FORUM: THE IDEA OF THE SELF

Extract

It is somehow fitting that Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self, a triumph of rigorous and erudite intellectual labor, has me thinking about labor. And so I will come at the book through the meanings given to labor from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. My skepticism is meant to serve a larger purpose: to begin mapping the research territories opened or resituated by Seigel's achievement.