In contrast to other books on 'culture', this study does not provide a history of the concept, rather it proposes an analysis of what might be called the underlying grammar or logic of the category. Ray argues that the disparate models, ideologies, and ethics that have been advanced in the name of culture -- or in opposition to it -- all derive from a fundamental shift in our ways of thinking about law, authority, and social life that occurred well before the advent of modernity.

This overview shows how the new logic formed in the collective imagination under pressure from discursive innovations in areas such as periodical journalism, the novel, educational theory, and the art museum. Blending close analysis of these mechanisms in eighteenth-century France into a broad historical and theoretical synthesis, Ray argues that the logic of culture, now as then, induces us to determine our proper place within the social hierarchy, consolidates belief in law through its critique, and inculcates norms through the organization of dissent.