Understanding and Misunderstanding Individual Modernity

A number of issues have arisen from the publication of Becoming Modern by Inkeles and Smith. This paper raises each issue in turn and attempts to support the major assertions of that study. Included are the reasons for studying the individual, the role of personality characteristics, the personal features of modernity, the universality and empirical status of the concept, some sources of individual modernity, relationships between modernity, stress, and alienation, the contrast between modernity and traditionalism, and the consequences of individual modernity for one's society.