Identity
Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition
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- $139.00
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- $139.00
Descripción editorial
Currently in Bill Gates's bookbag and FT Books of 2018
Increasingly, the demands of identity direct the world's politics. Nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, gender: these categories have overtaken broader, inclusive ideas of who we are. We have built walls rather than bridges. The result: increasing in anti-immigrant sentiment, rioting on college campuses, and the return of open white supremacy to our politics.
In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American and global institutions were in a state of decay, as the state was captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatens to destabilise the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to 'the people', who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.
Identity is an urgent and necessary book: a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continual conflict.
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Political scientist Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man) makes an ambitious and provocative critique of identity politics, which he locates in both the leftist crusade for equality for marginalized people and right-wing ethnonationalism and "economic anxieties," which he says are "actually rooted in the demand for recognition." He organizes his analysis around the concept of thymos, "the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity," which results in either "a desire to be respected on an equal basis with other people" (which, thwarted by marginalization, spurs leftist identity politics), or a "desire to be recognized as superior" (which he connects to dictatorial leaders). He draws from philosophers such as Hegel and Marx; traces the ascendancy of modern liberal democracies, specifically the French Revolution; and turns a critical lens on the Arab Spring, Europe's immigrant crisis, and Donald Trump to argue that identity politics has morphed into a "politics of resentment." The analysis ends with proposals for promoting broader conceptions of identity that bring people together to support liberal democracy's functioning. This erudite work is likely to spark debate.
