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Peter Mandler, Jerrold Seigel. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 724. $70.00, paper $27.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 112, Issue 2, April 2007, Pages 575–576, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.2.575
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Jerrold Seigel organizes his dense, sprawling, consistently thoughtful history of ideas of the self within two frameworks. In the first he breaks down the self into three dimensions: the bodily self, the social self, and the reflective self. In Seigel's view, these are the key features of the self which every systematic thinker must address, but the best understandings of the self—Seigel is not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve—are those that keep the three dimensions in good balance and healthy relation. Although his survey does reach back to Aristotle, the real starting point is the seventeeth century, and one of the early heroes is John Locke, precisely because his self appears fully three-dimensional. Seigel is particularly keen to vindicate the principal Enlightenment thinkers from charges of bourgeois individualism and thus makes a pressing case for Locke's regard for the socially constituted elements of the self as well as his respect for the “self to itself.” The treatment of David Hume is even slightly unbalanced as Seigel bears down to defend him against charges of asociality, and this line of argument naturally culminates in Adam Smith, disburdened of the long-resolved “Adam Smith problem” and shown to be also fully three-dimensional. Among the bad guys are those in a Cartesian tradition who disembody (and sometimes more generally decontextualize) the self and, at the other extreme, postmodernists and poststructuralists who demand “the death of the subject.” “Unbeknownst to those who make such claims, modern consciousness has long been capable of extricating itself from the pitfalls of reflection theory, and precisely by reflecting on reflection itself, thereby acknowledging its rootedness in some form of existence that is prior to it” (p. 367).
