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Self and Society in Popular Social Criticism 1920–1980
Author(s) -
Benton James S.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.1993.16.2.145
Subject(s) - individualism , criticism , rhetoric , period (music) , sensibility , sociology , context (archaeology) , social criticism , self criticism , aesthetics , social science , social psychology , psychology , political science , law , history , art , philosophy , politics , linguistics , archaeology
Since the tumult of the 1960s, sociologists and cultural historians have suggested that a “new sensibility” has become more prominent in the United States and other advanced capitalist democracies. In most accounts, the core of the change is an increase in expressive individualism, popularly justified by discourse very much indebted to the language of academic and clinical psychology. Among symbolic interactionists, Ralph Turner's proposal that there has been a shift from “institutional” to “impulsive” anchorage of the self has been the single most influential contribution to this debate. Turner's analysis is placed in the larger context of his work and considered in the light of changes in social criticism and the rhetoric of self in popular “conduct‐of‐life” literature published between 1920 and 1980. Three relatively distinct waves of social criticism are found in that literature during that period, with each one more firmly based on individualistic and psychologistic views of self and society than its predecessor.