Abstract
The explicitly soluble Luttinger model is used as a basis for the description of the general interacting Fermi gas in one dimension, which will be called 'Luttinger liquid theory', by analogy with Fermi liquid theory. The excitation spectrum of the Luttinger model is described by density-wave, charge and current excitations; its spectral properties determine a characteristic parameter that controls the correlation function exponents. These relations are shown to survive in non-soluble generalisations of the model with a non-linear fermion dispersion. It is proposed that this low-energy structure is universal to a wide class of 1D systems with conducting or fluid properties, including spin chains.