CHAPTER 6

Down with Authenticity

No cultural turn is so archetypically modern as the insistence that one behave in an authentic manner. The prophet and great exemplar of this view is Rousseau, whose Confessions sought approval precisely because the shocking revelations therein laid his soul bare. Of course, the book did not reveal the truth, at least obviously or in the round. One of the strangest elements in cultural life is the way in which art can prefigure later realities, and I have always found a resemblance between Rousseau and Alceste, the proponent of authenticity in Molière’s The Misanthrope. The point of the play is that this putatively authentic character is in fact the only one who is self-deceived. This is a useful introduction here, for it raises skepticism toward the cultural turn in question. A still better guide to what follows can be found in an aphorism of Ernest Gellner’s commenting on Polonius’s advice to be true to oneself: “ ‘Know Thyself’—an absurdity, presupposing a given, determinate self.”¹ These citations, the title of the chapter, and its placement in this part of the book make my own hostility to the demand for authenticity obvious. The intent is that of explaining why the demand for authenticity is so meretricious, so much opposed to civility. Doing so will not just cast light on the composite definition of civility already offered but will spell out certain key presuppositions upon which that definition rests.

The best way in which we can gain purchase on the call for authenticity is to consider the work of Erving Goffman. His work is celebrated, but it is difficult to interpret. The difficulty does not lie in the detail that he provided about daily life, most of which is highly suggestive, but in the lack of a set of generalizations on which to hang his description of the minutiae of social interaction. For example, it is fair to say that Goffman had no single theory of the self, despite titles such as The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. The diffidence toward theorizing was perhaps a tribute to the complexities of social life, but this served him badly, for relative silence on his part has not prevented others, quite naturally, from attempting to place his work. The argument of this chapter is that the main interpretation of his work on offer is negative, and that this is both misinformed and sociologically naive.

The main interpretation here is considered to be that either derived from or at least epitomized by Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology—something of a classic in its time that is now suffering from the neglect that followed the success of its attack on Talcott Parsons.² Gouldner’s argument was that Goffman’s “impression managers” are Machiavellian manipulators of an especially nasty type. This type of personality does not represent human nature as such but rather the status-conscious, anxiety-ridden world of the middle class in late capitalist society—a character type sometimes explicitly identified with the “other-directed” personality made famous by David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. Still more important are the moral and political consequences that are held to follow. Goffman’s work is judged to be politically suspect, if not downright conservative, since he treats the ground rules of “public order” on which impression management relies as if they were natural rather than the product of a social pathology. In contrast, the critics recommend that we learn to trust each other openly so as to create a “sincere” society—by which they mean, as we shall see, a society based on authenticity. Gouldner makes the point with force. He follows a long quotation, appropriately from Rousseau, with this injunction:

This passionate demand for artless “sincerity,” and this moral outrage at the constraint that custom imposes on the baring of the heart, is rooted in the assumption that man is at bottom good and he therefore need not fear self-exposure or the possibility that he would be less than he should be if he trusted his own impulses.³

A point that is close to this must also be mentioned. One critic within this school has argued that the practices described by Goffman are a danger to democracy; they are seen—within a framework derived from Ralf Dahrendorf’s account of Society and Democracy in Germany—as representing a retreat into privacy at the expense of those public virtues on which democratic order depends.⁴ One might add that in this, as in other cases, a disapproval of Goffman’s subjects merges easily into a disapproval of Goffman for studying them.

The views of these critics can usefully be termed “existentialist,” for they believe that human beings are possessors of a “real” self; all stress the potential of human beings as free and creative actors. However, they are aware that the full and proper development of the real self does not always occur. The early Sartre argued that the individual at times hides from full freedom, seeking to escape the responsibility for existence in “bad faith”—the latter condition consisting in the futile pretense of being a passive and determined object. The existentialist critics considered here owe most, however, to the later Sartre, who came to blame the particular organization of Western society instead of life as such for these vain and sorry attempts to shrug off one’s freedom. But despite this change Sartre was never really able to escape his pessimistic belief that there is no guaranteed route to “good faith” consisting in the respect of one’s own self and that of others.⁵ The existentialist critics considered here do not share his pessimism, and are in fact aglow with human potency. They imagine that sincerity and open respect for one’s own and another’s self is possible. Far richer concepts of self and sociability are held to be necessary to do justice to our condition and potential.

The best place to begin to untangle these issues is through an examination of the thought, and the political consequences of the thought, of Rousseau and his great descendant Sartre. They are relevant here since it is their conception of the real self openly embraced that underlies the ideas of the existentialist critics. Both begin their political philosophies from a radically individualist viewpoint that asserts the total freedom of human beings. Society is wholly absent from their initial deliberations; for any sociologist this tends to make what follows slightly naive and rather facile in that freedom is to be found in the fact that we feel free! However, if we suspend our disbelief, we find that such initial presuppositions lead to the development of political theories that are certainly authoritarian and clearly inimical to human freedom.

Political order becomes necessary for Rousseau and Sartre because there is “a problem of being.” For all their vaunted belief in human freedom, both find that being—or, more simply, one’s real self or individuality—is weak and desperately in need of social support. We need a sense of belonging. This is rather surprising. The burden of Being and Nothingness is to suggest that the social is a perpetual source of alienation; the gaze of the other is capable of turning a human being into an object. It was this that led Sartre to summarize his position in the famous observation that “hell is other people.” Much the same degree of hatred of social life is to be found in Rousseau. He felt, for example, that attending the theater would detract from the settled and complete individuality of human beings since it would encourage such vicarious living secondhand that it would lead to dissatisfaction with one’s own life.⁶ Nevertheless, where others with the same view of our condition suggest that we try to escape social life, Rousseau and Sartre attempt to found a political theory.⁷ Such a theory is not to have the negative task of allocating a private sphere protected by legal rights within which the individual can do as he or she chooses. Instead the theory’s positive purpose is to ensure that everyone is conscious of and lives up to his true being at all times. The truth to one’s being, to one’s real self is what Goffman’s critics have in mind when they recommend sincerity—by which they really mean, as noted, authenticity.

This attempt to square the circle of pure freedom and social order has, of course, been argued about endlessly; in my opinion, for reasons to be noted later, the attempt either fails or ends up supporting an extremely authoritarian political order. Both Rousseau and Sartre, when discussing their ideal images of society, wish to anchor their political order at a set moment. In Rousseau’s case this occurs when the social contract is established and the rights of individuals are ceded to the general will. For Sartre a similar moment occurs when the alienated “series” becomes a “group in fusion,” in which all are joined in a common purpose, that of fighting against the oppressor. The tone of Sartre’s example does not detract from the fact that the problem he wishes to solve is that of “grounding being,” that is, giving support to human individuality. How these moments occur—how the social contract can be formed without the presence of the new men it is supposed to create, and how original freedom was lost—remains, despite commentators, a mystery. But more important is the consequence.

In Rousseau’s case this is hard to establish precisely. If the general will acts on the votes of a mere majority, then it can no longer be general and legitimate; but if it does not act in this manner, then it is surely impotent; and Rousseau has not solved—at least in logic—the problem of founding a just political order. In Sartre’s case, in comparison, everything is brutally clear. When the group forms it must be cemented by a vow; any member who abandons the very strenuous liberty Sartre has in mind automatically becomes a traitor who can and should be killed. A legitimate society has been founded, but it is one that is no longer based on possessing the actual consent of its citizens at any particular moment. The politics of total freedom, with its merging of public and private, ends in securing social cohesion through terror.

All of this is miles away from the social interactions described by Goffman. In order to understand it, we need to extract and highlight two important and rather different conceptions of the self contained within his work as a whole. It may well be that the richness of his work would allow for further conceptions of the self to be discovered, but these two conceptions matter most, for they contrast most strikingly with the view put forward by his critics.

Throughout his work individuals are seen as making out as best they may within the context of social institutions that they did little to create. The self is portrayed as acted upon and as actively responding to such treatment. Thus “The Moral Career of a Mental Patient” shows the self the institution wishes to create, while “The Underlife of Public Institutions” shows the inmates “making out”—with the two essays being part of a single volume, Asylums.⁸ But the distinction I wish to draw here between social self and personal self covers slightly different ground from that concerned with the self as product and as agent. I am concerned rather with what Goffman’s sociology tells us about sincerity and the implications to be drawn from this.

We can approach an understanding of the social self through examining the one clear misreading of Goffman’s work by his existentialist critics—namely, that the individuals he portrays are sinister manipulators. This is only the smallest element of Goffman’s model of social interaction. In his first book he explicitly noted that

most of these defensive techniques of impression management have a counterpart in the tactful tendency of the audience and outsiders to act in a protective way in order to help the performers save their own show.⁹

It is tact and circumspection that allows interaction to occur at all. At moments of embarrassment capable of destroying the frame of reference that allows an interaction to occur, Goffman notes that “face-work,” whether in the form of giving an excuse or of the mutual ignoring of a faux pas, can be undertaken to remedy the situation.¹⁰ Crucially, such face-work will be undertaken both by the offender and by those offended. These points are summed up in this manner:

Much of the activity occurring during an encounter can be understood as an effort on everyone’s part to get through the occasion and all the unanticipated and unintentional events that can cast participants in an undesirable light, without disrupting the relationships of the participants. And if relationships are in the process of change, the object will be to bring the encounter to a satisfactory close without altering the expected course of development.¹¹

In other words, Goffman’s portrayal is less of a competitive set of liars and much more of a rather altruistic mutual aid society whose members help one another to get over difficult moments.

When we ask why people are so kind and tactful, we come to the core of the social self. Goffman’s work, despite being included in readers concerned with symbolic interactionism, descends from Durkheim. It is well known that the great French sociologist believed that the “cult of the individual” had in part taken over—and should take over completely—from religion as the moral principle suitable for a differentiated society. Durkheim’s own work was designed to extend a version of this respect so that the individual would be fully integrated within modern society.¹² Goffman’s work in a sense begins where Durkheim’s ends. He accepts that individualism is the central morality of our time, but goes beyond Durkheim in seeing how the sacred quality of the individual is created and maintained in everyday life. The practices that are involved in the ceremonial affirmation of the individual’s sacredness—above all, those concerning deference and demeanor—do not concern us here. But two general points are in order. First, Goffman insists that these practices are social and have little to do with questions of personal individuality: “It may well be true that the individual has a unique self all his own,” he notes disarmingly, but “evidence of [such a unique self] is thoroughly a product of joint ceremonial labour.”¹³ Second, Goffman suggests that it is in small-scale interactions within society that the larger moral order is affirmed. Rousseau wished us to affirm the values of the society in public and on a large scale; it is for this reason that he pays so much attention to the exercise of the general will. However, as Rousseau himself admitted, a large and complex society is unlikely to be able to have frequent communal re-endorsements. Hence, the rituals of daily life, in which the central moral value of the larger society—namely, individualism—is affirmed, become extremely important for the ordering and symbolic integration of the society.

With this conception of the social self in mind, we can return to the question of sincerity. Goffman notes that

those who are felt to be insincere or affected give the impression they are only concerned with what they can achieve in what is to follow and are willing to put on an act in order to achieve it. When the individual senses that others are insincere or affected he tends to feel they have taken unfair advantage of their communication position to promote their own interest; he feels they have broken the ground rules of interaction.¹⁴

This conception of insincerity is close to that which the existentialist critics have in mind when they criticize Goffman himself; it is amusing that his analysis of interaction shows that socially insincerity is also condemned. However, in one sense the critics are correct in detecting a difference between their position and the sincerity that can be derived from Goffman’s observations. The existentialists are in favor of sincerity (hereafter always called authenticity in contrast to the social practice of sincerity—or, more accurately, civility—that we can derive from Goffman) in the sense of being true to oneself at all costs; their argument is essentially an antisocial one that would be summed up as “put yourself above social practices.” Goffman’s conception of the respect due to the social self leads to rather different recommendations. Goffman notes, for example, that one tends to greet and leave friends with a ritual designed to show that one takes relationships seriously.¹⁵ In the short term such rituals are exaggerated, having little to do with the way in which the actors involved may be feeling. In the long term such tact seems less hypocritical since it can be seen as being true to the higher value of offering moral respect for individualism.

At this point we can say that the issue between Goffman and his critics is clear, and we will argue later, as noted, that there is a great deal more to recommend the sincerity or civility of Goffman’s model than the authenticity of the existentialist. However, before examining the second conception of the self, an irony may be noted. The practices that Goffman describes arose from a respect for individualism. Yet it is those practices that are now held—and have been so held by writers as diverse as Tocqueville and Chesterton (a historical point arguing against the view that impression-management is a product of late capitalism society)—to threaten one’s true self. Hence, we reach the ridiculous position that the existentialist critics wish to design new ways of encouraging individualism in the face of evidence, which they accept, that previous practices militate against such individualism. For the sake of clarity, it is well to anticipate a different way of reacting to this evidence, such as it is. It will be argued that the fear of excessive sincerity or civility as a political danger is vastly exaggerated, and that it is consequently better not to seek to make politics a sphere of authenticity at all. Rather, we might leave the uniqueness that we are all apparently so happily endowed with to look after itself. This skeptical conclusion may well become clearer by examining the second conception of the self that concerns us here. Goffman offers us mere hints of this conception of the self; to understand its implications we must build upon his work.

One frequently gets the impression that some of the practices that Goffman describes are designed not just to give ritual backing to the sacred quality of the self but simply as a means by which the individual can get through the daily round with the minimum of interference with his personal self. This is especially true of relations in the large American city; here individuals seek to appear nonthreatening to each other so that the vulnerabilities they are exposed to by urban life do not become all engrossing.¹⁶ A negative example of the same point is present in Asylums. Total institutions are able to destroy the two facts that give the individual a meaningful sense of freedom: the ability to control personal information and the right to choose to separate the audiences before whom separate roles are performed.¹⁷ In both cases Goffman points to some sort of volition lying behind different “fronts,” and it is that which is here termed “the personal self.”

Goffman is unwilling to characterize this personal self for two particular reasons. First, his vision of society is, in Weberian terms, extremely disenchanted. The smallest minutiae of social life are subject to patterning according to Goffman. He is thus one of the few sociologists to study small-scale interaction who is not seeking to celebrate a sense of human creativity as a result. It is important to make this point, given that theorists opposed to all notions of “social determinism” cite his work to support their position. At the conclusion of an essay on “Role Distance” Goffman explicitly notes that this phenomenon is “almost as subject to role analysis as are the core tasks of sociology themselves”—a statement made particularly striking by the fact that it is this essay that is often cited by those who see an escape from social determinism in his work.¹⁸ Second, however, Goffman’s work points to the extreme difficulty of knowing very much about questions of self, both of others’ and one’s own—since it is always hard to tell whether they are reacting to your presentations honestly. The latter is important in that inaccurate feedback may well lead to illusions about oneself.¹⁹

When these two points are taken in conjunction with the idea that we have different fronts for different audiences, one begins to note an uncanny resemblance between Goffman’s world and that of Marcel Proust. The introduction of the novelist is designed to make it possible to turn these slightly disconnected observations of Goffman into a fully fledged theory of the personal self. Marcel, the hero of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, finds his identity and that of others extremely hard to establish. On the one hand, he romanticizes love and “Society,” but finds that knowledge brings disillusion; on the other hand, he finds it almost impossible to tell when people are lying to him. The novel is a success story in that Marcel does, in old age and after a great deal of personal suffering, establish his own identity. Whereas before he has suffered from “the intermittences of the heart”—has been, in other words, a succession of roles and experiences without a firm, integrating core—he becomes able to join all his experience within a common framework.

The conception of the personal self as something achieved is in diametric opposition to the ontological self, so evident in the work of Sartre. Whereas the latter glibly insists that we have a real self available at every moment of our lives, thereby making our attempts at living in bad faith necessarily doomed, Proust suggests that we must search hard for a self that we can truly call our own. For clarity’s sake, it may be said that Proust believes that we can achieve an identity of our own after struggling to understand our past and the forces around us; he demonstrates the extreme difficulty of such a search, and guarantees no successful outcome. Surely, the belief that we have to try hard to understand ourselves corresponds more accurately to our condition than Sartre’s facile insistence that we possess a real self at all times.

I can now make the central argument that follows on the basis of the analyses made up to this point. What is important is the relationship between the sincerity or civility of the social self and the identity that the personal self may be able to achieve. Bluntly, the practices of the social self will be seen as necessary to allow the identity of the personal self to be created. In other words, I wish to defend the paradox that lies at the heart of Proust’s novel—that because the self is usually intermittent, moral ground rules are more necessary.²⁰ A series of points suggest that we favor civility above the authenticity endorsed by those who have criticized Goffman.

The first point is trivial, and certainly one not likely to convince an existentialist. It is an argument in favor of laziness. Sartre is a puritanical thinker who insists that we can never escape from consciousness, and should not try to do so. Proust’s attitude is different, and this despite one remarkable coincidence in viewpoint.²¹ He argues that habit—“bad faith” in Sartrean terms—is a human comfort; though he believes that artists should escape from habit, he does not suggest that they do so all the time. Further, Proust constantly notes that knowledge of oneself and of one’s art comes when one is not prepared for it. Such knowledge cannot be ordered at will. Proust was an extreme rationalist, but he also realized the importance of, and wished to allow for, less serious parts of the human mind—above all, play—to come into effect.

A second consideration is perhaps as unlikely to convince a dedicated existentialist critic. In the face of crime in the American city, Goffman is held—notably in “Normal Appearances” in Relations in Public—to have become more pessimistic and conservative. In these circumstances, one critic holds Goffman to have favored ever more insistently the maintenance of ground rules of public order, a move that is held to have placed him “on the side of the system.”²²

Much is wrong with this critique. First, Goffman is effectively found guilty by association. The fact that he is in favor of a set of rules is used to suggest that he endorses the rules currently operating in American society. This ignores Goffman’s own assertion that “mutual dealings … could probably be sustained with fewer rules or different ones.”²³ Second, it is worth remembering his analysis of “total institutions” in his classic Asylums. This is best read as an appeal for “the people” against a practice of late capitalist industrial society; and surely it is a novel and powerful appeal since it does not support the fashionable case that we do not need ground rules but argues instead for the less fashionable one that insists that it is inhumane to deprive anyone of the benefits—rights to privacy and information control—of such rules. Third, one discerns an extraordinarily antisociological assumption at work in this particular criticism. Social rules are well-nigh automatically equated with repression of the individual. Goffman, on the contrary, suggests that “persons can come together and voluntarily agree to abide by certain ground rules … the better to free attention from unimportant matters and get on with the business at hand.”²⁴ This argument is Durkheimian in its implication that society is enabling, that without it we would be, for instance, incapable of communication given that language itself is social—a point made with enormous power by François Truffaut in his film L’Enfant sauvage.²⁵ Moreover, the belief that the absence of ground rules would encourage us to approach each other with warmth and spontaneity is illusory. Goffman is surely right to show starkly the distrust and lack of warmth such a situation would breed. He thus escapes the simplistic “pro-rules equals anti-people” charge. He is indeed in favor of some rules, since without them the “truly human sociability and ‘co-mingling’ ” the critic in question desires would be impossible to attain.²⁶

The third consideration matters more, not least because Goffman makes it himself. He defended himself from the charge of being politically suspect on the grounds that “he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interest has much to do, because the sleep is very deep.”²⁷ One example of such sleep may be drawn from Stigma, given special interest by the fact that existentialism is here considered directly.

The thesis of the book is straightforward. Goffman pictures the stigmatized person occupying an invidious position, full of personal strain. Stigmatized people consider themselves to be normal yet know that the “normal” are uneasy in their presence. One form of advice given to the stigmatized derives from existentialism in general, and more particularly from Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew. The advice consists of Sartre’s habitual insistence that one should be authentic. The benefits of Goffman’s humanity and of his skeptical way of dealing with cant are clearly seen in his analysis of this piece of advice. He suggests that the one thing, say, a disabled person does not wish to be told is to be authentic since this means in practical terms recognizing himself as less than normal. He notes rather acidly that

the shrewdest position for him to take is … one which has a false bottom; for in many cases the degree to which normals accept the stigmatised individual can be maximized by his acting with full spontaneity and naturalness as if the conditional acceptance of him, which he is careful not to overreach, is full acceptance.²⁸

A fourth consideration concerns directly political matters. One claim of the critics, as noted, was that the world he describes is unhealthy because it exalts private above public virtues, which are held to be dangerous given Dahrendorf’s account of the social roots of Nazism. But this is a misuse of Dahrendorf. For the German sociologist distinguishes between public virtues as “a model of general intercourse between men” and private virtues “which provide the individual with standards for his own perfection, which is conceived as being devoid of society.”²⁹ He suggests that the motto of the former might be “keep smiling” and of the latter “be truthful.” What this amounts to is quite clear: Dahrendorf is in favor of politics based on civility rather than a concern for authenticity.

There are a number of reasons why authenticity should be kept out of politics, why politics should not be personalized. It has already been suggested that theories with the best intentions end up with authoritarian conclusions when trying to create political order based on respect for authenticity. The practical precedents are, of course, much worse: the most famous example of a politician basing his legitimacy on a claim of personal authenticity is that of Adolf Hitler.³⁰ And while it would be ridiculous to accuse Sartre of somehow supporting a single authentic individual, it is nevertheless worrying that the colonizers he condemns are treated as totally inauthentic and consequently less than human.³¹ Finally, we may remember that Riesman has argued that “this focus on sincerity, both in popular culture and in politics, leads the audience tolerantly to overlook the incompetence of the performers.”³²

Dahrendorf sees no link at all between other-directed and totalitarian politics:

Men who are trying to get on with one another are probably spared the extreme evilness that makes it possible simply to rule some people out of the world of men in order to expedite them out of it afterwards.³³

This is not to say that he considers other-direction something to be ignored. He agrees with Riesman, however, that the answer to this lies in reinforcing respect for privacy as a separate realm.³⁴ And again, it is important to note that there is no logical connection between realizing that a set of ground rules for public life are necessary and endorsing conservative politics.

Let us turn finally to the paradox of Proust’s work already noted, that of his call for moral order in the face of an awareness of the variability of human experience. A negative consideration comes to mind immediately. Proust’s novel is famous for its opening scene in which the young Marcel is able to get his way, so as to have his mother come and read in his room. The narrator of the novel returns to this scene time and time again, and ends up concluding that the father, who had opposed the exercise of the son’s will, was irresponsible in the arbitrary way in which he gave in; his behavior is then contrasted with that of the mother and grandmother, even though their consistency at times causes them pain.³⁵ But their position is upheld and the father criticized. The novel suggests that absence of standards in his early life has made it all the harder for Marcel to develop the willpower that he needs to become an artist, someone able to arrest the confusion of life. The point at issue has been neatly summed up: “Not to know who you are is as bad as not knowing what you are.”³⁶ In other words, a child needs something to react to if he or she is ever to be anything. Still more important is the need to note the functional nature of fronts and masks. On one occasion Goffman noted that “a disguise may function not so much as a way of concealing something as a way of revealing as much of it as can be tolerated in an encounter.”³⁷ Masks are often, as Oscar Wilde had insisted, enabling in other ways. If one is unsure of a situation, then playing a role may be reassuring.³⁸ More important, it is through and behind masks that people have the freedom to find their identity. As Proust made clear, this freedom is all too often not pleasant. It is not a question of choosing roles, as some existentialist critics would have us believe, but of learning how to control and understand the roles we have been, and continue to be, forced to play.

With this in mind it becomes possible to explain why the politics of authenticity are bound to become authoritarian. The personal self has at its core the insistence that people do not have a real self, always available at the slightest touch of introspection. On the contrary, they can establish something like this, an identity able to integrate the intermittences of life, through time and effort, and with luck. Hence, any political theory that seeks to anchor human personality at one particular point and prevents people, for example, from making mistakes, and hopefully learning from them, is bound to end up coercing people into one particular mold.

This chapter has suggested that the social practices described by Goffman are those of civility; they deserve support in the face of critics who suggest that people should refuse to tarnish their real selves with such tawdry and inauthentic behavior. Given that “uniqueness” is supposedly desirable, the demand for greater authenticity in personal affairs seems forceful. The argument has been that this is not so. Once we realize that the practices described by Goffman are not sinister, then the demand to abolish them loses its emotional force, and can be evaluated calmly. Unrestricted openness and authenticity would lead to confusion, distrust, and, perhaps, the creation of ground rules of even more questionable character. Most important, the fronts and masks that are at the center of the social practices that Goffman describes are to be welcomed in allowing people to establish identities of their own, at their own pace. In contrast, the belief that we have a real self always available has been regarded as facile, and the consequent demand for authenticity as potentially dangerous. A final reason may be given for rating Goffman’s work so highly. He is a skeptic. This is surely a merit in face of the great number of pseudofaiths on offer. One such pseudofaith that his work encourages us to distrust is the demand for authenticity.

¹ The aphorism was not published, but it is cited in J. A. Hall, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 2010), 76.

² A. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Cf. R. Sennett, “Two on the Aisle,” New York Review of Books, November 1, 1971; J. O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (London: Heinemann, 1972); C. Bryant, “Privacy, Privatisation and Self-Determination,” in Privacy, ed. J. Young (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1978); I. Craib, Existentialism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); A. Dawe, “The Underworld View of Erving Goffman,” British Journal of Sociology 24 (1973).

³ Gouldner, The Coming Crisis, 386–87.

⁴ C.G.A. Bryant, “Privacy, Privatisation and Self-Determination,” in Privacy, ed. J. Young.

⁵ R. Aron, History and the Dialectics of Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

⁶ Rousseau made this argument in response to D’Alembert’s claim that Geneva needed a theater (J. J. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert and Other Writings on the Theater [(1758) Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004]). The significance of this text was recognized by Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

⁷ This statement is slightly inaccurate. Rousseau was well aware of the attractions of disentanglement, and is best interpreted as torn between the desire for connectedness and the longing to be solitary.

⁸ E. Goffman, Asylums (London: Penguin, 1968).

⁹ E. Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 229.

¹⁰ E. Goffman, “On Face-Work,” in his Interaction Ritual (London: Allen Lane, 1967).

¹¹ Ibid., 41.

¹² Durkheim’s views are made especially clear in his 1898 essay “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” Political Studies 17 (1969). Goffman himself draws attention to the link to Durkheim in his “On the Nature of Deference and Demeanour,” in Interaction Ritual.

¹³ Goffman, “On the Nature of Deference and Demeanour,” 85.

¹⁴ Ibid., 90.

¹⁵ Such practices are termed “access rituals” in his Relations in Public (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 107–10.

¹⁶ Ibid., 322.

¹⁷ Goffman, “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” in Asylums.

¹⁸ E. Goffman, “Role Distance,” in his Encounters (London: Allen Lane, 1972). The sociologist seeking to escape social determinism is Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology (New York: Anchor, 1963), 135–36.

¹⁹ This aspect of Goffman’s work is seen in his book dealing with spies and strategies, Strategic Interaction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972).

²⁰ This paradox was clearly recognized by M. Hindus, The Proustian Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), especially in the chapter “Ethics.”

²¹ I have in mind their pessimistic views on the self-defeating quality of love.

²² Dawe, “The Underworld View,” 251.

²³ Goffman, Relations in Public, 15.

²⁴ Ibid., 16; emphasis in original.

²⁵ Truffaut came from a poor background, and the praise of society has real teeth in consequence, as it can be read as a critique of the wilder fantasies of May 1968.

²⁶ Dawe, “The Underworld View,” 253.

²⁷ E. Goffman, Frame Analysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 14.

²⁸ E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 122–23.

²⁹ R. Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), 286.

³⁰ See the brilliant opening chapters of J. P. Stern, Hitler, the Führer and the People (London: Fontana, 1975). Equally striking was Günter Grass’s assault on Heideggerian language by having a character use it when speaking of concentration camps in Dog Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965).

³¹ Aron, History and the Dialectics of Violence, 105.

³² Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, 194.

³³ Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany, 295.

³⁴ Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, part 3, “Autonomy.”

³⁵ R. Shattuck, Proust (London: Fontana, 1974), 17.

³⁶ D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London: London School of Economics, 1974), 16.

³⁷ Goffman, “Role Distance,” 69.

³⁸ Martin, Two Critiques, 25.