ABSTRACT
This book has been constructed around the development of an initial premise and the consequent implication of a thesis. The premise represents an attempt to work in terms of the narrative of the conflict in modern culture which was identified by Georg Simmel (and which I then identified as something of a common theme in the representative statements of modernity). I have been trying to suggest that if Simmel’s story of the conflict between form and life is rendered more fully sociological (not least through the re-interpretation of the mysterious quality called life) and if instead, it is interpreted as a conflict between a reflexive will to know and a will to certainty which rather more tends towards reification, then it becomes possible to provide some kind of explanation of the stakes and the evident features of post-modernity. However, it should be stressed that the account of post-modernity which I have offered should be treated as a story of post-modernity. It does not at all pretend to the status of being the story.
