> Carrol Cox wrote:
> >It would be
> >fascinating to speculate on the significance of Bacon being one of the very
> >earliest users of a concept
> [i.e. "identity" as The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in
> all circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself
> and not something else; individuality, personality]
> >so intrinsic to bourgeois individualism.
>
> And that John Dunne tried to strangle the imp in the cradle?
>
> 'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;
> All just supply, and all Relation:
> Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
> For every man thinks he hath got
> To be a Phoenix, and that there can be
> None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
>
> *The First Anniversarie*, lines 213-8
>
> Does anyone know of a good Raymond Williams type history of the emergence
> of this sense of "identity"?
For another take on this, admittedly a cursory one in a rather brief book, See *The Unconscious Civilization* by John Ralston Saul. Saul's book is aimed directly at the idea of "market democracy," and his point is simply that democracy gave birth to markets, not the other way around.
What he means by democracy traces back to the early centuries of this millenium, (the roots of English common law, & all that) and has to do with the emergence of a kind of individualism that's NOT divorced from society, but comes out of it -- though not a society defined in terms of "Prince" and "Subject."
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"