Reforming the world

Abstract

FEW HISTORIANS FAMILIAR WITH THE SUBJECT WOULD ARGUE WITH Thomas Haskell's assertion that humanitarian reformers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were consummate interpreters of a new moral universe. They have differed greatly, however, over what compelled them to become reformers-class interest, the market, guilt? Yet despite the breadth of scholarly interest in the sources of humanitarianism a factor in early American reform movements, Robert Abzug's study, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, stands alone in its effort to examine the cosmology of early American reformers. Many aspects of what he defines their cosmology have been studied to one degree or another, but not a whole; not, that is, an intense, all-encompassing, even desperate, attempt by a very passionate group of young reformers to make religious sense of society, economy, race, politics, gender, and physiology (4). One reason for this neglect, Abzug points out in his finely crafted Preface, is the tendency by a fairly substantial body of scholars to assume that religion exists as a conscious or unconscious cover for