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Published by EH.NET (January 2003)
Jeffrey Sklansky, _The Soul's Economy: Market and Selfhood in American
Thought, 1820-1920_. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
xiii + 313 pp. $45 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8078-2725-8; $19.95 (paperback), ISBN:
0-8078-5398-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Donald Frey, Department of Economics, Wake Forest
University. <[log in to unmask]>
Jeffrey Sklansky traces the ideas of seventeen nineteenth-century American
intellectuals as they rethought the nature of society and of the individual
in society (see listing at end of review.) He argues that this rethinking
was prompted by nineteenth-century changes in the American economy. The
Revolutionary era's "republican" thought had assumed an autonomous
individual as the locus of economic productivity, buttressed by a wide
dispersion of ownership of productive wealth. Such an individual pursued
economic interests through contracts; society was constructed on this model
(p. 5). This, of course, paralleled the axioms of classical economics,
which became the implicit target of the intellectuals Sklansky covers.
Sklansky pictures an ever-growing dissonance between nineteenth-century
economic reality and the republican model as "manufacturers and planters
laid claim to the mantle of the autonomous individual as they consolidated
control over land, labor and capital" (p.6). According to Sklansky, the
intellectuals he writes about restated the meaning of individuality and
society to conform to this new reality, and in some measure validate it,
while preserving the terminology of the old era. For example, they
"championed free will. But they redirected willpower away from controlling
labor and property, toward controlling belief and habit instead" (p. 8).
Another element common to almost all seventeen thinkers is the
interpretation of concepts once taken as objective reality (e.g., physical
property, natural law, natural prices based on labor input) in subjective
directions (e.g., intellectual property, internalized cultural mores, or
prices reflecting marginal utility). This reconceptualization, along with
others, allowed the emerging concentrated economy to proceed with an
intellectual framework to validate it, a framework not otherwise supplied
by the thought of the Revolutionary era. Sklansky is clear that this
framework had its blind spots, that its fruits were not all good, and that
it may have simply postponed the facing of some issues.
Sklansky's book is the result of many years' acquaintance with his
subjects' writings. It is obvious that he is thoroughly familiar with their
writings and with the nuances of their thought. Nevertheless, this reviewer
would suggest that the reader keep four caveats in mind.
First, in order to sharpen the difference between the ideas of his
nineteenth-century subjects and the Revolutionary-Enlightenment era,
Sklansky may exaggerate differences. For instance, he speaks in one place
of "the momentous shift of the center of economic analysis [in the late
Enlightenment] from the realm of production to the realm of exchange [in
his subjects' thought]" (p. 123). However, one does not find such an
exclusive emphasis on production in Adam Smith, who essentially defines
economic analysis of the earlier period. Very early in _The Wealth of
Nations_ (Book I, Chapter II), Smith famously argued that the full
advantages of the division of labor resulted from the human "propensity to
truck, barter and exchange one thing for another." Thus, Smith hardly
pushed exchange to the periphery of economics.
Second, having perhaps sharpened differences too much in order to create
his thesis, Sklansky tries too hard to make his thinkers fit the pattern he
has established. I am familiar enough with Henry George to be uncomfortable
with Sklansky's conclusion on George. According to Sklansky, Henry George
"defined the bountiful social force of market society in the terms not of
political economy but of modern sociology and psychology ... not in terms
of ownership of resources but in terms of participation in a mainstream of
guiding desires and compelling social norms" (p. 135).
This description hardly describes George's core analysis, which relied on
statements more like the following: "the denser the population the more
minute the subdivision of labor, the greater the economies of production
and distribution" (_Progress and Poverty_, Book III, chapter I). This quote
does not sound like psychology or sociology, but traditional political
economy. As well, there is little about "guiding desires and compelling
social norms" when George writes of urban land (which is the crux of the
matter for him). He writes "[To] labor expended in the subdivided branches
of production, which require proximity to other producers ... [urban land]
will yield much larger returns [than in agriculture]" (_Progress and
Poverty_, Book IV, Chapter II). Not only does this not sound like
psychology or sociology, but it is typical of the technical, economic
analysis that is central to George's answer to the question: how does
progress produce poverty? George's emphasis was strongly on the productive
process (he contributed early notions of scale and agglomeration
economies); on factors of production and their ownership (which the single
tax was to remedy); and on the staples of classical political economy such
as rent theory and the division of labor. Sklansky mars an otherwise
insightful summary of George by extrapolating to a conclusion that lands
too far from the original Henry George.
Third, it is fair enough for Sklansky to define a loose school of thought
and to concentrate on members of that school. However, given that this
school presumably arose in response to an intellectual crisis, Sklansky
probably owes his readers some check on whether other American
intellectuals were aware of this crisis. For example, Francis Wayland (not
one of Sklansky's subjects) in the 1830s authored major texts on moral
philosophy and political economy that
were to become the standards in American colleges. In them, Wayland
promulgated an economics that showed no discomfort with Enlightenment
individualism, property rights based on natural law, laissez-faire,
competitive markets and minimalist government. And he did this while
replacing Malthusian pessimism with an American optimism based on belief in
technological and scientific progress in the realm of production. Judging
from the popularity and durability of Wayland's writings in American
colleges, nineteenth-century economic changes produced no intellectual
crisis in the minds of many.
Fourth, in the nature of his case, Sklansky presents his school of thought
in contrast to what went before. Yet, at least some of the ideas of his
subjects simply restated longstanding themes in American thought. For
example, several of the ideas of Congregationalist theologian Horace
Bushnell, as summarized by Sklansky, hardly were new; and because they were
not new, they can hardly be viewed as a response to the changing economics
of America. Played against Enlightenment rationalism, Bushnell's emphasis
on faith as subjective experience rather than as assent to the objective
truth of doctrines might seem new. However, a good hundred years before
Bushnell, the Methodist John Wesley and Moravians in Europe and America
emphasized religion of the heart. Similarly, evangelical revivalism (from
as early as Jonathan Edwards) surely was an effort to reach the heart of
the listener -- if not in ways Bushnell would have approved.
Sklansky concludes, accurately I think, that Bushnell's emphasis on the
formation of a child's character by its family surely was a "model of
social life in which proprietary autonomy had no place, in which indeed
dependence formed the organizing principle [contrary to the republican
model]" (p. 59). True enough; but as early as the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Cotton Mather implied a role for parents in shaping
their children.
These caveats aside, I believe Sklansky has provided essays that catch much
of the character of the thought of these nineteenth-century American
intellectuals. I base this on familiarity with the writings of some of his
subjects -- admittedly not all. Even when Sklansky goes beyond summarizing
his subjects' ideas, his thesis -- subject to the caveats above -- has
merit. I draw that conclusion, in part, from my acquaintance with some of
the writings of Horace Mann, the pioneer in public education. Although
Sklansky does not include Mann among his seventeen, Mann reacted in much
the way Sklansky's subjects reacted to the conflict between
nineteenth-century realities and Revolutionary era philosophy. In Mann's
terminology, the autonomous individualists who resisted paying education
taxes were essentially irresponsible moral "hermits." He had a clear vision
of the socialization of children by culture; he claimed that society
collectively owed a debt to its children. He defined producers as the
beneficiaries of hundreds of generations'
worth of accumulation of capital and knowledge, not as autonomous
wealth-creators. A main focus of Mann's educational scheme was to create
workers disciplined for the emerging industrial America; as others in
Sklansky's book did, Mann had turned his back on the Revolutionary era's
model of small, autonomous producers who owned their own productive
capital. This is to say that Sklansky's thesis seems generally consistent
with other things I know about the thought of that era.
Sklansky's book covers the following thinkers: R. W. Emerson, Horace
Bushnell, Margaret Fuller in chapter 2; Henry C. Carey, George Fitzhugh and
Henry Hughes in chapter 3; William Graham Sumner and Henry George in
chapter 4; William James, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall in chapter 5;
Simon Pattten, Thorstein Veblen, Lester Ward and Edward Ross in chapter 6;
Thomas and Charles Cooley in chapter 7.
Donald Frey is author of "Francis Wayland's 1830s Textbooks: Evangelical
Ethics and Political Economy," _Journal of the History of Economic
Thought_, June 2002.
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