“A Cultural Historian’s Call of the Wild”: Paul Croce on Jackson Lears’s *Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street*

This masterful history is wide-ranging both in its coverage and its hybrid form. It offers specialized study of the vitalist tradition, broadly understood, in the modern US and Europe, with display of familiar facets of history on those terms. And as a general text culminating in social commentary, it offers a kind of scholar’s textbook, with overview and lively commentary about unconventional facets of culture and with endorsement of a science-supported revival of vitalism. The book is chock full of fascinating stories well told, yet in the midst of the masterful coverage, the meaning of vitalism remains elusive.

Section 1-Animal Spirits on Cultural Display

The title display of “Animal Spirits” offers an informal expression of the vitalist theory about the central significance of life. The subtitle contains a word for the feeling of being alive, “vitality,” and forecasts an eye-catching range of coverage, “from Camp Meeting to Wall Street.” That phrase channels John Kouwenhoven’s American Studies question about how jazz is like skyscrapers—so different in content and personnel yet similar in inspiration, design, and fit to mass society, just as Lears finds kindred vitalist themes manifesting in different social spheres.[1]

In the subtitle, Lears uses twenty-first-century brevity for a sampling of his diverse topics rather than replicating the nineteenth-century convention of the long descriptive title. But imagine if he had…

The American Pursuit of Vitality—Wild and Tamed!—in Mind-Body Relations, the History of Medicine, Animal Intelligence, Early Anthropological Views of Reputed ‘Civilized’ and ‘Primitive’ Humanity, the Evolution of Gender Assumptions, Racial Essentialism and Its Critics, the Social Authority of Science and Technology, Social Scientific Use of Statistics, Social Planning in Government and Business, the Relation of Elite and Folk Cultures, War and Empire, the Rise of Finance Capitalism, the Lure of Marketing, the Relation of Work and Play, Recent Environmentalism, and as Manifesting in a Generous Number of Literary Works of Social Commentary, Duly Explained in a Concise Introduction, 12 Chapters, and 21 Images, Through Exhibition of the Learned Author’s Thorough Knowledge of American History.

Such a title would have both captured Lears’s interest in enduring nineteenth-century cultural patterns and broadcast the book’s topics, even if the twenty-first-century publisher might not have been pleased with such a capacious title.

Lears serves as curator of a cultural cabinet of curiosities and as advocate for the significance of animal spirits shaping thought and culture often with literal use of the phrase. Searching for these would have been a fitting task for digital technologies, and the net result is an engaging array of primary-source references. A few examples hint at the widespread popularity of the phrase, from a Confederate soldier, ten days into his deployment in 1861, proudly reporting “no diminution in animal spirits” (135), to Thomas Alva Edison lauded as a hero for his “ferment of discovery […] overflowing with […] animal spirits” (178). The range of attention included concern, expressed in an 1857 Harper’s Monthly, that “animal spirits could become “violent, spasmodic, […]and exhausting” (130). Without the taming roles of education, sports, and other entertainments, the “sheer excess of animal spirits” would lead to degeneration with “wild girls,” “hooligan” boys, and criminal behavior (193, 195, 200).

Section 2-Whither Vitalism?

The vitalism at the heart of animal spirits is the view that being alive is the starting point for understanding human culture and all non-human biology. Intellectual life in the modern western world has generally ignored that primal point with vitalism scorned for blocking inquiry into material causation. Despite potential ridicule, Lears bravely takes vitalism seriously, albeit mostly in history before the modern and in cultural realms outside science.

Lears frankly reports “my own view” that “currents of vitality … constitute a crucial part of what it means to be human, with “essential” parts of life “share[d] with the nonhuman world” (5). That stance is a crucial part of his role as commentator, especially in the book’s introduction and conclusion. However, in his historical accounts after the Enlightenment, Lears shows impatience with figures who pursued theories of mind and body in relation, and he admires the power of the “new and systematic ways” of science (284). When scientific authority became positivistic confidence in science as the only positive knowledge, his respect shows limits, especially for “positivism’s parsimonious view of mental life” (151). Yet he welcomes steps up from the simplicities of vernacular thinking with social scientific experts now able to comprehend “subjective states” and “organize […] vital energies” (252, 253). In the face of the resulting “incorporation of vitalism,” with organized management of what had been addressed in vitalist terms, Lears remains wistful about “the older vernacular language of animal spirits” with its “more capacious intellectual space” (253, 288).

While scholars translated vitalist impulses into scientific terms, dominant European-American culture associated “animal spirits” with cultural “others” including in Harlem dance halls, among Native Americans retreating from western expansion, and with colonized Filipinos. Yet the “imperial gaze” of the dominant culture, Lears observes, “reveal[ed] troubling truths about the gazer” harboring grudging admiration for these “primitives” in their “abundance of animal spirits, which the ‘overcivilized’ imperialist often lacked” (157). And future inquiries on the agency of non-whites can make use of Lears’s presentation of the Harlem Renaissance as a “vitalist moment” with subaltern status culturally inverted (272).

Lears also identifies vitalism operating in economics, with wealth growing not only from enterprise and labor (free and forced), but also from increased reliance on credit. In 1709, Daniel Defoe called it “the Wheel within the Wheel of all our Commerce,” for its ability to multiply effective capital beyond money in hand (44). The “centrality of confidence” for establishing credit “fostered the animal spirits of feverish investors” (118, 119). And the booms and busts of nineteenth-century finance capitalism included factories and railroads of robust stone and steel built with the “conjuring trick” of confidence-based credit yet vulnerable to being “ripped apart by rumor” (118, 163).

John Maynard Keynes used vitalist thinking to turn economics and business behavior away from its models of rational self-interest toward the importance of animal spirits, “the spontaneous urge to action” (4). This motivated him to abandon conventional “abstinence theory” with savings as a path to prosperity (336). Instead, he promoted growth through the “urge to consume,” which could be stimulated by government deficit spending to “get […] more money in circulation” (336, 330). Continued robust consumption, he insisted “underwrote investment in enterprise and created prosperity” (336). So often seen in contrast with pro-business ideologies, his support of government spending, added money available just as did the magic of credit. This suggests opportunities for further research into Keynesianism’s relation to finance capitalism and polarized politics.

Lears presents Keynes and the American psychologist and philosopher William James as protagonists in his history for their “humane and capacious understanding of animal spirits” (5). Lears praises James’s simultaneous opposition to war and inquiries to understand its appeal for making peace more likely. Applying that approach also to Lears’s commitments has potential for finding healthier alternatives to market exploitation, consumerism, and overuse of natural resources. There are more potentials for use of this philosopher of use to address Lears’s ambivalence about science and positivism, especially with the book’s mention of James’s enlargement of empiricism to include experiences of “sensuous life” not recognized by positivists (179 and 207), and his grounding in physical facts to complement claims about the influence of mind (181).

Despite the positive potentials in animal spirits, Lears also detects their role fueling war and empire. He discusses the US-Mexico and Civil Wars with focus on “the sheer vitality—the animal spirits—unleashed by war” (126), especially “war as entertainment” for “emotional regeneration” (124-25). Along with these callous cruelties, the US stride into global expansion starting in 1898 with fighting in the Caribbean and the Philippines and the conversion of Spanish colonies into American possessions, Lears observes, brought “channeling of animal spirits into conventional military heroism and a broader ethic of mastery” (198). His iconic example is Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Rider popularity “sustaining a mythic promise” of a “vanishing but vaguely regenerative frontier” (198).

Section 3-Vitalism Shape Shifting Across Polarized Divides

In his evaluation of the decades after the Second World War, Lears’s criticism of militarism turns to alarm. “Cold War military policy” used “ingenious rationalization[s]” of the social sciences for worldwide warfare and global nuclear terror (371). And despite 1960s explorations of vitalism in peaceful directions, Ronald Reagan in the 1980s brought a “revival of militaristic vitalism” (374). In the next decades, beneath the polarized divisions of Democrats and Republicans, Lears maintains that the “neoliberal self” supported by both sides “intrudes instrumentalist market assumptions into every corner of human experience” (377). Lears finds in recent history both leftist reactions against vitality-muffling “technocratic expertise” and right-wing “market fundamentalism” supporting the free “flow of animal spirits on Wall Street” (376).

Keynes astutely noticed the importance of animal spirits, but he overlooked their harm to nature; Lears defends him in ways akin to neo-liberal stances, saying he would not have questioned the mass consumption he helped to unleash, but “would have likely proposed policy measures to contain its destructive effects” (337). Lears displays a similar ambivalence in his own history. After characterizing vitalism in the spirit of materialist scientific dismissal as a belief in “lesser spirits animating living creatures” (383), he endorses the environmental movement as a “revalued” version of vitalism. However, he praises it for trends that exhibit classic “animistic” thinking, including depictions of “earth as a living organism, […] yearnings to reconnect body and mind, […] explorations of qi [the vital energy of life in traditional Chinese healing], which resonate strikingly with [the nineteenth-century American] vision of a vitalist spiritual force, [and…] vitalist feminism” (383). Environmentalism focuses on self and community. These they could influence, while politics “remained beyond popular control” (383). Cultural versions of vitalism, Lears suggests, have supported a range of populist impulses—and that points to a rich vein for connecting cultural vitalism to political polarization.

Section 4-Vitalist Resources

Just as Jackson Lears has written his book on two levels, as specialized cultural history of vitalism and as comprehensive wide-ranging commentary, so too readers can approach the book in different ways. For those ready to read remarkable stories, the book is a treasure trove, with openings for learning about non-mainstream vitalist-leaning thoughts, especially as manifest in cultural expression. And for those already holding those sympathies, this book will supply historical antecedents to current practices in these directions. Among those looking for closer explanations, the movement across topics may frustrate especially with the shifts in judgment about animal spirits ranging from hearty endorsement especially in its historical and cultural forms to impatience with vitalism for not showing sufficient fidelity to modern science. That ambivalence could itself become a step toward further research, starting with support from James who treated ambivalence as a resource for understanding disparate parts of life, including both endorsement of scientific inquiry and explorations of immaterial life, mind, spirituality, and emotions circulating within the material world.[2]

Those interested in these realms of religion, science, philosophy, and psychology and their histories can reap great benefits from not only the author’s intelligent turns of phrase and great stories, but also from the potentials Lears provides for use of this comprehensive cultural history of vitalism as a platform for future studies. Despite attempts by so many to tame animal spirits, tamp down vitality, and dismiss vitalism, he shows that the myriad experiences that follow from being alive have endured and even thrived in a range of cultural forms. And in its own vital life as a kind of scholarly textbook, presented under the star of vitalism, this book provides wonderful slices of American cultural life from the perspective of energetic vitality. That will make for a great read for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students preparing for field exams. No matter the audience, all readers are in a for a treat with this masterful history.

NOTES

[1] Kouwenhoven, Made in America: The Arts in Modern American Civilization (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1948), 265-67.

[2] James distanced himself from scientific methods that reduced “life” to “dry clod[s]” of matter and favored “the principle of life” as “matter … incredibly refined.” On mind, he identified “one primal stuff or material in the world,… [namely,] pure experience,… [which] becomes the subject… [and] the object known” in everyday understanding. On spirituality, James spoke of the “immanence of God in creation,” with “the spiritual … in the midst of nature” and human physiology of mind the “subliminal” doorway to the “more” of human religions and relations with the divine. And on emotions, he explained that “the bodily changes… and … our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.” The Works of William James, Frederick Burkhardt, et al., eds., 19 vols: A Pluralistic Universe, 1909/1977, 76; Pragmatism, 1907/1975, 50; Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912/1976, 4-5; Pluralistic Universe, 1909/1977, 22, 70; Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902/1985, 170 and 400; Principles of Psychology, 1890/1981, 1063. On James, Lears shows sympathy for his spiritual leanings, with awareness that “matter and mind were interdependent,” yet expresses skepticism toward those spiritual views in presenting James affirming “the importance of material life” as a check on “mind over matter” in New Thought (181).