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.