The World We have Made? Individualisation and Personal Life in the 1950s
The World We have Made? Individualisation and Personal Life in the 1950s
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我们创造的世界？
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发表时间：
2011
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通讯作者：
S. Duncan
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作者：
S. Duncan
本文重点讨论个体化理论的一个基本问题——当代个人生活是全新的并且与过去不同的假设。这对于个体化理论来说是一个特别重要的问题，因为它们本质上依赖于划时代的、甚至革命性的历史变化的理念。我根据经验考察了 20 世纪 40 年代末和 1950 年代初英国的个人生活经历（那里有许多优秀的资料来源），并将其与今天进行比较。首先看看男女同性恋者以及异性配偶的个人生活，我发现这一时期在平等、开放和多样性方面取得了实质性但并非明确的“改善”。但这种改善并不一定意味着人们如何看待自己的个人生活以及他们应该如何进行生活的转变。因此，本文继续通过婚外性行为和离婚的观念来审视“传统”和“个性化”。考虑到当时的争论和问题，我发现这两个时期的人们对于如何进行个人生活的思考方式以及他们的思想范围似乎与今天相似，而不是这两个时期的“传统”和“个性化”人们之间存在某种二元性。在这两个时期，已婚者、年长者和更虔诚的人更“传统”，而年轻人和更专业的人则更“进步”。但这两个样本中的大部分都是“实用主义者”，他们对适应自己的环境和即兴发挥的合理适当和可能的做法持有实际的看法。
This paper focuses on a fundamental problem with individualisation theories – the assumption that contemporary personal lives are radically new and different from those in the past. This is a particularly important issue for individualisation theories because they essentially depend on the idea of epochal, even revolutionary, historical change. Empirically, I examine the experience of personal life in Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s (where a number of excellent sources exist) and compare it with today. Looking first at the personal life of gay and lesbian people, and of heterosexual spouses, I find substantial, but not unambiguous, ‘improvement’ – in terms of equality, openness and diversity – over the period. But this improvement does not necessarily mean transformation in how people think about their personal lives and how they ought to conduct them. The paper goes on, therefore, to examine ‘tradition’ and ‘individualisation’ through the lens of ideas around extra-marital sex and divorce. Rather than some duality between ‘traditional’ and ‘individualising’ people in the two periods, I find that how people thought, and the range of their thoughts, about how to conduct personal life seem similar in 1949/50 to the present day – given the debates and issues of the time. In both periods the married, older and more religious were the more ‘traditional’, and the young and the more professional were more ‘progressive’. But the bulk of both samples were ‘pragmatists’, holding practical views of what was reasonably proper and possible in adapting to, and improvising around, their circumstances.