Mr. Emerson's Revolution

Abstract

Mr. Emerson's Revolution is an edited collection of nine essays addressing Ralph Waldo Emerson's question about the relationship between self and society: “How Should I Live?” (p. viii). The Transcendentalist paradox between thought and action has been addressed previously by the contributors to the collection (and other scholars elsewhere), but Mr. Emerson's Revolution sets out to trace and explain Emerson's involvement in the public reform efforts of the era (specifically abolitionism and women's rights) and to examine (in true Transcendentalist fashion) his path from idealist to engaged reformer. This personal transformation is hinted at in the book's title, as a singular revolution, referred to by the editor, Jean McClure Mudge, as an “interior civil war” (p. xiii). In section 1 Phyllis Cole focuses on Emerson's early life and intellectual development, emphasizing the family and cultural influences that put the young man on a “trajectory toward vision and revolution” (p. 3). Cole includes the influence of Emerson's aunt Mary Moody, the subject of an earlier biography (Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism, 1998). Picking up after Emerson's graduation from Harvard University in 1821, Wesley T. Mott shows that Emerson did, in fact, play a “pivotal role” in the exploding social and religious reform movements of the 1820s and 1830s, as he moved through personal and career crises—from teacher to minister to philosopher—and moved from Boston to the “ancestral rebellious ground” of Concord (p. 77).