We often think of modernity as a time period in history. But people have been claiming to be modern since at least c. 550 AD, when the Roman writer Cassiodorus used the term modernus to mark off everything that had happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back much further, to the third century BC in ancient China, when a series of emperors claimed modernity to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing two forms of modernity claim—one that tries to erase the past and another that tries to master it—we can better understand what is at stake in our own invocations of “modernity."
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