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The
project TRAMOD aims at advancing the analysis of
the contemporary plurality of
self-understandings and related institutional structures
of societies
and polities in the current global context. It will analyze these
self-understandings against the background of the historical
trajectories of
those societies. The analysis of the existing multiple forms of
modernity is
the major challenge to current social and political theory and
comparative-historical and political sociology. It requires a
conceptual and
empirical analysis of that which is common to different forms of
modernity and
that which varies between them. Furthermore, it demands an analysis as
to why
particular forms of modernity developed in specific societal settings.
Convincing responses to these questions are currently not available.
Scholars
in this field either underestimate variation or succumb to some idea of
global
trends of ‘neomodernization’ or neo-liberal transformation of global
capitalism, or they overestimate historical continuities and provide
some
culturalist explanation of ‘civilizational’ difference.
The specific objectives are: a) to complement the
prevalent institutional analysis
of modern societies with an interpretative
approach that focuses on societal self-understandings, and to elaborate
an understanding of how novel such interpretations emerge and how they
contribute to reshaping institutions; b) to disentangle the overly
complex
concept of modernity into components that are empirically analyzable in
terms
of both commonalities shared by all modern societies and differences
that are
due to the variety of possible interpretations of modernity; c) to
analyze two
selected non-European societies – South Africa and Brazil – in terms of
their
specific articulations of these components of modernity and their
historical
transformations; d) to confront analyses of European
modernity with the
new analyses of non-European modernities with a view to laying
empirically rich
foundations for a global sociology of trajectories of modernity.
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