This book reads a series of texts as essentially journeys across class lines and shows how the image of the people functions in them as a point of reference onto which the observer projects a conceptual framework based on the observer’s own circumstances. To understand the considerable importance of this theme (which harks back in some ways to aspects of the author’s earlier The Nights of Labor), it needs to be set in the context of the innumerable ways the people have been invoked in support of political projects backed by people from other social classes.