1. Richard A. Posner, The Economics of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1. [BACK]

2. This movement, especially powerful in the field of torts, is usually understood to have begun in the 1960s with Guido Calabresi and Ronald Coase. See Calabresi, "Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts," Yale Law Journal 70 (1961): 499-553; Coase, "The Problem of Social Cost," Journal of Law and Economics 1 (1960): 3-7. [BACK]

3. Beginning with his 1957 dissertation on the economics of racial discrimination, Gary Becker has argued forcefully for the centrality of economic reasoning even in supposedly nonmarket domains (including the utilization of time, crime and prosecution, choice of marriage partners, reproduction, adultery, and suicide). For a classic statement of this economic fundamentalism, see Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). [BACK]

4. Posner, The Economics of Justice , 1, 2, 3, 60, 87. [BACK]

5. Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham , ed. Walter J. Meserve and David J. Nordloh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 241. All subsequent citations to this edition will appear in the text. [BACK]

6. Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government , ed. F. C. Montague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 93. [BACK]

7. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism , in Essential Works of John Stuart Mill , ed. Max Lerner (New York: Bantam, 1961), 194. [BACK]

8. Jeremy Bentham, Works , ed. John Bowring (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 1:31, italics in the original. [BACK]

9. For one example of such critique, see George Fletcher, "Why Kant," Columbia Law Review 87 (1987): 421-432. Interestingly, Fletcher sees not only Law and Economics but also Critical Legal Studies as descendants of utilitarianism. [BACK]

10. Posner, The Economics of Justice , 48, 33, 2. [BACK]

11. On this point, see my introduction. Posner mentions Aristotle in passing, although oddly enough he seems to associate Aristotle only with corrective justice, whereas the discussion of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics is actually much broader in scope. See Posner, The Economics of Justice , 73. [BACK]

12. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), 7, 6, 10, 7, 13, 10. The quotation from Bacon is from Advancement of Learning , in The Works of Francis Bacon , ed. Basil Montagu (London: W. Pickering, 1825), 2:126. [BACK]

13. Descartes's influence on the Enlightenment is a much debated matter. An authoritative account is Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment , trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). For a valuable summary and partisan statement, see Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). For the influence of Descartes in England, see Rosalie Colie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). See also the excellent bibliographical essay appended to Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1977), 617-620. [BACK]

14. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive , in Man and Citizen , ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 91. [BACK]

15. But see also Richard McKeon, The Philosophy of Spinoza (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), 153-157, 161-165, for an account of Spinoza's reservations about the mathematical model. [BACK]

16. Quoted in John Grier Hibben, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (New York: Scribner's, 1910), 165. It is fair to say, however, that this was a youthful remark; later in his life, Leibniz was not so confident. See, for example, his letter to Remond, in Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England , trans. James P. Pettegrove (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), 152. [BACK]

17. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), II.xvi.1 (205), italics in original. [BACK]

18. Ibid., III.xi.16 (516), italics in original. [BACK]

19. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1979), 151. [BACK]

20. Bentham, Works , 3:286-287. For Bentham's indebtedness to (and divergence from) Beccaria, see H. L. A. Hart, "Bentham and Beccaria," in his Essays on Bentham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 40-52. [BACK]

21. The authoritative accounts remain Leslie Stephen, English Utilitarians (1900; rpt. New York: P. Smith, 1950), and History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century , 3rd ed., vol. 2 (1876; rpt. New York: P. Smith, 1949). See also Ernest Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 1-190; John Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), 22-58; Anthony Quinton, Utilitarian Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1973), 11-26. [BACK]

22. William Wollaston, for example, in his influential Religion of Nature Delineated (London: S. Palmer, 1724), had done much the same thing, and with the same degree of obsessiveness. A representative passage from Wollaston reads as follows (35-36):

When pleasures and pains are equal, they mutually destroy each other; when the one exceeds, the excess gives the true quantity of pleasure or pain. For nine degrees of pleasure, less by nine degrees of pain, are equal to nothing; but nine degrees of one, less by three degrees of the other, give six of the former net and true. . . . [T]he man who enjoys three degrees of such pleasure as will bring upon him nine degrees of pain, when three degrees of pain are set off to balance and sink the three of pleasure, can have remaining to him only six degrees of pain[.]

23. Robert Shackleton, "The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number: The History of Bentham's Phrase," first published in Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (1972), reprinted in Essays on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment , ed. David Gilson and Martin Smith (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), 375-89. [BACK]

24. Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1971), 1:163-164. [BACK]

25. For Bentham's lack of influence, see P. A. Palmer, "Benthamism in England and America," American Political Science Review 35 (1941): 855-871; C. W. Everett, "Bentham in the United States of America," in Jeremy Bentham and the Law , ed. George W. Keeton and Georg Schwarzenberger (London: Stevens, 1948), 185-201. However, as I have been arguing, we should perhaps look at Bentham not as an isolated figure but as part of a broad intellectual tradition. For Bentham's influence on American legal thought, see Peter J. King, Utilitarian Jurisprudence in America: The Influence of Bentham and Austin on American Legal Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1986). For Bentham's influence on William Paley's "theological utilitarianism" as well as Paley's influence in America, see Wilson Smith, Professors and Public Ethics: Studies of Northern Moral Philosophers before the Civil War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), 44-73; Herbert Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 37-42. [BACK]

26. For an excellent account of the interchangeability of the moral and the economic in Adam Smith, see Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, "Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations ," in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment , ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-44. The literature on the subject is voluminous. See also Glenn Morrow, The Ethical and Economic Theo -

ries of Adam Smith (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969); Hiroshi Mizuta, "Moral Philosophy and Civil Society," in Essays on Adam Smith , ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Ralph Anspach, "The Implications of The Theory of Moral Sentiments for Adam Smith's Economic Thought," History of Political Economy 4 (1972): 176-194; Nathan Rosenberg, "Adam Smith and the Stock of Moral Capital," History of Political Economy 22 (1990): 1-17. I don't mean to suggest, of course, that the discipline of economics is exclusively traceable only to moral philosophy. For alternative genealogies, see William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964). For a complex account of the relations between "political arithmetic," moral philosophy, and political economy, see Mary Poovey, "Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking,'' in Rethinking Class , ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15-56. [BACK]

27. Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). [BACK]

28. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 346. [BACK]

29. Oddly, the seminal essay undermining the centrality of Locke is by a leading Locke scholar. See John Dunn, "The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century," in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives , ed. John Yolton (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 45-80. On classical republicanism, see above, chapter 2. Garry Wills has argued most strenuously for the centrality of the Scottish Enlightenment. See his Inventing America , and Explaining America: The Federalist (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981). For a critique, see Ronald Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills' Inventing America," William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 36 (1979): 503-523. For connections between classical republicanism and the Scottish Enlightenment, see John Robertson, "The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition"; Nicholas Phillipson, "Adam Smith as Civic Moralist"; J. G. A. Pocock, "Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers," all in Wealth and Virtue , ed. Hont and Ignatieff, 137-178, 179-202, 235-252. [BACK]

30. Donald Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); Wilson Smith, Professors and Public Ethics , 3-43; Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 73-184; David Fate Norton, "Francis Hutcheson in America," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 154 (1976): 1547-1568; Norman S. Fiering, "President Samuel Johnson and the Circle of Knowledge," William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 28 (1971): 199-236. [BACK]

31. The other three divisions were natural theology, ethics, and jurisprudence. See Dugald Stewart, "Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith," in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects , ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 273-275. [BACK]

32. For an account of Wayland, see Joseph Blau, Men and Movements in American Philosophy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 82-92. See also Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (New York: Viking, 1946), 2:758-767. [BACK]

33. For an amusing account of the "overworked" Alford Professor, see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), xv-xvi, 28-45. [BACK]

34. Francis Wayland, The Elements of Political Economy (New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co., 1837), vi. [BACK]

35. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). I should point out that for Hirschman, "passions" are associated primarily with the political sphere and not with the moral. The relation he examines is thus between the economy and the polity (in a sustained disagreement with Joseph Cropsey's Polity and Economy ). However, as his own discussions of Hume and Adam Smith suggest, the economic would seem to be a moral instrumentality as well. See especially 48-66, 108-110. [BACK]

36. John McVickar, Outlines of Political Economy (New York: Wilder and Campbell, 1825), 186-187. Quoted in Gladys Bryson, "Emergence of the Social Sciences from Moral Philosophy," International Journal of Ethics 42 (1931-1932): 304-323, quotation from 311. [BACK]

37. A nineteenth-century descendent of utilitarianism, "marginal utility analysis" was developed by William Stanley Jevons in England and Karl Menger in Austria. [BACK]

38. These arguments were developed by Patten in The Stability of Prices (Baltimore: American Economic Association, 1889); in an essay entitled "The Effect of the Consumption of Wealth on the Economic Welfare of Society," in Science Economic Discussion , ed. Richard T. Ely (New York: The Science Company, 1886), 123-135; and in The Consumption of Wealth (Philadelphia: T. and J. W. Johnson, 1889). For a useful discussion of Patten, see Daniel M. Fox, The Discovery of Abundance: Simon N. Patten and the Transformation of Social Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). [BACK]

39. Simon Nelson Patten, The Theory of Social Forces (1896; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970), 75-108, quotation from 76. [BACK]

40. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 14. [BACK]

41. In particular, I would disagree with White's characterization of Holmes, who, far from recoiling from utilitarianism, was on record stating just the opposite. Holmes wrote, "For the philosophy of law, the Fragment on Government and Austin's lecture are worth the whole corpus [of Roman law]" from "Value of Precedent," American Law Review 7 (1873): 579, reprinted in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—His Book Notices, Uncollected Letters, and Papers , ed. Harry C. Shriver (New York: Central Book Co., 1936), 34-35. For a detailed discussion, see H. L. Pohlman, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Utilitarian Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). [BACK]

42. Simon Nelson Patten, The New Basis of Civilization , ed. Daniel M. Fox

(1907; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 145-164, quotation from 149. [BACK]

43. Patten, The Theory of Social Forces , 77, 122. [BACK]

44. G. Edward White, Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), xvi. [BACK]

45. For a fuller discussion of penal reform, see chapter 1. [BACK]

46. For a parallel argument about the persisting vitality of utilitarianism in late-nineteenth-century England, see Ellen Frankel Paul, Moral Revolution and Economic Science (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979). [BACK]

47. David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 155-179; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 101-139. For a parallel account of humanitarianism in England, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage, 1992). [BACK]

48. Quoted in Asa Briggs, "The Human Aggregate," in The Victorian City: Images and Realities , ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge, 1973),1:87. [BACK]

49. Stuart Blumin, "Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City," Journal of Urban History 11 (1984): 9. [BACK]

50. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America , 123-124. [BACK]

51. Ibid., 146. [BACK]

52. My argument here about "rational benevolence" in organized charities parallels Lori Ginzberg's argument about the "passion for efficiency" in civil war relief. See Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). [BACK]

53. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Public Relief and Private Charity (1884; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1971), 90. [BACK]

54. Ibid., 89, 111. [BACK]

55. Ibid., 58, italics mine. [BACK]

56. Ibid., 89, 90, 66, 103. [BACK]

57. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1850; rpt. New York: Appleton, 1882), 353, 355. [BACK]

58. Lowell, Public Relief and Private Charity , 104-105, 94, italics in original. [BACK]

59. Thomas Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," parts 1 and 2, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 339-361, 547-566. See also the AHR Forum on Haskell's essay, with responses to Haskell from David Brion Davis and John Ashworth and a further response from Haskell himself, in American Historical Review 92 (1987): 797-878. For the on-going debate, see The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation , ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). [BACK]

60. I am indebted to Richard Brodhead for suggesting this important qualification to the Haskell thesis. [BACK]

61. Lowell, Public Relief and Private Charity , 69. [BACK]

62. S. Humphreys Gurteen, A Handbook of Charity Organization (Buffalo: The Courier Company, 1882), 205. [BACK]

63. William Graham Sumner, "The Shifting of Responsibility," The Independent , March 24, 1887, collected in Essays of William Graham Sumner , ed. Albert Galloway Keller and Maurice R. Davie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 1:260-265. [BACK]

64. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883; rpt. Los Angeles: Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton Printers, 1952), 11. [BACK]

65. William Graham Sumner, "The Forgotten Man," in Essays , 1:483, 479, 477, 486, 481, 483. [BACK]

66. Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other , 98. [BACK]

67. Francis Wayland, The Limitations of Human Responsibility (Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1838), 19. [BACK]

68. Ibid., 162, 181-182. [BACK]

69. The Elements of Moral Science , for example, sold more than two hundred thousand copies in the sixty years after its publication. See Blau, Men and Movements , 86. [BACK]

70. See Lawrence M. Friedman and Jack Ladinsky, "Social Change and the Law of Industrial Accidents," Columbia Law Review 67 (1967): 53. [BACK]

71. Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law , 2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 468. [BACK]

72. Another interesting juncture is the rise of life insurance. For an account of that development, see Viviana Zelizer, Morals and Markets: The Rise of Life Insurance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). [BACK]

73. Friedman, History of American Law , 299-302, 467-487; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 63-108, 201-210. See also Charles O. Gregory, "Trespass to Negligence to Absolute Liability," Virginia Law Review 37 (1951): 359-397. For a dissent from the Horwitz-Friedman position, see Gary Schwartz, "Tort Law and the Economy in Nineteenth-Century America: A Reinterpretation," Yale Law Journal 90 (1981): 1717-1775. [BACK]

74. For a discussion of Holmes and liability, see Grant Gilmore, The Death of Contract (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974). [BACK]

75. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (1881; rpt. Boston: Little Brown, 1946), 17, 90, 96, 79, 94. [BACK]

76. See the preface to Towards a Jurisprudence of Injury , a 1984 report to the American Bar Association. [BACK]

77. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Path of the Law," Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 459-460. [BACK]

78. See Richard A. Posner, "A Theory of Negligence," Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1972): 27-96. See also Law, Economics, and Philosophy , ed. Mark Kuperberg and Charles Beitz (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1983); William Landes and Richard Posner, Economic Structure of Tort Law (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1987); Steven Shavell, Economic Analysis of Accident Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). For contemporary approaches to torts different from the above, see George P. Fletcher, "Fairness and Utility in Tort Theory," Harvard Law Review 85 (1972): 537-573; Robert Epstein, "A Theory of Strict Liability," Journal of Legal Studies 2 (1973): 151-204; E. Weinrib, "Toward a Moral Theory of Negligence Law," Law and Philosophy 2 (1983): 37-62. [BACK]

79. For the relation between Holmes and Peirce, see Note, "Holmes, Peirce, and Legal Pragmatism," Yale Law Journal 84 (1975): 1123; Herbert Hovenkamp, "Pragmatic Realism and Proximate Cause in America," Journal of Legal History 3 (1982): 3-30. For the relation between Holmes and Green, see Philip Wiener's chapter on "The Pragmatic Legal Philosophy of Nicholas St. John Green," in his Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 152-171. [BACK]

80. Morton J. Horwitz, "The Doctrine of Objective Causation," in The Politics of law , ed. David Kairys (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 201-213. For a more general discussion of the legal significance of causation, see H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honore, Causation in the Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Robert E. Keeton, Legal Cause in the Law of Torts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963). [BACK]

81. Stone v. Boston and Albany Railroad Co. 51 N.E. 1 (Mass., 1898); Central of Georgia Railway Co. v. Price , 32 S.E. 77 (Ga., 1898). Discussed in Hovenkamp, "Pragmatic Realism," 4. [BACK]

82. Francis Wharton, "The Liability of Railway Companies for Remote Fires," Southern Law Review 1 (1876), 729. [BACK]

83. Ibid., 745, 730, 746. [BACK]

84. Francis Wharton, A Suggestion as to Causation (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1874), 8; also published as appendix to Treatise on the Law of Negligence (Philadelphia: Kay and Brother, 1874). [BACK]

85. Wharton, "Liability of Railroad Companies," 732, 744. [BACK]

86. Ibid., 739, 733. [BACK]

87. Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics (New York: A. L. Burt, 1879), subsequently published as part 1 of The Principles of Ethics (New York: Appleton, 1892), quotations from 1:186, 183, 176, 175. As Spencer notes in his 1893 General Preface, the ideas assembled here "date back to 1851," and "it yields me no small satisfaction to find that these ideas which fell dead in 1850, have now become generally diffused" and "have met with so wide an acceptance that the majority of recent works on Ethics take cognizance of them." [BACK]

88. Martin Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). [BACK]

89. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament; Being a Practical Inquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention, and Treatment of Those Diseases Commonly Called Nervous, Bilious, Stomach and Liver Complaints (1808; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1976), 21-22. [BACK]

90. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering , 148-157. [BACK]

91. S. Weir Mitchell, "Civilization and Pain," originally published in Annals of Hygiene , summarized in Journal of the American Medical Association 18 (1892): 108. This is the same Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who prescribed the rest cure to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a treatment she attacked in The Yellow Wallpaper . [BACK]

92. Benjamin Rush, "Medicine among the Indians of North America: A Discussion" (1774), in his Selected Writings , ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 259. [BACK]

93. A. P. Merrill, "An Essay on Some of the Distinctive Peculiarities of the Negro Race," Memphis Medical Recorder 4 (1855): 67, quoted in Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering , 155. Blacks were understood to have a hereditary disease called "dyaesthesia Aethiopsis," which induced in them an "obtuse sensibility of body." [BACK]

94. Horace Mann, "Twelfth Annual Report" (1848), in his Annual Reports on Education (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1872), 676. [BACK]

95. Letter of John William De Forest to his brother, November 27, 1863, De Forest Papers, Yale University Library. Quoted in George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 87. [BACK]

96. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), 189. [BACK]

98. Herbert Spencer, First Principles , 3rd ed. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1870), 489-490. [BACK]

99. Spencer, Principles of Ethics , 1:x, 373, 372, 369. [BACK]

100. I have taken this phrase from Bernard Williams, who calls attention to the "imperfect rationalisation" in any ethical theory that aspires to be a "model of theoretical rationality and adequacy." See Williams, Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 81. [BACK]

101. Here, I want both to acknowledge my indebtedness to Fredric Jameson and to distinguish my usage from his. For Jameson, "cognitive mapping" is a gesture toward some unrepresentable social totality; for me, "cognitive mapping" unsettles the very notion of totality. See Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , ed. Laurence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347-357. [BACK]

102. William Dean Howells, The Minister's Charge , ed. Howard Munford, David Nordloh, and David Kleinman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 139. For an interesting discussion of this novel (focusing on the relation between language and complicity), see Elsa Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells' America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 153-162. [BACK]

103. The classic statement on the "incommensurability of paradigms" is, of course, Thomas Kuhn, The Structures of Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). [BACK]

104. Thomas Laqueur also commented on the linkage between humanitarianism and the novel. See his "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Nar-

rative," in The New Cultural History , ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). [BACK]

105. Here, I would simply like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Anthony Giddens's important "antifunctionalist" theory of society, especially his emphasis on time and space. See, for example, his Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). [BACK]

106. In this context, it is interesting to speculate on the "superfluous" in other literary forms as well. See, for example, Richard Poirier, "Superfluous Emerson," in his Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37-75. For an implicit argument against using engineering as a model for literary analysis, see Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). [BACK]

107. In this sense, my book is a sustained argument with Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). [BACK]

108. William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's 72 (May 1886): 973. [BACK]

109. William Dean Howells, "Concerning a Counsel of Imperfection," Literature 1 (April 7, 1899): 290. [BACK]

110. William Dean Howells, "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business," in his Literature and Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), 33-34. [BACK]

111. Howells, letter to Roger A. Pryor, chief counsel of the anarchists, November 4, 1887, published in the New York Tribune , November 6, 1887, under the headline "Clemency for the Anarchists. A letter from Mr. W. D. Howells." William Dean Howells Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. [BACK]

112. Howells to Francis Fisher Browne, November 4, 1887. Howells had written the letter with the understanding that it would be published, as indeed it was—in the Chicago Tribune , November 8, 1887. William Dean Howells Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. [BACK]

113. See, for instance, Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966); Harold Kolb, The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form (Charlottesville: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Edwin H. Cady, The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). For qualifying views, see Kermit Vanderbilt, The Achievement of William Dean Howells (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Henry Nash Smith, "Fiction and the American Ideology: The Genesis of Howells' Early Realism," in The American Self , ed. San Girgus (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 43-57. [BACK]

114. In fact, as Patrick Dooley points out, contemporary readers of Howells "often focused on the love plot [and] all but ignored the bankruptcy plot." See "Nineteenth-Century Business Ethics and The Rise of Silas Lapham," American Studies 21 (1980): 79-93. [BACK]

115. William Dean Howells, "Equality as the Basis of Good Society," Century 51 (November 1895): 64, 63, 64, 63. [BACK]

116. Henry James, The Bostonians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 390. [BACK]

117. Alfred Habegger has also noted the less than happy endings in Howells and James. He sees those endings, however, as a protest by male authors against the "fantasy" endings of "women's fiction." See his Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 109-110. [BACK]