cont ents · margaret fuller, critic: writings from the “new-york tribune,” 1844–1846, ed....

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments ixList of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: “The Last Improvement Possible?” 1

1. The Right to Two Cities 11An Ancient Question · An Early Modern Answer · From Overlapping to Coinciding Cities · Modern Liberalism, or Democratic Cant Theorized · “Democratic Individuality” · From “Historical Discourse” (1835) to “Self-Reliance” (1841) · Conclusion

2. “Knock, and it shall be opened”: Fuller’s Higher Lawsuit 58The Hellenic Critique · The Hebraic Critique · Democracy and Conscience Incommensurable, 1839–1843 · The Masterwork: “The Great Lawsuit” (1843) · Democracy as Despotism, 1846 · Democracy’s Revived Promise, 1846–1850

3. Higher Law Debates and Overlapping Cities 102The “Living North” · Originalism · Aspirationalism · Proceduralism · Conclusion

4. “As justice satisfies everybody”: Emerson and the City of Man 136The 1840s: “Politics,” Early Antislavery Writings, “Napoleon” · The Antislavery Writings of the 1850s · The Masterwork: The Conduct of Life (1860) · 1862 Onward

5. “So we saunter toward the Holy Land”: Thoreau and the City of God 189Between Self and Society · Higher-Use Ecology · From Civil Obedience to Disobedience · “Slavery in Massachusetts” and Walden (1854) · The Masterworks: “Life without Principle,” “The Allegash and East Branch,” “Walking” · “Walking”: The Four Facets of the City of God · “Why Are You Out There?”

© University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission of the Press.

viii contents

Conclusion 256

Notes 261

Index 289


a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Were it not for three breakthroughs this book would have remained in that perfect state “which . . . I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen,” as Thoreau once wrote of something else. Hindsight also shows me that, while they seemed my own at the time, these epiphanies were all thanks to oth-ers. The first was when I realized that any book re-transcendentalizing the Transcendentalists ought to focus on the “higher law moment.” I discovered this historical moment in 2005 at the Library of Congress, where the staff led me to the databases that made this American obsession in the 1850s startlingly clear. I was able to grasp its significance, though, only thanks to a series of conversations with colleagues in Washington, DC, especially Paul Churchill, Karol Soltan, and Peter Levine. I was on leave then from Daniel Webster College, and for many conversations there I would also like to thank Don Wellman.

The second breakthrough came at a 2010 conference in Atlanta. Reflect-ing after lunch on our forthcoming collection on Emerson’s politics, Alan Levine, typically, wondered if our hero was really worth it: is Emerson a true political philosopher, he prodded, like Plato or Nietzsche, unafraid to question cows as sacred as democracy, or just another nineteenth-century liberal? Looking back, I believe the discussion that followed inspired the book’s second key contention: that the Transcendentalists not only sacral-ized the self but profaned democracy. My debt to Alan is tremendous, that conversation being just one of dozens during a wonderful period of intel-lectual collaboration. I would also like to thank all the other fine scholars who contributed to that volume, including Neal Dolan, Borden Flanagan, Jason Frank, Len Gougeon, Shannon Mariotti, Jim Read, and Chip Turner. In many ways this book continues conversations begun then.

After the Transcendentalists themselves, of course, the best reason to study them is their scholarly community. My thanks go to everyone I met on the conference circuit while presenting pieces of this project, especially Antonio Casado da Rocha, Phyllis Cole, Jeffrey Cramer, David Dowling, Mike Frederick, Greg Garvey, Bob Habich, Ethan Kytle, Wes Mott, San-dra Petrulionis, Todd Richardson, David Robinson, Dick Schneider, John Stauffer, David Voelker, Tiffany Wayne, and Mike Ziser. Like so many oth-


acknowledgmentsx

ers in the field, I remain especially grateful for the guidance of Brad Dean. At Western Illinois University, I appreciate the support of Mark Mossman, chair of the English Department, and Susan Martinelli-Fernandez, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as that of the Provost’s Office, the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Research, the Office of Sponsored Projects, and my students over the years.

The final breakthrough was when I recognized the Transcendentalists often depicted higher law and democracy as rival places. This happened during a 2013–2014 sabbatical when I myself had a chance to visit some very nice places, starting with an idyllic fall at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame. I am very grateful for the support of the people who work there, including Brad Gregory, Don Stel-luto, Grant Osborne, Carolyn Sherman, and Eric Bugyis; my fellow Fellows, including Robert Audi, Carl Gillett, Ethan Guagliardo, Douglas Hedley, Scott Kenworthy, Jonathan Marks, Gladden Pappin, Bharat Ranganathan, and Scott Shackelford; and several supportive faculty at that university, in-cluding Patrick Deneen, Mark Noll, Michael Zuckert, and especially Laura Dassow Walls. My sabbatical spring as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Heidelberg was equally rewarding in introducing me to the generous faculty there, most of all Ulrike Gerhardt, Günter Leypoldt, Dieter Schulz, and Jan Stievermann. While in Europe, I also had several opportu-nities to share my thesis, for which I would like to thank Michael Foley at the University of Groningen, Thomas Constantinesco at the University of Paris VII, and Katja Sarkowsky at the University of Muenster. For gener-ously welcoming me to their home as well as to the University of Bordeaux, I would especially like to thank Joseph and Michèle Urbas.

My superb experience with the University Press of Kansas began with its director, Charles T. Myers, and the readers, David M. Robinson and an anonymous scholar. I am also grateful for the assistance of Kelly Chrisman Jacques, Sara Henderson White, Larisa Martin, Carol A. Kennedy, Michael Kehoe, Karl Janssen, and Rebecca J. Murray.

That we still take the Transcendentalists seriously today is thanks mainly to the innovative work of a handful of scholars a few decades ago. While my differences with Lawrence Buell, Stanley Cavell, and George Kateb will emerge in what follows, I would not have written this book—or any-thing else about the Transcendentalists, frankly—without the inspiration and provocation of their scholarship. For these reasons, too, I will always


xiacknowledgments

be grateful I was able to study with another of Transcendentalism’s great twentieth-century champions, Richard Poirier.

Finally, a few more personal acknowledgments are in order. For their professional kindness and example to me over the past decade, I would like to thank Amanda Anderson, Lauren Goodlad, and Marianne Noble. For their friendship to me and my family when we lived in DC and beyond, I thank Matt and Joanne Gernstein London. My indispensable WIU-QC col-league Everett Hamner has walked with me through many of the arguments here. For sharing his house in Transcendentalist country every summer and much more, I thank my father-in-law, Paul Reinhardt. Now is a good time to thank one of my wonderful grandmothers, Viola Malachuk, who has always encouraged my learning, and to remember another, the late Isa-bel Ford, who taught me much that I then rediscovered in Thoreau. Loving thanks are due to my siblings, Mike and Katie, and our parents, Dan and Ginger, who have always been unstinting in their support. Finally, and with the promise of no more talk of breakthroughs, I dedicate this book to my wife, Katie Reinhardt, and our son, Paul, who together teach me daily what “simplify, simplify” really means.


a b b r e v i at i o n s

AW Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

CC Henry David Thoreau. Cape Cod, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

CW Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson, Ronald A. Bosco et al. 10 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2013.

E&L Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983.

EL Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972.

EMF Margaret Fuller. The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Ex Henry David Thoreau. Excursions, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

FPL S. Margaret Fuller. Papers on Literature and Art: Two Parts in One Volume. New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1852.

GL S. Margaret Fuller. “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” Dial 4 (1843–1844) 1–47.

J Henry David Thoreau. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

JMN Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. 16 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982.

LCW Abraham Lincoln. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler. 8 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

LE Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990–1995.


abbreviationsxiv

LL Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1843–1871, ed. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson. 2 vols. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

LMF Margaret Fuller. The Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert Hudspeth. 6 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983–94.

MFC Margaret Fuller. Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the “New-York Tribune,” 1844–1846, ed. Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

MMFO Margaret Fuller. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, ed. James Freeman Clarke et al. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1852.

MW Henry David Thoreau. The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

PJ Henry David Thoreau. Journal, ed. John C. Broderick (vols. 1–3) and Robert Sattelmeyer (vols. 4–). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981–.

RP Henry David Thoreau. Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.

S Ralph Waldo Emerson. Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Albert J. von Frank et al. 4 vols. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989–1992.

Sad S. Margaret Fuller. “These Sad but Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.

SL S. Margaret Fuller. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, ed. Susan Belasco Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

W Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904.

Wa Henry David Thoreau. Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Wk Henry David Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Carl F. Hovde et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

WNC S. Margaret Fuller. Woman in the Nineteenth Century: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Larry Reynolds. New York: Norton, 1998.


Introduction “The Last Improvement Possible?”

Democratic theory is the moral Esperanto of the present nation-state system, the language in which all Nations are truly United, the public cant of the modern world, a dubious currency indeed—and one which only a complete imbecile would be likely to take quite at its face value, quite literally. But it is with democratic theory that it seems right to begin.

John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future

The point of reading philosophers of the past is to find in them something different from the present—and that is not just a historical but a philosophical discovery.

Bernard Williams, The Sense of the Past

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

Since the late eighteenth century’s conjoined Ages of Revolution and Ro-manticism, the fates of political democracy and individual flourishing have become so entangled that it is now very difficult to imagine them as potentially separate endeavors. Historically, the great boosters of one usually


introduction2

championed the other, but perhaps even more important to this union have been their enemies—from the monarchists to the fascists to the religious extremists—who for more than 200 years have targeted democracy and in-dividuality as the monstrous hydra of modernity. In response to the not only theoretical but very real violence offered by such reactionaries, Western pro-gressives for the last quarter of a millennium have understandably reached three conclusions: that democracy is the “single world-wide name for the legitimate basis of political authority” (in the words of leading democratic theorist John Dunn), that every person is sacred (as summarized recently by the sociologist Hans Joas), and that these two values—somehow—overlap. This book examines a small group of progressive thinkers who endorsed the first two claims, but not the third.1

This attempt to disentangle democracy and individuality began—of all places—in the United States in the 1840s: specifically, in Concord, Massa-chusetts. In his 1844 “Politics,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that, while “personal rights [are] universally the same” (E&L 560), our current demo-cratic institutions “are not better, but only fitter for us”; or, if we must say that “[d]emocracy is better for us,” it is only “relatively right” (E&L 563). In an 1846 piece for the New York Herald Tribune, Margaret Fuller even more boldly separated the steadfast Transcendentalist commitment to the natu-ral rights of sacred persons, or what she called “Principles,” from whatever political regime might be in place. Imagining an aggressive feudal Russia eventually confronting an equally expansive slaveholding United States midway across Europe, Fuller stresses that, morally, “[s]hould . . . [Rus-sian] Despotism and [American] Democracy meet as the two slave-holding powers of the world the result can hardly be predicted” (MFC 327). When Lincoln would make this comparison between Russia and the United States a decade later, he did so out of disgust for American hypocrisy, for surely—Lincoln meant—American democracy ought to be the place for principles.2 For Fuller, though, the comparison was apt because the political arrange-ments of these two regimes are ethically irrelevant, an assertion that likely would have left Lincoln breathless. Instead, Fuller continues, what really matters is that, here and there, individuals—be they American slaveholders or Russian landowners—are listening to their consciences, and this “def-erence to the progress of Principles” exhibited by these rare men—and, pointedly, not their being democrat or despot—are the proof to Fuller that these principles alone will “have their era yet” (328). That such principles might enjoy an era of their own, entirely independent of democracy (or des-


“the last improvement possible?” 3

potism), was the still more radical message of yet another philosopher out of Concord, in an 1849 essay eventually titled “Civil Disobedience.” Here, Henry David Thoreau, too, carefully differentiated between the “machin-ery” of democracy and the principle of individuality. Yes, Thoreau writes, democracy seems an improvement over despotism, but this is only because the principle of “respect for the individual” has historically threaded its way through both: “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual” (RP 89). But what will come next, Thoreau asks? That is, like Emerson in 1844 and Fuller in 1846, Thoreau in 1849 insists that we should not confuse today’s passing interest in democratic “machinery”—however progressive (or not) for its time—with the timeless moral principle of the sacred person. “Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?” (89)

These texts from the 1840s only anticipated the Transcendentalists’ main thought in the 1850s, which is the ultimate focus of this book. For, in that dramatic decade, not only the Transcendentalists but many other Amer-icans opposed to legal slavery recognized what many citizens of democ-racies have subsequently forgotten: that democracy—“such as we know it”—is as often foe as friend to the sacred person. This book details how, within this decade, Emerson and Thoreau (Fuller having died tragically in 1850) stepped beyond their contemporaries to imagine not destroying but merely demoting democracy to “the necessary friction of the machine of government” (RP 73) (as Thoreau put it in 1849) or “the highest instrumen-tality” (E&L 639) (as Emerson put it in 1850), which churns away in one place while sacred persons flourish together in an entirely different place. These are the “two cities” in the political thought of Transcendentalism.

As Bernard Williams reminds us, we ought to read old thinkers for phil-osophical as much as historical discoveries, and in this spirit each of this book’s five chapters closely attends to both the specifics of antebellum American thought and today’s enduring normative concerns, particularly those illuminated in recent years by the “postsecular” critique of canonical Western political theory. The first chapter, “The Right to Two Cities,” be-gins by recalling how ancient political theorists had carefully differentiated the city of man from the city of Ideals or God and insisted on either their productive tension (as in the work of Plato and Augustine) or their natural continuity (as in the work of Aristotle and Aquinas). The chapter then sum-


introduction4

marizes an emerging postsecular scholarly consensus that early modern theorists like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau also adopted the model of two cities but pursued a third approach never considered by the ancients: neither holding the cities apart nor aligning them, but “overlapping” them—to repurpose a word made famous by John Rawls—just enough to bestow religious legitimacy upon the political realm. With the rise of de-mocracy, however, many political theorists became so enamored with this particular machinery of governance that they trusted it—and still do—to enable a new kind of state—a modern city of man—where individuals re-alize not only political relevance but moral perfection. Of course, much of antebellum American culture exemplified this confident confusion of the cities, particularly the widespread faith that, thanks to Providence, the indi-vidual conscience must necessarily hear its own echo in the democratically ratified Constitution.

However, not all of antebellum American culture participated so whole-heartedly in this effective sacralization of democratic governance: today we too often forget that Charles Dickens recognized one of Transcendental-ism’s “good healthful qualities” to be its “hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her ever-lasting ward-robe.”3 And, for the Transcendentalists, one of Cant’s most prominent outfits in American life was the blather about a conscientious democracy, which was really—as Thoreau memorably described voting—“a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it” (RP 69). Yet, ironically, far from pursuing the Transcendentalists’ proposition that conscientious democracy is a category confusion, historians as well as theorists of American thought have instead argued that this pairing— often called “democratic individuality”— was not just antebellum Ameri-ca’s but specifically the Transcendentalists’ great legacy to us, such as in the powerful reinterpretation of Thoreau’s and Emerson’s work by the politi-cal theorist George Kateb, who coined the phrase.4 That Emerson sought, on the contrary, to pull profane democracy and sacred individuality apart from each other is shown in both “Historical Discourse” (1835)—an early text with less enthusiasm for democracy than we’ve thought—and “Self- Reliance” (1841). In bucking the American trend, and trying to wrest apart these notions, Emerson initiated a revival of an old “right” first effectively championed by Plato: the right to not just one city, as a modern theory goes, but two: one for our profane democratic practices, another for the perfec-tion of sacred persons.



The second chapter, “‘Knock, and it shall be opened’: Fuller’s Higher Lawsuit,” first illustrates the distinctiveness of the American Transcen-dentalists’ pre-1850 challenge to democratic cant by comparison with two other and much more famous nineteenth-century exposés of democracy’s progressive pretensions. Originating with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840), the first exposé was especially developed by John Stuart Mill into what some have called an “aristocratic liberalism.” The aristocratic liberal critique of democracy excelled at exposing majorities as potentially tyrannous; however, its counterproposals—protections of minorities and a culture of individuality—eventually transformed from an exposé of democracy into a new faith in democracy as indeed the great pro-tector and even facilitator of individual growth, what Mill called “represen-tative government” or what is often called “liberal democracy.”5 A second progressive exposé of democratic cant in the mid-nineteenth century sim-ilarly grew into just another variant of democracy. Led by the radical aboli-tionists, who trusted in the individual conscience to expose the democratic state—specifically the United States as a slave regime—as illegitimate, this second set of challengers sought in turn a more participatory democracy, what W. E. B. DuBois even called “abolition-democracy,” though “republi-can democracy” or “participatory democracy” are now the more common designations.6

Only the third mid-nineteenth-century challenge to the democratic state—that mounted by the Transcendentalists, especially Margaret Fuller—truly desacralized the democratic state by reviving the two-cities thought of Plato and Augustine. Rather than perpetuate the faith that a democratic city of men might one day become godly, Fuller—in her writ-ings from around 1841 while in the Boston area through 1846 while in New York—argued that—according to a “higher law”—the city of men ought to be held liable for stunting the growth of individual men and women. This is the theme of her 1843 “The Great Lawsuit,” which she was urged to revise and expand, though with a new title, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. Fuller regretted that new title as obscuring her purpose to “intimate the fact”—as she put it, in defense of the original title in her preface to Woman—“that . . . the action of prejudices and passions which at-tend, in the day, the growth of the individual, is continually obstructing the holy work that is to make the earth a part of heaven” (WNC 5). Between 1843 and 1846, Fuller’s enthusiasm for remaking the earth into heaven waned, and she began instead to suggest that the “growth of the individual” might


introduction6

be realized independently of worldly governments, such as in her 1844 por-traits of new communities in the American Midwest in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. However, in 1846, Fuller left for Europe, and her experience with the democratic revolutions there led to a revived conviction that democracy might indeed perfect the world; her 1846–1850 contributions to social dem-ocratic thought are acknowledged at the close of the chapter, but it is her 1841–1846 portraits of two separate cities that are deemed in this book to be her more distinctive contribution to political theory, one to which Emerson and Thoreau were notably indebted.

For a century academic readers have judged the Transcendentalist val-uation of the independent conscience against a gold standard of “demo-cratic individuality,” and thus have either lambasted the movement for its undemocratic individuality—usually the apolitical narcissism of Emerson or Fuller, or the anarchic individualism of Thoreau—or insisted that the Transcendentalists (along with Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville, in F. O. Matthiessen’s famous argument) simply must be “devot[ed] to the possi-bilities of democracy.”7 That the Transcendentalists in the 1840s were on the trail of something else entirely was confirmed by a historical develop-ment itself underappreciated by modern historians: how in 1850 Senator William Seward challenged the legality of the Fugitive Slave Bill on the basis of a “higher law” and (inadvertently) initiated a series of nationwide de-bates over the priority of two regimes that most white Americans had long assumed to be one and the same. The third chapter, “Higher Law Debates and Overlapping Cities,” begins with these forgotten contests over the role of the higher law in a democratic republic. The breadth as well as depth of this “higher law moment” still requires its historian; here specific attention will be paid to the variety of inventive solutions proposed to handle this suddenly exposed gap between “Constitution and conscience,” the cities of man and God. Chapters 4 and 5 will show that it is the Transcendentalists’ account of this rift that is most distinctive, but chapter 3 first reviews three other solutions, all of them versions of the overlap theory pioneered by the early modern theorists, and all of them still more or less operative today. The first, here called an “originalist” approach to higher law, stubbornly held to the faith that the founders’ Constitution was indeed a reflection of Divine Will, a conservative argument that found its first (somewhat hapless) champion in Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts (one of the primary architects of the 1850 Compromise Bill, which included the Fugitive Slave Law that revived “higherlawism” in response). But originalism enjoyed



much more robust defenses in pro-Bible, pro-Constitution, and proslavery polemics, most of which insisted that conscientious individuals properly instructed by orthodox religion will always also revere the original Consti-tution. The second, here labeled with the neologism “aspirationalist,” is the future-oriented version of originalism, and the characteristic position of two groups of antebellum progressives who are usually pitted against one another: Lincoln and Republicans generally as well as radical abolition-ists from Frederick Douglass to John Brown. What all of these figures had in common was a deep faith that a democratic United States would one day realize a higher law of justice that a few individuals of conscience already grasped and that the Declaration of Independence presciently enunciated. The third, here called “proceduralist,” looked to neither the past nor the fu-ture but to the present to bring democracy and individuality into alignment through the processes of “popular sovereignty.” Stephen Douglas was the best known exponent of this position, though many scholars today— particularly those invested in today’s constructivist theories of deliberative democracy or public reason—have wished instead to associate it with more savory figures like Lincoln or the Transcendentalists. This is a case of wish-ful thinking, though; Lincoln aspired not to refine democratic processes but to realize the “ancient faith” (LCW 2.266) of the Declaration.

What about the Transcendentalists? The fourth chapter, “‘As justice sat-isfies everybody’: Emerson and the City of Man,” presents an entirely dif-ferent solution than the three overlap theories. Between 1850 and 1862, the Transcendentalists articulated a position here called “two cities.” This is the heart of the political thought of the American Transcendentalists, who unlike the originalists, aspirationalists, and proceduralists, desacralized the democratic state and relocated its perfectionist energies to an entirely different place—or “city”—where individuals flourished in concert with one another. The Transcendentalists’ distinctive disunion of democratic instrumentalism and moral perfectionism is the great but thus far unrec-ognized theoretical fruit of this great but thus far underappreciated debate in the 1850s about not just how but even if profane democracy and sacred in-dividuality should overlap. Emerson’s pursuit of (what he called in the 1844 “Experience”) “the value and law of this discrepance” between the two cit-ies constitutes the main drama of the chapter, which culminates in his still relatively neglected 1860 book The Conduct of Life. Here Emerson describes a just democratic state as merely an engine running on “higher kinds of steam,” as he puts it in “Fate” (E&L 959) so that where once “the opinion


introduction8

of the million was the terror of the world” democracy “contrive[s] to make of this terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State” (959, 960). Such a state will satisfy—“as justice satisfies everyone” (959); only in an entirely different realm will we realize higher values: a place where (as he writes in “Worship”) “the Laws are [our] consolers” and we enjoy “the neighborhood of the great” and are “in the presence of high causes” (E&L 1076). “Keep the town for occasions,” Emerson writes, in another essay from this book, “Culture”; “the habits should be formed to retirement” (E&L 1028).

Finally, the fifth chapter, “‘So we saunter toward the Holy Land’: Tho-reau and the City of God,” relies on this particular Transcendentalist’s un-surpassed topographical imagination to sketch the movement’s two-cities thought at its most compelling. The chapter begins by recognizing that all of the major Transcendentalists struggled through the 1840s to imagine a kind of community independent of the democratic polity; their efforts to describe “friendship” (in Emerson’s 1841 essay and Thoreau’s 1849 A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers) and “love” (in another 1841 essay by Em-erson) and marriage (the focus of Fuller’s 1845 Woman) were prodigious but ultimately fruitless as they either drifted back to individuality or launched up into Platonic abstraction. In contrast, it was Thoreau, who even more than his mentor famously sought solitude in his cabin at Walden Pond, and who also like his mentor was enchanted by the Platonic notion of a “higher law” (indeed using the phrase in his public work much more often than Emerson), but who nonetheless increasingly sought over the course of his writings in the 1850s to depict the city of God not as a state of mind or an abstraction but as a specific place experienced through specific practices, specifics not unlike those described by the anthropologist Victor Turner in his analysis of the pilgrimage. “When I was let out the next morning,” as Thoreau described leaving jail in the 1849 “Resistance to Civil Government” that would become “Civil Disobedience,” I . . . joined a huckleberry party . . . and in half an hour . . . was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen” (RP 84). That essay launched a decade of writing in which Thoreau explored the kind of communitas (to recall one of Turner’s key terms) achieved when people intentionally (to recall another) leave the city of men for a different realm experienced only liminally (to recall a third). These three plus an-other (teleology) comprise what this chapter identifies as the four facets of the city of God in Transcendentalist thought. Explaining that all the ma-



jor Transcendentalists now and then imagined the city of God where we make a “higher use” (as Thoreau put it in The Maine Woods) of nature, and thus that their two-cities thought poses a challenge to modern biocentric trends in environmentalism that fantasize about ecologies without human beings, this chapter stresses that, of all the canonical Transcendentalists, Thoreau through the 1850s—especially in his final masterworks of 1862—best brings into focus these core facets of the city of God. He explains in one of these, “Life without Principle,” that we should never let the city of man become our main focus. “Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine,” Thoreau wrote, “are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but,” he continued, they “should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the phys-ical body” (RP 178). Instead, he proposed, “now that the republic—the res- publica—has been settled, it is time to look after the res-privata,—the private state” (RP 174).

Several of these chapters—2, 4, and 5—concede that each of the three major Transcendentalists underwent something like a volte-face about the two cities: Fuller with her revived hopes for social democracy as a facilitator of moral perfectionism while in Europe in the late 1840s, Emerson with his newfound faith in Lincoln’s aspirations for the United States beginning in 1862 (when Lincoln announced his plan to emancipate the slaves), and even Thoreau on his deathbed that same year (at least if a few cryptic remarks re-corded by others are to be trusted). Because he lived the longest, Emerson’s later work especially exemplifies this reversal, as when he announced in the December 1863 “Fortune of the Republic” that “the purest religion will find their house in our institutions” (AW 154). With this, Emerson brought to a close the two-cities project that he initiated with his remark in the 1841 “Self-Reliance” that not to “vote and resolve in multitude . . . will the God deign to enter and inhabit you . . . but by a method precisely the reverse” (E&L 281). His, Fuller’s, and Thoreau’s reversals are fitting testimonies to the enduring appeal of overlap theory, which is one of the points stressed in the book’s “Conclusion.”

More importantly, though, the Transcendentalists between 1841 and 1862 provide us with a distinctive account of “two cities,” and we will begin to appreciate this only if we resist the tendency to read our own agendas into theirs. This is not a new temptation, of course. “Our age has a ten-dency,” Perry Miller wrote in 1956, “when dealing with figures of the past, to amputate whatever we find irrelevant from what the past itself consid-


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ered the body of its teaching.”8 It is true that these amputations may lead, as Sheldon Wolin observed in 1960, to interesting new theories, but these new theories were not the ones advocated by the original thinkers. After all, Wolin explained, “a political theory consists of a set of concepts . . . bound together . . . by a kind of notational principle that assigns accents and mod-ulations. Any displacement or significant alteration of the notational prin-ciple or any exaggerated emphasis on one or a few concepts results in a different kind of theory.”9 In honoring Transcendentalism’s development of the three keynotes of Augustine’s own two-cities thought—the desa-cralized state, the “inexpungeable religiousness” of their valuation of the person (as George Kateb once acknowledged),10 and the tense but produc-tive relationship between these two “cities”—this book recovers their most central and original political thought. Why continue to amputate and reas-semble some bits and pieces of their work into something that we happen to prefer? Do we not already have enough pragmatists, postmodernists, and political liberals to go around? Consider instead the most distinctive political thought of American Transcendentalism, the two cities.


cont ents · margaret fuller, critic: writings from the “new-york tribune,” 1844–1846, ed....

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