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Although leading thinkers of the late 20th century, stimulated by new social movements and public debate, have given currency in the 1970s and 1980s to a new version of the normative category of responsibility, sociology has been rather slow in appreciating the significance of this development. It is only in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, particularly in the 1990s, that the new concept has begun to attract the attention of sociologists, yet even today it is still not well understood. As a study in the sociology of morality that pursues a strand stretching from Durkheim to Habermas and beyond, this article seeks to contribute to the sociological appropriation of the concept of responsibility and to making it useful for the purposes of analysing contemporary society. On the one hand, it presents a theoretically suggestive typology of traditional individual, post-traditional individual and co-responsibility, while on the other, drawing on data generated by various research projects, it outlines a sociological analysis of responsibility as an important new master frame of our time.

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Responding to a call for systematic contributions on the theory of society, the principle aim of this article is to recover and reconstruct the Young-Hegelian core of critical theory’s theory of the dialectical development of society and, on that basis, to project its creative research-based continuation by analysing its largely neglected key concept of possibility. The acknowledgement of the critical theory lineage’s naturalist, realist and especially idealist features leads this reconstruction to ascribe a central role to certain pivotal concepts that deserve special attention – including nature, the construction of society, evolution, immanent–transcendence and the conceptual conditions or cognitive order of society. A side effect of this theoretical exposition is the exposure in the course of the argument of certain weaknesses often visible in the contemporary articulation of the theory of society in both critical theory and general social theory. Conceptual solutions to those deficiencies are simultaneously presented in a form appropriate to critical theory’s modal-based negative explanatory and positive disclosing critique.

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