The Politics and Ethics of Identity
In Search of Ourselves

Challenges the notion of consistent unitary identities, arguing that we are multiple, changing selves, shaped by social contexts and processes.

Richard Ned Lebow (Author)

9781107027657, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 August 2012

444 pages
23.1 x 15.2 x 3.3 cm, 0.75 kg

'Ned Lebow has a deserved reputation for tackling hard questions that require the resources of many disciplines to properly ask, let alone answer. In this, his most ambitious study yet, he combines social science, psychology, intellectual history, literary and even musical criticism to illuminate the character and significance of identity in the modern world. At the heart of the inquiry is [his] analysis of four distinct strategies of identity construction and the four distinct political orientations they provide the underpinnings for: conservatism, totalitarianism, liberalism and anarchism, and the question he ponders following on from this: whether we can dispense with claims about unitary and consistent identities and what would follow, ethically and politically, if we did. A powerful and challenging study by a major contemporary theorist at the top of his game.' Nicholas Rengger, University of St Andrews

We are multiple, fragmented, and changing selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities. What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central in post-war scholarship, fiction, and the media? Following Hegel, Richard Ned Lebow contends that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the tension between our reflexive and social selves. To address this problem Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction that are associated with four distinct political orientations. Lebow develops his arguments through comparative analysis of ancient and modern literary, philosophical, religious, and musical texts. He asks how we might come to terms with the fragmented and illusionary nature of our identities and explores some political and ethical implications of doing so.

1. Introduction
2. Narratives and identity
3. Homer, Virgil, and identity
4. Mozart and the Enlightenment
5. Germans and Greeks
6. Beam me up, Lord
7. Science fiction and immortality
8. Identity reconsidered.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], History of ideas [JFCX], Cultural studies [JFC]