Urbanism as a way of life?

So rapid and so widespread were the changes that the temptation to analyse society in ‘now-and-then’ terms was irresistible. As a consequence the present was constantly being contrasted with the past in the belief that what was occurring ‘now’ was quite unique and completely different from ‘then’—that is, before the advent of the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions. Almost all nineteenth-century sociological theorists succumbed to viewing social change in terms of what Nisbet has called ‘linked antitheses’— contrasting pairs of concepts, one of which is applied to society before the transformation and the other applied to the subsequent era.