| Looking at credit market creation and sentimental culture in Boston during the Early Republic, this study argues that we can best understand changes in economic, moral and aesthetic value as an epistemological conflict between Lockean empiricism and Scottish Moral Sense philosophy. The tension in economic value between intrinsic value in silver and imagined value in paper credit instruments replicated the tension in moral value, between the theological voluntarism of orthodox Calvinism, and warm heart-based Unitarian religion; in novels and other sentimental representations, between truth and fiction; and in aesthetic theory and practice, between mimetic empiricism and the expressionism of the imagination. Paper money, liberal religion, sentimental novels, a social ethos based on benevolence, an art and aesthetic based on the imagination, and a consumption-driven material culture shared an epistemology based on feelings and best expressed by Scottish Moral Sense philosophy. In all these spheres of human life, men and women of the Early Republic turned inward and replaced received, hierarchical structures with horizontal and anthropocentric systems and relationships. In doing so they destroyed the early modern 'prison house of the senses' and constructed a modern social order based on feelings and the imagination. |
