Introduction—A Nation of Individuals and Markets

Abstract

Individualism is commonly thought to go hand in hand with the practices and institutions of a market economy. This introduction lays out the essential claim of the book that in nineteenth-century America the rise of individualism and the rise of a market economy were interrelated and co-constitutive phenomena, but that neither strictly entails the other. In preparation for the historical and exegetical chapters that argue for this claim, this chapter defines and explores several key concepts: markets, market economies, and market societies as well as the individual, individuality, and individualism.