This is an exhilarating book, written by one of sociology's most imaginative theorists and critics. Professor Corrigan proceeds by turning old answers into new questions. He draws on a rich tradition of thought from sociology, philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and literary criticism to explore major ongoing problems in everyday life: moral regulation, schooling, the capitalist world economy, intellectuals, and the problem of difference, masculinity. The result is one of the most dazzling contributions to critical sociology published in recent years.

Philip Corrigan

Part 1. Instead of an Introduction: 'Doing Mythologies' (1984) Part 2. Essays: The Sociology of a Subject 1. Dichotomy is Contradiction: On 'Society' as Constraint and Construction. Remarks on the Doctrine of the 'Two Sociologies' (1975) 2. Feudal Relics or Capitalist Monuments? Notes on the Sociology of Unfree Labour (1976) 3. On Moral Regulation: Some Preliminary Remarks (1980) 4. Towards a Celebration of Difference(s): Notes for a Sociology of a Possible Everyday Future (1981) 5. In/Forming Schooling (1983) 6. The Body of Intellectuals/The Intellectuals' Body (Remarks for Roland) (1986) 7. Social Forms/Human Capacities: Further Remarks on Authority and Difference (1988) Part 3. Interlude: Methods in the Madness 8. Review of Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs by Paul E. Willis (1978) 9. Review of The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays by E.P. Thompson (1979) 10. Review of Arguments Within English Marxism by Perry Anderson (1980) 11. Review of The Rules Are No Game and Man and Woman, War and Peace by Anthony Wilden (1988) Part 4. Starting Over: The Subject of Sociology 12. State Formation (entry for a dictionary) (1986) 13. Masculinity as Right: Some Thoughts on the Genealogy of 'Rational Violence' (1987)