Überblick
"(...) Rethinking modernity has been the immanent challenge of sociological theory during the last three decades. By introducing the phenomenon of ?Second Modernity,? Ulrich Beck has rendered our continuous engagement with the basic premises of modernity into an explicit enterprise and provided the vision, necessary to understand how reflexive modernization is working. However, attempts to delineate a distinctive era run the risk of simply being juxtaposed to ?First Modernity.? Like other theorists before him, Beck?s analysis of a new type of (second) modernity is at peril to de-historicize the transition from one epoch to a new one by addressing it in terms of a rupture. Initially this helps to see the contours of a new era, but eventually abstracting from the diachronic renders epochal transitions into rigid schemes. As a result, sociologists have often tended to naturalize and subsequently strip certain terms (such as, for example, the nation-state or legal-rational legitimacy) from their historical origins and our sense of their malleability. We experience them as ?natural? to the degree that we ignore their historical roots, as well as the cultural conditions and political contingencies of their current incarnation. Modernity is perceived in a way that indicates that people have forgotten what the modernizing process consists of. It is instructive to take a brief look at how the founding fathers of sociology conceptualized the emergence of modernity. (...)"