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The Normal Chaos of Love, by Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. 231 pp. NPL paper. ISBN: 0-7456-1382-9.
To those who wonder why intimacy has become such a strenuous business, this book will offer many thought-provoking and innovative answers. Drawing evidence from recent statistics on the family and from popular fiction, the thesis marshaled throughout the book is that love, family, and parenthood are under the assault of "market biographies," or lives organized by and around the market. Market biographies are susceptible to crisis because they contain contradictory pulls: As traditions erode, as the market demands ever-increasing mobility, and as the peculiar state of "homelessness" that characterizes modernity increases, intimacy holds the promise to relieve us from the ever more implacable demands made on us by the double nexus of the state and the market. But the same forces that make intimacy a much needed substitute for the fading community and tradition also make intimacy an ever more elusive goal. Because the individual engineered by the welfare state and the market is called upon to "stage manage" her biography and to compulsively plan her moves, she must turn her self into the center of her life plan. The result, quite simply, is that the same forces that drive people to seek intimacy are also those that undermine it. Thus intimacy can potentially become a battlefield on which daily wars are waged over an equal sharing of domestic chores, geographical relocations, and child care. From this basic tension evolves the...