Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey Sklansky
offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in
the rise of industrial capitalism.
For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of
selfhood and society came from the tradition of political economy, which
defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of
self-employment. However, the gradual demise of the household economy
rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Large
landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege
of their growing monopoly over productive resources, while dispossessed
farmers and workers charged that a propertyless populace was
incompatible with true liberty and democracy.
Amid the widening class divide, nineteenth-century social theorists
devised a new science of American society that came to be called "social
psychology." The change Sklansky charts begins among Romantic writers
such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, continues through the
polemics of political economists such as Henry George and William Graham
Sumner, and culminates with the pioneers of modern American psychology
and sociology such as William James and Charles Horton Cooley. Together,
these writers reconceived freedom in terms of psychic self-expression
instead of economic self-interest, and they redefined democracy in terms
of cultural kinship rather than social compact.
