Ready-Made Democracy explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of social life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War. The story begins with the elevation of homespun clothing to a political ideology on the eve of Independence. Homespun clothing tied the productive efforts of the household to those of the nation, becoming a most tangible expression of the citizen's attachment to the public's happiness. Coarse dress did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it. Nevertheless, exhortations of industry and simplicity became a fixture of American discourse over the following century of industrial revolution, as the mass-produced suit emerged as a badge of a uniquely virtuous American polity. It is here, Zakim argues, in the evolution of homespun into its ready-made opposite, that men's dress proves to be both material and metaphor for the rise of democratic capitalism—and a site of the new social arrangements of bourgeois life.  In thus illuminating the critical links among culture, ideology, political economy, and fashion in antebellum America, Ready-Made Democracy will be essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the construction of modern life. "[Zakim] suggests that too much emphasis on America's preliberal past has diverted attention from the Big Story: the 'great transformation' of the United States into a democratic capitalist society in the early nineteenth century. It is this Big Story that Zakim seeks to illuminate in Ready-Made Democracy . He succeeds brilliantly. . . . Part of what makes Ready-Made Democracy so worth reading is Zakim's beautiful, even elegant, prose. At least as important is his ability to marry Marxian analysis and Tocquevillian insights into a coherent and compelling interpretation of American history." -- Gary J. Kornblith ― Common-Place “This dazzling book deserves a wide audience of readers, not least among labor historians.  Do not let the narrow-seeming subtitle fool you; saying that Ready-Made Democracy is about “men’s dress” is like saying that Moby Dick is about a whale.  Zakim uses the production, marketing, and consumption of clothing—a fascinating and important story that he tells with verve and precision—as a lens through which to reframe and synthesize the first century of democracy and capitalism in the United States.  This genre-bending work is simultaneously splendid cultural history, sure-handed business history, fascinating labor history, and, ultimately, an important political history, for it demonstrates the ways in which clothing became, in the mid-nineteenth century, a ‘paradigm of liberal governance’. . . . A brief summary can not do justice to the empirical richness or the surprising but enlightening juxtapositions and insights that mark almost every page of the book. . . . Ready-Made Democracy marks a signal contribution to American historiography.” -- Lawrence Glickman ― Labor “Zakim follows the development of the market for ready-made clothes from innovations in business and manufacturing through the emergence of an urban retail culture serving ‘white-collar’ clerks to the conditions of seamstresses and, finally, to the standardization of a sartorial icon for bourgeois individualism—the broadcloth suit. He thus offers an impressively nuanced social history of a modern commodity, one that describes in remarkable detail production and retail practices that often remain invisible in studies of the nineteenth-century city. . . . Situated against long-standing debates about the rise of capitalism and the liberal consensus that defined antebellum America, Ready-Made Democracy offers an innovative model of cultural history. It interprets broad themes about the legacy of the republican ideology of “homespun” within a startlingly vivid evocation of the material world of everyday life while keeping our eyes on the big picture of structural changes in society and economy that effected a sometimes tense accommodation of mass industry and democratization. More impressive than the archive Zakim has assembled is the sophisticated interpretation and elegant narration by which he dramatizes his argument. To understand why "getting dressed proves to be a central event in modern life," he notes, requires a method that locates the existence of the suit within a complex interplay of "habits, systems, conflicts, and explanations that were born in the wake of the commodity's rise to social dominance" (p. 4). Throughout, Zakim's reading of his sources remains pungently alive to the particular artifacts, terms, and phrases by which the market entered the very fabric of work, shopping, and deportment.” -- Thomas Augst ― Journal of American History “A brief review cannot do justice to the complexity of Zakim’s argument or to the multifaceted nature of his book, which literally bur