In this book, Giddens offers an interpretation of the institutional transformations associated with modernity. We do not as yet, he argues, live in a post-modern world. Rather the characteristics of our major social institutions in the closing period of the 20th century express the emergence of a period of high modernity, in which prior trends are radicalized rather than undermined. In developing an account of the nature of modernity, Giddens focuses on analyzing the intersections between trust and risk, and security and danger in the modern world. The trust mechanisms associated with modernity and the risk profile it produces, he argues, are different from those characteristic of pre-modern social orders.