Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. Harry Blatterer

      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