The Idea of the Self is a big book, not only in its literal heft, but also in its ambitions, its magisterial erudition, and the scale of its chronological, geographic, and thematic reach. To write a history of the “self” from the seventeenth century to the present is to chart one of the master themes of the modern era, a key dimension of philosophical reflection and literary production, and a force of social, political, and economic change, insofar as new experiences of selfhood opened new possibilities of action and desire. Considered from a sufficient height, the “self” looks like a great current streaming through the landscape of modernity; the moment one descends for closer study, the river turns into a delta full of alternative channels, dead ends, and the occasional morass. It is a singular accomplishment that Jerrold Seigel has been able to chart a path that provides a coherent narrative of the modern idea of the self, without sacrificing the complexity of this history.

Admittedly, coherence comes with costs. For one thing, his geographical scope is narrower than the title suggests, for he limits his inquiry to England, France, and Germany. For another, the balance of “thought” and “experience” suggested in the title is sometimes honored more in spirit than in practice. To be sure, Seigel periodically discusses broad transformations in the experiential possibilities of selfhood, for example, the new sociability emerging in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, or the new practices of reading during the same period, or the sense of personal liberation that altered interpersonal relations, economic pursuits, and political relations. Moreover, in numerous discussions of specific intellectual figures, Seigel deftly links their literary or philosophical products to their own lived experience. Frequently, however, discussions of the stated ideas of individuals overshadow the experiential dimension, and Seigel chooses to organize his chapters around individual figures or discrete clusters of intellectuals.

Inevitably, some readers will quarrel with Seigel's decision to pursue this more or less traditional intellectual history approach. In his defense, he readily acknowledges that his is only one possible approach, and it is undoubtedly an important one that yields many insights into this complex phenomenon. Others might dispute his inclusions and exclusions. Yet it would be churlish to upbraid Seigel for not including yet more, or other, writers in a book already thickly populated with major and minor figures of the last four centuries; indeed, while canonical writers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault play prominent roles in Seigel's narrative, he is to be praised for incorporating lesser figures like Victor Cousin, Pierre Maine de Biran, Alfred Fouillé, and Pierre Janet, not to mention Bernard Mandeville, whose importance in intellectual history emerges here in a new light. Specialists will undoubtedly find points of disagreement with a generalist bold enough to grapple with such a daunting array of major and minor figures, but the overwhelming impression is that Seigel's readings of specific individuals are deep, careful, and often surprisingly original.

Still, it is troubling that female writers are almost entirely excluded from this cast. With the exception of Madame de Staël, who factors in Seigel's treatment of Benjamin Constant, women's voices are absent. Yet surely Mary Wollstonecraft would contribute much to our understanding of the concept of the self around 1800; likewise the English and French utopian feminists of the early nineteenth century; or the rich literary and philosophical trajectories of Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, or Luce Irigaray in the twentieth. Indeed, the question of the gendered self, whether thematized by male or female writers, scarcely enters Seigel's discussion.

Seigel avoids fixing the essential qualities of selfhood, choosing instead to explore the various discourses that sought to articulate the nature of the self. He reveals that one need not wait for recent critics like Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida to find an awareness of the fluidity of the self. Indeed, even Locke emerges here as a thinker troubled by the challenge of conceptualizing stable personal identity within the terms of empiricism, a portrayal far from the complacent theorist of the “punctual self” described in Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self. Yet despite Seigel's historicist orientation, his idea of the “multi-dimensional” self does introduce something approaching a “normative” model. Any theory of the self, he asserts, will include at least one and possibly all of the following three dimensions: corporeality, relationality, and reflectivity. He clearly prefers multidimensionality, which tends to curb excesses, creating conceptions of personhood that balance hopes for self-fulfillment, personal autonomy, or self-transformation against a realistic sense of limits. Desirable as such moderation is, theorists who amplify one or another dimension dominate the history of modern thought. While the notion of the embodied self surfaces occasionally in Seigel's narrative, the real story is the relationship between the reflective self and the relational self. At polar extremes, we find theorists who champion either a vision of a pure self, whose autonomy stems from its self-reflective relationship to itself, or a vision of a self fully formed by social relations. The relational position could, in turn, produce sharply different outlooks: on one side, belief that recognition of society's formative power was the key to the self's true fulfillment, and on the other side, belief that the power of social norms or language to produce subjectivity exposes the whole project of autonomous selfhood as illusory. In the middle between these extremes are, of course, numerous philosophical attempts to reconcile the reflective self and the relational self within a higher unity. Still, even in these attempts at mediation, Seigel shows again and again how difficult it is to theorize the self without ultimately resorting to some model of reflection. This is true, he argues, even in theories that stridently challenge the reflective self, for example, Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein or Derrida's deconstruction of logocentrism.

While the three dimensions of selfhood provide Seigel with flexible and open categories by which to evaluate and order the discussion of multiple and frequently divergent trajectories, perhaps the more important ordering principle for Seigel's account is national difference. These differences, he carefully insists, are not the result of essential national characters, but of contingent historical forces that created enduring national specificities in the ways in which the self has been conceived.

In the British case, the political settlement of 1688, the growth of trade, and the comparatively open social structure led theorists like John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith to embrace multidimensional models of selfhood. Most fully developed in Smith, the British recognized the bodily element in their theories of sympathy and the role of needs; they acknowledged the importance of self-command and self-reflection, but they believed that the spontaneous emergence of a web of social relations fostered, rather than hindered, the development of autonomous selfhood. Contrary to accounts like Charles Taylor’s, Seigel shows that the individualist focus of these British theorists did not come at the cost of social decomposition; rather, they believed that growth of the individual's capacities creates greater need for sociability.

In France, a more rigid social hierarchy and the strongly centralized absolutist state created tendencies toward more extreme positions. Hence, for example, Rousseau recognized social experience as a necessary condition for stable personal identity, but he suffered social relations as an unbearable weight on his personal being. For a host of French thinkers and writers, from Rousseau and Denis Diderot, through Romantics like Benjamin Constant, and Symbolists and Decadents like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Maurice Barrès, self-fulfillment entailed a struggle against an oppressive social order. Conversely, in an argument reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville's claim for the persistence of the Old Regime, Seigel traces out a tendency in French thinking to look positively upon the state or to society itself as a powerful, even coercive, agent that actively shapes the individual. Émile Durkheim, for instance, pointed to the ensemble of “social facts”—social representations existing outside the individual—as the antidote to the centrifugal dangers of individualism. While some early twentieth-century French thinkers tried to navigate between the extreme positions, he argues that extremism persisted in French poststructuralism. Foucault's descriptions of disciplinary power and Derrida's exploration of the constitutive power of language both attest to the enduring conviction that the interiority of the self is in fact produced by exterior forces. Simultaneously, however, Foucault and Derrida express the other side of the French tradition in that both imagine radically open and unlimited human possibilities beyond the constraints of the social order.

In German-speaking Europe, yet another pattern prevailed, the belief in an ultimate harmony between self and world. Seigel first detects this in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's monadology, which he sees partly as a philosophic reflection of the Holy Roman Empire's curious sociopolitical structure, with its loosely articulated relations between imperial power and other sovereign entities, from territorial states, to principalities, to independent cities. Immanuel Kant's Third Critique perpetuates Leibniz's basic orientation, in that Kant conceives individual autonomy as operating within a natural world that shares the same purposive or teleological principle as the self. Undoubtedly, Kant's emphasis on an autonomous self that achieves freedom by following rules it has established by an act of self-legislation differs from Leibniz's idea of a self that achieves freedom not by following a law of its own making, but by following the innate principle of its own nature. Nonetheless, Seigel argues persuasively that Leibniz's “expressivist” form and Kant's “autonomous” form of selfhood both rest on the isomorphism of individual and world. From this stemmed the readiness of the post-Kantians, J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel, to combine the ideal of Kantian autonomy with the ideal of an expressive, purposeful social and natural world. The ensuing discussion of German Idealism is highly illuminating, but not nearly as provocative as Seigel's claim that the isomorphism of individual and world persists in Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom are generally assumed to have broken emphatically with the legacy of German Idealism.

The Idea of the Self boldly advances this overarching argument about enduring national styles; in their broad strokes, these national types will be familiar to European intellectual historians, though Seigel adds innumerable nuances and refinements to existing accounts. Some readers will greet Seigel's book with the skepticism that has driven exceptionalist or Sonderweg (special path) arguments out of fashion. Certainly, one can think of counterexamples in every national context—one of them, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great English conduit of German Idealism, receives extensive treatment by Seigel. Moreover, the circulation of people, books, and ideas across national boundaries throughout the four centuries surveyed here makes it difficult to know where to draw the boundaries between specific cultural entities. Even readers with such misgivings will have to acknowledge that Seigel makes his case with great erudition and subtlety. By arguing so strongly for the power of national intellectual styles, Seigel raises the bar for all sides of this long-standing debate. He will provoke opponents to seek these models of selfhood outside and beyond the national contexts where Seigel finds them and offer alternative explanations for their origins and functioning. Supporters will find it necessary to add further historical substance to Seigel's insistence that there are no essential national character types behind these traditions of thought, that is, to seek the concrete modes of cultural reproduction and transmission that perpetuate certain styles of thought within delimited contexts and across broad swaths of time.

Seigel's book is a major contribution to a central theme in modern history, one that will be a point of reference for subsequent discussion. Despite the work's many exceptional strengths, it is worth noting a curious disconnect that marks the thrust of Seigel's narrative. Although Seigel takes a strongly historicist approach to the question of selfhood, his sympathies clearly lie with theorists who attempt to integrate corporeality, relationality, and reflectivity. This tends to grant the British tradition a certain normative status above the French or German; moreover, chapter 1 presents numerous figures in recent and contemporary intellectual life, from philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Christine Korsgaard, Martin Hollis, Dieter Henrich, and Sydney Shoemaker, to neurologists like Gerald Edelman, as offering the richest and most promising directions of present-day thinking about selfhood. Yet Seigel's exploration of British theories of the multidimensional self essentially stops with Adam Smith, with John Stuart Mill as the carrier of that style into the nineteenth century. The reader will be left asking whether nothing noteworthy and novel appeared in the British discourse after Mill. This omission is all the more vexing insofar as the promising directions of current thinking outlined in chapter 1 are all multidimensional, yet they themselves never become the subjects of properly historical accounts. How can we get from Adam Smith to Shoemaker, let alone Edelman? Instead of addressing that question, the historical trajectory culminating in Heideggerean and poststructuralist disavowals of the autonomous subject dominates the latter chapters of the book. Undoubtedly, spectacular declarations of the death of man have garnered far more attention than patient, ongoing efforts to understand the linkages between self, society, and body. It is not surprising that Jerrold Seigel should feel compelled to meet the most radical critics of the self with a tour de force demonstrating the rich and complex resources of modern thinking about selfhood, and revealing the extent to which these radical critics remain tied to the subject they would disavow. In every respect, the Idea of the Self is a magnificent achievement; but by the lights of Seigel's own present-day preferences, there are clearly other historical pathways in the modern preoccupation with the self still calling for exploration.