Animal Spirits

A master historian's retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.

In The Wild Card, the distinguished cultural historian Jackson Lears tracks a tradition of thinkers and doers who propounded a gospel of the American spirit and its disruptive psychic energies. Lears traces the careers of ideas and fads such as vitalism, mesmerism, hypnosis, and faith healing from the pulpit and the stock exchange to the streets and the betting table, where the unruly "wild card" entered the game of poker in the 1870s.

Alongside Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, we meet the great prophets of the American irrational who rejected the idea that modern life must be rational, mechanical or disenchanted: they include Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie seer," who practiced the arts of clairvoyance with his Magic Staff; Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy; and "New Thought" pioneer Helen Wilmans, who maintained that vitality was the "god within-rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."

Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors' "animal spirits," these vernacular transcendentalists established an American religion of the mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist idea would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Teddy Roosevelt and his legatees, even as the 1960s counterculture and today's techno-futurists drew new wild cards from the deck. Today, scientists are re-discovering the best features of the vitalist tradition-permitting us to recall the wisdom of figures like William James, who asserted the claims of chance, spontaneous feeling, and sheer exuberance on the conduct of our lives.

Includes black-and-white illustrations