Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology

Sociology as a discipline is intimately entwined with modernity, both as lived and as theorized. Sociologists have galvanized distinctive mechanisms of social rationalization and technical regulation (not least statistics and surveys) and authored ideas of the modern social space as a realm that we denizens inhabit and control. Sociologists also have helped define modernity’s significant Others, including the categories of tradition and postmodernity. They have applied their intellectual energy to formulating what might be called the ‘‘sociological modern’’: situating actors and institutions in terms of these two categories, understanding the paths by which they develop or change, and communicating these understandings to states, citizens, all manner of organizations, and social movements—as well as vast armies of students. On this basis, sociologists have helped build and manage today’s sprawling, globally extended social edifice while simultaneously trying to diagnose and dismantle its disciplinary aspects and iron cages. The discipline is itself a product of modernity, not simply in its institutions but also, as we will argue, in its theoretical core. The formation of modernity now figures as a place of disorder as well as dynamism—troubled, fissured, perhaps even in civilizational crisis. This is all the more ironic now that capitalism—surely a core constituent of modernity—is thought by some to have arrived at a point of triumphant stasis, the highest stage and culmination of history.∞ In this unsettled time,