If one is looking for the authoritative work on the history of the modern Western concept of “self,” the place to go is Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self. It is a wide-ranging, deeply insightful account of Western thinking about the nature of selfhood in Britain, France, and Germany since Descartes, framed by a powerfully argued thesis about the right way to conceptualize it. But that project was driven by what in the retrospect of Seigel's whole body of work can be seen as an even more comprehensive historical program, one both methodological and substantive. One of Seigel's basic historiographical convictions, more implicit than systematically argued, is that individual subjectivity matters for historical explanation. His broader substantive interest is in the meaning of the Western notion of “modernity,” above all in its implications and consequences for our contemporary self-understanding. Methodological conviction and substantive interest are tightly interwoven. As Seigel sees it, the process of European modernization was guided by, and in turn further developed, a historically locatable, complex, and internally conflicted version of universal selfhood—the autonomous bourgeois self. His corpus is an extended and evolving exploration of this process and its result, which he finds most clearly documented in European thought and culture from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth.

The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am” is of relatively recent vintage. It became current as a concept of individual and group psychology only through Erik Erikson's work in the 1950s and its extension to collectivities in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. But an important strand of European literature began calling the possibility of fixed self-definition into question in the 1920s, occasionally even deploying the word “identity” explicitly. In the work of Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka, the dualistic representation of selfhood prevalent in much of prewar modernism gave way to the image of an infinitely fragmented and ontologically unfounded self not exhausted by any, or even the sum, of its many possible designations. For these authors, the events and aftermath of World War One desacralized a whole range of abstract collective identities—national or imperial citizen, cultured European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, the spiritual “eternal feminine”—which had furnished the most deeply rooted and honored individual identities of prewar Europe. As a consequence, identity itself was undermined. The paradox of the birth of identity is that it was discovered in the negation of its very possibility.

In recent decades, questions surrounding the concept of the “self,” whether by that name or such cognate terms as “subjectivity” or “identity,” have come to occupy a prominent place in historical scholarship, literary and gender studies, social theory and philosophy. Most recently, Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self has provided not only a vast new historical map of this conceptual terrain but a challenging new way of exploring it. My purpose here is to examine both, and the thematic and methodological questions they raise for this major contemporary field of inquiry.