ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the insights that modernity’s ‘emotional history’ is said to provide into the democratization of social life in late modernity. Chapter 6 considered the possibilities that reflexive modernity is said to present for the individual project of self-identity. According to Giddens, when traditional ways of living lose their value individuals face pressing questions about who and how to be. People negotiate their identities by making practical lifestyle decisions about everyday issues, including their relationships with others. Furthermore, in the insecure and risky world of late modernity, intimate life is identified as the place where security is most intensely sought and cherished, but it is also where radical insecurities and contingencies can be encountered in powerful ways. The topics of relating and intimacy are therefore deployed by reconstructivist theorists to provide insights into the implications of the social and cultural developments associated with late modernity.
