【Abstract】 In the history of social theory, there are three paradigms of diagnosing the difficulties of modernity: rationalism, historicism and postmodernism. All above paradigms think that it is the conflictive relation of rationality and non-rationality or anti-rationality results in all difficulties of modernity, so they can be reduced to a general paradigm: rationality vs un-rationality or anti-rationality. At the end of 20 th century, some social theorists put forward a new paradigm: reflection vs self-refutation. From the paradigm, we can discover that paradox is inherent of rationality and it is this paradox that makes rationality be the creator of modernity on the one hand and be the cause of modern risk society on the other hand.更多还原