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PREFACE

Peter Beilharz

The new individualism presents itself to us as a serious problem, and challenge. The main reason for this is obvious. There does seem to be a weakening of ties, a corrosion of loyalty, an acceleration of time, an increasing emphasis on looking out for number one. Sometimes this care still extends to looking after a family, but now the idea of the family is also increasingly uncertain, open to dissolution and renewal. If I can make my family anew, at short notice, then there is really only me, the individual, as a core unit or reality.

Leading intellectual trends such as communitarianism and critical theory have staked a claim to blowing the whistle on these trends. They have long identified surplus individualism, or narcissism, as a major problem in the West. Perhaps this was best brought out into the sixties, by the me-generation and its chronic self-absorption, self-obsession. This line of criticism was confirmed by writers like Lasch and Sennett in the US, and later by Bauman in Europe. Here the markers are apparent. There seems to be a loss of telos, or project, for many ordinary citizens in everyday life. The moment becomes all consuming, and immediate gratification becomes overwhelming. Huxley warned us about this is Brave New World in 1932 already. Changed conceptions of time would lead to reduced or diminished social commitments. Prolonged adolescence would bring with it postponed adulthood. Nobody seems to want to grow up any more, especially not the young.

Yet we behave like children, us adults too. Perhaps it is rather the case that the me-generation never stopped, just kept expanding. From a properly sociological perspective, it now seems that there was a Golden Age life course—a pattern of habits and expectations unique to the period of the postwar boom. Here there was a standard life-course, standardized expectations for men, women, and children, one size fits all, and these senses expanded conceptually until we had normalized them. Certainly one historically unique aspect of the postwar period was the expansion of youth and youth culture; and this is why we need today to match the idea of new individualism with that of new adults.

Communitarianism and critical theory are always open to the criticism of nostalgia, and this indeed is legitimate. For these are intellectual traditions whose purpose is the critique of modernity, and with it the critique of the idea of progress. Yet constant vigilance is also called for here; we cannot simply presume that it was always better in the past, and in fact most of us do not believe this in terms of our everyday sensibilities and dispositions.

Harry Blatterer's contribution in this book is brilliantly to work this interface between radical critique of the present and affirmation of its actually existing contents. This brilliant book is an invitation to contemplation and conversation, not least between us, close to middle age, and our children, our students. It is elegant, beautifully written, engaging, reflexive, an exemplary sociology of everyday life.

Blatterer starts from the premise that adulthood is an invisible concept, or norm, like whiteness. We know that “maturity” is difficult, not least in the academy, or anywhere where academic professionalization means that the prospect of autonomy or recognition comes late. Youth is a brilliant theme, deeply connected to romanticism and to Enlightenment.

Do we ever grow up? We do not grow, perhaps; we learn (perhaps). We struggle, and it is this that makes us what we are. The image of standard adulthood is nevertheless normalized after World War II, after the postwar boom. This is a symptom of Fordism, set roles, Levittown, or Elizabeth in Adelaide or any new suburbs in Australia or anywhere else in the suburban world—malls rule. Fordism is then frozen as a successful normative regime; but the world keeps moving. The notion of telos or transition is arguably normalized earlier, but it is less transition than movement which is fundamental. The norm of adulthood therefore corresponds to high modernity, or in theory to modernization theory. The problem now is not that society is postmodern, but rather that it is truly modern, i.e. innerly and always mobile. Here it is the presently dominant generation—us— which is transitional. Our children are ahead of us. Our children are therefore more modern than us, who are fixed to solid modern claims. They are therefore more challenged than us by the necessity and difficulty of choice. For them, the challenge is even harder—the image of society and subject without limits, including self limits, the simultaneous sense that I can and should be everything and yet that all this is elusive.

In all this, this book is neatly and powerfully sociological; the point is not that our children are lost, it is that if we were now in our twenties, we would respond to this world in the same ways as them. The process of change, contrary to public and scholarly misconception, is therefore both historical and sociological, rather than generational. The new “generation” is a carrier, as much as a leader (or follower). Nevertheless, the image of the biography, path, Lebenslauf pervades even in a postvocational society. Sociologically speaking, we are plainly not only after Weber, but also after Habermas.

The power and precision of insight involved in all this is incredible, as abundantly manifest not least in the case studies developed and so well interpreted here. In fact, the book gets better as it proceeds. Adulthood is now reconsidered as personhood, and we step to recognition. The maturity and balance here is remarkable, calm, reflective, but poignant. Then we turn to youth (and implicitly to beauty, to narcissism). The analysis of paths of youth and class are brilliant. Enter the teen, the rebel, the counterculture. Now the judgement becomes wise, “be young until you die,” youth as the ideology for life. This affects all of us, aging hippies no less than others.

As with Shakespeare, or Goffman, we are all players, but we are also planners. The discussion of problems of planning here is acute; the project of planning is implicitly radicalized, but we do still plan, even if we allow things to fall into place, accidentally as Heller would say, only later taking on coherence (or not; or necessity). Anyway, whatever Blatterer's interviewees say, they seem to cope; they might cope better than us. We face the two lifeworlds—theirs and ours are more connected than before; we also need to learn from them. The contemporary sense of crisis might really be ours, not theirs.

This is the core of Harry Blatterer's great achievement: to work the critical traditions which precede us against the energy, enthusiasm, and openness of these new adults who also need to negotiate the difference between their constraints and their dreams. The wonders of everyday life still precede us.