Review: Individualism, Emersonian Style

Reviewed Work(s): Emerson by Lawrence Buell: Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a
Democratic Intellectual by Peter S. Field: Emerson and Self-Reliance by George Kateb:
Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance by
Kenneth S. Sacks
Review by: Bryan-Paul Frost
Source: Polity , Apr., 2005, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Apr., 2005), pp. 286-293
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Northeastern Political
Science Association

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Polity e Volume 37, Number 2 * April 2005
C 2005 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/05 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

REVIEW ESSAY

Individualism, Emersonian Style

Lawrence Buell. Emerson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003.

Peter S. Field. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
George Kateb. Emerson and Self-Reliance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002.

Kenneth S. Sacks. Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His

Struggle for Self-Reliance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
The author can be reached at bfrost@louisiana.edu

Bryan-Paul Frost, University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Polity (2005) 37, 286-293. doi: 10. 1057/palgrave.polity.2300014

In 2003 we marked the bicentennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882), who was arguably America's first and perhaps most influential
public or democratic intellectual. Emerson was, in his day one of the most
popular lecturers and essayists in the United States and England; and although his
reputation may not be as great today as it was during his lifetime and immediately
following his death, there continues to be an enormous amount of interest in his
life and thought-Peter S. Field reports that no fewer than three biographies of
Emerson have been published in the last decade alone, and Lawrence Buell
reveals that inspirational one-liners from his corpus can be found all over the
internet. What accounts for this continuing interest in Emerson? Although none of
these books sets out to answer this question directly, each in its own way provides
an explanation as to why Emerson is an American icon beloved by academics
and the public alike.
Kenneth Sacks's Understanding Emerson is certainly the most narrowly focused
of the four books and is therefore more likely to appeal primarily to Emerson
scholars. Nonetheless, Sacks presents us with a lively, readable, and thorough
account of the circumstances surrounding the composition and reception of
Emerson's 1837 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa oration "The American Scholar." Averring
that this oration is the "most celebrated academic talk in American history" (1),
Sacks offers a detailed description of the political, social, and religious climate of

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 Bryan-Paul Frost 287

Boston and Harvard as well as many fine portraits of 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's democratic 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's early 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

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288 INDIVIDUALISM, EMERSONIAN STYLE

vocation as a public lecturer at last provided him with an "egalitarian medium"

(136)-"a type of secular sermon" (134)-whereby he could address and
emotionally connect with people directly, exhorting them throughout his career
to actualize their untapped inner potential.
Perhaps the highlight of the book is Field's judicious and even-handed account
of Emerson and the politics of race, slavery, and abolitionism. Field cites three
basic phases in the evolution of Emerson's thought: up until 1837, when he gave
his first lecture on slavery, he was more or less indifferent to the issue; during the
following decade, although he remained "largely mute on slavery," he began to
question his earlier belief about the "intractable inferiority of Africans"; but after
the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, which literally brought the
issue home to Concord, "Emerson often joined the ranks of antislavery activists,
at least in his own measured, prosaic way" (169). What Field helps to bring out in
relief in this, Emerson's "single great foray into active politics" (167), is his
ambivalence toward it. "Dismissive of the American tendency to fetishize politics,
Emerson unwaveringly urged his fellow citizens to redirect their energies more
properly toward self-improvement and culture. The political apparatus of the state
could only offer marginal help with what in the end proved to be a personal
quest" (218). Although it may be hard to believe in today's highly politicized
climate, America's first great democratic intellectual was resolutely apolitical.
Lawrence Buell's Emerson is an expansive and eclectic discussion which
focuses on "key moments of Emerson's career and major facets of his thought"
(1). Among these, Buell identifies contributions to poetry, religion, philosophy,
and social thought and reform. Buell also raises the problem of "mentorship" (2),
by which he means the difficulty in using Emerson as a mentor in light of his
frequent exhortations to "make free with history, books, tradition, sacred cows of
all sorts," if these cultural authorities were not deemed useful in one's own self-
actualization (312). There is much to recommend in this wide-ranging, evocative
analysis. First, Buell effectively discloses both the broad, general influence
Emerson has had on so many other thinkers and movements (from Nietzsche to
Pragmatism) as well as the wide range of writers and texts which influenced him
(from the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg to the Bhagavad Gita). Part of
Buell's effort is to make plausible the claim that although Emerson was "the first
public intellectual in the history of the United States" (1), he was not crudely
nationalistic or parochial but was indeed rather open and perhaps even multi-
cultural both in his outlook and influence. (It should be noted that Sacks
confirms Buell's contention here, at least when it comes to "The American
Scholar": according to Sacks, the oration is an effort "to define the American
scholar without dwelling on what is uniquely American. ... [F] or Emerson [being
a scholar] signified freedom from all prescribed culture and convention"
[30-31].) Second, Buell also reveals important tensions in Emerson's thought,

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 Bryan-Paul Frost 289

in particular concerning religion and social activism. In respect to religion,

Emerson claimed that there was an overarching soul or spirit permeating humans
and nature alike, while at the same time affirming that the only authentic
expression of that immanent god was by and through each and every individual:
no individual can dictate an authentic expression of this universal divine spirit for
others. In respect to social activism, and especially abolitionism, Buell even-
handedly demonstrates how "Emerson had trouble deciding which was worse: to
keep silent about practicalities while the world burned, or to intervene at the risk
of falling into programmatic myopia to the detriment of a scholar's proper work"
(244). Overall, Buell (who takes his cue from a remark William James made
about Emerson's religiosity) correctly sees that Emerson's "metaphysics,' which
oscillates between privileging the transpersonal and then the personal, or
monism and then individualism, is reflected throughout his writings: "His
philosophy of history sometimes boils down to the individual biographies of
selected great men, sometimes to the emanation of a polymorphous universal
mind. His social thought sometimes privileges acts of conscienceful self-assertion,
sometimes transpersonal higher law or principle. His literary theory sets
extremely high value on individual inspiration even as he remains convinced
of inspiration's transpersonal character" (163-64). Buell tries to resolve these
tensions by showing how each of the poles is in fact interdependent; in the
process, he demonstrates why Emerson intrigued and fascinated so many others.
Originally published in 1995, George Kateb's Emerson and Self-Reliance has
been reissued with a new preface (which explores the religious dimensions of
Emerson's first and perhaps most difficult to read book, Nature). In one important
sense, this is perhaps the most Emersonian of all the four books: just as Emerson
encouraged his audience to make use of other authors and authorities as they
saw fit, so Kateb appropriates him for his own purposes, showing us how
Emersonian self-reliance is in fact a theory or vital component of "democratic
individuality." Kateb distinguishes between mental and active self-reliance,
arguing that the only genuine form of independence comes through thinking
rather than acting. Mental self-reliance is "the steady effort of thinking one's
thoughts and thinking them through. It is intellectual independence, reactive and
responsive self-possession" (31). By seeing "life and the world with one's own
eyes, with eyes cleansed of the effects of the group mind and institutional
constrictions" (xlii), we will be able to "perceive and pronounce beauty and
hence to see and say what is truly there. The net effect is justice: to see the beauty
that is present but often obscured, ignored, betrayed or self-unclaimed" (60). In
the end, mental self-reliance can even "redeem" the frustrations and obstacles
encountered by self-reliant and independent individuals when they attempt to
participate in the world. Kateb's discussion of mental self-reliance concludes with
a fine exploration of the extent to which friendship and sexual love contribute or

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290 INDIVIDUALISM, EMERSONIAN STYLE

not to mental self-reliance. His conclusion: "Mental self-reliance begins and may
very well end in solitude, but its point, which is love of the world, gathers
indispensable help from the friendship in sexual love as well as the love in
unsexual friendship" (133). The final two chapters of the book examine the less
elevated form of independence, active self-reliance, and in particular economic
and political activity. Emerson favors "economic self-help" and gives qualified
support to the pursuit of wealth as a "proper manifestation" of active self-reliance;
"[s]tate socialism," by contrast, "is altogether incompatible with every aspect of
Emerson's thought" (144, 146, 152). Still, the highest form of active self-reliance is
finding and doing one's work or vocation: that which one can uniquely do and/or
do in one's own unique way becomes an expression of oneself. As for politics,
Kateb reaches conclusions similar to, and perhaps even stronger than, those of
Field and Buell: "Emerson would be an anarchist if he could" (189).
Kateb makes a strong case for privileging mental over active self-reliance
(even if Emerson himself never made that distinction, as Kateb is aware),
especially when one recalls Emerson's ambivalence to politics. But it is precisely
at this point that one can raise questions regarding Kateb's desire to use Emerson
as "the founder of the philosophy of democratic individualism" (197): why turn
to such a wholly apolitical man, one who was at best ambivalent about politics
and even associations, and who has no theory whatsoever of prudence or
statesmanship (even though he admired Lincoln). If the answer to this question is
that Emerson celebrates the potential self-reliance of each and every soul, thus
elevating democratic citizens, then it is unclear why Kateb wishes to eliminate
from Emerson the very ground of that belief: his insistence that a universal mind
or reason or spirit pervades all human beings, and that all humans have access
and can give expression to that spirit by hearkening to their own inner voice or
genius. Kateb, however, is clearly troubled and seemingly embarrassed about
Emerson's religiosity; he clearly wants to secularize him for a more modern
democratic audience. Where, then, would the source for our unlimited potential
be located? One may disagree with Emerson's spiritualism, but if individuals are
shorn of the divinity Emerson claimed was in us all, it seems exceedingly difficult
to affirm that individuals could approach genuine mental or active self-reliance.
These questions notwithstanding, Kateb is to be applauded for trying to
concretize self-reliance as a concept and then for working out its manifold
implications in love and friendship, economics and politics.
Educational reformer, democratic intellectual, spiritualist, cosmopolitan, and
self-reliant sage-as these books demonstrate, there seems to be something for
everyone in Emerson's capacious soul. In conclusion, however, we wish to raise a
Tocquevillean-inspired question. Not only do these four books argue that
Emerson was one of the first and most influential public intellectuals, but they
also strongly suggest that he was a healthy one for democracies as well. But is this

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 Bryan-Paul Frost 291

so clear? Emerson's unique brand of individualism demands that we slough off

any authority or institution (organized religion chief among them) that does not
speak to the divine within us; but in so doing, does Emerson not leave us more
naked and alone in the process, and therefore all the more susceptible to the
tyranny of the majority? Would not this unmooring of the soul from tradition,
custom, habit, religion, and associations leave most of us even more dependent
upon and susceptible to the crushing and numbing weight of mass opinion? In
other words, does Emerson's legacy of self-reliance foster a proud and feisty
individualism-one able to sustain democracy and democratic institutions-or
does it in fact lead to the isolated and atomized individualism that Tocqueville
describes-one that ultimately infects a healthy democratic society and turns it
into little more than a herd? Let us examine this latter possibility more closely
There is no doubt that Emerson is aware how difficult it is to withstand the

"unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society." In "Self-Reliance'," he

observes that it is relatively easy for a "firm man who knows the world to brook
the rage of the cultivated classes"; by contrast, it takes a truly extraordinary and
even godlike courage to ignore the "growl and mow" of an indignant majority.
And yet, despite the great difficulty involved in withstanding the oceanic
pressures of majority opinion, Emerson places the burden of doing so squarely on
the individual: groups and associations can offer but little (if any) assistance in
spiritual transformation and renewal. In his essay "New England Reformers,'
Emerson levies two main criticisms against political associations. First, all
political change tends to be partial and piecemeal, and it is therefore incapable
of achieving the "total regeneration" of society that he envisions. Second,
associations are no better than the individuals who make them up, and if those
individuals are not spiritually healthy, neither will the group be. Although
Emerson often encourages the diffusion of "culture" throughout America to
ennoble human beings, he never makes clear how this could be accomplished
except through very substantial educational and/or political reforms. Individuals
are the vehicles through which spiritual renewal must take place, and yet these
very same individuals, as part of the majority, prevent or severely curtail that
renewal. Emerson seems to offer us no mediating association or group which can
act as an instructor or bulwark against majority tyranny For Tocqueville, by
contrast, it is precisely civic engagement at the local level that helps to cure the
ills to which democracy is prone: civic participation in local associations
prevents our slide into individualism by forcing us outside of our closed world of
family and friends in order to engage in various community activities. Emerson,
however, does not look favorably upon any comparative set of institutions or
associations.

Let us grant for a moment that such spiritual renewal can and should take
place-how are individuals to summon or hearken to their inner voice; how are

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292 INDIVIDUALISM, EMERSONIAN STYLE

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":

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a

valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of
the church. On my saying, "What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions,
if I live wholly from within?" my friend suggested-"But these impulses may be
from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such;
but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be
sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the
only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all
opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.

According to this passage, how is one to differentiate between morality and

madness? Emerson could never concretize or codify such an understanding of
morality precisely because only individuals can determine morality's content by
following the promptings of the "divine" within them. By all accounts, Emerson
himself was a decent and benevolent individual, beloved by friends and family
alike; but can a mass democratic society put such faith in the spontaneous
impulses and intuitions of its citizens? By making us our own moral legislators, is
Emerson not unwittingly allowing us to indulge in our worst passions? It is here
that Tocqueville would likely find another dangerous consequence of Emerson's
brand of individualism. As he argues in the opening chapters of Volume II of
Democracy in America, when democratic peoples are bereft of fixed and settled
beliefs (especially concerning moral and religious matters), they will inevitably
turn to an anonymous but omnipresent public opinion to supply them with
convenient, ready-made answers to these and other troubling questions. Indeed,
democrats are particularly reliant upon public opinion inasmuch as egalitarian-
ism isolates and atomizes individuals from one another: to go against public
opinion leaves one feeling small, feeble, and helpless. One might push even
further, with Tocqueville, in this direction: traditional religion and religious
dogmas might provide a salutary counterweight to the ill-effects of democratic
isolation and atomization. By raising one's mind to the heavens, and by
inculcating duties to one's fellows, religion imposes obligations and responsi-
bilities that are contrary to the desires democrats would likely indulge in if left to
themselves. Although Emerson hopes to uplift and ennoble human beings by
having them seek out and develop their own moral and spiritual potential,
Tocqueville sees such a solution as likely to leave individuals lost and alone, and
thus all the more inclined to turn to mass opinion for guidance and support.

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 Bryan-Paul Frost 293

While it is clear that Emerson saw the tremendous power of majority tyranny 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.

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