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.