Henry Carey, Nature, and the Destiny of Man

Abstract

This chapters argues that Henry Carey was the most important economist of the antebellum period. Carey united protectionism into a single, coherent economic ideology. His most significant theoretical accomplishment is the assertion of human agency in the natural economic order, as described by Adam Smith and the British classicists. Carey inverts the relationship between man and nature, making humanity sovereign over what the British economists described as an unbending natural order. For Carey, man is no longer subject to nature’s will; rather humanity controls the natural economic order, extracting from it an economics of affluence that is distinct to the American experience.