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71 Soc. F. 229 (1992-1993)
Book Reviews

handle is hein.journals/josf71 and id is 245 raw text is: Book Reviews Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modem Age. By Anthony Giddens. Stanford University Press, 1991. 256 pp. Cloth $35.00; paper $12.95. Reviewer: ROsE LAu cosp, Boston College Modern life is marked by a multiplicity of choices provided by yet also restrained by institutions, which Giddens calls abstract systems. The new world is both fragmented and unitary. There is continuous interplay between the local and the global at the same time that tradition has become considerably weakened. Cultural mandates have lost their hold. Giddens suggests that family relation- ships after divorce offer a good illustration. Although there have always been stepparents and stepchildren, they used to result largely from a parent's death. But the current conditions of frequent divorce and remarriage have not created a new cultural pattern for dealing with the new kin relationships. I have often asked how paternal grandparents, for example, whose son has left his own family of pro- creation, are to behave with his offspring of the dissolved union. Giddens gives a different example: stepchildren who have two sets of parents with whom they must negotiate relationships. The culture does not provide a set of rules of rights and obligations, so individuals must discover their own solutions. This situation offers a certain freedom to choose among rights and obligations - but that freedom entails risks. Risk is an important feature of modern life. Giddens quotes from a book on self-therapy: If your life is ever going to change for the better, you'll have to take chances. Risk is not only inherent in monetary investment, but in investment in social relations as well. Of course, this goes together with freedom of choice. In making our choice, we trust that we do the right thing, that nothing bad will come from it. Thus, in modern life trust is intimately related to risk. In a small premodern community, where one knows other people intimately, one does not have to trust them because they are completely familiar; it is only if they are not familiar that trust becomes a prerequisite of meaningful behavior. Giddens could have added that the plastic credit card is the symbol of both trust and risk in modern society. As with the credit card, trusting in one's relationships implies the possibility of loss, as Giddens notes, just as creativity implies the willingness to accept both risk and trust - an opportunity provided in what I would call a society of segmented relationships, which Giddens calls the pluralization of contexts of action. One characteristic of modernity is reflexivity, that is, the fact that individuals reflect about themselves, about their choices, their pasts, and their futures. The formation of identity is a trajectory across different institutional settings throughout the life cycle. Each of us not only has, but lives a biography reflexively organized in terms of flows of social and psychological information about possible ways of Social Forces, September 1992, 71(1) 229 Q The University of North Carolina Press