The Material and the Real: American Conceptions of Materialism in the Nineteenth Century

This dissertation examines debates about the concept of "materialism" in the United States during the nineteenth century. Though now more commonly used to describe a sense of avarice or obsession with material gain, nineteenth-century discussions focused primarily on philosophical materialism, that is, materialism as a distinct body of thought that held matter as first principle. In this project, I trace the paired development of both materialist and anti-materialist discourse in the U.S., dissenting cultural traditions that clashed repeatedly as they evolved over this period. I argue that these debates about materialism reveal one way Americans responded to the continually shifting terrain of the nineteenth century. In general, anti-materialist rhetoric revealed a desire to preserve certain facets of American religious, social, intellectual, and political culture believed to be under threat. For much of the century, anti-materialist critics fixated on the allegedly atheistic implications of philosophical materialism. Materialists, by contrast, frequently voiced a desire to unseat deeply entrenched beliefs and profoundly transform American society. I argue that materialism remained steadily controversial precisely because of its connections to radical religious, philosophical, and political doctrines that called for such large-scale transformations.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116763/1/lutwitze_1.pd