Richard Ned Lebow
The Politics and Ethics of Identity
We are multiple, fragmented, and evolving selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities.
What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central to post-war scholarship, fiction and popular culture?
I contend that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the tension between our reflective and social selves.
To address this problem, Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction that are associated with four distinct political orientations: conservatism, totalitarianism, liberalism and anarchism.
I develop my argument through the reading of ancient and modern literary, philosophical and musical texts.
Editor: Erind Pajo
The Politics and Ethics of Identity
Richard Ned Lebow The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves Cambridge University Press 439 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 1107027657
Available here →February 15, 2013
20130215-lebow-richard-ned-on-politics-ethics-identity-search-ourselves-1-1-1
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Richard Ned Lebow
Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Besides the books featured in his Rorotoko interviews, Forbidden Fruit and Why Nations Fight, he is also the author of A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2008), winner of the Jervis-Schoeder Award for the best book in international relations and history and the Susan Strange Award for the best book of the year, and The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge, 2003), winner of the Alexander L. George Award for the best book in political psychology.
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There is no such thing as an identity, only a jumble of self-identifications with raw appetites underneath.
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