The Commerce of Thought: Professional Authority and Business Ethics in 19th-Century America

Abstract

This essay explores the ways that professions seek to claim social distinction by investing particular ways of knowing with moral authority. Through close analysis of popular representations of merchants in conduct books, business manuals, periodicals such asHunt's Merchant's Magazine, and biographical sketches, it describes a pervasive campaign to define business as a form of mental work. Representing the marketplace as a distinctively American school for character, merchants and their advocates sought to appropriate the moral authority traditionally associated with the learned professions of the ministry, the law, and medicine. Developing a critique of elitist pedagogy based on solitary reading, this campaign sought to identity expert knowledge with the practical experience of business. Redefining the relation between study and professional authority, the rhetoric of business helped to alter the symbolic value of education and to transform the nature of ethical reflection for liberal capitalism.