Review essay - Lemert and Elliott's New Individualism

Abstract

The New Individualism, is, amongst other things, an explicit attempt to examine the impact of globalization upon personal experience: ‘how the global . . . comes to be lived internally’ (p. 75); or, as it is more ambitiously posed, a ‘psychology of globalism’ (p. 103). However, the book does not follow the usual format of an extended psychological or sociological argument. It does contain such arguments, but they are blended with fictional narrative and self-help styled excursuses, which all jostle together in an apparently novel union of what, for want of a better term, might be referred to as ‘social science fiction’.