The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (review)

Seigel’s monumental history of an idea assimilates a daunting range of modern European thinking about the self. What daunts is not only the protean nature of the self and the list of notables consulted, but also the various types of writing that one must account for, including Hume’s epistemology, Smith’s political economy, Rousseau’s novels, Mill’s autobiography, Hegel’s theology, Freud’s psychology, and Derrida’s écriture. Proving himself an exceptional interdisciplinarian, Seigel distills an enormous range of thinking while providing a clear and incisive commentary on these and many other key thinkers.

Seigel’s work modestly avoids claiming to provide an ultimate theory of the self, yet it does provide a powerful conceptual grid that uses corporeality, sociality, and reflectivity as its three dimensions, whose interrelations allow Seigel a quite nuanced analysis of his authors. Beyond its analytical utility, however, the grid implies the robust theoretical conclusion that the self resists reduction to any single element—such as reflection, instinct, sympathy, social construction, or language—as some theorists have sometimes (perhaps hyperbolically) suggested. The richness of Seigel’s framework, as he repeatedly shows, gives him notable critical leverage. If not a finished theory of the self, Idea establishes the elements for which an adequate theory of the self must be accountable.

Primarily, Idea is a work of intellectual history including discussions of Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Condillac, Diderot, Rousseau, Maine de Biran, Constant, Kant, Herder, Humboldt, Goethe, Fichte, Novalis, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Mill, Durkheim, Mallarmé, Janet, Fouille, Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Merely to list these names, however, fails to convey Seigel’s judicious four-fold integration of the authors’ thoughts, the influence of their historical and intellectual circumstances, the insights of their commentators, and their place in his analytic framework. The result is a multilayered, intertextual genealogy of a central modern theme. Though some have judged that the history of ideas has been called into question by more fluid genealogies of epistemes and discursive practices, Seigel’s history shows that evolving ideas may be usefully mapped with enough of the right landmarks.

The centrality of his theme allows Seigel’s an extraordinarily inclusive focus, so much so that most chapters provide general introductions to the authors in question. The chapter on Adam Smith, for example, not only presents Smith’s moral philosophy in detail, but also links Smith’s notion of virtue to the idea of a commercial world in which people must interact favorably—as if guided by an invisible hand—with strangers as well as friends. Thus, commerce cultivates civic virtues. But as Seigel shows, Smith was no business-class cheerleader, having had few illusions about the limits of market discipline. While praising the invisible hand’s moralizing influence among strangers, Smith condemned the business class for exploiting their own laborers by conspiring to keep wages artificially low. The chapter on Rousseau, by contrast, draws heavily from the novels, which allows illuminating links between Rousseau’s life and his imagination of virtue. The chapters on the German idealists are especially useful for those seeking from Kant more than his epistemology in its essentials. Examining the development of idealism through Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger, Seigel illuminates a philosophical legacy whose repercussions reached from modern aesthetics to modern theology.

For contemporary readers, Seigel’s concise weaving of presentation and analysis is no less effective than in the final chapter on Foucault and Derrida. Seigel approaches Foucault through such lesser-known influences as Bataille and Roussel, revealing personal concerns with selfhood and death that are less obvious in the influential but abstract theoretical studies. Moreover, Seigel raises much needed questions about whether Foucault’s and Derrida’s contributions to the death of the self are as devastating as some have said. In particular, Seigel suggestively juxtaposes Foucault’s switch from psychological determinism to self-invention with his late shift toward liberal views he...