Introduction

Abstract

One of the major similarities of the many contenders for a theory of modern society produced in the last and during this century surely is the stress placed on science and technology as an agent of social and economic change in and of modern society. As a matter of fact, the genesis and nature of modern society itself is almost always seen to be linked to the many intellectual and social consequences of science. This is even more true for those theories of society which try to display the design of post-industrial society. However, the various theories of modern society — for example, those by Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber or Ferdinand Toönnies — produced decades ago or those constructed more recently to replace the classical conception of the origin and the structure of modern social relations — for instance, the theories of society in the work of Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons and Jörgen Habermas, to mention but a few of the more influential ones produced in recent years — all these share a peculiar treatment, or better, non-treatment of the very resource which is seen to transform society into contemporary society and later into post-contemporary society, namely the profound and apparently irreversible effect scientific knowledge is having on all social processes in society. Whether we examine the image of modern society found in Alfred Weber’s influential distinction between culture and civilization, Ferdinand Toönnies’ dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft or William F. Ogburn’s theory of the cultural lag, the almost irresistible force of science and technology produces virtually all of the displacements and transformations which these theories identify in modern society.