ABSTRACT
The world has become a dangerous place. There is not a single news bulletin without a report on the war on terror, accounts of yet more casualties, attacks on populations, security alerts, and further restrictions of civil liberties. Critical judgement appears abandoned in a thoughtless world. The events of September 11 demonstrated with brutal force the impotence of sense, significance, and thus reason and truth. The denial of human quality and difference was absolute, not even their corpses survived. In the context of poverty and increasing social strife, Martin Wolf has argued that the success of globalization requires stronger states. A social theory that does not put humanity at the centre and which therefore is premised on the so-called autonomy of social systems over and above the social individual, has to view humanity as a mere agent of objective forces. The focus on the human being is an essential element of the subversive character of a critical theory of society.
