Perpetually New – Essentially Modern: A Preliminary Study in the Discontinuities of Social Science Transformations
Perpetually New – Essentially Modern: A Preliminary Study in the Discontinuities of Social Science Transformations

Summary/Abstract: To Heraclitus, they say, belongs the saying that “The only constant is change” or translated differently, “Nothing endures but change”. For sure this is a pre-modern saying – the obsession with the “constant” (the “enduring”) is pretty obvious in it. A modern person, being conscious of one’s belonging to modernity, wouldn’t ever say such a thing. Because of the most important of all reasons – the change itself is changing, thus making the radical novelty quintessential to Modernity. This is what this story is about. Yet, in order to make it meaningful, we have to radically desert the purely abstract level of thinking. Please, follow me! It would be a risky business for the social sciences in the beginning of the 21st century to evolve in the same naive and pseudo-natural way as their history of nearly two hundred years has been doing so far. Having had a glorious past is not a guarantee for any bright future as we, here in Europe, know pretty well...

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