Inventing Personality examines the early career of Gordon Allport   (1897-1967) to reveal the history of the personality category he   championed. Drawing on an extensive array of previously unpublished   biographical materials, Nicholson masterfully combines biography with   intellectual history to reveal the ways in which Allport's science was   embedded in the cultural politics of America in the 1920s and the 1930s.   He argues that personality's emergence as an object of science was linked   to the gradual demise of character and the self-sacrificing, morally   grounded self that it supported. Carefully highlighting Allport's complex   commitments to both science and spirituality, Nicholson examines the rich   cultural and historical contexts that framed the emergence of personality   as a discipline, revealing multiple (even contradictory) meanings of   "personality" in the language of American selfhood. He asserts that   "personality's" appeal lay in its ability to integrate and obscure the   complex polarities of material and spiritual; old and new; masculine and   feminine; and freedom and control-categories rendered unstable in a new   and distinctively modern age. This book will be invaluable to scholars and  practitioners interested in personality, and it will serve as a model of   scientific biography.

Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood PDF

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