Introduction

Abstract

Individuals seem to be losing their essence as they actualize the multiple social worlds of contemporary society—the worlds of commerce, medicine, religion, education, kinship, and so on, as well as the numerous informal worlds of hobbies, sports, and avocations. Who is the real woman or man when that individual consummates the self in a single day as a spouse, parent, home owner, commuter, customer, employee, co-worker, pedestrian, aerobics enthusiast, diner, Catholic, fan, friend, TV-watcher, voter, and lover, and maybe also aberrant possibilities like speeder or tightwad? The profusion of social worlds and situational identitie (s so fragments and de-centers the individual that no self-essence seems to remain. The prevailing view of self and modernity, according to Giddens, is that “the self in modern society is frail, brittle, fractured, fragmented,” that “just as the social world becomes contextualized and dispersed, so too does the self” (1991, pp. 169–170).

I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886