Wilfred M. McClay - The Masterless: Self & Society in Modern America

Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the Earhart Foundation.

1994 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Portions of this work appeared earlier in somewhat different form in "Introduction" to the Transaction edition of Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993); "The Strange Career of The Lonely Crowd: Or, the Antinomies of Autonomy," in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraber (New York, 1993); ''A Tent on the Porch," American Heritage (July/August 1993); and "Weimar in America," American Scholar (Winter 1985-86) and are reproduced here by permission.

Wilfred M. McClay is associate professor of history at Tulane University.

Library of Congress
Cataloging -in-Publication Data
McCay, Wilfred M.
The masterless: self and society in modern
America / Wilfred M. McClay
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 0-8078-21179 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8078-4419-5 (pbk.:alk. paper)
1. IndividualismUnited States. 2. Social
integrationUnited States. 3. United States
Social conditions. I. Title.
HM136.M3814 1993
302.54dc20
939673
CIP

98 97 96 95 94 5 4 3 2 1

Before I wrote a book, I used to think the lengthy acknowledgments at the beginning of books were pretentious and superfluous. Now that I have written one, I marvel that authors' acknowledgments are not longer, and more florid and impassioned. I will try my best to abide here by a standard of sober brevity, though I am intensely aware of my intellectual creditors, to whom I have run up many more debts, large and small, than I can adequately acknowledge here, let alone ever discharge. Yet it is an extraordinary pleasure to express my gratitude to them, however inadequately. Each has contributed something important to this book.

First, I should acknowledge the help I received from the staffs of the various libraries and depositories that aided me in my work. I am particularly grateful to the Library of Congress, especially the Manuscript Division; the Harvard University Archives and Houghton Library; the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore (a wonderful institution now badly in need of financial support); and the libraries of Tulane University, Louisiana State University, Columbia University, the United States Naval Academy, Southern Methodist University, the University of Dallas, and Johns Hopkins University. I am also indebted to a number of persons and institutions for financial support that made the research and writing possible. I would never have made it through graduate school without the financial and moral support of a Danforth Fellowship and a Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, for which I thank, respectively, the Danforth Foundation and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. More recent sources of financial support have included a junior sabbatical provided by Tulane; research grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation (the last of

which was especially crucial); and constant help, provided in forms large and small, from the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane and its director, Rick Teichgraeber.

As for my formal education, I still proudly bear many of the marks of my undergraduate training at St. John's College (Annapolis) and will always count myself fortunate for having wandered into that singular place at an impressionable age. As a historian, I have learned to operate upon rather different premises than those undergirding the St. John's program; yet its legacy still lives in me, like an insistent Socratic voice that constantly calls my operating premises into question and insists upon a constant reconsideration of the broadest philosophical questions.