100 books like The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Davis tackles the way that depression or sadness came to be medicalized. He reminds us that these feelings are normal, integral parts of the human experience and analyzes how modern people started to view those emotions as abnormal, psychological conditions in need of pharmaceutical treatment. In his account of conversations with people who use anti-depressants, Davis shows that the medicalization of sadness can actually compound the suffering of people who struggle with depression. Is it really normal to be happy all the time? This book suggests it might not be.

Feldman’s title does not conceal his aims: this book presents a criticism of the ideal of authenticity as the highest order of self-expression. That said, much of the book is a careful explanation of how authenticity came to be so highly valued, and it catalogs the positive societal aspirations of authenticity when it is framed as a personal virtue. The concluding chapter offers a supremely-reasoned elaboration of four separate arguments against authenticity, after which Feldman invites us to start “looking outward,” rather than inward.

This is an older book that traces the development of the American definition of happiness from the founding of the nation until the mid-twentieth century. Jones carefully illustrates that happiness transformed from a collective political concept to an individual moral entitlement. His reading of self-help texts shows that earlier Americans tried to achieve happiness by learning to conform themselves to the obligations imposed on them by others outside the self. In contrast, Jones’ investigation shows that the modern understanding of happiness demands individual liberation from the expectations of others, a feat achieved by listening to the internal desires of the self.

If you want to learn about the history of the concept of authenticity and how it is understood in the western world, this is probably the best book to read (after my book, of course!). Charles Taylor is one of the most prominent living philosophers of selfhood, and this book (topping out at only a little over 100 pages) is an easy-to-read digestion of the ideas that he elaborated in his much-longer book Sources of the Self. Taylor is ambivalent about whether personal authenticity is a good or a bad thing in our era. He recognizes the harms imposed by some of the debased forms that it takes in modern society, but Taylor also tries to articulate an ethics that could rehabilitate authenticity in a way that affirms the dignity of and respect for each individual. I don’t like the fence-sitting, but this remains required reading.

Lisa Lowe and I were in sustained conversation as we were composing our respective books. I read earlier drafts of hers as I was writing mine. Her analysis of settler-colonialism, the African slave trade, and trade in Asian goods and peoples in the Caribbean and Americas illustrated for me ways of thinking about the global relations and interactive impacts of the movements of people, culture, and thought. Her focus on how liberal thought shaped and is shaped by these relations helped to surface the coercive and discriminatory practices that made liberal thought possible. This “history of the present” by extension was enormously generative for thinking about the history of the neoliberal present too. 

During the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to participate in Habermas’ legendary Monday night philosophy colloquium at the University of Frankfurt.

The experience transformed my understanding of the raison d’être of Critical Theory. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is not a book about fascism per se. Instead, it tells the story of how, after the war, the titans of interwar German Kulturpessimismus – Nietzsche (albeit, posthumously), Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger – were canonized by the leading advocates of “French Theory” as the new maîtres à penser or “master thinkers.”

Yet, the canonization of German philosophy came at a high cost. After all, historically speaking, the philosophies in question stood in close proximity to fascist ideology.

Hence, the question arises: to what extent did such pro-fascist “ideologemes” infiltrate and inform the basic tenets of French poststructuralism?

The great fact of economic history is that we all used to be poor, and now most of us are not. 200 years ago, almost 90 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, today around 9 percent does. This is the story of that remarkable transformation and what made it possible. Of course, there are many good books on this, and I have greatly enjoyed for example Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, and David Landes, but this is a powerful, short book by a great historian, that manages to weave together economic, political, technological and intellectual factors into a very compelling narrative of progress and its preconditions over the past one thousand years.

Maté asks why chronic illness and general poor health are on the rise in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, one person in five has high blood pressure, while in Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And adolescent mental illness is on the rise everywhere.

Despite medical knowledge and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person by not considering how contemporary culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines our sense of emotional balance.

Maté dispels common myths about what makes us sick, connecting the dots between the maladies of individuals and the progressive malaise of society, and offers some suggestions for healing. 

It’s a little weird that this book should find a place on my list. It’s a book about how society has become resistant to anything that is difficult and painful and the kinds of people that we have become as a result. But mathematics is difficult! To understand mathematics you have to think hard, sometimes for a long time. Moreover understanding something hard is discontinuous, it requires a leap to a new way of thinking. You have to start with a problem and this problem might be an ambiguity or a contradiction. A is true and B is true but A and B seem to contradict one another. When you sort out this problem you will have learned something.

The moral here is to embrace things that are difficult if you want to learn significant new things. “No pain, no gain.” You don’t have to worry about some super AI… show more.

I love how Dipesh’s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe “provincial”. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.