This opening chapter advances the book’s central claim that the disabling society is inhuman, and that this inhumanity, whilst historically variable in form, is produced by human hands and can therefore be transformed. It introduces a sustained dialogue between Zygmunt Bauman’s social theory and Disability Studies, arguing that each can alter the other: Social Theory is ‘cripped’ by centring disablement and the experiences of disabled people, whilst Disability Studies gains new resources for explaining how disablement arises, changes, and is sustained across solid and liquid modernity. The chapter traces the emergence of Disability Studies from the political and conceptual interventions of UPIAS and the development of the Social Model of Disability. It argues that solid modernity’s gardening culture, heterophobia, and the pathologisation of human difference are not marginal but constitutive of social theory’s formation and that re-reading modernity (both solid and liquid) through disability—and disability through modernity (again, both solid and liquid)—sets the groundwork for the book’s wider project of developing a social theory of disablement.