Contents -- List of Charts -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The Road Ahead -- Definitions and Clarifications -- Mapping Social Theory -- Tilting Marx Sideways -- The Structure of This Book -- Chapter 1 The Nature of Social Consciousness: A Theory of Mind -- The Sympathetic Social Mind -- Embodiment -- Passionate Action -- Purposive Action -- Intellectual Action -- Language as Symbolic Social Action -- Social Rules and the Creation of Social Roles -- Power, Hierarchy, and Social Structure -- Chapter 2 Intention, Meaning, and Structure in Social Explanation -- Prologue -- The Varieties of Rationality -- Intention -- Meaning -- Structure -- Chapter 3 A Structural Idealist Interpretation of Theories of Deviance -- Labelling/Transactionalist Views of Deviance -- New Subcultural Theory -- A Structural Idealist Understanding of Deviance and the Question of Causality -- Chapter 4 Reconstructing the Past: A Structural Idealist Approach -- Collingwood's Re-enactment Thesis -- Problems with the Thesis -- Structuring Human Actions -- The Centrality of Meaning in Historical Explanation -- The Reconstruction Thesis -- Construction, Reconstruction, and Objectivity -- Chapter 5 The Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Late Modernity -- A Cook's Tour of Late Modernity -- Nietzsche: From Morality to the Genealogy of Morals -- Freud: From Mind to Psyche -- From Sociology to the Sociology of Knowledge -- Chapter 6 The End of the Search for Depth Meaning as the Essence of Postmodernity -- The Basic Themes -- Foucault: From Truth to Power/Knowledge -- Derrida: From Meaning to Play -- Lyotard and Baudrillard: From an Incredulity to Metanarratives to Embracing Simulacra -- The Search for Meaning in Depth as a Disenchantment of the Social World -- From the Unmasking Mind to the Liquid Body.

Chapter 7 A Secret History of the Liquid Body: Image and Counter-Image in Twentieth-Century Culture -- A Theoretical Sketch -- Body Images, Power, and Levels of Meaning -- The Channels of Communication -- A Periodization -- A Case in Point: British Subcultural Styles, 1963-1978 -- The Liquid Body and the Question of Freedom -- Chapter 8 The Contribution of Structural Idealism to Cultural Critique -- Prologue: What is Culture? -- Voices in the Wilderness: A Tour of Contemporary Cultural Criticism, 1978-1995 -- Explorations in Contemporary Cultural Criticism -- A Sketch of a Structural Idealist Theory of Cultural Critique -- Towards a Unified Social Theory -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.