ABSTRACT
Central to modernity is an emphasis upon control and the reduction of the world to a collection of phenomena to be analysed and mastered. Mankind takes charge of building the future society rather than seeing social formulations as being in the hands of someone other than man, for instance God. Politically, the American and French Revolutions seemed to epitomise the notion of humans breaking out of the old feudal hierarchical ‘natural social structures’ and attempting to build new social structures on rational foundations. Such freedom became linked to technological power with the intensification in the growth of industrial society, the whole productive take-off in the mid 19th century of a number of European countries and the US; a world of limitless possibilities appeared open.
