In its newly fashionable usage, ‘Theory’ meant something quite different. It was largely taken up with ‘interrogating’ (a contemporary term of art) the method and objectives of academic disciplines: above all the social sciences—history, sociology, anthropology—but also the humanities and even, in later years, the laboratory sciences themselves. In an age of vastly expanded universities, with periodicals, journals and lecturers urgently seeking ‘copy’, there emerged a market for ‘theories’ of every kind—fuelled not by improved intellectual supply but rather by insatiable consumer demand.
