ABSTRACT
While on study leave in 1979 I finished wading through the Critique of Dialectical Reason. It seemed to me to offer some real help in getting beyond structuralism—not surprising, on reflection, since much of Althusser and some of Lévi–Strauss was based on a rejection of Sartre. At all events, here was an important resource which had been practically neglected in the theoretical debates of the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1970s. It seemed worth recovering and attempting to refine the useful parts. ‘How should we theorise patriarchy?’ made a small start with the knotty problem of the relation of biology to history, and this essay develops that theme as well as others. It was written in August 1980 as a paper for the Sociological Association conference in Hobart, and considerably revised after a very useful discussion there.
