Self-Made

Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians

By: Tara Isabella Burton

Narrated by: Patricia Santomasso

An exceptional history of ideas and a contemporary critique on the story of self-making: from the Renaissance to the present day

Today's defining celebrities have crafted public personae that walk the tightrope between authenticity and artificiality. Ordinary people now follow suit: lovingly tending our 'personal brands' for economic gain and self-expression alike.

Instagram culture is part of a story that goes back centuries. The vision that we not only can but should 'make' our own selves to shape our own destiny is an inextricable part of the formation of the modern world.

As traditional powers of pre-modernity - church and throne - waned, a new myth took their place: that of the 'self-made man', whose unique powers of personality - or canny self-presentation - give him not just the opportunity, but the obligation, to remake reality in the image of what he wants it to be.

From the Renaissance genius to the Regency dandy, the American prophets of capitalism to the aspirational übermensch of European fascism, Hollywood's Golden Age to today's Silicon Valley, Self-Made takes us on a dazzling tour of modern history's most prominent self-makers, uncovering both self-making's liberatory power, and the dangers this idea can unleash.

©2023 Tara Isabella Burton (P)2023 PublicAffairs

Critic reviews

'In the spirit of Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright Sided, Tara Isabella Burton delivers a fascinating intellectual and cultural history of our never-ending quest to reinvent ourselves. She masterfully balances high and low culture, ranging from Renaissance sculptors and Parisian Dandies, to American hucksters and Instagram selfies. Self-Made clears through the fog of our current moment and lets us see the methods behind our collective madness.' (Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture)

Tara Isabella Burton's...book charts the engrossing history of the self-made man (and woman) from the geniuses of the Renaissance to present-day reality TV stars. Philosophical, ethical and pragmatic by turns, Burton urgently interrogates the culturally dominant myths of individualism and self-realisation, asking what we lose when we gain what we think we really want: when we make ourselves into gods.' (Carolyne Larrington, author of The Norse Myths: A Guide to Viking and Scandinavian Gods and Heroes)

'What does the Marquis de Sade have to do with David Bowie? Oscar Wilde with Oprah Winfrey? Montaigne with Donald Trump? Learn the fascinating historical and philosophical connections over the past five centuries in this erudite and wildly entertaining study on the fine art of self-creation, one of the modern era's defining cultural traits long before Instagram made it a daily universal habit.' (Tony Perrottet, author of The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe)