ABSTRACT
In his recent book After Success (from which we have borrowed part of our title), Ray Pahl postulates that anxiety is part and parcel of the human condition, something that ‘in some form or other has plagued people for as long as they have been literate – and probably earlier’ (Pahl 1995: 15). He is also quick to point out, however, that thinking about anxiety in this kind of generic way is of litde sociological interest, it being something – like that old Home Office (1983: 15) finding about the crime risks of the statistically average citizen – that tells us both everything and nothing. According to Pahl: ‘The task for the sociologist is not simply to address the general question of what causes people to feel anxious but rather to explore the specific contemporary conditions that cause anxieties for specific categories of the population’ (Pahl 1995: 15; emphasis in original).
