Synopses & Reviews
The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.
Review
[A] provocative juxtaposition of economic and intellectual history.
Journal of American History
Review
Livingston engages with boundless energy and intelligence technicalities of economic development, the nation's literary traditions, [and] thorny philosophical questions.
Nineteenth-Century Prose
Review
[Q]uite simply, brilliant.
American Historical Review
Review
[A] pathbreaking cultural study, filled with boldly original arguments and provocative reinterpretations of familiar material.
Indiana Magazine of History
Review
Livingston has reached deeply into the resources of literary and cultural theory to produce a new narrative and analytic frame.
Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh