ABSTRACT
Some of the individual authors of Disorder and Discipline have demonstrated in other quarters admirable intellectual skills-Alun Howkins’ Poor Labouring Men, for example, or Stuart Laing’s Representations of Working-Class Life.1 For a decade or more all the authors have sustained an innovative, creative course; and in this day and age to produce in addition a book arising from collective teaching is indeed to battle against the odds, as many of us have experienced with considerably less to show for it. But the volume which has emerged is pretty ropey. The current overproduction in publishing depends upon indiscriminate appropriation: a contract is hustled into being in conjunction with a few suitably modish bottles of Frascati, a book stitched together which skims the boom until it dips from sight, the new list submerging the old.
