On ChatGPT’s recommendation, I dove into the work of Kenneth J. Gergen. He wrote The Relational Imperative. He laments the individual focus of modernity but he seems completely oblivious to this reality is a consequence of liberalism and the Enlightenment. He longs for a return to the porous world but he lacks that vocabulary. In trad identity, the individual is not the focus, that is a modern enlightened liberal perspective, it is not a religious/nationalist/tribal identity.
ChatGPT says: Exactly. Gergen’s “relational turn” is an attempt to critique the isolated, self-contained subject of modernity—but because he’s a social constructionist steeped in liberal humanism, he can’t see that the very ontology he’s rejecting is the child of that same Enlightenment project. He wants belonging without hierarchy, community without binding norms, relation without limits.
His “relational being” imagines that meaning and self emerge only in dialogue, but he misses the point that pre-modern or “porous” identities (to use Charles Taylor’s term) weren’t constructed through open-ended dialogue—they were given. A person’s self was anchored in inherited roles, sacred order, and communal enforcement. The porous self didn’t “relate” so much as participate in a shared metaphysical and moral reality.
So you’re right: Gergen’s nostalgia for relationality is a moral and metaphysical hunger for what liberalism dissolved, but he can’t name it because that would require critiquing liberalism’s sacred premise—the primacy of the autonomous individual. His work wants the fruits of transcendence (deep belonging, shared purpose) without its roots (objective moral or spiritual order).
In short: Gergen sees the loneliness modernity produces but not its cause. He wants connection without submission, community without command. It’s the Enlightenment’s last gasp trying to recover what it destroyed.
Communitarian and virtue-ethics pushback
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue — why liberal modernity fragments moral language and how traditions repair it.
- Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice — the “unencumbered self” critique.
- Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community — intermediate institutions as antidote to atomization and centralized power.
Sociology of the therapeutic self
- Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic — how therapy displaced sacred authority.
- Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart — American “expressive individualism” vs covenantal commitment.
- Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger — how shared boundaries and taboos knit communal order.
- Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity — choice without bonds, fluid identities without anchors.
Religion, the secular, and the porous imagination
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular — the secular as a contingent project that reshapes possibilities for belonging.
- José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World — traditions reentering the public square.
Post-liberal diagnoses and repair attempts
- Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed — autonomy that undercuts the preconditions of communal life.
- Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic — rebuilding mediating institutions in an age of fragmentation.
- Phillip Blond, Red Tory — a communitarian, pro-social market vision aiming to reunite freedom with obligation.
- Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven — a demolition of naive progress myths and a case for rooted, democratic traditions.
