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THE NEWBERRY SEMINAR IN AMERICAN SOCIAL HISTORY 
 
"Buy Cheap, Sell Dear": Social Constructions of the Market Ethos, 
Economic "Justice," and Competitive Hierarchy in Antebellum Society 
 
Jonathon Glickstein 
University of California, Santa Barbara 
 
at The Newberry Library (Chicago) 
Thursday, May 20, 1997 
3:30-5:30 p.m. 
 
This paper is the draft of part of a book on early nineteenth-century 
perceptions of manual labor. It treats the general subject of middle- and 
working-class representations of labor's "extrinsic rewards" in antebellum 
society and is concerned with much-debated issues of class consciousness 
among wage-earners during early industrialization. Competitive free market 
forces imposed considerable economic and cultural pressures on workers to 
behave in self-maximizing ways, yet they commonly exhibited, in strike 
manifestos and other documents, a yearning for something "better" than the 
capitalist market's "rules of the game." The paper's exploration of class 
consciousness includes several issues: the pull of material and 
occupational 
success (as embodied by early- nineteenth-century entrepreneurial 
capitalists and professional men), labor reform movements' reception of the 
radical, anticapitalist versions of the labor theory of value (which the 
paper takes to be emblematic of worker ambivalence to the emergent 
occupational hierarchy), and mainstream political party ideologies. 
 
***** 
 
If you plan to attend, please call Beth Rillema at (312) 255-3524 or e-mail 
[log in to unmask] for a copy of the paper.  The seminar format assumes 
that all participants have read the essay, and all those who request a 
paper 
will attend the seminar. 
 
Beth Rillema 
<[log in to unmask]> 
 
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