Becoming
Somewhere between the tea table and the insurance table, Lynn Hunt locates the genesis of modern individualism. In The Revolutionary Self, she argues that the late eighteenth century marked a fundamental shift in how people came to understand themselves: no longer as vessels of original sin, subordinated to divine authority, but as autonomous actors capable of rationality, self-cultivation, and social improvement. The ideological scaffolding of liberal democracy, choice, autonomy, development, finds its roots, she suggests, in the everyday gestures of the emerging bourgeoisie: sipping tea, making portraits, forming insurance companies. That these gestures were made against the backdrop of revolution is crucial. It is not a book about revolution as event but revolution as atmosphere, seeping into the spaces of domestic life, sociality, and the self.
The paradox at the heart of Hunt’s study, that the rise of the autonomous individual coincided with a new sense of social determinism, makes for an elegant narrative conceit. But her analysis remains tethered to a liberal framework that sees the development of the self as a linear achievement of Western civilisation. The book’s optimism about the birth of the modern individual is not shared by those of us for whom individualism is less a triumph than a trap. The self that emerges here is recognisably bourgeois: shaped by property, propriety, and the market. That Hunt begins with tea and ends with financial instruments is telling. Her “modern individual” is not only born of revolution but of capital.
“The self she traces is a bourgeois self: autonomous, calculating, and always already implicated in commerce.”
Throughout the book, Hunt’s method is associative rather than dialectical. She moves from tea tables to Scottish moral philosophy, from French revolutionary prints to the actuarial tables of the insurance industry, tracing a subtle shift in consciousness across disparate domains. In doing so, she offers a compelling account of the emergence of “society” as a category of analysis. But there is little sense that this society is structured by class antagonism. The social is something to be mapped, compared, systematised—as in the rise of “social science”—rather than struggled over. When Hunt writes of John Millar’s interest in the status of women, or Étienne Clavière’s engagement with the commercial economy, she does so through the lens of intellectual curiosity, not material conditions. The world is reimagined, but rarely contested.
“Society, for Hunt, becomes visible through metaphor and manners—but never through class.”
Extraction
What Hunt never quite confronts is the extent to which the individual she celebrates depends on the subjugation and erasure of others. Her narrative touches repeatedly on slavery, but the enslaved appear more as symbols than subjects. They “enacted their desire for autonomy,” we are told, and even “manipulated the commercial economy that had brought them into bondage.” But this sits uneasily alongside her breezy accounts of tea, porcelain, and insurance. Tea is cast as a quiet domestic revolution, allowing women to sit rather than stand. But tea, sugar, and porcelain arrived on ships stained with blood, their routes triangulated by imperial violence. That this revolution in selfhood was financed by chattel slavery is acknowledged, yet never quite theorised. The enslaved are folded into a story about the modern individual’s emergence, as if their role were to underscore the negative space around liberty. Hunt is interested in how freedom was imagined, not in how it was withheld.
There is a curious flattening here of historical agency. The enslaved resist, certainly, and white women grow more civilised over tea, but the revolution—the real one—seems to happen elsewhere, off-stage. When the abolitionist movement does enter the frame, it is explained less through material conditions or mass mobilisation than through the spread of ideas about capability and personhood. The notion that personhood was historically constructed, by property rights, by racial ideology, by law, is never pursued. There is no sense that “capability” might itself be a bourgeois category, one that licenses domination and exclusion as much as it enables emancipation.
“Tea civilised women, Hunt suggests—but only by remaking them into bourgeois subjects of consumption.”
Discipline
It’s a missed opportunity, especially given Hunt’s close attention to gender. Her chapter on tea and women’s “civilisation” is one of the most richly detailed sections of the book. But the same liberal optimism persists. The tea table becomes a site of levelling conversation, porcelain a medium of maternal warmth, and the Spectator a guide to polite intellectualism. All true, but partial. The shift from women standing to sitting with men is taken as a marker of equality, when it might also be read as a shift in the management of femininity, away from overt exclusion and towards subtle incorporation. The tea ritual does not overthrow patriarchy; it domesticates it, literally. And the rise of “conversation” is less the triumph of Enlightenment than the disciplining of speech along new gendered lines.
This is where Hunt’s liberalism most clearly falters. Conversation becomes a proxy for equality, civility a stand-in for social progress. But civility, as Norbert Elias1 knew, is always a code of control. The refinement Hunt documents so carefully, the porcelain teacup, the tempered voice, the polite rejoinder, is also a soft architecture of domination. What appears as the expansion of freedom is often just a redescription of constraint.
Her use of visual sources during the French Revolution is, again, suggestive but idealist. Revolutionary prints “make society visible,” she writes, and give form to a new consciousness of social relations. But society here becomes spectacle. The viewer reflects, the subject is revealed. This is a politics of perception, not of production. The prints are interesting not because they show society, but because they mediate it, rendering power palatable, encoding new norms, aestheticising change. As Debord taught us, the spectacle is not an image but a relation mediated by images. The revolutionary self is always already interpellated2.
If Hunt’s modern individual is a self in formation, it is also a self being made to fit. The focus on inner development and external restraint, what she calls the paradox of freedom and determinism, maps neatly onto the requirements of nascent capitalist society. Workers must be autonomous, but not rebellious; capable, but not collective. They must imagine themselves as free agents while submitting to impersonal market forces. The internalisation of norms, the cultivation of taste, the organisation of time—these are not incidental cultural shifts but the forging of labouring subjects. Hunt gives us the symptoms of this transition without its diagnosis.
“Hunt’s liberal individual is a mirror of the academic self: rational, reflective, and comfortably embedded in systems it claims to critique.”
Even the book’s central figures, Millar, Capet, Clavière, are case studies in becoming: the lawyer turned social theorist, the woman artist navigating patronage, the financial innovator who believed in markets and emancipation alike. They are compelling characters. But they are also, all of them, located in the circuits of capital and empire. Millar’s ideas travelled alongside goods and bodies. Capet’s portraits circulated within the structures of class display. Clavière speculated on insurance in the same breath he denounced slavery. The bourgeois self, Hunt shows, is full of contradictions. But she never asks whose contradictions they are, who pays, and who profits, from the psychic drama of becoming modern.
Afterlife
The most striking feature of The Revolutionary Self is how thoroughly it reflects the present ideological climate. The liberalism that threads through Hunt’s narrative, its focus on incremental change, cultural uplift, and the transformative potential of ideas, is not merely a description of the past but a prescription for the present. The book belongs to that genre of Enlightenment revivalism now fashionable among centrists, particularly in the United States, who look to eighteenth-century civility for rescue from twenty-first-century politics. Here, the individual remains sacred, autonomy the unexamined good, and the history of freedom a steady march from servitude to selfhood. That the march passed through the plantation, the counting-house, and the barracks is treated as backdrop, not structure.
In this sense, Hunt’s book is less about the revolutionary self than the self-image of liberal academia. It sees in the past what it wants to believe about the present: that change is possible without rupture, that history moves forward through consumption and conversation, that moral sentiments and soft furnishings can do the work of justice. This is not a history of class struggle, but of polite progress. The most radical gesture in The Revolutionary Self is to suggest that social science emerged when society itself became visible. A Marxist would say that society became legible when its contradictions sharpened. Hunt gives us the portrait; we still need the x-ray to see through the varnish.
“The revolutionary self is not born—it is made, violently and unevenly, by capital.”
If we are to revisit the late eighteenth century and it is a crucial moment to revisit, it must be with a different set of questions. Not: how did the individual emerge? But: what kind of self does capital require? Not: when did society become visible? But: how is it mystified, fragmented, commodified? The true paradox of the modern individual is not that we are both autonomous and determined. It is that we are encouraged to imagine freedom precisely where we are most tightly bound.
Book Review Books Britain Capitalism China Class Conservative Government Creeping Fascism diary Donald J Trump Economics Elon Musk Europe Film France Gaza Imperialism Israel Keir Starmer Labour Government Labour Party Marxist Theory Migrants Palestine Protest Russia Suella Braverman tarrifs Television Trade Unionism Ukraine United States of America War Work Working Class
Footnotes
- Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939), traces how the refinement of manners and bodily comportment in early modern Europe served as a mechanism of social control, internalising class and courtly discipline within the individual. For Elias, civility is not neutral; it is a form of power exercised through self-restraint, surveillance, and the management of affect. ↩︎
- Louis Althusser’s term for the process by which ideology “hails” individuals, transforming them into subjects who recognise themselves in the dominant order, always already positioned, before they are even conscious of it. ↩︎
