Abstract

The question: “Can Complex Societies Form a Rational Identity?” already indicates how I wish to use the term ‘identity.’ A society does not just have an identity ascribed to it in the trivial sense an object does, which can be identified by various observers as being the same ‘thing,’ although they may apprehend and describe it in different ways. In a certain sense a society achieves or, let me say, produces its identity; and it is by virtue of its own efforts that it does not lose it. To speak, moreover, of the ‘rational’ identity of society reveals that the concept has a normative content.