The Revolutionary Self: Social Change and the Emergence of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800 [Hardcover]

An illuminating exploration of the tensions between self and society in the age of revolutions. One of the foremost living historians of the French Revolution& [Hunt] has produced an insightful, provocative study. [I]nvestigates an important moment in the history of the individual and society& [ Taking in subjects ranging from the reform of the French military to the rise of social science, Hunt delivers a work that stands comfortably alongside Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Ladurie, and other prominent Europeanists. An engaging work of history that looks to changes in daily life as a key to understanding transformative movements. With her celebrated insight and irrepressible curiosity, Americas great historian of the revolutionary era explores a foundational struggle of modern life: the paradoxical effort to achieve equality and individual autonomy in societies revealed to shape and thwart them. At once clear-eyed and optimistic, the book is a bracing reminder for our own times that enormous changes can be wrought by the seemingly littlest of things. Lynn Hunt stands out as one of the finest historians in the United States or, for that matter, anywhere. Her new book combines virtuosity and erudition to show how two seemingly abstract and opposed tendencies, individual autonomy and social determinism, actually shaped lives through tea drinking, portrait painting, military discipline, financial speculation, and other unexpected activities during the eighteenth century. Historians often write of social change as an abstraction, but in Drawing on her unrivaled range of interdisciplinary interests, Lynn Hunt has woven together a diverse collection of stories to show how the revolutionary era created new possibilities for individual self-expression. Women artists, French revolutionary soldiers, and Swiss bankers come together in a vivid narrative from a historian whose work has inspired a generation of scholars.