ABSTRACT
Living in an age of constructivism, the attempt to draw a line between modernity (or as I would prefer to say rst industrial modernity) and world risk society (or second reexive modernity) seems to be naive or even contradictory. Within a constructivist framework no one is able to dene or declare what really ‘is’ or ‘is not’. Yet, this does not square with my experience. I cannot understand how anyone can make use of the frameworks of reference developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to understand the transformation into the post-traditional cosmopolitan world we live in today. Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’—in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future-is to me a prison of categories and basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences. It is the case that we have to free ourselves from these categories in order to nd out about the unknown post-Cold-War-world. Do not get me wrong. I do not consider most of the philosophies and theories (sociologies) of so-called postmodernity to fare any better since they cannot answer very basic questions about how and in what ways everyday lives and professional elds are being transformed. Conventional social sciences, I therefore want to argue, even if they are conducting highly sophisticated theoretical and empirical research programmes, are caught up in a circular argument. By using the old categories (like class, family,
gender roles, industry, technology, science, nation state and so on) they take for granted what they actually try to demonstrate: that we still live, act and die in the normal world of nation-state modernity.
