| This project traces the development of religious economic discourse in mid-nineteenth-century America. The primary question has to do with why leading religious intellectuals—Francis Wayland, Henry Vethake, Alonzo Potter, John McVickar, Lyman Atwater, and Calvin Colton—were attracted to the discipline of political economy. The answer, and the foundational argument of the dissertation, is that there was much about political economy to be attracted to. These clerical economists did engage in a bit of intellectual side-stepping as they sometimes forced Adam Smith's new science into conformity with their old faith, but they generally had understandable reasons for thinking as they did.; Emphasizing the unity of all truths, the clerical economists had faith that developments in the science of political economy, as pagan as they might first appear, would ultimately be “found to be in strict unison with religion, morals and social order.” They were also very enthusiastic about the prospects for political economy in the new republic. Not only was political economy the redeeming science for the nations, it was especially the science for their nation. Thus in America, with its endless frontier and high labor demands, there was nothing very dismal about “the dismal science.”; Not all Protestants during this era, however, welcomed the new economic order and its science, and the final chapter of the dissertation investigates two of them: Stephen Colwell and Orestes Brownson. The argument is that they were on a different side of economic discussions precisely because they did not share in either the intellectual tradition or the nationalist optimism of the clerical economists. For one, they were students more of Sismondi, Robert Owen and the Luddites, than they were of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Thomas Chalmers. They also differed from their more sanguine brethren in what they thought about the future of America. Whereas the clerical economists were more optimistic, westward-looking and nationally-focused, Brownson and Colwell were more pessimistic, looked east to the economic turmoil of industrializing Europe, and focused more on the growing plight of America's cities than the promises of manifest destiny and a redeemer national economy. |
