The household. There are few ideas so freighted with meaning and emotion, so vital to other notions of life and society, or so prone to distortion and fantasy. At once the fundamental idea of classical economics and politics, the household constitutes a primary element of social thought. But a household is no simple thing, or even a single thing. Instead, it is an idea that has been shaped, hardened, cracked, repaired, demolished, rebuilt, canonized, despised, and fought over since Aristotle's time. In Households of the Soul, Vincent Pecora surveys the modern progress of an idea that is never far from the center of social controversy and political struggle. He examines key arguments that have shaped debates about household and clan as well as culture and language. Pecora focuses on modernity's fascination with real and imaginary households whose archaic resonances recall the patron-client relations, gift exchanges, and magical thinking of the past. He examines a wide range of literary works and critical issues--from Tennyson's Ulysses to Joyce's, from Morgan's anthropology and Durkheim's sociology to Baudrillard's symbolic economy, from Hegel's ethics to George Gilder's entrepreneurial potlatch. Pecora's compelling analysis is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the modern era's atavistic spiritual household. "The imaginary household of the soul is an enchanted, theoretical gens that has been at (or very near) the center of modernism's sacred aesthetic economy, and it is a vision of culture that circulates still."--from Households of the Soul