The Political Emerson

The Political Emerson PDF Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807077238
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) never considered himself a political thinker. And yet he rose to prominence during one of the most turbulent times in U.S. history. As a result, political questions grew in importance for him, becoming by the 1860s one of his chief concerns as a public intellectual. In The Political Emerson, David M. Robinson has brought together for the first time the best of Emerson's numerous writings on politics and social reform.

The Political Emerson

The Political Emerson PDF Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807077238
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) never considered himself a political thinker. And yet he rose to prominence during one of the most turbulent times in U.S. history. As a result, political questions grew in importance for him, becoming by the 1860s one of his chief concerns as a public intellectual. In The Political Emerson, David M. Robinson has brought together for the first time the best of Emerson's numerous writings on politics and social reform.

A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Alan Levine
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813134323
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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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.

Emerson’s Liberalism

Emerson’s Liberalism PDF Author: Neal Dolan
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299228037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Emerson’s Liberalism explains why Ralph Waldo Emerson has been and remains the central literary voice of American culture: he gave ever-fresh and lasting expression to its most fundamental and widely shared liberal values. Liberalism, after all, is more than a political philosophy: it is a form of civilization, a set of values, a culture, a way of representing and living in the world. This book makes explicit what has long been implicit in America’s embrace of Emerson. Neal Dolan offers the first comprehensive and historically informed exposition of all of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings as a contribution to the theory and practice of liberal culture. Rather than projecting twentieth-century viewpoints onto the past, he restores Emerson’s great body of work to the classical liberal contexts that most decisively shaped its general political-cultural outlook—the libertarian-liberalism of John Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment, the American founders, and the American Whigs. In addition to in-depth consideration of Emerson’s journals and lectures, Dolan provides original commentary on many of Emerson’s most celebrated published works, including Nature, the “Divinity School Address,” “History,” “Compensation,” “Experience,” the political addresses of the early 1840s, “An Address . . . on . . . The Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” Representative Men, English Traits, and The Conduct of Life. He considers Emerson’s distinctive elaborations of foundational liberal values—progress, reason, work, property, limited government, rights, civil society, liberty, commerce, and empiricism. And he argues that Emerson’s ideas are a morally bracing and spiritually inspiring resource for the ongoing sustenance of American culture and civilization, reminding us of the depth, breadth, and strength of our common liberal inheritance.

Emerson: Political Writings

Emerson: Political Writings PDF Author: Kenneth S. Sacks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521883696
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the central figure in American political thought. Until recently, his vast influence was most often measured by its impact on literature, philosophy and aesthetics. In particular, Emerson is largely responsible for introducing idealism into America in the form of living one's life self-reliantly. But in the past few decades, critics have increasingly come to realize that Emerson played a key role in abolitionism and other social movements around the time of the American Civil War. This selection for Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought highlights not only Emerson's practical political involvement, but also examines the philosophical basis of his political writings. All of the usual series features are included, with a concise introduction, notes for further reading, chronology and apparatus designed to assist undergraduate and graduate readers studying this greatest of American thinkers for the first time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Peter S. Field
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847688432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this original and fascinating book, Peter S. Field argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson is America's first democratic intellectual. Field contends that Emerson was a democrat in two senses: his writings are imbued with an optimistic, confident ethos, and more importantly, he acted the part of the democrat by bringing culture to all Americans. In Ralph Waldo Emerson, Field connects Emerson and his remarkable creativity to the key political issue of the day: the nature of democracy and the role of intellectuals within a democratic society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Politics of Ronald Reagan

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Politics of Ronald Reagan PDF Author: Rainer Holl
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640429591
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 65

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, TU Dortmund (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Emerson - The World's Eye, language: English, abstract: The importance of the Romantic period and the meaning of its ideas for the development of the United States can not be overestimated. Ralph Waldo Emerson as its ingenious prototype for the American Scholar formulated ideas that created a base for a transcending Civil Religion that seems to be the foundation of the American self-concept. This Civil Religion was also the base for the politics of one of the most conservative politicians of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan. In my work I want to show that Emerson's ideas and the politics of Ronald Reagan don't exclude each other. Both, Emerson and Reagan, can be regarded as excellent speakers and writers, well versed in their rhetoric means. I want to show that there is a common ground where the ideas and the rhetoric of these seemingly contradictory characters meet, which supports the idea of an overaching truth within the minds of the American people.

Politics

Politics PDF Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781646795086
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
"The theory of politics, which has possessed the mind of men, and which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two objects for whose protection government exists." -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Politics (1844) Politics (1844), by Ralph Waldo Emerson details the author's views of the transitory nature of political institutions. Emerson's approach to politics championed democracy and individualism, Moreover, as a consequence of his transcendental beliefs, Emerson argued that the role of government would diminish as man's character evolves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Politics of Ronald Reagan

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Politics of Ronald Reagan PDF Author: Rainer Holl
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640429788
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, TU Dortmund (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Emerson - The World's Eye, language: English, abstract: The importance of the Romantic period and the meaning of its ideas for the development of the United States can not be overestimated. Ralph Waldo Emerson as its ingenious prototype for the American Scholar formulated ideas that created a base for a transcending Civil Religion that seems to be the foundation of the American self-concept. This Civil Religion was also the base for the politics of one of the most conservative politicians of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan. In my work I want to show that Emerson's ideas and the politics of Ronald Reagan don't exclude each other. Both, Emerson and Reagan, can be regarded as excellent speakers and writers, well versed in their rhetoric means. I want to show that there is a common ground where the ideas and the rhetoric of these seemingly contradictory characters meet, which supports the idea of an overaching truth within the minds of the American people.

Emerson

Emerson PDF Author: Robert D. Richardson Jr.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918371
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
Recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man. These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age. Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature. Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.

From Emerson to King

From Emerson to King PDF Author: Anita Haya Patterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195355172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book traces a provocative line from Emerson's work on race, reform, and identity to work by three influential African- American thinkers--W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West--each of whom offers subtle engagement with both the tradition of written protest and the critique of liberalism Emerson shaped. Emerson has been cast in recent debate as either an antinomian or an ideologue--as either subversive of institutional controls or indebted to capitalism. Here, Patterson contributes a more nuanced view, probing Emerson's record and its cultural and historical matrix to document a fundamental rhetoric of contradiction--a strategic aligning of opposed political concepts--that enabled him to both affirm and critique elements of the liberal democratic model. Drawing richly on topics in political philosophy, law, religion, and cultural history, Patterson examines the nature and implications of Emerson's contradictory rhetoric in parts I and II. In part III she considers Emerson's legacy from the perspective of African-American intellectual history, identifying fresh continuities and crucial discontinuities between the canonical strain of protest writing Emerson helped establish and African-American literary and philosophical traditions.