ABSTRACT
The early-nineteenth-century social reformers, including Auguste Comte, asserted that society could be an orderly creation shaped by human desire and brought into being by human will, much like the great machinery of industrialization. The desire for orderliness has produced a concentration on the surface life, on the appearance of things, that has had the effect of concealing other more disturbing features of the modem. It is becoming clear that the modern world is not just about high technology, scientific advances, and cultural proliferation. It is not just about more music, art, and literature; it is also about destructive technology, exploitative art, repressive power, and unsatisfying culture. The long-lived desire for a simple, orderly world—that hallmark of the rational, purposive, modern society—can be seen as the impetus behind refusal to recognize the importance of friction and the disturbing acts of irrationality and antinomy that occur daily in the modem world.
