| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

A. Kristen Foster. Moral Visions and Material Ambitions: Philadelphia Struggles to Define the Republic, 1776–1836. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. 2004. Pp. 205. $65.00.

In this book, A. Kristen Foster seeks to explain Philadelphia's transition from a fragile classical republican polity, which gained expression in the radical Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, to a competitive economy informed by possessive individualism, which emerged over the next few decades in tandem with the market revolution. Five chapters cover the politics of the American Revolution, tensions between masters and journeymen in the 1790s, working-class radicalism, the rise of the middle class, and, finally, race and gender. Foster's accounts of master craftsmen and of women and African Americans are new and illuminating. Her work on the Quaker City's small employers presents strong evidence for the emergence in the 1790s, before the industrial revolution, of a self-conscious class of small employers united in their own trade associations around common economic interests and around faith in the economic doctrines of Adam Smith. Other parts of her story, however, are well known. The sections on the politics of the revolution essentially follow the work of Ronald Schultz and Steven Rosswurm, and the portrait of William Heighton, the city's visionary labor radical, does not add much to what Louis Arky and Philip Foner have said. The larger story of the decline of republicanism and the rise of individualism covers ground already gone over piecemeal by other scholars. While this book encompasses a longer time frame than most work on the Quaker City, it does not really change what we already know.

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