From "Critique" to "Defense": Alain Touraine's Modernity

The category of "modernity" is still one of the most discussed in political and social sciences. In his recent Defense de la modernite (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 modernite (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".