[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 life is itself conceived as an 'ensemble of collective structuration processes' which are expressed 'in the psyche of all the group's members' and cultural creations are methodologically privileged by not merely corresponding to the structuration tendencies of a group's mental categories but by presenting an 'incomparably more advanced degree of coherence than the latter attain.'… (pp. 669-70)

This central research concern of Goldmann is the main theme of three of the six papers where the relations between industrial society and literary creativity are used to discuss issues of method (dialectic); it is also a resource in two of the remaining papers, one of which explores the importance of the concept of 'potential consciousness' (in contrast to 'real consciousness') to the analysis of a group's consciousness, while the other proposes a collective subject against the individual subject of idealism and structuralism's negation of the subject. The final paper is an outline of Goldmann's view of the relation between dialectical analysis and the changing forms of industrial society, with special reference to the changing forms of bureaucracy.

The main weight of Goldmann's writing here is methodological. However, his insistence on the importance of generating typologies through research (and here his non-Marxist roots in the work of Weber and the early Lukács predominate) surfaces through his own typologies of capitalism and bureaucracy, while the subtlety of his textual analysis is shown in his understanding of Genet's writing as the display of non-conformity. Dialectical analysis for Goldmann is a dialectic of comprehension and explication…. [And research occurs at] two levels of structure and functionality, where functionality refers essentially to the meaning of a phenomenon for a subject (individual or collective). So Goldmann's dialectics preserve a place for 'positive research' that is located at the level of function or meaning and ensure that theoretical practice is always more than speculation. But the crucial feature of his 'positive research' is its non-positivism. This is ensured by his insistence that research includes the researcher as part of the problem and by the primacy he gives to 'possibility' in his understanding of social reality. Similarly, dualities (such as philosophy and science, or theory and practice) are never absolute, so that, for example, human science is not only a knowledge permitting transformation but, insofar as it is the knowledge of a collective subject, transforms society 'by its mere development'…. (pp. 670-71)

The strength, then, of the book lies in its display, through a variety of materials, of the possibilities and complexities of Goldmann's method. There is inevitably some repetition arising from the rehearsal of the same themes for the papers' different original audiences but the promise of the writing more than compensates for this. As his final collection it forms an excellent introduction to his own corpus. (p. 671)