Republic of Intellect

In this cultural study of New York's Friendly Club, which flourished in the 1790s, Bryan Waterman sets out two aims: to examine the contexts of friendship, gender, conversation, and association in the urban world of the early republic and to analyze the “knowledge industries” sustained and promoted by club members (p. 12). Though the link between the two seems tenuous at first, when it becomes clearer that the club's literary activities both resulted from and extended this “world of association,” Waterman's book reveals itself as a truly enlightening case study of the synergy between literary and intellectual culture (p. 13). An extension of eighteenth-century gentlemen's conversation groups, the Friendly Club included the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, the playwright William Dunlap, and a host of other young men whose work in law, medicine, science, and magazine journalism testified to an expanded definition of “literature” in the late Enlightenment. Their deliberations, carefully recorded by the poet and physician Elihu Hubbard Smith, captured the intellectual dynamic of their times—for instance, struggles between their support of women's rights and their preference for homosocial conversation. Self-consciously transnational, as Waterman's title reminds us, the club struggled to adhere to a republic, not of politics, but of the mind, while participating in the effort to create an indigenous American literature. The club's demise around 1800 coincided with the emergence of nationalist literary traditions and the beginnings of disciplinary and literary professionalism (p. 238)

Aesthetics · Art · Club · Conversation · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Media studies · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Medicine · Philosophy