The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination. By Eyal Chowers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 260p. $49.95.

This is an extremely rich and provocative work, wide in learning, filled with thoughtful interpretations of Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault, among others, and containing many insights into the ways that “modernity” and its consequences for the self have been conceived in the last century. It is also a disturbing work, pointing to what the author argues are apparently inescapable dilemmas for “us” posed by both “our institutions” and “our notions of identity” (p. 197). And it will be a very contested work, first, because of what I think are a number of questionable assertions the author makes about the views of those he discusses, particularly Nietzsche and Weber; second, because of the completely unhistorical and uncontextual methodology the author employs to throw light on these thinkers so close to us in time, yet immersed in such different social and cultural milieus; and third, because of the larger thesis and framework of the interpretation, which convey great depth of concern and sincerity, but which, I think, are very problematical as an interpretation of these thinkers. To deal with the book adequately would require much more extended treatment than a short review can give it here.