[A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history. -Sarah E. Igo The New York
Times Book ReviewJackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire.
This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus. -Cornel WestOne of Wired's best
books of 2023A master historian's retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate
American life and the possibilities they offer today.In Animal Spirits the distinguished
historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the
thinkers who championed the individual's spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe
against the strictures of conventional religion business and politics. From Puritan times to
today Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock
exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality
from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the Poughkeepsie Seer) and the New
Thought pioneer Helen Wilmans who spoke of 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 vitalists established an American
religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth
century the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged
national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees even as African American writers
confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of
inspiriting the universe. Today scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist
tradition-permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our
lives and our understanding of the cosmos.Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images
