ABSTRACT
Self, identity, and subjectivity are central topics in contemporary social theory.1
In some respects, the relationship between self and society has been a core concern in social theory since the classical period of sociology: in Europe, the discipline’s founders – Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel – analyzed the impact of the structures of modern societies on the subjective experience of individuals and, across the Atlantic, George Herbert Mead developed the idea of the ‘social self’ (1934). But, despite initial interest, the topic largely disappeared from sociology by the middle of the twentieth century. For most sociologists of that era, the self was uninteresting. It was non-existent to those influenced by behaviorism and schooled in its empirical rigors; it was the province of psychological reductionism to those entranced by disciplinary boundaries; it was the passively determined product of social institutions to both functionalists and, insofar as they were known to mainstream sociologists, dominant schools of Marxist thought. In the final decades of the twentieth century, though, issues of self, identity, agency, and subjective experience emerged as central topics of analysis and debate among social theorists (Elliott 2001). In a collection published in 1996, Stuart Hall referred to a ‘veritable discourse explosion’ around matters of identity (Hall and Du Gay 1996: 1), while a few years later Zygmunt Bauman (2001) commented that the explosion had triggered an avalanche.
