If you have been to an exercise class—or a yoga studio—or a home goods store, anytime in the past year; indeed, if you’ve ever scrolled an Instagram or TikTok feed, you’ve probably come across the ubiquitous spiritualized language of energy. You may have witnessed a college roommate’s commitment to ridding herself of those who emit “toxic energy”; or a high school friend’s celebration of “positive energy.” You may have been encouraged, in spin class or on an exercise mat, to “channel your energy” or feel those of the people around you. You may even have been encouraged to “manifest”: to channel your psychic energy in the service of bringing health or wealth into your life, in an update of the once-ascendant self-help phenomenon known as The Law of Attraction or The Secret. 

Underpinning all this is a subtle metaphysic—you could even call it the “theology of vibes”—the idea that a single, harnessable, inscrutable life force, hovering between the scientific and the spiritual, animates all of human existence, and that our own thoughts and feelings are somehow deeply linked to, and might even have the capacity to control, that shadowy force. It may be the closest thing we have to a shared civil religion in an age of traditional orthodoxy’s decline; according to one recent study, more than a quarter of Americans report practicing “manifesting”—essentially, meditating on things they want in order to psychically bring them about in reality—on the regular in the hopes of gaining a material result, while over half say they believe in manifesting’s benefits.

But this is the religion of modernity, as American historian Jackson Lears shows us in Animal Spirits: his comprehensive, ambitious history of what a layman might (but Lears is far too learned to) call “vibes culture.” Over three hundred-odd pages, Lears demonstrates how that “subtil, aiery substance” often referred to in pop culture as the titular “animal spirits” played a defining role in American spiritual culture, and, more broadly, in the post-Enlightenment West: carving out a place for the emotive, the physical, and the spiritual alike in a world Lears characterizes as a “view of human rationality’s triumph over inert nature and animal automata.”

Lears is at his most convincing when supporting his thesis that “enchantment survived Enlightenment.” For Lears, the increasingly secular world that followed the so-called Age of Reason was neither reasonable nor secular. Rather, the spiritual impulses that once infused traditional orthodox religion life relocated, leading to a cultural reimagining of “energy” located in the individual’s emotions, desires, and will, and ultimately, in what the philosopher Henri Bergson would come to call the élan vitale: the universal creaturely compulsion to live.

From the financial speculations of seventeenth-century London to the proto-punk futurists of a newly-unified Italy, from nineteenth-century technologists of electricity and magnetism to evangelical tent revivalists, Animal Spirits’ myriad subjects double as a portrait of a world wrenched between technological innovation and religious yearning, where—as people’s own lives became longer and more secure—life itself became reimagined as the site of divine strength: grounded in the conviction that, as one of Lears’ sources put it, “there must be something more than dead matter.” What that something looks like—against the backdrop of the decline of traditional orthodox Christianity—proves thoroughly strange, and seductive.

The most engaging and thorough chapters of Animal Spirits deal with the precise nature of animal spirits in American life, where an emotive revivalist religious culture and a capitalist worship of monetary speculation—another realm where human creative freedom takes on pragmatic reality—fused with wider nineteenth-century romanticism (and, towards the end of the century, a far more chilling Nietzschean brand of vitalistic strength-worship). Drawing heavily from Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon and, less explicitly, Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, Lears skillfully weaves together the American obsession with (pseudo-)scientific accounts of electricity, personal magnetism, and New Thought, alongside a renewed cultural faith in the positive value of the human pursuit of self-interest. 

At the core of each of these, Lears reveals, are elements of the intellectual and cultural trend known as vitalism: a celebration of our innate hungers—equal parts somatic and spiritual—that underpin our lives both as human beings and as animals. “Animal spirits”—a term that, Lears reveals through a cornucopia of example, was ubiquitous in the nineteenth century to describe both masculine energy and sexual desire—and electrical energy alike, in Lears’ telling, are examples of modern conceptions of mana: “a mysterious force or spirit … that kept the fragments [of reality] from falling apart.” Or, as we might call it in a contemporary SoulCycle class: energy. Lears’s sources, relentlessly but elegantly deployed, provide a fusillade of evidence: revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney’s account of the Holy Spirit as “like electricity moving through me”; an 1802 pamphlet account of electricity as “the very soul of the universe . . . the accelerating, animating, and all-sustaining principle both of the animate and inanimate creation”; an 1850 article in a health journal celebrating how “every human being has a given amount of capital put into his possession by his Maker; that capital is his vital energy—his life-force.” All of these serve to illustrate a cultural miasma where human creative strength and vigor take on a spiritualized meaning.

Yet Lears stops short of drawing his study of vitalism to the conclusion he leaves implicit: that the “life force” of vitalism is inextricable from desire, particularly erotic desire. Certainly, he traces erotic vitalism’s literary legacy, from the yearnings of John Donne, who ached for his “three-person’d God” to “batter my heart,” to the sexual superabundance of Walt Whitman’s Body Electric, to the explicit post-Nietzschean philosophizing of George Bernard Shaw, who has one stage protagonist opine, “In the sex relation the universal creative energy, of which the parties are both the helpless agents, over-rides and sweeps away all personal considerations and dispenses with all personal relations.” 

Yet it is precisely when we understand animal spirits as desire: for sex, for self-propagation, for self-propagation through self, that we better understand its relationship to capitalism. Markets become the place in which desire, tactfully euphemised as demand, becomes and in turn, serves as the primary arbitrator of our shared social reality. Or, as one early twentieth-century psychologist put it: “Sex has become so free and abundant that it no longer provides the thrill it once did. … Gambling on Wall Street is about the only thrill we have left.” Be it “animal spirits” or mana or electricity, the inchoate energy Lears describes is inevitably linked to wanting: a wanting that, in turn, leads to the continuation of the self and its life: whether through the bearing of children or the self-glorification that comes through wealth. In that sense, Lears builds on McCarraher’s thesis in Enchantment of Mammon: that capital itself, in modern life, has become a kind of god: Lears’ sources suggest that the enchantment of capital is downstream of the enchantment of desire that animates the laws of supply and demand. Desire, in this new genealogy of the theology of modernity, becomes not something to be held in check—a foundational tenet of so many religious traditions—but a window into the truest authentic self: a self whose urges are constitutive of who they are. Lears’ narrative highlights this connection, but shies away from investigating in depth the relationship between sexual desire, sexual reproduction, the vitalist mystique, and the capitalist marketplace.

Even more curious is Lears’ elision of the role vitalism, particularly of the neo-Nietzschean kind, plays in our contemporary world, and, in particular, the political and cultural rhetoric of the post-Trump era: where the atavistic revival of masculine strength has become integral to the rise of the New Right. Although he makes perfunctory reference to vitalism’s dark side—the triumph of the will reconceived as aesthetic excess; the bloodthirsty subtext of spiritualized fascist—his final chapter, which dashes all too quickly towards the contemporary era, leaves us with an unconvincing picture of vitalism’s dormancy. 

Lears leaves us a strangely dated account of modernity in which, in his view, the most salient specter of post-Enlightenment alienation is the “neoliberal regime.” The Enlightenment’s most caricatured intellectual excesses—technocratic optimization; a schism between mind and body; blithe disregard for those very “animal spirits” that suffuse our identity—are, in Lears’ telling, unfortunately victories. In Lears’ 2023, neoliberalism is in ascendance; ere “each person becomes a piece of ‘human capital’—a little firm with assets, debts, and a credit score anxiously scrutinized for signs of success or failure, much as Calvinists scrutinized their souls for evidence of salvation or damnation.” Lears’ own success earlier in the book at convincing us that nearly everything—including American capitalism—is shaped by vitalistic impulses makes it difficult to conceive of a “neoliberal regime” that isn’t. Aside from a few nods to Christian dualism (itself complicated, and rightly so, by Lears’ own thoughtful examination of Medieval embodied Christianity earlier in the book) and off-the-cuff references to Cartesian rationalism, we rarely get to see enough examples of an American ideology not governed by animal spirits to contextualize the triumph, however temporary, of what Lears calls our “managerial age.”

Lears’ optimism about vitalism’s power, furthermore, seems blithely quixotic—particularly because he engages little or not at all with vitalism’s most insidious contemporary manifestations: the rise of a “manosphere” through evolutionary psychology-driven gurus like Jordan Peterson and its uneasy, anti-woke alliance with a Christian right that, in both Catholic and evangelical varieties, is all too quick to re-embrace the “strong gods,” as R. R. Reno once wrote: those pagan impulses of nationalism and power-worship that proponents of muscular Christianity all too often treat as preferable to the ostensible effeminacy of modern liberalism.

It is a discomfiting omission, and one that weakens our faith in Lears’ own conviction: that “a revived vision of universal animacy, equipped with scientific legitimacy, could rekindle a fresh engagement with the natural world.” Still, overall, Animal Spirits is not only an engaging read but a highly worthwhile one: among the best and most comprehensive articulations available of the relationship between human desire, creative energy, capitalistic speculation, and the post-Enlightenment quest for renewed aesthetic and spiritual meaning. In a world where more and more of us believe that what we want has the magical power to shape our reality—a belief that the Internet, a subject on which Lears is largely silent, has only intensified—a historical genesis of that belief can be nothing but necessary. When it comes to an account of the significance of vitalism in the present day, however, we are left wanting.