ABSTRACT
We saw in the last chapter that Anthony Giddens argues that modernity problematizes individual identity by virtue of its inherent tendency to undermine traditional forms of life through which earlier identities were more or less automatically established. Charles Taylor in his The Politics of Recognition agrees that the collapse of pre-modern hierarchies and the values associated with them-especially, for Taylor, the value of honor-partly explains why the issue of identity becomes so central to modern life. But he adds that its centrality is also the consequence of what he calls “the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths,”1 a subjective turn that he thinks Rousseau was the rst major thinker clearly to articulate. From Rousseau’s writings-not so much from the Social Contract but rather from his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his Emile-comes the idea-the altogether modern idea-that we have an authentic inner self that is all too oen distorted or repressed by the crass competition of a modern, increasingly commercial, society. us the very modernity that buries our identity under the weight of what Tocqueville called the “tyranny” of majority opinion incites us to uncover the true self that underlies it.
