I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is Open Source, the vitalism episode with the passionate

polymath Jackson Lears.

Your new book, Jackson, is Beyond Category, and gripping, too.

It's titled Animal Spirits, the American pursuit of vitality from camp meeting to Wall Street.

The historian in you is reintroducing us to the invisible germ of energy, enchantment,

courage, spontaneity, and longing that has driven the American story uphill and down

to wherever we are in the 2020s, a big question in itself.

You give us a world Jackson Lears that's drumming with invisible currents of power, something

more than animal magnetism, bigger than electricity.

Describe it, picture this vitalism for us today.

Let me just back up a second and say that I've came to this immediate subject, even though

I've been thinking about related ones all my career, but I came to this immediate subject

through John Maynard Keynes and his reappearance in the crash of 2008.

It was Keynes who popularized the concept of animal spirits for a modern and contemporary

audience by referring to it as a spontaneous urge to action.

Keynes was interested in that impulse in the actions of investors.

John Maynard Keynes, we think of him as the economist of the 20th century.

That's right, and a great man in many ways, and a great thinker with respect to vitalism

though he never called himself a vitalist.

What I discovered when I started looking into the notion of animal spirits is that it had

a long history, the phrase that a long history, one of those historic themes concerned a personal

link between body and soul, or body and mind, what we call vitality, individual vitality,

...