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.
