Reverend Horatio Alger Jr. and Dr Russell H. Conwell: Protestant Prescriptions for Social and Economic Mobility

Abstract

This thesis intends to identify the precise prescriptions for social and economic mobility intended by Horatio Alger Jr. and Russell H. Conwell in their works Ragged Dick and “Acres of Diamonds.” Furthermore, to explain why their prescriptions diverge from one another using the methodological lens of modernist sociologist Max Weber and postmodernists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The intent is to set up a dynamic tension between modernist and postmodernist vantage points that will function as a heuristic device explaining the differences in the prescriptions articulated by Alger and Conwell. The thesis looks for the intersection of subjective experiences of Alger and Conwell that are of more objective relevance to the American way of life, then and today. This paper sets up the dynamic tension between modernist attempts at objectivity and postmodernist acknowledgment of partial perspectives from a theoretical standpoint. This paper explores the theoretical intersection of subjective experience with the objective phenomenological reality we find ourselves. This thesis will historically and socially locate the works of Alger and Conwell and analyze them through the lens of Weber, Berger, and Luckman. There is an attempt to damage Weber’s historically framed analysis and Berger and Luckmann’s insistence on concrete social locations of knowledge by introducing the importance and explanatory value of life events. Furthermore, the possibility of timeless, durable prescriptive facts defying historical and social locations and engaging the phenomenological intersection of the subjective and objective. Ultimately suggesting this intersection is where knowledge is located.