ABSTRACT
As I have tried to illustrate throughout this work, the principal features of the late modern condition – rampant consumer-driven capitalism, cultural and communicative flux and disembeddedness, and the end of the unified coherent subject – have conspired to produce a ‘subject adrift’, an ontologically insecure actor who epitomises the destruction of the social contract of modernity. Add to this the heightened sense of dis-investment in society and community brought about by economic exclusion, the (as yet unmet) challenges of globalisation, and what Jock Young has described as ‘the veritable chaos of reward’ (1999: 152), and it is clear that ours is indeed a world of division and growing social and economic inequality.
