ABSTRACT
While I agree with much of their diagnosis, and sympathise with their impatience, I can’t embrace Brubaker and Cooper’s suggested cure, to discard the notion of ‘identity’ for social analytical purposes. If only because the genie is well and truly out of the bottle – ‘identity’ is already an established part of the sociological tool kit – this isn’t going to work. More important, for reasons that I began to outline in Chapter 1, ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ are still essential concepts if we are to understand the human world. Let’s explore that proposition further.
