“[A] master class in American cultural and intellectual history.” ―Sarah E. Igo, The New York Times Book Review
“Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.” ―Cornel West
One of Wired's best books of 2023
A master historian’s retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.
In Animal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within―rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."
Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition―permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos.
“Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.” ―Cornel West
One of Wired's best books of 2023
A master historian’s retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.
In Animal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within―rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."
Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition―permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos.
Summary of Animal Spirits
Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street by Jackson Lears is a wide-ranging work of cultural history that explores the role of non-rational energy—what he calls “animal spirits”—in shaping American life. Borrowing the term from John Maynard Keynes but expanding its meaning, Lears uses it to describe a vital force: a felt energy of desire, imagination, fear, and enthusiasm that animates human behavior. This vitality is not reducible to reason or calculation; it is a dynamic, often unpredictable current that moves individuals and societies alike.
The book traces this “vital energy” across American history, offering what amounts to a biography of an idea. Lears follows its presence in religious revivals, mystical traditions, and indigenous worldviews that saw nature as alive with spirit. He then examines its expression in movements like mesmerism, spiritualism, and New Thought, as well as in literature and philosophy through figures such as Walt Whitman and William James. Across these domains, Americans repeatedly sought a sense of aliveness that exceeded the bounds of mechanistic or purely rational explanations.
A central theme of the book is the role of animal spirits in capitalism. Lears shows that markets are not driven solely by rational self-interest but depend on confidence, imagination, and belief. Credit systems, speculation, and financial risk-taking all rely on intangible psychological energies—forms of collective faith and fear. In this sense, capitalism itself becomes a kind of quasi-spiritual system, animated by invisible forces that resemble the very energies found in religion and culture.
Lears emphasizes that these animal spirits are profoundly ambivalent. They can inspire creativity, innovation, and personal transformation, but they can also lead to mass hysteria, economic instability, and destructive ideologies, including forms of nationalism and racism. His broader argument challenges the modern assumption that human beings are primarily rational actors, suggesting instead that American life has always been shaped by deeper currents of feeling and imagination. The result is a portrait of a culture still animated by a restless, often volatile search for vitality.
The book traces this “vital energy” across American history, offering what amounts to a biography of an idea. Lears follows its presence in religious revivals, mystical traditions, and indigenous worldviews that saw nature as alive with spirit. He then examines its expression in movements like mesmerism, spiritualism, and New Thought, as well as in literature and philosophy through figures such as Walt Whitman and William James. Across these domains, Americans repeatedly sought a sense of aliveness that exceeded the bounds of mechanistic or purely rational explanations.
A central theme of the book is the role of animal spirits in capitalism. Lears shows that markets are not driven solely by rational self-interest but depend on confidence, imagination, and belief. Credit systems, speculation, and financial risk-taking all rely on intangible psychological energies—forms of collective faith and fear. In this sense, capitalism itself becomes a kind of quasi-spiritual system, animated by invisible forces that resemble the very energies found in religion and culture.
Lears emphasizes that these animal spirits are profoundly ambivalent. They can inspire creativity, innovation, and personal transformation, but they can also lead to mass hysteria, economic instability, and destructive ideologies, including forms of nationalism and racism. His broader argument challenges the modern assumption that human beings are primarily rational actors, suggesting instead that American life has always been shaped by deeper currents of feeling and imagination. The result is a portrait of a culture still animated by a restless, often volatile search for vitality.
Excerpts and Ideas
We live in dark times; we need to recover a "Grammar of Animacy"
The recovery of a “grammar of animacy” would challenge the reductionist imperative at the heart of technocratic rationality, which requires its devotees to reject any vestiges of vitalism they can sniff in the cultural atmosphere…The consequences of a more capacious “grammar of animacy” might be political and moral as well as intellectual. A full recognition of an animated material world could well trigger a deeper mode of environmental reform, a more sane and equitable model of economic growth, even religious precepts that challenge the ethos of market utility and mastery over nature…The task could not be more timely or more urgent. This book has highlighted two great vitalist thinkers in Anglo-American cultural history, William James and John Maynard Keynes. Though they never used the term “vitalism,” they embodied the tradition’s most humane meanings and possibilities. Both men celebrated spontaneous vitality while recognizing its darker possibilities, above all the delusion of regenerative war. We now live in a very dark time, when that delusion has once again been unleashed upon the world.
Lears, Jackson. Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (p. 390). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Seeking alternatives to the disenchanted universe
My scholarly career has been devoted to exploring discontent with the disenchanted universe that has accompanied modernity, and with efforts to find alternatives to it...The celebration of animal spirits can descend into triviality or worse — a fascist cult of violence. But it has more serious and valuable meanings as a reverence for life itself, as well as a broader connection with the recognition that the universe is alive.
- Lears, Jackson. "This is What's Behind Trump's Relentlessness," Opinion Essay, New York Times, May 1, 2025. Interviewed by John Guida
American culture has always contained within it a loosely defined outlook on life that valorizes spontaneous energy and which can be rendered in terms of a metaphysic, "living universe."
My interpretation follows the idea of animal spirits in two forms: a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience, and a metaphysical worldview—the philosophical successor to animistic thinking that was known as vitalism. The bundle of beliefs and emotions that constituted a modern version of mana went by various names—life force, libido, élan vital—and the history of these vitalist ideas is part of the history of animal spirits. By following the parallel but often convergent threads of animal spirits and popular vitalism, I hope to illuminate another way of being in the world, one that thrived on the margins and beneath the surfaces of conventional thinking—an alternative to the dominant ethos of human centrality and mastery.
Lears, Jackson. Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (p. 4). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Animal Spirits can be understood as Free-Flowing Energy: A Spontaneous Urge to Action
“Animal spirits” is a phrase that captures the notion of a vital force linking matter and spirit, soul and body. It also acknowledges the role of free-flowing energy in human experience, from romantic relationships to capital investment. For the philosopher Henri Bergson, animal spirits animated a current of “élan vital”; for the economist John Maynard Keynes, they constituted “a spontaneous urge to action” that was the key to investor confidence.
- Lears, Jackson. "This is What's Behind Trump's Relentlessness," Opinion Essay, New York Times, May 1, 2025. Interviewed by John Guida
As we recover a grammar of intimacy, we need to beware of the risks of exalting raw force, of valorizing war and violence. Keynes and James can help.
My own view is that animal spirits—and the currents of vitality they embody—constitute a crucial part of what it means to be human, as well as an essential reminder of the animality humans share with the nonhuman world. Yet I am also aware of how often the celebration of unalloyed vitality has sponsored violence, in vigilante or state-sanctioned forms. This sponsorship has continued to our own time, when the siren song of regenerative war has repeatedly served to justify inflicting destruction on innocent populations. The most profound vitalist thinkers have resisted this temptation and recognized the risks of exalting raw force. That is why Keynes and William James play such an important role in this narrative. They epitomize the most humane and capacious understanding of animal spirits—an understanding that led James to imagine a moral equivalent of war and Keynes to conceive capital investment as an instrument of the common good. Theirs is the version of vitalism that we need to resurrect at this fraught historical moment. The story of animal spirits and popular vitalism has important implications for contemporary public life.
Lears, Jackson. Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (p. 5). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.