The "True Professional Ideal" in America: A History

'The True Professional Ideal' in America is a major work of intellectual history, tracing the emergence of the 'professional ideal' in the United States, from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century. Describing and explaining, for the first time, the development of the term 'profession' and its cognates in American culture, the author convincingly demonstrates the deep connections between developments in those vocations known as 'professions' and semantic changes in the term 'profession' itself. These semantic and vocational changes are then shown to be linked, within a complex relationshiop, to wider changes within American intellectual, social, economic and political history. This comprehensive, detailed and persuasive account of the emergence of the signal idea of 'profession' in America will be welcomed both as a powerful contribution to contemporary debates on professionalism and as a richly complex evocation of four centuries of American culture.