Emerson Effect
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€92.99
A01=Christopher Newfield
Author_Christopher Newfield
Category=DSB
Category=JPA
Category=JPHV
Category=QDH
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780226576985
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jan 1996
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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This work presents a revisionist account of Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential thought on individualism, in particular his political psychology. The author analyzes the interplay of liberal and authoritarian impulses in Emerson's work in various domains: domestic life, the changing New England economy, theories of poetic language, homoerotic friendship, and racial hierarchy. Focusing on neglected later writings, Newfield shows how Emerson explored the tensions between autonomy and community - and consistently resolved these tensions by "abandoning crucial elements of both" and redefining autonomy as a kind of liberating subjection. He argues that in Emersonian individualism, self-determination is accompanied by submission to authority, and examines the influence of this submissive individualism on the history of American liberalism. In a reading of Emerson's early and neglected later works, the study analyzes Emerson's emphasis on collective, or "corporate", world-building, rather than private possession.
Tracing the development of this corporate individualism, he illuminates contradictions in Emerson's political outlook, and the conjunctions of liberal and authoritarian ideology they produced.
