ABSTRACT
The concept of identity speaks to anthropological constants about what it means to be human. It expresses certain basic and undeniable truths about the ways in which people realize themselves as symbolic, meaning-creating beings. Once culture breaks down, identities are also at risk, and people enter the terrain of failed socialization: group anomie or collective social pathology. In recent philosophical literature, the ethics of identity has become something of a minor cottage industry, since, frequently, the thin or minimal moral criteria bequeathed to people by political liberalism is widely acknowledged as one of liberalism's seminal deficiencies. Identity politics have proliferated as a defensive reaction against globalization and the fragmentation of social ties that has been globalization's necessary concomitant. Trans-national corporations and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund increasingly prescribe the terms of economic life.
