Book description
From before the Civil War until his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson
was renowned-and renounced-as one of the United States' most prominent
abolitionists and as a leading visionary of the nation's liberal
democratic future. Following his death, however, both Emerson's
political activism and his political thought faded from public memory,
replaced by the myth of the genteel man of letters and the detached sage
of individualism. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered Emerson's
antislavery writings and began reviving his legacy as a political
activist. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is the first
collection to evaluate Emerson's political thought in light of his
recently rediscovered political activism. What were Emerson's politics?
A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson authoritatively answers
this question with seminal essays by some of the most prominent thinkers
ever to write about Emerson-Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Judith N.
Shklar, and Wilson Carey McWilliams-as well as many of today's leading
Emerson scholars. With an introduction that effectively destroys the
“pernicious myth about Emerson's apolitical individualism” by editors
Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, A Political Companion to Emerson
reassesses Emerson's famous theory of self-reliance in light of his
antislavery politics, demonstrates the importance of transcendentalism
to his politics, and explores the enduring significance of his thought
for liberal democracy. Including a substantial bibliography of work on
Emerson's politics over the last century, A Political Companion to Ralph
Waldo Emerson is an indispensable resource for students of Emerson,
American literature, and American political thought, as well as for
those who wrestle with the fundamental challenges of democracy and
liberalism. Alan M. Levine, associate professor of political theory at
American University, is the author of Sensual Philosophy: Toleration,
Skepticism, and Montaigne's Politics of the Self. He lives in
Washington, D. C. Daniel S. Malachuk, associate professor of English at
Western Illinois University, is the author of Perfection, the State, and
Victorian Liberalism. He lives in Bettendorf, Iowa.
