ABSTRACT
The Insurgent article of 1976 was first written in 1975 as a paper for the annual British Sociological Association Conference. It is directed at the best representatives of the then most pertinent alternatives; it is concrete, specific, and referenced. The chapter presents the view of Weber, Giddens, and Runciman is omitted here for space considerations. However, social scientists and philosophers are currently, rather more than previously, prepared to accept that the way phenomena are named, labelled, characterized, and grouped together are enormously powerful tools of narration and persuasion. When a ruling class is all powerful, analyses of it lose their sex appeal. Many social theories and analyses are deeply enmeshed in the contexts of meaning and in the discursive formations of their times that it is both a strength and a weakness. The future challenges to the rulers of the world will come from other sources than industrial labor.
