ABSTRACT
Following the Euro-centricity of so many dominant social and cultural theories, an ongoing preoccupation within several of the theoretical frameworks considered elsewhere in this volume is to describe and adequately account for the various dimensions of modern social contexts. This involves exploring the corresponding social relations that emerge as features of modernity, and implicit within these analytical approaches are assumptions regarding the particularity of western modernity, and its more recent guises (late, post-, high), so distinguishing such manifestations of society from that which went before, as well as that which exists elsewhere. Weber suggested that a defi ning hallmark of modernity is a cultural predilection towards ‘calculating consequences’ and the increased recourse to techniques of planning (rationalizing) which results – with the analysis of these modern approaches to consequences thus becoming integral to his sociological project. Indeed, from a Weberian perspective, ‘the central task of universal history is to explain this unique [i.e. modern western] rationalism’ (Brubaker 1984: 8).
