5. Private Selves and Public Lives: Neoclassical Perspectives

Abstract

It is often claimed that modern concepts of individuality or the public sphere did not yet exist in the early modern period; or if they did, they looked and (probably) felt very different. There is a range of sociological and historical models and conceptual approaches to explain the emergence of a modern self-awareness of ‘individuals’ between 1300 and 1800 (see, for example, Greenblatt 1980; Taylor 1989; Mascuch 1996; Porter 1997). The problems begin with the word ‘individual’, which was not used in its modern meaning in the seventeenth century but may have “suggest[ed] a relation” rather than “a separate entity” (Stallybrass 1992, 606; see also Ferry 1983, 33–39). Similarly, the word ‘self’ was not used to denote the intrinsic, authentic, essential core of one human being (Ferry 1983, 39–45; Reiss 2003) and the word ‘subject’ did not mean an autonomous subject of decision and action but the subject as subditus, as subjected to the sovereign, sometimes contrasted to the ‘citizen’. Did the early moderns, then, not have a coherent and stable concept of selfhood or subjectivity? In contrast to this view, others emphasise “the conceptual importance of personal inwardness” (Maus 1995, 27; cf. Schoenfeldt 1999a, 11–13, 16–18). They focus on the textual traces of historically specific connections between concepts of privacy, inwardness, and personhood; they opt for a more pragmatic and limited analysis of the ways in which something like individuality becomes discernible in distinctions between inside and outside or between public and private spaces. From this vantage point, ‘subjectivity’ no longer appears as a (fairly) precise philosophical concept but as “a loose and varied collection of assumptions, intuitions, and practices that do not all logically entail one another and need not appear together at the same cultural moment” (Maus 1995, 29). That is to say that the imposition of a radical difference between modern and premodern forms of subjectivity (Barker 1984, Belsey 1985) can be as misguided as the assumption of continuity between them (Jagodzinski 1999b, 1–22). Continuities are almost inevitably evoked in conceptual histories that trace the semantic changes in words like ‘self’ and ‘individual’, too hastily assuming the existence of some entity to which the words are thought to refer. Conversely, the absence of a word in a certain period does not necessarily prove the non-existence of the concept in question. Inwardness, then, is less a concept than a cluster of “assumptions, intuitions, and practices” (Maus 1995, 29) which can be observed in different historical configurations. In this chapter, I present two case studies to explore how and why the distinction