The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

Carl Trueman traces the historical development of "expressive individualism," a framework where personal identity is defined by internal feelings rather than external social structures. He analyzes how the West shifted from a mimesis view of the world—where individuals conform to a given order—to a poiesis view, where the self creates its own meaning. The text connects the Romanticism of Rousseau and the psychological theories of Freud to modern shifts in sexual ethics. Trueman argues that the current sexual revolution is the logical conclusion of redefining the human person as a psychological, rather than biological or communal, entity.

This book is written for historians, theologians, and cultural critics seeking to understand the philosophical roots of contemporary social change. Readers look to this work to find a coherent intellectual genealogy of concepts like "liquid modernity" and the politicization of the private self. By the end, the reader possesses a historical vocabulary to explain why traditional moral frameworks lost their cultural authority. It provides a technical analysis of how secularism and technology shifted the basis of human dignity from religious belonging to subjective self-expression.