Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age / Edition 1

by Anthony Giddens

Overview

Modernity differs from all preceding forms of social order because of its dynamism, its deep undercutting of traditional habits and customs, and its global impact. It also radicallly alters the general nature of daily life and the most personal aspects of human activity. In fact, one of the most distinctive features of modernity is the increasing interconnection between globalizing influences and personal dispositions. The author analyzes the nature of this interconnection and provides a conceptual vocabulary for it, in the process providing a major rethinking of the nature of modernity and a reworking of basic premises of sociological analysis.

Building on the ideas set out in the author's The Consequences of Modernity, this book focuses on the self and the emergence of new mechanisms of self-identity that are shaped by—yet also shape—the institutions of modernity. The author argues that the self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences. Rather, in forging their self-identities, no matter how local their contexts of action, individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications.

The author sketches the contours of the he calls "high modernity"—the world of our day—and considers its ramifications for the self and self-identity. In this context, he analyzes the meaning to the self of such concepts as trust, fate, risk, and security and goes on the examine the "sequestration of experience," the process by which high modernity separates day-to-day social life from a variety of experiences and broad issues of morality. The author demonstrates how personal meaninglessness—the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer—becomes a fundamental psychic problem in circumstances of high modernity. The book concludes with a discussion of "life politics," a politics of selfactualization operating on both the individual and collective levels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804719445
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	07/01/1991
Edition description:	1
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anthony Giddens is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and also Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Table of Contents

Introduction.

1. The Contours of High Modernity.

2. The Self: Ontological Security and Existential Anxiety.

3. The Trajectory of the Self.

4. Fate, Risk and Security.

5. The Sequestration of Experience.

6. Tribulations of the Self.

7. The Emergence of Life Politics.

Notes.

Index.

Editorial Reviews

'In this book Anthony Giddens brings back in personality, the psyche, human nature itself. It is a pleasure and a real intellectual advance to have a social theorist of his stature revive the once central but long ignored study of personality and culture, character and society, especially a theorist with his very precise sense of what is truly modern in contemporary life.' Professor Dennis Wrong, New York University

From the Publisher