ABSTRACT
The dynamics of social change may be said to constitute the Urgrund or original matrix of sociological reflection, starting with Saint-Simon seeing the need of a “social physiology” science to make sense of the social turmoil attending the post-1789 European scene. Two hundred years later, and hundreds if not thousands of sociological writings later, the topic of social change retains all its pregnancy, prodded in just a few recent years by the unexpected transformations of seemingly monolithic structures of power. Clio has been immensely generous: to her children in the west she gave the events of “1968” and to those in the East she gave the events of “1989,”2 both immense historical moments, unpredicted by almost all social scientists irrespective of their ideological persuasion. Much of the contemporary world may be seen as resultant of these two moments of social change, or at least profoundly affected by them. while we search and sift through the still-settling dust in terms of changing institutions, social arrangements and collective identities, we can only agree with Sztompka’s recent framing of contemporary social change as signifying an ontological “becoming of the very mechanism of becoming”, that “social becoming changes its mode in the course of history” (Sztompka 1993: 230).
