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The American Ethos And The Contribution By Franklin

Satisfactory Essays

In a lengthy article on the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Sophus A. Reinert makes the claim that Franklin was instrumental through his writings in creating the American ethos in his work on Advice to a Young Tradesman and subsequently played a part a seminal part in the creation of modern capitalism and globalism through his writing on The Way to Wealth. The concepts introduced in the article are summarized and the concept of the American ethos and the contribution by Franklin to modern capitalism are analyzed and critiqued. The first major concept introduced by Reinsert is that Franklin, in his Advice to a Young Tradesman, claimed that “Time … is Money.” Such a statement, he notes is iconic because “the commodifying of existence itself helped articulate the emotive core of modern capitalism” (Reinert 61). Franklin is introduced by the author as a “savant of capitalism” (Reinert 62). There many such statements attributed by Reinert to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin with the sole purpose of claiming that Franklin played a major role to the globalization of American capitalism. He equates Franklin with the economic status of such great scholars of his time such as Adam Smith who wrote Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of Wealth of Nations (Reinert 65). Reinert notes that “Economic works can take many forms across many genres, from the theoretical to the prescriptive, from the hermetic to the popular” and he implies by this statement that although the

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