TY - JOUR
AU1 - Honneth, Axel
AB - Despite the fact that the sociological notion ‘individualization’contains the most heterogeneous phenomena, the article develops an interpretation ofthe fate of individualization in Western capitalism today. After havingdifferentiated three different meanings of that notion with the help of GeorgSimmel, the position is defended that the claims to individual self-realization,which have rapidly multiplied in the Western societies of thirty or forty years ago,have become so much a feature of the institutionalized expectations inherent insocial reproduction that the particular goals of such claims are lost and they aretransmuted into a support of the system’s legitimacy. The result of thisparadoxical reversal, where the processes which once promised an increase ofqualitative freedom are henceforth altered into an ideology ofde-institutionalization, is the emergence in individuals of a number of symptoms ofinner emptiness, of feeling oneself to be superfluous, and of absence of purpose.
TI - Organized Self-Realization
JF - European Journal of Social Theory
DO - 10.1177/1368431004046703
DA - 2004-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/organized-self-realization-1DBjKE2ey4
SP - 463
EP - 478
VL - 7
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -