These were the starting conditions for what would become an American revolution of the self that would infect us all. It was a vision, unlike that of Freud or the European Christians, that saw the human as something inherently deserving of good and that contained within it everything it needed to make itself healthy and wealthy and smiling. This was, of course, a partial revival of Ancient Greek ideas of the perfectible human self, with its focus on the all-powerful ‘I’. What the two countries shared was their unusual compartmentalized structure: where Greece was a civilization of ‘city
...more
