Emerson and Communism

Abstract

IN the period of intellectual fermentation which was middle nineteenth-century America, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a highly interested observer and critic. To slavery, of course, he paid particular attention, and his utterances regarding what he conceived to be the greatest of all evils reveal not only a sharp insight into practical affairs but a profound hatred for servitude of every kind. In addition, he kept a keen eye on such contemporary movements as woman suffrage, temperance, public education, and communism. Today his reaction to the various group-life projects that took place around him has special pertinence, for Emerson is still regarded as one of the prophets of modern America, and there is nothing more triumphantly modern than communism. He took definite notice of the tendency to segregate people into communities devoted to a single aim. His friends were members of the most famous of the phalansteries, Brook Farm; Alcott's Fruitlands was within reasonable walkingdistance of Concord. The ideal of such establishments, moreover, coincided, at least in part, with his own. How far did his sympathy and his approval go? It is easy to forget that Brook Farm was neither the first nor the most enduring of the communistic experiments in America, although it was unquestionably the best known. The Shakers had organized a community project as early as 1776; 1 George Rapp and his followers had emigrated to the United States in 1804, and Robert Owen had founded his Indiana utopia barely twenty years later.2 Indeed, upwards of forty Fourieristic phalanxes were eventually established in this country. Brook Farm itself, though it endured from 1841 to 1846, did not become a genuine phalanstery until