In contrast to other approaches, `modernity' in this article is not dealt with as a historical concept but as a normative-aesthetic term and as a mythical narrative in the sense of Nietzsche's `eternal recurrence of the same'. Paradoxically, there still exists a semantic shift between different historical concepts of modernity beginning in late antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the present confusions about `postmodernity'. However, the aesthetical bias of the discourse of modernity prevents any serious interpretation which is able (...) to refer these semantic shifts directly to some clear and incontestable socio-structural facts and developments. In its contemporary sociological form this discourse overlaps on the contrary with some main trends in aesthetic theory and practice: the exchangeability between `old' and `new' and the permanent suspension of the boundaries between `art' and `life'. Consequently, aesthetics as well as sociology are describing modernity as a cultural system which is `playing' with its own fundamental differentiations between `in' and `out' or self-reference and other-reference. (shrink)

When Max Weber made use of the terms ?Vergemeinschaftung? and ?Vergesellschaftung? in the first chapter of ?Economy and Society?, he was among other things alluding to Ferdinand Tönnies' well- known usage of ?Gemeinschaft? and ?Gesellschaft?, as well as to related conceptions in the work of Georg Simmel. However, Weber's usage not only differed from the senses in which Tönnies and Simmel used these terms; he had himself altered his own usage since the early draft of this chapter, published in 1913 (...) as ?On some Categories of Interpretive Sociology?. The tangled resonances that result from this are carefully identified and separated, and in so doing light is shed upon the nature and status of Weber's intentions in writing his important chapter on ?Basic Sociological Categories? (shrink)