THE REVOLUTIONARY SELF

Shining a light on the individual.

UCLA European history professor Hunt explores what she calls a paradox: “the simultaneous discovery that individuals had a capacity for autonomy and that society had the power to sculpt that individuality.” Allied ideas began to form during the Enlightenment, at the end of the 1700s, some of them puzzling: Why, Hunt wonders, was abolitionism so slow to take shape but then so quick to build into a popular social movement in the decades that followed? Mostly, however, she focuses on subtle transformations in everyday life that helped individuals and individualism emerge: for example, the arrival of the custom of drinking tea, which, unlike the exclusively male world of the coffeehouse, found women at the center of the action as they “presided over tea tables, which became the center of conversation in the household.” Moreover, such women equipped themselves with things to talk about, as with one “country lady” who collected a fine private library containing the works of Isaac Newton and John Locke. These “silent changes in the status of women” met other changes, not all positive: drinking that tea required sugar, which in those days—back to abolitionism again—called for slave labor. Hunt then turns her attention to the social changes wrought by printers and printmakers in revolutionary France, bringing new ideas to mass audiences, sometimes bewilderingly; as Hunt writes, “ordinary men cannot have found the sudden refashioning of themselves as revolutionary citizens to be easy or stress free.” 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.