Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton is a fascinating trek through the history of self-making.
In an age where we compare our daily experience of life to the highlight reels of family, friends, and strangers online, we’re all desperate to carve out a unique personality that will allow us to stand out of the crowd.
Or, well, stand out enough to fit in, because nobody wants to be the outlier. You’d have to be weird to want that, right?
Self-Made is for you if you enjoy sociology and find you often think about self-image, self-awareness, and how capitalism affects how we see ourselves and the society around us.
The book is equal parts anthropological, historical and spiritual analysis, and synthesises several viewpoints into an interesting investigation of this phenomenon.
It’s easy to think of individualism as an agenda driven by the collision of social media and capitalist forces, but Burton gives us what feels like a series of lectures on the roots of self-making that go back much further than that.
Today, branding ourselves is the norm, but this idea of the individual rose out of a counter-force to more collectivist ideas. As attitudes towards religion, politics and society changed, we gradually embraced ever more individualistic ideas and the importance of self-making became more pronounced.
Burton explores our needs and desires to curate ourselves, all the way from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, by looking at the forces and theories behind the driving forces. It’s a mix of cultural and historical commentary that is very entertaining.
Each chapter delves into the stories of those individuals who pushed the limits of what was acceptable or the norm in their day. Burton covers centuries (which I love) and takes the time to carefully examine each turning point in the history of self-making.
The book looks at the origins of self-making, with things like;
- Thomas Aquinas’ Prime Mover theory 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 wrote of the Enlightenment that it was “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity” and no longer would men be “grasping at the leading strings” to follow the way of their parents,
- the Renaissance saw men determined to reinvent themselves;
- 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”,
- Baldassare Castiglione, whose 1528 book The Courtier served as a guide for those who wanted to learn the art of “sprezzatura” (a studied nonchalance that allows the performer of it a graceful conduct without apparent effort) and serve the royal courts,
- Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince which was a guidebook for the self-reinvention of would-be rulers,
- the French freedom-seeking philosophies of Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade, and the latter’s effect on the culture of the individual even as he wrote his works in prison,
- Regency England and the “bon ton” of public figures like Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde, who was notorious for his self-making (as many before him, for commercial gain).
Burton makes the point that in Europe, this quest for self-making was initially an aristocratic pursuit; anyone could become princely with the right attitude (even if they were far removed from being an actual prince).
She draws the conclusion that this attitude made the fascism of the 20th century inevitable, 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 neighbours as subhuman”.
When this philosophy crossed the Atlantic, it took on a distinctly anti-aristocratic flavour as it wove itself into the American Dream.
Growing into industries in their own right, self-help and manifestation began to drive the need for everyone to make themselves.
Arguably, the greatest catalyst of the cult of the individual was the Hollywood machine, which went from not even naming most of the actors in their films for fear of fans becoming more devoted to them rather than the studios, to tightly controlling the image their stars and starlets presented to the world (going even as far as tracking the female movie star’s menstruation cycles).
Hollywood made it seem like having the ineffable “it” was not only desirable, but attainable (for a price). This paved the way for the rise of self-promoters like the Kardashians, Donald Trump and other internet celebrities. Burton writes that “‘social media star’ is now the fourth most desirable career for contemporary teenagers” – and we even see this coming true again and again.
If you’re familiar with the historical development of the West, this is like a light lecture version of a more complex history. If you’re unfamiliar with that history, you might discover a lot of new dimensions and ways in which the modern moment is rooted in history. While I don’t necessarily agree with all the conclusions Burton arrives at, I absolutely appreciate the historical tracing of some of the issues we’re facing today.
This is an enjoyable and entertaining read that I’d recommend to anyone interested in understanding both history and themselves better. It’s well written and well-researched, constructing the arguments skilfully.
The focus is more on historical aspects of self-making, and Burton only touches on the modern day results of that history briefly at the end of the book. Just because it evokes the Kardashians on the cover, doesn’t make this a pop-sci book, but a more robust exploration of historical context.
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