Modernity is a sociological category that has both explanatory and normative dimensions. It is commonly used to describe the dominant institutions, patterns of meaning, and modes of living of modern societies. That is, the type of societies that emerged after feudalism, initially in Europe and North America. The category of modernity has always been evaluative, since it is meant to convey some sense of the realization of the modern. The concept of the modern has been consistently used to describe the temporal separation of the present from the past. The modern is not simply a concept or an idea. It is a social imaginary signification, in the sense that Cornelius Castoriadis proposed: the creation of a meaningful outlook on the world and its symbolic representation. Social imaginaries are not just cultural frameworks and representations; they are institution. To be precise, Castoriadis (1987) argues that social imaginaries are instituted and instituting.

The social imaginary of modernity, I argue, concerns the configuring of the relationship between the instituted form of society, in its various dimensions, and the instituting practices of subjects. In its different expressions, modernity involves the view that the existing institution of society is not given and that there is a constant tendency towards transformation inherent in the present. Modernity is a social imaginary in the further sense that this view of the constitution of society and its transformation are only true because of the practices that seek to realize it. For this reason, there is a strong connection between modernity and the ideal of autonomy, since autonomy presupposes that practices are self- determining.

Modernity has to a large extent meant the empowerment of human capabilities. Peter Wagner (1994) observes that modernity is founded on the assumptions that the world is intelligible and shapeable. Of course, the actual institution of modernity has not always been consistent with these principles. Modern institutions have generated new forms of domination and destruction, such as through the market's conditioning of class relations, the power of the apparatuses of the political administrative systems to intensively control individuals and groups, and the destruction of the natural environment as a consequence of industrialization.