Modernitenin köklerini aramak: Antik Yunan, İslam'ın altın çağı ve Rönesans İtalya`sı

The concept of modernity has been prolifically discussed and analyzed in multipledisciplines, yet the research potential of modernity and its attributes in the area ofInternational Relations have not been well emphasized. This thesis aims to directattention to the roots of modernity while understanding it, in other words, to identifywhich attribute brought about rest of the phenomena. The various descriptions ofmodernity from the vast literature reveal three main characteristics of modernity aspotential main independent variables causing the rest of the attributes to come about;rise of capitalism, science and technology, and democratic values. Besides thesethree variables that embody diverse descriptions from the literature in a single term,the study also includes the indigenous culture variable that denies the existence of anexogenous common characteristic in modern societies. The cases chosen to searchfor the roots of modernity are Ancient Greece between 7th and 5th centuries B.C.,the Golden Age of Islam between 8th and 12th centuries and Renaissance Italybetween 14th and 16th centuries. The research on the cases concludes that theconcept of modernity is not bound by time or space but characteristics that make thesociety modern and that capitalism is the variable that chronologically precedes all ofthe other characteristics and therefore is the main independent variable.Keywords:Modernity, Ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, Golden Age of Islam