Deadly Worlds

Deadly Worlds offers an original analysis of one of the unsolved questions of the current age: what are the emotional costs and possibilities of globalization? Lemert and Elliott challenge the dominant interpretations of the late modern world by delving below the surface of cultural and economic theories to explore theories of the new individualism. Against European ideas that the individual is either a manipulated artifact of mass culture or a reflexive self facing global risks, they pose the possibility that the new worlds are actually deadly. Against the American tradition of viewing the individual as having abandoned her moral center, they suggest the necessity of rediscovered aggression as a proper moral quality. Deadly Worlds is controversial, but also plain spoken and intriguing. It dares to rework the case method by telling the stories of real individuals: Kelly struggling to find herself by plastic surgery; Norman responding to a positive HIV status by remaking his community; Larry desperately seeking to control the world's demands by therapy; Phyllis using her natural gift for aggression to heal and build institutions. The life stories root the book's themes in worlds all can recognize, while the presentation of the prevailing theories of globalization and its effects expand the reader's social imagination to new possibilities.

Deadly Worlds offers an original analysis of one of the unsolved questions of the current age: what are the emotional costs and possibilities of globalization? Lemert and Elliott challenge the dominant interpretations of the late modern world by delving below the surface of cultural and economic theories to explore theories of the new individualism.

Charles Lemert is Andrus Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and is the author of many widely read books, including Dark Thoughts: Race and the Eclipse of Society and Postmodernism Is Not What You Think/How Globalization Threatens Modernity. Anthony Elliott is professor of social and political theory at the University of the West of England, where he is director of the Centre for Critical Theory. His recent books include Concepts of the Self, Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction, and Critical Visions.