ABSTRACT
European social thought has always been of many minds. With every other intellectual enterprise, it has made room for its conservatives, its progressives, and its radicals. With most other intellectual enterprises, it has found room for an equal share of philosophers and poets, of critics and tinkerers. The boundaries of the "contemporary" are almost always elusive and virtually never as real, never as solid, as periodic timetables make them appear to be. The boundaries that separate, or might separate, contemporary Europe from its pre-contemporary predecessor are particularly elusive and particularly fluid. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the landscape had changed, the moment along with it. There was a revolution in the air, but an industrial revolution, not the political revolution of which Immanuel Kant had known. The contemporary epidemic of ontological uncertainty has left more than a few European social thinkers distraught and confused; it has left some sceptical even of the possibility of social thought itself.
