Introduction

This introductory text situates modernity, its evolution and its conceptualisation, as well as the impasses and challenges it faces today. It asks what is new at present and seems to arise from what may be seen as a conjunction of crises. It takes the COVID-19 pandemic as the starting point for the book's discussion, taken not as a critical juncture, in the technical sense of path-dependence theory, but as an accelerator of multidimensional pre-existing trends. Along with the presentation of the upcoming chapters, the text then asks what are the crises that appear today intertwined, the struggles that characterise them and which configurations emerge from this fluid situation.