From Econimic Man to Social Self

Gillis J. Harp
Grove City College

SKLANSKY, JEFFREY.  The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920.  Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.  xiii + 313 pp.  Introduction, notes, and index, ISBN 0-8078-5398-4

The Soul's Economy examines a subject both substantial and significant. Between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fundamental transition from classical political economy to social psychology occurred, a shift evident in the writings of a handful of key American thinkers. "While the new psychology described a much more seamless relationship between self and society," Sklansky argues, "in so doing it tended to set aside older questions about the structure of political and economic power" (9). Although a gradual change, the ramifications of this transition were profound and wide-reaching.	1
Sklansky begins by demonstrating how political economy "define[d] the parameters of public debate in the early republic" (5). Mainstream commentators assumed the labor theory of value and understood that labor was the basis of property. In the Founding Era, the majority of white men could realistically hope to possess their own land or business by middle age. Moreover, an egalitarian distribution of property was viewed as essential to the health and longevity of the republic. Because it took class conflict (arising from a maldistribution of property) seriously, the old political economy was a strong voice for social equality and, on occasion, a strong tool for the economically marginalized.	2
Confronted with rapid economic change by the Jacksonian era, Romantics like Ralph W. Emerson, Horace Bushnell and Margaret Fuller came to articulate a different approach. Their critique of eighteenth-century political economy attacked its abstract formalism, individualism and crass materialism. Emerson and others no longer "defined selfhood in terms of independence andÉindependence in terms of control of productive property." By "severing the bond between selfhoodÉand property," these Romantics either overlooked or declined to "question the transformation of self-employed farming and artisan families into propertyless wage earners" (37). On one level, the subjectivism of Transcendentalists offered emancipation from material concerns and some embraced their analysis as an avenue of liberation. Yet by focusing on a higher unity that linked individuals to their larger human community and to nature (and, ultimately, to the divine), American Romantics actually served to legitimate the market society sprouting around them. In Sklansky's apt phrase, their perspective "ironically took the sting out of the emerging class divide" (38).	3
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