Jeffrey Sklansky, PhD

Jeffrey Sklansky specializes in the intellectual and social history of capitalism in colonial America and the United States. Originally from southern California, he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and taught at Oregon State University from 1997 to 2011, when he moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago. At UIC, he teaches undergraduate and graduate history courses on capitalism, radicalism, care labor, property, intellectual history, and environmental history.

Sklansky’s research explores how Americans came to conceive and contest market relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how the terms and parameters of public debate over rights, resources, and power changed over the course of capitalist development. His first book, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), charts a century-long shift from classical political economy to modern sociology and psychology as the dominant social-scientific framework for understanding market society. The transformation that the book traces began among Romantic writers in the early American republic, continued through the polemics of economic writers in the Gilded Age, and culminated with the pioneers of modern American social psychology in the Progressive Era. Together, these writers reconceived freedom in terms of self-expression instead of self-employment, and they redefined democracy in terms of cultural kinship rather than social compact. The Soul’s Economy received the 2004 Cheiron Book Prize from Cheiron, The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Sklansky’s second book, Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), examines the two-hundred-year struggle over what should serve as money, who should control its creation and circulation, and what political principles should govern its role in market relations. It argues that the means of payment formed a fundamental means of class rule and subject of class conflict in early America, setting the stakes of social struggle over the rise of capitalism between the advent of colonial paper currency and the founding of the Federal Reserve System. More broadly, the book illuminates the roots of the money question in other aspects of American culture including natural law and natural history, melodramatic literature and neoclassical architecture, and Christian fellowship and fiduciary trust. Sovereign of the Market won an Honorable Mention for the Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History in 2018.

Sklansky has also written a series of wide-ranging essays on the rise of the history of capitalism as a major field of American historical scholarship in the years since the financial crisis of 2008. He is currently researching and writing on the pension system, institutional investment, and new conceptions of trust and care since the 1970s.

For potential graduate students, Sklansky is currently accepting new students in early American history, intellectual history, labor history, and the history of capitalism.

Books

Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

James Farmer: Civil Rights Leader (Chelsea House Publishers, 1992). One in a series of books for young adults on “Black Americans of Achievement.”

Articles

“The Work of Retirement,” International Review of Social History 68:2 (Aug. 2023): 301-323.

“The Work of Class in American History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16:4 (December 2019): 11-28.

“Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11:1 (Spring 2014): 23-46.

“Marxism in the Age of Financial Crises: Why Conventional Economics Can’t Explain the Great Recession,” New Labor Forum 21: 3 (Fall 2012): 49-56.

“The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9:1 (April 2012): 233-248

“William Leggett and the Melodrama of the Market,” in Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012): 199-222.

“The Moneylender as Magistrate: Nicholas Biddle and the Ideological Origins of Central Banking in the United States,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 11:1 (Jan. 2010): 319-59.

“Business and Solitude,” Modern Intellectual History 3:2 (Aug. 2006): 357-369.

“Corporate Property and Social Psychology: Thomas M. Cooley, Charles H. Cooley, and the Ideological Origins of the Social Self,” Radical History Review 76 (Winter 2000): 90-114.

“Pauperism and Poverty: Henry George, William Graham Sumner, and the Ideological Origins of Modern American Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 35:2 (Spring 1999): 111-138.

“Rock, Reservation and Prison: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz Island,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 13:2 (1989): 29-68.