Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians

The selfie, from Dürer to the Kardashians, is a thought-provoking story of how we reinvent ourselves every time we reveal ourselves, and how Instagram culture is part of a story that goes back centuries. It explores the liberatory power of self-making and the dangers this idea can unleash, revealing the self-making's liberatory power and the dangers this idea can unleash.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 29 June 2023
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

We are all self-makers now, whether we like it or not - and this witty, skeptical book is the thought-provoking story of how we got here.

The selfie, from Dürer to the Kardashians, is a must-read if you want to understand how we reinvent ourselves every time we reveal ourselves.

Today's defining celebrities have crafted public personae that walk the tightrope between authenticity and artificiality. Ordinary people now follow suit: lovingly tending our personal brands for economic gain and self-expression alike.

Instagram culture is part of a story that goes back centuries. The vision that we not only can but should make our own selves to shape our own destiny is an inextricable part of the formation of the modern world.

As traditional powers of pre-modernity - church and throne - waned, a new myth took their place: that of the self-made man, whose unique powers of personality or canny self-presentation give him not just the opportunity, but the obligation, to remake reality in the image of what he wants it to be.

From the Renaissance genius to the Regency dandy, the American prophets of capitalism to the aspirational übermensch of European fascism, Hollywood's Golden Age to today's Silicon Valley, Self-Made takes us on a dazzling tour of modern history's most prominent self-makers, uncovering both self-making's liberatory power and the dangers this idea can unleash.

Both revelatory and a warning about the ways that focus on the self distorts our individual lives and the broader society, Francis Fukuyama.

Weight: 490g
Dimension: 163 x 243 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529364699