Things will and do at times go wrong, and actions taken will at times have unintended consequences. As such there is nothing at all remarkable in any of this. Things that go wrong will most often work themselves out on their own, and unintended consequences will most often be compensated for by other action. What has prompted the writing of this book is a growing realization of the significance to social science theorizing of cases where none of this is true, that is, where things go wrong to the point that systemic mechanisms of self-correction break down and the analytical models of social science cease to be helpful.

The essence of the argument is that such extraordinary cases of systemic failure represent causal chains of events that may be fully understood only by taking into account a wide range of factors that are no longer possible to house in toto within any of the increasingly specialized subdisciplines of modern social science. The reasons for the latter are simple and essentially represent a trade-off. Increasing theoretical sophistication has been bought at the price of a loss of perspective and of sensitivity to the controversial roles of cultural and historical specificity. In routine situations of marginal change, the benefits of this development clearly outweigh the costs. In cases, however, of major societal transformations that result in systemic failure, an important part of the problem will be that impressions of theoretical sophistication have produced overconfidence in the powers of prediction and of political action to achieve anticipated goals.