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"[A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history." -Sarah E. Igo, The New York Times Book Review "Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.'' -Cornel West A master historian's retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today. In Animal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual's spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the "Poughkeepsie Seer") and the "New Thought" pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the "god within-rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am." Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors' "animal spirits," these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition-permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images

The relationship between economics and culture is an uneasy one. Many observers view these two areas as separate or even antagonistic. In recent years, scholars have developed new models favoring either economics (in a post-Marxist approach) or culture as the foundational or encompassing aspect of national societies and international interaction, but there are also more integrationist positions. In an innovative manner, this volume brings together contributions from economists and cultural specialists who address core questions on the subject of the influence economics has on culture and the way in which culture(s) may impact economics: What are the historical and sociocultural roots of national economies? What are the effects of economic globalization and cultural transnationalism, but also of localization, on the interplay of culture and economy? How do the demands of business shape social, economic and cultural values? Do national cultures develop different, culturally specific business ethics? What do we mean by "commodification of culture", but also by "culturalization of commodities"? Which changes is the role of elite culture undergoing in an increasingly economic world?