I want to thank those who read andĬommented on the manuscript, in part or as a whole, at various stages Make it better, but it does ensure that the author accumulatesĬonsiderable debts along the way to completion. HAT a book is a long time in the making does not necessarily IV) Transition: Religion and Selfhood 290 I) Irony as Possession and Demystification of Infinity II) Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Whole Man 27 I) Friedrich Schleiermacher: The Divided Self 18 PERMANENCE AND DURABILITY OF THE COMMITTEE ON ON ACID-FREE PAPER AND MEET THE GUIDELINES FOR PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS ARE PRINTED THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN LINOTRON CALEDONIA INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX. ORIGINS OF MODERN SELFHOOD, 1787–1802 / GERALD N. IMPOSSIBLE INDIVIDUALITY : ROMANTICISM, REVOLUTION, AND THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, M O D E R N S E L F H O O D, 1 7 8 7–1 8 0 2ĬOPYRIGHT 1992 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS R O M A N T I C I S M, R E V O L U T I O N, In reaction, the Romantics shifted their absolute claims for the self to the realm of creativity and imagination, and made such claims less dangerous by attributing totality to nature, art, lover, or state, which in return gave that totality back to the self. They had begun by seeing the individual self as the sole source of meaning and authority, but the convergence of crises in their personal lives with the crises of the revolution revealed this ideal as dangerously aggressive and self-aggrandizing. Izenberg demonstrates how the Romantics retreated, in part, from a preliminary, radically activist ideal of autonomy they had worked out under the impact of the French Revolution. The second argument seeks to explain these paradoxes historically, showing how romantic individuality emerged as a compromise. The first is that the Romantics developed a new idea of the self as characterized by fundamentally opposing impulses: a drive to assert the authority of the self and expand that authority to absorb the universe, and the contradictory impulse to surrender to a greater idealized entity as the condition of the self's infinity. Izenberg makes two persuasive and related arguments. More than a study of one national culture influencing another, this work goes to the heart of kindred intellectual processes in three European countries.
Studying major writers and philosophers-Schlegel and Schleiermacher in Germany, Wordsworth in England, and Chateaubriand in France-Gerald Izenberg shows how a combination of political, social, and psychological developments resulted in the modern concept of selfhood.
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