ABSTRACT
It seems to me that most people ask themselves, at one time or another, what sort of society is it in which we live? How can we make sense of what is going on with our world? And where is it all taking us? This is a daunting and frequently bewildering task because it involves trying to identify the major contours of extraordinarily complex and changeable circumstances. It is, in my view, the duty of social science to identify and explain the most consequential features of how we live now, the better that we may see where we are headed, so that we might influence where we are going. Some people quickly give up on the task, frankly admitting confusion. Still others, encountering disputation, retreat into the comforting (and lazy) belief that we see only what we choose. Fortunately, most people stick with trying to understand what is happening in the world, and in so doing reach for such terms as ‘capitalism’, ‘industrialism’, ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘liberal democracy’. Most of us will have heard these sorts of words, will have voiced them ourselves, when trying to account for events and upheavals, for important historical occurrences, or even for the general drift of social, economic and political change.
