1.My main reaction to Self-Made was annoyance that you stole, stole, my idea — largely through writing it down first and publishing it — which is that the real key to understanding human relations is through the concept of ‘ideal selves.’ That in a society at a given time we have different models of who we want to be — that this shapes the psychology of the society in fundamental ways and that history is largely about how one model passes into another. Is that the kind of frame you would use for the analysis you do in Self-Made?
I think our sense of self has always been mediated through imitation — whether we're talking classical heroes, or the lives of the saints. And I think one way of looking at Self-Made's argument is, in essence, the creation of distinctly secular hagiographies: narratives of the lives of (mostly) men held up as examples of those who are the best at being human — where, increasingly, being “good at” being human was understood as synonymous with self-creation and self-fashioning, of both the aesthetic and economic kind. And there's times where that's literally true — I'm thinking in particular of nineteenth-century accounts of Representative or Self-Made Men we find in, say, Emerson (or Harriet Beecher Stowe): which are very much structured like hagiographies: models of self-starters to imitate.
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