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When Luigi Cornaro, a wealthy and cultured citizen of Venice, publishes in 1558 an essay, repeated many times in subsequent editions, entitled De la vie sobre, it seems to follow a well-established tradition: that of the numerous treatises on diet or health maintenance that have long traced and echoed injunctions and life rules. Yet one first difference cannot fail to emerge, and it is all the more important because it signals a total renewal: the author claims to decide alone, apart from any external advice or knowledge, what suits him or does not. The choice to maintain one’s health, to preserve oneself, to treat oneself would thus belong to the individual, to no other, until a near-absolute certainty: “In reality man can be the perfect physician only of himself.” This is a cultural cue, inherently subjective, far more than scholarly, exclusively intimate as well, yet it reveals a demand utterly distant from the old tracts: the assertion of a subject who claims to govern, in complete independence, his well-being and his health.
A second principle, perhaps less perceived and commented on, precedes such a decision while shedding light on it: the regimen of life no longer has to depend on the position of the stars, the zodiac or the planets, or even the climate, as the oldest tradition insisted. Cornaro explicitly claims to “get rid of” such determinants. Hence the denial of countless forces that the Middle Ages treated as sovereign and inexorable. A decisive certainty even one can admit: the “stars incline… but do not compel.” To free oneself from them must take precedence. The consequence is a renunciation of external powers in favor of inner powers. Nothing more, then, than a claimed and preliminary “liberation,” opening onto a self that is equally claimed.
A third requirement follows, extending the first two: after this emancipation, to perceive deep inclinations, to face inner depth, to explore one’s secrets — taste, emotion, and sensitivity. Luigi Cornaro is evidently convinced: “Each person can, through various experiences, deeply know his temperament, his most hidden dispositions, those same dispositions that long-term observation alone can pierce.” The claim may be grand, even illusory, but it is the inner “feeling,” its exclusive novelty, that must prevail here.
Thus three dynamics dominate in this text, all the more revealing because it comes from a mere European citizen: the dynamics of emancipation, of singularization, of interiorization. All three, deeply linked, traverse time, gain nuance, deepen, diversify, and slowly carry the entire undertaking forward despite resistances and denials.
Should we add how much the bodily experience alone seems to reveal these dynamics as never before, turning to the most concrete and, at the same time, the most sensitive? This same experience remains, however, a far broader route to the history of Western subjectivity: inner design, worldview, personalization, sensitivity. Everything demands, therefore, that we explore, with the greatest breadth and variety, their slow construction, the way in which the Western individual is perfected. A long history, in other words, that alone makes sense of today’s universe. Its originality lies primarily in thinking three processes together, over the longue durée: emancipation, individualization, and interiorization.
To say it plainly, these dynamics do not constitute a continuous march, nor a progressive and homogeneous liberation. They advance through shifts, resistances, returns, and contradictions. Everything thus compels us to measure how this very construction is not without obstacles, failures, or even durable, possible, and verifiable limitations. The West, in particular, has historically built the individual as a subject who becomes increasingly autonomous, even as the contemporary moment reveals how this same autonomy multiplies new dependencies.
The Onset of Modernity. Liberation, Individualization, Interiorization
The Renaissance, in and of itself, provides multiple examples. Emancipation first of all is relational, in Erasmus, when he lashes out in 1523 against lodging houses where promiscuity of close quarters becomes increasingly unacceptable:
“I know nothing more dangerous than these many gatherings where one breathes the same vapor, especially when the body is perspiring… Not to mention garlic burps, winds, and bad breath…”
The stakes are decisive, illustrating an unprecedented aspiration: to condemn long-standing habits that have become a hindrance, if not a form of oppression, and to assert a readiness that others might unduly oppose. A demand for “independence,” in other words, a new, clearly formulated one: “to avoid nuisances, constraints… to maintain and enforce a space of liberty among individuals.”
Emancipation continues as, at the same moment, many techniques are renewed and disseminated, believed to “free” attitudes and behaviors: from the individual watch to the compass, from tools to machines, from mines to canals; all of which leads to the Cartesian assertion whose formidable ambition we know: “to become master and possess of nature.”
This new mastery of “doing” cannot be without consequences: individual assurance asserts itself more. The new presence of self-description, in the social upper echelons, even confirms it in its own way. Jérôme Cardan, the Milanese mathematician and polygraph, in his memoirs from the second half of the sixteenth century, provides a lengthy description of his own appearance. He notes his “moderate height,” his “slightly narrow chest,” his “long and thin neck.” He notes his facial features. A striking relation, revealing for the first time the individual who assesses his appearance, who names his profile, who grants to him and him alone a value that comes from him: individuality as a new wealth, clearly emphasized.
Growing self-assurance, no doubt, leads everyone to examine themselves more, but sociability grows as well, guiding greater self-control. The functioning of the modern state, especially the fully centralized court, particularly transforms the regime of affections. A constraint is thus diffused: the necessity of constant secrecy about what can be felt intimately. “To succeed” consists in hiding; “to attain” rests on concealment. Only calculated concealment wins against ever-watchful eyes: emotions more vividly stirred, perhaps, but emotions always more concealed; the only path to overcoming rivalries. Moreover, such a model spreads across society, becomes banal, aided by the expansion of administration, the market, and urban space. Interiority thus gains unprecedented importance, expanding the private universe, growing in dimension and reach.
Western modernity thus gives increasing substance to the three dynamics that particular behaviors clearly highlight.
Finally, it must not be forgotten that in the classical world there were many limits to such developments, many practices of domination as well as many practices that ignored any singularity. Distant lands are the first example, where beings encountered were judged almost foreign to humanity. Meanwhile women and children, from classical Europe, remained the objects of submission as evident as it was unquestioned.
All these signs, it must be said again, reveal the evident historicity of the “making” of the Western individual: meaningful advances, and yet enduring partialities, persistent blind spots, or even notable progress that would soon become derisory in view of a future more assertive of itself.
The Enlightenment Universe. The Invention of an Inalienable Autonomy
The Enlightenment confirms such historicity, while introducing a major renewal. The emblematic sentence of Immanuel Kant, answering in 1784 the question “What is Enlightenment?” asserts the evident: “Enlightenment is the courage to use your own understanding without being guided by others.” This frees the individual, beyond the mere regimen of life, in a more intimate, if not deeper, mode.
The image of the future citizen therefore haunts such certainties, culminating in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, where a single formula, read by Sieyès in the preamble to the Constitution on July 20, 1789, gathers attention: “All men are the sole proprietors of their persons, and this property is inalienable.”
“Property,” “inalienability”—new terms, reconstructing as much as individual rights: the expansion of what is deemed “intolerable,” the intensification of belonging to oneself. The private sphere’s structuring already shows this, reconfiguring the old rejection of promiscuities in favor of a more assertive singularity: housing distribution changes, especially among the wealthy. A framed, worked individualization slowly spreads. More secluded spaces are created, more differentiated activities are invented, domestic spaces fragment: “drawing room,” “library,” “dressing room,” “wardrobe,” and so forth. Hence these ever more personal gestures, previously unknown, even if reserved for the privileged.
The greater acceptance of singularity then contributes to an equally great recognition of inclinations, affections, and even desires. A discreet but important pleasure, previously strongly constrained, can now be expressed: libertine practices, among others, and the appearance of freer representations in engravings and paintings, the half-nudes of Boucher or Watteau, works that a rich collector might place in his private cabinet, even if he must hide them behind a curtain. These practices remain marginal but new and partially shared—emancipation, finally, as revealing as it is socially contained. Interiority thereby enriches itself with domesticated desires.
Emancipation, Individualization, Interiorization are thus replayed with the Enlightenment, deeper, more won, more intensely felt. As are their possible limits: a supposed “inalienable property of the person” while slavery remains tolerated in colonies, or in 1800 when French women remained fully dependent on their husbands. Dynamics still inscribed, in other words, in a precise era, which a near future cannot fail to reveal as partial or provisional.
The Pre-Contemporary Universe. The Space Conquered and the Inner Trauma
Emancipation reappears with the nineteenth century and industrial society, to revolutionize what is possible. A changed world.
The mastery of space, the transformation of travel, marks a major emblem of emancipation: from stagecoaches to trains, from roads to networks, from canals to navigable waterways, a real unbottling occurs, turning distant, traditionally foreign places into near neighbors. The rail would even allow us to “devour distances,” reshaping space and time, transforming landmarks and perceptions. Even Jules Janin’s poetic remark at the inauguration of the Paris–Saint-Germain Railway in 1837—“One does not walk, one glides”—hints at this new reality.
Another mode of freedom, still from the Enlightenment, leads to different, yet major consequences. The autonomy gained from late eighteenth-century codes directly transforms how one relates to oneself. Individuality strengthens. Self-appraisal shifts: no longer just a description of oneself, but an “improvement” of oneself — of appearance, of possible uniqueness. The Journal for All translates this in the mid-nineteenth century into a call for “egalitarian” mastery: “We live in full freedom, and this state of affairs has created for every woman a responsibility for her beauty; there is no longer any excuse…” A rethought ideal, for Baudelaire, the “modern beauty,” which obliges everyone to “invent themselves.”
Autonomy grows ever more assertive, finally, but with it, the nineteenth century introduces questions of originality: “Why does freedom from all restraint also permit inner disturbances to exist?”; “Why does personal independence permit the maintenance of moral troubles?” Thomas de Quincey, the first to answer this question in 1822, does so distinctly. His subject initially seems far: he seeks to explain massive opium use that began as a dental remedy. A disturbing fact: rising doses, a compulsive craving, dull pains increasingly caused. His narrative soon shifts, probing forgotten sufferings, childhood traces possibly reactivated. The idea arises of past affects, buried but still within tormenting memory. He mentions “deep layers” of the self, becoming, in his eyes, “indispensable keys.” A fundamental finding emerges: inner space grows, effects arise unexpectedly. A new interiority is born, heavy, gnawing. A psychic wound, a “trauma” not yet named, asserts itself at the core of the subject.
From space to thought, from individualization to sensitivity, the personal universe is overturned with the nineteenth century. The individual exists with greater intensity, despite breakages and chaos. The three dynamics — emancipation, individualization, interiorization — have hollowed out and intensified existence, rather than muted it.
The Contemporary Universe. Metamorphoses of Autonomy
That these three dynamics continue to grow today is hardly surprising; it forbids treating the “contemporary individual” as a ruptured moment. On the contrary, a conquest is pursued by deepening it. Starting with a subversion of space where contemporary technology seems to have multiplied possibilities, making them as varied as they are experienced, soon seen as “natural.”
But beyond space, it is the continuation of intimate emancipation that must be grasped and distinguished, in which feminine liberation plays a decisive role, even if it remains circumscribed and “limited.” The figure of Brigitte Bardot marks one of these symbolic milestones. In the 1950s, a figure arose who embodied a total novelty: less passive than active, less object than subject, less dominated than emancipated, living at her own pace, choosing her loves, abandoning or keeping them according to a rule that belongs only to her, achieving an autonomy at the most “inner” level of the self. She acts according to her conscience with the “courage to do what she likes, when she likes,” as a character from Roger Vadim put it. Commenting on And God Created Woman, Jane Fonda phrases it as the convergence of a physical aesthetic and a cultural moment: “The film was one of the first to speak of women’s liberation.”
This intimate emancipation concerns men and women alike, renewing a critique of constraints that is becoming ever more exhaustive—those that govern relationships between people, stigmatizing situations once accepted or underrecognized, and forging words to name them better. The term “harassment,” for instance, is among those that became established in the 1990s, establishing the existence of a new crime, initially targeting sexual behavior and personal affront, before extending far beyond. Notions of “influence” or “invisible hurt,” redefining personal boundaries in the 2000s, extend this same trajectory. All this shows that as the feeling of autonomy grows, the demand for intimate defense sharpens—what history alone can show. Hence shifts in legal benchmarks and the search for emancipation in things that were not named until now.
Such a growing assertion of autonomy can, then, contribute to promoting singularities ever more intensely. This is almost what fashion itself has invented: “Don’t follow my style, create your own,” says a magazine, flattering the most distinctive part of the subject; “Because I’m Worth It” — this global motto of L’Oréal since 1971, has become one of the most universal symbols of self-affirmation. A triumph of an increasingly assumed individuality.
And it is precisely because such individuality earns legitimacy like never before that it questions itself even more deeply, and more than before, about possible disorders, its limits, or any unmastered well-being. The psychic wound or trauma thus comes to the forefront in such a quest, a presence tucked away in the subconscious: a tentacled interiority, interiority amplified. The injury is even multiplied as never before. Hence responses that are ever more varied, corresponding to a world of “inside” that is itself increasingly stratified. The “listening,” among other things, now imposes itself as a method of elucidation, revealing an almost infinite spectrum of possible self-work: all kinds of dieting practices, corporeal psychotherapies, meditation and mental focus, consumption of psychotropics, investments in worlds of “mindfulness.” The wealth of inner life thus redefines and reveals openings and constraints woven together.
Risks and Dangers. The Great Reversal of Dependencies
Undoubtedly, the three dynamics have intensified as never before, sketching a universe that appears more and more “managed.”
Yet a critical view has grown, focusing first on emancipation itself — a radical contradiction, quietly present already at the end of the nineteenth century, when the sense of a “destructive economy” emerged, driven by the intense forests industry that was seen as menacing, even dangerous, according to minor testimonies at the time, suggesting new perils: possible soil exhaustion, deterioration of crops, alteration of hydrological regimes, risks to physical lives. The classical perspective inverts: a cosmos once portrayed as subordinate now becomes dominant. The triumphant emancipation turns into nearly powerless enslavement.
Today it is no longer only deforestation at stake, but unprecedented, growing threats related to fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, and widespread communications: chemical degradations, diffusion of pollutants, toxicity of artificial substances, climate disturbances. Everything has changed: what was seen as a milieu to rule becomes an obstacle and a hazard. A form of “control” perhaps, but at the expense of air purity, the fluidity of relationships, and the quality of the common world. An unprecedented challenge has presented itself, for which responses do not yet appear optimally suited.
Beyond such paradoxical emancipation, the expansion of an unlimited confidence in the “self” must be emphasized — the mirage of omnipotence and its dangers, once the inexorable rise of individualization is acknowledged. The extreme illusion of the belief that “anything is possible”: slogans read in many discourses and blogs, where seriousness yields to the ridiculous, “I can create whatever I desire…”
A more serious danger when it edges into the political, leading to powers that mix personal certainties with a lack of empathy, combining absolute assurance and irresponsibility. Donald Trump, former president of the United States, is among those: emancipation, no doubt, through social influence as well as gained confidence, yet certainty, to the point of obsession, of an individual legitimacy so overpowering that it borders on the limitless. The denial of any collective reality — information, economic facts, science, culture — is not merely a personal drift: it is the extreme culmination of a dynamic that places the “self” above all, until it renders external resistance illegitimate. A point of an extended history, up to surpassing it by distorting it. The heart of the debate remains the irrepressible ascendancy of the “subject” as an absolute reference, delegitimizing any possible resistance: a malignant culmination of a long history.
Beyond such caricatures, sensitivity and the increased presence of affect remain among the hallmarks of the Western individual. A single indicator, namely the relation to violence, testifies to this. Over the long term, homicide numbers in France have notably fallen: from 1.1 per 100,000 people in 1936 to 0.8 in 1968. More concretely, 1,406 homicides were recorded in 1994, 948 in 2022, and 1,010 in 2023 — an increase of about 6.5 percent in one year, which does not invalidate the downward trend observed over several decades. Still, there is an increased sensitivity to attacks and violence, confirmed by a major symbolic legal decision: the abolition of the death penalty in France on October 9, 1981.
This leads to a double consequence: the fear of armed conflict and the hope that its impossibility is attainable, on the one hand; while the “shadow side” and “hatred,” forged by different powers and regimes, act against this supposed fragility and especially against the individualization that accompanies it, on the other. What then becomes of the Western individual when surrounding powers do not necessarily share the same political anthropology? There is no doubt that this is how the current confrontation can be understood, the return of war to Europe: a Russia that dismisses a West judged too free, too “emancipated,” accused of “decadent morals,” of too individual behaviors — assumed, then, as a threat to any state solidarity. History seems to invert itself: “good” turning into “evil,” “success” into “failure,” state and empire blindness advancing against a decisive and complex autonomy.
The history of the Western individual thus shows how it cannot be reduced to mere “individualism.” It is also a history of a particular enrichment, clearly original, where transformations of the relation to the world, continuous emancipation, and the interiorization of affections converge. But it also shows that it cannot end with emancipation, let alone with the sharpening of the sensitive. It opens, instead, onto a contemporary universe in which the autonomy won must now learn to accommodate strong and unprecedented dependencies that it cannot ignore any longer.