Sociology is in this regard indispensable. It is the discipline which developed, emerging from secular thought, a direct heir to the Enlightenment and has leant over the most general questions of social organization, seeking to make out, in particular, the characteristics and the meaning of modernity. Its importance is today restated: only by escaping common sense can we pierce through some crucial aspects of our world which remain otherwise inaccessible and thereby devise some possible paths to follow. Social theories, with Marxism on the one hand, and Liberalism, on the other, had their presuppositions of absolute truth and unstoppable progress challenged. We need thus to think of the world and modernity in a more open-ended way and from new angles; in addition, it is necessary that we creatively face-up to the new riddles society poses for us. (2000, vii)