The most important features of every society are its institutional arrangements and the ideological assumptions on which their representation and operation depend - its regime.
A regime shapes the surface conflicts and exchanges of social life, especially those over the resources of power, capital and cultural authority by which we make the social future within the social present.
Human history is a record of struggle over such regimes and their reconstruction. The long periods in which they are left in place alternate with more concentrated times of disruption and in those moments of disruption it is not just the institutional and ideological order that is shaken. So, too, are the beliefs that each class or community has about its interests and its identity. They all lose some of their appearance of naturalness and necessity together.
Our confidence in our ability to mark the boundaries of the accessible possibilities — the theres to which we can get from here - is shaken.