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.
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.