Animal Spirits
The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
“[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
One of Wired's best books of 2023
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Lears (Rebirth of a Nation) attempts to explain in this sprawling study "how animistic thinking survived in the modern Anglo-American world." Characterizing animal spirits as both "a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience and a metaphysical worldview," Lears ranges from the emergence of credit-based capitalism in 18th-century England (he notes that Daniel Defoe thought "credit was to the body economic as animal spirits were to the individual body: a mysterious but essential vital force, an evanescent liquid evaporating into thin air"); to the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, where "enthusiasm for the sheer vitality—the animal spirits—unleashed by war won out over the fear of unreasoning animal instincts"; and the "varieties of black vitality" captured by the writers, musicians, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Lears draws captivating profiles of Americans who embodied "animistic thinking," including mesmeric healer Andrew Jackson Davis, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and inventor Thomas Edison, and his extensive research touches on many fascinating historical eras. However, the concept of animal spirits remains amorphous (somehow, it's everything from "vernacular dance crazes to theoretical innovations in physics and psychology"), making it difficult to draw any firm conclusions about what it means to American history. The result is an entertaining but exhausting survey.
