Pekka Sulkunen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki

Detailed and thought-provoking discussion of lifestyle regulation and how preventive lifestyle policies need to be shaped with the 'saturated society' - a society of self-controlled, fully autonomous individuals - in mind.

Introduction
Lifestyle and the Social Bond
The Good Order of Nature: Progress and Criticism in Adam Smith¿s Sociology of Modernity
Autonomy: the Contracting individual
Intimacy: the Romantic Self
The New Consumer Society and Its Critics
The Welfare State in the Consumer Society
From Pastoral to Epistolary Power
Inner-Directed or Other-Directed? Agency and Citizenship in Mass Society
Re-Inventing the Social Contract