Self and Social Fashioning

The author uses his life to explore the problems of choice and constraint and successful and unsuccessful ways of responding to them. From child Holocaust survivor, to civil rights and anti-war activist, to the academic study of international relations and ethnic conflicts, to serving as a professor of strategy at the National War College and the first scholar-in-residence in the CIA, the author discusses a struggled to free himself from constraining socially imposed identifications, and to develop self-identifications and get others to recognize them. It tells the story a person at home in multiple worlds but not comfortable or fully committed to any of them, family aside.

This autoethnographic study uses the author’s unusually adventurous but also reflective life to illustrate the tensions and rewards of assimilation and detachment. The book offers a broader message about the difficulty and advantages of escaping from narrow, national, social, and cultural identifications, whilst profiting from what they have to offer.

This is Richard Ned Lebow’s third book with Ethics International Press.