Book cover of The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920

Book description

Socializing the psyche; 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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Soul's Economy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jeffrey Sklansky is that rare academic with a writer’s literary imagination, which serves the reader well in engaging The Soul’s Economy, a riveting and dense intellectual history of the market’s emergence as the organizing principle of not only economic life, but of a distinctly new moral sensibility between 1820 and 1920. 

Sklansky explores this far-reaching turn of events through a series of dedicated readings of America’s leading philosophers and pundits of the times, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Dewey, who collectively recast the pursuit of wealth into an ethic of personal rectitude and even the source…

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