Abstract

The category of «modernity» is still one of the most discussed in political and social sciences. In his recent Défense de la modernité (2018) Alain Touraine proposes the term «hypermodernity» to define a descriptive and prescriptive way out of the «crisis of modernity». This article discusses this book by confronting it with Touraine’s Critique de la modernité (1992) underlining similarities and differences. In the conclusion, I will stress two main problems in Touraine’s whole paradigm, the first one which concerns the author’s theory of history and the second one which involves Touraine’s understanding of «modernity».