Overview

The eighteenth century was a time of cultural friction: individuals began to assert greater independence and there was a new emphasis on social equality. In this surprising history, Lynn Hunt examines women's expanding societal roles, such as using tea to facilitate conversation between the sexes in Britain. In France, women also pushed boundaries by becoming artists, and printmakers' satiric takes on the elite gave the lower classes a chance to laugh at the upper classes and imagine the potential of political upheaval. Hunt also explores how promotion in French revolutionary armies was based on men's singular capabilities, rather than noble blood, and how the invention of financial instruments such as life insurance and national debt related to a changing idea of national identity. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking, The Revolutionary Self is a fascinating exploration of the conflict between individualism and the group ties that continues to shape our lives today.

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9781324079033

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Reviews

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.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review 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.--Jeremy D. Popkin, author of A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution 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 nineteenth century.--Robert Darnton, author of The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 With her celebrated insight and irrepressible curiosity, America's 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.--Darrin M. McMahon, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea Historians often write of 'social change' as an abstraction, but in The Revolutionary Self Lynn Hunt shows, in thrillingly vivid detail, how the upheavals of late eighteenth-century Europe were both experienced and enacted by individuals. From the parlors of Scotland and England to artists' studios in Paris, from Napoleonic armies to the worlds of revolutionary high finance and politics, Hunt takes readers on a dizzying tour of the places and practices that reshaped the Age of Revolutions.--Sarah Maza, author of Thinking about History

Author Information

Lynn Hunt is distinguished research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author of numerous works, including Inventing Human Rights and Writing History in the Global Era, and a former president of the American Historical Association, she lives in Los Angeles.

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