Konflikt- und Rückzugspotentiale in spätkapitalistischen Gesellschaften / Potentials of Conflict and Withdrawal in Late Capitalist Societies

Abstract

Abstract Late capitalist societies increasingly prove incapable of generating the modal personality that would correspond to the imperatives under which the political and economic subsystems operate. This is due to a process of the sharpening of the crisis of adolescence in which system-dysfunctional solutions are gaining ground. In terms of the interactionist approach the problem specific to the adolescent phase, i. e. the problem of identity formation, becomes one of coming to grips with the cultural system; this in turn, prompted by a series of socio-cultural changes, lays bare the immanent structural difficulties of the bourgeois legitimation system. Differentiated ways of solving this crisis correspond to various processes of a selective thematization of the contents of the cultural system and thereby to differential behavior patterns (e. g. student revolt, hippies, drug-addicts, Jesus-People, withdrawal).