ABSTRACT
This book is quite deliberately Janus-faced, simultaneously looking forwards and backwards. It attempts selectively to appropriate certain anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist insights developed by post-structuralism and other versions of modern social theory, in order to come to the rescue of sociological theorya mode of analysis neither very popular in the 1960s and 1970s when sociology was under the sway of Althusserian Marxism, nor very fashionable today when sociology is mesmerized by anti-Marxist versions of structuralist and poststructuralist thought.
