ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with social scientific theories of modern society. The very concept of society, now an essential cognitive tool of social science, for the most part can be traced to the philosophers of the Scottish and French Enlightenment. The chapter outlines the logic of the orthodox perspective and then attempt to offer an alternative theoretical perspective of long-term social development that is both non-teleological and non-evolutionary. It examines each of the premises of the orthodox logic of classical theories society in greater detail: The unit of (macro-)- social scientific analysis tends to be society in the sense of the nation-state. The idea of functional differentiation generally is that modern social reality, as it replaces traditional forms of life, is subjected to progressive specialization and that clusters of social activity, in relation to each other, for example, in the organization of production, education and government, become more and more self-contained, self-centered, and self-propelled subsystems of society.
