Taylor develops a geohistorical argument which focuses on the periods and places of modernities, offering a grounded analysis of what it is to be modern. He identifies three 'prime modernities' which have defined the development of our modern world: today's consumer modernity preceded by the industrial modernity of the nineteenth century which was itself preceded by mercantile modernity.
Preface.
Prologue: Being Geohistorical.
Who's Modern?.
1. Modern, --ity, --ism, --ization:.
Ambiguous to the core.
Social theory with smoke in its eyes.
2. Prime Modernities:.
Multiple moderns versus multiple modernities.
Consensus and coercion in the projection of hegemonic power.
3. Ordinary Modernity: .
Cultural celebrations of the ordinariness.
Feeling comfortable: the modern home.
Suburbia: the domestic landscape of consumer modernity.
Not modernism.
4. Modern States: .
Inter-stateness.
Absolutism as a political way of life.
Going Dutch.
The changing nature of territoriality.
5. Political Movements: .
Parties and movements.
Movements and modernities.
Socialism against the modernity that Britain built.
Environmentalism against the modernity that America built.
r 6. Geographical Tensions:.
Where and what?.
Place-space tensions.
Nation-state as enabling place and dis-enabling space.
Home-household as enabling place and dis-enabling space.
7. Americanization:.
Incipient, capacious and resonant Americanizations.
Inside America: conditions for constructing a modernity.
Outside America: seeing the most modern of the modern.
Americanization and globalization.
Epilogue.
Presents and Ends.
System logic: the extraordinary effect of ordinary modernity.
Political practice: the post-traditional challenge.
References.
Index.
