In his Reflective Authenticity, Alessandro Ferrara also sets out to defend authenticity as an ideal, but in contrast to Taylor he is interested in the social and philosophical issues of the relation between authenticity and validity. According to Ferrara’s diagnosis, we are currently witnessing a profound transition that, besides affecting cultures, values and norms, also touch on the “foundations of validity,” thereby affecting the “bedrock of the symbolic network through which we relate to reality and reproduce our life-forms” (Ferrara 1998: 1). At the core of this transformation is the reformulation of “well-being” (eudaimonia) as the normative ideal of authenticity, which can be of help in reconstructing a contemporary understanding of normativity. For Ferrara, it can ground a new ideal of universal validity “ultimately linked with the model of exemplary uniqueness or enlightening singularity thus far associated with ‘aesthetics’” (Ferrara 1998: 10). Authenticity is then characterized by the “self-congruency” of an individual, collective or symbolic identity (Ferrara 1998: 70), and is thought of as providing a new universal validity that does not build on the generalizable but rather on the exemplary. Ferrara views Simmel’s idea of an individual law as an instructive example of such an anti-generalizing universalism, and it is exactly this characteristic that makes it better suited to the pluralist contexts faced by modern Western societies. More recently, Ferrara (2019) has argued that authenticity currently faces a “dual paradox” and is misconstrued by many critics  advocating its deconstructionist dismissal.