or includes the contemporary history period up to the present day. Notable historical events in the late 18th century that marked the transition from the early modern period to the late modern period include – the American Revolution (1765–1791), the French Revolution (1789–1799), and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1760.

Significant events

As a result of the Industrial Revolution and political revolutions in the early modern period, the world-views of modernism emerged. The industrialization of many nations was initiated with the industrialization of the Kingdom of Great Britain. Particular facets of the late modern period include:

• Increasing role of science and technology
• Spread of social movements
• Institution of representative democracy
• The abolition of slavery
• New Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa, and later decolonization
• Industrialization
• Urbanization
• Increasing role of medicine and sanitation
• Mass literacy and proliferation of mass media
• Women's rights
• Socialism and the Cold War
• Demographic transition
• Green Revolution in agriculture
• Information Age in the latter 20th and the early 21st century

Other important events in the development of the Late modern period include:

• The Opium Wars and Unequal Treaties in China
• The failed Revolutions of 1848 in Europe
• The development of the telegraph and the adoption of Morse code
• The American Civil War (1860–1865) and the abolition of slavery in the US (1863–1865)
• The Meiji Restoration in Japan
• The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the Unification of Germany (1871), and the Unification of Italy (1871)
• The Berlin Conference (1884–1885) and the Scramble for Africa.
• The development of radio telecommunication
• The Spanish–American War and the American annexation of the Philippines
• The First World War (1914–1918) and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires
• The Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) between the British and French empires create the modern boundaries of Syria and Iraq
• The Russian Revolution (1917) and the Russian Civil War (1917–1922)
• The Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922); the Greek (1913–1922), Armenian (1914–1923), and Assyrian (1914–1924) genocides
• The March on Rome and the rise of Fascism in Italy (1922)
• The Great Depression (1929 – late 1930s) worldwide and the New Deal in the US
• The failed Beer Hall Putsch (1923) and the Hitler's rise to power in Germany (1931–1933)
• The Soviet famine (1932–1933), including the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine and the Kazakh famine in Soviet Kazakhstan.
• The Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945)
• The Second World War (1939–1945) and The Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe (1941–1945)
• The Founding of the United Nations (1945) as a successor to the League of Nations (1920–1946)
• The Bengal famine (1943) and the Partition of India from the British Empire (1947)
• The Chinese Civil War (beginning 1927) and the Chinese Communist Revolution (1945–1949)
• The Cold War (1947–1991) (including Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Hungarian Uprising (1956), the Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) and Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1955–1975), the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia (1968), and the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989))
• De-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw in the Soviet Union, and subsequent Sino-Soviet split (1956–1966)
• The Great Leap Forward campaign (1958–1962), the subsequent Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China
• The 1954–1968 civil rights movement in the United States
• The first spaceflights, the beginning of the Space Age (1957–present) and the Space Race, the first man in space (1961) and the first man on the Moon (1969)
• Bangladesh genocide (1971) and Bangladesh Liberation War from Pakistan (1971)
• The Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) in Israel, and the subsequent OPEC oil embargo against Western countries (1973)
• The Cambodian genocide (1975–1979)
• The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979), and the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988)
• Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990) and the Persian Gulf War (1990–1991)
• The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc (1989–1991), and reunification of West Germany and East Germany (1990)

Possible end of the Late Modern period

There are differing approaches to defining a possible end or conclusion to the Late Modern period, or indeed whether it might be considered to have concluded at all; if that period is indeed concluded, then there are various options for how to label the subsequent era, i.e. the current contemporary era, as described below.

• The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century, characterized by a rapid epochal shift from traditional industry established by the Industrial Revolution to an economy primarily based upon information technology.
• Some researchers typify the end of the Late Modern period by the concerns for the environment which began in 1950, as this marks the end of modern confidence about humanity's domination of the natural world.
• The Postmodern era is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity, while some believe that modernity ended sometime after World War II. The idea of the post-modern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state, such as e.g. regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism. It questions or criticizes viewpoints associated with Enlightenment rationality dating back to the 17th century.

• The Post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy. The term was originated by Alain Touraine and is closely related to similar sociological theoretical concepts such as post-Fordism, information society, knowledge economy, post-industrial economy, liquid modernity, and network society. They all can be used in economics or social science disciplines as a general theoretical backdrop in research design. As the term has been used, a few common themes have begun to emerge. Firstly, the economy undergoes a transition from the production of goods to the provision of services; also, producing ideas is the main way to grow the economy. The term is used by various researchers and social scientists.

Possible subdivisions

Additionally, the Late Modern period can be divided into various smaller periods; there are differing opinions and approaches on which time periods to assert in doing so.

• Post-war era. This period refers mainly to social history and domestic economic activity, as it relates to societal progress and the major economic expansion after World War II which occurred in the United States and parts of the Western World.
• Postcolonial Era. This relates to the major increase in decolonization which occurred directly as a result of World War II from 1946 onwards, as major European powers formally relinquished political control over almost all of their colonies and overseas possessions, leading to major new countries being formed with full sovereignty.
• Cold War era. The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which began following World War II. Historians do not fully agree on its starting and ending points, but the period is generally considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947) to the 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union (December 26, 1991). The term cold war is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars.

In 1989, the fall of the Iron Curtain after the Pan-European Picnic and a peaceful wave of revolutions (with the exception of Romania and Afghanistan) overthrew almost all communist governments of the Eastern Bloc. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control in the Soviet Union and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This in turn led to the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, the declaration of independence of its constituent republics and the collapse of communist governments across much of Africa and Asia. The United States was left as the world's only superpower.

• The Digital Revolution (also known as the Third Industrial Revolution) is the shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics which began in the latter half of the 20th century, with the adoption and proliferation of digital computers and digital record-keeping, that continues to the present day.
• The Internet age dates from late 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, and created the world's first web page, marking the beginning of the World Wide Web.

Science and philosophy

Replacing the classical physics in use since the end of the scientific revolution, modern physics arose in the early 20th century with the advent of quantum physics, substituting mathematical studies for experimental studies.

The old quantum theory was a collection of results which predate modern quantum mechanics, but were never complete or self-consistent. The collection of heuristic prescriptions for quantum mechanics were the first corrections to classical mechanics. Outside the realm of quantum physics, the various aether theories in classical physics, which supposed a "fifth element" such as the Luminiferous aether, were nullified by the Michelson–Morley experiment—an attempt to detect the motion of earth through the aether. In biology, Darwinism gained acceptance, promoting the concept of adaptation in the theory of natural selection.

Starting one-hundred years before the 20th century, the enlightenment spiritual philosophy was challenged in various quarters around the 1900s. Developed from earlier secular traditions modern Humanist ethical philosophies affirmed the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appealing to universal human qualities, particularly rationality, without resorting to the supernatural or alleged divine authority from religious texts. For liberal humanists such as Rousseau and Kant, the universal law of reason guided the way toward total emancipation from any kind of tyranny. These ideas were challenged, for example by the young Karl Marx, who criticized the project of political emancipation (embodied in the form of human rights), asserting it to be symptomatic of the very dehumanization it was supposed to oppose. For Friedrich Nietzsche, humanism was nothing more than a secular version of theism. In his Genealogy of Morals, he argues that human rights exist as a means for the weak to collectively constrain the strong. On this view, such rights do not facilitate emancipation of life, but rather deny it. In the 20th century, the notion that human beings are rationally autonomous was challenged by the concept that humans were driven by unconscious irrational desires.

Notable persons

Sigmund Freud is renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life, as well as his therapeutic techniques, including the use of free association, his theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and the interpretation of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires.

Albert Einstein is known for his theories of special relativity and general relativity.

Social Darwinism

At the end of the 19th century, Social Darwinism was promoted and included the various ideologies based on a concept that competition among all individuals, groups, nations, or ideas was a "natural" framework for social evolution in human societies. In this view, society's advancement is dependent on the "survival of the fittest". The term was in fact coined by Herbert Spencer and referred to in "The Gospel of Wealth" written by Andrew Carnegie.

Marxist society

Karl Marx summarized his approach to history and politics in the opening line of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto (1848). He wrote:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

The Manifesto went through a number of editions from 1872 to 1890; notable new prefaces were written by Marx and Engels for the 1872 German edition, the 1882 Russian edition, the 1883 German edition, and the 1888 English edition. In general, Marxism identified five (and one transitional) successive stages of development in Western Europe.

1. Primitive Communism: as seen in cooperative tribal societies.
2. Slave Society: which develops when the tribe becomes a city-state. Aristocracy is born.
3. Feudalism: aristocracy is the ruling class. Merchants develop into capitalists.
4. Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the true working class.
5. Dictatorship of the proletariat: workers gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.
6. Communism: a classless and stateless society.

See also

• International relations (1814–1919)
• Industrial society
• Modern period
• Western culture