Western Conceptions of the Individual - Exploring Personal Identity in Modern Society | Perfect for Psychology Studies, Cultural Research & Self-Development

Brian Morris is Professor Emeritus (retired) of Anthropology @ University of London. He's published interesting work, and this book is wonderfully interdisciplinary and suitable for advanced undergraduate students and entry level graduate students working on Intellectual History, Cultural History, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Cultural Studies etc.Moving on, the book gives great accounts of how numerous intellectuals, schools of thought, theoretical stances, and discourses have accounted for and described 'the individual' - and by extention, 'the subject' and 'the self'.The book's scope is wide and covers many significant moments in modern Euro-American Intellectual history.It covers the 1) beginning of the subject (Descartes/Kant), 2) The will (Freud/Nietzsche), 3) Empiricism (Skinner, Sociobiology), 4) Neo-kantianism (Dilthey/Wundt/Boasian Anthropology), 5) Hegelianized Marxism (Gyorg Lukács), 5) Sociology (Durkheim), 6) Pragmatism (also covering Goffman's symbolic interactionism), 7) Critical Theory (Frankfurt School, but also covering Marcuse's psychoanalytic bent), 8) Phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), 9) Structuralism and Beyond [Clearly taking the title from Dreyfus and Rabinow's book] (Levi Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, and Derrida).One complaint- I think that he should have either combined the chapter on Lukács w/ the one on The Frankfurt School, or the Frankfurt School should have came directly after.For more complex accounts of histories of the self or subjectivity look at Jarrold Sigel's book- 'The Idea of the Self', Martin Jay's 'Songs of Experience', Dwor Wahrman's 'The Making of the Modern Self', Michael Mascuch's 'Origins of the Individualist Self' and the powerfully influential 'Sources of the Self' by Charles Taylor