50 pages • 1 hour read
Andrew CarnegieThe Gospel Of Wealth
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1889A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Allusion
Carnegie employs several different kinds of allusions in his article to enhance his arguments and explanations. Various Biblical allusions elevate his ideas to the level of religious, and specifically, Christian, discourse. When he suggests that a man who dies rich also dies disgraced, he may be using the religious meaning of the word “grace,” which is a state of being close to God—that is, by dying rich, a man is entering the afterlife far from God, which is a risky proposition for Christians. As well, Carnegie uses allusions to allude to the “incompetent and lazy fellow” (7), such as this allusion from the Book of Micah: “‘If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap” (7).He also compares the rare productive sons who inherit masses of wealth to “the salt of the earth” (10), an allusion to the Gospel of Matthew.
Another important allusion takes the form of Carnegie’s reference to Shakespeare’s tragedy The Merchant of Venice, comparing the “millionaire’s hoard” (13) to that of Shylock’s wealth. Shylock, one of Shakespeare’s best-known villains, is a Venetian moneylender who places cruel and immoral conditions around his loans and takes advantage of people who need his services. By comparing the wealthy men who keep their fortunes close to an evil character like Shylock, Carnegie is dramatizing his criticism of such behavior, intensifying it to nearly criminal levels of anti-humanistic behavior.
Amplification
At times, Carnegies takes his rhetorical style to extremes, embellishing and lengthening some of his sentences to make his point undeniably clear. For example, Carnegie writes:
Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced in to the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and often there is friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor (5).
This sentence could easily be split into several shorter and more concise statements, but Carnegie chooses to use the conjunction “and,” as well as a series of commas, to maximize the power of his language. By incorporating a list as well as the rule of three, both of which are elements of persuasive speech-making, Carnegie heightens the impact of his statement by forcing the reader to pay attention to the entire length of the sentence. Carnegie employs rhetorical flourishes such as these in other amplified sentences in the article, and often follows them with a brief sentence that concludes a paragraph, skillfully leaving the reader with a final concluding thought.
Metaphor
Carnegies uses metaphors at several points in his article to make comparisons that serve his argument. When Carnegie seeks to make the point that certain conditions must be in place for capitalism to succeed, he compares capital to a bird, explaining that without a talented individual who has the know-how to create capital, “capital soon takes wings” (6). Carnegie criticizes political belief systems like socialism or anarchism, condemning them for “attacking the foundation upon which civilization itself rests” (7), and thereby comparing civilization to a home or other building which requires a stable resting place in order to stand. When Carnegie proposes philanthropy as a solution for the problem of inequality between the rich and poor, he states that the policy will not “sap the root of enterprise” (13), by which he means that philanthropy is unlikely to discourage hard work and ambition, which are the basis, or root, for a successful business of any kind.
Antithesis
Early in the article, Carnegies acknowledges that the law of competition brings positives and negatives to a society, but he feels sure that competition is ultimately a good thing. In order to make this opinion clear to his reader, he employs antithesis, writing that “while the lay may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race” (6). The two opposites at play here are the individual and the human race as a whole; by positioning them in parallel situations, Carnegie emphasizes the quality of opposition, which makes his point that the law of competition is actually the best thing possible for the largest group of people.
