ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to highlight the importance of a critique of the idea of resilience. It focuses on the proximity between resilience discourses, self-contained and economic individualism, and contemporary neoliberalism. Particular attention is paid to the process of individualization which has undergone a dramatic acceleration in the time of economic crisis and which has implied a shift from social insecurity to individual/personal insecurity. As for the concept of resilience, the concept of security has also increasingly gained attention in the social and psychological sciences. Psychological resilience can be regarded as a typically individualistic construct rooted in the individualization of the subject which characterizes capitalism. In advanced capitalist democracies, the policy framing of resilience encapsulates the principle of individualisation that has been characteristic in the neoliberal realignment of social policy to economic aims. Resilience is typically represented in social policy as a matter of individual attributes that are integral to autonomy, self-invention and choice biographies.
