This is an extremely rich and provocative work, wide in learning, filled with thoughtful interpretations of Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault, among others, and containing many insights into the ways that “modernity” and its consequences for the self have been conceived in the last century. It is also a disturbing work, pointing to what the author argues are apparently inescapable dilemmas for “us” posed by both “our institutions” and “our notions of identity” (p. 197). And it will be a very contested work, first, because of what I think are a number of questionable assertions the author makes about the views of those he discusses, particularly Nietzsche and Weber; second, because of the completely unhistorical and uncontextual methodology the author employs to throw light on these thinkers so close to us in time, yet immersed in such different social and cultural milieus; and third, because of the larger thesis and framework of the interpretation, which convey great depth of concern and sincerity, but which, I think, are very problematical as an interpretation of these thinkers. To deal with the book adequately would require much more extended treatment than a short review can give it here.

By entrapment, Eyal Chowers means “the dehumanizing sameness that springs from duplication of the social—the menace of homogenized existence in a world conceived as self-made” (p. 2). The entrapment thinkers, Weber, Freud, and Foucault, are distinguished by contrast to optimistic “proto-entrapment” thinkers of the nineteenth century, like Marx and Nietzsche—who believed in the possibility of revolutionary action or personal transformation as solutions to the “malaise of modernity” (p. 4)—and to “pessimistic” twentieth-century versions of such thinkers, like Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt—who still believed somehow in “redemption and hope” and in “modes of intervention in historical time” (p. 181). The entrapment thinkers all see the self “as trapped in the life-orders of modernity,” though the trap looks somewhat different to each of them. Indeed, to Chowers, “perhaps they convey as a group a truth that transcends diverse theoretical frameworks and disciplines; perhaps, indeed, they constitute a loose ‘school’ of their own,” for they all “reject the belief that human beings are the authors of history,” capable of “steering the future in desirable directions.” And their ultimate lesson is that, therefore, “the best we can do is to cope with its dehumanizing effects, mostly through individual projects” (p. 181). Chowers sees them and their project in quite romantic terms, praising their “dignity” (p. 186), their “courage” (p. 187), and their renunciations of hope.

Yet it is very hard to believe that we have gone through all of this analysis of modernity, of rifts in the self, and of experiences of being stymied, blocked, and entrapped only to come up with the claim that the ultimate lesson of these thinkers is that we should just stop fooling ourselves with groundless dreams of what we would like to see, be, and have, stop aiming so high, and, instead, just “cope.” This is advice most people could get from their parents or friends whenever they happen to be going through a crisis or having a hard time.

Naturally, one should not dismiss wisdom just because it appears in a simple form; perhaps that is the highest wisdom, but the evidence of Weber, Freud, and Foucault runs quite against this. Where is Weber's great project for mastery of the order of the spheres of the world, on behalf of which he calls for a revival of the Puritan “calling” to permit self-mastery, control, and leadership of the political, economic, and intellectual orders of the world, as all charismatic leaders have done before? Where is the Freud who believed that he was the successor of Copernicus and Darwin in disturbing the “sleep” of humankind and who dismissed the rejection of his “truths” about sexuality as simply “resistance”? Where is the Foucauldian conviction that we have outgrown the need for moral imperatives to govern our conduct and are actually, not potentially, much freer than before, so that we can now take up the project of becoming artists of the self, dismissing all of history, tradition, and the demands of others, to renounce what everything and everyone has imposed on us, owing explanations of ourselves to no one? These are not projects of “coping,” however much they may diverge from what Bernard Yack (1992) has called the “longing for total revolution” so desired by the optimistic and pessimistic “proto-entrapment” thinkers. They are grandiose, world-challenging projects, and that is why we still read them.

Although much of the textual work of this book is extremely good, especially on Freud and Foucault, Chowers has too often chosen to emphasize the features of all of these thinkers that seem to confirm his picture of their intellectual “school.” At other places, his interpretations stretch what can be found in the texts, although some of his claims about modernity might be very helpful if he realized that they were his, and not those of Weber and the others (not a surprising claim, perhaps, from a Weber scholar like myself). More troubling is how completely these thinkers are divorced from the real interlocutors, concrete problems, and audience of the world they actually lived in, a consideration of which might have provided a more tangible understanding of why these particular issues emerged for these particular upper-middle-class intellectuals and why they thought of them as they did, rather than seeing these intellectuals as a kind of rupture with all thought until theirs, engaged in critique of a “modernity” as abstract and divorced from real experience as a Platonic form.

The Modern Self in the Labyrinth should be read for its interesting interpretations of the thinkers it treats, as well as for the author's own views of modernity. His views of the dilemmas he observes deserve to be expanded on their own, rather than read through Weber, Freud, and Foucault, because I do not believe that the author has persuaded us that his views and their views are actually in agreement.