Books like The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self — picked by fans

Davis tackles the way that depression or sadness came to be medicalized. He reminds us that these feelings are normal, integral parts of the human experience and analyzes how modern people started to view those emotions as abnormal, psychological conditions in need of pharmaceutical treatment. In his account of conversations with people who use anti-depressants, Davis shows that the medicalization of sadness can actually compound the suffering of people who struggle with depression. Is it really normal to be happy all the time? This book suggests it might not be.

Feldman’s title does not conceal his aims: this book presents a criticism of the ideal of authenticity as the highest order of self-expression. That said, much of the book is a careful explanation of how authenticity came to be so highly valued, and it catalogs the positive societal aspirations of authenticity when it is framed as a personal virtue. The concluding chapter offers a supremely-reasoned elaboration of four separate arguments against authenticity, after which Feldman invites us to start “looking outward,” rather than inward.

This is an older book that traces the development of the American definition of happiness from the founding of the nation until the mid-twentieth century. Jones carefully illustrates that happiness transformed from a collective political concept to an individual moral entitlement. His reading of self-help texts shows that earlier Americans tried to achieve happiness by learning to conform themselves to the obligations imposed on them by others outside the self. In contrast, Jones’ investigation shows that the modern understanding of happiness demands individual liberation from the expectations of others, a feat achieved by listening to the internal desires of the self.

If you want to learn about the history of the concept of authenticity and how it is understood in the western world, this is probably the best book to read (after my book, of course!). Charles Taylor is one of the most prominent living philosophers of selfhood, and this book (topping out at only a little over 100 pages) is an easy-to-read digestion of the ideas that he elaborated in his much-longer book Sources of the Self. Taylor is ambivalent about whether personal authenticity is a good or a bad thing in our era. He recognizes the harms imposed by some of the debased forms that it takes in modern society, but Taylor also tries to articulate an ethics that could rehabilitate authenticity in a way that affirms the dignity of and respect for each individual. I don’t like the fence-sitting, but this remains required reading.

I remember first reading Future Shock after buying a battered, orange-coloured paperback edition at a bargain price from one of the second-hand bookshops that once saturated London’s Charing Cross Road.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before how much the increasingly rapid technological changes around us might create a sense of shock—‘future shock’— for some people. It changed my thinking about the influence of technology on our world and the impact it has on people, society, economics, and politics.

Even after all these years, many of Alvin Toffler’s insights and ideas remain just as topical today.

I value this book because, since joining the United Kingdom in 1707, much of Scottish history has been disregarded. Even though I studied history in my Scottish school to a high level, the details of our past were replaced with English history. Well-known radio personality, Billy Kay, brings together a wealth of information about Scotland’s outside influence through the ages. Scotland was one of the first countries to see the benefit of an educated working class, and in the countries to which they emigrated, their learning stood them in good stead. Scottish culture, over hundreds of years before it was incorporated into the United Kingdom, had well-established cultural centers throughout Europe and even as far as Russia.

Despite the Covid pandemic, the two biggest threats to human society are political strife and degradation of its food supply through climate change and population explosion. Darren Qualman provides an easily understood discussion of the latter. He starts with the simple closed-loop plant/animal cycle powered by the sun’s energy, which existed up until about 300 years ago. Then, explains how the discovery of coal and oil, invention of the tractor, and development of a process to convert oil into fertilizer changed all that.

As a teenager, I was taught that the population explosion would cause mass starvation in the near future. Darren explains how force-feeding plants and domesticated animals, now using over 400 million tons of oil-based fertilizer each year, forestalled that. But combined with oil, gas, and coal burned today, human society is living with a time-bomb unless we learn to live with energy now available from the sun.

This is the Harari that looks forward, and that is the one I keep recommending.

I read it just before the pandemic, right as I was turning my agency into a consultancy, which was unfortunate timing. Sapiens looks backward; this one looks at what is coming, and that pulled me in harder. It sits close to the future of work I would actually want, though I do not think we get there, because people reject the things that make them feel bad long before they will change.

I lent my copy to a friend chewing over the same questions. He read it until the spine broke and never gave it back.

I find Sam’s book imperative: love it or hate it, praise it or criticize it; Sam gets us to think seriously about culture and identity as he opens an important debate for our complex democracies to engage with. I taught with Sam at Harvard and never ceased to be amazed by his profound understanding of the world. We may disagree with him, but he certainly gets us talking.

I met Svetlana in the last two years of her life and was deeply impressed by her brilliance in literature and the history of ideas and cultures. She died, tragically, in her mid 50s cutting short her extraordinary career, from childhood and youth in Soviet Russia to her stellar career as a Harvard professor of comparative literature. Of her seven books, this highly original study of nostalgia has been particularly important.

A ground breaking study about longing in its positive and negative forms, focusing on post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, and writers Nabokov, Brodsky, and Kabakov. Erudite, brilliant, and witty, this is a great cross-genre study of our modern condition.