The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England by Dror Wahrman Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin by John Edward Toews (review)

Abstract

268 Max Weber Studies than declarations, legislation, and constitutions. The latter have indeterminate pur chase, and might even constitute ruses to mislead external agencies form the more pedestrian and opaque realities of state power. Each of the case studies is of high quality and refreshingly theoretically engaged (as opposed to empirical and comparative in approach). I will finish with a few criti cal comments, none of which should be taken as a reason not to read the book, which is an important antidote to the swathes of privatization literature, especially that which has resulted from consultancies for development organizations. For all the complexity, subtle continuities, and historical context, it is clear that something novel has been taking place over the past twenty years. This novelty remains underspecified in the book, although there is clearly some assumption about the global consolidation of capitalism. After all, all of the case studies derive from 'transition economies', which have been powerfully hit by neoliberal agendas. And, in many ways, the kinds of processes described in the chapters are not historically alien of capitalist development understood generally or abstractly. Many aspects of the forging of capitalism in Europe—as Adam Smith observed and critiqued—relied on favour, force and criminality, themes that Max Weber was certainly also aware of. The book would have benefited from greater depth in terms of understanding the nature of moments of significant and unstable capitalist consolidation rather than making the less ambitious contradistinction with the highly ideological representa tions of the neoliberals. And, why not include some Western case studies? I would have thought that the United States or the UK post-1989 would have fitted rather nicely into any of the three sections. Graham Harrison University of Sheffield Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modem Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Cen tury England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. xvii + 414. ISBN 0-300-10251-8. £25.00 (hbk). John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. xxiv + 466. ISBN 0-521-83648-4. £55.00 (hbk). These two densely written, ambitiously presented, provocatively argued and deeply learned books present cutting edge cultural and intellectual histories of the modern self in both eighteenth-century England, and nineteenth-century Prussia and Berlin. Both are concerned with the way in which one can understand the rise of modern 'selfhood' as both idea and historical reality in the modern period, and both are equally concerned with the interrelationship between the idea of the self and history on the other. Put another way, understanding the development of the modern self historically, and the understanding of the self as a self in history are themes that unite these books that range, nevertheless, over different geographical and chronological time periods, but this unity is what justifies their interest to readers of such a journal as Max Weber Studies. Not only was Weber profoundly interested in the develop ment of the idea of the self as a category, and of the idea of the development of the self as a creature of personality. He was also profoundly influenced, of course, by© Max Weber Studies 2008. Book Reviews 269 developments in English and German history, and these two studies throw impor tant light on both chapters, and provide telling glimpses into those areas that were of such interest to Weber. Where Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1990) focused on providing an histori cal philosophy of selfhood, Wahrman sees his project as an historical 'epistemology' of selfhood, and wishes to pursue the argument that in the final decades of the eigh teenth century, a revolution in the concept of selfhood occurred. Ranging widely over the sentimentalist novels and manuals of moral instruction, to comparison with animal psychology and racism, social anthropology, court cases and art historical illustration, alongside the prodigiously important ideas of language acquisition and its impact, Wahrman offers a complex and theoretically sophisticated social history of selfhood and its development in his period. He is keen to show too, as others have, the multiple languages of selfhood apparent in his study, illustrating that not all stadial theorists...