SOURCE: Rowe, Joyce A. “Social History and the Politics of Manhood in Melville's Redburn.” Mosaic 26, no. 1 (winter 1993): 53-68.

In the following essay, Rowe discusses Redburn's handling of the conflict between capitalism and social justice in the Jacksonian period.

Among the many conflicts which characterize American culture, few are more deeply rooted than that between the claims of free enterprise and those of social justice. Few contending claims are more difficult to reconcile and also more prone to political smoothing over through rhetorical recourse to “middle-class” values. Perhaps, then, this is the time to look back at the Jacksonian era with a view to suggesting the degree of family resemblance between nineteenth-century entrepreneurship and twentieth-century corporate capitalism. Certainly, the two seem to share a common ideology and a reluctance to consider the psychic cost of economic survival in bourgeois society.

No American thinker or artist in either the...