Review of Michael Zakim’s *Accounting for Capitalism: The World The Clerk Made*

Accounting for Capitalism is the best intellectual history of American constipation you will ever read.

Constipation is—in case that subject doesn’t tantalize you—only one of many subjects that Michael Zakim covers in this brilliant study of antebellum political economy, and in each subject he either creates remarkably fresh readings of familiar material or makes wholly unexpected connections and dazzling insights. One learns dozens of pointillist details about the life of an antebellum clerk, from the kind of lectures he attended to the kind of pen nibs he used, but each detail is woven into not only a larger structure of analysis but a larger structure of feeling as well.

Zakim refers to his book’s subject as “the interaction between the moral and the material,” but “moral” here has the broad, almost eighteenth-century connotations of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments rather than the cramped and crabby sense with which we use it today—a sense that is seldom distant from “moralizing.”

What Zakim means by moral is something more like “spiritual,” although again a certain cultural inflexibility lets us down: the book is not about religion, but about the self, about those parts of the self that people variously wrestle with, indulge, suppress, despair over, enjoy, and try to ignore. It is, to use a term from the period, about the human faculties, but it is also—to use a Freudian term—about the human drives, and it is most of all about the way those faculties and drives touch down in the flesh, in the way the back aches from hunching over to copy out a bill of lading or the way the lungs feel in a room that needs an open window. And it is about the way the bowels feel on a noxious diet that is crammed into a few fugitive minutes of “bolting” because one must always be on the move, always pursuing the business of self-making.

 

This is a familiar story, and Zakim pays his debts unstintingly in a delightful enfilade of informative and frequently argumentative endnotes. What distinguishes Zakim’s story from, say, Daniel Walker Howe’s Making the American Self, Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution, Mary Ryan’s The Cradle of the Middle Class, or Jeffrey Sklansky’s The Soul’s Economy (all works that cover similar “spiritual” territory) is—as with a Henry James novel—its point of view. Here’s Zakim’s own description of the book:

The story that follows is, as such, an account of the winners written from the bottom up. This is a social history of capital that constitutes an alternative kind of subaltern study—not an attempt to redeem the social margins from the amnesia of a ruling ideology but a search for the everyday sources of that amnesia, an exploration of the minutiae of a cultural system that so resolutely, and convincingly, reinvented civic life in the form of a business deal.

“An account of the winners written from the bottom up” is a strikingly accurate description of much of the new history of capitalism, particularly that which—like Accounting for Capitalism—reconstructs not the world of physical commodities but instead the realm of finance—insurance, credit, equity—and its tentacles into law, social and economic thought, and political development.

Rather than track the global circulation of a particular commodity or the growth of a particular firm as it opens new plants, buys new machines, and hires and disciplines new workers, these historians reconstruct the capitalism of paper and handshakes—the economic relations that are represented in words rather than materialized in iron or muscle. This capitalism is still embodied—hence the constipation—but it is a diaphanous, elusive capitalism. It is a history of capitalization even more than it is a history of capital; it is a history of things imagined as assets or revenue streams rather than a history of things making things, people making things, or things making people. The mantra of this historical mode is Marx and Engels’s “all that is solid melts into air.”

Some of the finest practitioners of this subgenre of history are often consciously literary both in terms of the material they use—Melville’s Bartleby is a favorite—and in their style, which can eschew the plainspokenness of most historical writing. Instead, these writers advance their arguments with a kind of playfulness that—unexpectedly—adds greater weight to simple historical or historiographical connections. Through wordplay and irony, historians like Scott Sandage or Dan Bouk turn the history of capitalism into a story worthy of Ibsen or Dreiser, chunked full of a kind of optimistic anguish and anguished optimism that challenges one of the oldest American myths: the self-made man.

In all of this, I think they owe a debt (one that Zakim amply acknowledges) to the circle of scholars who produced the important volume of essays The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 in 1983. Zakim has himself edited (with Gary Kornblith) a kind of sequel volume to that book, 2012’s Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America. In it are many of the pathbreaking scholars of this subgenre of the history of capitalism—Jonathan Levy, Edward Baptist, Elizabeth Blackmar (whose work on rent is also another point of origin for this subgenre), Jeffrey Sklansky, and Zakim himself. Jean-Christophe Agnew—who contributed to The Culture of Consumption—provides an illuminating coda to the volume.

Agnew also suggests that this mode or subgenre of the history of capitalism might be called “anonymous history,” after the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, whose Mechanization Takes Command was the source of the title for Zakim and Kornblith. It is an anonymous history not because it has no named persons in it—in fact, it frequently has quite well-known personages in it—but because its quarry is what he calls the “cumulative cultural consequences” of “the financial devices and technologies… by which Americans adapted (and were adapted to) the intensifying capitalization of land, labor, and goods of the nineteenth century.”

Another word we might use in place of “anonymous” is “intangible,” a word that can at once encompass experience and affect as well as all the brainwork—the mental routines that make paperwork (a huge subject in Zakim’s book) legible, the professional norms that distinguish a young man on the make from a loafer, the “financial devices and technologies” that spin wagers and promises into specie—that Zakim’s clerks undertook. Zakim’s book is a triumph of an “intangible turn” which has been gestating—I’d argue—since the early 1980s but is now fully coming to fruition.