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Northeastern Political Science Association: Palgrave Macmillan Journals
Northeastern Political Science Association: Palgrave Macmillan Journals
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Boston and Harvardas well as many fine portraitsof Emerson's friends and family,
from Bronson Alcott to his aunt Mary Moody Emerson. The overall picture that
emerges from Sacks's copiously documented account is of an Emerson who is
rather unsure of himself on the eve of the oration-indeed, as someone who is
rather ashamed that he "continued to compromise his desire to express himself
with complete candor" during his lyceum lectures the previous years. Emerson
therefore finally summoned "the courage to defy tradition" and live up to his
principles by directly challenging the very educational system in which he had
been raised (4). Along with his Harvard Divinity School address the following
year (after which he was not invited to speak at his alma mater for almost 30
years), this oration begins to sound essential Emersonian themes, especially in
regards to education: the need to transform the university from producing future
Boston Brahmins to cultivating unified and harmonious souls; to be liberated
from (if not to reject outright) any books, cultures, or traditions that did not
directly aid in the development of a student's inner voice or intuition; and to
celebrate in literature the "rich potential of popular culture,' or what Emerson
called the literature of "the near, the low, the common" (28). In short, "The
American Scholar"was the "fountainhead of his engagement with humanity" (3).
Peter S. Field's Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual is the closest
of the four books we have to an intellectual biography,although his goal is not so
"comprehensive" as this; instead, Field seeks to "distill the essence of his
character and expose his singular impact upon nineteenth-century American
culture" (1) by focusing on key moments in his life that made him the country's
first and pre-eminent democratic intellectual. Similar to Sacks, but more
expansive in his coverage, Field gives us a lively picture of Boston and Harvard
in the early 1800s, and he focuses much of his analysis on the first half of
Emerson's life. At the risk of oversimplifying, Field identifies four pivotal moments
in Emerson'sdemocratic development. First,Emerson ultimately rejected the elite
Boston Brahmin establishment to which his father belonged (and which his father
studiously cultivated) as pastor of Boston's influential First Congregational
Church. Second, after his father'searly death when he was 8 years old, Emerson
was marked both by the "genteel poverty" (40) of his family and then by his
education at Harvard,which he regarded as rigid and uninspired-the opposite
of what genuine education should be on his view. Third, although he finally
decided to become a minister after all, he soon resigned from the pastorate of
Boston's Second Church after three short years and more or less broke with what
he saw as the staid formalism and social elitism of the Unitarians with his
infamous Harvard Divinity School address. (In this respect, Field differs from
Sacks in privileging the Divinity School address as a real turning point in
Emerson's life; nonetheless, both Field and Sacks rightly point to the years 1837-
1838 as key in his intellectual development.) And finally fourth, Emerson's
they to know that that voice is authentic; and what is the ultimate message or
content of that voice? Unfortunately,Emerson offers little concrete guidance on
these points. Consider the following passage from "Self-Reliance":
While it is clear that Emerson saw the tremendous power of majoritytyranny and
opinion, his proposed individualist solution might be worse than the problem.
Although these four books lay a solid foundation for understanding Emerson's
unique legacy of self-reliant individualism, together they raise a crucially
important question concerning that legacy: did Emerson accurately understand
the genuine strengths and weaknesses of democratic society, and did he offer the
best and most salutary solutions to the problems and proclivities to which
democracy and democratic individuals are prone? I have suggested that there
stands opposed to Emerson another public intellectual in the American tradition
with an equally compelling yet contrary understanding of individualism. I can
think of no better political philosopher than Tocqueville to help us begin a critical
assessment of this most important question.