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The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Hardcover – 24 November 2020

by Carl R. Trueman (Author), Rod Dreher (Contributor)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 1,923 ratings
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Carl Trueman traces the historical roots of many hot-button issues such as transgenderism and homosexuality, offering thoughtful biblical analysis as he uncovers the profound impact of the sexual revolution on modern human identity.

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  1. Print length
    432 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Crossway Books
  4. Publication date
    24 November 2020
  5. Dimensions
    15.24 x 3.51 x 22.86 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    1433556332
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1433556333
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  1. The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.
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  2. While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person.
    Highlighted by 2,614 Kindle readers
  3. For me to be a self in the sense I am using the term here involves an understanding of what the purpose of my life is, of what constitutes the good life, of how I understand myself—my self—in relation to others and to the world around me.
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About the Author

Carl R. Trueman (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is a contributing editor at First Things, an esteemed church historian, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including Strange New World; The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; and Histories and Fallacies. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crossway Books (24 November 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1433556332
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1433556333
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 3.51 x 22.86 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 1,923 ratings

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  1. Carl R. Trueman

    Carl R. Trueman

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    Carl R. Trueman (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Creedal Imperative; Luther on the Christian Life; and Histories and Fallacies. Trueman is a member of The Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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  2. Rod Dreher

    Rod Dreher

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Top reviews from Australia

Mike Dicker
5.0 out of 5 stars Stimulating and insightful
Reviewed in Australia on 25 February 2021
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Loved reading this book. It draws together the many threads of cultural historical and philosophical analysis to present a balanced view of the 21st C world.
Much to ponder from this book about how to live as a disciple Christ in a way that is not only understandable to our Western neighbours but also holds out the compelling vision of life found in the gospel.
4 people found this helpful
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Oscar C
5.0 out of 5 stars Orientating
Reviewed in Australia on 30 July 2023
To quote Cicero:
"We were like strangers in our own city, visitors who had lost their way. It was your [book] that, as it were, bought us back home, so that at last we could recognize who we were and where we were."
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London Mum
5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone should read this
Reviewed in Australia on 4 March 2022
Great book for understanding the gender issues of today and why sexuality is such a determining factor of one’s identity today.
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Paul Charbonneau
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in Canada on 5 July 2023
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Carl Trueman clearly explains the historical long road to where we find ourselves today. His insights help to explain not only the traction that the LGBT+ movement is making today but also the lightning fast change in attitude towards end of life issues (in particular Medical Assistance in Dying.) The Church will need to depend on the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit to navigate through these challenges at the same time staying true to the Lord.
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Meic Pearse
5.0 out of 5 stars Probably the most important book on human personhood since Miroslav Volf's "Exclusion and Embrace"
Reviewed in the United States on 1 March 2021
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All my life, I have been fleeing a certain idea from France. According to it, civilisation enchains us: freedom consists in returning to a supposedly idyllic state of nature — or to 'barbarism', as some of us have belatedly come to realise. For by now we are all thoroughly enslaved by this foolish misapprehension and its dire consequences.

If Calvin was the Frenchman who inflicted himself on Geneva (a thing he would have said was always going to happen), then Rousseau — "the other Genevan", as Carl Trueman calls him — was that city's belated revenge on France. And, through France, on the rest of us.

"Man is born free", Rousseau declared, "but is everywhere in chains". What — everywhere? Yes. For his protest was not exclusively against the royalist absolutism of Louis XV, but against the socialising process itself, and the constraints it places upon the sovereign individual. All societies, therefore, come within the purview of his condemnation.

This is Carl Trueman's starting point. And from it, he draws a straight(-ish) line to our present situation, in which "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" is a coherent, intelligible thought. For, as he himself points out, as little as a generation ago, his grandfather "would have burst out laughing and considered it a piece of incoherent gibberish".

This volume is, in my judgment, one of the most important books to have appeared in some years. There. I've said it. Much has been written furiously assailing 'political correctness', 'critical theory', 'identity politics', 'cancel culture', and associated phenomena. But Trueman writes calmly, analytically — and showing the route by which we got here. Far from throwing stones, he makes the enemies' case as powerfully as they would themselves. He shows that he truly does 'get it'. He has no time for chatter about 'snowflakes'. And his riposte is all the more devastating for it.

In Trueman's brilliant exposition, the issue of how perceptions of selfhood have changed from Rousseau to Caitlyn Jenner forms the central strand of his narrative. He teases out, major thinker by major thinker, the route by which we have arrived at the contemporary "expressive individualism" that is today the orthodoxy — the all-powerful "social imaginary" — of the West and, via the osmosis of global westernisation, of many non-Western countries too.

"All-powerful?" I hear you ask. "Orthodoxy?" Yes, yes. For what Rousseau — and, after him, John Stuart Mill — failed to recognise was that there never was, nor ever can be, any possibility of a society without an orthodoxy, or devoid of the means to impose it. The only question is of what that orthodoxy will be. And, after that, of how tight a stranglehold it will impose upon its subjects, and how far it facilitates frictionless cohabitation between numerous individuals who, by the nature of the case, will differ from each other in temperament, interests, and opportunities.

Trueman traces the lineage and expansion of "expressive individualism" over the past two centuries. The journey takes us by way of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley and Blake, and their excoriation of traditional religion for (as Blake put the matter) "binding with briars my joys and desires”. Morality, especially sexual morality, trammels the free personality; we stand in need of something more in accord with human nature.

Next comes Marx who, as a materialist, thinks that there is no 'human nature' with which to be in accord: we are what we make ourselves. Appeals to a fixed or given 'human nature', as to morality and religion, are mere mists between ourselves and things-as-they-are. By way of Nietzsche, who was certain that Enlightenment thinkers had been too cowardly to confront the consequences of their own dismissal of God, Trueman brings us to Freud, who contended that all civilisations are defined by the behaviours they forbid — and that what they forbid is sexual. For the individual to liberate himself or herself from oppression by society, therefore, we need to embrace the suppressed sexual urges inside ourselves. Trueman contends that Freud's successors, such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, connected the insights of Marx and Freud: the result was the politicisation of sex and the birth of the New Left. From there, the road was clear, over several decades, to stand all the traditional sexual mores on their heads: the old virtues were mere oppression, and so actually wicked; previously stigmatised behaviours, on the other hand, were simultaneously marks of one's victimhood and of one's liberation from it — and so actually virtuous. And — here we are.

Though Trueman writes as a Christian, the average infidel reader will seldom be distracted by that point. Even if the overall argument of the book leaves the religion discarded by Rousseau and his successors looking far preferable to our current sorry state, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self reads less like a work of Christian apologetics than as a rigorous examination of why we are where we are, and how the heck we got here. And it is precisely the non-combative tone of the whole that will make this readable by people of all shades of opinion — even, perhaps, by those whose worldview stands to be desiccated in consequence. Forget the populist angry-head scribblers on the right, who will merely confirm your own indignation: read this instead, and get the bigger picture.
25 people found this helpful
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Niklas Morgan
5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr lesenswert!
Reviewed in Germany on 8 December 2021
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Dieses viel zu wenig bekannte Buch ist mit Sicherheit eines der besten Philosophie bzw Psychologiebücher, die ich in den letzten Jahren gelesen habe.
Brilliante und auch faire Analyse, statt den sonst oft üblichen Polemiken und Strohmann Debatten.

Hier hat jemand gründlich gelesen und nachgedacht und er erklärt den modernen „psychologischen Menschen“. Er spannt einen grossen Bogen von der Aufklärung über die Romantik, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Reich, bis zu Marcuse und den postmodernen Feministinnen und Butler.
Danach versteht man die Komplexität der aktuellen Reizthemen des aktuellen Zeitgeists, von Gender über Homoehe bis Transgender.

Erstaunlich, dass ein religiöser Theologe so analytisch fundiert die Position der Gegenseite erklären kann, ohne dabei unfair oder herablassend zu werden. Sehr bemerkenswert. Werde es aufgrund der Informationsdichte sicherlich bald nochmals lesen.
6 people found this helpful
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Cjbevan
5.0 out of 5 stars the history of thought and assumption to the present construct
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 July 2021
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21 07 15 the rise and triumph of the modern self
The phrase ‘I am a woman trapped in a man’s body’ epitomises our arrival at a point in time where public discourse seems to have changed out of all semblance, not only to our past, recent and distant, but even out from a firm anchor in reality itself. This phrase previously would have been considered nonsensical, or as symptom of mental disorder, but now has credence in public life and even controversially in medicine. This has not happened overnight, nor even particularly quickly, but is the most recent manifestation of trends that have been going on for centuries. Trueman in this book describes how we have come to this point, the world of emotivism and the world of deathworks.
He traces the history of thought and assumption to the present construct of the Psychological Man of Phillip Reiff , living out the Expressive Individualism of Charles Taylor, from the Reformation, via Rousseau ; then the Romantics Wordsworth, Shelley and Blake ; and then the overtly political and iconoclastic Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin ; and finally the politicisation of sex, of Freud being appropriated into Marxism by the Gramsci, and then the Frankfurt School firstly by such as Horkheimer and Fromm, and then Reich, Del Noce, and Marcuse . We have arrived to an anti-culture.
What emerges is a history of thought about human nature; a genealogy of the contemporary worldview which currently appears to dominate in so many ways. The present cultural conflicts are in origin presenting issues based upon conflicting world views, each with deep emotional and philosophical roots.
One thing I noticed particularly when reading out loud is that Trueman actually writes well. He shapes sentences carefully, with economy and imagination. There is not spare word in the book. There is no waffle or ambiguity. That also means that much is said, thus requiring careful thought and reflection, making this a demanding but rewarding book to read.
One recurring theme is the agreement, repeatedly, throughout the history of these ideas, of the hatred for family life. Thinkers such as Godwin considered marriage the most odious of all monopolies . The Romantics, such as Shelley, disliked the family as being confining and thus inauthentic . Marx opposed the family as bourgeois and oppressive. The New Left, such as Reich, sees the family as part of the authoritarian state, inculcating the values of the thus embedded status quo . Del Noce sees a problem in parents overseeing the sexual education of their children, since for him this is part of growing political awareness, and thus the province of the state, so the family should be dismantled . Feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, with her loathing of motherhood, and Shulamith Firestone’s desire for universal pansexuality, the polymorphous perversity of Freud , all agree with their predecessors that the tyranny of the family must be abolished. This chimes chillingly with avowed intention of the Black Lives Matter movement to destroy hetero-normativity, and the oppressive patriarchal family.
A salutary warning at the end is that we are all living in conversation with our times and places, as much as fish live in the sea. Our churches become shaped by appeals to emotive personal stories, not historical precedent, nor rigorous theology, nor solid metaphysical foundations for decisions (hence the booing when the Bible was quoted in Synod ); a process very much part of therapeutic culture. But those in theory attempting to avoid such pitfalls can fall into therapeutic and aesthetic ways of thinking all too easily. Churches can reflect such things, even when in theory upholding a mostly orthodox faith.
This is most easily demonstrated by the elements of choice ; we choose to be Christians, then we choose to which church we go; we choose whether to attend locally, or go further afield; we choose by denomination, worship style, preaching, theology, company, or times of events; we can choose a church as if choosing a cat or a meal. Choice is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part . We live in a world where the un-tethering of what it means to be human from any kind of metaphysical framework has rendered the notion of universal human dignity something that threatens to push the West into a kind of totalitarian anarchy .
The church must not simply imitate the world in its zero-sum confrontations, its sarcasm, and ad hominem polemics. Moral and ethical decisions must be soundly founded upon solid thought, not emotive appeals, nor attractive personas. Christianity that is authentic is dogmatic, doctrinal, and assertive, as well as compassionate . The church must function as authentic community . That community must be united in compassion, as well as in dogma, doctrine, and assertion.
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IC
5.0 out of 5 stars A readable, intelligent tracing of the roots of the psychology of the (post)modern mind
Reviewed in Canada on 14 April 2021
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The book basically tracks the shift from general belief in the externality of truth and the values of Western culture were gradually replaced with the present belief that inwardness and private "authenticity" are the determinants of truth and morality. Working from Rousseau to Foucault, touching such noteworthiness as Shelley and Blake, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Darwin, Gramsci and Marcuse, the author explains how the current dominant mindset became alienated from truth, facts, evidence and science, and how the current political climate became irrationally polarized.

This is quite a readable book. It doesn't hurt to have some background in the humanities in higher education, if you want to get the most out of this. But the ordinary person could also read through, even if he/she had to take some information for granted. And it's well worth the price.
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