Modernity—characterized by science, democracy, and capitalism—may have first arisen in the West, but that does not make it identical to Western civilization. Pundits who equate modernity with Westernization overlook the likelihood that the non-West is adapting the universals of modernity to the particulars of it own cultural legacies.

David R. Gress works at the Centre for Cultural Research in the University of Aarhus.
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