Emerson and the Defense of Equality
Arguing for equality as the necessary foundation of liberty
During Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lifetime, the idea of universal human equality was under intensive assault. Repeatedly—in contexts ranging from slavery, to marriage, to politics and workers’ rights—Americans of the time were being told that equality was an obsolete ideal and that the future would belong to those who accepted the hard truth that liberty lies not in egalitarian values but in hierarchies of domination and submission. Greg Garvey’s Emerson and the Defense of Equality focuses on Emerson as a real-time defender of equality during the antebellum culture wars.
In contrast to studies that treat individual liberty as Emerson’s primary concern, Garvey argues that Emerson’s works define a broad and sustained defense of equality as the necessary foundation of liberty. When read as part of a debate about equality, Emerson’s Nature is a treatise on individuality and the common weal; his anti-slavery speeches and English Traits advance evolutionary theories to rebut polygenesist arguments for white supremacy; the essays “Love” and “Domestic Life” challenge gender spheres and explore equality in marriage, friendship, and citizenship. As Emerson speculates on the future, “Politics” and “The Young American” anticipate a “beneficent socialism” in which human rights will always have priority over property rights. In his career-long effort to defend a threatened ideal, Emerson develops an aspirational vision of society that understands equality to be a fundamental aspect of liberty.
‘Greg Garvey is familiar with a broad array of Emerson literature, as well as a great deal of 19th century political and intellectual American history. Emerson and the Defense of Equality is a welcome and valued scholarly addition.’—Bob Pepperman Taylor, author of Lessons from ‘Walden’: Thoreau and the Crisis of American Democracy
‘Garvey is one of the leading authorities on Emerson’s writings and ideas. Emerson and the Defense of Equality is an important contribution not just to Emerson studies, but to the intellectual history of nineteenth-century America, as well as to political thought.’—Benjamin Park, author of Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
GREG GARVEY is professor of English at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. His books include Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America, and he has published widely in numerous edited volumes and journals, including American Nineteenth Century History, The New England Quarterly, and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance.
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