In this acclaimed exploration of the search for "authentic" individual identity, Marshall Berman explores the historical experiences and needs out of which this new radicalism arose.
Focussing on eighteenth-century Paris, a time and place in which a distinctively Modern form of Society was just coming into its own, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity--of a self that could organize the individual\'s energy and direct it toward his own happiness--articulated eighteenth-century man\'s deepest.
In this acclaimed exploration of the search for "authentic" individual identity, Marshall Berman explores the historical experiences and needs out of which this new radicalism arose