Sources of the Self

"This is not really an economics book. Sources of the Self is one of the great books of the last 25 years, I think. It’s a history of the understanding of the self in the West since the Greeks. A couple of thousand years ago, when the Greeks were doing their writing, the self was understood as kind of a cog in a broader cosmic system that operates outside of the self. Taylor traces through to the Reformation and beyond and how the reference point became more and more limited to the family or to the group or to the nation, so now you’re down to this atomised self-serving individual. Exactly right. To this radical individualism, which is where we are in economics. And it’s odd that you see conservatives pushing this. How do you know that the poor are getting better off? Because they’ve got more television sets. That’s a radically modern point of view. You just count the things that they’ve got and know that they’re better off. That is a perception of the self that is only about a century old. They would have focused on…I mean, there were a lot of things wrong with Greek society, of course. Not every person qualified! But they would have asked: Are you happy? Do you have a balanced life, a decent set of human relations, a good place to live and enough to eat? How do you feel relative to how a person should fit into this cosmic kind of thing? So you’re always thinking of yourself, not as your goal but as part of a process. That’s what makes this book so great, is that he traces the whole process through to a frame of reference that’s fairly new, but for most of us now it’s very hard to think of any other way. Well, I would say it’s something to do with economics and the tendency in economics to think it is a theory of everything. In the last 30 years economics has been colonising every science. Even something like education all comes down to incentives, and that mind-set has become pervasive. One of the good things about this recent crash is that it might counter that, because it’s clearly wrong. When I grew up in the 1950s you were kind of part of a larger group and people were uncomfortable if they were a lot richer or poorer than the group, but we never thought about getting rich as kids. We thought about the satisfaction we might get out of work, but that’s different. My kids are in their 40s and they go from job to job, but their relationship to their firm is always as an independent contractor. They think it’s more efficient that way. And how do you tell that? Because you can buy more iPods or iPads or whatever they are."

"What is so powerful and marvellous about Taylor’s book is what the title announces – this deep question of where do we get our ideas of ourselves from? And the answer is history. We tend to suppose that our selfhood is something tremendously precious and all our own. And one of the things that I am at pains to emphasise in my book is that we are wholly made out of our history, including our most intense and personal feelings. At one point I sketch out a short history of feelings to indicate how different frames of feelings emerge from this period across 200 or 300 years. Those frames of feelings co-existed, and this is something Taylor brings out with beautiful force. For example, he shows how the Romantic Movement brought in a new place for passionate feeling as itself the vindication of who one is. I have tried to analyse this through Verdi’s Traviata . There, supremely, we find dramatised this idea that our strongest feelings belong to the truest version of ourselves. But at the same time that is at odds with another frame of feeling, which is dictated by class. There we find the practice of the alternation of deference on the one side and condescension on the other. So the powerful condescend in the old-fashioned sense of the word, i.e, to indicate their proper sense of social position, which then needed gratifying by the people with whom one did social business. This whole concept was knocked sideways by the Romantic Movement’s idea that I am as good as the next person and equality is more important than due respect for persons. Taylor’s great book traces those sources. The celebrity in all this becomes someone who will have identified for us what feelings we ought to be having. My history picks up a new kind of inspection of the feelings which begins to come over us during the 20th century, which can be traced in the famous novelists between about 1880 and 1920: I mean writers such as Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf and particularly Henry James , in whose work people aren’t sure what they feel, and study their feelings minutely in order to find out what they are and then what to do about it. “The celebrity in all this becomes someone who will have identified for us what feelings we ought to be having.” The intense study of one’s feelings in a spirit of truthfulness to oneself becomes a characterising moment as the 20th century advances. And of course you then get the trade of feeling therapy and psychoanalysis just because we are no longer sure of our true feelings. And as time goes by many people find they don’t feel anything and they have to bully themselves in order to have some feelings. Celebrity in all this business is, you might say, the public dramatisation of our best and worst feelings, and endlessly discussed as such."