The Paintgrinder: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Karl Marx on a Horizon of Thought

Abstract

This article undertakes a radical rereading of capitalist ideas in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). In both popular and academic appraisals, Emerson is an exponent of mainstream American values, moral and economic. We challenge such appraisals through a novel analysis of Emerson's brief contact with the work of Karl Marx and proceed to illustrate the subtlety of Emerson's engagement with the structure of capitalist labor. Using explanatory metaphors based on painterly labor, Emerson demonstrates how labor structures that are assumed to be products of capitalism were also discernable in cultural settings in the mid-nineteenth century, and that neglected lines of affinity exist between cultural and capitalist production. The result is a speculative new purview for the analysis of the social forms of the capitalist era, which indicates the shortcomings of what Michel Foucault termed a Marxian "horizon of thought" that governs the critical outlook of the humanities.