This paper examines the nineteenth-century roots of the twentieth-century turn away from class analysis in American social science and social thought. For a century after the Revolution, the dominant American understanding of social relations came from the tradition of classical political economy, which defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of self-employment. The gradual demise of the household economy, however, rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Amid the widening class divide, nineteenth-century social theorists devised a new science of market society that came to be called "social psychology." Beginning among Romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, continuing through the polemics of political economists such as Henry George and William Graham Sumner, and culminating with the pioneers of modern American psychology and sociology such as William James and Charles Horton Cooley, this paper outlines the reconception of the emerging industrial order as a mainstream of cultural standards, norms, and values instead of an arena of competing individual and class interests. Put another way, the paper traces the changing stakes of social struggle, from the notions of self-ownership and social contract that informed the American Revolution and subsequent campaigns for equal rights to the principles of interdependence and social selfhood that inspired the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the New Left.

Politically and ideologically, the movement from political economy to social psychology cut two ways. On the one hand, the rise of social psychology represented a progressive challenge to the reigning ethic of competition and accumulation, and it animated sweeping efforts to temper political and economic individualism by humanizing the industrial order and socializing human nature. On the other hand, the fall of political economy discredited demands for a democracy of means rather than wants or for the socialization of property rather than the psyche. As a platform for social reform, the transformation of social science revealed the democratic promise and possibilities of the new industrial order while concealing its enduring limits. The seismic shift in the conventional understanding of market society raised crucial new questions about social identity and participation, but it left equally pressing questions about property and class unansweredand, more importantly, unasked.

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