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Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street
“[A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history.” ―Sarah E. Igo, The New York Times Book Review
“Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.” ―Cornel West
A master historian’s retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.
In Animal Spirits , the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within―rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."
Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition―permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos.
Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images
“Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.” ―Cornel West
A master historian’s retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.
In Animal Spirits , the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within―rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."
Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition―permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos.
Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images
464 pages, Hardcover
Published June 20, 2023
17 people are currently reading
298 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 10, 2023
Bourgeois innovation
January 1, 2024
In Animal Spirits, historian Jackson Lears ambitiously traces the concept of vitalism - the notion of a dynamic life force animating the world - across centuries of American thought and culture. As described in this scholarly yet engaging book, the pursuit of vitality emerges as a recurring preoccupation that shaped views on religion, science, economics, art and more.
The book’s broad scope lends insight, even as some connections strain credibility. Ultimately Lears exposes the failures of American modernity to sustain a culture open to mystery. Neither cold rationality nor capitalist metaphors allowed room for the undiscovered. Lears evidently favors a world that admits the possibility of animal spirits, dangers and all. His eloquent critique suggests what we lost when modernity foreclosed the admission of invisible forces.
While not all readers will embrace the vitalist framework, the interdisciplinary mastery and creative analysis on display ensure the book succeeds as a thought-provoking, exhaustive, and exhausting intellectual history.
The book’s broad scope lends insight, even as some connections strain credibility. Ultimately Lears exposes the failures of American modernity to sustain a culture open to mystery. Neither cold rationality nor capitalist metaphors allowed room for the undiscovered. Lears evidently favors a world that admits the possibility of animal spirits, dangers and all. His eloquent critique suggests what we lost when modernity foreclosed the admission of invisible forces.
While not all readers will embrace the vitalist framework, the interdisciplinary mastery and creative analysis on display ensure the book succeeds as a thought-provoking, exhaustive, and exhausting intellectual history.
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June 19, 2023A new book from one of my favorite social commentators!
Book Review ~ Jackson Lears, 'Animal Spirits’: Vitality Rages Against the Machine ~ Shaw’s life force, Freud’s libido, Bergson’s ‘élan vital’—all are expressions of a spark that eludes the control of civilized modernity—Jeremy McCarter @WSJ https://on.wsj.com/3NDMkKi
PERSONS FUN AUTONOMY (?)
Book Review ~ Jackson Lears, 'Animal Spirits’: Vitality Rages Against the Machine ~ Shaw’s life force, Freud’s libido, Bergson’s ‘élan vital’—all are expressions of a spark that eludes the control of civilized modernity—Jeremy McCarter @WSJ https://on.wsj.com/3NDMkKi
PERSONS FUN AUTONOMY (?)
March 16, 2024
I'm not sure I've ever read a 14+ hour book that didn't engage me before, but this was rough. Highly academic, with predictable, unrealistic politics mixed into a discussion of vitality and capitalism. This really reads like a dissertation substantiating a far-fetched thesis with lots of long-winded examples, ie, not how I want to spend my time. Truly, a struggle.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews