The Republican Philosophy of Emerson's Early Lectures

Abstract

CHOLARSHIP on Ralph Waldo Emerson has been and probably always will be as idiosyncratic as work of its subject. Much more straightforward, however, are analyses of Emerson's political thought, which have typically characterized him in one of two ways. He is praised (or vilified) as genius of American individualism, the transcendental philosopher who successively separated himself, intellectually and emotionally, from various crises of hour [and who] eventually surrendered to a serene acceptance of fate. Or, more recently, he is celebrated as a prominent nineteenth-century social reformer, public intellectual, or cultural critic.' Opinion about Emerson's political thought has polarized so readily and completely, I believe, because twentieth-century critics have viewed it through their own political imaginations, and those imaginations are quite different from Emerson's own. Emerson was schooled in what historians today call republicanism, a tradition of political thought that threads its way through Renaissance Italian and English, American, and French revolutionary period texts. Although many historians have examined republicanism's afterlife as a nineteenth-century ideology, only recently have some scholars begun to explore