Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive
history of identity as the answer to the question, who, or what, am I?
It covers the century from the end of World War I, when identity in this
sense first became an issue for writers and philosophers, to 2010, when
European political leaders declared multiculturalism a failure just as
Canada, which pioneered it, was hailing its success. Along the way the
book examines Erik Erikson's concepts of psychological identity and
identity crisis, which made the word famous; the turn to collective
identity and the rise of identity politics in Europe and America;
varieties and theories of group identity; debates over accommodating
collective identities within liberal democracy; the relationship between
individual and group identity; the postmodern critique of identity as a
concept; and the ways it nonetheless transformed the social sciences and
altered our ideas of ethics.
At the same time the book is an argument for the validity and
indispensability of identity, properly understood. Identity was not a
concept before the twentieth century because it was taken for granted.
The slaughter of World War I undermined the honored identities of prewar
Europe and, as a result, the idea of identity as something objective and
stable was thrown into question at the same time that people began to
sense that it was psychologically and socially necessary. We can't be at
home in our bodies, act effectively in the world, or interact
comfortably with others without a stable sense of who we are. Gerald
Izenberg argues that, while it is a mistake to believe that our
identities are givens that we passively discover about ourselves,
decreed by God, destiny, or nature, our most important identities have
an objective foundation in our existential situation as bodies, social
beings, and creatures who aspire to meaning and transcendence, as well
as in the legitimacy of our historical particularity.
