This book presents some novel takes on fundamental questions of sociology, including what the nature of the social is, how one can square the sometimes evident rigidities of social structure with the effectively universal capacity to defy or resist rules, norms, or other possible sources of social cohesion and regularity, and what the nature of social stratification is.

I will not try to anticipate the full answers here— that is the task of the text. But I do want to insert a few observations about the nature of the argument.

This book took a long time to prepare— the better part of a decade although in truth I only worked on it full time during two years of sabbatical leave. It is laughable to recall this now, but when I first anticipated the project I allocated “about a month” at that, the brief month of February. It didn't quite work out.

My optimism had grounds. I had a relatively short list of notions that I aimed to cover. To me, these were clear conceptions and claims that I had entertained for some number of years. Seemingly all I had to do was write them out.

What made that much harder than I anticipated was twofold. For the most part, all of my claims were mutually linked, that is, each of the facets illuminated multiple other facets and the lights shined in either direction. In a sense, this was inevitable, for what I had in mind was a singular object, a conceptual sketch of social structure, that combined multiple complementary notions. A first consequence was that no particular order for writing them out was apparent. Second, nearly all of the claims deviated from widespread sociological reasoning generally regarded as compulsory. Nakedly stated, without the scaffold of supporting elaborations, my notions could easily be read as assorted offbeat misunderstandings contrary to what most people knew or took to be true. It was only by assembling the pieces in a careful order that did not open onto sidetracks, many of which I knew were widely taught and widely accepted, that I could hope to convey how the off- beat elements were not ignorant blunders but instead were solutions. Or at least potentially productive novelties.