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The aim of this paper is to confront two highly differentiated accounts of transformations of contemporary intimacy. The first account, represented mainly by Anthony Giddens and Brian McNair, concentrates on the processes of democratization and emancipation; simply speaking, this approach suggests that modern intimacy contains higher amount of freedom than the pre-modern one. The second account underlines significance of processes of commercialization and rationalization of intimacy; according to this approach intimacy becomes more and more dependent to the capitalistic market. This point of view is represented by social scientists such as Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Eva Illouz and Arlie Russell Hochschild. The aim of the article is to analyze the abovementioned accounts not as opposite, but as complementary perspectives, which enable one to perceive the highly ambivalent character of modernization of intimacy and modernization in general.
Maciej Musiał (Tue,) studied this question.