Deadly Worlds: The Emotional Costs of Globalization

Deadly Worlds offers an original analysis of one of the unsolved questions of the current age: what are the emotional costs and possibilities of globalization? Lemert and Elliott challenge the dominant interpretations of the late modern world by delving below the surface of cultural and economic theories to explore theories of the new individualism. Against European ideas that the individual is either a manipulated artifact of mass culture or a reflexive self facing global risks, they pose the possibility that the new worlds are actually deadly. Against the American tradition of viewing the individual as having abandoned her moral center, they suggest the necessity of rediscovered aggression as a proper moral quality. Deadly Worlds is controversial, but also plain spoken and intriguing. It dares to rework the case method by telling the stories of real individuals: Kelly struggling to find herself by plastic surgery; Norman responding to a positive HIV status by remaking his community; Larry desperately seeking to control the world's demands by therapy; Phyllis using her natural gift for aggression to heal and build institutions. The life stories root the book's themes in worlds all can recognize, while the presentation of the prevailing theories of globalization and its effects expand the reader's social imagination to new possibilities.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1 Individualism for Beginners: When Caoimhe met Annie Somewhere in Global Space Chapter 3 2 Was the Free Individual Just A Dream? Snapshots of Individualism and the Illusion of the Good Society Chapter 4 3 Living in a Privatized World? Coping with Globalization Chapter 5 4 On the Individualist Arts of Sex: Intimacy, Eroticism, and the Newly Lost Individual Chapter 6 5 The Self and Other Ethical Troubles: Ethics, Social Differences, and the Truths of Multiculturalism Chapter 7 6 Surviving The New Individualism: Living Aggressively in Deadly Worlds

About the Author :
Charles Lemert is Andrus Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and is the author of many widely read books, including Dark Thoughts: Race and the Eclipse of Society and Postmodernism Is Not What You Think/How Globalization Threatens Modernity. Anthony Elliott is professor of social and political theory at the University of the West of England, where he is director of the Centre for Critical Theory. His recent books include Concepts of the Self, Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction, and Critical Visions.

Review :
Bringing sociology down to earth the authors force us to confront the disturbing consequences of the new individualism. A powerful account of the implosion of private life. Deadly Worlds provides us with an original analysis of what is happening to our day-to-day life, and therefore our psyches, under globalization. It offers a stirring social psychology of how the myth of individualism undermines what it purports to uphold: the individual itself. Clearly written and well argued, this book will provide an important tool for anyone struggling to come to terms with our complex world. ...the authors...offer an extremely scholarly analysis of recent trends. The book is an enjoyable and informative read which provides powerful insights into the way that human beings today are responding to the complexities and challenges of a globalizing world. Thick with theoretical taxonomies and conclusions, and unburdoned by footnotes, this inquiry moves briskly across genres through six chapters. Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert have infused high theory with a sense of what it means for everyday life. Blending a discussion of theory with case histories they take us into the heart of the contemporary dilemmas of globalization, and the growing inequalities-and awareness of these inequalities-that create a growing sense of unease within even the most prosperous of societies. This is an important contribution to the sociology of a world marked both by increasing fear and unprecedented consumption.