Concepts of the Self

Key Concepts (Polity)

by Anthony Elliott

New edition of a successful key concepts book.
Clearly written introductory text by an internationally renowned author.
Has been fully revised and updated in the light of adopter feedback.
The book is updated throughout, with new material in particular on emergent trends in the area such as Zizek and globalization.
Adopted at levels 1 and 2 on courses on identity, the self and social theory.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published August 29, 2001

Reviews

[Charlie Byers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a class on sociological ideas of self. It's a nice bird's-eye view of some of the major debates in the area in the 20th century, and earlier theorists who've informed those debates. The focus is on summarizing different theorists' arguments, and my main criticism would be that there isn't quite enough introduction to the ideas being discussed; the chapter on technologies of the self does a fine job of summarizing Foucault's ideas of selfhood, and some of the major rebuttals to them, but never actually talks about what's meant by the phrase 'technologies of the self'. I kept craving a topic sentence. The book also omitted any exploration of theories on race/ethnicity, which was a litte surprising. I think the book can be valuable to sociology students for the way it puts influential theorists in context, but I wish there had been more depth to it.

[vam pire]

a good introduction to *modern* concepts of the self, which is to say, the text focuses entirely on sociology, psychoanalysis and postmodernism... so not exactly a comprehensive ontology of personal identity.

elliot introduces key thinker within these domains and provides some critique of each, which was useful even if i didn't really agree with some of the conclusions he came to.

note: my reading was mostly focused on chapters 3, 4 and 5. I read the introduction on full, glossed over chapter one (i already had a fairly firm understanding of goffman & the sociological perspective), skipped chapter three (on psychoanalysis) entirely, and also skipped chapter 6 (on AI - though i may come back to this later).

despite offering a concise critique of the postmodern tendency to reduce selfhood to an operation of power, elliott's sympathy for the multiplication of individualism renders his conclusions about the state of the self within modernity politically innert in their confusion.

[xenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick outline of some key thinkers in psychology, poststructuralism and the like, but due to its small size, Elliott often ends up summarising a single book, from a single theorist, in three or four pages, which fails to do justice to how broadly and deeply some of these theorists think.

[Nox Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confusion. Yeah. Silly goofy times fr.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read. Great for people who do not know much about the realm of sociology or want to read something thought-provoking.

[Paul Pawlik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magnificently Introductory.