The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America

Capa
University of Chicago Press, 15 de jan. de 1996 - 278 páginas
What is the political sensibility of America's middle class? Where did it come from? What kind of life does it hope for? Newfield finds a major source in the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and offers a radically revisionist account of his powerful influence on individualism and democracy in the United States. Emerson's thought encompassed the most important cultural and social changes of his time - a new urban street culture, early versions of the business corporation, experimental communes, the rise of women authors, new forms of labor, a less father-centered family, frontier wars with American Indians, Mexicans, and others, and the controversy over slavery. Locating him at the center not only of philosophical but of national developments, Newfield shows how Emerson taught the middle class to respond to these changes through a form of personal identity best termed "submissive individualism." Newfield identifies a previously unacknowledged connection between liberal and authoritarian impulses in Emerson's work and explores its significance in various domains: domestic life, the changing New England economy, theories of poetic language, homoerotic friendship, and racial hierarchy. This provocative reassessment of Emerson's writing suggests that American middle class culture encourages deference rather than independence. But it also suggests that a better understanding of Emerson will help us develop the stronger, alternative forms of personhood he often desired himself. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the development and the current limits of liberalism in America.

De dentro do livro

Conteúdo

Introduction
1
Liberal Troubles
15
The Submissive Center
17
Nature The Corporatist Solution to Submission
41
The Authoritarian Language of Liberal Religion
43
Democratic Prophecy and Corporate Individualism
62
Individualism and Submission in Private Life
89
Friendly Inequalities Emerson and Straight Homoeroticism
91
Loving Bondage The Authority of Domestic Remoteness
129
Late Emerson Corporate Liberties
151
Market Despotism The Poet Affirms the Laws
153
Corporatism and the Genesis of Liberal Racism
174
Continuations Liberation from Management
209
Notes
219
Index
263
Direitos autorais

Outras edições - Ver todos

Termos e frases comuns

Sobre o autor (1996)

Christopher Newfield is director of research at the Independent Social Research Foundation, London.

Informações bibliográficas