ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have documented the ways in which reflection, entrepreneurship and pluralism were institutionalised in Europe from the Middle Ages onward. This was how the non-modern era gradually came to give way to the modern; this is how modernity happened. A modern society, we said, is a society which always changes, and change is a result of the translation of potentiality into actuality. Change is the outcome of people discovering new things and acting on their discoveries but it also presupposes a way of dealing with the conflicts that reflection and entrepreneurship inevitably produce. In modern societies all three moments are institutionalised and by combining the one set of institutions with the other, a piece of social machinery is put together which is able to overcome the inertia inherent in all social life. Change takes place automatically, relentlessly and progressively not because someone wished it or consciously sought to bring it about but because change is institutionalised.
