The English Origins of American Upward Mobility; or, the Invention of Benjamin Franklin

This essay argues that the American rhetoric of upward mobility popularized by Benjamin Franklin originates in a tradition of early modern English writing that emphasizes virtuous labor and living and moderate striving and rising. As seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century economic change and social instability redefined the meanings of labor and ambition, these texts—wealth manuals, prudential proverbs, and life narratives—described the tropes and technologies of “thriving” to an increasingly diverse readership and gave shape, directly and indirectly, to Franklin’s Autobiography and Poor Richard. But if they construct an emergent culture of economic individualism, they are also definitively disciplinary, regulatory, and communitarian, and thus offer a significant challenge to the contemporary American culture of unlimited ambition and growing inequality.