| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past. Ed. by Wilfred M. McClay. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. x, 506 pp. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-8028-6311-9.)

In 1952 Lewis Mumford argued that the growth of "technics" and "the machine arts" in the postwar world had come to threaten the basic values of American life. "To avert a tragic end," Mumford claimed in Art and Technics, "the human person must come back onto the center of the stage ... summoning the forces of life to take part in a new drama" (p. 152). For many years, terms such as "human person" have been discredited by poststructuralists and anti-humanists for carrying the assumption that individuals are largely immune to the forces of history, politics, and economics. As such, over the last forty years "the self" has become the most widely used scholarly term. But as Wilfred M. McClay details in his introduction to this very interesting and expansive collection, "the self" is also a problematic concept, "a moveable and malleable target, one that adapts to changing circumstances, revising its constitution repeatedly over the course of an individual life" (p. 4). The self, then, may have the plasticity to allow for intellectual play and textual intricacy, but "it is, in some fundamental way, unreachable," often floating free of the material anchors that make human life meaningful—a criticism similar, in fact, to the one poststructuralists leveled at liberal humanist ideology (ibid.). This volume offers "human person" as a signifier of an individual "whose nature is bound up in the web of obligations and duties that characterize our actual lives in human history, in human society" (ibid.). Whereas "the self" might suggest interiority, "the person" throws us into the flux of history and other forces that, as Mumford noted in 1952, often challenge an individual's autonomy.

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