Articles

Practical Americans

Farber, Hannah

What are the implications of this interest in economic practice across broad expanses of American space and time? A generation ago, employment of the term “practice” and reference to the “habitual” usually signaled an incipient cultural analysis: a conversation, if perhaps at a remove, with scholars such as Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, and Clifford Geertz....

More recent approaches to practice operate differently. For Hart, Rosenthal, and Greenberg, the goal of reconstructing everyday practices is not primarily to interpret their meaning, or to assess what sort of culture they added up to, but to figure out how things worked—to grasp the practicalities of life within the vast, hazy edifice of American capitalism. They are, in other words, studies in American capitalism as a “how,” rather than as a “why” or a “what.”

These recent analyses also leave us with new questions about American capitalism as a “who.” Certainly their authors would deny that American capitalism was constituted by homo economicus, the sempiternally rational actor of classical economics against whom much of the recent history of capitalism has been deliberately constructed. Yet given the ways in which these new books shift our attention away from meaning—away from Americans’ religious, ethnic, ideological, and communal lives, away from the institutions that competed with the market for resources and attention, away from the ways that individual Americans made sense of their actions— contemporary readers are left with the impression that early Americans were, if not rational actors, then at least practical ones, people who generally acted with their own material self-interest in mind. It is worth considering what this implies for our understanding of Americans in the past—and perhaps for what it tells us about scholars and readers in the present.

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Title
The William and Mary Quarterly
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.78.2.0339

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History
Published Here
January 30, 2025