A second critical aspect of postmodernity is an extraordinary heightening of individuation which can be described as the consequence of the multiplication and segregation of roles available to, in some measure forced upon, the individual. One result is that persons can share a nearly identical portfolio of roles without sharing similar commitments or coming to […]

Among the more critical aspects of postmodernity is the normalization of change, the unprecedented degree to which change permeates virtually every aspect of our lives and the immediate landscape of our lives and the unprecedented degree to which we have come to live with it, expect it, and even come to desire it as the […]

The contemporary situation may represent a more revolutionary time than any the Western world—and now the entire globe—has ever known. The idioms and images we associate with postmodernism are not merely matters of styles, fashionable cliches, or intellectual fashions; rather they are an expression of a shift as profound as any we have known since […]

Approximately at mid-century, two seminal works appeared that defined the most influential approaches to the interactions that simultaneously create individuals and societies. These two works were by writers fully aware of each other. One was Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950); the other was David Riesman’s amazingly prescient work The Lonely Crowd (1969). Childhood and […]

There is no emotion, Only a collage of emotions; There is no desire, Only an ecology of desires;There is no pleasure, Only an economy of pleasures. All attempts at theorizing social life are, at the same time, works of autobiography. This is the most basic insight of the sociology of knowledge and, as such, it […]

During the decade in which the following essays were composed, I was fortunate in having as initial readers some remarkable persons. First among these was my wife, Lynn Randolph, who suffered through successive drafts and my persistent irritation at her persistent insight. A very special reader was the late Robert J. Stoller. Bob read early […]

The work that follows is drawn from papers and essays, published and unpublished, written over the past decade (1984-94). It is not, however, merely a collection of such papers and essays. Each has been revised, frequently incorporating concepts and insights developed in others. By the same token, it is not intended to represent a single, […]

William Simon argues, among many other things, that sexuality—that “inconstant universal”—is conducted at an angle: it is never just sex. Indeed, as he says in his preface, “all discourses of sexuality are inherently discourses about something else; sexuality rather than serving as a constant thread that unifies the totality of human experience, is the ultimate […]