ABSTRACT
This book has not been about ‘cultural studies’ but about the study of culture. The two are not incompatible, but the latter, which subsumes the former, derives from a variety of philosophical antecedents and traditions of social theorizing upon which I have attempted to place some sense of order throughout this short monograph. ‘Cultural studies’, though drawing variously, and either explicitly or implicitly, from these traditions, is a relative newcomer and claims a difference for itself. I shall attempt here a brief sketch of this difference, or rather identity, and its background, which will not necessarily provide a justification for its particularity although, as in the case of postmodernism, I have confirmed its status by singling it out for special treatment.
