ABSTRACT
Society, it is assumed, transcends the individual: it is a totality whose powers far surpass those of the identifying individual who has to come to terms with it. More important is the assumption that identity transcends the past and the constraints of the lived human world. Many thinkers in ‘medieval’ or ‘traditional’ India saw the person or self both as relatively heterotelic, as pursuing different goals in different situations, and as relatively homotelic, as articulating those different goals into some sort of unity. The process that causes some sort of bringing together of individual and society on the part of new recruits is usually called identification or identity formation. The idea that everyone should have an identity seems vaguely widespread. The idea that came to the fore in twentieth-century representations of utopia, especially after World War II, is that the whole of the nation is an emergent paradise, especially for its elite.
