ABSTRACT
According to – amongst others – Taylor, Seigel and Wahrman, the concept of personal identity as ‘one that presupposes an essential core of selfhood characterized by psychological depth, or interiority, which is the bedrock of unique, expressive individual identity’ (Wahrman, xi) emerges in the course of the eighteenth century. This correlates with a shift from the holistic cosmology of the body politic and status-based feudal hierarchies to a model of functional differentiation (Luhmann 1997, 731; Scholz, 1-2). Instead of the family one was born into, capitalist market forces and specialized social subsystems such as politics, religion, law, the economy or literature provide multiple frameworks for identity formation. In this changing culture, people are expected to conform to social norms, but at the same time they have to differentiate themselves from others (Elias 1993-1994; Luhmann 1998).
