ABSTRACT
Environmental disasters such as Chernobyl, 9/11, global financial crises, and climate change are manufactured uncertainties and incalculable global risks resulting from the triumphs of modernity and mark the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first modernity associated specifically with industrial society was characterized by a logic of organization and action that involved the establishment of extremely fine divisions between categories of people and of activities and the distinctions between spheres of action and forms of life such as to facilitate an unambiguous institutional ascription of competence, responsibility, and jurisdiction. The collapse of boundaries and the new mobility of risks have fundamental implications for the social sciences inasmuch as it helps to the insight that sociology remains bogged down in a “methodological nationalism.” Methodological nationalism rests on the assumption that “modern society” and “modern politics” are synonymous with a society and a politics organized in terms of nation-states.
