ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the American oriental-observer tale’s critique of the extreme-individualist self of sentiment as it serves as a component for a new democratic system. In The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787), Republican author Peter Markoe confronts the notion of the individual forwarded by thinkers such as Benjamin Rush as of a piece with the American nation’s own self-evident rational standing. Rush is puzzled by the revolutionary mania he diagnoses in his fellow citizens and prescribes rational self-restraint to help stave off “Turkish” behavior. Markoe, whom John Adams was later to call a “terrorist,” rejects the developing economic theories of an enlightened self-interest becoming established during the period and proposes instead an idea of the democratic spirit as a common passion, one that in the context of Shays’ Rebellion seems to promise (or threaten) perpetual revolution and explode the development of a still-nascent American imperialist self.
