The social sciences have always faced a fundamental problem. Their central concern is to understand modernity, yet, as the product of modernity itself, they could never achieve the critical distance to do this. In recent decades some scholars have sought a way out in the notion of postmodernity, the idea that we have entered a new era from which ‘modernity’ can be judged from the outside. However, since a central component of the postmodernist paradigm is the suspension or at least the relativisation of both epistemological and normative frameworks, it deprives itself of the very analytical tools it would need for the task. For a while, following the end of the Cold War, a hyper-modernist view enjoyed some prominence, according to which, far from being transcended, modernity was culminating in the dominance of a single social, economic and political model represented by the victorious United States.