The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approach to and criticisms of the idea at the heart of the self-understanding of the modern Western, or bourgeois, from of historical life: the free reflective self-determining subject. Since it is a relativity recent historical development that human beings have come to think of themselves as individual centers of agency and to believe that entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable raising such a question also raises the question of the historical location philosophical reflection itself. What might it mean that is to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection must always be reflection on the historical actuality of its own age? In discussion of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Arendt, Manfred Frank and John McDowell and in examinations of modern institutional practices and modernist art and literature Robert Pippin challenges a number of prevalent views about both the nature and the value of leading one's oen life.