Correspondence may be addressed to: Edward E. Sampson, 790 Bolinas Road, Fairfax, CA 94930.

A commonplace assumption maintained by those scientists who study the world of plants and animals suggests that our knowledge would not advance very far were our theories of a particular species to ignore the ecological niche the life form inhabited. We know, for example, that such environmental conditions as the composition of the soil and amount of rainfall have a significant effect on the characteristics of a plant's root system and its leaf structure (from Wicker, 1979). In the world of persons, it is likewise reasonable to suggest that our knowledge would be inadequate were our theories of the person insensitive to the social world into which persons are born and within which they carry out their lives.

Fortunately, this perspective is generally well known to many psychologists (e. g. , Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Erikson, 1950; Gergen & Davis, 1985; Harré, 1984; Luria, 1976; Tajfel, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978) and has also formed a central feature in the emergence of several important interpersonally and culturally oriented theories of psychopathology (e. g. , see Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, for a useful review). Although this sensitivity to the social world is admirable, I believe that we have not gone far enough in connecting our theories of the person with social change, in particular, with major historic transformations in the social world (but see Luria, 1976, for a partial exception). What effect on our theory of the person would occur, for example, if the current social world were to undergo a major transformation of the same order as the historic change from the premodern to the modern era? Surely this magnitude of change would have a dramatic impact on our understanding of the person.

It is my contention that we are currently undergoing just such a major transformation (e. g. , see Block, 1987; Bowles & Gintis, 1987; Mumford, 1956; Poster, 1984; Reich, 1987). The modern, industrialized world of the last several centuries is gradually but perceptably yielding to a postmodern, postindustrial (i. e. , information rich and service oriented), globally linked world system. For the most part, psychology's current theories of the person were developed during the era of modernism and were apt descriptions of that era's framework of understanding. These theories were well suited to a world dominated by industrialization, technology, secularism, individualism, and democracy (e. g. , Nisbet, 1969): a world in which the self-contained individual (Sampson, 1977, 1985) emerged from embeddedness in various collectivities to become the free-standing, central unit of the new social order.

The transformation from the modern era's industrialized and individualized settings into the postmodern era's postindustrial, information-based, and globally linked social environments will call for a dramatic transformation in psychology's theories of the person. Over 30 years ago, Mumford (1956) noted that we are on the verge of "another great historic transformation" (p. 138). He suggested that the major task humanity confronts is to create a new self, better suited than the current form, to dl with the issues that this historic change will introduce, in particular, issues that derive from the emergence of a globally linked world system. This transformation, I believe, sets the challenging task and future agenda for psychology.

One of the clearest changes that characterizes the transition from traditional to modern Western society involves the change of the functional unit of the social order from the community and household to the individual (e. g. , Aries & Duby, 1988). Where once households dotted the landscape and were the unit of central relevance for understanding human life, the breakdown of the traditional social order and the emergence of the individual modified this picture.

Premodern Western society understood persons as defined by their particular social contexts. Persons were fundamentally citizens of the polis, members of their religious communities, spouses, soldiers and so forth, not merely individuals as such. Unlike our current understanding, which distinguishes between real persons and the roles they must play, in premodern society, roles were the elements that constituted the person as such. Roles were not appended to the "real" person who somehow continued to dwell authentically somewhere behind them. There was no stepping outside one's community and one's roles within it in order to act differently; one always acted within the community and in its behalf. To be outside was in effect to be nonexistent, a stranger, or dead.

In MacIntyre's (1984, 1988) view, shared with several other commentators whose writings form the basis of my own analysis (e. g. , Cahoone, 1988; Sandel, 1982), life itself had a clearly defined purpose or telos that provided the context of meaning and relevance for all human existence. Every person's life was carried out in the service of this larger purpose. Intrinsic value resided in the community, its objects, events, and practices.

The modern era began approximately around the 15th and 16th centuries. For a variety of complex sociopolitical and economic reasons well beyond the scope of this present article, individuals qua individuals increasingly came to populate the social world. Anyone wishing to understand human life now had to contend with fathoming the dynamics of the individual. This is not to suggest that conceptions of the individual were absent in the premodern era, but rather to note that a differently formulated theory of the person was required once individuals replaced the community and household as the functional unit and organizing principle of society.

A liberal individualist framework emerged at this time, both to oppose the premodern understanding and to establish the familiar terms of modern life. Individuals were to be set free from all the ties and attachments that formerly defined them. Individuals, understood as self-determining, autonomous sovereigns, authors in charge of their own life's work, became the central actors on the social stage. Sandel (1982) referred to these newly minted individuals as disembodied, unencumbered subjects; MacIntyre (1988) described them as characters possessing "their identity and their essential human capacities apart from and prior to their membership in any particular social and political order" (p. 210). I have referred to these newly emerged subjects of modern life as self-contained individuals (Sampson, 1977, 1985, 1988).

Modernism's liberating vision called for a rather complete detachment of individuals from the ties that formerly bound them into the telos of their community and that defined who or what they were or could be in terms of that telos. This detachment set people free to determine their own self-definitions. The particular forms that communities would take were henceforth to be understood as derivative of the desires and preferences of the individuals who comprised them.

Thus, both the meaning of individual and of community dramatically changed. Individuals were constituted as entities apart from any particular community; they had priority over it and so could freely choose the forms of association to which they would subject themselves. In turn, the community became an instrumentality for individuals, a necessity required so that individuals could pursue their personally chosen purposes in life, or at times, a sentimentality, involving ties of affection freely given by one person to others (see Sandel, 1982, pp. 147-154). The premodern sense of a community that creates individuals was lost; communal associations were established by persons who fundamentally existed independently of those associations and who could as freely withdraw their consent to belong as they freely gave it in the first place (e. g. , see Bowles & Gintis's, 1987 discussion of "exit" rather than "voice" to describe this form of individual power under the conditions of modern life).

The hallmark of modernism's theory of the person was the priority it established for the individual. Whatever formerly held intrinsic meaning and provided the framework within which individual's actions were undertaken (e. g. , the community) lost that meaning to the meaning-endowing capacities of the individual subject. Prioritizing the individual assured that the stranglehold of tradition over the person would be undone. Persons were free to establish their own framework of belief and value, to choose the goals and purposes that they desired.

Under this theory of the person, a "well-ordered society is...one in which people are free to pursue their various aims" (Sandel, 1982, p. 116), and the task of government is to assure the conditions needed to allow individuals to choose their own aims and purposes in life, not to set these aims for the individual (also see MacIntyre, 1984). It was assumed that society was made up of a plurality of individuals possessing different interests and that the function of the government was to see that fairness reigned in working out the melding of this plurality of divergent interests and talents into some workable plan.

As Weber (see Gerth & Mills, 1946) noted, administration and management became central features of the modern period, and efficiency of operation emerged as the one shared standard for judging the worth of any enterprise. The state was to remain indifferent and neutral, neither taking sides nor espousing any one purpose over any other beyond ensuring that no single purpose would dominate. The individual was simply "to propose and to live by whatever conception of the good life he or she pleases" (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 336).

In effect, by giving priority to the individual, the liberal individualist's theory of the person required viewing individuals as being, at least in part, antecedent to the society in which they lived. Only in this way did it make sense to speak of persons as subjects capable of choosing the ends or purposes they would pursue. When ends and purposes are given the priority they held in the premodern tradition, then persons are more subjected than they are subjects. For persons to be freely capable of choosing, they must be understood to be external to and separate from society: "The subject, however heavily conditioned by his surroundings, is always, irreducibly, prior to his values and ends, and never fully constituted by them" (Sandel, 1982, p. 22).

This modern, liberal individualist theory of the person does not deny the importance of values and purposes for human life. Rather, given the priority it establishes for the individual, it emphasizes the point "that the values and relations we have are the products of choice, the possessions of a self given prior to its ends" (Sandel, 1982, p. 176). In other words, a voluntarist notion of personhood is at the center of the liberal individualist tradition. Needless to say, given this kind of theory of the person, anyone who wishes to understand human life must necessarily focus intently on the dynamics of the individuals whose activities create the features of human life that we encounter.

I have just described the larger social world within which modern psychology was born and in which its ongoing growth was assured. With the emergence of the individual as the functional unit of the social order, a discipline such as psychology made sense as the appropriate vehicle for understanding human life by studying the dynamics of this self-contained individual.

Although psychology has taken many different forms and has developed a variety of seemingly opposing perspectives on the nature of persons, the overriding concern with understanding the individual marks the commonality across this diversity. That concern with the individual, in turn, was required by the emergence of the individual as the central unit and organizing principle of the modern era of Western social life. Studying individuals during the time in which the household was the functional unit of the social order would have made little or no sense. Once the individual emerged as central, however, seeking to understand the individual became a highly cherished cultural project (see Foucault, 1979, 1980, on a similar theme).

None of what I have said is intended to criticize either psychology or the tradition of liberal individualism within which it was born and nurtured. My point is to remind us of the profound connections among the shape of a social order, the kinds of functional units it constitutes as central, and in this case, the emergence both of the individual unit and of psychology as the discipline designed to study that unit.

The point of this brief review of the historic transformation of the premodern into the modern era is to lay the foundation for what I contend is the next major societal transformation, from modernism to postmodernism. If this latter transformation introduces a functional unit for the social order other than the individual, then what sense will there be to continue to study the dynamics of the individual as currently conceived? In effect, studying the individual makes sense under the historical conditions of modernism, in which the individual became the central unit and organizing principle of society. Once modernism moves into the wings and a new organizing principle emerges as central to the social order, then another object of study, founded on a different theory of the person and a different conception of the discipline of psychology, will be required.

In my view, we are already witnessing a significant transformation in the central organizing principle of society away from the individual and toward some more globally conceptualized entity. Although space limitations do not permit my doing more than mentioning them and providing references for additional reading, we can already see signs of this change in a wide variety of cultural endeavors that have challenged the primacy of the individual as currently understood, that is, as the familiar self-contained form (Sampson, 1977, 1985, 1988). Examples are deconstructionism (e. g. , Derrida, 1974, 1978, 1981), feminism (e. g. , Gilligan, 1982, Lykes, 1985; Miller, 1976), cross-cultural work on concepts of the person (e. g. , Geertz, 1979; Heelas & Lock, 1981; Miller, 1984; Shweder & Bourne, 1982), and the challenge to liberal individualism (e. g. , Cahoone, 1988; MacIntyre, 1984, 1988; Sandel, 1982; also see Shweder's 1982 review of the "liberalism as destiny" theme reflected in Kohlberg's 1981 work on moral reasoning).

It is my contention that the age of individualism has already moved off center sge for Western, industrialized societies and is rapidly being replaced by a more globalized functional unit (see Block, 1987; Bowles & Gintis, 1987; Poster, 1984). Quite simply, understanding the individual qua individual is no longer relevant to understanding human life. Even today, that understanding demands theories and methods oriented toward a more global type of entity. In the years ahead, the dominance of this global functional unit will be even greater, demanding that we revise our work accordingly.

One arena in which this transformation is clearly apparent involves the functioning of the economic system (e. g. , Bowles & Gintis, 1987; Reich, 1987). Even a casual observer of the economic system in the United States, for example, will be impressed with how much its operation can no longer be understood simply by examining the internal or local market system. Economic analysis must become increasingly sensitive to the linked world market system as a key unit of analysis in its own right. Those whose futures were tied up in the U. S. stock market, for example, saw how precarious those futures were when in October 1987 the U. S. market plunged; most became painfully aware of the way in which their personal economic benefits were determined by events occurring in stock exchanges in Asia and Europe and not simply by local events (see Sewell, 1988, on a similar point).

It is not only the economic sphere, however, that reveals the emergence of an essentially global functional unit. Technological innovations have made it possible to communicate with and to experience lives far removed from our own territory. Our knowledge and informational boundaries cannot be contained as they once were; our consciousness and even our rationality can no longer be assumed to be securely housed within our self-contained individuality. As technology expands our range of contacts, the sources for socializing our identities will be further enlarged.

Many other areas of current life also reveal the force of globalization. Pollution does not respect national boundaries. Policies and behaviors of states and persons far removed from our own habitats have profound implications for our longevity, economic status, and the very quality of our lives. The threat of nuclear annihilation casts a shadow that extends around the world, placing each of us in the darkness and doubt of events occurring on a truly global basis.

In these and in numerous other ways, we have become members of a large, linked world system. Our lives are elements in several dramas that can no longer be understood simply by focusing narrowly on our inner experiences or personal preferences. Whether the narrowed focus on the self-contained individual is seen to be an ideological obfuscation for the operation of sinister social forces taking place behind our backs (as Marxian analysis would suggest) or simply a survival into the late 20th century of the state of 19th century society, the point remains much the same. The functional unit whose understanding we must seek is no longer the individual as currently understood, but something more globalized in its form. In effect, the theory of the person that was suited to the era of individualization is ill suited to the era of globalization. A new theory of the person is needed, thus posing a new, different, and indeed difficult challenge to psychology, the field whose origins lay in developing and exploring the current theory of the person.

Although no one has yet come forth with a satisfactory description of the new functional unit or the revised theory of the person it entails, it is clear that the critics of the liberal individualist tradition have at least recognized the already visible winds of change (e. g. , Bowles & Gintis, 1987; Cahoone, 1988; MacIntyre, 1984, 1988; Sandel, 1982). I have found their interpretations to be some of the most insightful. I hasten to note that for the most part these critiques were not written in order to establish a globalized alternative, but I believe that the direction of their analyses suggests the very kind of transformation in the theory of the person that is well suited to the postmodern, globalized era.

As we have seen, the liberal individualist perspective is understandable once we locate it in opposition to the premodern tradition, which it replaced. However, as persuasive as its perspective might sound to those of us reared under its auspices, Cahoone (1988), MacIntyre (1984, 1988) and Sandel (1982) have concurred in arguing that it is incoherent on its own terms, whereas Bowles and Gintis (1987) and Block (1987) have viewed it as rife with internal contradictions. In effect, the liberal individualist tradition cannot realize what it purports to achieve and continue to sustain its theory of the person.

The arguments here are complex and can only be briefly summarized. MacIntyre (1988) has suggested that the disembodied selves characteristic of the liberal individualist tradition are supposed to act rationally in choosing the ends they will seek. Yet, insofar as rationality is not a transcendent possession of individuals, but exists only as defined within a particular tradition, and insofar as liberal individualism has eschewed all tradition, it leaves persons without any grounds for acting rationally. Cahoone's (1988) argument is similar to MacIntyre's although he spoke of rationality as lodged within culture rather than using MacIntyre's term, tradition. Sandel's analysis of Rawls's (1971) theory of justice provides a further development of this point. He persuasively demonstrated the incoherence of Rawls's liberal individualist theory of the person by revealing the nonindividualistic understandings that are required if Rawls's claims are to be upheld.

Although I do not take issue with this strategy of undoing liberalism on its own terms, my own point involves the failure of the liberal individualist theory of the person in the context of an emerging new tradition, postmodern globalization. In agreement with MacIntyre's (1988) argument, I suggest that as world history changes, traditions that formerly presented suitable ways of conceptualizing reality may provide visions that are out of touch with newly emerging issues. In great measure, this occurred when the premodern theory of persons was no longer suited to the spirit of industrialization, capitalism, the rising dominance of the nation-state, and liberal democracy. An alternative tradition, liberal individualism, emerged and provided a more appropriate formulation of the nature of persons and their association and so replaced the premodern understanding.

The globalization of the postmodern world has created severe strains for the liberal individualist theory of the person. These strains are not simply a function of the incoherence of liberal individualist theory on its own terms, but are also due to its failure to offer a framework for an understanding of the nature of persons that is better suited to a global, linked world system. It is against this background that I see the necessary emergence of a new kind of functional unit for the social order and a theory of the person based on a postmodern tradition of human understanding.

If my analysis of historical change is correct, our present task is to unfold the essential characteristics of a globalized theory of the person. I have found Sandel's (1982) ideas most helpful. In developing his critique of liberal individualism, Sandel distinguished between its concept of possession (to which, following my own previous terminology [Sampson, 1977], I will refer as self-contained) and an alternative, constitutive view.

In breaking individuals free from all those attachments that formerly set the terms of their very existence, and thereby granting them priority, the liberal individualist theory of the person compels us to dissociate persons from any particularly contingent circumstances of their lives. As Sandel (1982), among others, has reminded us, persons cannot be both sovereign agents free to determine the ends they will seek and at the same time essentially be what they have chosen. Sovereignty means that persons must stand outside this network of their choosing; otherwise they lose their priority as subjects who choose, select, and decide. Sandel has argued that this formulation of an unencumbered subject is essential to the liberal individualist theory of the person and is found in nearly every representative of this tradition.

Although we should not invariably expect to find so direct a statement of the unencumbered view as is made here, any other possibility would be incoherent given the entire fabric of liberal individualist social, economic, political, psychological and even, for the most part, religious institutions and practices. For example, there would be little sense in viewing people as giving their voluntary consent to be governed if we simultaneously fail to view persons as the kinds of creatures who are able to give such voluntary consent. For persons to be such creatures, we logically require a theory of the person that grants priority to persons over anything to which they may choose to subject themselves.

As I previously commented, psychology has grown up within the liberal individualist tradition and should thereby reveal this central feature of the tradition in its own theories of the person. One can readily discern this emphasis on the self-contained view within most psychological understanding (e. g. , Sampson, 1977, 1985, 1988). I will shortly turn to some noteworthy exceptions (e. g. , Gergen & Gergen, 1988; Harré, 1984; Tajfel, 1984). Although some psychological theories try to operate interactively, I can see no reason to alter the conclusion I previously reached: These accounts emphasize two self-contained entities interacting, rather than adopting the constutive tradition to which I will now turn (also see Lykes, 1985).

Sandel contrasted the liberal individualist (i. e. , self-contained) conception with an alternative, constitutive view in which persons are seen as creatures whose very identities are constituted by their social locations. There are no subjects who can be defined apart from the world; persons are constituted in and through their attachments, connections, and relationships. Unlike the liberal individualist view in which persons choose the lives they will lead and construct the kinds of community they will inhabit, in this alternative view, persons' "more or less enduring attachments and commitments" (Sandel, 1982, p. 179) help define who the persons are. In Sandel's view, persons do not choose the ends or purposes they will select to follow, but rather they engage in a shared, common process of discovery in which their goals and purposes are revealed in a never-ending process of living with others.

Both Cahoone (1988) and MacIntyre (1984, 1988) have echoed this constitutive formulation of the person. Cahoone emphasized the internal rather than external relationship between culture and person. Culture is not something that stands in the way of persons or something that persons must overcome in order to realize their real self, but rather it is the only vehicle available for persons to know and to understand who they are.

Although MacIntyre (1984, 1988) did not use the same terminology as Cahoone or Sandel, it is clear that in his examination of the classical and the Aristotlean conceptions of the person he has adopted much this same point of view. He captured this understanding in observing that for Aristotle, "it is the individual qua citizen who reasons ... [but] in the practical reasoning of liberal modernity it is the individual qua individual who reasons" (1988, p. 339). In other words, reasoning in the modern tradition is a kind of transcendent capacity of individuals who are reasoning personages regardless of their particular social setting. In the classical and Aristotlean tradition, by contrast, reasoning can occur only by virtue of the context within which it emerges, guided by the telos of that context.

In effect, for the constitutive view, there is no meaningful way to speak about persons abstracted from the particular community that is an essential ingredient of their identities as persons. The liberal individualist tradition sought to accomplish just this abstraction in the name of providing freedom and dignity for the individual. Yet, by so thoroughly detaching persons from the social and historical locus that constitutes their very being, the modern liberal individualist tradition has had the ironic effect of denying persons any kind of dignity, autonomy, or power (e. g. , Bowles & Gintis, 1987). The detachment and prioritization of the individual creates an empty, functionally meaningless abstraction incapable of doing much of anything. The constitutive perspective contrasts markedly with this modern tradition. In its view, attachments within a community do not describe mere attributes of a person's identity but are in effect constituents of their identities: "The community of which they are a part ... describes not just what they have ... but also what they are" (Sandel, 1982, p. 150).

None of the critics of the liberal individualist tradition have set forth the complete terms of a new tradition to replace the waning liberal individualist formulations that they have criticized. As I have suggested, however, the constitutive framework they have introduced is more compatible with the emerging era of globalization than with the era of individualization, for which the self-contained view was more suitable. Let me now build on these ideas and focus on one of the most central implications of the constitutive theory of the person for understanding the person-other or person-society relationship. The key is the notion of ownership.

Within the liberal individualist tradition, individuals are assumed to have personal ownership of the identities they possess, including all of their attributes (e. g. , talents and abilities) as well as the outcomes of whatever achievements their particular abilities and motivations bring to them. Macpherson (1962) referred to this understanding as possessive individualism: a "conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them" (p. 3). In Macpherson's view, consonant with Sandel's (1982) perspective, individual freedom is founded on this concept of the individual as fundamentally "an owner of himself" (p. 3).

Because individuals retain personal ownership, they have personal responsibility for determining how to dispose of what they own. The particular ways in which we enter into contracts or exchange relationships with others or the ways in which we negotiate an agreement would have little meaning if persons did not rightfully claim personal ownership over their possessions and achievements. Personal ownership lets persons enter into agreements in which they decide to give up a part of what they own in exchange for benefits they will receive from others who are similarly situated.

Indeed, the essence of liberal individualist society is this notion of personal ownership and the theory of the person it requires: That is, persons are understood to be antecedent to any kind of constitutive community. However, once we have reformulated our conception of the person from the self-contained to the constitutive view, we see that the attributes (e. g. , possessions, abilities, and achievements) that we currently believe are private items to be disposed of as persons wish are common goods for community consideration. Sandel (1982) captured this transformed meaning as follows:

What at first glance appear as "my assets" are more properly described as common assets ... since others made me, and in various ways continue to make me the person I am, it seems appropriate to regard them ... as participants in "my" achievements and common beneficiaries of the rewards they bring. (p. 143)

In other words, if a person's attributes are held to be at least partly determined by the community that has constituted the person, attributes we currently consider to be private possessions are recast into attributes for use on behalf of the common good. Persons become the guardians of particular assets, not their owners. Needless to say, this is a very different way of understanding achievements, possessions, talents, and so forth. Each individual is the guardian of these assets on behalf of something larger than personal benefit; the disposition of such assets is not an individual's choice as much as a matter for community evaluation and decision in terms of its interests and purposes.

Reich (1987) has offered a similar perspective in his analysis of health and retirement benefits, urging a transformation from their current conception as individual entitlements to entitlements common to a community of persons constituted by that community. Reich expressed a concern about the current way that certain benefits are allocated within U. S. society, observing, for example, that providing medical benefits to individuals may actually encourage poor preventive health habits: Persons receive medical care whether or not their own behavior has been guided by principles of healthful living. Reich noted how in a thoroughly individuated situation, devoid of what we would term constitutive attachments, no one bears any responsibility for anyone's behavior and so we all pay for each individual's irresponsibility.

The flavor of this can be gleaned from considering efforts to legislate the wearing of helmets by motorcyclists. The battle lines involve pitting the rights of individuals to do with their lives whatever they please and the rights of the community members who eventually pay the medical bills for long-term care of the profoundly brain-injured riders. Under the liberal individualist ethic, persons own their own lives, and so long as one life does not intrude on another, persons can choose to live any way they wish, even foolishly. Riding without a helmet is a right all individuals have; the community has no stake in controlling this kind of private behavior. However, insofar as persons' relationships to their communities are more constitutive than self-contained, the community does have a stake in what occurs.

The constitutive view transforms the entire person-community relationship. The point is not simply that the community has a stake in what happens to its individual members and thus must intervene in their lives, but equally, because individuals are constituted by their communities (i. e. , they are not self-contained individuals with lives apart from others) community involvement is not experienced as an improper intrusion into their personal affairs. Because persons' attributes are not privately owned apart from their community, they do not have the same sense of being violated by infringements on their freedom of self-determination that we currently have.

As I have noted, the constitutive formulation of the person better suits the global world into which we are rapidly heading than the self-contained liberal individualist conception that has dominated our self-understandings during the modern period. We have gone well beyond that modern period and have entered a new world with new issues and demands. The liberal individualist theory of the person is not simply incoherent in its own terms, promising what it cannot logically provide, but it also fails to offer a blueprint for the era of globalization in which persons will increasingly be parts of a thoroughly linked, interdependent global world system. Actions in one segment of this system have consequences for all, and therefore a more constitutive vision is required.

By now it should be clear that the discipline of psychology emerged within the era of modernism and has participated in the liberal individualist perspective that is the hallmark of that tradition. Psychology is not to be faulted for its embeddedness in the liberal individualist tradition, but its future task will be to deal with the challenge of the era of globalization that is now looming on the horizon. A psychology for tomorrow is a psychology that begins actively to chart out a theory of the person that is no longer rooted in the liberal individualist assumptions, but is reframed in terms more suitable to resolving the issues of a global era.

I previously commented that there already exist several harbingers of this new era, including much of the feminist scholarship within psychology. In my view, however, the feminist perspective should no longer be understood as developing a psychology of women but, I believe, is better seen as developing a psychology of humanity tomorrow. The real issue, therefore, does not involve gender differences per se, as much as it speaks to an emerging theory of the person that is appropriate to the newly emerging shape of a globally linked world system.

Other recent contributions to psychology also have sought to redirect the focus of the field toward the constitutive conception of the person I have presented in this article. Harré (1984), for example, has introduced a meaning for "personal begin" that is clearly constituted within the social world. In defining the fundamental human reality to be a conversation, Harré has compelled us to become aware of the manner by which personhood is socially constituted. Harré cited the works of Shotter (cited in Harré, 1984) and some of his associates on the concept of psychological symbiosis to describe the way in which a socially constituted personhood is learned: "In psychological symbiosis mothers do not talk about the child's wishes and emotions; they supply the child with wishes, needs, intentions, wants and the like, and interact with the child as if it had them" (p. 105).

Likewise, the recent contributions of Gergen and his associates (e. g. , Gergen & Davis, 1985; Gergen & Gergen, 1988) provide a further attempt to contextualize our theory of the person (e. g. , also see Sarbin, 1977). Gergen and Gergen (1988), for example, outlined a theory of the self as a narrative in which, although the object is the single individual, "it would be a mistake to view such constrtions as the product or possession of single selves" (p. 37). There is a clear correspondence between this manner of understanding personal identity as narrative and the constitutive view of the person and of possession I previously outlined.

The recent two-volume compilation outlining the European approach to social psychology edited by Tajfel (1984) offers still further evidence of active efforts within the field of psychology to bring the social dimension to topics such as attribution, emotion, and cognition, which are usually considered in a more strictly individually self-contained manner.

By now it should be apparent that my point has not been to bemoan any lack either of sensitivity or of activity on the part of at least certain segments of the field to develop a differently framed theory of the person. Although these and related efforts mark significant strides in turning the field around, to my knowledge there have been few, if any, efforts (with Luria's, 1976, pioneering efforts standing as a possible exception) systematically to link changes in the theory of the person, which these authors have sought to describe, with the dramatic transformation in the social order now taking place.

For the most part, psychology has not been as reflective about its own subject matter as it needs to be, at least not in the sociohistorical sense that I have sought to describe. Psychology has not seen its role to be that of discovering what theory of the person it currently espouses, how that theory conforms to a particular kind of social and historical order, how changes in that social and historical order will require a new theory of the person, and especially how a central role for psychology is to take the lead in generating this new theory.

I have introduced not only a challenge for psychology, but also a new and somewhat different role: to being to explore, systematically and as a central feature of its disciplinary agenda, the contours of a new theory of the person suitable for the global era into which we are rapidly heading.