"[Lears] has spent his distinguished academic career excavating the spiritual and psychic substrate of American modernity. His prior forays [. . .] converge in this wide-ranging account of precisely how, when and why Americans contemplated an animated world . . . There is brilliance in its improbable yet utterly persuasive leaps . . . Eloquent . . . [A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history." —Sarah E. Igo, The New York Times Book Review
"In his fifth book, [Lears's] note of longing at last finds full voice . . . Lears floats and darts and swoops—from indigenous wisdom to Romantic poetry, from “Tristram Shandy” to Bergson vs. Benda, from the Iraq war to neo-Lamarckian genetics and beyond . . . Surprising, fascinating . . . Lears has been so diligent in excavating the irrational and the enchanted in our lives that when you look around after reading his book, you think: What’s not strange?" —Jeremy McCarter, The Wall Street Journal
"Thrilling . . . [Animal Spirits] makes a strong case for the enduring power of counter-Enlightenment thinking . . . Lears’s efforts to document centuries of resistance to dominant ways of thinking are [. . .] illuminating." —Sean T. Byrnes, The New Republic
"As Lears memorably demonstrates, the belief in the significance of pulsing flows of energy that move through minds and objects has played a profound, if not often well-acknowledged, role in American philosophy and lived experience . . . A notable strength of the book is the richness of the author’s commentary on the context in which vitalist ideas emerged . . . Well-informed [and] engrossing." —Kirkus Reviews
"Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus. His grand narrative of animal spirits and popular vitalism takes us from the heights of William James, John Maynard Keynes, Norman Mailer, and Jane Bennett to the depths of grassroots spiritualism and countercultural activism. His ecological vision and radical democratic politics speak directly to our moment of spiritual decay and market idolatry!’’ —Cornel West
"Jackson Lears has once again, brilliantly, found a keynote for our culture, this time in our vitalist passions and wildness. With vast learning and literary grace, he plunges deep into the American phrenzy, centuries of it, finding it sometimes bewildering, sometimes loony, but redeemed in the end by a pulsating openness to the universe." —Sean Wilentz, author of No Property in Man and The Rise of American Democracy
"Is modernity about progress beyond animistic and vitalistic superstition? On the contrary, America’s leading cultural historian proves in this absorbing, delightful, and unexpected book. Not only did advances—including in our best economic theory—lean on insights into the enduring limits of reason. Even now, Jackson Lears shows, our national future will depend on continuing exploration of the creative enigma of being alive." —Samuel Moyn, author of Humane
"With Animal Spirits, Jackson Lears gives us yet another tour de force of Anglo-American cultural history. The energy of his ideas and the hum and roar of his prose should convince even the most skeptical reader of the 'miraculous aliveness of the world.' It’s as if vitalism itself chose Lears to author its biography." —Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, author of American Nietzsche
"Animal Spirits is several important books in one: a revisionist history revealing the invincible strain of vitalism running through modern social thought and culture; a fresh portrait of key thinkers, notably William James and John Maynard Keynes, casting them in the light of this persistent wild type; and a powerful plea for the vitalist principle that the world and all its meanings are made of the aliveness of living things. The loveliness of Jackson Lears’s language doesn’t just convey but also exemplifies his message about the beauty and meaning inherent in a living world." —Jessica Riskin, author of The Restless Clock
“Good history-writing offers up unexpected material on the way to surprising conclusions. In Animal Spirits, Jackson Lears ransacks five centuries of Anglo-American popular and high culture to demonstrate the persistence of vitalism, the heterodox conviction that the world is not divided into living spirit and dead matter but rather that agency and spontaneity are ubiquitous. As he puts it, startingly: ‘the universe is alive.’ Astonishingly, men and women in every age and walk of life have believed this: businessmen, preachers, farmers, confidence men, sexual revolutionaries, John Donne, Adam Smith, William James, Keynes. Lears’s industry and imagination have brought something important to light.” —George Scialabba, author of How to Be Depressed and Slouching Toward Utopia
"Once again Jackson Lears demonstrates his skill in turning a neglected wild card of post-Enlightenment intellectual history—in this case, vitalism—into the hidden ace it is. In exposing the medieval Western notion of an animated universe as a surprisingly persistent undercurrent running through four centuries of American politics, religion, economic theory, and popular culture, Animal Spirits will transform our perspective of the cultural matrix we inhabit." —Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets
2023-03-22
How ideas about the blending of spirit and materiality have influenced American thought and life.
In his latest book, history professor Lears explores the American evolution of so-called animistic thinking, “a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience,” or a somewhat more formalized “metaphysical worldview…known as vitalism.” The author first covers some key British expressions of vitalism in such figures as John Donne, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Sterne, who “epitomized the lingering and lurching of the patriarchal ethos in a world where male authority was becoming detached from its traditional sources in dogmatic religion and landed wealth.” Then he moves on to a series of American exemplars, including both the well known (Timothy Dwight, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt) and the more obscure (Andrew Jackson Davis, Helen Wilmans). As Lears memorably demonstrates, the belief in the significance of pulsing flows of energy that move through minds and objects has played a profound, if not often well-acknowledged, role in American philosophy and lived experience. The author makes a convincing claim that vitalism remains relevant not just in popular, but also scientific discourse and has in fact “begun to acquire new legitimacy in our own time as scientists have rediscovered the uses of animist-derived ideas in physics, botany, geology, and epigenetics.” Such recuperations will continue to be crucial, the author argues, in responding to the contemporary threat of ecological collapse. A notable strength of the book is the richness of the author’s commentary on the context in which vitalist ideas emerged; he offers a strikingly detailed view of the lineage of specific articulations of a faith in “animal spirits.” The only lacuna is a thorough accounting of how Indigenous worldviews have impacted Anglo-American thinking over several centuries; a little more close attention to those worldviews, which have undergone their own substantial transformations, would have been useful.
A well-informed, engrossing consideration of the significance of vitalist ideas.