This chapter reconstructs the modern foundations of the concept of risk by tracing its emergence within processes of Western rationalization and societal differentiation. It argues that the dominant “measuring and control orthodoxy” in risk studies—grounded in scientific expertise, calculation, and formal rationality—rests on historical transformations that privileged abstraction over lived experience. Drawing on classical sociological debates by Weber, Marx, Adorno, and others, the chapter contends that modernization produced bureaucratic systems, specialized knowledge domains, and rationalized institutions, but also generated epistemological limits, contradictions, and new forms of alienation. It contrasts institutional rationalization with everyday sense-making, highlighting tensions between expert knowledge and embodied, localized, or experiential forms of understanding. Introducing early critiques and alternative imaginaries, the chapter sets up the book's central puzzle: why non-rational, imaginative, and experiential engagements with uncertainty persist within highly rationalized societies, and how these modes of reasoning shape contemporary practices of risk management.