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

This the second work that put risk at the centre of European social theory debates and focuses more on the processes that link the late modern individual to contemporary (Western) conditions. A series of arguments support the idea of a reduced sense of security and purport to explain the undermining of the contemporary self in terms of a break with well established social and cultural processes which late modernity makes redundant.

Despite the influence of Giddens’s work, particularly in the English-speaking world where it is generally considered less abstruse than Beck’s "risk society", it is difficult to find etiological links between the well-known developments that Giddens addresses.

With the benefit if time elapsed, it is possible to look at both works as reliable descriptions of contemporary declines in trust and security but not as frameworks of explanatory power regarding the current condition; this remains a challenge to which this WP and the entire Challenge IP are geared to contribute.

Giddens A.,Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991.