My PhD dissertation titled “Ideology, Behavior and Necessity in Seventeenth-Century England and Virginia” was completed under the direction of Darrett B. Rutman at the University of Florida in the spring of 1995. Because the dissertation is available online I don’t feel the need to post the entire dissertation (all 612 pages of it!) on my website. However, most of the content from the dissertation appears in one way or another under different research topics on this website.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………… iii
PREFACE………………………………………….. vii
Notes…. xii
CHAPTERS
1 MYTHS OF ORIGIN, ORIGINS OF MYTH………………….. 1
Modernist Approach…………………………………. 3
Traditionalist Approach…………………………….. 9
Behavioral Consensus……………………………….. 11
Myth of Origins……………………………………. 15
Origins of an Ethos: Cavalier versus Yankee…………… 19
Defunct Historians and Economists……………………. 29
Notes…. 30
2 CHREMATISTICS, COMPETENCY, AND THE COMMONWEAL………. 45
Transition to Capitalism……………………………. 47
Economic versus Political Liberalism…………………. 52
Liberty and the Common Good in Traditional Thought…….. 56
Necessity and Competency……………………………. 58
The Case for Political Liberalism……………………. 64
Notes…. 70
3 PLANTING A COMMONWEALTH………………………….. 81
Common Good and Public Necessity…………………….. 83
Covetousness, Competency, and Poverty………………… 91
Liberties and the Common Good……………………….. 98
The Limits of the Normative Ideal……………………. 108
Notes…. 112
4 NECESSITY, THE PERPETUAL MOTHER…………………… 120
The Scylla of Avarice, the Charybdis of Indolence……… 121
Origins of Political Economy and the “Labor Question”….. 124
Classical Necessity………………………………… 130
Necessity, the Mother of Invention…………………… 140
The Adam Smith Paradox……………………………… 151
What Ever Happened to the Necessity Consensus?………… 156
Notes…. 160
5 NECESSITY IN THE MIDST OF PLENTY………………….. 178
Trouble in Paradise………………………………… 181
The Rhetoric of Poverty…………………………….. 187
Responses to Poverty……………………………….. 197
The Rhetoric of Indolence…………………………… 203
The Rhetoric of Gentility…………………………… 214
Beyond the Operative……………………………….. 221
Notes…. 223
6 NECESSITY AND PLANTER BEHAVIOR……………………. 237
Modeling and Testing Necessity………………………. 239
Tobacco Productivity, 1669-1703……………………… 242
Demand for Labor, 1662-1679…………………………. 264
Demand for Land, 1664-1706………………………….. 282
Conclusion 294
Notes…. 297
7 NECESSITY AND EARLY AMERICAN HISTORIANS……………. 307
Half-Hearted Necessity……………………………… 309
A Curious Blindspot………………………………… 316
Beyond the Chesapeake………………………………. 323
Notes…. 328
8 NECESSITY, EXCEPTIONALISM, AND HUMAN NATURE………… 334
A Universal Backward-Sloping Supply of Labor?…………. 338
The Trouble with Marx………………………………. 342
A Humean Corrective………………………………… 348
Notes…. 350
For the entire dissertation, see
https://archive.org/details/ideologybehavior00bair
or
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00003186/00001