ABSTRACT
Certainly, modernity was lived through the leitmotif that the world could and should be made a better place. That was to be achieved through the free use and practical activities of entirely social resources. But that narrative confidence was frequently little more than a heavily plastered facade which shakily masked a whole collection of doubts and conflicts. The institutions and the arrangements of modernity might have known why to go on, yet the problems of how to go on, and indeed the identity of the fellow travellers on the journey, were rather harder to resolve. Perhaps the explanation is not too difficult to find. Although modernity was indeed the proclamation of social independence and self-sufficiency, it also involved a recognition that the realm called ‘the social’ was itself internally broken and riddled with schisms and fault lines between the Enlightened and the stupid, the cosmopolitan and the local. As such, the faults became things to be made good. But by whom?
