[Cultural Creation] gathers six papers written between 1965 and 1970, and adds a dialogue between Goldmann and Adorno and two brief tributes to Goldmann by Piaget and Marcuse. Addressed to different audiences the papers nevertheless have a methodological, substantive, and, above all, a moral unity that displays Goldmann's own sense of theory in the human sciences as a specific human practice. The papers' varying topics circle around Goldmann's concern to institute aesthetic practices as the paramount subject matter of sociological analysis and to pursue this project through his dialectic of genetic structuralism.

Works of art (primarily literature in Goldmann's own work) provide us with the richest and most complex occasions for reconstructing the 'world-view' of privileged or dominant social groups; and this re-construction is a necessary stage in the explication of the genesis and transformation of structures which, though tending towards equilibria, are always in a process of structuration. Social...