| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society. By James E. Block. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. xiv, 658 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-674-00883-9.)
A Nation of Agents is a work of extravagant erudition and originality. James E. Block has read voraciously in the sources, seen things that few have seen before, and put them together as none have done before. He sets forth a new view of American culture, threading his thesis through three centuries of American thought and the preceding century of English thinking besides.	1
To say that Block has brilliantly reconceived the core of the American way of life is to say too little of the immensity of his accomplishment. But to say that he is persuasive is to say too much. A Nation of Agents is as exasperating as it is exhilarating, as infuriating as it is invigorating.	2
It is impossible to convey the intricacy and ingenuity of Block's argument in brief compass. But, overschematically, that argument holds that an Anglo-American Protestant avant-garde averted the specter of a radical empowerment of the individual in early modernity by diverse doctrines of agency. Agents acted on behalf of others. They were deputies. They chose only their own means, to achieve ends they conceded to collective determination. Exactly as agents, they experienced themselves as autonomous and self-reliant even as others considered them conformists.	. . .

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