ABSTRACT
Authenticity is a protean concept in philosophy and in the social sciences, ironically always at risk of luring us into the opposite path, into a somewhat “inauthentic” use of authenticity. It has played the role of catchword for a number of traditions-existentialism, Heidegger’s analytics of Being, neo-conservative cultural criticism, certain therapeutic strands of humanistic psychology and of the human potential movement-while never succeeding, at least thus far, in fully playing what could be its potential role: to replace the pivotal role that the notion of autonomy as self-determination, in the variety of its meanings, played in an earlier stage of modernity.
