Identity in Question by Elliott Anthony;du Gay Paul; & Paul du Gay

Author:Elliott, Anthony;du Gay, Paul; & Paul du Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 537755
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Limited
Published: 2009-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Despite some significant differences in method and emphasis, studies framed by this historiographic and anthropological approach treat their respective philosophical objects as reflexive ethical instruments – that is, as means by which ‘individuals are inducted into new existential relations to themselves’ (Hunter, 2001: 23). As such, they approach the ‘self’ not as a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but in terms of ‘one historically cultivated to meet the purposes of a particular way of life’ (Hunter, 2001: 23–4).

We have already seen that certain seventeenth and eighteenth century conceptions of ‘self-interest’ were promulgated with specific purposes in mind – to act as an ethical and cultural counterweight to religious ideals of conscience and aristocratic ideals of glory. Hume (1998: 38–43), for instance, viewed Christianity as an almost intolerable moral provocation. He certainly conceived of commercially directed, self-interested conduct as a relatively peaceful alternative to sectarian zealotry. He also viewed enthusiasm as socially undesirable, and just as alien to a calculating mindset as the nobility’s addiction to glorious adventurism. As Holmes (1995) has put it, the principal aim of those who wrote favourably of self-interest at this time was

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