Sceptical Sociology
Routledge & Kegan Paul, $29.95, 201pp
A Spengler from Moonee Ponds
Sceptical Sociology is really a set of essays, some of them previously published, by the Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University. It contains a long introductory piece which gives the book its title, a concluding confession, and a number of vignettes which Carroll calls ‘stories’. The book as a whole is a display of the perversity of brilliance.
What are we to make, for example, of Carroll’s clever essay ‘Automobile Culture and Citizenship’, where he argues, perhaps ironically, that the motor-car is ‘the most vital element in the modern consumer struggle to keep his liberty intact’. For all his denunciation of Rousseau’s poisonous intellectual influence, Carroll’s motor-car essay readers like a modern version of Rousseau: Reveries of a Solitary at the Steering Wheel.
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