Commerce and Character

The Anglo-American as New-Model Man

Bibliographic Data

ID3212480
AuthorsRalph Lerner (corresponding author)
Year1979
Volume36
Issue1
Pages3
Publication date1979-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1921978
OpenAlexW2328934913
LanguageEN
Citations received11

B q ETWEEN them, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville have provided us with a detailed, fully realized portrait of the new man of commerce. Their psychological analysis both of the universal type and of its American democratic exemplar is by now familiar and persuasive. We not longer startle at the strange blend of limitless aspiration, quasi-heroic effort, and sensible calculation that characterizes their model man of the future. And, of course, we rarely wonder at how much domestic tranquillity owes to the influence of commerce upon men's tastes, thoughts, and manners. In the eighteenth century, however, when this model of civil behavior was being formulated, all this stood in need of explication and argument. A case had to be made, and then won. The advocates men as diverse as Montesquieu and John Adams, Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Benjamin Rush were united at least in this: they saw in commercial republicanism a more sensible and realizable alternative to earlier notions of civic virtue and a more just alternative to the theological-political regime that had so long ruled Europe and its colonial periphery. However much these advocates differed in their philosophic insight, in their perception of the implications of their proposal for the organization of economic life, even in the degree of their acceptance of the very commercial republic they were promoting for all this, they may be considered a band of brethren in arms.1

Character (mathematics · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Mathematics

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