Classical modernity definitions all shared an acceleration core that later theory forgot

Evidence

The result of this review of the interpretations proposed by the “classics” is as follows: their still influential definitions of modernity as a process of individualization, rationalization, differentiation, and increasing domination of nature as a result of the development of the forces of production possess a common core that lies in the experience of an immense acceleration, mobilization, and dynamization of social life. They represent at the same time responses to and systematic explanations of that basic experience of modernity. But the transformation of temporal structures itself does not stand in the systematic epicenter of the modernization theory of any of these authors, although it is thematized and serves as a motif in all of them. … And thus it was possible for the acceleration process to lose more and more importance relative to other processes in the overwhelmingly “detemporalized” development of sociological and social-scientific definitions of modernity and to play almost no role in later theories of modernization. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 208

Categorization

• SEED: The idea that Marx, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim etc. all secretly centered acceleration — but social theory then ‘detemporalized’ — is a strong hook for an essay on why the sociology canon suppressed its own temporal dimension.