Ryan C. McIlhenny's American Socialist is the first comprehensive biography of Laurence Gronlund (1844–1899), one of the nation's most persuasive proponents of socialism. Gronlund cultivated a unique polemic against capitalism by advocating positions that synthesized Marxism with Darwinian evolution, rejected class violence, and emphasized cooperation over competition. According to McIlhenny, a belief in a divine force advancing history toward a "cooperative commonwealth" underpinned his philosophy. Gronlund's books enjoyed a wide and dogmatic readership during the late nineteenth century, and his teachings inspired prominent Gilded Age figures, including Edward Bellamy, Leo Tolstoy, and Eugene V. Debs. American Socialist masterfully restores Gronlund to his place among the nation's most important political thinkers.
Ryan C. McIlhenny is professor of liberal arts and humanities at Xing Wei College in Shanghai, China, and the author of To Preach Deliverance to the Captives: Freedom and Slavery in the Protestant Mind of George Bourne, 1780–1845.
"Ryan C. McIlhenny has written one of the best intellectual biographies I have ever read. In clear, concise prose, he leads readers through the economic, political, and historical writings of Laurence Gronlund, showing us that the unkempt economist was one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth century. Gronlund called out capitalism for robbing people of sympathy for one another, for causing people to give up on God, and for creating the stratification of great poverty and great wealth. His abiding faith in bloodless revolution broke through the polarities of the late nineteenth century, imagining a path—guided by the divine—between capitalism and anarchy. In McIlhenny's beautiful telling, Gronlund's vision of cooperative industry, nationalized mines, public utilities, and universal public education was much more than a political conceit. He had a spiritual vision for individual and social evolution, and convinced many Americans that they could work together without violence to forge a vastly different world." - Janine Giordano Drake, author of The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement
"American socialism has always been religious, and socialist religion has always overflowed the banks of even the most justice-minded of churches. Laurence Gronlund was the theorist who made socialism truly American by tapping into its spiritual depths, and McIlhenny's careful exegesis makes Gronlund's vision accessible to a new generation of scholars and socialists." - Dan McKanan, author of Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition
