Historically, the contingency is thought by Aristotle, for the first time, in his text peri hermeneias where the philosopher introduces the concept endechómenon, translated later as contingency. The discovery of the contingency reflects a new spirit in the works of Weber, Parsons and Luhmann as in the Western philosophy in Husserl, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre and other, that notice the dramatic tension of the relationships and contingent phenomena. In spite of the long tradition of the conscience of the contingency in the western thought, it is the coming of the "postmodernity", relatively late, that brings its meaning to the light of day. Authors as Lyotard, Maffesoli and Bauman explore the discovery of the contingency in the field of the social theory and they show that the world is necessarily as it is but, also, it could be different. Our hypothesis is that the highly contingent character of the modern technique, as long as it penetrates the contemporary society more and more it affects decisively the man and its way of living in the world; in this way the problem of the contingency wins sociological relevance.
contingency; modernity; postmodernity; technique; sociological theory