In his 1890 study, the Principles of Psychology, William James questioned anew the meaning of selfhood – a philosophical issue embedded in his generation's endeavor to distinguish between slavery and freedom. The ideal of a society based on contract presupposed a self that could not be bought and sold, or owned by another, or enslaved. This free subject imagined by liberalism also interested James, though his inquiry was not into political economy but rather into the complexities of defining what was meant “by the name of me.” In a chapter on “The Consciousness of Self” James began, “it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.”

In its own day the Principles was greeted as a masterpiece, and today it is recognized as foreshadowing James's later philosophy of pragmatism. Yet it reflected not only theory to come but debates that had gone before. James began writing it in 1878 and had been gathering materials for at least a decade earlier. He was a thinker particularly aware of the historical contingency of ideas, and it seems likely that the questions he raised about self consciousness in the Principles were influenced by and responsive to postbellum arguments about the outcome of slave emancipation in a free market society. For the problem of drawing lines between me and mine - between what was unsaleable and what could be sold – had been the centerpiece of debate over the transition from bondage to contract freedom in James's Boston just as much as in the cotton fields of the Sea Islands.