In America, and an ever-growing portion of the world, individuals and markets are commonly and closely associated. More precisely, the constellation of concepts, values, and practices collected under terms like āthe individualā and āindividualismā are commonly associated with the constellation of concepts, values, practices, and institutional arrangements variously collected under terms like ācapitalismā and āthe (free) market .ā 1 Such association is pervasive in public culture, something often assumed or believed unreflectively, and reiterated by media and public officials. Yet the tendency also has a substantial scholarly pedigree. The linkages between individualism and market systems are analyzed, elaborated, criticized, and defended by a diverse array of modern thinkersāfrom historians and sociologists like Lorenzo Infantino, Charles Sellers, and Max Weber to classical liberals and libertarians like Friedrich von Hayek, Tibor Machan, Robert Nozick, Adam Smith, and Herbert Spencer, socialists and social democrats like Karl Marx, Henri de Saint-Simon, and C.B. MacPherson, liberals like John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, communitarians and conservatives like Robert Bellah and Leo Strauss, feminists like Nancy Fraser and Eva Feder Kittay, to postmodernists like Michel Foucault, and critical theorists like Herbert Marcuse. Though diverse in their methods, assumptions, and aims, the works of such diverse scholars cluster around the common notion that individualism and the market are fated to one anotherāif we would have one, we must have the other. Some, like Hayek or Mill, claim a positive relationship between the two, maintaining that individuals flourish most under market systems; others, like Bellah or Marx, claim a negative relationship, and maintain that human personality and flourishing are deformed by the market and its attendant individualism. Whether because of shared values, mentality, or practices, the consensus view is that individualism and the market are, so to speak, siblings.
This widely held notion is not without some basis. The two have, as a rule, developed together. What we commonly refer to as āthe individualā was temporally and practically co-emergent with complex market economies, each conditioning and conditioned by the other (Oakeshott 1991, 363ā83). The two have also been joined rhetorically and ideologically in political, legal, and cultural struggles, such as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century battles over the genesis of the regulatory state in America, and in the opposition invoked on nearly all sides during the Cold War between individualism and capitalism on the one hand, and collectivism and communism on the other. Through both choice and chance, the conceptual and practical connections between individualism and the market have become so entrenched in the modern imagination that few seriously entertain the possibility that one could exist without, or could stand in real tension with, the other.
The central purpose of this book is to complicate the often assumed and rarely questioned partnership between the individual and the market by examining the intertwined history of these two figures as their concepts and practices developed in nineteenth-century America. That time and place provide especially fertile ground for such a study. As historian Daniel Walker Howe has observed, Americans in that century widely ācherished the ideal of self-makingā as the common yet personal vocation of all (2007, 656). Characterizing the prevailing spirit of the time, in 1827, Ralph Waldo Emerson described this transformative century as āthe age of the first person singularā (1963, 70). While it would be an overstatement to say that nineteenth-century America was a nation of individualists (in a philosophical sense), it is no exaggeration to say that Americans in that century came to understand themselves ever more fully as individuals, and to embrace ideals of individuality and individualism out of practical opportunity and necessity if not systematic ideology. Individualism was on the march, even in the words and deeds of those who did not intend to advance it. Yet, āthe meaning of āindividualismā depends on the historical settingā and in America, both during and since the nineteenth century, the emergence and maturation of a market economy have been a central, inescapable feature of that setting (Riesman 1954, 26). Historians now widely agree that antebellum America was the scene of a āmarket revolution ,ā a profound economic transformation that ramified throughout most every aspect of life. 2 The nationās lingering resemblances to the Jeffersonian ideals of independent, largely self-sufficient yeoman farmers and artisans gave way to a new age of individual striving and new ideals of self-improvement. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the market ācame of age and entrepreneurship became the primary model of American identity,ā with āindividualism ā becoming āa grandiloquent name for the go-ahead creedā of this new market culture (Sandage 2005, 3; 94). By the end of the century, industrialization and further integration of domestic and international markets brought to fruition what Karl Polanyi called āthe Great Transformation,ā further affecting how individuals lived and understood themselves and their world (1944/2001). Individualism and the market thus underwent their maturation together, and to understand either one we must be attentive to their historical imbrications.
This study is animated and guided by an overarching question: how did individualism take shape in nineteenth-century America, and how was its articulation prompted, conditioned, and constrained by the rise of the market? Providing even a partial answer to this question entails tracing some of the most important interconnections between two of nineteenth-century Americaās most prominent and powerful ideas. I approach answering this question partly by way of a synthetic historical survey meant to explore the interwoven developmental trajectories of individualism and the market, and partly by way of analytical, exegetical, and conceptual study of three iconic nineteenth-century American individualists: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803ā1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817ā1862), and William Graham Sumner (1840ā1910). These thinkers articulate three distinct conceptions of individualism by way of distinct accounts of how the individual and the market are related, for better or for worse. My aim is neither to attack nor to defend individualism or any of the representative thinkers herein discussed, but to explore their respective doctrines. If there is an agenda behind this work, it is to show that there is more than one kind of individualism , more than one aspect of life in a market society, and more than one way to understand how the individual stands to the market, even just within the scope of nineteenth-century American political and social thought. These various strands of individualism developed in the context of an ascendant market order, but, I argue, they do not all indifferently mirror, justify, or serve the market. The existence of such diverse and robust visions of individualism, and of how individuals relate to markets and to one another through them, betokens the simplicity of prevailing notions that individualist doctrines are at bottom theories of the ideal market participant.
My choice of Emerson, Thoreau, and Sumner is calculated to illustrate this plurality of individualisms. Each of them developed their ideas in a critical engagement with the transformations of their day, and their thought ācannot be separated from market practices and institutions in their own timeā (Teichgraeber 1995, 267). Each confronts conditions at the heart of American economic, social, and political life, and each presents a āheroic ideal of the self-constructed individual ā (Howe 1997, 109). Yet they arrive at interestingly different understandings of the relationship between the individual and the market: Emerson believes that the self-reliant individual might avail herself of the opportunities furnished by a market economy; Thoreau repudiates the market as the antagonist of the deliberate life of individuality; and Sumner wholeheartedly embraces the market as the social stage upon which the natural struggle between individuals plays out. Each thus renders an account of individualism that is addressed to the palpable realities of the rise and maturation of the market system in nineteenth-century America, though they each depict different points along a notional continuum.
While there exist numerous works devoted in significant measure to the economic thought of Emerson, Thoreau, and, to a lesser extent, Sumner, many of which I draw upon and respond to in what follows, few extant works study these thinkersā respective doctrines of individualism as attempts to navigate the conditions of life in a market society, and none substantially address all three along any common theme whatsoever. Yet Emerson, Thoreau, and Sumner present a valuable array of ideas regarding how the individual can properly flourish as an individual under the sorts of economic conditions that are all but ubiquitous in the world as we know it today. Thus, I do not merely hope to close an alleged gap in the literature, I hope to better illustrate the continuing relevance of these thinkers and to provoke more adequate appreciation and understanding of the depth and diversity of individualism by way of their examples. What is more, they provide glimpses of the development of individualism and the market across the bulk of a century. Their works illustrate how the maturation of the American market system prompted changed understandings of the individual and individualism, making some views seem more or less plausible than others (though I shall suggest that all three remain compelling, even if they have not all remained fashionable). Arranging the study that follows in roughly chronological orderāmoving from Emerson to Thoreau to Sumnerāallows their respective doctrines to index economic and cultural change, highlighting the historical accounts contained in their works in addition to their philosophical, literary, and critical content. I hope thereby to present related images comprising an intellectual triptych, rather than disconnected snapshots in the history of ideas. However, the main concepts I shall employ throughout this study warrant some contextualization and elaboration at the outset.
1.1 Individuals, Individuality, Individualism
Individualism and individuality are ideas premised upon a distinctly modern (and, in its origins, Western) conception what it means to be a person and a self. According to this modern conception, ā[w]e think of ourselves as people with frontiers, our personalities divided from each other as our bodies visibly are. Whatever ties of love or loyalty may bind us to other people, we are aware that there is an inner being of our own; that we are individualsā (Morris 1972, 1). Our lives and identities are fundamentally organized around schemes of separation, of inner and outer, of mine and thine, of private and public which delineate between oneself and the rest of the world, however, intensely we may feel ourselves attached to other persons and portions of that world. As I shall use the term, individual refers to this notion that in addition to being separately embodied, each human being exists separately in psychological, agentic, and ethical senses, as a being with thoughts, feelings, purposes, a story, and a personality or character all oneās own. The world in which we live reflects this conception of the individual self in many ways. From language and literature to law and the built environment, our lives, concepts, practices, and institutions commonly reflect the predominant sense that we are each individual centers of (self-)awareness and (self-)experience, capable of acting for and as ourselves, pursuing our own personal hopes and wants, and finding meaning and satisfaction in these endeavors of self-enactment (Oakeshott 1991, 364ā70). That is, we live in a world whose human-made features are typically fitted to the contours of the individual.
Yet it was not always so. Intellectual historians have long suggested that this conception of persons as individuals originated in Western culture during the past millennium. In the nineteenth century, Jacob Burc...