<i>The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good Josh Lauer (bio) The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. By John Lauritz Larson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii+208. $75/$20.99. Free markets, as the recent financial collapse so spectacularly illustrated, are never really free. Credit, contracts, price systems, and speculative investment—all part and parcel of modern capitalism—necessarily ensnare even the politically free in bonds of economic dependency. It cannot be otherwise; markets are not abstractions but social relationships between human actors and the institutions they inhabit. Those who engage in market economies cannot help but forfeit some measure of autonomy when they wait for a buyer or employer to pay them or trust the value of their government's currency. This tension between political and economic freedom, between the American ideals of self-determination and national progress, is at the heart of John Larson's history of the market revolution. What emerges, in retrospect, is a Faustian deal in which post-revolutionary Americans traded agrarian self-sufficiency for the heady promises of far-flung interdependence. Conceived as an undergraduate primer, Larson's concise and well-written book introduces the concept of the market revolution and its major chronological and thematic problems. He addresses two basic questions: When exactly did the transition to a market economy occur and what impact did this have on the everyday lives of Americans? Both questions are the subject of voluminous interpretation, as Larson duly notes and his useful bibliographic essay summarizes. The first chapter contextualizes the political ideology and economic system of the Early Republic—significantly, the conflation of political and economic liberalism—and efforts to establish a functional financial system. The second describes the internal improvement projects and technological developments, from transportation and manufacturing to communications, that facilitated and accelerated (but did not determine) changing economic and social relationships before 1860. The third examines the penetration of impersonal commercial values among various constituencies, including farmers, artisans, factory workers, entrepreneurs, women, African Americans, and southerners. The fourth discusses key theoretical lenses (capitalist political economy, communism, the slavery question, social Darwinism) through which nineteenth-century critics understood and debated the transformation of American economic life. The book is punctuated by two interludes devoted to the Panics of 1819 and 1837, a conceit that works well to mimic the disruptions they describe, and closes with an epilogue on the financial crisis of 2008. Larson's survey of political, economic, and technological change is evenhanded and insightful, but more important is the author's effort to [End Page 197] anchor the impact of the market revolution in everyday experience. By mapping out the domains and varieties of antebellum market culture, Larson's deceptively slight book is expansive. The leitmotif that emerges is that of increasing mediation—financial, institutional, and technological—as the face-to-face moral economy gave way to the imperatives of distance, speed, anonymity, rationalization, and quantification. If Larson's struggle to identify the "tipping point" (p. 9) at which American society passed from neighborly idyll to cold-hearted capitalism is stymied, it is because the process was so complex that even contemporaries regarded the whirlwinds of change with "maddening ambivalence" (p. 98). A typical antebellum American, he concedes, was entirely likely to experience the combined forces of modernization and commercial estrangement with a mixture of fear, awe, resentment, and pride. Larson's openness to such contradictions, and his refusal to impose an artificial narrative frame, are admirable. Though the book is synthetic by design (sections on the history of internal improvements and transportation are informed by Larson's prior scholarship), it concludes with an argument. Having had the good fortune of writing this book as a contemporary object lesson unfolded, Larson connects the ideological roots of the antebellum market revolution to the Panic of 2008. Even as the American financial system teetered on the verge of collapse and innocent citizens lost their homes and livelihoods, heated partisan battles were waged over the legitimacy of government intervention. Such battles, Larson explains, highlight the long-standing false choice between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism, between economic...