When does the Modern Begin and Has It Ended?

The article deals with the essence, genesis of the modern (the modern age, modernity) and the qualification of the present time on the basis of the earlier developed approach to the periodization of the World History,
which includes the basic concepts: «stages of social evolution», «great transformations – evolutionary shifts» and «eras of domination». The modern age cannot be separated from modernization, which is interpreted as a complex of autonomous processes of bureaucratization, secularization, capitalist industrialization and democratization (R. Collins). In addition, the modern age is usually associated with quite specific characteristics of state, society and culture: the rise of national states, civic equality, education, the dominance of scientific discourse, the flowering of ideologies, «great narratives». When comparing these characteristics with the major historical phenomena of Europe in the last five centuries, the following stages are distinguished: the prehistory of modernity as a transition from the era of mature statehood to the epoch of penetrating statehood in the initial form of «absolutism» (from early 16th to mid-17th century), the early modernity and Modernization-1 (from mid-17th to early 19th
century), the classical modern and Modernization-2 (from early XIX to late XX century). The arguments are presented that the epoch of modernity has not been completed, and at the present time (from the beginning of the 21st century) the extremely controversial actual processes should be treated as a new transition period, i.e. Modernization-3.

Keywords: modernity, modernization, social evolution, European history, bureaucratization, secularization, capitalist industrialization, democratization, mature statehood, penetrating statehood, absolutism, ideology.