DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Emerson Effect

Individualism and Submission in America

Christopher Newfield author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:16th Apr '96

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Emerson Effect cover

This work presents a revisionist account of Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential thought on individualism, in particular his political psychology. The author analyzes the interplay of liberal and authoritarian impulses in Emerson's work in various domains: domestic life, the changing New England economy, theories of poetic language, homoerotic friendship, and racial hierarchy. Focusing on neglected later writings, Newfield shows how Emerson explored the tensions between autonomy and community - and consistently resolved these tensions by "abandoning crucial elements of both" and redefining autonomy as a kind of liberating subjection. He argues that in Emersonian individualism, self-determination is accompanied by submission to authority, and examines the influence of this submissive individualism on the history of American liberalism. In a reading of Emerson's early and neglected later works, the study analyzes Emerson's emphasis on collective, or "corporate", world-building, rather than private possession. Tracing the development of this corporate individualism, he illuminates contradictions in Emerson's political outlook, and the conjunctions of liberal and authoritarian ideology they produced.

ISBN: 9780226576985

Dimensions: 23mm x 16mm x 2mm

Weight: 567g

288 pages