Times of Modernity. Regarding Marshall Berman

Modernity, modernization and modernism have being scrutinized thoroughly in humanities since the 1990s. They bear the accusation of harbouring a normative content, which would render it not useful for social analysis. This essay states that in order to make those terms adequate for historiography, the concept of time that is at its core has to be openly discussed and even modified. To this purpose, the article regains the debates that followed the publication of All that is Solid Melts into the Air (1983) by Marshall Berman, and concludes that to free the concept of modernity from its constraints, a heterogeneous concept of time is needed, instead of the homogeneous one which has traditionally prevailed.