This title was first published in 2001: For over 30 years it has been argued that contemporary society is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The portrait of the modern society or modernity offered by philosophers and social scientists from Hobbes to Parsons is no longer understood as a description of the final and highest stage in the social evolution of mankind. Modern society is not the end of history but simply another more or less contingent social and cultural formation on planet earth. This new perspective on modernity and its transformation, which has emerged from the...