With her celebrated insight and irrepressible curiosity, America's great historian of the revolutionary era explores a foundational struggle of modern life: the paradoxical effort to achieve equality and individual autonomy in societies revealed to shape and thwart them. At once clear-eyed and optimistic, the book is a bracing reminder for our own times that enormous changes can be wrought by the seemingly littlest of things.--Darrin M. McMahon, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea

Historians often write of 'social change' as an abstraction, but in The Revolutionary Self Lynn Hunt shows, in thrillingly vivid detail, how the upheavals of late eighteenth-century Europe were both experienced and enacted by individuals. From the parlors of Scotland and England to artists' studios in Paris, from Napoleonic armies to the worlds of revolutionary high finance and politics, Hunt takes readers on a dizzying tour of the places and practices that reshaped the Age of Revolutions.--Sarah Maza, author of Thinking about History

Drawing on her unrivaled range of interdisciplinary interests, Lynn Hunt has woven together a diverse collection of stories to show how the revolutionary era created new possibilities for individual self-expression. Women artists, French revolutionary soldiers, and Swiss bankers come together in a vivid narrative from a historian whose work has inspired a generation of scholars.--Jeremy D. Popkin, author of A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution

Taking in subjects ranging from the reform of the French military to the rise of social science, Hunt delivers a work that stands comfortably alongside Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Ladurie, and other prominent Europeanists. An engaging work of history that looks to changes in daily life as a key to understanding transformative movements.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

One of the foremost living historians of the French Revolution... [Hunt] has produced an insightful, provocative study.--Jeffrey Collins "Wall Street Journal"

[I]nvestigates an important moment in the history of the individual and society... [The Revolutionary Self] comes at an opportune time, reminding us that seemingly small new habits, whether drinking tea or befriending Chatbots, can lead to revolutions in our sense of self.--Marjoleine Kars "New York Times"

Lynn Hunt stands out as one of the finest historians in the United States or, for that matter, anywhere. Her new book combines virtuosity and erudition to show how two seemingly abstract and opposed tendencies, individual autonomy and social determinism, actually shaped lives through tea drinking, portrait painting, military discipline, financial speculation, and other unexpected activities during the eighteenth century.--Robert Darnton, author of The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2025-02-18

Length: 208 pages