Is There An American Self?

Making the American Self, the title of Daniel Walker Howe’s new book, is potentially misleading. Seeing it on display at a recent American Studies Association convention, I expected a work influenced by cultural studies and the “linguistic turn” in intellectual history—a work focusing on the construction of identities and “differences” of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. I assumed that the “American Self” referred to in the title was ironic, and that Howe’s book would be devoted to debunking the notion that such a thing has ever existed or, at the very least, revealing it to be a discursive fiction that has obscured the many ways Americans have constructed their identities in the past.

But Howe has written a very different kind of book. Rejecting the analytic tools and ironic posture of postmodernism, he has produced a lucid, elegant example of conventional intellectual history. His title is meant to be taken literally. It refers to a model of autonomous selfhood that was widely shared by Americans during the early national and antebellum eras—so widely shared, in his view, that it merits being called the “American Self.” At a time when most scholars organize their work around differences, conflict, or dissent, Howe’s focus on shared values and ideals is unusual. In many ways, this is a book reminiscent of consensus history, playing down the differences among the figures he has chosen to examine and scrupulously omitting voices who might have given it a more cacophonous air. This approach will leave many historians—especially social historians—dissatisfied. But there are also virtues to his approach that make the book important and extremely suggestive.

According to Howe, the roots of the American Self lay in Enlightenment thought, particularly in the works of the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, men such as Frances Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith. These thinkers developed an optimistic vision of human nature and human potential that contrasted sharply with the pessimism of Calvinism and exerted a tremendous influence over the American gentry during the eighteenth century. At first, this vision was applied only to elite white men and was compatible with the gentry republicanism of the Founding Fathers. But over time, Howe argues, it was steadily democratized and applied to other kinds of people—middling and poor white men, women, peoples of color. More important, it was also embraced by them, a model of selfhood they consciously chose to adopt. This was made possible by the expansion of commerce and market relations, which increased the range of choices open to ordinary people, as well as by the spread of evangelicalism, which placed a new premium on choice and individual agency. Indeed, the evangelical zeal with which many Americans embraced the ideal of autonomous selfhood led to the creation of new institutions—public schools, asylums, and penitentiaries, for example—through which it was promoted. Embodied in such institutions, articulated in both high and popular culture, the ideal of autonomous selfhood “spread throughout American society,” binding together Americans of different classes, races, and genders (p. 263).

But as an intellectual historian, Howe is less interested in the manner in which the ideal was disseminated than in the ideas that comprised it. Accordingly, his book focuses on prominent intellectuals and reformers and their articulation and use of the ideal of autonomous selfhood. Among the figures whose work he examines are Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. All of these figures, Howe argues, “shared a common model of what human nature was like and how human selves should be constructed” (pp. 1–2). This model was derived from faculty psychology, the dominant paradigm for understanding human nature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Faculty psychology promoted the notion that human nature was divided into components, the most important of which were “understanding” and “will,” the latter referring to “powers of action or motivation” (p. 5...