The Fabric of Self: A Theory of Ethics and Emotions

By Diane Rothbard Margolis

"Margolis illuminates our path through a cluttered conceptual territory. I think this is a straining, important contribution to our understanding of emotion and the self". -- Arlie Russell Hochschild,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300069901
• ISBN13: 9780300069907
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

a truly remarkable book

Once every few years, I read a book that changes the way I understand myself. Professor Margolis may not have intended that purpose when she wrote this book, but it serves well. I teach ethics, and I picked it up accidentally as I browsed my campus bookstore. The idea that our culture offers us a choice of selves--reflected and observable through literature--to construct our own understanding of our lives, our values, and emotions has always appealed to me. This book helps to explain why so much of our culture--based as it is on an "exchanger" view of human worth, seems hollow, self-absorbed, and paralysed. Margolis contributes to our understanding of how gender constructions have grown out of cultural and economic forces...so, for instance, that the idea of romantic love, though real and compelling, is a result of the need for a market-based economy to sustain itself, often at the expense of the freedom and self-actualization of women. Her idea of emotions as the way we navigate the boundaries of our constructed selves explains to me how we can love someone and yet feel so differently about the same things. This is a wondeful, unique, and imaginative book. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in ethics, moral development, psychology, gender, communication, literature, or education.