| This dissertation analyzes the ideological synthesis of a Protestant derived spirit of utility, with a later less sectarian, republican virtue which took the moral and pragmatic components of the latter to formulate a model for political economy integral to the American Enlightenment. Beginning (in my first chapter) with Max Weber and Thomas Merton's careful analysis of the calculative and pragmatic systems created by the early Protestant middle class, I analyze several English/transatlantic colonial texts from the seventeenth century, written expressly to raise capital for small trading companies. These Protestant influenced early colonial texts reveal a clear complicity between the growth of transatlantic trade routes (for the accumulation of capital) and the moral concerns of the Protestant Ethic. Like the more complex advancements in such fields as science and astronomy, the colonial narratives reflects a preoccupation with a well ordered political state, specifically with regard to how England's unemployed rogues could be reformed in the New World through Protestant influenced forms of discipline. After opening up the connection between the Protestant spirit of utility and various forms of colonial exploitation, I next approach (through a brief study of the English commonwealth tradition) how late eighteenth century Americans became deeply influenced by the concept of republican virtue, while retaining such Protestant concepts as industry, frugality, and economy, essential to America's economic independence from England. Later on I consider how republican virtue and its Protestant derived "political economy" were reconceptualized by republican reformers (like Mathew Carey and Tench Coxe in the early nineteenth century) from a classical agrarian model, to one of modern factory production, allowing America to compete with England's burgeoning industrial revolution. In the fourth chapter I consider how these developments in republican industry were ideologically polyvalent and capable of transforming the labor of both factory workers, and students (as described in the various republican treatises on education I discuss) into malleable, docile bodies. |
