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Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians
An exploration into the curation of the self in Western civilization from Da Vinci to Kim Kardashian.
In a technologically-saturated era where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to stand out and be seen. As the forces of social media and capitalism collide, and individualism becomes more important than ever across a wide array of industries, "branding ourselves" or actively defining our selves for others has become the norm. Yet, this phenomenon is not new. In Self-Made , Tara Isabella Burton shows us how we arrived at this moment of fervent personal-branding.
As attitudes towards religion, politics and society evolved, our sense of self did as well, moving from a collective to individual mindset.Through a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) "self-creators" in the modern Western world, from the Renassiance to the Enlightenment to modern capitalism and finally to our present moment of mass media, Burton examines the theories and forces behind our never-ending need to curate ourselves. Through a vivid cast of characters and an engaging mix of cultural and historical commentary, we learn how the personal brand has come to be.
In a technologically-saturated era where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to stand out and be seen. As the forces of social media and capitalism collide, and individualism becomes more important than ever across a wide array of industries, "branding ourselves" or actively defining our selves for others has become the norm. Yet, this phenomenon is not new. In Self-Made , Tara Isabella Burton shows us how we arrived at this moment of fervent personal-branding.
As attitudes towards religion, politics and society evolved, our sense of self did as well, moving from a collective to individual mindset.Through a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) "self-creators" in the modern Western world, from the Renassiance to the Enlightenment to modern capitalism and finally to our present moment of mass media, Burton examines the theories and forces behind our never-ending need to curate ourselves. Through a vivid cast of characters and an engaging mix of cultural and historical commentary, we learn how the personal brand has come to be.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published June 27, 2023
68 people are currently reading
1,671 people want to read
About the author
Tara Isabella Burton
21books693followersTara Isabella Burton has followed a female hermit into the remote Caucasus, gotten love amulets from Turkish Islamic shamans, and held signs with the street preachers of Las Vegas.
Her work on religion, culture, and place can be found at National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, The Economist's 1843, Aeon, The BBC, The Atlantic, The American Interest, Salon, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, and more. Her fiction has appeared at The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, Great Jones Street, Tor.com, PANK, Shimmer, and other places. She has received The Spectator's 2012 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a 2016 Lowell Thomas Award.
Her first novel, Social Creature, is forthcoming from Doubleday (US) and Bloomsbury/Raven (UK) in June 2018, and will be translated into nine more languages, including Italian, French, and Russian. She is also working on a non-fiction book about new religious and "replacement religion" movements, Strange Rites: Cults and Subcultures After the Death of God, to be published by Public Affairs in 2019.
Tara recently completed a doctorate in theology as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford. She is currently a staff writer on the religion beat at Vox.
Her work on religion, culture, and place can be found at National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, The Economist's 1843, Aeon, The BBC, The Atlantic, The American Interest, Salon, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, and more. Her fiction has appeared at The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, Great Jones Street, Tor.com, PANK, Shimmer, and other places. She has received The Spectator's 2012 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a 2016 Lowell Thomas Award.
Her first novel, Social Creature, is forthcoming from Doubleday (US) and Bloomsbury/Raven (UK) in June 2018, and will be translated into nine more languages, including Italian, French, and Russian. She is also working on a non-fiction book about new religious and "replacement religion" movements, Strange Rites: Cults and Subcultures After the Death of God, to be published by Public Affairs in 2019.
Tara recently completed a doctorate in theology as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford. She is currently a staff writer on the religion beat at Vox.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
May 4, 2023
Self-Made is an account of how we began to think of ourselves as divine beings in an increasingly disenchanted world and about the consequences � political, economic, and social � of that thinking. These consequences have both liberated us from some forms of tyranny and placed us into the shackles of others. It is a story, in other words, about human beings doing what we have always done: trying to solve the mystery of how to live as beings both dazzlingly powerful and terrifyingly vulnerable, thrust without our consent into a world whose purpose and meaning we may never be able to truly know.
The publisher’s blurb describes as “a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) ‘self-creators� in the modern Western world�, and essentially, it reads like author Tara Isabella Burton is presenting a lecture series on our society’s evolution from enforced (cultural and religious) conformity to the pressures we feel today to each be striking individuals with marketably unique brands. Each chapter tells the stories of those who pushed the limits of what was acceptable in their day, and from these individual biographies to Burton’s overall thesis, I found this to be totally fascinating and readable. If I had a complaint it would be that this felt too comprehensive � there are so many stories here, spanning centuries, that I find it hard to sum up succinctly � but that’s hardly a complaint at all (if this had been a lecture series, I would have enjoyed taking it in over several weeks or months, but as it was, I still enjoyed reading this slowly.) Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.
All of us have inherited the narrative that we must shape our own path and place in this life and that where and how we were born should not determine who and what we will become. But we have inherited, too, this idea’s dark underbelly: if we do not manage to determine our own destiny, it means that we have failed in one of the most fundamental ways possible. We have failed at what it means to be human in the first place.
In opposition to Thomas Aquinas� Prime Mover theory (which stated that in addition to creating the world, God had immutably “determined the shape of human life, including rank, blood, and station�), German philosopher Immanuel Kant would later write that the Enlightenment was “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity�; no longer would men be “grasping at the leading strings� to follow the way of their parents. The Renaissance saw men (and it was always men with the opportunities) determined to reinvent themselves. This ranged from notorious self-creator Albrecht Dürer (“hailed as many things: one of the Renaissance’s finest artists, the inventor of the selfie, the world’s first celebrity self-promoter�) to Baldassare Castiglione (whose 1528 book The Courtier served as a guide for those who wanted to learn the art of “sprezzatura� and serve the royal courts) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: a guidebook for the self-reinvention of would-be rulers. Burton shares the French freedom-seeking philosophies of Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade. She writes of Regency England and the “bon ton� of public figures like Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde, and throughout, makes the point that in Europe, the quest for self-creation had an “aristocratic� bent: anyone could become princely, if not an actual prince, with the right attitude. (Burton intriguingly points out that this attitude inevitably led to the fascism of the Twentieth Century, with figures like Gabriele D’Annunzio, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini peddling “the fantasy of superhuman specialness to a population all too willing to treat their neighbors as subhuman�.)
If the social Darwinists had envisioned human progress as a linear march toward perfection, then the advertisers of the early twentieth century helped clarify what, exactly, that perfection looked like: a whole nation of stars, all expressing their own singular, unique personality by using the same few products.
On the other hand, the quest for self-creation in America had a more “democratic� bent: From Frederick Douglass� pulling-up-of-the-bootstraps get-to-work philosophy to Phineas Quimby’s New Thought movement (“you can think yourself to wealth�), the American Dream, from the beginning, was thought to be attainable by anyone (and those who failed to attain great wealth had only themselves to blame: you only need to work harder; think harder). Between Hollywood and Madison Avenue, “It� (the ineffable sprezzatura and bon ton of earlier ages) was presented as desirable and attainable � for a price, anyway. And this attitude inevitably led to the rise of self-promoters like Donald Trump and the Kardashians, and today, the belief that anyone could become an internet sensation if they only found their niche and marketed themselves properly (Burton writes that “‘social media star� is now the fourth most desirable career for contemporary teenagers�, and that just doesn’t sound attainable or psychologically healthy to my aged sensibilities.)
The story of self-creation, at its core, is not only a story about capitalism or secularism or the rise of the middle class or industrialization or political liberalism, although it touches upon all these phenomena and more. It is, rather, a story about people figuring out, together, what it means to be human. It is a story about trying to work out which parts of our lives � both those parts chosen and those parts we did not choose � are really, authentically us, and which parts are mere accidents of history, custom, or circumstance. It is, in other words, a story about people asking, and answering, and asking once again the most fundamental question human beings can ask: Who am I, really?
Burton concludes that the modern day answer to “Who am I, really� � “whoever I want to be� � is dangerous because it not only disregards very real limits to outward change and social mobility but it also discounts the fundamental truths (shaped by the environment, community, secret longings) we hold within ourselves: and why should the outer presentation be considered more authentically “real� than the inner experience? It’s undeniable that shaking off the yoke of Mediaeval-style societal/religious control is a boon for mankind, but why has public acclaim become the only marker of self-worth? Burton covers many more thinkers and their lives than I can recount in a review � making it slightly challenging to share her thesis and its proofs � but I can say that I loved every bit of this.
July 2, 2023
I would rate this 3.5 out of 5.
I want to thank Netgalley & PublicAffairs for an uncorrected proof of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I was initially drawn to this book because I have some experience with the psychological concept of the self and I thought this might provide a different and exciting point of view on the topic. Overall, I was not disappointed by Burton's arguments throughout this book about the socio-cultural and economic impacts on the development of the self.
That being said I did find this book really hard to connect with. I did not find that I was really engrossed in the topic of the book until the third chapter and somewhere around the seventh my interest fell off again. I almost wish that the book was written in the opposite direction where Burton started with the present day and worked backwards. I think that would have been helpful to me as it would have given a frame to the topic with which the reader is more familiar rather than starting the topic from an area where there is less familiarity as it was five centuries ago. I also found that the language usage in the book might not be accessible to everyone who might pick this book up as there was a lot of academic phrasing and language.
I did appreciate that throughout the book Burton made an effort to point out the boundaries that self-made men, dandies, etcetera were often exclusionary to women and people of colour. Often when doing an analysis with a historical progression the topic is not addressed by the author in any way and that was refreshing to see.
I also really appreciated that Burton would take one or two people from a period of time to focus on the central idea of how the self was constructed during that period to make the point. It made the information easier to digest because there was a stable center to which all of the information could be drawn back. I also think of the balance Burton provided by pointing out the ways in which the subject exhibited the larger practice of self-making while addressing the very negative aspects that were inherent in that process.
If you are a fan of books that synthesize several fields into a coherent analysis of a topic I would recommend this book. Equal parts historical, anthropological, and spiritual analysis this is an interesting read.
I want to thank Netgalley & PublicAffairs for an uncorrected proof of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I was initially drawn to this book because I have some experience with the psychological concept of the self and I thought this might provide a different and exciting point of view on the topic. Overall, I was not disappointed by Burton's arguments throughout this book about the socio-cultural and economic impacts on the development of the self.
That being said I did find this book really hard to connect with. I did not find that I was really engrossed in the topic of the book until the third chapter and somewhere around the seventh my interest fell off again. I almost wish that the book was written in the opposite direction where Burton started with the present day and worked backwards. I think that would have been helpful to me as it would have given a frame to the topic with which the reader is more familiar rather than starting the topic from an area where there is less familiarity as it was five centuries ago. I also found that the language usage in the book might not be accessible to everyone who might pick this book up as there was a lot of academic phrasing and language.
I did appreciate that throughout the book Burton made an effort to point out the boundaries that self-made men, dandies, etcetera were often exclusionary to women and people of colour. Often when doing an analysis with a historical progression the topic is not addressed by the author in any way and that was refreshing to see.
I also really appreciated that Burton would take one or two people from a period of time to focus on the central idea of how the self was constructed during that period to make the point. It made the information easier to digest because there was a stable center to which all of the information could be drawn back. I also think of the balance Burton provided by pointing out the ways in which the subject exhibited the larger practice of self-making while addressing the very negative aspects that were inherent in that process.
If you are a fan of books that synthesize several fields into a coherent analysis of a topic I would recommend this book. Equal parts historical, anthropological, and spiritual analysis this is an interesting read.
Shelved as '2023'
June 6, 2024📱 Thank you to NetGalley and PublicAffairs
Read
October 30, 2024jumpscared by the caroline calloway mention, though of course i should have expected it, coming as it is from the author of social creature. when talking about hyperspecific personal brands, burton mentions "lesbians who like "dark academia"" as an example, which made me actually laugh out loud. anyway, i loved this.
August 12, 2023
Blame it all on the dandies.
August 15, 2023
Self-made. Ein Phänomen der westlichen Welt. Ständig werden Personas besonders hervorgehoben und fallen durch ihr überdurchschnittliches Selbst-Branding auf. Ob in der Naturwissenschaft, Philosophie, Hollywood oder in der Politik. Besondere Menschen fallen durch ihre skuriose Art auf, so dass man schon fast süchtig wird nach Neuigkeiten. Nietsche, Darwin, Da Vinci, Kardashian oder Trump.
In dieses Phänomen taucht die Autorin ein. Allerdings nicht in der erhofften Tiefe und sehr oberflächig. Am Ende des Buches konnte ich nicht verstehen, welche besondere Information ich nun durch dieses Buch angeeignet habe, was man durch common-sense schon nicht hätte wissen müssen.
In dieses Phänomen taucht die Autorin ein. Allerdings nicht in der erhofften Tiefe und sehr oberflächig. Am Ende des Buches konnte ich nicht verstehen, welche besondere Information ich nun durch dieses Buch angeeignet habe, was man durch common-sense schon nicht hätte wissen müssen.
March 14, 2024
Burton is brilliant and an incredible writer. The way she is able to track and articulate how ideas progress over time, how they are constantly in conversation with each other, constantly reacting like chemicals in a lab, all peppered with vivid, concrete details of fascinating people, is an inspiration to me as a writer and a delight as a reader.
Some of what she says is obvious to many of us, such as the slippery codependence between authenticity and advertising, but the way she locates these trends in history is helpful. I found particularly eye-opening the aesthetics of fascism and the difference ways that the desire for self-creation and self-expression manifested in Europe versus America (the same trends underlying both aristocracy and democracy). Without giving him too much time, she had some good insight into how Trump's ascension depends on our obsession with authentically creating reality. And I was particularly interested in the trend that began with the nineteenth-century dandies to convey "a sneer for the world"—the way seeming effortlessness and disaffectedness have been marks of the popular, the authentic, and the successful across the subsequent centuries. I've thought about earnestness lately, about awkwardness, about how it has often been considered cool to look like you don’t care about what people think of you. I think that is changing, which is good on the whole, although I'm sure it's already becoming commodified and produced.
Anyway, there is much to think about here. The part that resonated the most with me was the epilogue, about what we lose when we consider our own desires and visions of our ideal selves the "realest" thing about us:
We take on the divine role of constructing and shaping reality. What we want, and who we want to be, has become the key to who we really are. In the process, we have lost sight of other elements of our shared reality, not just the customs that shape us against our will but all the other things we do not necessarily desire and do not choose. Other people—their traditions, their customs, their stories, their narratives—are treated as existential threats to our authentic inner selfhood. We ignore the inconveniences and insufficiencies and imperfections of our bodily existence. We have, in celebrating the quintessentially human trait of self-invention, neglected that other great human trait: our fundamentally social nature as creatures who depend upon one another.
I appreciate Burton's ability to lay out the facts mostly dispassionately and to apply an opinion at the end that is balanced, neither downplaying the dangers nor proclaiming a doomsday warning. Her view of history aligns with mine: history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. This is new, but it isn't. Humans are always like this. This isn't the end but neither is it necessarily better than before. To combat the excesses, to seek out the middle ground a la Aristotle, seems to be her call to us, and I resonate with that.
I think in some ways this book was too detailed, and in other ways, it was a little basic. The cast of characters, many of whom I hadn't heard of before, was fascinating but it was hard to keep track of them all as we kept speeding on to the next century. That is the cost of an overview book like this, I know. But then other times I wanted to dive more into the contradictions within different schools (and applications) of thought and the ways that these trends manifested within various subcultures. I think that, too, is too much to ask from this book, but it still left me wishing for a bit more. In the end, highly recommended to understand our world and where we have come from.
This is not, in other words, only a story about how we became gods. It is also a story about how we have always been, and remain, human beings: caught between facticity and freedom, trying imperfectly to work out how to relate ourselves to both. We are—as Hamlet still reminds us—kings of infinite space, bounded in nutshells. We are bound to a natural world we do not fully understand, to our bodies that so often betray us, to the communities that give us language and culture and shared senses of meaning, and to the interior longings and yearnings that vex and confuse us as often as they provide us with hope, joy, and purpose. Which part or parts of that tapestry of identity “count� as real? And which do we leave behind? And what do we lose once we do?
Some of what she says is obvious to many of us, such as the slippery codependence between authenticity and advertising, but the way she locates these trends in history is helpful. I found particularly eye-opening the aesthetics of fascism and the difference ways that the desire for self-creation and self-expression manifested in Europe versus America (the same trends underlying both aristocracy and democracy). Without giving him too much time, she had some good insight into how Trump's ascension depends on our obsession with authentically creating reality. And I was particularly interested in the trend that began with the nineteenth-century dandies to convey "a sneer for the world"—the way seeming effortlessness and disaffectedness have been marks of the popular, the authentic, and the successful across the subsequent centuries. I've thought about earnestness lately, about awkwardness, about how it has often been considered cool to look like you don’t care about what people think of you. I think that is changing, which is good on the whole, although I'm sure it's already becoming commodified and produced.
Anyway, there is much to think about here. The part that resonated the most with me was the epilogue, about what we lose when we consider our own desires and visions of our ideal selves the "realest" thing about us:
We take on the divine role of constructing and shaping reality. What we want, and who we want to be, has become the key to who we really are. In the process, we have lost sight of other elements of our shared reality, not just the customs that shape us against our will but all the other things we do not necessarily desire and do not choose. Other people—their traditions, their customs, their stories, their narratives—are treated as existential threats to our authentic inner selfhood. We ignore the inconveniences and insufficiencies and imperfections of our bodily existence. We have, in celebrating the quintessentially human trait of self-invention, neglected that other great human trait: our fundamentally social nature as creatures who depend upon one another.
I appreciate Burton's ability to lay out the facts mostly dispassionately and to apply an opinion at the end that is balanced, neither downplaying the dangers nor proclaiming a doomsday warning. Her view of history aligns with mine: history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. This is new, but it isn't. Humans are always like this. This isn't the end but neither is it necessarily better than before. To combat the excesses, to seek out the middle ground a la Aristotle, seems to be her call to us, and I resonate with that.
I think in some ways this book was too detailed, and in other ways, it was a little basic. The cast of characters, many of whom I hadn't heard of before, was fascinating but it was hard to keep track of them all as we kept speeding on to the next century. That is the cost of an overview book like this, I know. But then other times I wanted to dive more into the contradictions within different schools (and applications) of thought and the ways that these trends manifested within various subcultures. I think that, too, is too much to ask from this book, but it still left me wishing for a bit more. In the end, highly recommended to understand our world and where we have come from.
This is not, in other words, only a story about how we became gods. It is also a story about how we have always been, and remain, human beings: caught between facticity and freedom, trying imperfectly to work out how to relate ourselves to both. We are—as Hamlet still reminds us—kings of infinite space, bounded in nutshells. We are bound to a natural world we do not fully understand, to our bodies that so often betray us, to the communities that give us language and culture and shared senses of meaning, and to the interior longings and yearnings that vex and confuse us as often as they provide us with hope, joy, and purpose. Which part or parts of that tapestry of identity “count� as real? And which do we leave behind? And what do we lose once we do?
December 20, 2023
Scholarly in scope and tone, jammed with historical anecdotes, this chronology telling outlines self-creation, celebrity, and how to attain it through the past 500 years. Burton uses two polarities, ‘artificial-authentic� and ‘innate genius-hard work� to calibrate the successful self-made and their personas, arguing that the best appear to meld these seamlessly. It is a slippery topic, always threatening to slide into philosophy, psychology, and drama on the serious side and hucksterism and salesmanship on the other, but in the end the insights here, like celebrities themselves, seem fragile and fleeting.
February 11, 2025
Cool insight on what being “self made� looked like through the years, mainly in the two veins of what the author defines as aristocratic and democratic self-makers. Although I read this for class, I was able to choose it and am glad I did for its blend of historical anecdotes and overarching theme of what it means to be human.
September 7, 2023
If you are familiar with the source texts of the standard narrative of the development of the west from the Renaissance to the present (the growth of the modern self), this will feel like a review. If you're not familiar with those books and that narrative, this may feel a little too brief on any one figure to make a strong case. The link between the self-making American of the 19th century and the rest of Burton's narrative also feels like a stretch. On the whole, however, this does what it sets out to do really well. This is a strong attempt to write this story in an engaging style and make it relevant to our present moment. I'll encourage my students to read this book because it will make them feel smart and get them to think about how the contemporary moment is deeply connected to the past.
December 29, 2023
Burton's book Self-Made tackles the concept of the "self-made" person (usually male person, up until the 20th century) through both historical examples (i.e., Regency era proto-influencer Beau Brummel whose name-drop in the musical Annie has been cut out of recent editions, the French libertine the Marquis de Sade whose lewd works helped coin the modern-day concept of sadism) and modern "pop culture" examples (Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, Caroline Calloway). Burton explores historical concepts of what it meant to have what today we might call the "it factor" -- in the Renaissance it was called "sprezzatura," and in early 19th century England and France it was called "bon-ton" (a concept that would later be used for the Bon-Ton brand of department stores prevalent in the US Midwest and Northeast from the turn of the 20th century through the early 21st century).
The book is presented in chronological order and with a largely Western focus, and like other reviewers have noted, does veer into academic phrasing and foci when presenting the historical examples and their sociocultural contexts. The final few chapters on Hollywood Golden Age stars and starlets, and modern-day influencers, are written in more of a pop culture lens. It's a challenging undertaking to narrate the historical concept of evolution of social identity creation in under 300 pages/a 10-hour audiobook. That being said, I did enjoy this book quite a bit and would recommend.
The book is presented in chronological order and with a largely Western focus, and like other reviewers have noted, does veer into academic phrasing and foci when presenting the historical examples and their sociocultural contexts. The final few chapters on Hollywood Golden Age stars and starlets, and modern-day influencers, are written in more of a pop culture lens. It's a challenging undertaking to narrate the historical concept of evolution of social identity creation in under 300 pages/a 10-hour audiobook. That being said, I did enjoy this book quite a bit and would recommend.
May 15, 2023
A well written and clearly thoroughly researched journey taking a peek into the lives of people who have consciously bucked social, economic, and religious cultural standards throughout history.
Burton gets in use of the best word that John Green ever taught me, “eschatological,� so I must offer bonus kudos for that. I did not realize going in to this book that Burton is a theologian, but it becomes obvious as religion is so often either directly/literally or indirectly/metaphorically invoked throughout.
It really made me consider that perhaps the way we present ourselves is less about how society perceives us and more about how we perceive society. What is it within us that makes us look at what’s “normal,� current and popular and decide, “Not me� or “That’s how I must be�? It kind of makes me want to delete social media 😅
Who will enjoy “Self-Made�? Readers who are seriously into sociology and want to think about self-awareness, self-image, the ways that we either maintain the status quo or purposefully buck it in the pursuit of capital, social or otherwise. It was definitely not as pop-sci of a vibe as I expected from a book that invokes the Kardashians in the subtitle!
Thanks to NetGalley and PublicAffairs for the chance to read this book to review.
Burton gets in use of the best word that John Green ever taught me, “eschatological,� so I must offer bonus kudos for that. I did not realize going in to this book that Burton is a theologian, but it becomes obvious as religion is so often either directly/literally or indirectly/metaphorically invoked throughout.
It really made me consider that perhaps the way we present ourselves is less about how society perceives us and more about how we perceive society. What is it within us that makes us look at what’s “normal,� current and popular and decide, “Not me� or “That’s how I must be�? It kind of makes me want to delete social media 😅
Who will enjoy “Self-Made�? Readers who are seriously into sociology and want to think about self-awareness, self-image, the ways that we either maintain the status quo or purposefully buck it in the pursuit of capital, social or otherwise. It was definitely not as pop-sci of a vibe as I expected from a book that invokes the Kardashians in the subtitle!
Thanks to NetGalley and PublicAffairs for the chance to read this book to review.
January 10, 2024
“This has come to define how we think about self-creation in the contemporary era� Our powers to create, to imagine, and most important, to desire are as close as we can get, in this chaotic and meaningless world, to divinity. We are the only gods� and our greatest power is to fashion ourselves.�
This book was a really fascinating look at how we have arrived at our current society level interest/ obsession with the self-made person. Using a historical framework starting 500 years ago and building up to modern day, Burton makes the argument that the growing permission and understanding that our desires are the fundamentally the most true thing about us has permeated to make society heavily focused on curating self.
I wish she would have spent more time looking at the strengths of this view point and it took her to the very end to give some positive credence to the current mental model, While I don’t agree with every conclusion she draws, overall it was a fascinating read that is a great launching point to consider what our society values and how we got here.
This book was a really fascinating look at how we have arrived at our current society level interest/ obsession with the self-made person. Using a historical framework starting 500 years ago and building up to modern day, Burton makes the argument that the growing permission and understanding that our desires are the fundamentally the most true thing about us has permeated to make society heavily focused on curating self.
I wish she would have spent more time looking at the strengths of this view point and it took her to the very end to give some positive credence to the current mental model, While I don’t agree with every conclusion she draws, overall it was a fascinating read that is a great launching point to consider what our society values and how we got here.
August 6, 2023
This is a really ambitious study of 'self creation' as an ideology from Renaissance to today. The chapters linking Dandyism to fascism were particularly fascinating. My only caveat is that it could've been a lot longer. I felt the author had a lot more to say, especially on current ideas around self creation, and would've loved a longer discussion. Her previous book, Strange Rites, is a favorite, and while this covered a lot, I wanted just a little more
November 4, 2023
Huge fan of Burton's work. I appreciate her historical tracing of some of the issues we face today. I don't agree with all her conclusions but I'm thankful for her work in this area.
January 22, 2024
Beginning had a lot of promise, but it kinda felt like she had just said the same thing over and over again by the end.
June 24, 2024
She’s good but she’s DENSE
November 30, 2024
Essential reading! An indespensible history of ideas that makes sense of our current cultural moment like nothing I’ve read before.
Read
April 24, 2024A very helpful tracing of the belief and practice of self-creation over the last few centuries.
A very good book for anyone seeking to understand ona deeper level the ethos of our western culture.
A very good book for anyone seeking to understand ona deeper level the ethos of our western culture.
June 2, 2023
⭐️ rating: 3+
Burton takes the reader through various topics that I was not expecting when I chose this book. It is NOT a guide on how to be an influencer - in fact, it hardly touches on modern day. She goes through each era to discuss how the concept of self was regarded at that time. To emphasize the point, Burton includes influential self makers and how they utilized each way of thinking.
While I did find the content interesting, I had a tough time getting into the book each time I picked it up. The writing felt educational more than literary, similar to a thesis or extended essay. Some areas were difficult to follow. Overall, I think this is a unique and well-researched novel that would be a good read for anyone interested in this particular topic.
I received a copy of this book as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. #NetGalley #LilReads
Burton takes the reader through various topics that I was not expecting when I chose this book. It is NOT a guide on how to be an influencer - in fact, it hardly touches on modern day. She goes through each era to discuss how the concept of self was regarded at that time. To emphasize the point, Burton includes influential self makers and how they utilized each way of thinking.
While I did find the content interesting, I had a tough time getting into the book each time I picked it up. The writing felt educational more than literary, similar to a thesis or extended essay. Some areas were difficult to follow. Overall, I think this is a unique and well-researched novel that would be a good read for anyone interested in this particular topic.
I received a copy of this book as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. #NetGalley #LilReads
January 8, 2024
to be entirely honest i did not technically finish this book. this was a lot heavier on history than i normally like which isn’t a bad thing, i just don’t love the type of history she was exploring. she was also exploring self creation through the lens of like religion and the white western world which isn’t a bad thing however i feel like this book would have been more fascinating to me if it was exploring self creation through the lens of people typically not seen in society and how that allows us to create ourselves more freely.
June 16, 2024
Absolutely adored. Burton's historical survey of unbridled entrepreneurism and self-creationism from the Renaissance to the present is so fascinating. Part historical survey, part theological/anthropological critique, part social commentary as it relates to authenticity and artificiality.
May 24, 2024
From The Christian Century (October 2023), reviewed by Benjamin J. Dueholm.
The genealogy of selfhood
by Benjamin J. Dueholm in the October 2023 issuePublished on September 18, 2023
11�14 minutes
It was the kind of pop culture ephemera that I would typically forget: a 2007 radio ad for a reality show about people I’d never heard of, doing things I didn’t know anything about. Maybe it was the uncommon family name or the alliteration of Keeping Up with the Kardashians that grappled into my memory. In the following years, I never saw the show (which ran until 2021), followed breakout star Kim’s Instagram, or purchased any of her many products. Despite not knowing where she came from or what she, for lack of a better word, did, I feel like I’ve always known what she looked like, who she married and divorced, and the fact that she was a famous person: who she is.
Kim Kardashian had osmotically seeped into my brain through checkout-counter magazine covers, gas-pump screens, and random news items. She is “famous for being famous,� a disdainful phrase that avoids her real accomplishment. She made herself into someone everyone would know. She optimized herself to master, at least for a time, what Tara Isabella Burton in Self-Made calls “a digital landscape where our attention is the building block of reality.�
How did this kind of fame—enigmatic, iconic, and somehow omnipresent—become possible? How has it become so necessary to form our very personalities in the image of our own and the world’s desires? And how have we come to understand success and failure when we, from the humblest gym goer to the most overexposed celebrity, are our own projects?
In a cultural history spanning five centuries and crisscrossing the Atlantic, Self-Made provides a genealogy of the modern idea and practice of selfhood. Against the constraints and inequalities of fate, circumstance, and community, Burton claims, we operate under an unstated but universal assumption that “who we are–deep down, at our most fundamental level—is who we most want to be.� And, just as importantly, what we can convince the world we are.
Burton’s story of limitless, ruthless self-creation begins in the Renaissance, with the precociously brand-aware painter Albrecht Dürer. Like so many of the figures who followed, the celebrated portraitist of kings, wealthy burghers, and (significantly) himself “didn’t just make art; he transformed himself into a work of art.� This is the first great age of the unpedigreed genius, as Dürer and his contemporaries broke medieval conventions of anonymous artistry, Castiglione taught literate Europe the mannerisms of the aristocracy, Pico della Mirandola revived ideas of the grandeur and perfectibility of human nature, and Machiavelli instructed would-be rulers on the moral latitude and image management needed to gain and keep power. In art and politics, it became possible for upstarts to imagine fashioning themselves into people who could climb the supposedly fixed social and natural order in which they lived without fundamentally altering its structure.
The Renaissance provides a template for the periods that followed, each opening a new vista on the shifting horizon of the self while elaborating the constraints discovered, or erected, as human beings move toward it. Where the Renaissance luminaries taught self-made people how to adopt elite customs, the Enlightenment thinkers “disenchanted� custom entirely and pushed up to, and beyond, the brink of questioning the religious and political orders altogether.
In Europe, new wealth from colonial expansion and industrial development led to the rise of self-invented tastemakers who used clothing, manners, and a blasé affect to enter and shake up the existing aristocratic hierarchy. Encompassing both the high style of Oscar Wilde and the amoral depredations of the Marquis de Sade, and issuing finally in the pompous artificiality of Italian fascism, the self-made man in what Burton calls the “aristocratic� style emphasized his victory not just over inherited custom and emerging democratic norms but over nature and society. (A funny running bit in the book is the number of figures who add a bogus “de� to their family names to feign an aristocratic pedigree.)
In America, with no proper aristocracy to disrupt, a “democratic� and “entrepreneurial� style of self-making develops, with the goal of improving and cultivating one’s own inner resources. Starting with Frederick Douglass, the American story passes through Gilded Age robber barons and inventors, the highly stylized personalities of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley to the present age of social media celebrities and viral content producers, all harnessing the spiritual or mystical energy of the universe to bend reality to the optimized will.
Through all the centuries and fashions, the story of self-making is defined by the tension between ideas of “innate superiority and social fluidity, between aristocracy and democracy.� Some of us achieve ourselves, while others are consigned to a “psychic underclass,� too graceless or lazy to shape the world to our desires. But all of us have to keep trying—not just to be our best selves but to make a commodity of those selves. Whatever else you can say about Kim Kardashian, she has undeniably succeeded in the very terms established for her—and not just by modern media or late capitalism but by a long tradition of visual culture, business thought, and philosophical speculation.
Burton uses a wide lens to capture her history, going well beyond canonical literature to pulp fiction, clothing, manners, consumer fads, and outright frauds. And she is careful to situate the ideas she describes in their economic and technological contexts, rather than treating them as protagonists in disembodied combat. This distinguishes Self-Made from the genre of conservative polemics that treat the trajectory of post-Renaissance cultural history as a long theological or psychological decline from good ideas and stable roles to bad ideas and moral license, a prehistory of the contemporary cultural wars connecting Machiavelli to Marx to marriage equality.
Applying the claims of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Burton does acknowledge that we live in an age of “expressive individualism� that would be radically unintelligible to the medieval mind, to which human beings are fully created as part of an integrated and essentially unalterable whole. But Self-Made is a story of neither decline nor liberation. It’s a story of evolution in which both progressive and reactionary politics and culture today are fully embedded.
The mechanisms of self-making have, indeed, opened avenues for social mobility that were unknown in each previous era. But, as Burton makes clear, they have until relatively recently been mostly unavailable to women, who, if anything, were objects of disdain or worse in the liberated imaginings of de Sade and his paler imitators. Nor were they easily accessed by racial and ethnic outsiders, and only on very limited terms by anyone who fell outside of a given society’s conventions of gender or sexual expression. The cult of self-making divides poor people into a few shining examples of social mobility and a torpid mob of failure, while simultaneously obscuring the difference between the genuine innovator and the humbug artist.
It is easy to conclude that these are not mere oversights or imperfections in the story of universal self-creation but rather integral to it. All that glitters is not gold, but it catches the same eyes. Old inequalities may fade, or they may change shape, even as new forms of hierarchy are invented.
Whatever has been gained in this sprawling journey toward universal self-creation has come at the cost, Burton suggests, of suppressing important aspects of our own humanity. True selfhood would require us to acknowledge the parts of ourselves we might efface for online clout, political influence, or financial success. It would require us to acknowledge rather than deny the roles of community, contingency, and vulnerability that shape us whether we want them to or not. If we don’t, we are “liable to mistake our ordinary human desires, and ordinary human efforts, for spiritually potent forces with the psychic or moral power to bring us fame, riches, or superiority to others.�
All of this comes in a brisk, erudite, and uncommonly pleasurable trip through the ages. So it is equivocal praise to say that I found myself wishing Self-Made would not end. Its story could have started earlier; I would love to read Burton on a self-conscious striver like Cicero or Bernard of Clairvaux. But this would require breaking the historical frame, coming from Taylor and others, that treats the “medieval worldview� as a real thing of coherence and unquestioned consensus rather than an ideological artifact obscuring the very real conflicts within the church, state, and economy. Whatever changed in the era of Dürer and Da Vinci, it wasn’t the ability of human beings to abstract their individual consciousness from their social order or to question its fundamental rationality.
More importantly, the story could have pushed later and deeper into our present era’s nexus of self-fashioning and cultural influence. Burton is a shrewd observer of online culture, particularly the recently ascendant strains of right-wing provocation and crackpot political theory. These intellectual circles are rife with the frustrated social striving, sartorial dandyism, and aestheticized religion so prominent in Self-Made (and, for that matter, in Burton’s two fine novels). Similarly, Self-Made could have served as a genealogy of the current entrepreneurship, and sometimes fraud, relating to illness and identity. Our age has given us both Rachel Dolezal, an academic who pretended for years to be Black, and Bronze Age Pervert, a writer and podcaster who plays at reviving paganism based on cultural and racial resentment. I wish Burton had taken us into the mirrored hallway of stunted professional ambition, craving for deference, and grandiosity that provokes such odd self-imagining.
Any good cultural history will, however, leave the reader with unanswered questions about what the story leaves out and where it might go next. Burton’s diagnosis of mandatory striving and self-creation adds useful depth to our public discourses about inequality, media influence, and mental health. The story of people who have successfully performed modern selfhood is, ultimately, the story of what happens to their audiences—the masses whose attention creates reality, yearning for intimacy with our world’s winners but scorning their real vulnerability, aspiring to embrace and supplant them in one movement. The possibility that we may fail not only at a career or a particular project but at the very task of being ourselves might destabilize whole societies as well as individual lives.
Economic and psychological vulnerability reinforce each other: If I am not what I want to be, nor what anyone else wants me to be, what am I? For a society of self-made people, limited social prospects are congruent with emotional woundedness. We become ever more vulnerable to delusions or to projecting our needs onto charlatans and authoritarians. Kim Kardashian was a puzzling Rorschach test; a Kim Kardashian with an aggrieved, emotionally stunted militia is a nightmare we are already starting to experience.
The culprit, for Burton and others following Taylor’s description of secular modernity, is the absence of meaning or significance in the postmedieval world. Where once we might have taken the purpose or coherence of our lives, however small, for granted, now we are all doomed to an untethered search to find or make them for ourselves.
But if this is true, we will need to start making stronger claims about what human life should be. To acknowledge our own contingency and need for others, as Burton insists we must, is the beginning of wisdom in a world of self-making. But it is only the beginning. A good life, and a coherent self, still awaits its portrait. The cultural historians have, so far, only interpreted the self. The point really is to change it.�
The genealogy of selfhood
by Benjamin J. Dueholm in the October 2023 issuePublished on September 18, 2023
11�14 minutes
It was the kind of pop culture ephemera that I would typically forget: a 2007 radio ad for a reality show about people I’d never heard of, doing things I didn’t know anything about. Maybe it was the uncommon family name or the alliteration of Keeping Up with the Kardashians that grappled into my memory. In the following years, I never saw the show (which ran until 2021), followed breakout star Kim’s Instagram, or purchased any of her many products. Despite not knowing where she came from or what she, for lack of a better word, did, I feel like I’ve always known what she looked like, who she married and divorced, and the fact that she was a famous person: who she is.
Kim Kardashian had osmotically seeped into my brain through checkout-counter magazine covers, gas-pump screens, and random news items. She is “famous for being famous,� a disdainful phrase that avoids her real accomplishment. She made herself into someone everyone would know. She optimized herself to master, at least for a time, what Tara Isabella Burton in Self-Made calls “a digital landscape where our attention is the building block of reality.�
How did this kind of fame—enigmatic, iconic, and somehow omnipresent—become possible? How has it become so necessary to form our very personalities in the image of our own and the world’s desires? And how have we come to understand success and failure when we, from the humblest gym goer to the most overexposed celebrity, are our own projects?
In a cultural history spanning five centuries and crisscrossing the Atlantic, Self-Made provides a genealogy of the modern idea and practice of selfhood. Against the constraints and inequalities of fate, circumstance, and community, Burton claims, we operate under an unstated but universal assumption that “who we are–deep down, at our most fundamental level—is who we most want to be.� And, just as importantly, what we can convince the world we are.
Burton’s story of limitless, ruthless self-creation begins in the Renaissance, with the precociously brand-aware painter Albrecht Dürer. Like so many of the figures who followed, the celebrated portraitist of kings, wealthy burghers, and (significantly) himself “didn’t just make art; he transformed himself into a work of art.� This is the first great age of the unpedigreed genius, as Dürer and his contemporaries broke medieval conventions of anonymous artistry, Castiglione taught literate Europe the mannerisms of the aristocracy, Pico della Mirandola revived ideas of the grandeur and perfectibility of human nature, and Machiavelli instructed would-be rulers on the moral latitude and image management needed to gain and keep power. In art and politics, it became possible for upstarts to imagine fashioning themselves into people who could climb the supposedly fixed social and natural order in which they lived without fundamentally altering its structure.
The Renaissance provides a template for the periods that followed, each opening a new vista on the shifting horizon of the self while elaborating the constraints discovered, or erected, as human beings move toward it. Where the Renaissance luminaries taught self-made people how to adopt elite customs, the Enlightenment thinkers “disenchanted� custom entirely and pushed up to, and beyond, the brink of questioning the religious and political orders altogether.
In Europe, new wealth from colonial expansion and industrial development led to the rise of self-invented tastemakers who used clothing, manners, and a blasé affect to enter and shake up the existing aristocratic hierarchy. Encompassing both the high style of Oscar Wilde and the amoral depredations of the Marquis de Sade, and issuing finally in the pompous artificiality of Italian fascism, the self-made man in what Burton calls the “aristocratic� style emphasized his victory not just over inherited custom and emerging democratic norms but over nature and society. (A funny running bit in the book is the number of figures who add a bogus “de� to their family names to feign an aristocratic pedigree.)
In America, with no proper aristocracy to disrupt, a “democratic� and “entrepreneurial� style of self-making develops, with the goal of improving and cultivating one’s own inner resources. Starting with Frederick Douglass, the American story passes through Gilded Age robber barons and inventors, the highly stylized personalities of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley to the present age of social media celebrities and viral content producers, all harnessing the spiritual or mystical energy of the universe to bend reality to the optimized will.
Through all the centuries and fashions, the story of self-making is defined by the tension between ideas of “innate superiority and social fluidity, between aristocracy and democracy.� Some of us achieve ourselves, while others are consigned to a “psychic underclass,� too graceless or lazy to shape the world to our desires. But all of us have to keep trying—not just to be our best selves but to make a commodity of those selves. Whatever else you can say about Kim Kardashian, she has undeniably succeeded in the very terms established for her—and not just by modern media or late capitalism but by a long tradition of visual culture, business thought, and philosophical speculation.
Burton uses a wide lens to capture her history, going well beyond canonical literature to pulp fiction, clothing, manners, consumer fads, and outright frauds. And she is careful to situate the ideas she describes in their economic and technological contexts, rather than treating them as protagonists in disembodied combat. This distinguishes Self-Made from the genre of conservative polemics that treat the trajectory of post-Renaissance cultural history as a long theological or psychological decline from good ideas and stable roles to bad ideas and moral license, a prehistory of the contemporary cultural wars connecting Machiavelli to Marx to marriage equality.
Applying the claims of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Burton does acknowledge that we live in an age of “expressive individualism� that would be radically unintelligible to the medieval mind, to which human beings are fully created as part of an integrated and essentially unalterable whole. But Self-Made is a story of neither decline nor liberation. It’s a story of evolution in which both progressive and reactionary politics and culture today are fully embedded.
The mechanisms of self-making have, indeed, opened avenues for social mobility that were unknown in each previous era. But, as Burton makes clear, they have until relatively recently been mostly unavailable to women, who, if anything, were objects of disdain or worse in the liberated imaginings of de Sade and his paler imitators. Nor were they easily accessed by racial and ethnic outsiders, and only on very limited terms by anyone who fell outside of a given society’s conventions of gender or sexual expression. The cult of self-making divides poor people into a few shining examples of social mobility and a torpid mob of failure, while simultaneously obscuring the difference between the genuine innovator and the humbug artist.
It is easy to conclude that these are not mere oversights or imperfections in the story of universal self-creation but rather integral to it. All that glitters is not gold, but it catches the same eyes. Old inequalities may fade, or they may change shape, even as new forms of hierarchy are invented.
Whatever has been gained in this sprawling journey toward universal self-creation has come at the cost, Burton suggests, of suppressing important aspects of our own humanity. True selfhood would require us to acknowledge the parts of ourselves we might efface for online clout, political influence, or financial success. It would require us to acknowledge rather than deny the roles of community, contingency, and vulnerability that shape us whether we want them to or not. If we don’t, we are “liable to mistake our ordinary human desires, and ordinary human efforts, for spiritually potent forces with the psychic or moral power to bring us fame, riches, or superiority to others.�
All of this comes in a brisk, erudite, and uncommonly pleasurable trip through the ages. So it is equivocal praise to say that I found myself wishing Self-Made would not end. Its story could have started earlier; I would love to read Burton on a self-conscious striver like Cicero or Bernard of Clairvaux. But this would require breaking the historical frame, coming from Taylor and others, that treats the “medieval worldview� as a real thing of coherence and unquestioned consensus rather than an ideological artifact obscuring the very real conflicts within the church, state, and economy. Whatever changed in the era of Dürer and Da Vinci, it wasn’t the ability of human beings to abstract their individual consciousness from their social order or to question its fundamental rationality.
More importantly, the story could have pushed later and deeper into our present era’s nexus of self-fashioning and cultural influence. Burton is a shrewd observer of online culture, particularly the recently ascendant strains of right-wing provocation and crackpot political theory. These intellectual circles are rife with the frustrated social striving, sartorial dandyism, and aestheticized religion so prominent in Self-Made (and, for that matter, in Burton’s two fine novels). Similarly, Self-Made could have served as a genealogy of the current entrepreneurship, and sometimes fraud, relating to illness and identity. Our age has given us both Rachel Dolezal, an academic who pretended for years to be Black, and Bronze Age Pervert, a writer and podcaster who plays at reviving paganism based on cultural and racial resentment. I wish Burton had taken us into the mirrored hallway of stunted professional ambition, craving for deference, and grandiosity that provokes such odd self-imagining.
Any good cultural history will, however, leave the reader with unanswered questions about what the story leaves out and where it might go next. Burton’s diagnosis of mandatory striving and self-creation adds useful depth to our public discourses about inequality, media influence, and mental health. The story of people who have successfully performed modern selfhood is, ultimately, the story of what happens to their audiences—the masses whose attention creates reality, yearning for intimacy with our world’s winners but scorning their real vulnerability, aspiring to embrace and supplant them in one movement. The possibility that we may fail not only at a career or a particular project but at the very task of being ourselves might destabilize whole societies as well as individual lives.
Economic and psychological vulnerability reinforce each other: If I am not what I want to be, nor what anyone else wants me to be, what am I? For a society of self-made people, limited social prospects are congruent with emotional woundedness. We become ever more vulnerable to delusions or to projecting our needs onto charlatans and authoritarians. Kim Kardashian was a puzzling Rorschach test; a Kim Kardashian with an aggrieved, emotionally stunted militia is a nightmare we are already starting to experience.
The culprit, for Burton and others following Taylor’s description of secular modernity, is the absence of meaning or significance in the postmedieval world. Where once we might have taken the purpose or coherence of our lives, however small, for granted, now we are all doomed to an untethered search to find or make them for ourselves.
But if this is true, we will need to start making stronger claims about what human life should be. To acknowledge our own contingency and need for others, as Burton insists we must, is the beginning of wisdom in a world of self-making. But it is only the beginning. A good life, and a coherent self, still awaits its portrait. The cultural historians have, so far, only interpreted the self. The point really is to change it.�
February 1, 2024
I first met Tara Isabella Burton at an event where she led a discussion on this book. Our group discussed how humans shape our own identities and how many people are under pressure to present a superficial "authentic self". A few days later, I coincidentally ran into her again at a friend's NYE party, where she presented herself differently from her "work persona". It was an interesting meta moment regarding the idea of curating one's "brand", which she discusses throughout the book.
This book is a history of the way humans in the Western world went from being part of a collective to trying to "find oneself". Much of this began in the Renaissance era, with the painter Albrecht Durer being an early example of self-promotion in which he would sign all his paintings with a unique "AD" symbol. Other early examples included the Marquis de Sade, who framed his inidividualism by purposely transgressing societal taboos. This all happened within the backdrop of the Protestant Reformation and the development of liberalism. Burton does a great job hinging each of her chapters around a few core characters that show the development of individualism and the notion of the self in the West.
Many chapters discuss the difference between American and European styles of self-making. Burton gives examples like the dandies Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde to show how Europeans had a more aristocratic sense of self-making, where being an individual was seen as an activity for only a select few elite people, whereas America was more like Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, and the concept of an "it girl", where anyone could "pull oneself by the bootstraps" to create an identity of their own under the more capitalist-driven impulses of the American spirit. (She doesn't really talk about aristocratic American tropes like Boston Brahmins or Edith Wharton's books)
The final chapters discuss techno-utopianists, the Kardashians, and Donald Trump as examples of self-making. The rise of film, reality TV, and social media all play a part in today's landscape. Throughout the book, she often calls back to figures from earlier chapters, helping to connect all their stories in one grand narrative. This is a very readable work of pop-sociology that helps people grasp just how our society came up with ideas about "self-actualization", "finding one's true self". and other therapuetic terms. She uses a lot of religious terminology and notes that the West went from "humans worship God" to "humans become God through the process of self-making". This is a strength of the book but also left me wanting for a more theological explanation of just how changes in religious belief led to this shift, which I'm sure she knows considering that she has a doctorate in theology. This book would be a lot better for me if it was much longer, but I suppose most readers want a quick and easy read.
As us humans are more atomized than ever, more disconnected from physical communities, and increasingly feel a lack of meaning and purpose, Self-Made is a good primer of just how we got here.
This book is a history of the way humans in the Western world went from being part of a collective to trying to "find oneself". Much of this began in the Renaissance era, with the painter Albrecht Durer being an early example of self-promotion in which he would sign all his paintings with a unique "AD" symbol. Other early examples included the Marquis de Sade, who framed his inidividualism by purposely transgressing societal taboos. This all happened within the backdrop of the Protestant Reformation and the development of liberalism. Burton does a great job hinging each of her chapters around a few core characters that show the development of individualism and the notion of the self in the West.
Many chapters discuss the difference between American and European styles of self-making. Burton gives examples like the dandies Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde to show how Europeans had a more aristocratic sense of self-making, where being an individual was seen as an activity for only a select few elite people, whereas America was more like Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, and the concept of an "it girl", where anyone could "pull oneself by the bootstraps" to create an identity of their own under the more capitalist-driven impulses of the American spirit. (She doesn't really talk about aristocratic American tropes like Boston Brahmins or Edith Wharton's books)
The final chapters discuss techno-utopianists, the Kardashians, and Donald Trump as examples of self-making. The rise of film, reality TV, and social media all play a part in today's landscape. Throughout the book, she often calls back to figures from earlier chapters, helping to connect all their stories in one grand narrative. This is a very readable work of pop-sociology that helps people grasp just how our society came up with ideas about "self-actualization", "finding one's true self". and other therapuetic terms. She uses a lot of religious terminology and notes that the West went from "humans worship God" to "humans become God through the process of self-making". This is a strength of the book but also left me wanting for a more theological explanation of just how changes in religious belief led to this shift, which I'm sure she knows considering that she has a doctorate in theology. This book would be a lot better for me if it was much longer, but I suppose most readers want a quick and easy read.
As us humans are more atomized than ever, more disconnected from physical communities, and increasingly feel a lack of meaning and purpose, Self-Made is a good primer of just how we got here.
October 14, 2024
Tara Burton's book follows "self-made" people over the centuries and how they reached past the societal standards of their time. It is a good read for those interested in sociology and history and gives an excellent base to start considering the future of self-identity.
Burton's main point seems to show how people have changed the criteria for self-identity throughout time and for the reader to recognize the differences between authenticity and artificiality. She writes it's "a story about people figuring out, together, what it means to be human" (235). Burton uses many sources to reinforce her statements, starting with the belief in God's plan for deciding who people would be and ending with obsessive self-promotion stemming from current-day social media. She uses primary sources such as speeches, autobiographies, and newspapers; she also uses secondary sources like newspapers and biographies. Another topic that often comes up is the creation of "self-help" books made by figureheads of each time period, which pushed social narratives of self-identity. Later, the creation of the World Wide Web made seeing and further promoting these ideals easier and more streamlined. The people chosen to be focused on in the book are primarily of white, western, and male backgrounds, albeit a few. This is most likely due to the innate privilege of these groups, which makes "self-made" journeys possible, especially during previous centuries.
Writing Style: Burton successfully articulates her historical subject's endeavors in a way that clearly identifies the points that she wants to highlight. I rarely encountered a sentence that I could not grasp the meaning or purpose of while reading.
Relevancy: The topics in the book are relevant to anybody who is part of society, especially those with an online presence. The book covers history in earlier chapters, which are relevant to the later, present-day chapters and directly applicable to daily living and the future of self-identity.
Enjoyment: I found this book to be entertaining and insightful. I will most likely review it again to ensure I have not missed any finer details. I will also be looking through Tara Burton's other written works in the future.
I believe this book can be an integral piece of commentary and research that allows the reader to better comprehend the past and present and, when it comes to it, what the future has to hold regarding being "self-made." It left me wondering what the next step will be.
Burton's main point seems to show how people have changed the criteria for self-identity throughout time and for the reader to recognize the differences between authenticity and artificiality. She writes it's "a story about people figuring out, together, what it means to be human" (235). Burton uses many sources to reinforce her statements, starting with the belief in God's plan for deciding who people would be and ending with obsessive self-promotion stemming from current-day social media. She uses primary sources such as speeches, autobiographies, and newspapers; she also uses secondary sources like newspapers and biographies. Another topic that often comes up is the creation of "self-help" books made by figureheads of each time period, which pushed social narratives of self-identity. Later, the creation of the World Wide Web made seeing and further promoting these ideals easier and more streamlined. The people chosen to be focused on in the book are primarily of white, western, and male backgrounds, albeit a few. This is most likely due to the innate privilege of these groups, which makes "self-made" journeys possible, especially during previous centuries.
Writing Style: Burton successfully articulates her historical subject's endeavors in a way that clearly identifies the points that she wants to highlight. I rarely encountered a sentence that I could not grasp the meaning or purpose of while reading.
Relevancy: The topics in the book are relevant to anybody who is part of society, especially those with an online presence. The book covers history in earlier chapters, which are relevant to the later, present-day chapters and directly applicable to daily living and the future of self-identity.
Enjoyment: I found this book to be entertaining and insightful. I will most likely review it again to ensure I have not missed any finer details. I will also be looking through Tara Burton's other written works in the future.
I believe this book can be an integral piece of commentary and research that allows the reader to better comprehend the past and present and, when it comes to it, what the future has to hold regarding being "self-made." It left me wondering what the next step will be.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 21, 2024
Our modern myths circulate around a singular idea: you are what you make of yourself. As Burton demonstrates, the story of the 'self-made man' reaches back much farther than the Kardashians.
From at least the time of Albrecht Durer and Leonardo Da Vinci, there has been a trending impulse of self-promotion and the elevation of the self to a divine status. Even within a nominally Christian society, the self is seen as Creator - or at least re-creator - so that the 'genius' and the self-made-man were synonymous. The obsession with the naked natural state in the Enlightenment, the placement of bon ton as an indicator of aristocratic fashionability in regency London, and the proliferation of Dandies in the late 18th century all contributed to a social imaginary of self-expression that has become all but unquestioned in our own day.
Though there were certainly benefits of freedom of self-expression, the unintended consequence was that moral value was now assigned to success. If you fail to gain prestige or pedigree, then you only have yourself to blame - because you did not create a new 'self' for yourself. Poverty now is perceived as a sin, and obscurity is no longer a virtue. The only thing transcendent in a post-Nietzschean world is the self's desire.
Whatever had been building up until the 1920's was about to be dwarfed by the rise of the 'Hollywood it-girl.' Actresses like Clara Bow exhibited a 'careless elegance' that led to capitalistic reward. The new American Dream was to become rich and famous by becoming a star. As Burton said, 'originality was now marketable.' If you can maintain a certain 'look' then you can sell products that show that you have 'taste.'
No longer is virtue or skill primary, but perception and projection take center-stage. In the infamous televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy, what became clear is that the American people did not want a president, but a performer instead. Unless you can show a carefully curated nonchalance, you would be left behind.
As promised, Barton began with Da Vinci and ended with the Kardashians. In light of the history that the author presented, the rise of Paris Hilton's closet organizer to ultimate celebrity now makes sense. But the 'enmeshed advertising' that the Kardashians perfected didn't stop with them. Now every child is a would-be influencer, willing to brand a 'self' and sell an identity to the masses.
But, in all of it, the question remains: can a 'self' really be created? Surely projection is possible, but a deep integration of the parts of one's 'self' seem to be innate. Though the cultural value of self-making is unquestioned, maybe it is time to put the spotlight on our assumptions. Self-expression might be a good, but self-creation will always be nothing but a 'myth.'
From at least the time of Albrecht Durer and Leonardo Da Vinci, there has been a trending impulse of self-promotion and the elevation of the self to a divine status. Even within a nominally Christian society, the self is seen as Creator - or at least re-creator - so that the 'genius' and the self-made-man were synonymous. The obsession with the naked natural state in the Enlightenment, the placement of bon ton as an indicator of aristocratic fashionability in regency London, and the proliferation of Dandies in the late 18th century all contributed to a social imaginary of self-expression that has become all but unquestioned in our own day.
Though there were certainly benefits of freedom of self-expression, the unintended consequence was that moral value was now assigned to success. If you fail to gain prestige or pedigree, then you only have yourself to blame - because you did not create a new 'self' for yourself. Poverty now is perceived as a sin, and obscurity is no longer a virtue. The only thing transcendent in a post-Nietzschean world is the self's desire.
Whatever had been building up until the 1920's was about to be dwarfed by the rise of the 'Hollywood it-girl.' Actresses like Clara Bow exhibited a 'careless elegance' that led to capitalistic reward. The new American Dream was to become rich and famous by becoming a star. As Burton said, 'originality was now marketable.' If you can maintain a certain 'look' then you can sell products that show that you have 'taste.'
No longer is virtue or skill primary, but perception and projection take center-stage. In the infamous televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy, what became clear is that the American people did not want a president, but a performer instead. Unless you can show a carefully curated nonchalance, you would be left behind.
As promised, Barton began with Da Vinci and ended with the Kardashians. In light of the history that the author presented, the rise of Paris Hilton's closet organizer to ultimate celebrity now makes sense. But the 'enmeshed advertising' that the Kardashians perfected didn't stop with them. Now every child is a would-be influencer, willing to brand a 'self' and sell an identity to the masses.
But, in all of it, the question remains: can a 'self' really be created? Surely projection is possible, but a deep integration of the parts of one's 'self' seem to be innate. Though the cultural value of self-making is unquestioned, maybe it is time to put the spotlight on our assumptions. Self-expression might be a good, but self-creation will always be nothing but a 'myth.'
July 8, 2024
✒️ | "Somos el contenido que creamos."
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¿De dónde viene la tarea de preguntarnos cómo nos ven, qué deseamos proyectar, qué queremos alcanzar, quiénes queremos ser? Tara Isabella Burton nos comparte una cronología narrativa que establece que este asunto no es algo de nuestra generación y que estas preguntas tienen su origen en el proceso de secularización que se dio en el Renacimiento y que se ha extendido hasta hoy día.
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Considerarando a Charles Taylor, Tara desglosa a través de estas páginas el trasfondo del desarrollo de la cultura del 'self-made' y su impacto político, social y económico, particulamente en el mundo occidental. Parte desde mediados de 1400 hasta el presente con figuras como Albrecht Dürer, Marques de Sade, George Brummell, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison y Oscar Wilde hasta Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Max More, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump y Caroline Calloway. Estas personas tienen algo en común: transgredieron las expectativas y moldes sociales de su época en búsqueda de construir una identidad divergente, que distinguiera sin comparación del resto de su comunidad, con un fin de beneficio propio.
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Destaco de la lectura la manera en que se logra trazar de forma secuencial las influencias culturales que se vieron en sociedad a través de personas hitos para que hoy tengamos conceptos como 'branding', 'influencers', 'sponsors', filtros, potencial propio, 'entrepeneurs'... Partiendo de la lectura, confirmo que el andamiaje del self-made es humo, pero es denso y abarca todo el panorama visual. De igual manera, no se puede perder de vista el contexto de donde la autora expone y escribe situándose desde la experiencia de una fe cristiana, pero con una preparación académica y carrera que sostiene su exposición que le permite ubicarse entre letras que hay que considerar.
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Ante este escenario "humo", Tara propone que la fragilidad del andamiaje de la formación identitaria forjada en el individualismo debe volver a considerar la comunidad como espacio identitario ya que es a través del otro que logramos entendernos realmente como personas que viven en sociedad. Para este punto, necesitamos otros libros.
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¿De dónde viene la tarea de preguntarnos cómo nos ven, qué deseamos proyectar, qué queremos alcanzar, quiénes queremos ser? Tara Isabella Burton nos comparte una cronología narrativa que establece que este asunto no es algo de nuestra generación y que estas preguntas tienen su origen en el proceso de secularización que se dio en el Renacimiento y que se ha extendido hasta hoy día.
�
Considerarando a Charles Taylor, Tara desglosa a través de estas páginas el trasfondo del desarrollo de la cultura del 'self-made' y su impacto político, social y económico, particulamente en el mundo occidental. Parte desde mediados de 1400 hasta el presente con figuras como Albrecht Dürer, Marques de Sade, George Brummell, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison y Oscar Wilde hasta Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Max More, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump y Caroline Calloway. Estas personas tienen algo en común: transgredieron las expectativas y moldes sociales de su época en búsqueda de construir una identidad divergente, que distinguiera sin comparación del resto de su comunidad, con un fin de beneficio propio.
�
Destaco de la lectura la manera en que se logra trazar de forma secuencial las influencias culturales que se vieron en sociedad a través de personas hitos para que hoy tengamos conceptos como 'branding', 'influencers', 'sponsors', filtros, potencial propio, 'entrepeneurs'... Partiendo de la lectura, confirmo que el andamiaje del self-made es humo, pero es denso y abarca todo el panorama visual. De igual manera, no se puede perder de vista el contexto de donde la autora expone y escribe situándose desde la experiencia de una fe cristiana, pero con una preparación académica y carrera que sostiene su exposición que le permite ubicarse entre letras que hay que considerar.
�
Ante este escenario "humo", Tara propone que la fragilidad del andamiaje de la formación identitaria forjada en el individualismo debe volver a considerar la comunidad como espacio identitario ya que es a través del otro que logramos entendernos realmente como personas que viven en sociedad. Para este punto, necesitamos otros libros.
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May 8, 2023
Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, by Tara Isabella Burton, is a fun and fascinating read whether you're here for the larger historical/sociological argument or simply the biographical sketches of those highlighted throughout this account.
My interest was mainly the big picture, seeing how we as humans have changed in the ways we view ourselves and the world. I expected some of the accounts but was intrigued by many of the ones that were entirely new to me. The larger idea, from collective and religious to more individualistic and, well, still religious but placing ourselves in the center, is not new. What this book does so well is trace that progression (digression?) in a narrative that helps to answer, or at least speculate about, the reasons.
Some who might not really be interested in the historical change but more in how and why we are where we are may find themselves preferring the biographical sketches than the arguments linking them. That is understandable, and the book offers enough of that to keep those readers happy, though it appears the interest area may differ. I, for instance, found the people further back in history more interesting, theirs were creative in a way that differs from the "creativity" of those simply modifying what has already been done. But many readers prefer staying in their comfort zone and prefer the more recent stories. Either way, there is plenty here.
This is the kind of book that could easily please someone considering an area of study, or information for a present area of study, as well as the popular reader who just wants to know a little more about how we have become a society not so much of people but of brands.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
My interest was mainly the big picture, seeing how we as humans have changed in the ways we view ourselves and the world. I expected some of the accounts but was intrigued by many of the ones that were entirely new to me. The larger idea, from collective and religious to more individualistic and, well, still religious but placing ourselves in the center, is not new. What this book does so well is trace that progression (digression?) in a narrative that helps to answer, or at least speculate about, the reasons.
Some who might not really be interested in the historical change but more in how and why we are where we are may find themselves preferring the biographical sketches than the arguments linking them. That is understandable, and the book offers enough of that to keep those readers happy, though it appears the interest area may differ. I, for instance, found the people further back in history more interesting, theirs were creative in a way that differs from the "creativity" of those simply modifying what has already been done. But many readers prefer staying in their comfort zone and prefer the more recent stories. Either way, there is plenty here.
This is the kind of book that could easily please someone considering an area of study, or information for a present area of study, as well as the popular reader who just wants to know a little more about how we have become a society not so much of people but of brands.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
August 18, 2023
The story of self-creation is not only a story about capitalism or secularism or the rise of the middle class, industrialization or political liberalism. It is rather a story about people figuring out what it means to be human. It is a story about trying to work out which parts of our lives - both those parts chosen and those parts we did not choose - are really, authentically us, and which parts are mere accidents of history, custom, or circumstance. It is a story about people asking the most fundamental question human beings can ask: Who am I, really?
Tara Burton writes:
We have always been human beings caught between facticity and freedom, trying to imperfectly work out how to relate ourselves to both. We are - as Hamlet still reminds us - kings of infinite space, bounded in nutshells. We are bound to a natural world we do not fully understand, to our bodies that so often betray us, to the communities that give us language and culture and shared senses of meaning, and to the interior longings and yearnings that vex and confuse us as often as they provide us with hope, joy, and purpose. Which part or parts of that tapestry of identity "count" as real? And which do we leave behind? And what do we lose once we do? All of us - from classical philosophers to millions of ordinary people whose lives are often less bombastically recorded - are trying to work out the answer to that same question. When we lose sight of that, I think ,we lose sight of what makes us really, authentically human in the first place.
This book was a great read because it helped to articulate the questions that all of us unconsciously think about but haven’t sat down to really struggle and wrestle with in as deep of a way as the author has.
Tara Burton writes:
We have always been human beings caught between facticity and freedom, trying to imperfectly work out how to relate ourselves to both. We are - as Hamlet still reminds us - kings of infinite space, bounded in nutshells. We are bound to a natural world we do not fully understand, to our bodies that so often betray us, to the communities that give us language and culture and shared senses of meaning, and to the interior longings and yearnings that vex and confuse us as often as they provide us with hope, joy, and purpose. Which part or parts of that tapestry of identity "count" as real? And which do we leave behind? And what do we lose once we do? All of us - from classical philosophers to millions of ordinary people whose lives are often less bombastically recorded - are trying to work out the answer to that same question. When we lose sight of that, I think ,we lose sight of what makes us really, authentically human in the first place.
This book was a great read because it helped to articulate the questions that all of us unconsciously think about but haven’t sat down to really struggle and wrestle with in as deep of a way as the author has.
April 10, 2024
Self-Made is an intriguing work of cultural history and social commentary that traces the evolving concept of the self from medieval communal fatalism through the age of capitalistic titans to modern social media self-invention. It shows how the liberating ideas of the Enlightenment, that man could become more and reach higher, have been stretched to the point of believing that personal desires and impulses are the highest form of authenticity, and that only by embracing and broadcasting those behaviors can we be "actualized." Elevated ideas of self have always been defined against the lesser "other," and through time this has manifested in everything from the dandyism of Oscar Wilde to the megalomania of Benito Mussolini to the acknowledged scamming of modern media personalities.
Tara Burton, a Doctor of Theology, doesn't uniformly condemn the wordly, but her background viewpoint comes through. This wasn't a problem for me, as I also see dangers in untrammeled secular humanism and the cult of the self. Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, and the world of Instagram influencers might not agree.
Her book made me think a lot about the "self" I portray to the world, and about what I do or don't do to cultivate that image. In today's society most of us feel pressured to play the game of self-promotion, whether it's to compete in the workplace or just to participate in the world of TikTok and Facebook. Many are recognizing this does not, in fact, make them feel "actualized."
This would be a great non-fiction selection for a thoughtful book club.
4 stars.
Tara Burton, a Doctor of Theology, doesn't uniformly condemn the wordly, but her background viewpoint comes through. This wasn't a problem for me, as I also see dangers in untrammeled secular humanism and the cult of the self. Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, and the world of Instagram influencers might not agree.
Her book made me think a lot about the "self" I portray to the world, and about what I do or don't do to cultivate that image. In today's society most of us feel pressured to play the game of self-promotion, whether it's to compete in the workplace or just to participate in the world of TikTok and Facebook. Many are recognizing this does not, in fact, make them feel "actualized."
This would be a great non-fiction selection for a thoughtful book club.
4 stars.
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