About the Book
What does it mean to be an American, and how have individual Americans consciously endeavoured to create their own identity? "Self-improvement", "self-culture", and "to make something of oneself" were all terms used from Colonial to Victorian times. This quest has been a powerful cultural imperative for hundreds of years. This book explores the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Lincoln, and Dorothea Dix, among others, engaged in discussions about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behaviour, and what can be done about the social problems that these create. The book reveals how Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it, and looks at the pursuit of identity in all walks of life, while still grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity.
Table of Contents:
Part I Virtue and passion in the American Enlightenment: Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and the problem of human nature; the American founders and the Scottish Enlightenment; the political psychology of "The Federalist". Part II Constructing character in Antebellum America: the emerging ideal of self-improvement; self-made men - Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; shaping the selves of others. Part III The cultivation of the self among the New England Romantics: the platonic quest in New England; Margaret Fuller's heroic ideal of womanhood; the constructed self against the state.
Review :
"Making the American Self" is an important book...[Howe's] achievement...is hardly limited to fulfilling his stated goal of proving that a reexamination of 'the place of morality and the "moral sense" in the process of character-formation, ' both individual and national, is long overdue. For along the way, he shows that this effort must not neglect the role of religion in the making of the American self. And in that, Daniel Walker Howe more broadly suggests that American history is a matter best not left to those who worship exclusively in the Temple of Reason.--K. P. Van Anglen "Religion and the Arts "
"Making the American Self" is at once a history of, and argument for, the process of self-construction. Focusing on selected American figures and their writings on the self, Daniel Walker Howe maps out a wide-ranging discourse on self-making running from roots in faculty psychology and the Scottish Enlightenment to the reincarnation of self-constructions in Romanticism and Transcendentalism. The writers whom Howe analyzes are a diverse lot, but he gives them collective coherence through his thesis, which he develops with striking erudition, deep conviction, and luminous clarity...Howe, it should be acknowledged, is a brilliant lumper whose explication of these diverse American texts on the self will help the reader see not only how the disciplined realism of faculty psychology created important boundaries for nineteenth-century liberalism, but also why such an amalgam might serve well today.--Norma Basch "Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences "
Howe succeeds triumphantly in linking the cultural gestures of politicos like Madison and Lincoln with the formal systems of thinkers like Edwards, and middle-brow culture brokers like Mann, Emerson, and Fuller. His skill in dovetailing these otherwise angular and resistant minds illuminates landscapes of the American intellect that the pragmatic narcosis of American public philosophy had for long closed off to view.--Allen C. Guelzo "Books & Culture "
In a thoroughly researched and skillfully written book, Daniel Walker Howe traces the faculty psychology fostered by 'classical learning, Renaissance humanism, Christian theology, Enlightenment science, and Scottish-American moral philosophy' in prominent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American thinkers...Howe [has] masterful insights for American intellectual historians who, in their efforts to show the dynamics of change, have perhaps drawn too sharp a contrast between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the romantic movement. In "Making the American Self", Howe never minimizes the rich diversity of his subjects' thought, but he artfully binds the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers together with his theme and in the process offers convincing solutions to historiographical disputes about the influences of Europe on the American mind.--John W. Kuehl "North Carolina Historical Review "
Making the American Self is at once a history of, and argument for, the process of self-construction. Focusing on selected American figures and their writings on the self, Daniel Walker Howe maps out a wide-ranging discourse on self-making running from roots in faculty psychology and the Scottish Enlightenment to the reincarnation of self-constructions in Romanticism and Transcendentalism. The writers whom Howe analyzes are a diverse lot, but he gives them collective coherence through his thesis, which he develops with striking erudition, deep conviction, and luminous clarity...Howe, it should be acknowledged, is a brilliant lumper whose explication of these diverse American texts on the self will help the reader see not only how the disciplined realism of faculty psychology created important boundaries for nineteenth-century liberalism, but also why such an amalgam might serve well today.
In this intellectual history, Howe explores how Americans have developed their individualism or, as Jefferson phrased it, their 'pursuit of happiness.' Howe...discusses figures like Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Margaret Fuller...An erudite study.
"Making the American Self is at once a history of, and argument for, the process of self-construction. Focusing on selected American figures and their writings on the self, Daniel Walker Howe maps out a wide-ranging discourse on self-making running from roots in faculty psychology and the Scottish Enlightenment to the reincarnation of self-constructions in Romanticism and Transcendentalism. The writers whom Howe analyzes are a diverse lot, but he gives them collective coherence through his thesis, which he develops with striking erudition, deep conviction, and luminous clarity...Howe, it should be acknowledged, is a brilliant lumper whose explication of these diverse American texts on the self will help the reader see not only how the disciplined realism of faculty psychology created important boundaries for nineteenth-century liberalism, but also why such an amalgam might serve well today.
