ABSTRACT
In many ways this book is a kind of detective story. It tries to find something out about the kind of society which is taking shape in these last years of the century. No doubt the empirical sociologist will be aghast to find that, instead of an examination of structural social change in, for example, Europe and North America, the solid core of the investigation concerns the nature of madness, the birth of the prison, problems of textual interpretation, the nature of the self in ancient Greece, and forms of theorizing current within socialist, feminist and anti-racialist movements. But forensic procedures are not always obvious, and in this case they lead to certain hypotheses about our present and future which perhaps could not have been easily arrived at in any other way.
