Introduction

The times in which we are living are often characterized in terms that suggest that our societies are undergoing epochal change. For several decades now it has been common in both popular and scholarly discourse to describe our situation in terms that have the prefix “post-,” all of which suggest that we have entered an era when people’s lives will be different in fundamental ways from the ones their industrial-era predecessors knew. This book criticizes that way of thinking, and it does so on the basis of ideas drawn from Max Weber’s view of modern life. It acknowledges that the claims made by “postist” thinkers have some truth to them, but it maintains that the impression they create is still a misleading one because they ignore all the ways in which our societies are being prevented from breaking with the way of life we inherited. The question we ought to be asking about our current situation, the book proposes, is not “why are things changing so much,” but rather “why are they not changing more?” The answer it provides has two parts. One is that in the 1980s these societies made a turn toward neoliberalism that has made it difficult ever since for their inhabitants to do anything other than perpetuate the approach to life that prevailed in the industrial era. The other is that this happened because a large part of the membership of these societies were predisposed to think they could not afford to deviate from the path they had been on ever since the Industrial Revolution. And the reason for that, the book proposes, is that modern societies tend to be obsessively committed to pursuing indefinitely a project Weber characterized as the “quest for mastery.”