“This book critically engages with a series of provocative questions that ask: Why are contemporary societies so dependent on constructive and destructive effects of individualization? Is this phenomenon only related to the ‘second’ or ‘late’ modernity? And can the concept of individualization be productively used for developing a sociological diagnosis of our time? The innovative answers this book suggests are focused on two types of challenges accompanying the rise of the global trend of individualization. First, it is caused by controversial changes in social structures and action patterns. Second, the effects of individualization question varieties of the common good. Both challenges have a long history but reached critical intensity in the advanced contemporary societies in the context of the current globalization. That is why the knowledge on the accelerating individualization is crucially important for the sociological diagnosis of our time. This knowledge belongs to the cognitive core of strategies for steering contemporary social development”

Nikolai Genov, Challenges of Individualization, 2018

Professor Emeritus of the Free University Berlin