Timeline overview

Pre-modern society (before industrialisation): tradition, religion, local community and inherited status strongly shape life chances.
Modernity (from the Enlightenment and industrialisation onward): capitalism, science, bureaucracy, urban life and the nation-state become more central.
Late modernity (late 20th century onward): a view that we are still in modernity, but its institutions are now more global, reflexive and shaped by risk.
Post-modernity (a rival view of the same recent period): certainty weakens, identities fragment, and media and consumption become more central to social life.

Sequence: pre-modern society -> modernity -> the contemporary world, interpreted either as late modernity or post-modernity.

Timeline overview

Pre-modern society (before industrialisation): tradition, religion, local community and inherited status strongly shape life chances.
Modernity (from the Enlightenment and industrialisation onward): capitalism, science, bureaucracy, urban life and the nation-state become more central.
Late modernity (late 20th century onward): a view that we are still in modernity, but its institutions are now more global, reflexive and shaped by risk.
Post-modernity (a rival view of the same recent period): certainty weakens, identities fragment, and media and consumption become more central to social life.

Sequence: pre-modern society -> modernity -> the contemporary world, interpreted either as late modernity or post-modernity.

Modernity and post-modernity Lesson