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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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