----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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. Copyright (c) 2003 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2850; Fax: 513-529-3308). 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