SELF: THE LIMITS OF AUTONOMY

If one is looking for the authoritative work on the history of the modern Western concept of self, the place to go is Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self. It is a wide-ranging, deeply insightful account of Western thinking about the nature of selfhood in Britain, France, and Germany since Descartes, framed by a powerfully argued thesis about the right way to conceptualize it. But that project was driven by what in the retrospect of Seigel's whole body of work can be seen as an even more comprehensive historical program, one both methodological and substantive. One of Seigel's basic historiographical convictions, more implicit than systematically argued, is that individual subjectivity matters for historical explanation. His broader substantive interest is in the meaning of the Western notion of modernity, above all in its implications and consequences for our contemporary self-understanding. Methodological conviction and substantive interest are tightly interwoven. As Seigel sees it, the process of European modernization was guided by, and in turn further developed, a historically locatable, complex, and internally conflicted version of universal selfhood - the autonomous bourgeois self. His corpus is an extended and evolving exploration of this process and its result, which he finds most clearly documented in European thought and culture from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017.