When the anthropologist Marcel Mauss was invited to give the 1938 Huxley Memorial Lecture, he chose for his subject ‘A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’. Mauss thought that his contemporaries falsely believed that the idea of the self captured an innate human property, and that, due to this error, they subscribed to a socially divisive cult of the individual. He proposed that the conception of ourselves as unique is largely a historical artefact. Not only do other peoples hold very different notions of the self, but each conception is intimately connected to the specific ethical community to which persons belong. Mauss referred to ethnographic materials from North America, Australia and archaic Greece to show that in cultures where personhood is defined by kinship, descent and status, responsibility flows directly from family or clan membership, and neither love nor one's conscience alone serve as justifications for action. Only with the emergence of a more abstract conception of a person, seen as the locus of general rights and duties, could individuals understand themselves as endowed with a conscience and inner life. It is this notion of the person as the possessor of a moral consciousness, as the source of autonomous motivation and something capable of self-development, that is the foundation of our own self-understanding.

We, Mauss's current readers, are sceptical about there being any single narrative that could account for self-conceptions of the human subject, and we are more attentive than his contemporaries were to the impersonal nature of the forces that shape the individual's consciousness.