Is There An American Self?

Abstract

Making the Self, the title of Daniel Walker Howe's new book, is potentially misleading. Seeing it on display at a recent Studies Association convention, I expected a work influenced by cultural studies and the linguistic turn in intellectual history-a work focusing on the construction of identities and of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. I assumed that the American Self referred to in the title was ironic, and that Howe's book would be devoted to debunking the notion that such a thing has ever existed or, at the very least, revealing it to be a discursive fiction that has obscured the many ways Americans have constructed their identities in the past. But Howe has written a very different kind of book. Rejecting the analytic tools and ironic posture of postmodernism, he has produced a lucid, elegant example of conventional intellectual history. His title is meant to be taken literally. It refers to a model of autonomous selfhood that was widely shared by Americans during the early national and antebellum eras-so widely shared, in his view, that it merits being called the American Self. At a time when most scholars organize their work around differences, conflict, or dissent, Howe's focus on shared values and ideals is unusual. In many ways, this is a book reminiscent of consensus history, playing down the differences among the figures he has chosen to examine and scrupulously omitting voices who might have given it a more cacophonous air. This approach will leave many historians-especially social historians-dissatisfied. But there are also virtues to his approach that make the book important and extremely suggestive.