This homage to the prominent French sociologist Raymond Boudon (1934–2013), one of the most notable scholars of our day, who can be said to stand within the classical tradition of sociology in emphasising individual social action, along with the rationality of action and choice, gives a comprehensive representation of his work and achievements.

Kevin Hollinrake is the member of parliament for Thirsk and Malton, Yorkshire, UK.

Kevin Schilbrack has pointed out that in my publications over a period from 1994 to 2007 there are some discrepancies in my arguments about some categories, especially "politics" and "culture." In some earlier research on Dalits and Buddhists in Maharashtra I could not locate "religion," so I attempted, unsuccessfully, to develop a tripartite conceptual substitution for "religion" ritual, politics and soteriology for purposes of description and analysis. However, though this was repeated in Ideology, I have come to realize that it contradicts a more fundamental argument which is tacit all the way through Ideology, for example in the critique of constructions of "religion-and-society." It has become progressively clearer to me that the religion-politics binary is one of a series which rhetorically invents both domains (fundamentally religion-nonreligion) as mutually parasitic, while simultaneously transforming the nonreligious secular domains into the common sense order of things. Religion acts as the arena of "faith" and "belief" in contrast to the supposed objective secular knowledge of the "real" world. I have pursued this latter argument most recently in Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth, which shows how writers in that discipline have transformed "religion" into a global agent of malice threatening the benignly rational secular state.

Q. How did your education and early career lead to your initial and continuing interest in the control field?