Charles Sellers was best known for his book “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846,” published in 1991, in which he argued that the rapid expansion of capital and industry during that period did more than just create a new economy; it altered everything, including the way people worshiped, slept and even had sex.
Dr. Sellers detested Jackson’s pro-slavery sentiment and Indian removal policies. But he argued that the primary object of the Jacksonians’ hatred was not Black people or Native Americans but capitalism and its benefactors. (...) “He saw the Jacksonians as the last great expression of a democratic sensibility doomed to be overthrown by a capitalist bourgeois sensibility,” said Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton. (...) Such changes, he posited, were largely unwelcome, and the passionate reaction of most Americans consolidated in the rise of Andrew Jackson, who as president took on the coastal elites, most famously in his veto of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832. (...)
The book is nevertheless evocative of the 1960s counterculture — both in its depiction of a precapitalist America awash in communal living and free love and in its rejection of the work of postwar academic historians who, Dr. Sellers said, tried to hide the reality of class conflict in early America behind a veil of democratic consensus. (...)
“I took alarm when historians armed the United States for Cold War by purging class from consciousness,” he said at the 1994 conference in London. “Muffling exploitative capital in appealing democratic garb, their mythology of consensual democratic capitalism purged egalitarian meaning from democracy.”
Source : Portrait de Charles Sellers écrit par Clay Risen pour le New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/books/charles-g-sellers-dead.html
Photo : Eric Etheridge
