This best-selling book offers an integrated social science view of the world, emphasizing that social change is the pervasive reality of our era.

One of the main themes of Contemporary Society is that the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial order in the modern world is fraught with difficulties, as was the transition from an agricultural to an industrial order in an earlier human era. This framework also illustrates the increasing fragmentation of the social order, which leads people away from community and a common purpose to conflict and disunity.