Adrie Kusserow argues that, for too long, social theorists interested in cultural conceptions of the self have treated mainstream North American individualism as a homogeneous, self-evident category. Although many North Americans may, indeed, share an ideology of individualism, Kusserow suggests that class relations shape the ways that individualism is experienced, articulated, and transmitted to the next generation. In her book, Kusserow offers an account of how parents and teachers in three neighborhoods in New York City conceptualize a child’s “self” and socialize their children into class-based identities. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s scholarship on habitus, Kusserow aims to examine the relationship between conceptions of individualism and the reproduction of social inequalities. Kusserow offers new insights into the relationship between cultural ideas about the person and social class in North America, although she ultimately raises more questions than she answers.

Kusserow provides a detailed account of gaining access to the communities as well as of her own positioning. She worked in three neighborhoods: two in Queens (Kelley and Queenston), one white, working class and one mixed, lower-working class, and the third an upper-class, white neighborhood in Manhattan (Parkside). Kusserow is careful to point out that although gender, ethnicity, and race are certainly imbricated in the workings of social class, she does not address them (p. 8). Nevertheless, by choosing predominantly white communities, Kusserow has implicitly included race, albeit as an unmarked category. Throughout the book, Kusserow points to interesting directions her work might have taken had she included race or gender, which can be frustrating, especially given that she is poised to engage discussions of race (whiteness) and class.

After a review of the literature, which is so broad that it is not helpful to her argument, Kusserow gets to the heart of the analysis. In ch. 3–5, using interview data, she compares and contrasts parents’ “ethnoconceptions of the child’s self.” In ch. 6 and 7, she examines preschools in the three communities, focusing on teachers’ conceptions of the child’s self as enacted in exchanges with children. Kusserow’s main finding is that individualism can be qualified as “hard” or “soft,” with the working-class communities tending toward hard individualism and the upper-class community toward soft individualism. Hard individualism is divided into hard protective individualism (Queenston) and hard projective individualism (Kelley). This reflects that parents experience Queenston as a dangerous place from which children needed to be protected and that Kelley parents, as working class but upwardly mobile, were preparing their children to change their socioeconomic status (p. 57). In contrast, in upper-class Parkside, soft individualism, which included the notion of a psychologized self, prevailed. Kusserow draws on the metaphors that parents frequently used to evoke their conceptions of the child’s self. The children in Parkside, for example, were compared to flowers blossoming, whereas Queenston parents used fortress metaphors and those in Kelley used sports metaphors (endurance and strength).

A surprising omission in the text was children’s voices. Readers have little idea of how children responded to their parents or their peers except for some reported exchanges in classrooms with teachers. Kusserow cites the language-socialization literature that shows that children are active in their own socialization, although she does not engage this approach rigorously. This would explain why, as she portrays them, the children seem like empty vessels awaiting their class-based futures. Instead, Kusserow adopts the theory that socialization is a form of adaptation to the environment. This is an overly mechanistic understanding of complex processes that produce subjectivities.

The book is most intriguing when direct comparisons are made among the different communities. Then the reader is able to see both the subtle and explicit differences in conceptions of the self articulated through individualism. Especially provocative is Kusserow’s discussion of the upper-class emphasis on the need to know “the true self” to be successful and “excellent” in a career (p. 163). In these discussions, she reveals the ways that parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about individualism create expectations for participation in class-based positions.

Kusserow touches on some of the broader political implications of her work primarily in the concluding chapter. An important insight is her suggestion that upper-class conceptions of individualism (consciously or not) obfuscate class hierarchies while naturalizing and reproducing elite status, which is an important insight. Kusserow concludes with a series of provocative questions, such as the implications for working-class children when a soft form of individualism is privileged in the classroom (p. 187). If these questions had been integrated in and addressed throughout the text, however, Kusserow might have provided broader theoretical insights than she does into the relationship between individualisms across social classes and the reproduction of social inequality.