The following comments and response were presented at a symposium on Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), held at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, on 14 October 2005. The symposium was organized by David Armitage, Peter Gordon and Judith Surkis and was sponsored by the CES's Colloquia in Intellectual and Cultural History.