The Lost Order...? Around Modern and Post-Modern Constructing of the Identity

The paper attempts to answer the question, whether the processes of constructing identity in modern and post-modern times are similar or rather different. Modern society, in contrary to traditional (primitive, simple, pre-industrial) society, ruptures with collective and universal values that influenced human life and his identity. Since that moment, a man is no more strongly involved in social ties; modernity and post-modernity give him unquestionable autonomy in which individualism is the key-value. Therefore, accordingly to the new reality and new social (philosophical) conditions, the human identity is constructed. What are the rules of this process? Are the modernism and post-modernism two separate epochs and two separate realities that construct different cultural frames in which the process of building the identity and the identity itself take specific (opposite) directions? Or rather, as some sociologists prove (e.g. Anthony Giddens), post-modernism brings indeed the new quality of life but should be understood just as the continuation – strengthened form of the previous – modern stage of society? The attempt to answer the question, by presenting main scientific assumptions about subject matter, has been undertaken in this paper.