Don't Take It Personally

Abstract

Abstract This book examines the fundamental distinction between two contrasting visions of personhood—one featuring specific individuals characterized by their singularity and the other envisioning unspecified, effectively generic ones. Whereas the former characterizes one’s “personal” relationships with one’s friends, for instance, the latter underlies the more “impersonal” relationships between doctors and patients or store staff and customers. The distinction between those two visions of personhood is most compellingly captured by contrasting a company’s decision to lay off ten percent of its employees and only later determine specifically who they would be with an a priori decision to fire those specific individuals, as well as by the U.S. Department of Justice’s insistence that “No one is above the law.” In sharp contrast to “personalness,” “impersonality” implies viewing people as presumably typical incumbents of particular social roles (instructor, police officer, cashier) or as effectively interchangeable members of particular social categories or groups (“Filipinos,” “conservatives,” “Muslims,” “millennials”), and “impersonalization” thus entails focusing on individuals’ social identity (“what” they are) while downplaying their personal identity (specifically “who” they are), thereby disregarding their singularity. Identifying the fundamental constitutive elements of impersonality as well as the basic ingredients of the process of impersonalization, the book also examines the specific impact of urbanization, capitalist marketization, and automation on this process and concludes by weighing the benefits against the costs of impersonalizing so much of modern social life.