History

Jackson Lears, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 464 pp. Hardback, $32.00.

Jackson Lears’s 2003 book Something for Nothing: Luck in America concludes at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where, in 1987, a lavish celebration was held for the eighty-third birthday of Benny Binion, the casino mogul (and convicted killer) who started the World Series of Poker. Lears’s interest there was in the mythologizing of the gambler—someone whose fate lies outside the controlled managerial systems of the modern world. Despite the best efforts of casinos, luck is something that can’t quite be organized. Its results can’t be known in advance.

Lears’s work has built upon his successful first book, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981), which took a critical look at the dominant rhetoric of “progress” at the turn of the century and found an anxious undercurrent of worries about the loss of moral authority in a modernizing American culture. A leading cultural historian of the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Lears is clearly interested in human desires that cannot be contained. He has written about the pursuit of grace, the pursuit of luck, and now, in his new book, Animal Spirits, the pursuit of “vitality.”

The term “animal spirits” had its heyday in the nineteenth century, though it has recently returned among economic analysts who want to address—and perhaps manage—the irrational forces that can sway markets. Wells Fargo Bank, for instance, has an “Animal Spirits Index.” This modern usage of the term, as Lears makes clear, descends from John Maynard Keynes’s tremendously influential General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which argued that most investment decisions were “a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction,” rather than “an exact calculation of benefits to come.” Economists, in other words, should not assume that people are always acting rationally in their own self-interest. Gut feelings are bigger drivers than cool calculations.

Lears offers an intellectual history of this term, “animal spirits,” and of the conviction that some vital, non-material life-force animates our individual and social behaviors. The book begins in the 1600s with the poetry of John Donne and concludes with the activism of Norman Mailer, but the bulk of it focuses on Lears’s wheelhouse, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the middle of the 1800s, “animal spirits” referred to the mysterious, Frankensteinian forces that distinguished organic from inorganic matter—some sort of quasi-electrical fluid that animates and energizes. Hence the Western fads both for indigenous “animism” (usually a primitivist fantasy about pre-modern cultures’ access to the spirit world) and for pseudo-scientific “animal magnetism” (which might explain both hypnosis and ghosts).

Animal Spirits explains how the biological curiosity of the 1800s becomes the economic theorization of the 1900s. This can best be seen around the turn of the century, with the rising popularity of the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson—and their respective hypotheses regarding libido and élan vital. Such individual vital traits were easily applied to entire societies, potentially explaining market fluctuations. What was vitalism in the nineteenth century simply became capitalism in the twentieth.

It’s also at the turn of the century, as Lears has been arguing for decades, that faith in modern progress was met with the antimodern suspicion that too much was being lost. Vitalist discourse suggested to urban elites that the enervating forces of modern civilization need to be counteracted by exercise and athleticism—the “strenuous life” so vigorously promoted by Theodore Roosevelt (a man repeatedly described in the newspapers as “full of animal spirits”). As the wilderness of the frontier was eliminated, its supposed charms became more desirable. “It is not coincidental,” writes Lears, “that the ‘wild card’ was introduced into poker by Americans at about the same time—the 1870s and after—that wildness was being systematically tamed and paradoxically revalued as something precious that was about to disappear.”

The work of Animal Spirits lies in its careful attention to shifts in ontological and rhetorical properties, and Lears’s scholarly acumen may scare away the casual reader. Section headings such as “Headlong Insouciance” and “Libido and Its Vicissitudes” indicate the book’s intellectual tenor. Research seems to lean heavily on combing archives and databases of old newspapers and magazines and searching for the phrase “animal spirits.” As a result, somewhat random examples are occasionally privileged over other possibilities, and some figures not explicitly using the term “animal spirits” are overlooked. (Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, whose 1925 classic Science and the Modern World challenged Cartesian dualism, is surprisingly never mentioned.)

But the most appealing element here is the cast of characters; the examination of various “-isms” is always linked to the work of colorful personalities. New figures enter and exit every few pages, some of them well known, some quite remarkable. Andrew Jackson Davis, for instance, gained fame in the 1850s as “The Poughkeepsie Seer.” Davis claimed to possess clairvoyant powers; by entering a mesmeric trance, he could read papers stored in drawers and describe places he had never physically visited. He could perceive, he insisted, the interiors of human beings—“the hidden sources of their luminous magnetical emanations.” Helen Wilmans became, in the 1890s, a national spokesperson for what she called “Mental Science”—a kind of “cognitive therapy” that involved both “thinking your way to prosperity” and “thinking your way to health.”

This is a wide-ranging history that should challenge received notions about personal and national energy.

Of the twelve chapters in this book, Chapters 5 and 8 stand out as especially strong and might be excerpted for potential readers who would only like to sample this intellectual history. Chapter 5 follows the reception of Charles Darwin’s work in the United States in the decades after the Civil War—and the “seismic shift in cultural values” they occasioned, as “animal life” took on new meanings. Lears persuasively links evolutionary theorizing to the “emotional theology” of Henry Ward Beecher, America’s most famous preacher at the time. Beecher’s attention to “life force” transformed enthusiasm into energy.

Chapter 8, meanwhile, focuses on the 1910s and on the American preference for Henri Bergson (and his élan vital) over Sigmund Freud. It moves from Randolph Bourne’s celebration of youth to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s “sexual radicalism” to celebrity economist Irving Fisher’s obsession with hygiene. Lears considers Luhan’s Greenwich Village salon, but shortly thereafter she would move to Taos, New Mexico, running a literary colony there until her death in 1962. These leaps should suggest the breathtaking scope of Animal Spirits. This is a wide-ranging history that should challenge received notions about personal and national energy.