Individualism, for Alex Zakaras, functions as both a description of American society and a moral ideal. Here, it means that America “is and ought to be (a) a polity devoted to the expansion of private liberty and (b) a meritocratic society in which individuals are responsible for their own fates” (p. 20). Zakaras identifies three strains of American political myth centered on the individual and traces their evolution in the Jacksonian era. These are the myth of the independent proprietor, that of the rights-bearer, and that of the self-made man (p. 5). In his account, the myths forged in the Jacksonian era have shaped both dominant political discourses and dissenting ones to this day. While these myths are more pronounced on the political right than the left, Zakaras contends, they compete and intermingle over time as they are reappropriated.
Zakaras’s claim is that in the crucible of Jacksonian America, beliefs from the founding era were fundamentally transformed, partly owing to the optimism of religious revivals, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Newtonian science. A more optimistic view of human nature and less emphasis on the need for government coercion emerged—especially among Jacksonian Democrats. These nineteenth-century transformations included the three versions of individualism, and in this period, individual self-interest became a benign motivation. I would note that this last transformation was relevant to establishing political parties as legitimate opposition; the role that Van Buren played in this shift is nicely explored by Jeffrey Selinger in Embracing Dissent (2016). American political discourse, Zakaras contends, is recognizable from this period forward. Jacksonian Era thinkers believed in American exceptionalism; while they sometimes read and appropriated European thinkers, their political discourse was largely a closed system.
Zakaras argues that even radicals and egalitarian movements derive from this framework, and points to some activists who resisted dominant narratives, often revising them to make radically different arguments for ambitious egalitarian goals. The richest treatment offered is of abolitionist thought, although there is some attention to antebellum labor activists.
Zakaras clearly roots for more egalitarian outcomes and reminds readers frequently of the racial rather than class hierarchy of the Jacksonians. Yet especially when characterizing the ideas and struggles for greater equality of post-Jacksonian women, Native Americans, Blacks, laborers, and undesired immigrants, he relies on a relatively narrow range of white male scholars, neglecting some major primary and secondary sources. In this sense, this book, while an important addition to the literature on American political beliefs, replicates some of the issues that this lengthy literature has exhibited.
If you’ve been wanting to do a deep dive into the various strains of political thought forged by antebellum Democrats and Whigs, read this book. These partisans were generally enamored of the market but drew different lessons about the role government should play in economic matters. Democrats, railing against monopolies, speculators, and banks, thought government policies created special privileges and generally interfered with the proper and natural distribution of market rewards. Whigs thought unfettered freedom combined with the discipline of individual self-improvement promoted economic mobility. For 239 pages, we learn how founding ideas morphed and developed into the 1840s versions of these three myths; most of the attention is given to strains of Jacksonian Democratic thought (with one chapter devoted to the Whigs). Only in the Afterword section does Zakaras move to industrialization and the Gilded Age. The Civil War is absent. Apart from a brief conclusion and a few allusions, The Roots of American Individualism does not move beyond the nineteenth century.
This would not be problematic except that Zakaras emphasizes the direct lineage between strains of thought in the Jacksonian years and contemporary movements and political rhetoric. He states but does not demonstrate that the American left from the Civil War through the civil rights and feminist movements (and the twenty-first century push for health care as a human right) drew upon the strain of abolitionist thought that insisted the federal government should protect individual rights from assault, so that the federal government became an important agent of emancipation (p. 195). This morphed into an agenda of federal government intervention in state and local life. A schematic diagram of lineages, resembling a family tree and including what variant of Jacksonian era ideas fueled what twentieth-century movement, would have been clarifying if reasons and some evidence were added toward the end of the volume.
Zakaras cites various scholars approvingly and includes others in footnotes but does not situate his work relative to major interpreters of American political thought such as Louis Hartz, David Potter, Robert Wiebe, Michael Kammen, J.G.A. Pocock, Sacvan Bercovitch, James E. Block, and David Greenstone. This is particularly surprising in the case of Hartz (who is mentioned), since Zakaras’s argument tracks Hartz in several ways, including Hartz’s location of the founding of the myth of the self-made man in the same generation Zakaras believes it gelled (though Hartz is inattentive to religion). Both believe that class was of little salience in nineteenth-century political thought, which patterned later discourse. While Zakaras tells a richly complex story, it is difficult to understand what is clearly unique about the argument without better self-location.
The Roots of American Individualism implicitly invites questions of constitutional interpretation. Are current originalists working with constitutional understandings filtered through the Jacksonian Age? For Zakaras, notions of unenumerated natural rights are owing to early nineteenth-century glosses on Jefferson and Paine. I would enjoy seeing this book in conversation with Simon Gilhooley’s recent Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution (2020), since Gilhooley’s constitution morphs during this same period. In a rich exploration of fights over slavery in the District of Columbia, Gilhooley provides a convincing illustration of how actors reworked approaches to constitutional meaning in a specific context and for particular political purposes. On another constitutional matter, is Zakaras correct that all evangelicals supported anti-establishment? Jefferson insisted that the First Amendment barred a federal establishment but not state establishments. The current Supreme Court majority insists that anti-establishment was not characteristic of this period at the state level; in the founding era and in the early nineteenth century, states provided financial support to private schools, including denominational ones (Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 2020). Akhil Amar (The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, 1998) argues that it was not until the latter part of 19th Century that states began to believe disestablishment was also a state imperative.
Unfortunately, readers do not get a good feel for why particular forces win the battles for ideas (p. 257). There is little predictive power here about which versions or combinations of the three foundational myths would survive and thrive: capitalists and elites simply win. The richly descriptive characterizations of foundational myths and their morphings lead ultimately to an argument that feels instrumentalist: America’s individualist myths “have continually buoyed the political fortunes of those who have channeled them skillfully” (p. 285). Readers could better understand why certain versions of the myths prevailed were there greater connection to American political development scholarship or even to changes in economy and society that were taking place, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. The reform-minded are left with the rather weak hope that “now as ever, the winners in this struggle [over politics, economics, discourses] will likely be those who construct, out of the raw materials of America’s individualist mythology, the most compelling story of what this country can and should be” (p. 285).
Political myths, stories “used to make sense of political events and experiences” (p. 12), reduce chaos and complexity to familiar patterns, often by staging moral dramas. But if “political myths remain myths only so long as they give meaning to the present” (p. 12), why—and how—do the political myths explored here still function? Optimism about how the market delivered to each (at least white males) according to their abilities, and economic mobility in the antebellum decades were underlying conditions that seem very different from those facing twenty-first-century Americans.
Zakaras provides readers with a very rich, engaging and well-written book that mines quite a lot of primary materials, brings together sacred and secular developments, and sheds new light on various strains of early and mid-nineteenth-century American political thought that may be with us today in ways we fail to recognize. We are reminded that collaboration and solidarity are also part of American discourse, albeit from dissenting traditions. Among the strands of this legacy, Zakaras finds reason for optimism that more egalitarian stories could gain the day as faith in Reaganism fades and there is instability in America’s self-conception.
