ABSTRACT
The 40th anniversary of the book On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (1974) serves as an opportunity to reflect upon one of the most enduring and compelling aspects of the work, something that might best be described as a perplexing problem as well as a mandate. It is the problem of the need to live in the everyday world with the knowledge of what this book offers and exemplifies in the form of a commitment to what is referred to in the book as analytic desire. Insofar as appreciating the need for this desire engenders a will to pursue the social inquiry named in the title, the problem the book presents is how to live up to or do justice to whatever it is you know after reading the book that you did not know before. What does the practice of the pursuit of the theory the book proffers, consist of or look like?
