Emerson S Liberalism

Emerson’s Liberalism explains why Ralph Waldo Emerson has been and remains the central literary voice of American culture: he gave ever-fresh and lasting expression to its most fundamental and widely shared liberal values. Liberalism, after all, is more than a political philosophy: it is a form of civilization, a set of values, a culture, a way of representing and living in the world. This book makes explicit what has long been implicit in America’s embrace of Emerson. Neal Dolan offers the first comprehensive and historically informed exposition of all of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings as a contribution to the theory and practice of liberal culture. Rather than projecting twentieth-century viewpoints onto the past, he restores Emerson’s great body of work to the classical liberal contexts that most decisively shaped its general political-cultural outlook—the libertarian-liberalism of John Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment, the American founders, and the American Whigs. In addition to in-depth consideration of Emerson’s journals and lectures, Dolan provides original commentary on many of Emerson’s most celebrated published works, including Nature, the “Divinity School Address,” “History,” “Compensation,” “Experience,” the political addresses of the early 1840s, “An Address . . . on . . . The Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” Representative Men, English Traits, and The Conduct of Life. He considers Emerson’s distinctive elaborations of foundational liberal values—progress, reason, work, property, limited government, rights, civil society, liberty, commerce, and empiricism. And he argues that Emerson’s ideas are a morally bracing and spiritually inspiring resource for the ongoing sustenance of American culture and civilization, reminding us of the depth, breadth, and strength of our common liberal inheritance.

From before the Civil War until his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was renowned—and renounced—as one of the United States' most prominent abolitionists and as a leading visionary of the nation's liberal democratic future. Following his death, however, both Emerson's political activism and his political thought faded from public memory, replaced by the myth of the genteel man of letters and the detached sage of individualism. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered Emerson's antislavery writings and began reviving his legacy as a political activist. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is the first collection to evaluate Emerson's political thought in light of his recently rediscovered political activism. What were Emerson's politics? A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson authoritatively answers this question with seminal essays by some of the most prominent thinkers ever to write about Emerson—Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Judith N. Shklar, and Wilson Carey McWilliams—as well as many of today's leading Emerson scholars. With an introduction that effectively destroys the "pernicious myth about Emerson's apolitical individualism" by editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, this volume reassesses Emerson's famous theory of self-reliance in light of his antislavery politics, demonstrates the importance of transcendentalism to his politics, and explores the enduring significance of his thought for liberal democracy. Including a substantial bibliography of work on Emerson's politics over the last century, A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is an indispensable resource for students of Emerson, American literature, and American political thought, as well as for those who wrestle with the fundamental challenges of democracy and liberalism.

What is the political sensibility of America's middle class? Where did it come from? What kind of life does it hope for? Newfield finds a major source in the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and offers a radically revisionist account of his powerful influence on individualism and democracy in the United States. Emerson's thought encompassed the most important cultural and social changes of his time - a new urban street culture, early versions of the business corporation, experimental communes, the rise of women authors, new forms of labor, a less father-centered family, frontier wars with American Indians, Mexicans, and others, and the controversy over slavery. Locating him at the center not only of philosophical but of national developments, Newfield shows how Emerson taught the middle class to respond to these changes through a form of personal identity best termed "submissive individualism". Newfield identifies a previously unacknowledged connection between liberal and authoritarian impulses in Emerson's work and explores its significance in various domains: domestic life, the changing New England economy, theories of poetic language, homoerotic friendship, and racial hierarchy. This provocative reassessment of Emerson's writing suggests that American middle class culture encourages deference rather than independence. But it also suggests that a better understanding of Emerson will help us develop the stronger, alternative forms of personhood he often desired himself. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the development and the current limits of liberalism in America.

Counters the view of the late Emerson's decline by rethinking his engagement with liberal education and his intellectual relation to Whitman, William James, Charles Eliot, and Du Bois.

This book traces a provocative line from Emerson's work on race, reform, and identity to work by three influential African- American thinkers--W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West--each of whom offers subtle engagement with both the tradition of written protest and the critique of liberalism Emerson shaped. Emerson has been cast in recent debate as either an antinomian or an ideologue--as either subversive of institutional controls or indebted to capitalism. Here, Patterson contributes a more nuanced view, probing Emerson's record and its cultural and historical matrix to document a fundamental rhetoric of contradiction--a strategic aligning of opposed political concepts--that enabled him to both affirm and critique elements of the liberal democratic model. Drawing richly on topics in political philosophy, law, religion, and cultural history, Patterson examines the nature and implications of Emerson's contradictory rhetoric in parts I and II. In part III she considers Emerson's legacy from the perspective of African-American intellectual history, identifying fresh continuities and crucial discontinuities between the canonical strain of protest writing Emerson helped establish and African-American literary and philosophical traditions.

In this age of "total" war on terrorism, many liberals fail to recognize the dangers of adopting the methods of their enemies--of meeting propaganda with propaganda, cruelty with cruelty, and violence with violence. Other liberals reject even modest efforts to teach and regulate good citizenship, fearing that in doing so they will come to resemble their enemies. Can liberal democracy be strengthened and secured without either compromising basic liberal principles or emasculating fundamental liberal purposes? The great totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century are gone, but the need for "strong liberalism" has never been more urgent. Jason A. Scorza argues that liberalism can generate an account of citizenship responsive to such pressing contemporary challenges as political fear, political apathy, and conformist political membership. Strong Liberalism is founded on understanding thoroughly the canonical defenders of liberal democracy (John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and Judith Shklar), moving beyond the thinking of prominent contemporary theorists (Stephen Macedo, William Galston, and Thomas Spragens), and parrying the arguments of liberalism's critics (Benjamin Barber, Michael Sandel, and Mary Ann Glendon). Scorza imparts a sharp theory of "strong liberalism" that summons liberal philosophy to the battlefield of the inner life of politics and recalls it to its own essential but often overlooked strengths: civic friendship, political courage, political self-reliance, civic toleration, and political irreverence. The theory of strong liberalism accepts that civic strength is rooted in civic pluralism. Liberal democracy is best served by the cultivation of multiple examples of good citizenship rather than by the insistence that a single, ideal civic character can be identified and universally imposed through civic education.