Making the American Self is at once a history of, and argument for, the process of self-construction. Focusing on selected American figures and their writings on the self, Daniel Walker Howe maps out a wide-ranging discourse on self-making running from roots in faculty psychology and the Scottish Enlightenment to the reincarnation of self-constructions in Romanticism and Transcendentalism. The writers whom Howe analyzes are a diverse lot, but he gives them collective coherence through his thesis, which he develops with striking erudition, deep conviction, and luminous clarity...Howe, it should be acknowledged, is a brilliant lumper whose explication of these diverse American texts on the self will help the reader see not only how the disciplined realism of faculty psychology created important boundaries for nineteenth-century liberalism, but also why such an amalgam might serve well today.
-- Norma Basch Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Howe succeeds triumphantly in linking the cultural gestures of politicos like Madison and Lincoln with the formal systems of thinkers like Edwards, and middle-brow culture brokers like Mann, Emerson, and Fuller. His skill in dovetailing these otherwise angular and resistant minds illuminates landscapes of the American intellect that the pragmatic narcosis of American public philosophy had for long closed off to view.
-- Allen C. Guelzo Books & Culture
Making the American Self is an important book...[Howe's] achievement...is hardly limited to fulfilling his stated goal of proving that a reexamination of 'the place of morality and the "moral sense" in the process of character-formation,' both individual and national, is long overdue. For along the way, he shows that this effort must not neglect the role of religion in the making of the American self. And in that, Daniel Walker Howe more broadly suggests that American history is a matter best not left to those who worship exclusively in the Temple of Reason.
-- K. P. Van Anglen Religion and the Arts
In a thoroughly researched and skillfully written book, Daniel Walker Howe traces the faculty psychology fostered by 'classical learning, Renaissance humanism, Christian theology, Enlightenment science, and Scottish-American moral philosophy' in prominent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American thinkers...Howe [has] masterful insights for American intellectual historians who, in their efforts to show the dynamics of change, have perhaps drawn too sharp a contrast between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the romantic movement. In Making the American Self, Howe never minimizes the rich diversity of his subjects' thought, but he artfully binds the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers together with his theme and in the process offers convincing solutions to historiographical disputes about the influences of Europe on the American mind.
-- John W. Kuehl North Carolina Historical Review
In this intellectual history, Howe explores how Americans have developed their individualism or, as Jefferson phrased it, their 'pursuit of happiness.' Howe...discusses figures like Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Margaret Fuller...An erudite study.
-- Library Journal
An erudite, original, and often eloquent reconstruction of, and tribute to, a vital and protean tradition in American liberal culture. Howe's study has much to say to readers who, as they approach the end of the second millennium, often wonder how sophisticated people could believe in a transcendent self at all, much less in its creative and democratic fashioning.
-- Charles Capper, author of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life
Since the founding no single idea has better expressed the moral meaning of America than 'self-made.' We are lucky; for Daniel Walker Howe does this immensely important topic true justice.
-- Isaac Kramnick, Cornell University
Making the American Self is likely to attract a wide readership among historians of American thought. Thoroughly researched, skillfully and convincingly argued, and well written, it seems likely to establish itself as one of the central studies of antebellum American culture.
-- James T. Kloppenberg, Brandeis University
The cast of characters in Making the American Self is intimidating. Yet through unusually judicious readings and thoughtfully probing analysis Daniel Walker Howe brings it off. His accounts of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau show why earlier American efforts at constructing the self are historically significant, but also of no little relevance to the contemporary situation. By reinvigorating the past--with its harmony of Protestantism and the Enlightenment, its fascination with faculty psychology, its promotion of 'balance' as a key to character--he provides also much to ponder for the present. We have no better historian on broad questions at the intersection of mind and culture in the American past than Daniel Walker Howe.
-- Mark A. Noll, Wheaton College
With insight and skill, Daniel Walker Howe has probed American writings on the self, a discourse with fascinating parallels to the emergence of individualism in the early nineteenth century.
-- Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles