Search

Summary

Between 1830 and 1860, new conceptions of moral complicity sparked fierce debates in the United States. Reformers, religious authorities, novelists, market activists, and politicians zealously spelled out how moral liability flowed across legal systems, commercial networks, conspiracies, and political structures. The Introduction begins by illuminating the religious roots of this activist discourse. Then it outlines gendered threads of northern complicity critique, especially the focus on urban sexual vice, and plumbs abolitionism’s preoccupation with thickening social ties and causal webs that connected individuals and institutions to remote and widely distributed evils. Finally, an overview of the book’s chapters introduces key concepts such as moral ensembles, organic sin, tolerance complicity, moral taint, the Black market, and democratic complicity. Throughout, the Introduction highlights how complicity critics adapted old imaginative grammars and developed new ones to capture new forms of moral enmeshment and convey their dynamics and dangers.

Search Results

Refine search

Refine search

Actions for selected content:

1 results

Introduction

Summary

Search Results

Refine search

Refine search

Actions for selected content:

Save Search

1 results

Introduction

Summary