The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920Univ of North Carolina Press, 2003 M10 16 - 336 pages Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey Sklansky offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in the rise of industrial capitalism. For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of selfhood and society came from the tradition of political economy, which defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of self-employment. However, the gradual demise of the household economy rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Large landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege of their growing monopoly over productive resources, while dispossessed farmers and workers charged that a propertyless populace was incompatible with true liberty and democracy. Amid the widening class divide, nineteenth-century social theorists devised a new science of American society that came to be called "social psychology." The change Sklansky charts begins among Romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, continues through the polemics of political economists such as Henry George and William Graham Sumner, and culminates with the pioneers of modern American psychology and sociology such as William James and Charles Horton Cooley. Together, these writers reconceived freedom in terms of psychic self-expression instead of economic self-interest, and they redefined democracy in terms of cultural kinship rather than social compact. |
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agrarian American Social Science antebellum basis Bushnell C. B. Macpherson Cambridge University Press capitalist Carey Carey’s Charles Horton Cooley classical political economy common conception conflict contemporary Cooley Cooley’s corporate critique culture democracy Dewey Dewey’s Emerson Essays Fitzhugh Fuller George Fitzhugh George’s Gilded Age Hall Henry George History Horace Bushnell Hughes human nature Ibid ideal ideology independence individual industrial capitalism interests James James’s John John Dewey land liberal liberty Margaret Fuller market relations market society mental moral nineteenth century one’s organization ownership Patten philosophy political and economic private property productive resources Progress and Poverty psychic quoted passage radical reform reprint republic republican Revolution Revolutionary rise Ross self-interest selfhood slave slavery Smith social contract social order social psychology social science Sociology sovereignty spiritual Stanley Hall struggle Sumner theorists theory Thomas tradition United Veblen Ward wealth William William Graham Sumner women writers wrote York