In Emerson's view, at least in the context of this 1854 lecture, supposed historical inevitability is a false, dangerous ethos for democratic politics. 1 With the exception of "Fate," "The Natural History of Intellect," "John Brown," and various journal entries not included in the collection, all parenthetical references to Emerson's work refer to The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Gougeon identifies Emerson's 1844 speech on the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies as a major turning point.
But if we read it in the context of his theories of self-reliance, despair lurks in his Anglo-Saxonism. In moments that I read as Anglo-Saxon theories of despair, Emerson downplays the power of the self and defines the world around him in terms of hierarchy and inevitable dominance.
Self-Reliance” and Ahistorical Selfhood
It probably goes without saying that most of the historical victims of kings, nobles, and large landowners suffered because of widespread threats and spectacular displays of violence, not just because they were somehow. In the paragraphs that follow, Emerson expands on the claim that the rhetoric of the historical imagination, in addition to being dusty and illusory, actually disables the main source of self-reliance: self-belief. Redirecting the metaphor, she traces the magnetic force of self-reliance to an internal and ahistorical source: "the essence of genius, virtue, and life, which we call spontaneity or instinct." The agent in this passage is not Alfred or Gustavus or some other rendering of the historical imagination, it is the individual of the present—the steward of the original action who can and must undergo the rigorous work of self-reliance.
I have already mentioned that part of the significance of this passage lies in its redirection and co-option of the "magnetic" force of political history, which Emerson transfers to and locates in the self. What Emerson takes issue with, however, is history's supposed hijacking of the car in the first place—here he rejects the notion that "history" exerts physical force. In the Democratic Party's growing legislative majority and quest for territorial expansion, the Whigs saw—in Emerson's rhetorical cast—ubiquitous reminders of the difficulty of self-reliance, and they despaired accordingly.
As Noble asserts: "Emerson's distribution of the properties of Faraday's atom onto the properties of the person thus enables him, as in the 1844. Nature, to think that as we become aware of the electric field of force that connect things together, we learn to draw on 'the unfathomable forces of gravity and chemistry' that already 'pre-exist in us in their highest form' (19). The will of the individual, as Emerson explains at the end of his career in "The Natural History of Intellect," "is the progress toward that which is rightfully ours, to which the inward magnet ever points, and which we dare say." n make.” (46).
The magnetism of the self is "ours," Emerson insists, and we are bound by neither gods nor kings nor illusions of the past to surrender it. This textual core in "Self-Reliance" and its scholarly contexts are useful indicators in any discussion of agency and circumstance in Emerson's work. As Laura Dassow Walls asserts for Emerson, "the law of nature which governed both science and poetry was the same with the moral law which governed each individual man," and as such, "the key concepts of nineteenth-century science"— including magnetism -.
I introduce this caveat to emphasize the rigor of independent political activity - as speculated in "Self-Confidence" - and to foreshadow the role of external circumstances in the desperate, deterministic logic of the later essay, "Fate". This paper is not the place to establish the innate qualities of human agency; however, it is necessary, as I interpret Emerson's initial exaltation and later departure from a theory of selfhood, to consider how he viewed the limitations on and contingencies of selfhood. The real "power" of the self, Emerson writes several paragraphs after describing the fatality of perception, "resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the golf, in the darting to an aim .
Fate,” English Traits, and Emerson’s Racial Fatalism
Whether Emerson classifies the "rate of races" as among the limitations contained in the "book of fate" is unclear, as is his use of the term "race." Emerson first theorized the "soul's home" decades before the publication of "Fate," even a few years before "Self-Reliance." In the closing paragraph of his 1836 book, Nature, he writes: "Then will come to pass what my poet said: 'Nature is not fixed, but fluid. This claim ran counter to the influential scientific racism of the day, including that of the Scottish scientist Robert Knox, whose theory of "intolerable" races earns Emerson's sneer in the opening line of "English Traits"'s chapter on "race". , despite Emerson calling him "a clever anatomist" (Emerson 489; Castillo 108-109).
Note, for example, the evolutionary language Emerson uses in English Traits to explain the supposed continued supremacy of the "Saxon" race: "The Saxon had the most bottom and longevity. The genius of the race and the genius of the place conspired to this effect. That is why he saw can easily dismiss concerns about the "impermanence" and "purity" of races.
Implicit in his references to the inevitable "gradation and settlement of the races" is the claim that this final settlement will, at least in part, prove the permanence of the Anglo-Saxon race. In West's reading, individual action—the central unit of analysis in Emersonian philosophy—is "racially circumscribed." Emerson's Anglo-Saxonism in West's view, then, not only counterbalances the magnetic potential of the self, but determines it. But to read Emerson's trafficking in these theories as an extension or actualization of self-reliance is to lose sight of the ahistorical promise of the self and the difficult, black project of self-work.
Momentarily, I will turn to the Anglo-Saxon exclamations of "Fate," which contain some of the most violent and dehumanizing imagery in Emerson's oeuvre—desperate departures from any meaningful program of self-reliance. In this dehumanizing description of global capitalist racial destiny, immigrants and enslaved life and labor are the "guano"—the manure—of the nation's soil, while the "English, French, and Germans" provide its seed. But as Emerson has already explained, the "plant" races exist at the expense of the "guano" races.
Fate, as a whole, was a triumphant individualist text, then it would be difficult to read the alleged exploits of the "imperial Saxon race" as anything other than the inevitable result of racially constrained individualism. Reading Emerson's Anglo-Saxon theory of history as an extension of self-reliance, however, simultaneously misrepresents the radical, ahistorical essence of "Self-Reliance" and the fatalistic, anti-individualist motives of "Fate." In Self-Reliance, the individual redirects the magnetic power of the monarch; they disregard the legends of ancient nations as unimportant; they look inward and rely on instinct to improve.
Political Despair and the Anglo-Saxonist Abdication of Agency
Emerson's Anglo-Saxonism is a theory of despair: it relies on a racist, sophisticated rationalization of history, one without selfhood. Rather, talk about what depends, because it works and is." The self works and is. The pro-slavery Whig, in Emerson's view, confuses what can happen for what must happen: "In vulgar politics the Whig goes for what was, for the old necessities—the musts.
Even around the time Emerson was writing about Anglo-Saxon political freedom in English Traits and "Fate," commentators pointed out the irony of the supposedly "liberty-loving" Anglo-Saxon race. In 1859, for example, the Anglo-African Magazine contributor "S.S.N." outline this irony in their essay, "Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Africans." They scoff at the essentialist genealogies of the Anglo-Saxons, writing: "The Angles and Saxons—historians tell us, were both barbarous German tribes, who stole the land of the Britons and appropriated it to their own use; and here the only case we see is that the present conglomerate allied called the American people, with their claimed illustrious ancestors. It seems to prove one thing, namely—that it runs in the blood to steal" (247).
Or notice how contributor "S.S.N." — rejecting "Anglo-Saxon" and "Anglo-African" as descriptors for any American in an 1859 Anglo-African Magazine column — articulates a model of black political organization that refuses to identify with any. We cannot take the Emerson we encounter in the Fugitive Slave Law address as the definitive Emerson when it comes to questions of self-reliance, history, and race. By the same logic, however, it is also impossible to take the author of English Traits and "Fate" as the definitive Emerson—an approach that has been common among scholars of Emerson's Anglo-Saxonism.
Emerson's thoughts continue to flow through American political life, we must gauge the power of his despair. As I have argued before, Emerson's Anglo-Saxon faith is a departure from, or at least a distortion of, self-reliance. The Place of Poetry in the Crisis and Compromise of 1850.” Journal of the Civil War Era, vol.
How Come He There?’: Self-Reliance, Misalliance, and Emerson’s Second Fugitive Slave Law Address.” American Transcendental Quarterly, vol. Liberty Is Never Cheap': Emerson, 'The Fugitive Slave Law', en die Antislavery-lesingsreeks by die Broadway Tabernakel. The New England Quarterly, vol.
