"The Right to Purchase Is as Free as the Right to Sell": Defining Consumers as Citizens in the Auction-house Conflicts of the Early Republic
This article explores the commercial turf war over auction houses in the 1820s, a dispute which inadvertently altered how Americans imagined the civic rights and obligations of consumers. Beginning in 1817, east coast merchants embarked on a self-interested crusade to convince Congress to tax auction houses out of existence. As the auctioneers retaliated, this private conflict over profits escalated into a public debate on the state of the nation's political economy. Seeking public sympathy, both sides quickly focused on the needs of purchasers, arguing that their business alone upheld the rights of the consumer in a chaotic and corrupt marketplace. But this strategy failed as the choices and desires of individual shoppers forced both sides to reformulate their understanding of the consumer. As Americans continued to flock to shops that stocked goods bought at auction, merchants in particular conceded that championing the consumer did not serve their cause. Abandoning hope that a tariff would curb the success of the auction-house, the merchants began to argue that consumers must regulate themselves for the good of the nation. By 1828, this argument hardened into a new understanding, that placed the "right to purchase" alongside a set of new obligations, ones that made consumer choice and taste a requirement of good citizenship.
Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860
"Ready-Made Democracy" explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of social life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War. The story begins with the elevation of homespun clothing to a political ideology on the eve of Independence. Homespun clothing tied the productive efforts of the household to those of the nation, becoming a most tangible expression of the citizen's attachment to the public's happiness. Coarse dress did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it. Nevertheless, exhortations of industry and simplicity became a fixture of American discourse over the following century of industrial revolution, as the mass-produced suit emerged as a badge of a uniquely virtuous American polity. It is here, Zakim argues, in the evolution of homespun into its readymade opposite, that men's dress proves to be both material and metaphor for the rise of democratic capitalism - and a site of the new social arrangements of bourgeois life. In thus illuminating the critical links among culture, ideology, political economy, and fashion in antebellum America, "Ready-Made Democracy" will be essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the construction of modern life.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.