This interdisciplinary study examines the emergence, rise, and decline of individualism as a central feature of the Western world view. Building on research into the concept of self, Daniel Shanahan argues that the seeds of individualism - that system of beliefs in which the individual becomes the final arbiter of truth - were sown in ancient civilisations where subjective consciousness first became apparent. He then traces the evolution of the Western self-concept through its various historical representations: the analog self of the Greeks and Hebrews; the authorised self of Augustine and the Christian era; and the empowered self of modernity.

Men and women remain unequal in the United States, but in this provocative book, Robert Max Jackson demonstrates that gender inequality is irrevocably crumbling. Destined for Equality, the first integrated analysis of gender inequality's modern decline, tells the story of that progressive movement toward equality over the past two centuries in America, showing that women's status has risen consistently and continuously. Jackson asserts that women's rising status has been due largely to the emergence of modern political and economic organizations, which have transformed institutional priorities concerning gender. Although individual politicians and businessmen generally believed women should remain in their traditional roles, Jackson shows that it was simply not in the interests of modern enterprise and government to foster inequality. The search for profits, votes, organizational rationality, and stability all favored a gender-neutral approach that improved women's status. The inherent gender impartiality of organizational interests won out over the prejudiced preferences of the men who ran them. As economic power migrated into large-scale organizations inherently indifferent to gender distinctions, the patriarchal model lost its social and cultural sway, and women's continual efforts to rise in the world became steadily more successful. Total gender equality will eventually prevail; the only questions remaining are what it will look like, and how and when it will arrive.

What personal truths reside in biological ties that are absent in adoptive ties? And why do we think adoptive and biological ties are essentially different when it comes to understanding who we are? At a time when interest in DNA and ancestry is exploding, Frances Latchford questions the idea that knowing one's bio-genealogy is integral to personal identity or a sense of family and belonging. Upending our established values and beliefs about what makes a family, Steeped in Blood examines the social and political devaluation of adoptive ties. It takes readers on an intellectual journey through accepted wisdom about adoption, twins, kinship, and incest, and challenges our naturalistic and individualistic assumptions about identity and the biological ties that bind us, sometimes violently, to our families. Latchford exposes how our desire for bio-genealogical knowledge, understood as it is by family and adoption experts, pathologizes adoptees by posing the biological tie as a necessary condition for normal identity formation. Rejecting the idea that a love of the self-same is fundamental to family bonds, her book is a reaction to the wounds families suffer whenever they dare to revel in their difference. A rejoinder to rhetoric that defines adoptees, adoptive kin, and their family intimacies as inferior and inauthentic, Steeped in Blood's view through the lens of critical adoption studies decentres our cultural obsession with the biological family imaginary and makes real the possibility of being family in the absence of blood.

In this engaging, optimistic close reading of five late twentieth-century novels by American women, Magali Cornier Michael illuminates the ways in which their authors engage with ideas of communal activism, common commitment, and social transformation. The fictions she examines imagine coalition building as a means of moving toward new forms of nonhierarchical justice; for ethnic cultures that, as a result of racist attitudes, have not been assimilated, power with each other rather than power over each other is a collective goal.Michael argues that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of care and nurturing that move away from the private sphere toward the public and political. Specifically, texts by women from such racially marked ethnic groups as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and experiences of these hybrid cultures and thus offer feminist and ethical revisions of traditional concepts of community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency.Focusing on Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Michael shows that each writer emphasizes the positive, liberating effects of kinship and community. These hybrid versions of community, which draw from other-than-dominant culturally specific ideas and histories, have something to offer Americans as the United States moves into an increasingly diverse twenty-first century. Michael provides a rich lens through which to view both contemporary fiction and contemporary life.

This book traces the emergence of the concept of self-identity in modern Western culture, as it was both reflected in and advanced by the development of autobiographical practice in early modern England. It offers a fresh and illuminating appraisal of the nature of autobiographical narrative in general and of the early modern forms of biography, diary and autobiography in particular. The result is a significant and original contribution to the history of individualism. Michael Mascuch argues that the definitive characteristic of individualist self-identity is the personal capacity to produce a unified retrospective autobiographical narrative, and he stresses that this capacity was first demonstrated in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He examines the long-term process of innovation in written discourse leading up to this event, from the first use of blank almanacs and common place books by the pious in the late sixteenth century, through the popular criminal biographies of the late seventeenth century, to the printed-for-the-author scandalous memoirs of the mid-eighteenth century. While offering a detailed account of a significant period in the rise of a modern literary genre, Origins of the Individualist Self also addresses topics which are central in the fields of literary and cultural theory and social and cultural history.

America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. These writers’ shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived—or, in Dewey’s term, “reconstructed”—individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.

Ecclesiology is a key issue for the present age of church history. This groundbreaking work by one of today's leading theologians offers a major Protestant ecclesiology for the church catholic. This volume, the first of three, considers the priesthood of the church in light of the priesthood of Christ. Tom Greggs shows the connection between Christ's work as high priest and the universal church's role in salvation. All together, the three volumes will offer a major statement on the doctrine of the church for Christians from a variety of backgrounds.

This book argues that the liberal concept of rights presupposes and is grounded in an individualistic culture or shared way of relating, and that this particular shared way of relating emerged only in the wake of the Reformation in the modern West.

The Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies offers an exceptionally clear overview of the analysis of identity in the social sciences, and in so doing seeks to develop a new agenda for identity-studies in the twenty-first century. The key theories of identity, ranging from classical accounts to postmodern, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised, and there are substantive sections looking at racial, ethnic, gendered, queer, consumerist, virtual and global identities. The Handbook also makes an essential contribution to the debate now opening up over identity-politics and its cultural consequences. From anti-globalization protestors to new ecological warriors, from devotees of therapy culture to defenders of international human rights: the culture of identity-politics is fast redefining the public political sphere. What future for politics is there after the turn to identity? Throughout there is a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity with essays covering sociology, psychology, politics, cultural studies and history. The Handbook’s clear and direct style will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience in the social sciences and humanities.

Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of persons-in-history/history-in-persons, focusing on how individuals and groups as agents both fashion and are fashioned by social, political, and cultural discourses and practices. In this approach, power, agency, and history are made explicit as individuals and groups work to constitute themselves in relation to others and within and against sociopolitical and historical contexts. Contributors to this volume extend this emphasis, drawing upon their ethnographic research in Nepal to examine closely how selves, identities, and experience are produced in dialogical relationships through time in a multi-ethic nation-state and within a discourse of nationalism. The diversity of peoples, recent political transformations, and nation-building efforts make Nepal an especially rich locale to examine people's struggles to define and position themselves. But the authors move beyond geographical boundaries to more theoretical terrain to problematicize the ways in which people recreate or contest certain identities and positions. Various authors explore how people_positioned by gender, ethnicity, and locale_use cultural genres to produce aspects of identities and experiences; they examine how subjectivities, agencies and cultural worlds co-develop and are shaped through engagement with cultural forms; and they portray the appropriation of multiple voices for self and group formation. As such, this collection offers a richly textured and complex accounting of the mutual constitution of selves and society.