ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION ‘There is no such thing as society’, the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once famously proclaimed. It is understandable that people want to be seen as individuals. Certainly Mrs Thatcher understood this, to devastating electoral effect. We tend to resent being reduced to crude social determinants of class, gender, race, age, sexuality or nationality. Whilst we may often be guilty of stereotyping others, we don’t want it done to us. On the other hand, with just a little reflection, it is also fairly obvious that we only possess and express our individual identities through wider social dimensions: through the relations we have to others (the three of us writing this could not be lecturers without students, men without women); through the organizations and social settings that we inhabit (our families, our friendships, our haunts); through our senses of collective identification. Strip all that away and most of us would fall apart (which is why solitary confinement is a such a brutal form of discipline and has such powerful effects on individuals).
