The Hegemony of Common Sense: Wisdom and Mystification in Everyday Life, is a path-breaking synthesis, a unique contribution to the study of class and consciousness. Here, Dean Wolfe Manders brings critical social theory to bear on the nature of links between American popular sayings, capitalist ideology, and the everyday lived dynamics of class domination.

The agenda of this book is easily stated -- that reigning American "common sense" is amenable to sustained critique by means of inquiry into common sayings, proverbs, and other forms of everyday discourse. What Manders offers, in...