The thesis attempts to create an economic sociology by deriving the implications, for social theory, of the concept of human capital. Human capital formation is the rationalized skill formation of industrial society, an indispensable element in the emergence of a liberal individualist order. In pre-industrial society skill formation was generally of a non-market kind, and its relatively static character partly explains the unspecialized division of labour and the coercive control-structures of a agrarianism. In advanced society, human capital formation is a central part of a relatively voluntarist structure of economic action which both creates and requires the deeply consensual nature of modern capitalism.