Claims inflation, modern individualism and immunity

In today’s world society, the proliferation of claims could be seen as a problematic consequence of functional differentiation and modern individualism: everyone could potentially be included in every subsystem of society (economy, law, politics, etc.), but has to build his or her own personal identity through decisions. Claims are then the result of the attempts to be individual (self-determined, specific, different), i.e. to respond to contingency and complexity. While the Western tradition socially legitimates the claim to be different from others, this legacy seems to be challenged today. The paper analyses four emerging tendencies relating to claims to protection and inclusion based not on the individual per se, but on specific memberships, on the one hand, and on the insistence on affectivity, on the other. The hypothesis is that these claims reflect the difficulty of responding to structural change in a society dominated by contingency and uncertainty.