Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on social-criticism, self-help manuals, and the social scientific analysis of American character, this text examines American thinking about individualism, conformity, and community from 1920 through 1995.
Trade ReviewAt once a history of ideas, a history of American mores, and an essay in sociological theory, this book tackles head-on the most fundamental issues about the relation between self and society. Irene Taviss Thomson chronicles the highlights of eight decades of (most American) theories about individualism, conformity, and community. She counterpoises the theories with practical advice contemporaneously proffered via best-selling self-help books and, to some degree, with social survey data. Her comprehensive, meticulous review of the literature makes this book required reading for anyone who wants to do serious research on changing self and society relationships in America. -- Richard Madsen * Contemporary Sociology *
This is an invaluable work and worthy of [the] broadest deliberation. Irene Taviss Thomson does nothing less than document and illuminate the 20th century erosion of a lynchpin concept in Western culture: the individual self. Further, she heralds the forthcoming of what may well become its 21st century replacement: relational being. -- Kenneth J. Gergen, Swarthmore College; author of The Saturated Self
Table of ContentsChapter 1 1. A Changing American Self Chapter 2 2. The Changing Meanings of Individualism, Conformity, and Community Chapter 3 3. The Individual-Society Realtionship, 1920-1995 Chapter 4 4. The Emerging Self: Flexible, Constructed, Multiple, and Relational Chapter 5 5. The Relational Self and Contemporary Social Science Chapter 6 6. The Causes and Implications of the Demise of the Conflict Paradigm
