Description: An illuminating exploration of the tensions between self and society in the age of revolutions.
Brief description: Lynn Hunt is distinguished research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author of numerous works, including Inventing Human Rights and Writing History in the Global Era, and a former president of the American Historical Association, she lives in Los Angeles.
Review Quotes: With her celebrated insight and irrepressible curiosity, America's great historian of the revolutionary era explores a foundational struggle of modern life: the paradoxical effort to achieve equality and individual autonomy in societies revealed to shape and thwart them. At once clear-eyed and optimistic, the book is a bracing reminder for our own times that enormous changes can be wrought by the seemingly littlest of things.--Darrin M. McMahon, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea